#high-end precision products | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

yanwonnies · 2 months

Text

ꜜ : 𝑺𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒆𝒅 𝑺𝒆𝒍𝒇𝒊𝒔𝒉𝒏𝒆𝒔𝒔 ﹙ 희승; 제이 ; 정원 ! ﹚

↝ At the MAMA awards, Y/N's dangerously short dress intensely catches the attention of Jungwon, Heeseung, and Jay, sparking tension and desire in the dressing room.

⠇↴ Pairings: poly!ot7 x added member!reader ﹙ l.hs, p.js, y.jw centric. ﹚ ⠇↴ Words: 3.4K

Warnings ‎⸝⸝⸝ suggestive, ass grabbing (l.hs part), throat grabbing (p.js part), making out session?? i don't really know, just a lot of kissing, enha' a bit dominant and possessive, insecure!reader as well as anxious!reader, a little angsty, ending a little short and boring to be honest. I think that's all… if I missed something, let me know!

Wonnie’s note ‎⸝⸝⸝ english is not my first language, so I apologize if there are any typographical errors or if the text loses meaning in some parts. I appreciate your understanding and patience. I hope you enjoy the reading, and thank you very much for taking the time to read my work.

𝘺𝘢𝘯𝘸𝘰𝘯𝘯𝘪𝘦𝘴 2024 © 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘦𝘥.

The hustle and bustle in the hallways backstage at the MAMA Awards was almost deafening. The atmosphere vibrated with palpable anticipation, a whirlwind of adrenaline and excitement enveloping every corner of the staging area. Artists, stylists and production staff moved with frantic urgency, each focused on perfecting the details for the big event. In the midst of all this excitement, my only point of focus was the reflection of my own figure in the dressing room mirror.

The dress I had been assigned for the presentation was not simply a costume piece; it was something that brazenly defied the rules of modesty. The tight, shiny fabric clung to my body with a precision that was almost unsettling, highlighting every curve and contour with an intensity that made me feel exposed. What really bothered me, however, was not just the tight material, but the way the dress cinched around the safety shorts.

The hem, which ended dangerously high, barely covered the essentials, letting the edges of the shorts peek out shyly and accentuating the feeling of vulnerability. Every little movement was a reminder of how close I was to unwanted exposure. The shiny fabric seemed to dance to the rhythm of my body, revealing more than I wished to show.

The tight fit of the dress and the visibility of the shorts created a palpable discomfort. Every breath became an act of discipline, a conscious effort to maintain a graceful posture while dealing with the restriction the fabric imposed. The heat and pressure under the dressing room lights added to my discomfort, making every movement feel like a constant challenge. I knew it would be complicated to move fluidly on stage, and that certainty only added to my anxiety.

In the midst of this internal whirlwind, the sound of the dressing room door opening interrupted my thoughts, bursting the bubble of my self-analysis. Instantly, I shrank back a little, instinctively seeking to hide my unease. Jungwon entered, and as our gazes met in the mirror, I noticed something that made my heart skip a beat. There was concern in his eyes, yes, but what surprised me most was how his pupils dilated and his eyes, normally filled with a warm glow, seemed to have darkened.

His gaze lingered on my figure, with a flash of curiosity that soon turned into something deeper. His expression changed, a touch of seriousness I hadn't seen before. -Is that… what you're going to wear? - he asked, his tone evoking a sense of tension.

Instead of responding with words, I simply nodded my head, unable to articulate a more coherent response. My throat felt dry, and nervousness prevented me from formulating a clear explanation. I looked down to fiddle nervously with my hands. The feeling of being watched so closely made me look for any distraction that might help me manage the growing nervousness.

The room seemed to have shrunk to an intimate space, and the bustle outside faded to a distant whisper. Jungwon approached slowly, his movements deliberate and calculated, like a predator studying its prey. His every step seemed to echo in the silent room, and his presence seemed to fill everything.

When he stood in front of me, the closeness was overwhelming. I was cornered between the makeup table and him, my back pressed against the edge of the table. His legs were strategically placed in between mine, leaving barely any space between us. His proximity was so palpable that I felt his warmth almost like an extension of my own body.

With a gesture that combined firmness and gentleness, he placed his hand on my waist; the pressure of his fingers was sure but not aggressive, as if he was trying to balance control with an almost intimate subtlety. The contact was enveloping, his every movement causing the warmth of his hand to transmit through the material of the dress.

The sensation of her fingers pressing against my waist, while his legs were so close to mine, intensified the feeling of confinement. The pressure of his body against mine and the brush of his hand on mine created an atmosphere charged with tension. His gaze rested on every detail of my figure, his piercing eyes revealing a concern that seemed to merge with a palpable attraction.

He bowed his head with an almost imperceptible gesture -You look…- he began to say in a whisper that vibrated with a captivating depth. -You look… absolutely amazing- The way he articulated each word, slurring the syllables, conveyed not only admiration, but a possessiveness that made me shudder. His tone charged with burning desire caused a searing heat to rise in my cheeks, and my skin tightened under his penetrating gaze.

Before I could react, Jungwon further reduced the distance between us and kissed me. It was a kiss that unfolded with an intensity that took my breath away. His lips, warm and demanding, met mine in a contact that was both demanding and delicate. The pressure of his mouth was firm, but the touch of his tongue, as it slid between our lips, was surprisingly gentle. His tongue moving with a confidence that combined desire and subtle dominance, caressing and exploring every corner of my mouth.

The kiss deepened with a palpable urgency. I felt his hands cling to my waist, firm and dominant, but at the same time careful, as if trying not to lose himself in the maelstrom of his own desire. Every caress of his tongue, every exploration, was a testament to a need that could not be contained. The outside world faded away, and there was only the warmth of her lips and the touch of her body.

When he finally pulled away, his lips left a trail of warmth on mine. He placed his forehead against mine, a gesture that sealed the moment with overwhelming intimacy. His eyes, still fixed on mine, reflected a mixture of desire and almost palpable concern. The closeness of our foreheads made our breaths synchronize, creating a space in which every inhale and exhale felt shared.

The feel of his warm, soft skin against mine, combined with the intensity of his gaze, created an emotional connection that transcended the physical.

-You can't use this, Y/N. Not like this…- said Jungwon in a low, firm whisper that resonated with authority, his voice laden with a depth that seemed to penetrate my essence. The words, though soft, carried a weight that contrasted sharply with the fervor of the kiss we had just shared. His gaze remained fixed on mine, his eyes brimming with a mixture of desire and concern -You can't move or dance like that, and that's not something you can ignore.

The certainty in her voice and the firmness of her statement brought me back to the reality of the moment. The discomfort and restriction of the dress became more apparent, and the genuine concern in her eyes merged with the intensity of her desire.

-I'm too selfish to let anyone else see you like this-Jungwon said, and his tone, charged with a possessiveness that made me shudder, seemed to further accentuate the heat rising in my cheeks.

Jungwon slowly pulled away, his forehead parting from mine with a gentleness that contrasted with the intensity of the moment. He walked out of the dressing room with a palpable determination, leaving me alone with a sense of emptiness and confusion. Minutes later, he returned accompanied by Jay and Heeseung.

As the door opened, Jay walked in first and his reaction was instantaneous. His eyes instantly darkened, surprise reflected in his face. His eyes, which normally sparkled with a playful sparkle, turned serious, almost as if they were absorbing the shock of what they saw. The intensity of his gaze swept over every detail of the dress, making it clear that he was affected by the sight.

Heeseung entered shortly after, and a shaky sigh escaped his lips. -God… -His eyes roamed over every line of the dress with a mixture of awe and suppressed desire. The exclamation, though softly spoken, was charged with a fascination she could not conceal. The way his eyes dilated and his expression hardened clearly showed how shocked he was by the sensuality of the outfit.

Instinctively, I pulled the hem of the dress down a little, in a desperate attempt to cover myself further, though I knew it was a temporary and ineffective solution. This simple movement seemed to bring all three of them back to reality.

Jay removed his leather jacket in one purposeful motion and tied it around my waist. The gesture, while practical, carried with it a sense of closeness and protection that I had not anticipated. As he leaned toward me, the intensity of his gaze and the determination in his movements created an atmosphere of security that counteracted my growing anxiety.

The jacket he tied around my waist provided additional coverage, but the real comfort came from his closeness.

-There's no way you're going out like this- Heeseung said, taking a step closer to me, his voice tense and laden with a concern that was evident in every word. The intensity of his gaze swept over my figure with a firmness that left no room for doubt.

-It's obvious- Jay added, his tone now firmer and more determined. -Where's the stylist?- he asked, looking around with palpable trepidation. The search for an immediate solution was evident in his tone, and his concern for my well-being was undeniable.

Nervously, I looked at Jay, trying to remain calm -No, it's really okay…- I said, as I tried to convince them and myself that I could handle the situation. -I don't want to slow us down or upset the staff… It's fine like this.

Jay paused for a moment, and his expression softened. Without another word, he leaned toward me and placed a soft kiss on my lips. His lips moved over mine with an intensity that made me shiver, and the way he held me by the neck gave him a sense of protection and dominance. The kiss was a reminder of his commitment and how deeply he cared for me. His touch, at once gentle and commanding, spoke of a desire to protect me and keep me safe.

-No, I'm not going to let anyone see my girlfriend like this- he said in a deep voice charged with determination, as he slowly pulled away from the kiss. His expression was a reflection of the intensity of his feelings, and his words were an affirmation of his unwavering resolve.

With palpable determination, Jay left the dressing room in search of the stylist, with Jungwon at his side, insisting on accompanying him to ensure that everything was resolved in the best possible way. The door closed behind them with a faint click, leaving me in the dressing room with Heeseung.

The tension in the room was thick and palpable, and the silence that followed Jay and Jungwon's departure was filled with the soft murmur of my gasping breath. Heeseung approached me with a calming presence. The way he moved, with a mixture of assurance and tenderness, contrasted with the intensity of the moment before. He wrapped his arms around my waist, his hands resting gently on my belly. The feel of his warmth and the comforting touch of his fingers brought me a slight relief, and his close whisper in my ear gave me a breath of relief.

-Calm down- Heeseung said to me, his voice was soft, almost like a whisper, laden with an affection that wrapped around me like a warm blanket.

I turned in his arms, feeling the comfort of his nearness. His eyes, ever so warm and understanding, reflected a mixture of concern and affection. It took me a moment to appreciate every feature of his face, with none of the stern grimaces I had seen on Jay.

-It's just that Jay looked really stressed- I told him, seeing Jay lose his composure like that and the seriousness on his face had added an extra layer of unease to my already agitated mind.

Heeseung looked at me with deep understanding. -It's okay- he said, his tone comforting. -Although I personally think the dress is… pretty- his voice carried a tinge of sarcasm, hinting at the hotness of the outfit -I understand that not everyone has the right to see you like this.

A spontaneous smile appeared on my face at Heeseung's boldness; his response was a relief in the midst of the tension. His lighthearted attitude, even in the midst of such an intense situation, was a source of comfort.

Heeseung bowed his head slightly, his gaze fixed on me with a mischievous glint in his eyes. -I'll find a way to bring this dress to the dormitories- he said with a smile that hid a mixture of defiance and tenderness.

I couldn't help but laugh at his comment, giving him a playful pat on the arm. My laughter was a welcome respite, a release of the tension that had built up. However, as soon as my laughter subsided, Heeseung leaned toward me and kissed me passionately on the lips.

The kiss began slowly and playfully, his lips moving over mine with tantalizing softness. Heeseung's lips were warm and firm against mine, and his hand began to slowly roam my waist. The pressure of his touch was a constant reminder of his desire and presence, adding a layer of sensuality to each caress.

I tried to maintain control, not allowing his tongue access to my mouth. His hands, which initially caressed my waist with tantalizing tenderness, slowly descended down my hips. Each movement was deliberate, each caress carefully measured to intensify the desire we shared.

My attempts to maintain dominance over the kiss became more difficult as his hands moved down my thighs, moving with an assured confidence. The feel of his fingers exploring the surface of my skin made me feel vulnerable, and his touch became a promise of what was to come. His hand finally reached my ass, squeezing it with a firmness that made me let out an unexpected gasp.

The sound escaped my lips unintentionally, and at that moment, Heeseung took the opportunity to slide his tongue into my mouth with determined sensuality. The warmth of his tongue met mine, and the kiss deepened with an intensity that made every fiber of my being stir. His movements were sure, every touch and every caress charged with a loving possession that enveloped me completely.

Heeseung began to slowly pull back, his body moving with an innate confidence. Finally, he leaned back against the table, his hips flush against the cold, solid surface. His hands, which previously explored my body tenderly, had now focused on my ass, squeezing it with a firmness that made each caress feel even more intense.

My hands, moving instinctively, found the nape of Heeseung's neck. I began to stroke his hair with a gentleness that was a mixture of affection and desire. The touch of my fingers on his scalp elicited a low moan that escaped his lips, and I felt his body tense against mine with renewed desire.

Suddenly, footsteps sounded in the distance, approaching rapidly. I broke away from Heeseung quickly. As he wiped the residual gloss from my lips with a quick, subtle gesture, I tried to compose myself, adjusting my breathing and arranging my dress with trembling hands. Jay's jacket, still tied around my waist, shifted slightly as I tried to give it a final touch to disguise the slip.

My heartbeat echoed in my ears like a frantic drum as I spun around to face those who were entering. I watched Jungwon, Jay and the stylist cross the threshold, and felt a surge of nervousness course through my body.

Jungwon, with his imposing bearing and a determined expression on his face, waved his hand at me. The concern in his eyes was palpable; he knew well that, as the only woman in the group, my position was especially vulnerable.

-She can't wear that- Jungwon said, his voice ringing with a firmness that left no room for doubt.

The stylist, upon hearing the statement, turned to me with an expression of surprise that quickly morphed into a silent exclamation of understanding. Her lips formed an "O" of surprise and concern as she connected the pieces of the puzzle.

-Ah, this? - She said, pointing to the jacket still tied around my waist. -Yeah, this jacket is Jay's, so this isn't supposed to-

Jay, in a low but determined tone, interrupted immediately -The jacket stays unless T/N changes this piece of fabric that you call a dress- his voice was low and direct, and his displeasure was palpable.

Jay's statement was a reality check that made me feel even more aware of the situation.

Jungwon, noticing the growing tension, tried to calm the atmosphere. -Hyung...- he said in a tone that sought to moderate the situation -we need T/N to change. She can barely move with this on. - He explained, addressing the stylist with a mixture of firmness and calm. Her words were clear: the dress did not allow any free movement, and a solution was urgently needed.

The stylist, with an air of resignation, replied in a tone that made her discomfort clear. -The company chose the clothes, and I really can't do anything about it at the moment- she said.

Jungwon, with a determination that brooked no objection, insisted. -Then the jacket stays.

The stylist sighed, clearly frustrated. The combination of the jacket with the dress was not ideal, and the effort to match it correctly seemed to be reaching its limit. -I'll see what I can do- she said in a tone that promised action, and hurried out of the dressing room in search of a solution.

As the stylist walked away, with hurried steps, my attention was drawn to Jay.

Jay was standing near the door, his figure imposing and his expression filled with palpable concern. The intensity of his gaze was a reminder of how much he cared about all of this. I approached slowly, feeling the tension in my muscles begin to loosen with each step I took toward him. The closeness of his presence brought me a breath of relief, as if the weight of the situation was eased by his proximity alone.

When I was finally close enough, I gently leaned toward him and gave him a kiss on the cheek. My touch was a mixture of gratitude and nervousness, a gesture that sought to express all that I could not say in words. I felt the warmth of his skin under my lips, a warmth that was comforting and reassuring. -Thank you, Jay- I murmured in a voice that tried to remain calm, but hinted at the emotion and gratitude I felt inside.

Jay, upon receiving my kiss, showed a slight smile that spoke of relief and satisfaction. I then turned to Jungwon, who was watching the scene tenderly. I approached him with purposeful steps, seeking his support in the midst of the chaos I had been experiencing.

I offered him a kiss on the cheek, and in that instant, the warmth of his body and the firmness of his embrace became a refuge in the midst of my emotional storm. His embrace was enveloping and protective. -Thank you, Jungwon- I said in a voice full of sincerity and gratitude.

At that moment, the tension in the air began to dissipate, and the atmosphere was filled with a brief breath of relief. Jay, watching Heeseung with a smile that mixed amusement and satisfaction, let out a low chuckle, which broke the tense silence in the dressing room. -Hyung, are you all right? -he asked in a playful tone.

Heeseung, still leaning back from the makeup table, let out a sigh that was a mixture of relief and amusement. The little scuffle between Jay and Heeseung, accompanied by jokes and comments, brought momentary relief to the tension that had been so palpable earlier. As I listened to their banter and bickering, I felt comforted by the solidarity and love they were offering me.

I leaned toward Jungwon once again, feeling the warmth and firmness of his embrace. -Thank you again- I said in a tone full of affection. He smiled slightly, and his expression softened even more. -I had already told you. We are too selfish to share you.

1K notes · View notes

slaygentford · 6 months

Text

Armand's podcast chiarobscuro on obscure art history is just him speaking in a monotone for 1 hour about 1 page of 1 illuminated manuscript nd it's coincidentally number 1 trending on pods because people use it as a sleep aid. but then sometimes in the middle of it he'll say something incredibly disturbing and a cult (haha.) following starts claiming there are hidden subliminals in it which are allegations Armand never acknowledges and which people on twitter roast but reality shifters on tik tok get increasingly into. Daniels podcast by/line is beat out consistently by pod save America which is totally fine and not contributing to his alcoholism or his divorce or his psychosexual obsession with armand. he won't listen to armands podcast as a point of principle except for when he puts it on to fall asleep and then gets weirdly turned on and then pavlovs himself into arousal every time he hears armands voice. one sided psychological torture. Armand's cult (haha.) following continues to grow until lestat's podcast lestat (self-titled) filed in culture & the arts blows up and usurps him even though its an hour and a half one-man monologue about quite genuinely nothing at all, though worryingly often, his mother. and Louis? well Louis isnt privy to any of this because he has a child to raise and zones out whenever lestat starts talking about renting out a bigger recording studio for his podcast so that he can have guests on and invest in sound equipment FOR CLAUDIAS FUTURE, OF COURSE. her college fund Louis! the dividends will go toward her college fund. ahaha. what is the definition of this: dividends. Louis gets curious and listens to lestats podcast but gets distracted by recommended for you: chiarobscuro, finds it interesting enough that he doesn't fall asleep, and mentions it offhandedly to lestat after telling him lestat (self-titled) is cute. lestat is distracted by the high of being told Louis likes his podcast but wakes up in the middle of the night sitting straight up in bed when he remembers Louis said "chiarobscuro" in passing at precisely 7:46am this morning. lestat who has armand in his phone represented by the 🕴🏼emoji from college (Louis doesnt know he knows him, lestat has never once mentioned him) calls him from the bathroom at 4am and demands he immediately end his podcasting career. armand who of course answered at 4am counters that they meet in a neutral location to discuss terms. at 5am lestat and armand meet at a park. lestat rages, scaring off several sunrise joggers and their dogs. armand allows this to happen in silence and then says look across the pond. at which point lestat does and sees a bedraggled 50 year old white man plodding along with bodega coffee. you needn't worry about your Louis, says armand. I have a different project. I have been implanting subliminal messages in my podcasts in order to lure Molloy into my thrall. lestat, grudgingly impressed, concedes and stops to get coffee for the family before going back home. Louis and claudia are delighted by the impromptu breakfast and lestat is offered a special shower time reward. before disrobing, and working quickly, he hacks Louis' phone (passcode claudia's birthday) and in a fit of true selfless sacrifice deletes not just Louis' subscription to chiarobscuro, but his podcast app as a whole--damning his own podcast to never again be heard by Louis but removing armand permanently from their lives forever. he joins Louis in the shower, stunned by his own genius. perhaps he will have that worm molloy on his show in order to thwart armands plans. lestat 2 armand 0. it's almost enough to ease the burn of armand telling lestat in their audio production class in college that he's too dumb to start a podcast

2K notes · View notes

unstable-samurai · 4 months

Text

Breathing This Calm Night - smut

Yunjin x Male Reader

ONE-SHOT

Tags: fluff, oral sex, one-shot, tightjob, penetration, k-idol, famous girl, secret relationship

A/n: This is my first request. Thanks @dav1233555 for the plot suggestion 🫡

The two of you were anxiously dragging yourself towards the end of the day. Slowly the hours passed, seeming to last longer than they should, while a hurried and hard routine was followed, with no time to even exchange a few messages.

But you were finally free, at least for now, from the mess that is a magazine of international relevance.

I'm arriving

You read the message and smiled at the phone screen. It wasn't crowded at the restaurant you chose to have dinner at. You reflected for a moment, and thought there was a bit of madness in what you two were doing, but it was indisputable that it was genuine and pure.

Truth be told, this whole thing was real. And thinking that this could be a bit crazy (in other people's eyes, to be more precise) only made your panoramic view of society more bitter.

After all, what was so great about being a foreigner and dating a K-idol? Well, you weren't the guy who was going to change the view of an entire society, so worrying about it was useless.

At least there was some security that this relationship would not be leaked to the media. Well, you were in fact part of the fucking media. There was support from the magazine you worked for (not that you were the owner or anything), and at least no one on your team would poke your eye out. Some other editors you trust already knew about your relationship. It was one of the countless advantages of being in a high position in the company and having a strong influence on what happened inside. I mean, someone from the magazine could try to fuck with you, snakes exist everywhere, doing this in an attempt to self-promote or even abandon ship, handing over the leak of your relationship to another magazine or tabloid (in the headline the motherfuckers would find a way to use the word "affair", just because your previous relationship ended a month before you met Yunjin). But you would discover the funny guy so easily that there wouldn't even be any fun in solving the mystery. All it took was a single call to your father, simply the greatest editor-in-chief who worked at the magazine's headquarters. Already retired, but still exercising great decision-making power thanks to his long years of contributions to the magazine. Your old man was seen almost as a royal advisor or a wise monk where directors, managers and editors from various sectors of the magazine went to ask for advice and help. You were relatively shielded from leaks.

You noticed her approaching. Well disguised, with glasses, hair tied back and comfortable clothes. She looked like just another ordinary girl. You couldn't help but notice the NY Knicks sweatshirt you had given her as a gift, it was both of your favorite team.

She greeted you with a discreet hug. You still hadn't gotten used to the fact that you couldn't give a peck in public que in South Korea. In your perception, it was the most normal thing in the world.

"Hi, baby! How are you?" she asked you as she sat down at the table.

"Better now, honey. What about you?"

"The same!"

"Was the day as hard as always?" you asked.

"Yeah, definitely!" she replied. Yunjin seemed eager for this question. She continued: “In the morning I had rap class. By the way, I think I'm getting better. Oh, and in the afternoon I recorded my lines, like, over and over again. The music producer has a very specific vision of what he wants for this track. He apologized and admitted that it might take some time to achieve the desired result.”

"Well, I trust your talent. Remember that you and your group are dealing with a delicate concept. I have seen up close the production of albums that address intimate themes, it is always a challenge, but also a true work and certainly a amazing gift for the fans. You girls are going to do great."

Yunjin laughed, a little shyly.

"It feels like I'm talking to a music critic instead of my boyfriend."

"Well, you're actually talking to a music critic. Oh, by the way, I remembered that I won't be writing the article about Le Sserafim's new album like I said before."

Her expression was one of surprise. Yunjin asked:

"Is it because of me?”

"Yes." you answered honestly. “Well, look, love, I'm prioritizing our relationship and thinking about the future. If this is for real, eventually the press will hear about us together, and a review from me about my girlfriend's music group obviously it would make my opinion seem partial and biased. It's just to avoid future problems."

"Okay" She looked upset. "But I'll still want to know your opinion when you hear the album."

"I'm really looking forward to hearing it." You smiled, making her feel better. "I left the review about the new album for a good friend of mine to write. I really respect her opinion."

"Well, i think we're in good hands. But let's stop talking about work for a bit!"

The waiter seemed to have heard Yunjin's speech as he appeared to save them right after she finished saying that. Yunjin had great taste in food, that's why she always chose the order for the two of you, you weren't the "culinary trailblazer" type; a few months in South Korea and you only knew five typical dishes (always returning to the arms of the big fast-food chains).

"Oh, I almost forgot to give you this!" You handed her a gift. "It had been on my lap for so long that I had forgotten I had brought it with me."

"Oh, baby! You didn't have to do that!"

She started to unwrap it.

"Hope you like."

You waited for her reaction. Yunjin smiled and made a cute little noise when she saw that it was a book (although she already knew from the shape of the gift wrap).

"You know I love reading! Thank you so much."

"It's The Alchemist. I know you love fantasy and this silly self-help thing. This book is a mix of both."

You saw her eyes light up.

"You're perfect. I love how well you know me. And self-help isn't silly, it's very good for evolving as a human being." she scolded you.

You shrugged.

"It's not the kind of thing I'd like to put on my bookshelf. But to each their own.”

She laughed.

"I'm still going to make you read one of these."

"Well, I've already read The Alchemist. If for me it's average, for you it will be a masterpiece."

★

It was around 10pm when the two of you finally arrived at your apartment. Dinner was very good, especially dessert (that bingsu thing was really delicious), and by that night there was no more energy for more fun, it was preferable to have a good night's sleep so that the next day you could do something together. Even so, Yunjin hummed excitedly in the car on the way home. You appreciated all that joy.

You took off your shoes while Yunjin took off her NY Knicks sweatshirt, leaving only a tight tank top on her body. You noticed that she wasn't wearing a bra by the way her breasts showed through the fabric of her tank top. You slowly approached her and grabbed her from behind, kissing her repeatedly. Yunjin wrapped her hands around your neck as she giggled at the series of kisses.

“Will you be my teddy bear tonight?” she asked sweetly. “I need your affection so much, baby.”

“Whatever you need, sweetie.” You said as you kissed her on the neck.

Things were heating up. Your hands slid down Yunjin's soft belly, heavy sighs escaped her mouth unconsciously.

“Look, we still need to shower.” she said.

"No problem." you answered.

“You're putting me in the mood. I'm warning you that if you keep touching me like this, you're going to have to go all the way to finish what you started.”

“And since when has this been a problem for me?” you asked as you led her to the couch.

You took off your shirt and belt from your pants. Yunjin took off her jeans, leaving only her tank top and adorable pink panties. Your hand slid down Yunjin's left thigh while you kissed her right thigh. That was more than enough to give her goosebumps. She had her legs wide open, waiting, almost begging, for you to touch that place. Instead of doing it right away, you decided to play with her a little, kissing and biting her inner thigh while using one of your hands to lightly massage her pussy through her panties. Your lips slid to Yunjin's crotch, where you licked the entire area, she reveled in the act, trying hard not to close her legs with the spasms she was having. It didn't take long for a wet stain to darken the pink of the panties. When you finally removed Yunjin's panties, you saw how wet she was. So horny that she couldn't wait for you, fingering her pussy slowly, opening it with her fingers so you could see how drooling she was; a successful action of provoking you. Then you realized how hard your cock was, pulsing in your pants, painfully tight, which made you hornier.

Without wasting any more time, you dived between Yunjin's legs, eager to taste her (that flavor that was becoming increasingly familiar and addictive… Part of your life. Yeah, we could put it that way), your tongue delighting in the taste and the cozy warmth of the inside of her pussy, while Yunjin moaned softly, digging her nails into the sofa cushions.

“I love it when you suck me like that, baby. You make me feel so good!” she moaned.

At one point she asked to stop because her lust was unbearable and that way he would have an orgasm in a short time.

“I want to feel your cock inside me now.” she said. You had just taken off your underwear when she added, “Wait, what if we fuck in the bathroom. Let’s save time, what do you think?”

Your response was to lift her off the couch and take her to the bathroom. You turned on the light with your elbow and, before you could think of anything, she said:

“Fuck me like this! Your cock goes deep into my pussy when you fuck me in the air.”

You kissed her intensely while you tried to fit your dick into her pussy. The feeling of your cock sliding inside Yunjin was wonderful. Upon realizing that your cock was well placed inside her, you grabbed Yunjin's thighs tightly and began to thrust into her energetically while she held onto you, moaning compulsively.

And Yunjin was right, your dick went deep in that position. You could feel her deep inside, the entire length of your cock was being used, and she loved it. When she announced her orgasm, you wanted to make sure it was intense and pleasurable, the way it made her roll her eyes, so you lifted her a little higher, grabbing her ass, while Yunjin wrapped her legs inside your arms, making her practically hang from you and her pussy is completely inside your dick.

“Oh God, Baby! I’m cumming!”

She trembled holding onto you, while you practically rubbed her pussy on your dick, always rotating it close to your body. It was just a shame that you couldn't enjoy her eyes rolling back at the moment of orgasm, you simply loved seeing her go crazy with pleasure, but there was also a certain contentment in just knowing that it happened.

You sat Yunjin down on the sink and there you started fucking her again, looking deeply into her eyes. At one point she looked at you with so much passion, so much desire that there was a sudden growing desire to fill her pussy with your load of cum.

“Hang me, love.” she asked affectionately.

Her hand wrapped around just over half of her neck, serving as support to fuck her even harder. Sweat running down both bodies, your gaze was lost between the mirror's reflection, her eyes, her tits and her expressions of pleasure. With the sensations highlighted, you realized how much you loved Yunjin and how much this feeling contributed to eminent pleasure during sex.

Holy shit! You were almost there.

You thought about how much you wanted to go deep into this, literally to the end, but you were without a condom and suddenly stopping the act to go get a condom at the end of the championship was a bit... discouraging.

But you have an idea.

“Stand up, sweetie” you said. “Let’s try something new.”

Yunjin got out of the sink, looking at you excitedly.

“Get in the shower stall with me.” you asked, opening the door.

"What do you want to do?"

“It’s nothing out of this world, but it occurred to me that you’ve never given me a tightjob, I think it’s time we tried it.”

She had some assumptions about what this position was, but you helped her anyway. Yunjin was a rather tall girl, so there were no problems for your dick to fit between her thighs, the result was perfect, nothing uncomfortable. You thought about turning on the shower to lube up a little, but her pussy was so wet and the continuous sweat running down between her thighs was already more than great. You grabbed Yunjin's waist tightly and she crossed her legs a little, squeezing your dick.

You began to thrust into her, your cock sliding back and forth as you dragged Yunjin's labia. So you discovered in the best way that this was very pleasurable for both of you. The internal heat started inside you again and gradually you lost yourself in that exciting sensation. As you approached the final explosion, you bestially grabbed Yunjin in every way possible, sliding your sweat-damp hands down her belly, squeezing her breasts and slapping her ass. You lost yourself in the voluptuousness that was Yunjin's body and- Fuck! She loved it. She loved being your instrument of pleasure, knowing that the person she loved so much reached maddening peaks of passion, desire and lust for her. A juice of feelings for an insatiable thirst.

“Oh baby! I’m gonna cum! I’m gonna-”

Without any warning, Yunjin began to move her hips in a rhythm that immediately took you to the precipice of pleasure. The soft, hot, wet, suffocating skin of her thighs dancing over your cock. This was too much for you. When you came, you hugged Yunjin tightly, holding her as if your life depended on it, giving in to inconstant and uncontrollable moans close to her ear. The frantic thrusts lost their rhythm, going deeper and slower through Yunjin's thighs. She held your arms affectionately, waiting for your breathing to become less labored before kissing you.

"I love you." You said to her.

The phrase was so loaded with something that covered your feelings at that moment, and you wished she was the woman of your life and would never leave your side.

"I love you too!" said Yunjin when she found a way out of your tongue. “Baby, you don’t know how much.”

“This took longer than expected. Let’s take our shower.”

“Yep! Let's go."

You turned on the shower. The hot running water was invigorating, even more so being next to Yunjin, you didn't know that sharing certain intimacies was so special until you finally did it with her. you soaped Yunjin's entire body, she helped you wash your back and you shampooed her hair, gently massaging her scalp; it was cute how it relaxed her, she seemed so surrendered to you in that moment, and just a few months ago you were sitting across from her and the other Le Sserafim girls, asking incisive questions about the creative process of their latest album. That's where it all started, after all. And who could say where it would end?

“Hey, baby, let me shampoo your hair now.” Yunjin said with a cutie smile.

Nobody, you thought. Nobody could say.

A/n: sorry for any grammatical errors 😅

706 notes · View notes

sebastianswallows · 5 months

Text

The Little Death — 1. Captive of your desires

— PAIRING: Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen x Bene Gesserit!Reader

— SYNOPSIS: A Bene Gesserit gets left behind in the Arrakeen palace. When Feyd becomes the Planetary Governor, he finds her there in hiding. The Harkonnens don't traditionally keep them as truthsayers or concubines like other Houses do, but Feyd might have a use for her. After all, he's never had a Bene Gesserit of his own before.

— WARNINGS: choking and death threats

— WORDCOUNT: 2.2k

— A/N: I couldn't resist. I had to write more for him. Reader, I love him. This fic might go a little wild, because I want to play into this naughty boy's love for pain. Expect some subby Feyd, some inkpies, generally a messed up dynamic with an equally messed up reader. Hope you enjoy, my lovelies! 🖤

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty. — Bene Gesserit Coda

House Harkonnen fell upon Arrakis like a hammer — with a deafening crash and destructive reverberation. After the palace was ransacked and the most important figures murdered, their bodies piled high and set alight, the stragglers were hunted through the streets and homes of Arrakeen. There was a week of slaughter. By the end, nothing moved. All spice production had ceased. Then the violence left the city and spread out into the desert, and the whole hemisphere of the planet was captured.

Arrakeen sat near the northern pole, on thick bedrock surrounded by natural fortifications that protected it from worm attacks. It was a difficult place to escape from. Those who remained were understood to be loyal to the Harkonnens, or at least indifferent to who held the power. The Atreides rule had been brief enough to not have garnered that many supporters. Only the rumour of their goodness and grace had been planted, and the Harkonnens returned before those could take root.

There can be said to have been a second Harkonnen takeover once Feyd-Rautha arrived. The Baron’s youngest nephew. Word was spread — or rather, been carefully planted — that he was the kinder, gentler of the Harkonnen brothers. The people greeted him like a saviour. Inside the palace, the atmosphere was more subdued.

It was a stark contrast to the transition from when Rabban came to power. No mass killings, no ransacking of rooms, just an orderly takeover through which the cold and calculating presence of Feyd-Rautha flowed. Furniture was rearranged. Staff was brought in from Giedi Prime. Brand new equipment arrived, especially for the spice harvesters.

The message was clear. The new planetary governor was thorough and exacting. Most of those in the palace breathed a sigh of relief, but there was at least one breath that stuttered.

She was there at his arrival, watching from a distance together with the throng of Arrakeen locals, Fremen and others, who gathered to see the procession. It was early in the morning, just before sunrise. He walked differently than other Harkonnen she’d seen. Rabban stomped through like a bull. The servants grovelled. The Baron was so fat he had to be suspended in the air. But this one, this one strolled through with confidence. Sleek and slender, he was beautiful in an inhuman way. That much she could make out from a distance.

He struck out at Fremen sietches on his very first day, using artillery fire and on-the-ground troops. An old way of doing things, but effective. It painted the new governor as precise, determined, and strangely honourable, and then word spread around the palace that he’d struck his own brother to the ground and made him kiss his feet. The word ‘humiliation’ was uttered. The news sewed a sliver of hope in the hearts of the longsuffering palace staff.

She had evaded close contact with the Harkonnens until then. It only made sense, as she was in hiding, slipping through the cracks of their negligence until she could procure safe passage off-planet, but that was getting more difficult by the day. What they lacked in caution, they made up for in paranoia, and all comings and goings were kept behind esoteric layers of bureaucracy. She was in the process of making contact with a smuggler when Feyd-Rautha gained governorship of the planet, and all her hopes were dashed.

It was the evening of his second day on the planet when she was called. The servant that summoned her looked at her like she was an apparition — which, in a way, she was. She had managed to remain undetected, keeping herself busy, staying out of sight, acting like she was meant to be there. She’d become part of the scenery and could dispel suspicion if anyone got too close. Her Bene Gesserit training was good for that if nothing else. But there was no escaping this. Somebody had finally found her and knew exactly where she was.

She followed the servant — a heavily armed pasty-white figure, crooked and willowy — to the chamber door of what she knew to be the largest office of the governor. He opened it for her, pushed her in, and locked the door behind her.

Like a tiny sun, a glowglobe floated through the room, its light falling on the smooth black surfaces of the furniture and the pale stone of the walls. She folded her hands before her, hidden by the long sleeves of her dress, and followed what the light revealed. The room was large and windowless, stripped bare of any useless item. The table was empty, the chairs were in their place, and upon the plinths set in the corners, no potted plants or works of art stood. Only one thing moved there, together with the light. Feyd-Rautha paced slowly, quietly, on the other side of the room.

“My lord na-Baron,” she said in a smooth and submissive voice. Her knees bent in a slight curtsy — respectful, but not too much. “You summoned me.”

She wore a garb that didn’t belong to any particular function. The long black dress would have fit just as well in the kitchens as in the cleaning staff, and the head covering was suited for the Arrakis weather, worn by any female. All of those with hair, anyway. The light material bent around her, giving her a slightly oval shape, soft and harmless. But when she looked up and caught the na-Baron’s gaze, he would have seen a sharper look there than that of any servant.

His eyes were cunning too. They looked upon her knowingly and with amusement, a strange manner for a Harkonnen.

“Who are you?” he asked with a playful squint.

His voice scratched across her skin like kitten claws. He didn’t sound the way he looked, and she admitted it surprised her. His tone, nevertheless, was gentle. Deceitfully kind. He could kill me in an instant, she thought, and take pleasure from it.

“My lord, I —”

“You were not on Rabban’s stafflist. I know that, because he didn’t have one. And you’re not on mine, because I didn’t ask for you. We have as of today an account of all the palace workers, but the list comes up with one extra room unaccounted for.”

Nights in Arrakeen were cold, but her skin just turned colder. What rotten luck, to be in the palace right when they decided to actually investigate who worked there and did what. It’s my own fault, she said to herself. I relied on their incompetence for far too long. Now I pay the price. So be it.

“I have been a servant in this palace for many years, my lord na-Baron,” she said with a slow bow of her head. “And I wish to serve you as well.”

“Is that so?” he purred, coming closer. His steps were lazy, but the pace was measured. He had more control over his body than his playful swagger let on. “Many years, you say? You worked for the Atreides, then?”

“And for Count Fenring before them.”

He stopped. She looked up at him from underneath her lashes and smiled in quiet satisfaction. Lady Fenring was a skilled Bene Gesserit sister and had lived in Arrakeen with her husband for many years before the Atreides decided on it for their capital. She was the most logical choice as a secret envoy to the Harkonnen heir. And if Feyd-Rautha met her, it could only mean one thing.

Uroshnor, she thought. He’s likely been imprinted with the usual prana-bindu phrase. It would stun him, if only for a moment. But long enough… It didn’t provide her a means of escape, but it gave her hope. It gave her room for manoeuvre.

“I am not a spy,” she said, straightening her back.

“Of course, a spy would say that.”

“You may test me in any way you wish,” she said with a playful chuckle.

Feyd’s eyes darkened at her proposition, a smile bending his full lips as he stepped closer. Oh, he could think of many ways to test her…

“What are you, then?” he asked, his voice scratching low and close as he stopped close enough to touch.

She could see now that his eyes were a clear blue. Not the sort of blue brought on by long-term spice exposure, that dark electric shade, but blue like water, like the sky, like a shard of ice. His jawline was firm — that of a biter. But his lips were pillow-soft and curled around the edges in a smile that wouldn’t go away. Lips made for laughing, made for kissing, made for love. He’s such a delicate boy. The thought ran through her mind before she realised.

“I served the Lady Fenring as a housekeeper,” she said.

“Lies.”

“My lord?”

“You’re one of them, aren’t you? A damn witch.”

She remained completely still, her eyes locked on his. He was trying to dominate her with a hard incessant glare, but she held his gaze merely for the pleasure of it. What a comforting colour they were on such a harsh planet… No matter the malice behind them.

“You’re a Bene Gesserit. I’ve met your kind before,” he continued, looking down her body in a cruel, suggestive way. “You hold yourselves the way no other women do.”

“Perpans not like Harkonnen women.”

He chuckled, the sound scraping up his slender neck. “All women in the known universe are the same, given the right circumstances.”

“But not the Bene Gesserit.”

“Yes, not you,” he sighed, head tilting as if his mind was trying to escape a painful memory.

His eyes stayed upon her figure, trailing down the contours of her dress. Then he reached out a hand and touched it, his fingers tracing a silky pleat so lightly that it barely moved. She felt it still, the slight disturbance his caresses caused, but willed her body to stay motionless. There was no trace of aggression in him now.

“Why are you still here?” he asked.

“You have not dismissed me, my lord na-Baron.”

He chuckled faintly. “I mean on Arrakis.”

“I wish to remain in the palace.”

“Why?”

“The deserts are harsh.”

“Many prefer that to serving a Harkonnen.”

“One master is as good as another.”

“I’m sure it must’ve felt like that to you,” he said, looking her in the eye again. His fingers left her dress and went to rest upon the hilt of a dagger at his belt. “So I take it you were one of Lady Fenring’s servants. A… fellow sister, would you call it?”

“I was part of her staff, yes.”

“And you didn’t leave with her and the Count when the Atreides came?”

“I remained behind to assist with training their staff,” she said with a bow of her head. Even now she retained a certain respect for that dead House.

“And Lady Fenring,” he hissed, the name dripping from his mouth like poison, “she never wanted to retrieve you?”

“I believe they think me dead.”

“Yes, she is not the sentimental sort,” he chuckled, and his cold gaze caught hers.

A dangerous thought was taking root behind those eyes, she could see it germinating. She waited, reading his body, scanning the minute changes in his expression, and tried to determine what went on behind that pallid mask.

There was envy there, and regret, and longing. The Harkonnens never kept Bene Gesserit truthsayers, nor were there any among the Baron’s concubines — all of them were young boys anyway. They were unique among the Great Houses in that way, and although she knew that Feyd’s mother had been a Bene Gesserit herself, he probably didn’t know what it was like to be raised by one. Why else would he be looking at her now as if he wanted to peel her clothes away, and then her skin, and reach toward her heart and grab it?

“How can I help my na-Baron?” she asked, her voice a whisper, her gaze a caress.

“By not getting above yourself,” he rasped with the air of slapping her offer away.

Her heart stuttered in her chest and she bowed her head to hide her terror. Did I read him wrongly? she thought to herself. I must not fear.

“House Harkonnen has no use for witches,” said Feyd.

She felt his strong hand grip her shoulder, slipping past the veil to curl around her neck. He stayed there, holding her in a half-choke just firm enough to feel her heartbeat in the palm of his hand.

“I ought to kill you,” he said sweetly, “and feed you to my darlings.”

Her lips parted, swelling slightly, and she felt her face go pale. The little death takes on a whole new meaning, she thought with grim amusement.

“But I do want to know one thing…”

“Yes, my na-Baron?” she asked in a shaky voice.

He breathed in sharply at the sound of it. He liked it. When she looked up into his eyes again, the grip around her throat felt not so much murderous anymore as it did greedy, possessive.

“I want to know… Do you have one of those pain boxes too?”

#Feyd #Feyd Rautha Harkonnen #Feyd Rautha #Dune #Dune part 2 #Dune fanfiction #Dune imagine #Feyd Rautha x reader #Feyd x reader #Feyd Rautha fanfic #Feyd Rautha imagine #sswallow;fanfics #sswallow;made a thing #fanfic;littledeath

625 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 8 months

Text

My McLuhan lecture on enshittification

IT'S THE LAST DAY for the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

youtube

Last night, I gave the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin. The event was sold out and while there's a video that'll be posted soon, they couldn't get a streaming setup installed in the Canadian embassy, where the talk was held:

https://transmediale.de/en/2024/event/mcluhan-2024

The talk went of fabulously, and was followed by commentary from Frederike Kaltheuner (Human Rights Watch) and a discussion moderated by Helen Starr. While you'll have to wait a bit for the video, I thought that I'd post my talk notes from last night for the impatient among you.

I want to thank the festival and the embassy staff for their hard work on an excellent event. And now, on to the talk!

Last year, I coined the term 'enshittification,' to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers, it really hit the zeitgeist. I mean, the American Dialect Society made it their Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I'm definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).

So what's enshittification and why did it catch fire? It's my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters – and what we can do about it.

We're all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.

It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für Englisch Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let's examine how enshittification works.

It's a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Let's do a case study. What could be better than Facebook?

Facebook is a company that was founded to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that.

When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and k-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It told them: “Yes, I know you’re all using Myspace. But Myspace is owned by Rupert Murdoch, an evil, crapulent senescent Australian billionaire, who spies on you with every hour that God sends.

“Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world, and we will compose a personal feed consisting solely of what those people post for consumption by those who choose to follow them.”

That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end-users. Those end-users proceeded to lock themselves into FB. FB — like most tech businesses — has network effects on its side. A product or service enjoys network effects when it improves as more people sign up to use it. You joined FB because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there.

But FB didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem.

It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. You and your six friends here are going to struggle to agree on where to get drinks after tonight's lecture. How were you and your 200 Facebook friends ever gonna agree on when it was time to leave Facebook, and where to go?

So FB’s end-users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then FB exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end-users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers, and publishers.

To the advertisers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? We lied. We spy on them from asshole to appetite. We will sell you access to that surveillance data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting, and we will devote substantial engineering resources to thwarting ad-fraud. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it.'

To the publishers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? We lied!Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link, and we will nonconsensually cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetize as you please, and those users will become stuck to you when they subscribe to your feed.' And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too, dependent on those users.

The users held each other hostage, and those hostages took the publishers and advertisers hostage, too, so that everyone was locked in.

Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders.

For the users, that meant dialing down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers.

For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen by a person.

For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt, until anything less than fulltext was likely to be be disqualified from being sent to your subscribers, let alone included in algorithmic suggestion feeds.

And then FB started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting fulltext feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetization, via the increasingly crooked advertising service.

When any of these groups squawked, FB just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learned in the Darth Vader MBA: 'I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.'

Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus, and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders.

But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service but I can’t bring myself to quit it,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit? Get me the hell out of here!” is razor thin

All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then FB discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword.

If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go, too.

That’s terminal enshittification, the phase when a platform becomes a pile of shit. This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech bros euphemistically call 'pivoting.'

Which is how we get pivots like, 'In the future, all internet users will be transformed into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world called "metaverse," that we ripped off from a 25-year-old satirical cyberpunk novel.'

That's the procession of enshittification. If enshittification were a disease, we'd call that enshittification's "natural history." But that doesn't tell you how the enshittification works, nor why everything is enshittifying right now, and without those details, we can't know what to do about it.

What led to the enshittocene? What is it about this moment that led to the Great Enshittening? Was it the end of the Zero Interest Rate Policy? Was it a change in leadership at the tech giants? Is Mercury in retrograde?

None of the above.

The period of free fed money certainly led to tech companies having a lot of surplus to toss around. But Facebook started enshittifying long before ZIRP ended, so did Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Some of the tech giants got new leaders. But Google's enshittification got worse when the founders came back to oversee the company's AI panic (excuse me, 'AI pivot').

And it can't be Mercury in retrograde, because I'm a cancer, and as everyone knows, cancers don't believe in astrology.

When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that's a sign that the environment has changed, and that's what happened to tech.

Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.

The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honorable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality, and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty.

There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses.

First: competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices.

Second: regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.

These two forces affect all industries, but the next two are far more tech-specific.

Third: self-help. Computers are extremely flexible, and so are the digital products and services we make from them. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing-complete Von Neumann machine, a computer that can run every valid program.

That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company's shareholders. Think of a board-room table where someone says, 'I've calculated that making our ads 20% more invasive will net us 2% more revenue per user.'

In a digital world, someone else might well say 'Yes, but if we do that, 20% of our users will install ad-blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, forever.'

This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory maneuver will prompt their users to google, 'How do I disenshittify this?'

Fourth and finally: workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn't mean that tech workers don't have labor power. The historical "talent shortage" of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage over their bosses. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another job – a better job.

They knew it, and their bosses knew it. Ironically, this made tech workers highly exploitable. Tech workers overwhelmingly saw themselves as founders in waiting, entrepreneurs who were temporarily drawing a salary, heroic figures of the tech mission.

That's why mottoes like Google's 'don't be evil' and Facebook's 'make the world more open and connected' mattered: they instilled a sense of mission in workers. It's what Fobazi Ettarh calls 'vocational awe, 'or Elon Musk calls being 'extremely hardcore.'

Tech workers had lots of bargaining power, but they didn't flex it when their bosses demanded that they sacrifice their health, their families, their sleep to meet arbitrary deadlines.

So long as their bosses transformed their workplaces into whimsical 'campuses,' with gyms, gourmet cafeterias, laundry service, massages and egg-freezing, workers could tell themselves that they were being pampered – rather than being made to work like government mules.

But for bosses, there's a downside to motivating your workers with appeals to a sense of mission, namely: your workers will feel a sense of mission. So when you ask them to enshittify the products they ruined their health to ship, workers will experience a sense of profound moral injury, respond with outrage, and threaten to quit.

Thus tech workers themselves were the final bulwark against enshittification,

The pre-enshittification era wasn't a time of better leadership. The executives weren't better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power.

So what happened?

One by one, each of these constraints was eroded until it dissolved, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittoscene.

It started with competition. From the Gilded Age until the Reagan years, the purpose of competition law was to promote competition. US antitrust law treated corporate power as dangerous and sought to blunt it. European antitrust laws were modeled on US ones, imported by the architects of the Marshall Plan.

But starting in the neoliberal era, competition authorities all over the world adopted a doctrine called 'consumer welfare,' which held that monopolies were evidence of quality. If everyone was shopping at the same store and buying the same product, that meant it was the best store, selling the best product – not that anyone was cheating.

And so all over the world, governments stopped enforcing their competition laws. They just ignored them as companies flouted them. Those companies merged with their major competitors, absorbed small companies before they could grow to be big threats. They held an orgy of consolidation that produced the most inbred industries imaginable, whole sectors grown so incestuous they developed Habsburg jaws, from eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer.

Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with 'predatory pricing' that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold.

When Diapers.com refused Amazon's acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100m on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until diapers.com went bust, and Amazon bought them for pennies on the dollar, and shut them down.

Competition is a distant memory. As Tom Eastman says, the web has devolved into 'five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four,' so these giant companies no longer fear losing our business.

Lily Tomlin used to do a character on the TV show Laugh In, an AT&T telephone operator who'd do commercials for the Bell system. Each one would end with her saying 'We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.'

Today's giants are not constrained by competition.

They don't care. They don't have to. They're Google.

That's the first constraint gone, and as it slipped away, the second constraint – regulation – was also doomed.

When an industry consists of hundreds of small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is a mob, a rabble. Hundreds of companies can't agree on what to tell Parliament or Congress or the Commission. They can't even agree on how to cater a meeting where they'd discuss the matter.

But when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel.

Five companies, or four, or three, or two, or just one company finds it easy to converge on a single message for their regulators, and without "wasteful competition" eroding their profits, they have plenty of cash to spread around.

Like Facebook, handing former UK deputy PM Nick Clegg millions every year to sleaze around Europe, telling his former colleagues that Facebook is the only thing standing between 'European Cyberspace' and the Chinese Communist Party.

Tech's regulatory capture allows it to flout the rules that constrain less concentrated sectors. They can pretend that violating labor, consumer and privacy laws is fine, because they violate them with an app.

This is why competition matters: it's not just because competition makes companies work harder and share value with customers and workers, it's because competition keeps companies from becoming too big to fail, and too big to jail.

Now, there's plenty of things we don't want improved through competition, like privacy invasions. After the EU passed its landmark privacy law, the GDPR, there was a mass-extinction event for small EU ad-tech companies. These companies disappeared en masse, and that's fine.

They were even more invasive and reckless than US-based Big Tech companies. After all, they had less to lose. We don't want competition in commercial surveillance. We don't want to produce increasing efficiency in violating our human rights.

But: Google and Facebook – who pretend they are called Alphabet and Meta – have been unscathed by European privacy law. That's not because they don't violate the GDPR (they do!). It's because they pretend they are headquartered in Ireland, one of the EU's most notorious corporate crime-havens.

And Ireland competes with the EU other crime havens – Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and sometimes the Netherlands – to see which country can offer the most hospitable environment for all sorts of crimes. Because the kind of company that can fly an Irish flag of convenience is mobile enough to change to a Maltese flag if the Irish start enforcing EU laws.

Which is how you get an Irish Data Protection Commission that processes fewer than 20 major cases per year, while Germany's data commissioner handles more than 500 major cases, even though Ireland is nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent.

So Google and Facebook get to act as though they are immune to privacy law, because they violate the law with an app; just like Uber can violate labor law and claim it doesn't count because they do it with an app.

Uber's labor-pricing algorithm offers different drivers different payments for the same job, something Veena Dubal calls 'algorithmic wage discrimination.' If you're more selective about which jobs you'll take, Uber will pay you more for every ride.

But if you take those higher payouts and ditch whatever side-hustle let you cover your bills which being picky about your Uber drives, Uber will incrementally reduce the payment, toggling up and down as you grow more or less selective, playing you like a fish on a line until you eventually – inevitably – lose to the tireless pricing robot, and end up stuck with low wages and all your side-hustles gone.

Then there's Amazon, which violates consumer protection laws, but says it doesn't matter, because they do it with an app. Amazon makes $38b/year from its 'advertising' system. 'Advertising' in quotes because they're not selling ads, they're selling placements in search results.

The companies that spend the most on 'ads' go to the top, even if they're offering worse products at higher prices. If you click the first link in an Amazon search result, on average you will pay a 29% premium over the best price on the service. Click one of the first four items and you'll pay a 25% premium. On average you have to go seventeen items down to find the best deal on Amazon.

Any merchant that did this to you in a physical storefront would be fined into oblivion. But Amazon has captured its regulators, so it can violate your rights, and say, "it doesn't count, we did it with an app"

This is where that third constraint, self-help, would sure come in handy. If you don't want your privacy violated, you don't need to wait for the Irish privacy regulator to act, you can just install an ad-blocker.

More than half of all web users are blocking ads. But the web is an open platform, developed in the age when tech was hundreds of companies at each others' throats, unable to capture their regulators.

Today, the web is being devoured by apps, and apps are ripe for enshittification. Regulatory capture isn't just the ability to flout regulation, it's also the ability to co-opt regulation, to wield regulation against your adversaries.

Today's tech giants got big by exploiting self-help measures. When Facebook was telling Myspace users they needed to escape Rupert Murdoch’s evil crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, 'Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here'

It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your Myspace username and password, and it would login to Myspace and pretend to be you, and scrape everything waiting in your inbox, copying it to your FB inbox, and you could reply to it and it would autopilot your replies back to Myspace.

When Microsoft was choking off Apple's market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac – so that offices were throwing away their designers' Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator – Steve Jobs didn't beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office.

He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office, and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could perfectly read and write Microsoft's Word, Excel and Powerpoint files.

When Google entered the market, it sent its crawler to every web server on Earth, where it presented itself as a web-user: 'Hi! Hello! Do you have any web pages? Thanks! How about some more? How about more?'

But every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, that was progress. If you try to do it to them, that's piracy.

Try to make an alternative client for Facebook and they'll say you violated US laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and EU laws like Article 6 of the EUCD.

Try to make an Android program that can run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple's media stores and they'd bomb you until the rubble bounced.

Try to scrape all of Google and they'll nuke you until you glowed.

Tech's regulatory capture is mind-boggling. Take that law I mentioned earlier, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Bill Clinton signed it in 1998, and the EU imported it as Article 6 of the EUCD in 2001

It is a blanket prohibition on removing any kind of encryption that restricts access to a copyrighted work – things like ripping DVDs or jailbreaking a phone – with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

This law has been so broadened that it can be used to imprison creators for granting access to their own creations

Here's how that works: In 2008, Amazon bought Audible, an audiobook platform, in an anticompetitive acquisition. Today, Audible is a monopolist with more than 90% of the audiobook market. Audible requires that all creators on their platform sell with Amazon's "digital rights management," which locks it to Amazon's apps.

So say I write a book, then I read it into a mic, then I pay a director and an engineer thousands of dollars to turn that into an audiobook, and sell it to you on the monopoly platform, Audible, that controls more than 90% of the market.

If I later decide to leave Amazon and want to let you come with me to a rival platform, I am out of luck. If I supply you with a tool to remove Amazon's encryption from my audiobook, so you can play it in another app, I commit a felony, punishable by a 5-year sentence and a half-million-dollar fine, for a first offense.

That's a stiffer penalty than you would face if you simply pirated the audiobook from a torrent site. But it's also harsher than the punishment you'd get for shoplifting the audiobook on CD from a truck-stop. It's harsher than the sentence you'd get for hijacking the truck that delivered the CD.

So think of our ad-blockers again. 50% of web users are running ad-blockers. 0% of app users are running ad-blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that's a felony (Jay Freeman calls this 'felony contempt of business-model').

So when someone in a board-room says, 'let's make our ads 20% more obnoxious and get a 2% revenue increase,' no one objects that this might prompt users to google, 'how do I block ads?' After all, the answer is, 'you can't.'

Indeed, it's more likely that someone in that board room will say, 'let's make our ads 100% more obnoxious and get a 10% revenue increase' (this is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website).

There's no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn't install a counter-app that coordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold.

No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete, or in other words: 'IP law.'

'IP' is just a euphemism for 'a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers.' And 'app' is just a euphemism for 'a web-page wrapped enough IP to make it a felony to mod it to protect the labor, consumer and privacy rights of its user.'

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.

But what about that fourth constraint: workers?

For decades, tech workers' high degrees of bargaining power and vocational awe put a ceiling on enshittification. Even after the tech sector shrank to a handful of giants. Even after they captured their regulators so they could violate our consumer, privacy and labor rights. Even after they created 'felony contempt of business model' and extinguished self-help for tech users. Tech was still constrained by their workers' sense of moral injury in the face of the imperative to enshittify.

Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?

Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.

Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.

And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired last year six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.

Workers are no longer a check on their bosses' worst impulses

Today, the response to 'I refuse to make this product worse' is, 'turn in your badge and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.'

I get that this is all a little depressing

OK, really depressing.

But hear me out! We've identified the disease. We've traced its natural history. We've identified its underlying mechanism. Now we can get to work on a cure.

There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labor.

To reverse enshittification and guard against its reemergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these.

On competition, it's actually looking pretty good. The EU, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and China are all doing more on competition than they have in two generations. They're blocking mergers, unwinding existing ones, taking action on predatory pricing and other sleazy tactics.

Remember, in the US and Europe, we already have the laws to do this – we just stopped enforcing them in the Helmut Kohl era.

I've been fighting these fights with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 22 years now, and I've never seen a more hopeful moment for sound, informed tech policy.

Now, the enshittifiers aren't taking this laying down. The business press can't stop talking about how stupid and old-fashioned all this stuff is. They call people like me 'hipster antitrust,' and they hate any regulator who actually does their job.

Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has run more than 80 editorials trashing Khan, insisting that she's an ineffectual ideologue who can't get anything done.

Sure, Rupert, that's why you ran 80 editorials about her.

Because she can't get anything done.

Even Canada is stepping up on competition. Canada! Land of the evil billionaire! From Ted Rogers, who owns the country's telecoms; to Galen Weston, who owns the country's grocery stores; to the Irvings, who basically own the entire province of New Brunswick.

Even Canada is doing something about this. Last autumn, Trudeau's government promised to update Canada's creaking competition law to finally ban 'abuse of dominance.'

I mean, wow. I guess when Galen Weston decided to engage in a criminal conspiracy to fix the price of bread – the most Les Miz-ass crime imaginable – it finally got someone's attention, eh?

Competition has a long way to go, but all over the world, competition law is seeing a massive revitalization. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put antitrust law in a coma in the 80s – but it's awake, it's back, and it's pissed.

What about regulation? How will we get tech companies to stop doing that one weird trick of adding 'with an app' to their crimes and escaping enforcement?

Well, here in the EU, they're starting to figure it out. This year, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act went into effect, and they let people who get screwed by tech companies go straight to the federal European courts, bypassing the toothless watchdogs in Europe's notorious corporate crime havens like Ireland.

In America, they might finally get a digital privacy law. You people have no idea how backwards US privacy law is. The last time the US Congress enacted a broadly applicable privacy law was in 1988.

The Video Privacy Protection Act makes it a crime for video-store clerks to leak your video-rental history. It was passed after a right-wing judge who was up for the Supreme Court had his rentals published in a DC newspaper. The rentals weren't even all that embarrassing!

Sure, that judge, Robert Bork, wasn't confirmed for the Supreme Court, but that was because he was a virulently racist loudmouth and a crook who served as Nixon's Solicitor General.

But Congress got the idea that their video records might be next, freaked out, and passed the VPPA.

That was the last time Americans got a big, national privacy law. Nineteen. Eighty. Eight.

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?

Having 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 big coalition for that kind of privacy law.

What about self-help? That's a lot farther away, alas.

The EU's DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You'll be able to use Whatsapp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind.

But if you want to reverse-engineer one of those Big Tech products and mod it to work for you, not them, the EU's got nothing for you.

This is an area ripe for improvement, and I think the US might be the first ones to open this up.

It's certainly on-brand for the EU to be forcing tech companies to do things a certain way, while the US simply takes away tech companies' abilities to prevent others from changing how their stuff works.

My big hope here is that Stein's Law will take hold: 'Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop'

Letting companies decide how their customers must use their products is simply too tempting an invitation to mischief. HP has a whole building full of engineers thinking of new ways to lock your printer to its official ink cartridges, forcing you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink to print your boarding passes and shopping lists.

It's offensive. The only people who don't agree are the people running the monopolies in all the other industries, like the med-tech monopolists who are locking their insulin pumps to their glucose monitors, turning people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers.

Finally, there's labor. Here in Europe, there's much higher union density than in the US, which American tech barons are learning the hard way. There is nothing more satisfying in the daily news than the latest salvo by Nordic unions against that Tesla guy (Musk is the most Edison-ass Tesla guy imaginable).

But even in the USA, there's a massive surge in tech unions. Tech workers are realizing that they aren't founders in waiting. The days of free massages and facial piercings and getting to wear black tee shirts that say things your boss doesn't understand are coming to an end.

In Seattle, Amazon's tech workers walked out in sympathy with Amazon's warehouse workers, because they're all workers.

The only reason the tech workers aren't monitored by AI that notifies their managers if they visit the toilet during working hours is their rapidly dwindling bargaining power. The way things are going, Amazon programmers are going to be pissing in bottles next to their workstations (for a guy who built a penis-shaped rocket, Jeff Bezos really hates our kidneys).

We're seeing bold, muscular, global action on competition, regulation and labor, with self-help bringing up the rear. It's not a moment too soon, because the bad news is, enshittification is coming to every industry.

If it's got a networked computer in it, the people who made it can run the Darth Vader MBA playbook on it, changing the rules from moment to moment, violating your rights and then saying 'It's OK, we did it with an app.'

From Mercedes renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dishsoap, enshittification is metastasizing into every corner of our lives.

Software doesn't eat the world, it enshittifies it

But there's a bright side to all this: if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification.

Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive, it's unstoppable.

The cynics among you might be skeptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn't "enshittification" the same as "capitalism"?

Well, no.

Look, I'm not going to cape for capitalism here. I'm hardly a true believer in markets as the most efficient allocators of resources and arbiters of policy – if there was ever any doubt, capitalism's total failure to grapple with the climate emergency surely erases it.

But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and wooly internet, a space where people with disfavored views could find each other, offer mutual aid, and organize.

The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crapgadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand-names, and cryptocurrency scams.

The internet isn't more important than the climate emergency, nor gender justice, racial justice, genocide, or inequality.

But the internet is the terrain we'll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it's joined.

We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device.

We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to coordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, and save our planet and our species.

Martin Luther King said 'It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.'

And it may be true that the law can't force corporate sociopaths to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut-bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation.

But it can make that exec fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity, even if he doesn't think you deserve it.

And I think that's pretty important.

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/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel/a>

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

Image: Drahtlos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Motherboard_Intel_386.jpg

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

cdessums (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monsoon_Season_Flagstaff_AZ_clouds_storm.jpg

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

#pluralistic #transmediale #lectures #enshittification #big tech #berlin #mcluhan lecture #Youtube

404 notes · View notes

apas-95 · 2 months

Note

Couldnt it be argued that the US is still a slave republic? Domestically, there is slave labor through the prison system, human and labor trafficking, and only a few decades ago, if at that, systems such as convict leasing, share cropping, and debt peonage. Internationally, there is also the fact that for conflict minerals, coffee, chocolate, and other commodities, a portion if not the majority of it is sourced from slave labor.

The use of slavery in and of itself doesn't constitute the slave-society stage of production. Slavery continues to exist under feudalism and capitalism, but not as the driving force of society as in the ancient slave republics. Politically, in the modern USA, it is the bourgeoisie that are in power; and economically, it is the exploitation of waged labour (much of it overseas) that is the basis of production.

Further, slaves in the US are owned either by the state, in state prisons, and leased to private companies; or owned by large companies directly in private prisons. The individual or smallholder ownership of slaves was done away with in the USA's previous civil war: carried out between the industrial haute-bourgeois of the developed north, and the agricultural petty gentry of the southern hinterland. Slaves in the US today are the exclusive property of the bourgeoisie, through their corporations or bourgeois state.

While large amounts of raw materials are sourced through slave labour, as are agricultural goods, slave labour in the broadest sense is not applicable to industrial production of the type required by modern capitalism - if for nothing else than reasons of profitability. The slave labourer is effectively themselves human capital, part of the machinery bought wholesale - while they still effectively carry out labour, they fundamentally do not produce surplus value in the same manner as a wage-worker; it is necessary for their food and other reproductive labour to be given to them without cost, in the same way one carries out maintenance on equipment - whereas a wage-worker is only purchased and employed as capital for the duration of the workday, and then is responsible for their own food, housing, and reproductive labour. The principal exception to the use of slave labour in industrial production (which already has an exceedingly high fixed-capital cost compared to agriculture) is in the historical case of fascism, where primitive accumulation and war industry led to conditions favourable to industrial slave labour, which was carried out en-masse by e.g. German industrial syndicates using concentration camp labourers.

While the earlier USA, as a settler nation, made heavy use of both slavery and primitive accumulation, this was necessarily a historically-contingent process, one carried out by the European empires precisely because the Americas had not been 'brought up to' the level of social contradiction they had. Slavery's profitability necessarily fell as the USA industrialised, and remains now only in certain key industries like agriculture and military production. Historically, again, the movement to make slavery a profitable general venture in the era of capitalism is the fascist movement, which attempts generally to replace the proletariat at large by mobilising the higher strata upwards, into petty-bourgeois smallholders (e.g. wehrbauern), converting the middle strata into slaves, and exterminating the lower strata - a movement that fundamentally requires both large swathes of cleared land as well as mass depopulation, due to the lower population density such an essentially backwards mode of production can support. Ultimately, it is a project doomed to failure, due to the impossibility of turning back history - but one the bourgeoisie are inevitably driven to attempt when capitalism starts nearing the end of its profitability.

In the USA, historically, the exploitation of indigenous nations and external colonies has provided a source of profit and primitive accumulation that has rendered a genuine fascist movement effectively unnecessary, despite the middle-class yearning for it, but these systems are themselves drying up, and the US, while not a slave republic, will soon start attempting to fashion itself into one by carving up its population.

I hope this has answered your question, thank you for writing in!

171 notes · View notes

chenfleur · 1 year

Text

lowkey

summary. jeonghan's supposed to be on stage in twenty minutes, and he's nowhere to be found.

pairing. idol!jeonghan x makeup artist!y/n ft vernon genre. fluff, secret relationship word count. 1.7k released. 03.26.2023 author's note. this is so funny to me because im pretty sure i can count the number of interactions vernon and jeonghan have had on one hand

masterlist

“Where’s Jeonghan?”

There’s an urgent lilt in the stage director’s voice as it booms around the crowded, high-tension salon space.

You’d typically roll your eyes. God forbid Yoon Jeonghan stays still for just a second.

As the notice of his going missing sinks in, the atmosphere becomes frantic. The sound of rustling grows loud and overbearing—people begin to fly around the messy space, trying to organize and give last-minute touches to the rest of the group; a few managers had already walked out the door without a second thought, going to go search.

“That idiot,” you murmur, eyebrows pinched together.

Jeonghan has always had the tendency to wander. It’s just a product of restlessness, and it's always been a fairly harmless habit, but this space isn’t one that’s familiar like a music show; it's the first stop on the world tour—where the venue is completely foreign to both the members and the staff—and if he doesn’t show up in the next ten or so minutes, it would not end prettily.

Vernon, whose base makeup you were touching up, eyes you curiously. Your movements had faltered considerably upon the director’s shout, going from precise, aggressive beats against his face to uncharacteristically soft, unsynchronized taps.

He watches your unsettled expression with slightly squinted eyes—but he doesn’t say anything, simply averting his gaze to his reflection.

The soft, worried mutters of the other members paired with the worked-up exclamations from the different staff fill your ears until it grows unbearable. You can't take it anymore.

You find yourself only giving Vernon a few more quick taps before muttering a faint “you’re all set”, tossing the beauty sponge haphazardly onto the cluttered countertop. You hear a thoughtful “thank you” come from him before you bolt across the room and out the door.

The lingering uncertainty of Jeonghan's whereabouts must be messing with your senses, because the grey halls feel even more obscure than before—they're seemingly never-ending as you twist and turn around the venue, the only times you stop being to peek down corridors for the silhouette of a person.

Your legs begin to ache from how fast you’re walking, but that pain fades as you finally catch sight of a figure in one of the waiting areas, leaning against the wall next to a vending machine.

“Jeonghan-ssi!” you call out immediately, striding towards him.

The man’s head looks up from his phone screen, warily looking around. Realizing it was you that was coming towards him, he pockets his phone before peeling himself off the wall and going to meet you halfway.

You stop a few steps away from him, eyes scanning over his build as if to check for any accidents. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but everyone is looking for you, you have to be on stage really soon-”

“Y/N,” Jeonghan murmurs, cutting you off. “Y/N, it’s just us. Stop talking like that, you sound so cold.”

Your eyebrows furrow, but when you realize what he was referring to, you grow quiet.

When the two of you got together, you made it clear that you wanted to remain professional. Jeonghan is your coworker, and so, you treat him as such–you keep speaking to him with formalities and interact with him only when necessary, trying your hardest to not drop any sort of indication that you have a more intimate relationship with him.

Even if other people knew about your relationship, you still think you’d like to keep your work and personal life wholly separate. You think it's just more simple that way, and you don’t want to become someone who seems unreliable.

It strikes you that you had been speaking to him formally, and even after realizing it, you don’t know why you still find yourself unable to slip into a more casual persona.

Maybe it’s because he was in his stage outfit, all made up and styled to perfection—or maybe it’s because the setting of a waiting room is one you associate so heavily with work—either way, you find yourself keeping a small distance from him, hands at your sides with the same indifferent, borderline stern expression on your face.

“Come back to the salon, please,” you say sharply before turning away.

Jeonghan winces. He encircles his fingers around your wrist to stop you from walking away any further, the gentleness of his touch contrasting the edge of your tone.

“You're so mean…”

His grip on your wrist makes you turn back around, looking at him with curiosity. Your eyes widen at the sight of an unfamiliar expression painted on Jeonghan’s face—one that’s slightly forlorn.

“Call me Han, or something. Please. I need you to ground me,” he whispers.

He’s laughing—his voice still has the teasing charm that’s always present whenever he speaks—but you can’t help but notice the small amounts of desperation that seep through.

Taking a few steps forward, you’re now much closer to him than before. You remove his fingers from around your wrist, and after a little hesitation, you slowly interlock your fingers together.

Immediately, Jeonghan squeezes your hand tightly, the tension leaving his body as soon as he feels the smoothness of your touch. He brings your interlocked hands up to his lips, pressing a soft kiss to your knuckles.

You freeze. The idea of PDA in a work setting makes you uneasy—but, you put that aside to focus solely on Jeonghan, because something was clearly bothering him.

“What’s wrong, Han?” you ask, much softer than before.

Jeonghan’s head hangs down as he chuckles meekly. “Nothing. It’s stupid.”

“No, it’s not. Stop downplaying yourself. What’s wrong?”

“I just- I’m nervous, baby.”

The pet name slips out naturally, but you barely register it. “It’s been a really long time since we’ve been on tour, and we’ve never been to this city before… I don’t know if anyone will like my performance? Like-”

“Shhh, Han,” you shush, tentatively stroking your thumb on the top of his hand.

“It’s fine to be nervous. I’d be surprised if any of you weren’t nervous,” you say jokingly, rolling your eyes. You don’t notice, but Jeonghan's gazing at you with fondness, his lips threatening to quirk up.

“But what’s not fine is for you to think that no one will like your performance. You’re such an incredible performer, Jeonghan," you say, eyes shining. "Maybe even my favourite performer, but you can’t tell Mingyu I said that.”

Jeonghan scoffs dramatically, ripping his hand out of yours and crossing his arms in front of his chest. "Maybe? You’re breaking my heart, Y/N,” he chides.

A melodic laugh bubbles from you, and Jeonghan tries his absolute hardest to not break into a massive smile.

Jeonghan doesn't mind the distant, formal dynamic the two of you have during work. He, too, has an image to maintain and wants to be professional—though he won’t deny that he wishes he could see you like this more often: eyes crinkling in delight as you laugh at his antics. It suits you better than the serious expression you wear when you do his makeup, he thinks.

Jeonghan doesn’t try to stop you when you reach for his hand, taking it in yours again.

“But seriously, you’re great. Listen, they’re all there for you,” you say, looking up at nothing in particular as you listen to the muffled roars of fans singing along to the music videos that play before the concert starts.

Your sincerity is too much for his poor heart, and Jeonghan finds himself grinning widely.

“I suppose they are,” he mutters, making you laugh.

A silence falls over the two of you, before it’s broken by Jeonghan.

“Thank you,” he whispers genuinely. "For always supporting me."

You don’t say anything in return, only giving his hand one final squeeze before detaching yourself from him and beginning to walk away.

Though, you only make it a few steps before you’re frozen in your place. You're looking at something that makes your eyes widen and the wires in your brain snap.

Leaning against the threshold between the waiting area and the hall, arms crossed and a the ghost of a smile on his face, is Vernon.

Jeonghan comes up behind you and, though he isn’t nearly as stunned as you, blinks in confusion at the sight of his member standing there.

“Oh, hey man. What are you doing here?” he asks nonchalantly.

The younger shrugs. “You’ve caused quite the riot, hyung. Everyone’s looking for you."

Vernon pushes himself off the doorframe before directing his gaze to you. “So this is why you were so worried about him,” he wonders aloud, an amused glint in his eyes.

Words refuse to come from your lips as your jaw hangs open. All you feel is Jeonghan putting his annoying yet warm hand on your waist, giving it a small, excited squeeze.

“Worried about me, hm?” your boyfriend teases. You don’t even have it in you to shoot back, only turning your head away from him to hide your quickly burning face.

“How long?” Vernon suddenly muses.

“About half a year. You think she hates me yet?” Jeonghan jokes, though his eyes are half-lidded as he affectionately looks down at you.

"Seems like it," Vernon responds, chuckling. "Hey- is this why you sometimes don’t come back to the dorms?”

The younger's eyebrows shoot up as the realization dawns on him, breaking the signature, neutral expression he always wears. He's impressed. "God, we've just been thinking you, like, get drunk and blackout on the road or something."

Jeonghan throws his head back, the sound of his loud laughs ringing through the air. “Yeah. But don’t tell anyone- no one else knows.”

Vernon whistles lowly, before bringing his hand up to mime sealing his lips and throwing away the key.

Your shock has somewhat subsided, and when you suddenly remember why you were in this situation in the first place, you gasp. “Oh my god, you guys have to go. Now.”

Even as you practically throw him off of you, the smile seemingly can’t be wiped off your boyfriend’s face.

Jeonghan can’t stop thinking about your shining eyes and the shade of red that tinted your cheeks, even as he walks away.

#seventeen scenarios #seventeen x reader #svt x reader #seventeen fluff #svt fluff #svt scenarios #jeonghan x reader #jeonghan imagines #jeonghan oneshot #jeonghan fluff #jeonghan scenarios #seventeen #svt #yoon jeonghan #seventeen jeonghan #seventeen drabbles #seventeen imagines #yoon jeonghan x reader #svt imagines

2K notes · View notes

poppy-metal · 3 months

Note

inappropriate relationship with country club tennis instructor [2019] patrick?

you're rich. and you're pretty. and you're home for the summer from uni, and you cant wait for a few months with nothing to do but sip mimosas by your luxurious mansion pool. after all, neither of your parents ever pay any attention to you or what you're doing - why should they start now?

except they do. they hand you a few brand-new tennis rackets and tell you you've gotta start doing something with your time. sometimes productive. so you're forced to join about ten other well-to-do rich girls at the local country club in daily tennis lessons. and you hate it, but you're not bad. actually, you're quite okay at it. you're fluid, beautiful on the court, calculated. you understand. you're so good that, in your pressed white lacoste sets and your cute little pink sneakers, you remind your instructor of two people he used to love a very long time ago.

your instructor, btw, is hot. like, all the other girls in the class agree. hes sort of a dick, but hes HOT. and he takes a liking to you. likes thats you're a good girl - you wear your skirts longer than the others in his class, you blush easily. you address him, "yes sir," and "thank you, sir". you listen raptly to everything he says, because you might be a rich little prat, but you've been in etiquette classes since you could walk and you know how a little lady is supposed to behave in public.

so he dotes on you a little. and that's all you wanted, right? a handsome older man to pay you attention, to coddle you and compliment you and tell you how good you're doing. and it's completely, totally innocent.

until you end up in his backseat with your head between his thighs. or the club bathrooms with his hand in your panties. or hiding in a closet with his tongue in your ass. or, on one particularly daring afternoon when your parents arent home, taking him to your sweet, soft pink bedroom with the lace curtains and the frilly duvet cover, so he can finally take your virginity on your bed.

-kit ♡♡♡

@gamesetart

gonna go bananas

you're kind of excel past the other girls laughably well. and you're ostracized for it - they dont like you. think you're trying to fuck patrick - like they aren't.

and you're not, at first. you genuinely just want to be good. you didn't expect to like tennis this much - you expected to hate it - some stupid exercise your parents were forcing on you to feel good about themselves, and while it is that, you find excitement in it. the discipline it requires - it quiets your mind and gives you something to focus on. hitting the ball over the net.

you're the only one in the class that shows real potential.

and yeah, your tennis instructor is hot. patrick zweig. yeah - you'd looked him up immediately after that first day and spent the rest of the night watching him play. yeah, you got kinda sucked into it - watching him play. it fascinated you. he fascinated you.

you hadn't thought of tennis much before then but what you did know about it - but you'd thought it must be boring.

nothing was boring about how patrick played, though. he played with a kind of intensity that surprised you. he dominated the court. ran his opponents on the other side to dust. wiped the floor with them. the precise movements of his arm - the way he seemed to smash the ball across the court instead of just hit it.

it'd been a long time since you felt that motivation. but suddenly you wanted to be good at something. something that wasn't just handed to you. something you had to work to get good at.

the first time you played against patrick and managed to volley back and forth with him for more than ten seconds and he'd grinned at you over the net, said "that wasn't complete shit." you felt like you were high.

and patrick..... it's just for the money at first. some extra cash just to teach some spoiled brats how to hit a ball with a racket - he didn't even have to do that much. he could just lounge around while you played - mooch off the snacks and drinks at the country club.

he didn't expect anyone to actually be good at it.

you suprised him. got his attention. he wondered if this is what tashi felt with art, that kind of spark of satisfaction when you instructed someone and then watched them use that instruction to flourish.

he never considered himself being a good coach but he found himself actually getting more serious about it. and that felt good.

finding you hot was a problem.

god, why did you have to look at him with worship? and you were so polite - standing straigher when he approached. saying "yes sir!" in that eager tone. he'd never had someone respect him this much. idolize him. did terrible things to his head, which was big enough.

he didn't trust himself not to abuse it. knew he definitely would if he was alone with you long enough - which is why he responded with a resounding "no." when you asked for private lessons.

winced at how you crumpled like wet paper. scratched the back of his neck because how could he explain that he couldn't be alone with you and your big eyes and pouty lips and need for validation and not sink his big cock into your pussy. he didn't have that kind of strength.

but you didn't let up. you just tried harder. everyday after practice you'd follow him like a puppy with your tail wagging and ask, "please, sir." and "i know i could be better if you just spent some time on me -" jesus fucking christ. and "my parents will pay you more-"

okay, his ears had perked at that one. even if your persistence irritated him.

"i said no."

one time you followed him all the way out to his car, and kept going on and on about how you'd watched his videos all of his videos and how you admired him so much and how good he looked playing tennis and how you wanted to be good and how cool he was and please mr. zweig I'll be so good I'll listen to whatever you say I'll be so good I'll make you so proud, i promise -

he dropped his bag in the backseat of his van. looked around the lot to make sure you were alone before he turned around after slamming the door shut and gripping you by the back of your neck like a kitten by its scruff and dragging you to his mouth.

you let you a little gasp. patrick didn't wait for you to adjust to him, he slipped his tongue right into your mouth, dominated the kiss, dragged moans from your chest and had you leaning into his broad chest with a whine - head spinning, you had to stand on your tippy toes to meet his violent kisses - his big hands gripping your body - your waist, your ass, your tits. you yelped when he squeezed one harshly, whining his name helplessly and he ate the sound from your lips.

by the time he pulled back your lips were swollen and spit slick and you were swaying on your feet, dazed.

you'd read about the term 'kissed senseless', but you didn't know how it could be real. you did now. you felt ravaged. your whole body buzzing.

patrick sighed. ran a hand through his sweat slicked hair, making it even more wild. had you ran your hands through it? you hadn't even been conscious of doing it, but you wanted to again.

patrick said, suddenly. "double it."

you blinked at him, owlish.

patrick was already opening the drivers side door. he plucked his sunglasses from the dash, plopped them on. "what your parents are paying for you now. for private lessons, i want it doubled."

oh. that.

you grinned - momentarily distracted from what that kiss meant by the glee that patrick was gonna be your private instructor. all yours!

"done! its so done - mr zweig, im -"

"patrick." he corrected.

you bit your lip. "oh! um - i was just trying to be polite - i didn't mean -"

"i know what you meant. I'm telling you to stop because if i hear you call me that again I'm going to think it means you want me to fuck you and I'm going to find the nearest empty room to do just that in."

"m - patrick -" you fumble. your whole body flushes. your nipples harden. your cunt pulses in your little panties and you feel something wet drip. "i - i - i mean, i didn't - i wasn't trying to -"

he flicks his sunglasses over his eyes. one hand on the steering wheel. "im a shitty man and a pervert - lets get that out of the way. if you want to keep this professional -" through his sunglasses you feel his eyes like a hot brand on your skin, looking you up and down. "- you'll stop treating me like a good girl treats her daddy. because I'll take advantage of that very thoroughly."

he closes his car door. leaves you alone in the parking lot to just. sit with that.

#ask #frens <3 #NEED HIM TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ME SO BAD

242 notes · View notes