#group 1a

[worst-xmas-song-bracket]

For songs like this that have been sung by many, many people, I want to know if you hate the actual song, not just how a particular artist sings it. If this song advances to the next round, I will choose a different version.

[roninversary-brawl]

[hellohellowelcome]

Class A alum trying their hardest over the years to keep the support gear funding a secret from Izuku. It kills them not to be able to say anything. Katsuki will kill them if they say anything. Most of the class + All Might finally find a time to meet up as a group. Izuku tells the others that of course he loves being a teacher, but he'd be a liar if he said he didn't lie awake at night thinking about what it would be like to still be a hero alongside them. But, that's just wishful thinking. He's long accepted that it's simply not in the cards. Of course they all know that what Izuku still longs for might still, in fact, be in the cards (in just a few years if Hatsume's status updates are anything to go by). Without thinking, Kaminari blurts out, "Ha, well, never say never!" His hands fly over his mouth instantly, realizing what he's just said. Everyone freezes, thinking he's just tipped Izuku off to their plans. Instead, Izuku just laughs it off, putting everyone at momentary ease.

(Kaminari is removed from the Operation: Super Suit group chat later that night)

[plusultraetc]

I know for a fact that Aizawa has said 'don't move as a group, you're not gazelles' at least once during 1-A's hero training

[pokemonalphabet]

Reblog for a bigger sample size!

[jyaproject]

JYA STUDENTS BATCH 1-A

Eunjeong longs for...something more. Her mother runs a popular bakery and her father is a police man. She is often percieved as quiet and friendly. She carries her notebook and special pen with her everywhere she goes to jot down song lyrics and is often humming to herself as the inspiration for writing music constantly flows through her. Finally free from the shackles of student life, she yearns to develop her skills and truly find herself despite her mothers urgent pleas to find a good, respectable and stable job.

Jongdae has often been seen as rough and broody and was ostracized a lot in school. His birth mother passed away when he was twelve and after three years, his father got remarried. His step mother always tries her best to befriend him but he often pushes her away. His outlet for his negative emotions comes in the form of rapping and after getting involved in the underground scene while also befriending a group of break dancers, he finds himself torn between the two "factions" so to speak.

Jimin is a former SM trainee who was eventually dropped from the company because they felt he wasn't making enough progress. He was adopted by his Aunt and Uncle (who are rich) at the age of eight when his parents sadly passed away in a house fire. He's a very gifted singer who lacks in confidence but many look up to him due to his outgoing and friendly nature. A good student overall who recieved many praises from his teachers throughout the years. He is very focused on improving his dance skills which is why he chose to audition for JY Academy.

Junseo is the older brother to fellow student Binna. The two siblings are very close and both talented in the art of dance and performing. He is known as "Mr. Sunshine" because of his radiant personality. Due to his family being quite poor, he has taken to working multiple part time jobs to help support his them. His parents are very supportive of him and his sister, who he often busks with and posts various tiktok dances with which have made them quite popular on SNS. He along with Binna were originally discovered by Kay of ELEKTRA, who introduced them to Jaeyoung and were eventually chosen as backup dancers for Kay's solo debut after some short time training at the academy.

Binna is the younger sister of Junseo. She is seen as quite tough but loveable and is talented in both dance and rapping. Her favorite styles of dance are hip hop and popping. Despite her more serious image, she is also very good at cute concepts and is secretly a fan of aegyo. She's quite popular in school and is a leader of her schools dance team. She focuses a lot on making her parents proud of her so she works extra hard on school work, which often leaves her mentally and physically fatigued but she pushes through with the hope of becoming a well known name in the dance industry.

Alli-Mae (birthname: Hatsuda, Haruka) was born in Kochi, Japan but her family immigrated to the United States when she was ten years old. More specifically to New York City, where Alli-Mae attended the Joffrey Ballet School with hopes of becoming a world class ballet dancer. Though she loved it, her parents had forced it on her from a young age and as she grew older, she began to despise it and now was looking to expand her talents elsewhere. She is currently studying at Yonsei, University as an international student and her relationship with her parents has since diminished greatly due to her "rebelling". She dreams of becoming an idol and will do anything to achieve it.

[npzlawyersforimmigration]

DOS VISA BULLETIN UPDATE: VISA BULLETIN FOR JANUARY 2025 - IF YOUR "PRIORITY DATE" IS CURRENT, PLEASE LET US KNOW?

https://visaserve.com/resources/visa-bulletin/

#VisaBulletin #GreenCard #EmploymentBased #Visa #FamilyBased #USCIS #DOS #DHS #VisaBulletinJanuary2025

[thorsenmark]

Inspiring Vistas and Fresh Air (Jasper National Park) by Mark Stevens Via Flickr: While at a roadside pulloff along the Icefields Parkway with a view looking to the west-southwest to the distant ridges and peaks with Mount Edith Cavell. This is a Jasper National Park. While I couldn't avoid the nearby tall trees, I did work to align myself and minimize some of the taller ones, so that the image would focus on the nearby hillside and have a more leveled-on view with Mount Edith Cavell, just above the horizon. The blue skies and clouds would be that color contrast to complement the earth-tones in the lower portion of the image.

[ao3feed-erasermic]

Class 1A group chat with extra chaos

Use the related link post to read Class 1A group chat with extra chaos on AO3 at https://archiveofourown.org/works/60827926 by TheOneAndOnly1256 A group chat full of wonder with some scenes sprinkled in. Words: 1164, Chapters: 1/?, Language: English Fandoms: 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia (Anime & Manga) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Categories: F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi Characters: Class 1-A (My Hero Academia), Midoriya Izuku, Shinsou Hitoshi, Todoroki Shouto, Aizawa Shouta | Eraserhead, Yamada Hizashi | Present Mic, Nezu, Mineta Minoru Relationships: Midoriya Izuku/Shinsou Hitoshi/Todoroki Shouto, Asui Tsuyu/Uraraka Ochako, Shouji Mezou/Tokoyami Fumikage, Aizawa Shouta | Eraserhead/Yamada Hizashi | Present Mic, Aizawa Shouta | Eraserhead & Midoriya Izuku Additional Tags: Mineta Minoru is Expelled from U.A. High School, Genderfluid Character, Nonbinary Character, Class 1-A Group Chat (My Hero Academia) Use the related link post to read it on AO3 at https://archiveofourown.org/works/60827926

[lylianrae]

A list of all the things I have manifested ⋆˚⟡˖ ࣪

We manifest everything in our lives btw - the good and the bad which is why I will be including both to prove that the law does not discriminate. If you can successfully become poor, you can most definately become rich with the same ease because everything is just a state.

Long hair

AHH this is one of my favourite manifestations. Ever since I was young I had a weird bob with a fringe (often crooked) and I wanted long hair like all the other girls (lmaoo) but my mum was strict so she didn't let me grow it out. Although I didn't know about manifestation back then, every new year and birthday I would wish for long hair and I would pretend I was a princess with butt long hair. Guess what, somewhere along the line, my mum let me grow it out and now I have butt length hair (don't really know what to do with it tho </3).

As all kids do, I went through an emo phase where I chopped off like half of my hair like 4 years ago. I literally grew back 7-8" of hair within a month because my parents got too mad. I knew about manifestation here so I just assumed my hair always grows unaturally fast. Same with when I cut bangs, they grew past my chin within a couple of weeks.

Manifesting my way into a private school

Honestly this just shows that you dont need 2430430 hours of working on your self concept to manifest. Literally so many celebs, including Marylin Monroe (the queen), manifested their fame with awful self concept. Likewise, here I was possibly going through the worst time of my life back then. I would wake up at 8 am and start studying and end at 11 pm despite being only 10 at the time. I was so freaking stressed and envious of all the other children and went into a depressive spiral where my two options were pass or die. I didn't even have enough practice and I cried my self to sleep on most nights. Anyways, when i did the exam I was deathly calm and even after the exam I was apparently so chill so my parents thought I failed.

I literally left 9 questions on one paper but throughout the summer, everytime I found a dandelion I would make a wish and imagine digging a tunnel to the examiners room where I secretly change my answers into the right ones (lmfao my tiny 10 yr old brain - idek how it worked). Anyways my results were sent back to me a month later on a random October evening and I got a really high mark. Even after 7 years of going to this school I havn't met anyone who has gotten a mark higher than mine.

Curly hair / straight hair

Sigh. We always want things we don't have. When I was younger I had really straight hair like 1A asian hair but when I was like 10, I really wanted curly hair and I would try to curl it often. After a few months, I manifested a curling iron and my hair literally became naturally curly like right after a wash it would curly af when before it was dead straight. Naturally I grew bored of it and I wanted my straight hair back and for ages I began overcomplicating the law and struggled to manifest it. It was only recently when I actually let go of the 3D that I manifested the silky, shiny straight hair.

Social life?

This is also a funny one, just shows how easily you can manifest. So back in 2021 after lockdown I felt so lonely and felt so left out of my friendship group so after a few months I began stressing myself out and spiraling for like 30 minutes, sobbing to myself about how I was so lonely and how nobody loved me (💀). Anyways it became reality, I found myself uncomfortable in many social situations and found myself becoming forgotten far more easily. I don't really remember the details but it was so bad that I think I accidently manifested social anxiety (oh well we still up tho).

However I am a loa girly so I found myself listening to popularity subliminals and slowly (but surely) my mindset change from having no friends to being the most popular girl in the year. Like no joke I became friends with like 3 people from different social circles so at lunchtime we had to join up like 3 different tables so we can all sit together. Overall I got myself 20+ close friends and even my ex friends began to admire me although it had ended badly. Even now, when someone says something thats untrue - for example saying that they are dumb when they are not, they would be like "ahaha so its like when Rae (me) says she has no friends, the whole school knows who Rae is".

Clear skin

This was sort of in the beginning of my loa (law of attraction back then) journey, I just randomly found out what subliminals were and was still quite new to everything. Now I don't even understand how it happened but I had busted some capillaries under my skin and it looked like small red viens under my skin and bro I was freaking out at the time. One night I was like just, I had enough, I'm going to get myself better skin and so I listened to a sub once for 3-4 days and on like the 4th day, my cheeks began to heat up which was odd and the next day it was 90% gone. Just like magikkkk.

Desired university?

Guys. Feeling is the secret. Don't you ever forgot that - not feeling as in emotions but rather the feeling of knowing. I had 2 entrance exams to do to apply for my universities and it was a stressful time where I wasn't getting enough sleep and wasn't eating enough simply because I didn't have the time. Like I come home from school and would have 3-4 hours of homework, then I need to revise for tests and then the remaining time would be spent on the entrance exams. Each past paper took 2 hours and I have around 13s per questions and I was already struggling on time. Anyways, I began to hate them and I would often complain to my mum saying things like "My score got even lower!!" or "I hate it so much" or "My head hurts / eyes hurt".

Guess what? Not only did I see my score decrease over time but I also made such a silly mistake on the most important entrance exam which I needed for 4/5 of my universities. I left a question and completely forgot to mark on the answer so when I finished the section I realised I had one more space on the sheet with like 10s to spare. I didn't have enough time to go back and fix it and lemme say that I did so badly in the test. Even while waiting for results I was just like "ah it would be a miracle if I scored above this bla bla".

I got the score back and it was so freaking bad like I did not stand a chance at my university at all. However, I started to affirm for a place and to my utter shock and surprise my desired university reached out and offered me an interview. I knew people who had like scores which were 50% better than mine and they still got rejected pre-interview. Anyways I began stressing about the interview and the results of the whole thing and boom. I got rejected 3 days after my birthday lmaoo. But its okay because I'm reapplying and I learnt so much more. I'm redoing the entrance exam and my score is a loooot better than it ever was last year.

A key take away would be thoughts are the result of the state you are in. Your dwelling state manifests and I was focusing on the unrealness and the difficultly of getting into this uni and thats what manifested. At the time I was heartbroken and literally went through the 7 stages of grief and spent so many months trying to revise it only for me to focus on the 3D. Just know that everything is done in imagination and it appears in the 3D as a result.

Photographic memory

So this is also something I had manifested before I actually knew about loa but the takeaway here is that manifestation is always instant. I was around 11 reading a random book on my tiny kindle and the book was on how to develop a good memory and I was like ah that'll be useful. Anyways later in the car, I asked my dad about photographic memory and he sort of explained it to me. I just assumed that I have that and I told him I do. He just laughed at me and said thats something that you have to train for and I was not impressed lmao. Inside my tiny brain, I was just like nope, I already have photographic memory and I dropped that thought. Let me tell you, my memory is actually photographic and has helped me out on so many occasions like my brain just takes pictures of things.

Learning fast

This is also something I did before I knew loa, I was just always wondering why the other kids couldn't grasp concepts as easily as I did. Literally in every lesson I would be like ah I learn so fast and now I am actually blessed with the ability to grasp complex subjects so fast. A favourite example of mine would be when I was obsessed with music but to take it to a higher level you need to be able to play an instrument. I couldn't at the time and my teacher told me the requirements a week before the actual deadline. I have never actually played piano with both hands but one day I sat down and worked through the entire song (fur elise by Beethoven) which is a grade 5 (I think) and it normally takes people months / weeks to learn. I learnt the whole thing in 3 days and from then on, I could play piano like I had been doing for ages. Again the memory thing was so helpful because I never actually used any sheet music, I learnt it off a youtube video and I remembered every single note I needed to play.

Hourglass body + 22" waist

This was a couple of years ago when I actually didn't understand loa. Anyways long story short, I would do a 3 minute workout and then flex infront of the mirror all day (💀) and be like omg I have abs. Overtime, I actually got so skinny everyone around me kept pointing it out to me and my mum got so concerned that she took me to the doctor like 4 times. It was so funny, I would loose like 2-3kg overnight and my parents would have to buy better fitting uniform.

Bigger boobs

This was also back in the day (2021?) when I didn't understand how to manifest things easily af. I had an A cup but I wanted better boobies and I listened to like 2 subs for a week and I went to a B cup. But I just assumed I have a bigger cup size recently and I just skipped C and went to D+ (haven't measured in a long time).

I'm not done but I'm tired now bye bye

[ephemii]

˙⋆✮Grace Alexander, INTRO✮⋆˙

(finally lol)

. INFORMATION; .

.°⭑ ͙͘͡★ ⭑°.

✶ class: 1A

✶ birthday: January 18 (capricorn)

✶ age: 17

✶ height: 163 cm

✶ dominant hand: right

✶ from: ???

✶ club: gargoyle studies club

✶ favorite subject: history of magic

✶ hobbies: painting, reading

✶ pet peeve: gossipers

✶ favorite food: shrimp soup

✶ least favorite food: yogurt

. TIDBITS; .

.°⭑ ͙͘͡★ ⭑°.

✶ by the time she was told that NRC was an all boys school, she had already been found out by Ace and Deuce. The very next day, she gave herself a haircut, procured a makeshift binder out of old scraps she found in Ramshackle, and the few friends she made adamantly referred to her as a guy. It was almost as if everyone else had imagined her feminine origins.

✶ that being said, it didn't take long for the staff to find out. Crewel tailored a proper binder for her, and even went as far as brewing her a special potion as an extra precaution. She was told to "never get used to this type of hospitality", yet by the end of every month, a prim little box tied with a sleek black ribbon would always be sitting at her front door.

✶ she keeps to herself, and is seldom known to get into trouble. That being said, when being around Ace and Deuce, it's always hard not to get into all sorts of trouble despite her best efforts. Despite the image she projects, she can be quite the brute— sheer force of will is both a terrifying strength and an awful weakness of hers.

✶ fiercely loyal as a friend, and isn't afraid to show her appreciation for others. Her first year friends find it off-putting sometimes, but it does strengthen their bond, if even by a smidgen. Grace once told Deuce how thankful she was to have him as a friend and that he was one of the first to shed some light on her grim situation, and he had to turn away to hide his misty eyes.

✶ huge, and I mean massive crush on Malleus. It took her friends a long while to connect the dots, but their reaction to the newly acquired information was nothing short of hilarious and maybe slightly offensive. The nocturnal fae is none the wiser to their unfaltering stares as he passes by their group during lunch.

✶ has a bit of a lack of personal space. More often described as a curious cat, she likes to peep and slot herself once something or someone catches her attention. It becomes a quickly known fact that she has no qualms over sharing, even if others do. One time, Leona stayed awake for an entire lecture for the first time since his freshman years— not to listen, but to stare vehemently at his golden rings wrapped around Grace's fingers during an elective class. She merely grinned mischievously once she caught his eye.

There's a lot more I could add, but maybe I'll leave those for fics and drabbles lol (which I also need to start working on.. I have like 10 drafts already 😵‍💫) but if you've read this far, thank you! 🩷🩷🩷

[worst-xmas-song-bracket]

I'm trying to be fair to the song itself here. If I used the Alvin & The Chipmunks version, I'm quite certain that would introduce a significant amount of bias. I want to know if you hate the actual song, not just if you hate Alvin & The Chipmunks.

[roninversary-brawl]

,

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Disenshittify or Die”

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).

Last weekend, I traveled to Las Vegas for Defcon 32, where I had the immense privilege of giving a solo talk on Track 1, entitled "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification":

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861

This was a followup to last year's talk, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification," a talk that kicked off a lot of international interest in my analysis of platform decay ("enshittification"):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

The Defcon organizers have earned a restful week or two, and that means that the video of my talk hasn't yet been posted to Defcon's Youtube channel, so in the meantime, I thought I'd post a lightly edited version of my speech crib. If you're headed to Burning Man, you can hear me reprise this talk at Palenque Norte (7&E); I'm kicking off their lecture series on Tuesday, Aug 27 at 1PM.

==

What the fuck happened to the old, good internet?

I mean, sure, our bosses were a little surveillance-happy, and they were usually up for sharing their data with the NSA, and whenever there was a tossup between user security and growth, it was always YOLO time.

But Google Search used to work. Facebook used to show you posts from people you followed. Uber used to be cheaper than a taxi and pay the driver more than a cabbie made. Amazon used to sell products, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands. Apple used to defend your privacy, rather than spying on you with your no-modifications-allowed Iphone.

There was a time when you searching for an album on Spotify would get you that album – not a playlist of insipid AI-generated covers with the same name and art.

Microsoft used to sell you software – sure, it was buggy – but now they just let you access apps in the cloud, so they can watch how you use those apps and strip the features you use the most out of the basic tier and turn them into an upcharge.

What – and I cannot stress this enough – the fuck happened?!

I’m talking about enshittification.

Here’s what enshittification looks like from the outside: First, you see a company that’s being good to its end users. Google puts the best search results at the top; Facebook shows you a feed of posts from people and groups you followl; Uber charges small dollars for a cab; Amazon subsidizes goods and returns and shipping and puts the best match for your product search at the top of the page.

That’s stage one, being good to end users. But there’s another part of this stage, call it stage 1a). That’s figuring out how to lock in those users.

There’s so many ways to lock in users.

If you’re Facebook, the users do it for you. You joined Facebook because there were people there you wanted to hang out with, and other people joined Facebook to hang out with you.

That’s the old “network effects” in action, and with network effects come “the collective action problem." Because you love your friends, but goddamn are they a pain in the ass! You all agree that FB sucks, sure, but can you all agree on when it’s time to leave?

No way.

Can you agree on where to go next?

Hell no.

You’re there because that’s where the support group for your rare disease hangs out, and your bestie is there because that’s where they talk with the people in the country they moved away from, then there’s that friend who coordinates their kid’s little league car pools on FB, and the best dungeon master you know isn’t gonna leave FB because that’s where her customers are.

So you’re stuck, because even though FB use comes at a high cost – your privacy, your dignity and your sanity – that’s still less than the switching cost you’d have to bear if you left: namely, all those friends who have taken you hostage, and whom you are holding hostage

Now, sometimes companies lock you in with money, like Amazon getting you to prepay for a year’s shipping with Prime, or to buy your Audible books on a monthly subscription, which virtually guarantees that every shopping search will start on Amazon, after all, you’ve already paid for it.

Sometimes, they lock you in with DRM, like HP selling you a printer with four ink cartridges filled with fluid that retails for more than $10,000/gallon, and using DRM to stop you from refilling any of those ink carts or using a third-party cartridge. So when one cart runs dry, you have to refill it or throw away your investment in the remaining three cartridges and the printer itself.

Sometimes, it’s a grab bag:

You can’t run your Ios apps without Apple hardware;

you can’t run your Apple music, books and movies on anything except an Ios app;

your iPhone uses parts pairing – DRM handshakes between replacement parts and the main system – so you can’t use third-party parts to fix it; and

every OEM iPhone part has a microscopic Apple logo engraved on it, so Apple can demand that the US Customs and Border Service seize any shipment of refurb Iphone parts as trademark violations.

Think Different, amirite?

Getting you locked in completes phase one of the enshittification cycle and signals the start of phase two: making things worse for you to make things better for business customers.

For example, a platform might poison its search results, like Google selling more and more of its results pages to ads that are identified with lighter and lighter tinier and tinier type.

Or Amazon selling off search results and calling it an “ad” business. They make $38b/year on this scam. The first result for your search is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The first row is 25% more expensive than the best match. On average, the best match for your search is likely to be found seventeen places down on the results page.

Other platforms sell off your feed, like Facebook, which started off showing you the things you asked to see, but now the quantum of content from the people you follow has dwindled to a homeopathic residue, leaving a void that Facebook fills with things that people pay to show you: boosted posts from publishers you haven’t subscribed to, and, of course, ads.

Now at this point you might be thinking ‘sure, if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.'

Bullshit!

Bull.

Shit.

The people who buy those Google ads? They pay more every year for worse ad-targeting and more ad-fraud

Those publishers paying to nonconsensually cram their content into your Facebook feed? They have to do that because FB suppresses their ability to reach the people who actually subscribed to them

The Amazon sellers with the best match for your query have to outbid everyone else just to show up on the first page of results. It costs so much to sell on Amazon that between 45-51% of every dollar an independent seller brings in has to be kicked up to Don Bezos and the Amazon crime family. Those sellers don’t have the kind of margins that let them pay 51% They have to raise prices in order to avoid losing money on every sale.

"But wait!" I hear you say!

[Come on, say it!]

"But wait! Things on Amazon aren’t more expensive that things at Target, or Walmart, or at a mom and pop store, or direct from the manufacturer.

"How can sellers be raising prices on Amazon if the price at Amazon is the same as at is everywhere else?"

[Any guesses?!]

That’s right, they charge more everywhere. They have to. Amazon binds its sellers to a policy called “most favored nation status,” which says they can’t charge more on Amazon than they charge elsewhere, including direct from their own factory store.

So every seller that wants to sell on Amazon has to raise their prices everywhere else.

Now, these sellers are Amazon’s best customers. They’re paying for the product, and they’re still getting screwed.

Paying for the product doesn’t fill your vapid boss’s shriveled heart with so much joy that he decides to stop trying to think of ways to fuck you over.

Look at Apple. Remember when Apple offered every Ios user a one-click opt out for app-based surveillance? And 96% of users clicked that box?

(The other four percent were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees.)

That cost Facebook at least ten billion dollars per year in lost surveillance revenue?

I mean, you love to see it.

But did you know that at the same time Apple started spying on Ios users in the same way that Facebook had been, for surveillance data to use to target users for its competing advertising product?

Your Iphone isn’t an ad-supported gimme. You paid a thousand fucking dollars for that distraction rectangle in your pocket, and you’re still the product. What’s more, Apple has rigged Ios so that you can’t mod the OS to block its spying.

If you’re not not paying for the product, you’re the product, and if you are paying for the product, you’re still the product.

Just ask the farmers who are expected to swap parts into their own busted half-million dollar, mission-critical tractors, but can’t actually use those parts until a technician charges them $200 to drive out to the farm and type a parts pairing unlock code into their console.

John Deere’s not giving away tractors. Give John Deere a half mil for a tractor and you will be the product.

Please, my brothers and sisters in Christ. Please! Stop saying ‘if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.’

OK, OK, so that’s phase two of enshittification.

Phase one: be good to users while locking them in.

Phase two: screw the users a little to you can good to business customers while locking them in.

Phase three: screw everybody and take all the value for yourself. Leave behind the absolute bare minimum of utility so that everyone stays locked into your pile of shit.

Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.

That’s what enshittification looks like from the outside, but what’s going on inside the company? What is the pathological mechanism? What sci-fi entropy ray converts the excellent and useful service into a pile of shit?

That mechanism is called twiddling. Twiddling is when someone alters the back end of a service to change how its business operates, changing prices, costs, search ranking, recommendation criteria and other foundational aspects of the system.

Digital platforms are a twiddler’s utopia. A grocer would need an army of teenagers with pricing guns on rollerblades to reprice everything in the building when someone arrives who’s extra hungry.

Whereas the McDonald’s Investments portfolio company Plexure advertises that it can use surveillance data to predict when an app user has just gotten paid so the seller can tack an extra couple bucks onto the price of their breakfast sandwich.

And of course, as the prophet William Gibson warned us, ‘cyberspace is everting.' With digital shelf tags, grocers can change prices whenever they feel like, like the grocers in Norway, whose e-ink shelf tags change the prices 2,000 times per day.

Every Uber driver is offered a different wage for every job. If a driver has been picky lately, the job pays more. But if the driver has been desperate enough to grab every ride the app offers, the pay goes down, and down, and down.

The law professor Veena Dubal calls this ‘algorithmic wage discrimination.' It’s a prime example of twiddling.

Every youtuber knows what it’s like to be twiddled. You work for weeks or months, spend thousands of dollars to make a video, then the algorithm decides that no one – not your own subscribers, not searchers who type in the exact name of your video – will see it.

Why? Who knows? The algorithm’s rules are not public.

Because content moderation is the last redoubt of security through obscurit: they can’t tell you what the como algorithm is downranking because then you’d cheat.

Youtube is the kind of shitty boss who docks every paycheck for all the rules you’ve broken, but won’t tell you what those rules were, lest you figure out how to break those rules next time without your boss catching you.

Twiddling can also work in some users’ favor, of course. Sometimes platforms twiddle to make things better for end users or business customers.

For example, Emily Baker-White from Forbes revealed the existence of a back-end feature that Tiktok’s management can access they call the “heating tool.”

When a manager applies the heating toll to a performer’s account, that performer’s videos are thrust into the feeds of millions of users, without regard to whether the recommendation algorithm predicts they will enjoy that video.

Why would they do this? Well, here’s an analogy from my boyhood I used to go to this traveling fair that would come to Toronto at the end of every summer, the Canadian National Exhibition. If you’ve been to a fair like the Ex, you know that you can always spot some guy lugging around a comedically huge teddy bear.

Nominally, you win that teddy bear by throwing five balls in a peach-basket, but to a first approximation, no one has ever gotten five balls to stay in that peach-basket.

That guy “won” the teddy bear when a carny on the midway singled him out and said, "fella, I like your face. Tell you what I’m gonna do: You get just one ball in the basket and I’ll give you this keychain, and if you amass two keychains, I’ll let you trade them in for one of these galactic-scale teddy-bears."

That’s how the guy got his teddy bear, which he now has to drag up and down the midway for the rest of the day.

Why the hell did that carny give away the teddy bear? Because it turns the guy into a walking billboard for the midway games. If that dopey-looking Judas Goat can get five balls into a peach basket, then so can you.

Except you can’t.

Tiktok’s heating tool is a way to give away tactical giant teddy bears. When someone in the TikTok brain trust decides they need more sports bros on the platform, they pick one bro out at random and make him king for the day, heating the shit out of his account.

That guy gets a bazillion views and he starts running around on all the sports bro forums trumpeting his success: *I am the Louis Pasteur of sports bro influencers!"

The other sports bros pile in and start retooling to make content that conforms to the idiosyncratic Tiktok format. When they fail to get giant teddy bears of their own, they assume that it’s because they’re doing Tiktok wrong, because they don’t know about the heating tool.

But then comes the day when the TikTok Star Chamber decides they need to lure in more astrologers, so they take the heat off that one lucky sports bro, and start heating up some lucky astrologer.

Giant teddy bears are all over the place: those Uber drivers who were boasting to the NYT ten years ago about earning $50/hour? The Substackers who were rolling in dough? Joe Rogan and his hundred million dollar Spotify payout? Those people are all the proud owners of giant teddy bears, and they’re a steal.

Because every dollar they get from the platform turns into five dollars worth of free labor from suckers who think they just internetting wrong.

Giant teddy bears are just one way of twiddling. Platforms can play games with every part of their business logic, in highly automated ways, that allows them to quickly and efficiently siphon value from end users to business customers and back again, hiding the pea in a shell game conducted at machine speeds, until they’ve got everyone so turned around that they take all the value for themselves.

That’s the how: How the platforms do the trick where they are good to users, then lock users in, then maltreat users to be good to business customers, then lock in those business customers, then take all the value for themselves.

So now we know what is happening, and how it is happening, all that’s left is why it’s happening.

Now, on the one hand, the why is pretty obvious. The less value that end-users and business customers capture, the more value there is left to divide up among the shareholders and the executives.

That’s why, but it doesn’t tell you why now. Companies could have done this shit at any time in the past 20 years, but they didn’t. Or at least, the successful ones didn’t. The ones that turned themselves into piles of shit got treated like piles of shit. We avoided them and they died.

Remember Myspace? Yahoo Search? Livejournal? Sure, they’re still serving some kind of AI slop or programmatic ad junk if you hit those domains, but they’re gone.

And there’s the clue: It used to be that if you enshittified your product, bad things happened to your company. Now, there are no consequences for enshittification, so everyone’s doing it.

Let’s break that down: What stops a company from enshittifying?

There are four forces that discipline tech companies. The first one is, obviously, competition.

If your customers find it easy to leave, then you have to worry about them leaving

Many factors can contribute to how hard or easy it is to depart a platform, like the network effects that Facebook has going for it. But the most important factor is whether there is anywhere to go.

Back in 2012, Facebook bought Insta for a billion dollars. That may seem like chump-change in these days of eleven-digit Big Tech acquisitions, but that was a big sum in those innocent days, and it was an especially big sum to pay for Insta. The company only had 13 employees, and a mere 25 million registered users.

But what mattered to Zuckerberg wasn’t how many users Insta had, it was where those users came from.

[Does anyone know where those Insta users came from?]

That’s right, they left Facebook and joined Insta. They were sick of FB, even though they liked the people there, they hated creepy Zuck, they hated the platform, so they left and they didn’t come back.

So Zuck spent a cool billion to recapture them, A fact he put in writing in a midnight email to CFO David Ebersman, explaining that he was paying over the odds for Insta because his users hated him, and loved Insta. So even if they quit Facebook (the platform), they would still be captured Facebook (the company).

Now, on paper, Zuck’s Instagram acquisition is illegal, but normally, that would be hard to stop, because you’d have to prove that he bought Insta with the intention of curtailing competition.

But in this case, Zuck tripped over his own dick: he put it in writing.

But Obama’s DoJ and FTC just let that one slide, following the pro-monopoly policies of Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and setting an example that Trump would follow, greenlighting gigamergers like the catastrophic, incestuous Warner-Discovery marriage.

Indeed, for 40 years, starting with Carter, and accelerating through Reagan, the US has encouraged monopoly formation, as an official policy, on the grounds that monopolies are “efficient.”

If everyone is using Google Search, that’s something we should celebrate. It means they’ve got the very best search and wouldn’t it be perverse to spend public funds to punish them for making the best product?

But as we all know, Google didn’t maintain search dominance by being best. They did it by paying bribes. More than 20 billion per year to Apple alone to be the default Ios search, plus billions more to Samsung, Mozilla, and anyone else making a product or service with a search-box on it, ensuring that you never stumble on a search engine that’s better than theirs.

Which, in turn, ensured that no one smart invested big in rival search engines, even if they were visibly, obviously superior. Why bother making something better if Google’s buying up all the market oxygen before it can kindle your product to life?

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon – they’re not “making things” companies, they’re “buying things” companies, taking advantage of official tolerance for anticompetitive acquisitions, predatory pricing, market distorting exclusivity deals and other acts specifically prohibited by existing antitrust law.

Their goal is to become too big to fail, because that makes them too big to jail, and that means they can be too big to care.

Which is why Google Search is a pile of shit and everything on Amazon is dropshipped garbage that instantly disintegrates in a cloud of offgassed volatile organic compounds when you open the box.

Once companies no longer fear losing your business to a competitor, it’s much easier for them to treat you badly, because what’re you gonna do?

Remember Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator in those old SNL sketches? “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”

Competition is the first force that serves to discipline companies and the enshittificatory impulses of their leadership, and we just stopped enforcing competition law.

It takes a special kind of smooth-brained asshole – that is, an establishment economist – to insist that the collapse of every industry from eyeglasses to vitamin C into a cartel of five or fewer companies has nothing to do with policies that officially encouraged monopolization.

It’s like we used to put down rat poison and we didn’t have a rat problem. Then these dickheads convinced us that rats were good for us and we stopped putting down rat poison, and now rats are gnawing our faces off and they’re all running around saying, "Who’s to say where all these rats came from? Maybe it was that we stopped putting down poison, but maybe it’s just the Time of the Rats. The Great Forces of History bearing down on this moment to multiply rats beyond all measure!"

Antitrust didn’t slip down that staircase and fall spine-first on that stiletto: they stabbed it in the back and then they pushed it.

And when they killed antitrust, they also killed regulation, the second force that disciplines companies. Regulation is possible, but only when the regulator is more powerful than the regulated entities. When a company is bigger than the government, it gets damned hard to credibly threaten to punish that company, no matter what its sins.

That’s what protected IBM for all those years when it had its boot on the throat of the American tech sector. Do you know, the DOJ fought to break up IBM in the courts from 1970-1982, and that every year, for 12 consecutive years, IBM spent more on lawyers to fight the USG than the DOJ Antitrust Division spent on all the lawyers fighting every antitrust case in the entire USA?

IBM outspent Uncle Sam for 12 years. People called it “Antitrust’s Vietnam.” All that money paid off, because by 1982, the president was Ronald Reagan, a man whose official policy was that monopolies were “efficient." So he dropped the case, and Big Blue wriggled off the hook.

It’s hard to regulate a monopolist, and it’s hard to regulate a cartel. When a sector is composed of hundreds of competing companies, they compete. They genuinely fight with one another, trying to poach each others’ customers and workers. They are at each others’ throats.

It’s hard enough for a couple hundred executives to agree on anything. But when they’re legitimately competing with one another, really obsessing about how to eat each others’ lunches, they can’t agree on anything.

The instant one of them goes to their regulator with some bullshit story, about how it’s impossible to have a decent search engine without fine-grained commercial surveillance; or how it’s impossible to have a secure and easy to use mobile device without a total veto over which software can run on it; or how it’s impossible to administer an ISP’s network unless you can slow down connections to servers whose owners aren’t paying bribes for “premium carriage"; there’s some *other company saying, “That’s bullshit”

“We’ve managed it! Here’s our server logs, our quarterly financials and our customer testimonials to prove it.”

100 companies are a rabble, they're a mob. They can’t agree on a lobbying position. They’re too busy eating each others’ lunch to agree on how to cater a meeting to discuss it.

But let those hundred companies merge to monopoly, absorb one another in an incestuous orgy, turn into five giant companies, so inbred they’ve got a corporate Habsburg jaw, and they become a cartel.

It’s easy for a cartel to agree on what bullshit they’re all going to feed their regulator, and to mobilize some of the excess billions they’ve reaped through consolidation, which freed them from “wasteful competition," sp they can capture their regulators completely.

You know, Congress used to pass federal consumer privacy laws? Not anymore.

The last time Congress managed to pass a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988: The Video Privacy Protection Act. That’s a law that bans video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you take home. In other words, it regulates three things that have effectively ceased to exist.

The threat of having your video rental history out there in the public eye was not the last or most urgent threat the American public faced, and yet, Congress is deadlocked on passing a privacy law.

Tech companies’ regulatory capture involves a risible and transparent gambit, that is so stupid, it’s an insult to all the good hardworking risible transparent ruses out there.

Namely, they claim that when they violate your consumer, privacy or labor rights, It’s not a crime, because they do it with an app.

Algorithmic wage discrimination isn’t illegal wage theft: we do it with an app.

Spying on you from asshole to appetite isn’t a privacy violation: we do it with an app.

And Amazon’s scam search tool that tricks you into paying 29% more than the best match for your query? Not a ripoff. We do it with an app.

Once we killed competition – stopped putting down rat poison – we got cartels – the rats ate our faces. And the cartels captured their regulators – the rats bought out the poison factory and shut it down.

So companies aren’t constrained by competition or regulation.

But you know what? This is tech, and tech is different.IIt’s different because it’s flexible. Because our computers are Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines. That means that any enshittificatory alteration to a program can be disenshittified with another program.

Every time HP jacks up the price of ink , they invite a competitor to market a refill kit or a compatible cartridge.

When Tesla installs code that says you have to pay an extra monthly fee to use your whole battery, they invite a modder to start selling a kit to jailbreak that battery and charge it all the way up.

Lemme take you through a little example of how that works: Imagine this is a product design meeting for our company’s website, and the guy leading the meeting says “Dudes, you know how our KPI is topline ad-revenue? Well, I’ve calculated that if we make the ads just 20% more invasive and obnoxious, we’ll boost ad rev by 2%”

This is a good pitch. Hit that KPI and everyone gets a fat bonus. We can all take our families on a luxury ski vacation in Switzerland.

But here’s the thing: someone’s gonna stick their arm up – someone who doesn’t give a shit about user well-being, and that person is gonna say, “I love how you think, Elon. But has it occurred to you that if we make the ads 20% more obnoxious, then 40% of our users will go to a search engine and type 'How do I block ads?'"

I mean, what a nightmare! Because once a user does that, the revenue from that user doesn’t rise to 102%. It doesn’t stay at 100% It falls to zero, forever.

[Any guesses why?]

Because no user ever went back to the search engine and typed, 'How do I start seeing ads again?'

Once the user jailbreaks their phone or discovers third party ink, or develops a relationship with an independent Tesla mechanic who’ll unlock all the DLC in their car, that user is gone, forever.

Interoperability – that latent property bequeathed to us courtesy of Herrs Turing and Von Neumann and their infinitely flexible, universal machines – that is a serious check on enshittification.

The fact that Congress hasn’t passed a privacy law since 1988 Is countered, at least in part, by the fact that the majority of web users are now running ad-blockers, which are also tracker-blockers.

But no one’s ever installed a tracker-blocker for an app. Because reverse engineering an app puts in you jeopardy of criminal and civil prosecution under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with penalties of a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

And violating its terms of service puts you in jeopardy under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which is the law that Ronald Reagan signed in a panic after watching Wargames (seriously!).

Helping other users violate the terms of service can get you hit with a lawsuit for tortious interference with contract. And then there’s trademark, copyright and patent.

All that nonsense we call “IP,” but which Jay Freeman of Cydia calls “Felony Contempt of Business Model."

So if we’re still at that product planning meeting and now it’s time to talk about our app, the guy leading the meeting says, “OK, so we’ll make the ads in the app 20% more obnoxious to pull a 2% increase in topline ad rev?”

And that person who objected to making the website 20% worse? Their hand goes back up. Only this time they say “Why don’t we make the ads 100% more invasive and get a 10% increase in ad rev?"

Because it doesn't matter if a user goes to a search engine and types, “How do I block ads in an app." The answer is: you can't. So YOLO, enshittify away.

“IP” is just a euphemism for “any law that lets me reach outside my company’s walls to exert coercive control over my critics, competitors and customers,” and “app” is just a euphemism for “A web page skinned with the right IP so that protecting your privacy while you use it is a felony.”

Interop used to keep companies from enshittifying. If a company made its client suck, someone would roll out an alternative client, if they ripped a feature out and wanted to sell it back to you as a monthly subscription, someone would make a compatible plugin that restored it for a one-time fee, or for free.

To help people flee Myspace, FB gave them bots that you’d load with your login credentials. It would scrape your waiting Myspace messages and put ‘em in your FB inbox, and login to Myspace and paste your replies into your Myspace outbox. So you didn’t have to choose between the people you loved on Myspace, and Facebook, which launched with a promise never to spy on you. Remember that?!

Thanks to the metastasis of IP, all that is off the table today. Apple owes its very existence to iWork Suite, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote are file-compatible with Microsoft’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But make an IOS runtime that’ll play back the files you bought from Apple’s stores on other platforms, and they’ll nuke you til you glow.

FB wouldn’t have had a hope of breaking Myspace’s grip on social media without that scrape, but scrape FB today in support of an alternative client and their lawyers will bomb you til the rubble bounces.

Google scraped every website in the world to create its search index. Try and scrape Google and they’ll have your head on a pike.

When they did it, it was progress. When you do it to them, that’s piracy. Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

Because this handful of companies has so thoroughly captured their regulators, they can wield the power of the state against you when you try to break their grip on power, even as their own flagrant violations of our rights go unpunished. Because they do them with an app.

Tech lost its fear of competitin it neutralized the threat from regulators, and then put them in harness to attack new startups that might do unto them as they did unto the companies that came before them.

But even so, there was a force that kept our bosses in check That force was us. Tech workers.

Tech workers have historically been in short supply, which gave us power, and our bosses knew it.

To get us to work crazy hours, they came up with a trick. They appealed to our love of technology, and told us that we were heroes of a digital revolution, who would “organize the world’s information and make it useful,” who would “bring the world closer together.”

They brought in expert set-dressers to turn our workplaces into whimsical campuses with free laundry, gourmet cafeterias, massages, and kombucha, and a surgeon on hand to freeze our eggs so that we could work through our fertile years.

They convinced us that we were being pampered, rather than being worked like government mules.

This trick has a name. Fobazi Ettarh, the librarian-theorist, calls it “vocational awe, and Elon Musk calls it being “extremely hardcore.”

This worked very well. Boy did we put in some long-ass hours!

But for our bosses, this trick failed badly. Because if you miss your mother’s funeral and to hit a deadline, and then your boss orders you to enshittify that product, you are gonna experience a profound moral injury, which you are absolutely gonna make your boss share.

Because what are they gonna do? Fire you? They can’t hire someone else to do your job, and you can get a job that’s even better at the shop across the street.

So workers held the line when competition, regulation and interop failed.

But eventually, supply caught up with demand. Tech laid off 260,000 of us last year, and another 100,000 in the first half of this year.

You can’t tell your bosses to go fuck themselves, because they’ll fire your ass and give your job to someone who’ll be only too happy to enshittify that product you built.

That’s why this is all happening right now. Our bosses aren’t different. They didn’t catch a mind-virus that turned them into greedy assholes who don’t care about our users’ wellbeing or the quality of our products.

As far as our bosses have always been concerned, the point of the business was to charge the most, and deliver the least, while sharing as little as possible with suppliers, workers, users and customers. They’re not running charities.

Since day one, our bosses have shown up for work and yanked as hard as they can on the big ENSHITTIFICATION lever behind their desks, only that lever didn’t move much. It was all gummed up by competition, regulation, interop and workers.

As those sources of friction melted away, the enshittification lever started moving very freely.

Which sucks, I know. But think about this for a sec: our bosses, despite being wildly imperfect vessels capable of rationalizing endless greed and cheating, nevertheless oversaw a series of actually great products and services.

Not because they used to be better people, but because they used to be subjected to discipline.

So it follows that if we want to end the enshittocene, dismantle the enshitternet, and build a new, good internet that our bosses can’t wreck, we need to make sure that these constraints are durably installed on that internet, wound around its very roots and nerves. And we have to stand guard over it so that it can’t be dismantled again.

A new, good internet is one that has the positive aspects of the old, good internet: an ethic of technological self-determination, where users of technology (and hackers, tinkerers, startups and others serving as their proxies) can reconfigure and mod the technology they use, so that it does what they need it to do, and so that it can’t be used against them.

But the new, good internet will fix the defects of the old, good internet, the part that made it hard to use for anyone who wasn’t us. And hell yeah we can do that. Tech bosses swear that it’s impossible, that you can’t have a conversation friend without sharing it with Zuck; or search the web without letting Google scrape you down to the viscera; or have a phone that works reliably without giving Apple a veto over the software you install.

They claim that it’s a nonsense to even ponder this kind of thing. It’s like making water that’s not wet. But that’s bullshit. We can have nice things. We can build for the people we love, and give them a place that’s worth of their time and attention.

To do that, we have to install constraints.

The first constraint, remember, is competition. We’re living through a epochal shift in competition policy. After 40 years with antitrust enforcement in an induced coma, a wave of antitrust vigor has swept through governments all over the world. Regulators are stepping in to ban monopolistic practices, open up walled gardens, block anticompetitive mergers, and even unwind corrupt mergers that were undertaken on false pretenses.

Normally this is the place in the speech where I’d list out all the amazing things that have happened over the past four years. The enforcement actions that blocked companies from becoming too big to care, and that scared companies away from even trying.

Like Wiz, which just noped out of the largest acquisition offer in history, turning down Google’s $23b cashout, and deciding to, you know, just be a fucking business that makes money by producing a product that people want and selling it at a competitive price.

Normally, I’d be listing out FTC rulemakings that banned noncompetes nationwid. Or the new merger guidelines the FTC and DOJ cooked up, which – among other things – establish that the agencies should be considering whether a merger will negatively impact privacy.

I had a whole section of this stuff in my notes, a real victory lap, but I deleted it all this week.

[Can anyone guess why?]

That’s right! This week, Judge Amit Mehta, ruling for the DC Circuit of these United States of America, In the docket 20-3010 a case known as United States v. Google LLC, found that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," and ordered Google and the DOJ to propose a schedule for a remedy, like breaking the company up.

So yeah, that was pretty fucking epic.

Now, this antitrust stuff is pretty esoteric, and I won’t gatekeep you or shame you if you wanna keep a little distance on this subject. Nearly everyone is an antitrust normie, and that's OK. But if you’re a normie, you’re probably only catching little bits and pieces of the narrative, and let me tell you, the monopolists know it and they are flooding the zone.

The Wall Street Journal has published over 100 editorials condemning FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying she’s an ineffectual do-nothing, wasting public funds chasing doomed, quixotic adventures against poor, innocent businesses accomplishing nothing

[Does anyone out there know who owns the Wall Street Journal?]

That’s right, it’s Rupert Murdoch. Do you really think Rupert Murdoch pays his editorial board to write one hundred editorials about someone who’s not getting anything done?

The reality is that in the USA, in the UK, in the EU, in Australia, in Canada, in Japan, in South Korea, even in China, we are seeing more antitrust action over the past four years than over the preceding forty years.

Remember, competition law is actually pretty robust. The problem isn’t the law, It’s the enforcement priorities. Reagan put antitrust in mothballs 40 years ago, but that elegant weapon from a more civilized age is now back in the hands of people who know how to use it, and they’re swinging for the fences.

Next up: regulation.

As the seemingly inescapable power of the tech giants is revealed for the sham it always was, governments and regulators are finally gonna kill the “one weird trick” of violating the law, and saying “It doesn’t count, we did it with an app.”

Like in the EU, they’re rolling out the Digital Markets Act this year. That’s a law requiring dominant platforms to stand up APIs so that third parties can offer interoperable services.

So a co-op, a nonprofit, a hobbyist, a startup, or a local government agency wil eventuallyl be able to offer, say, a social media server that can interconnect with one of the dominant social media silos, and users who switch to that new platform will be able to continue to exchange messages with the users they follow and groups they belong to, so the switching costs will fall to damned near zero.

That’s a very cool rule, but what’s even cooler is how it’s gonna be enforced. Previous EU tech rules were “regulations” as in the GDPR – the General Data Privacy Regulation. EU regs need to be “transposed” into laws in each of the 27 EU member states, so they become national laws that get enforced by national courts.

For Big Tech, that means all previous tech regulations are enforced in Ireland, because Ireland is a tax haven, and all the tech companies fly Irish flags of convenience.

Here’s the thing: every tax haven is also a crime haven. After all, if Google can pretend it’s Irish this week, it can pretend to be Cypriot, or Maltese, or Luxembougeious next week. So Ireland has to keep these footloose criminal enterprises happy, or they’ll up sticks and go somewhere else.

This is why the GDPR is such a goddamned joke in practice. Big tech wipes its ass with the GDPR, and the only way to punish them starts with Ireland’s privacy commissioner, who barely bothers to get out of bed. This is an agency that spends most of its time watching cartoons on TV in its pajamas and eating breakfast cereal. So all of the big GDPR cases go to Ireland and they die there.

This is hardly a secret. The European Commission knows it’s going on. So with the DMA, the Commission has changed things up: The DMA is an “Act,” not a “Regulation.” Meaning it gets enforced in the EU’s federal courts, bypassing the national courts in crime-havens like Ireland.

In other words, the “we violate privacy law, but we do it with an app” gambit that worked on Ireland’s toothless privacy watchdog is now a dead letter, because EU federal judges have no reason to swallow that obvious bullshit.

Here in the US, the dam is breaking on federal consumer privacy law – at last!

Remember, our last privacy law was passed in 1988 to protect the sanctity of VHS rental history. It's been a minute.

And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden? Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google? Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics? Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms? Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

A federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems

There's a pretty big coalition for that kind of privacy law! Which is why we have seen a procession of imperfect (but steadily improving) privacy laws working their way through Congress.

If you sign up for EFF’s mailing list at eff.org we’ll send you an email when these come up, so you can call your Congressjerk or Senator and talk to them about it. Or better yet, make an appointment to drop by their offices when they’re in their districts, and explain to them that you’re not just a registered voter from their district, you’re the kind of elite tech person who goes to Defcon, and then explain the bill to them. That stuff makes a difference.

What about self-help? How are we doing on making interoperability legal again, so hackers can just fix shit without waiting for Congress or a federal agency to act?

All the action here these day is in the state Right to Repair fight. We’re getting state R2R bills, like the one that passed this year in Oregon that bans parts pairing, where DRM is used to keep a device from using a new part until it gets an authorized technician’s unlock code.

These bills are pushed by a fantastic group of organizations called the Repair Coalition, at Repair.org, and they’ll email you when one of these laws is going through your statehouse, so you can meet with your state reps and explain to the JV squad the same thing you told your federal reps.

Repair.org’s prime mover is Ifixit, who are genuine heroes of the repair revolution, and Ifixit’s founder, Kyle Wiens, is here at the con. When you see him, you can shake his hand and tell him thanks, and that’ll be even better if you tell him that you’ve signed up to get alerts at repair.org!

Now, on to the final way that we reverse enhittification and build that new, good internet: you, the tech labor force.

For years, your bosses tricked you into thinking you were founders in waiting, temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who were only momentarily drawing a salary.

You certainly weren’t workers. Your power came from your intrinsic virtue, not like those lazy slobs in unions who have to get their power through that kumbaya solidarity nonsense.

It was a trick. You were scammed. The power you had came from scarcity, and so when the scarcity ended, when the industry started ringing up six-figure annual layoffs, your power went away with it.

The only durable source of power for tech workers is as workers, in a union.

Think about Amazon. Warehouse workers have to piss in bottles and have the highest rate of on-the-job maimings of any competing business. Whereas Amazon coders get to show up for work with facial piercings, green mohawks, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don’t understand. They can piss whenever they want!

That’s not because Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy loves you guys. It’s because they’re scared you’ll quit and they don’t know how to replace you.

Time for the second obligatory William Gibson quote: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” You know who’s living in the future?. Those Amazon blue-collar workers. They are the bleeding edge.

Drivers whose eyeballs are monitored by AI cameras that do digital phrenology on their faces to figure out whether to dock their pay, warehouse workers whose bodies are ruined in just months.

As tech bosses beef up that reserve army of unemployed, skilled tech workers, then those tech workers – you all – will arrive at the same future as them.

Look, I know that you’ve spent your careers explaining in words so small your boss could understand them that you refuse to enshittify the company’s products, and I thank you for your service.

But if you want to go on fighting for the user, you need power that’s more durable than scarcity. You need a union. Wanna learn how? Check out the Tech Workers Coalition and Tech Solidarity, and get organized.

Enshittification didn’t arise because our bosses changed. They were always that guy.

They were always yankin’ on that enshittification lever in the C-suite.

What changed was the environment, everything that kept that switch from moving.

And that’s good news, in a bankshot way, because it means we can make good services out of imperfect people. As a wildly imperfect person myself, I find this heartening.

The new good internet is in our grasp: an internet that has the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the greased-skids simplicity of Web 2.0 that let all our normie friends get in on the fun.

Tech bosses want you to think that good UX and enshittification can’t ever be separated. That’s such a self-serving proposition you can spot it from orbit. We know it, 'cause we built the old good internet, and we’ve been fighting a rear-guard action to preserve it for the past two decades.

It’s time to stop playing defense. It's time to go on the offensive. To restore competition, regulation, interop and tech worker power so that we can create the new, good internet we’ll need to fight fascism, the climate emergency, and genocide.

To build a digital nervous system for a 21st century in which our children can thrive and prosper.

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/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

Image: https://twitter.com/igama/status/1822347578094043435/ (cropped)

@fak3r@mastodon.social (cropped)

https://mamot.fr/@fak3r@mastodon.social/112963252835869648

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.pt

[artemis32]

Lovelorn

Yandere Class 1A x reader

yeah, uh, i hate this, but you get what you get

mbe masterlist

Izuku was at a loss.

He'd tried everything - absolutely everything - to get you to open up. To talk. To partake in group activities outside of class

But no matter what he did, no matter how he tried to sell the idea, no matter how manipulative he was, you declined.

Every. Single. Time.

What made it worse was that he knew several other people in your class were trying to achieve the same thing.

Mina had invited you out more times than he could keep count of, and each time she was met with a short, harsh rejection.

Sero and Kaminari had joked with you, trying to get you to at least crack a hint of a smile.

No success.

Momo constantly offered to help you study, and when you inevitably said no, she would insist on tea parties and lunch dates and shopping trips with the rest of the girls in the class. You had stared at her with a blank gaze until she felt uncomfortable enough to leave.

Even Uraraka, as sweet as she was, was unable to crack your tough exterior.

Izuku realised that they were quickly running out of options. They'd run through the list of class members they could turn to for a solution, and sooner or later they'd have to accept the worst-case scenario.

They'd have to ask Bakugo for help.

****

You hated your classmates.

They were annoying. They were insistent.

When they were around, you never got so much as two minutes of peace and quiet.

It was bearable during the first few months of your first year, when you could go home and have a break from their never-ending questions.

But then the school had decided that it was in the best interest of the students to have you all move into dorms.

You hadn't known a single moment of peace since.

There always seemed to be someone attached to your hip, or trailing a few steps behind you, or eyeing you from across the room.

It was annoying, and you thought you’d made that clear.

In the beginning, you thought they had all been so insistent because they were curious about your quirk. 

That in itself was understandable - no one knew one another, so it was natural for everyone to want to get to know their classmates quirks.

You knew of everyone else’s quirks - of course you did, you knew everything about them - and for the most part, they knew about yours, or as much as you’d told them. 

Teleportation.

You thought that would be enough to satiate them, but evidently, you were wrong.

At first, your classmates, Izuku specifically, wanted to know about all the intricacies of your quirk - the parameters, drawbacks, limits, range, all of it. That had been the first warning sign. You were taught growing up to never tell anyone more about your quirk than they needed to know. That was enough for you to avoid Izuku.

All of your classmates seemed to be in awe of your power, which was strange.  You weren’t particularly fond of your quirk. It was just so boring.

Teleportation, especially at your current level, wasn’t very useful to a hero. You weren’t much good when you were only able to teleport yourself.

Regardless, you were working on improving your quirk as best you could.

A small part of your mind whispered to you that they knew about things they shouldn’t, but that was just the usual bout of paranoia getting to you. You’d know whatever they knew straight away.

****

You teleportation quirk had developed at four years old, which was slightly younger than your father had been banking on. He’d gone to great lengths to teach you how to control your ability - at four years old, you had a tendency to just disappear. Not because you wanted to, or because you were actively thinking about leaving. No, it was more because you had absolutely zero control over yourself or your quirk.

By the time you turned six, you’d mastered the control your father so desperately wanted you to learn. You found that keeping your emotions in check helped more than consciously thinking about not using your quirk.

That degree of control couldn’t have developed at a better time, because eight months later, right before your seventh birthday, you developed your second quirk.

Telepathy.

That’s what became the real bane of your existence. 

Sure, you were blessed to have two quirks. In fact, you loved it as a child. But controlling this quirk proved to be significantly more difficult than your first. 

You managed to get it under control, for the most part. You made sure that you weren’t blaring your thoughts out loud constantly, and you learnt how to talk to people one on one pretty quickly.

What you couldn’t control, even close to ten years after discovering your second quirk, was how to shut other people’s thoughts out. 

It was a never-ending battle, trying not to up and leave whenever you got too overwhelmed. 

You’re sure someone could have helped you. The adults in your life - middle school teachers, your friends, their parents, maybe even Mr Aizawa and your classmates could have helped you, but you would never breathe so much as a word to them about your quirk - not when you saw how people reacted to the idea of someone being able to read their every thought.

So you kept it to yourself, occasionally making use of your teleportation quirk to get a moment of silence, leaping far, far away from civilisation, from people’s thoughts.

In those moments alone, it wasn’t so bad. You thought about how incredible your quirks actually were, about how fortunate you were to have a quirk at all, never mind two.

Then you’d return back to your dorm, and the cycle would repeat.

****

You would admit, it was pretty funny.

Hearing how strangely obsessed your classmates were with you was actually hilarious, especially considering they thought you had no idea. Not to mention, constantly ruining their supposedly brilliant plans. 

Some of their ideas truly were brilliant, and they may have worked, had you not known about them in advance.

There were times that you almost felt bad for them. Almost. But playing along with them, seeing just how far you could push them without raising suspicion - it was fun.

Like right now, for example.

“-but I’m sure the weather will be clear enough for a picnic next weekend, since you don’t seem to like the idea of a tea party. What do you think?”

Yaoyorozu and Mina, who stood in front of your desk as you stared out the window, were still talking. Of course, what they were saying sounded nice enough, but their thoughts betrayed their true intentions.

Come oooonnnnnn, say yes, say yes! Just one bit of personal information, that’s all I need. I absolutely have to win this bet with Kaminari, so just give me something to work with!

Mina was someone who remained loud and talkative both within her mind, and when talking to people aloud.

The bet she was thinking about had been a running gag for a while now, something you had almost grown bored of.

Mina, Denki and Sero had made a bet; whoever was first to learn a tidbit of personal information about you, from you, got free reign of the communal gaming system in the dorm lounge for a month.

At least, that's what it started out as in the beginning.

It quickly reached the ears of the other students in your class, and everyone wanted in on the bet.

The promise of dibs on the game system long forgotten, their focus quickly moved on to bragging rights - after all, getting you to reveal any amount of personal information was seen as a great feat, one worthy of praise.

It had been funny at first, seeing how they scrambled to talk to you first, or the awkward ways they interacted with you to get even the slightest sliver of information.

Now, their thoughts gave you a headache whenever they were near.

You could probably have gone to Mr Aizawa if you had to - you were sure you could fabricate some evidence of their weird behaviour and have him intervene.

But the problem was, he was just as bad.

He had this weird, protective mindset.

It had creeped you out at first, but with time, you'd almost grown fond of his concern. It was... endearing. Kind of. Like a father. Or a puppy.

Regardless, he knew about their antics, and he hadn't bothered with them so far, so you decided it would be best if you kept your knowledge of the situation to yourself.

“No. Thank you though,” you reply smoothly, turning away from them to signal the end of the conversation.

But of course, they never really took no as an answer.

“Why? If it’s because you don’t want to be around a ton of people, then don’t worry about it - it’ll be like, eight of us. Please,” they ask, eyes wide and hopeful.

You’re saved, literally, by All Might entering the classroom with a silent shuffle.

“To your seats everyone, get to your seats please.”

****

Even without the use of your quirk, you can feel your class glowering from across the room.

You aren’t sure how your purple haired companion doesn’t realise that they’re glaring daggers at him - he really doesn’t even register that they’re looking at him at all.

But he doesn’t mention it, and no thoughts of them cross his mind, so you pay them no mind.

You liked Shinso. He was good company - quiet, polite, and his thoughts were the kind that barely skirted the edge of your consciousness. Being around him was like a breath of fresh air, so you clung to him.

It wasn’t often that you found someone who didn’t induce a migraine as soon as they entered the room. In fact, you could count on one hand the number of people you’d met that you could tolerate for longer than ten minutes.

Shinso was one, and Aizawa, surprisingly, was another. 

Even more surprising than that though, had to be that Bakugo of all people had a quiet mind.

If anyone had known about your quirk and you told them, you were sure they’d call you a liar.

But it was the truth. The angry blond had such a tranquil mind that, if he allowed it, you’d befriend him. But you’d grown an aversion to being near him, as wherever Bakugo was, a crowd of classmates was sure to follow.

You’re brought back to the present moment as Shinso shakes his hand in front of your face, throwing you a quizzical look.

“Ah, sorry, I zoned out.”

He nods in understanding, before glancing behind you.

“Just thought I’d let you know; your classmates look like they want my head on a stick,” he says in a bored tone, eyes sliding back to you a moment later.

You make a noise at the back of your throat.

“Yeah,” you wince, “I noticed that. I didn’t want to mention it.”

He shrugs, standing up and offering you his hand.

“Well, then let’s find somewhere else to sit, huh?”

You smile. Your classmates are outraged, seething as you accept his hand and sweep out of the cafeteria.

Thank goodness, you think, there were so many voices.

You only went to the cafeteria because Shinso liked the soba they served.

Honestly, braving the bustling centre felt like someone was hitting between your eyes with an ice-pick - pure torture.

The flood of thoughts fades as the two of you walk further from the main building, and your shoulders slump with relief.

If he notices, Shinso doesn’t comment. You’d thought originally that he was just extremely unobservant, but he really just didn’t think about or mention anything unless it raised any actual concern.

You’d realised that when you had accompanied him to a private training session with Aizawa, and you’d had a migraine from a long day of dealing with your classmates.

He only brought it up, openly thought about it when he saw how you grabbed at your head out of the corner of his eye.

Being with him was peaceful, you’d realised in that moment, because he had incredible control over his thoughts. That must have been because of his own predominantly mental quirk.

The thought made you happy, for some reason.

****

You liked when Mr Aizawa used his quirk on you.

The rest of your classmates hated it, and it really seemed to throw them off, but to you, it felt like sweet relief. It made everything quiet. Peaceful.

There were times where it threw you off, suddenly hearing nothing but radio silence, but after some adjustment, it was as if someone had released the pressure on your skull. Not that he, or anyone else knew.

Though, on some occasions, when he looked at you before you had time to mask the relief on your face, you saw the slight glimmer of something akin to realisation in his eyes. If he knew, he never brought it up.

It should’ve had you on edge - the fact that he might’ve known, but never said anything. But it didn’t. You didn’t know why.

If anyone were to discover your second quirk, you’d be in a world of trouble. Having an unregistered quirk, especially at your age, in UA of all places - it was unheard of. 

It was criminal.

So you should’ve been terrified at the thought of someone finding out, knowing about your quirk.

But surely if he knew, he’d have brought it up by now?

“Quiet down class,” Aizawa demands flatly.

They don’t listen. Of course they don’t. 

Their incessant chatter matches their constant barrage of thoughts, and it seems particularly noisy today. All their thoughts are focused on you, and it leaves a sharp throb in your temples.

Aizawa glares at them, eyes flashing crimson for a moment, and you feel all the tension melt away. You prepare yourself for the inevitable rush of returning voices, but it doesn’t come. Aizawa, for some reason, keeps his quirk activated, gaze roaming the class, lingering on you for a second too long before he looks away, brows furrowing as he blinks.

You mask your wince with an awkward cough, shifting in your seat. Now, most thoughts were centred around Aizawa and how scary he was.

The thought makes you laugh. They were so far off the mark, it was comical. Aizawa was like an overly concerned parent, thoughts constantly circling his students, how he could push them to be better. Honestly, it was quite heart warming, and the fact that his actions were so glaringly different to his thoughts made it ten times funnier.

Aizawa calls your name, drawing you out of your thoughts.

“Sensei?”

“See me after class.”

Before you have a chance to delve into his mind to see what he was thinking, a barrage of thoughts hit you from all angles, your classmates wondering, like you, what this was all about.

You don’t give much thought to his request, too overwhelmed to try and sift through the turbulent sea of thoughts.

****

Aizawa schools his expression, staring down at you blankly.

“Well?”

You looked so young like this – wide eyed, trembling hands, pale, blanched face. You were panicked. He knew you were, but he made no move to ease your worries, waiting instead for confirmation.

“I– Sensei…”

He feels his brow twitch.

Not in annoyance. Not with you. Never you. You tended to tug at his heart strings, for reasons he didn’t fully understand.

Maybe because you were so young? You appeared younger still with that gleam of innocence in your eyes. Hero society was no place for someone like you - you were someone heroes should be protecting, rather than welcoming into their ranks.

“Answer the question.”

Your throat bobs as you swallow and turn your head to look out the window.

Were you thinking of a way to talk yourself out the situation? Were you trying to find a way to play off his discovery as nothing more than a funny happenstance? He didn’t doubt it.

“…yes.”

The word weighs heavily on you, shoulders sagging as you stand before him, curling in on yourself. His heart aches at the sight.

How overwhelming was it, to keep something like this to yourself? To live in fear of someone discovering your secret and hating you for it?

“And you’ve kept this to yourself for the past ten years? You’ve had no training or help whatsoever?”

You seem surprised at the shock colouring his tone, as if you’d expected him to be angry or fearful, rather than sympathetic. Again, he wondered how you’d dealt with this all alone for so long.

He sighs.

“You’re not in trouble. I’m not mad.”

He sees the tension melt from your posture in real time, as if someone had lifted an anvil off your shoulders.

“If you’d like, I can help you. We could do some training after classes; help you learn control? I can’t promise anything, but it might help.”

Of all the things Aizawa had expected to happen, you bursting into tears wasn’t one of them. Some long buried protective instinct rears it’s head at the sight of your red rimmed eyes as you try desperately to mop away the tears on your cheeks.

He awkwardly shifts from one foot to another, patting your shoulder in a pathetic attempt to comfort you.

“I’m really not in trouble? Y-You don’t hate me for listening in on your thoughts without permission?”

Again, that same painful clench in his heart.

“No, I don’t. Why would I hate you for something you can’t control? None of your classmates would either, I can promise you that.”

Aizawa spends the next twenty minutes clumsily comforting you, dismissing you as soon as your tears have stopped and he makes his way to the principal’s office a few minutes later. When he arrives, he’s immediately greeted by a very tense looking All Might and an oblivious, chattering Nezu.

He seats himself in the armchair next to Toshinori, posture sagging.

“You were right.”

Nezu cackles at that, hardly able to get a word in through his triumphant laughter. His reaction is in stark contrast to the other two men and their responses. The two share a tense, understanding look, glancing back at Nezu as he calms his laughter.

“Oh, this is most wonderful! I can’t wait to see what happens!”

Guilt eats away at Aizawa. He could only hope you wouldn’t hate him and Toshinori, or even your classmates for what they planned on doing.

[pokemonalphabet]

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