#influence campaign
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honestly, FUCK ISRAEL!!
#pro israel propaganda#influence campaign#us lawmakers#pro israel content#fake accounts#social media manipulation#israel's ministry of diaspora affairs#stoic marketing firm#chatgpt generated posts#misinformation watchdog#fakereporter analysis#fake news sites#online disinformation#us politics interference#social media bots#israel-palestine conflict#online influence operations#diaspora affairs denial#achiya schatz comments#new york times report
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youtube
Let's talk about social media influence....
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Israeli Psy-Ops on Americans
youtube
Some democratic ally...😒
#psy op#palestine#palestinians#gaza#genocide#israeli propaganda#israeli atrocities#israeli apartheid#israeli occupation#war crimes#free palestine#free gaza#justice#idf terrorists#iof war crimes#iof terrorism#arrest netanyahu#icc#icj#right wing extremism#influence campaign#fake news#chat bots#social media#lies#trolls#racism#american politicians#us politics#humanitarian crisis
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And then what else will they toss in? Knowing Iran, absolutely antisemitism.
Aug. 9, 2024, 8:26 AM MST
By Brandy Zadrozny
Iran is stepping up its influence campaign aimed at the U.S., researchers at Microsoft said in a new report, adding to the ongoing efforts by Russia and China to sway American public opinion before the presidential election.
Researchers identified websites that they attributed to the Iranian operation, aimed at voters on the political left and right. One website, Nio Thinker, bills itself as “your go-to destination for insightful, progressive news and analysis that challenges the status quo” and hosts articles that bash former President Donald Trump and hail Vice President Kamala Harris as “our unexpected, awkward savior.”
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The largest campaign finance violation in US history
I'm coming to DEFCON! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).
Earlier this month, some of the richest men in Silicon Valley, led by Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz (the billionaire VCs behind Andreesen-Horowitz) announced that they would be backing Trump with endorsements and millions of dollars:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/07/16/trump-lands-more-big-tech-backers-billionaire-venture-capitalist-andreessen-joins-wave-supporting-former-president/
Predictably, this drew a lot of ire, which Andreesen tried to diffuse by insisting that his support "doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care about":
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/24/24204706/marc-andreessen-ben-horowitz-a16z-trump-donations
In other words, the billionaires backing Trump weren't doing so because they supported the racism, the national abortion ban, the attacks on core human rights, etc. Those were merely tradeoffs that they were willing to make to get the parts of the Trump program they do support: more tax-cuts for the ultra-rich, and, of course, free rein to defraud normies with cryptocurrency Ponzi schemes.
Crypto isn't "money" – it is far too volatile to be a store of value, a unit of account, or a medium of exchange. You'd have to be nuts to get a crypto mortgage when all it takes is Elon Musk tweeting a couple emoji to make your monthly mortgage payment double.
A thing becomes moneylike when it can be used to pay off a bill for something you either must pay for, or strongly desire to pay for. The US dollar's moneylike property comes from the fact that hundreds of millions of people need dollars to pay off the IRS and their state tax bills, which means that they will trade labor and goods for dollars. Even people who don't pay US taxes will accept dollars, because they know they can use them to buy things from people who do have a nondiscretionary bill that can only be paid in dollars.
Dollars are also valuable because there are many important commodities that can only – or primarily – be purchased with them, like much of the world's oil supply. The fact that anyone who wants to buy oil has a strong need for dollars makes dollars valuable, because they will sell labor and goods to get dollars, not because they need dollars, but because they need oil.
There's almost nothing that can only be purchased with crypto. You can procure illegal goods and services in the mistaken belief that this transaction will be durably anonymous, and you can pay off ransomware creeps who have hijacked your personal files or all of your business's data:
https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/
Web3 was sold as a way to make the web more "decentralized," but it's best understood as an effort to make it impossible to use the web without paying crypto every time you click your mouse. If people need crypto to use the internet, then crypto whales will finally have a source of durable liquidity for the tokens they've hoarded:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/16/nondiscretionary-liabilities/#quatloos
The Web3 bubble was almost entirely down to the vast hype machine mobilized by Andreesen-Horowitz, who bet billions of dollars on the idea and almost single-handedly created the illusion of demand for crypto. For example, they arranged a $100m bribe to Kickstarter shareholders in exchange for Kickstarter pretending to integrate "blockchain" into its crowdfunding platform:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/untold-story-kickstarter-crypto-hail-120000205.html
Kickstarter never ended up using the blockchain technology, because it was useless. Their shareholders just pocketed the $100m while the company weathered the waves of scorn from savvy tech users who understood that this was all a shuck.
Look hard enough at any crypto "success" and you'll discover a comparable scam. Remember NFTs, and the eye-popping sums that seemingly "everyone" was willing to pay for ugly JPEGs? That whole market was shot through with "wash-trading" – where you sell your asset to yourself and pretend that it was bought by a third party. It's a cheap – and illegal – way to convince people that something worthless is actually very valuable:
https://mailchi.mp/brianlivingston.com/034-2#free1
Even the books about crypto are scams. Chris Dixon's "bestseller" about the power of crypto, Read Write Own, got on the bestseller list through the publishing equivalent of wash-trading, where VCs with large investments in crypto bought up thousands of copies and shoved them on indifferent employees or just warehoused them:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho
The fact that crypto trades were mostly the same bunch of grifters buying shitcoins from each other, while spending big on Superbowl ads, bribes to Kickstarter shareholders, and bulk-buys of mediocre business-books was bound to come out someday. In the meantime, though, the system worked: it convinced normies to gamble their life's savings on crypto, which they promptly lost (if you can't spot the sucker at the table, you're the sucker).
There's a name for this: it's called a "bezzle." John Kenneth Galbraith defined a "bezzle" as "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." All bezzles collapse eventually, but until they do, everyone feels better off. You think you're rich because you just bought a bunch of shitcoins after Matt Damon told you that "fortune favors the brave." Damon feels rich because he got a ton of cash to rope you into the con. Crypto.com feels rich because you took a bunch of your perfectly cromulent "fiat money" that can be used to buy anything and traded it in for shitcoins that can be used to buy nothing:
https://theintercept.com/2022/10/26/matt-damon-crypto-commercial/
Andreesen-Horowitz were masters of the bezzle. For them, the Web3 bet on an internet that you'd have to buy their shitcoins to use was always Plan B. Plan A was much more straightforward: they would back crypto companies and take part of their equity in huge quantities of shitcoins that they could sell to "unqualified investors" (normies) in an "initial coin offering." Normally, this would be illegal: a company can't offer stock to the general public until it's been through an SEC vetting process and "gone public" through an IPO. But (Andreesen-Horowitz argued) their companies' "initial coin offerings" existed in an unregulated grey zone where they could be traded for the life's savings of mom-and-pop investors who thought crypto was real because they heard that Kickstarter had adopted it, and there was a bestselling book about it, and Larry David and Matt Damon and Spike Lee told them it was the next big thing.
Crypto isn't so much a financial innovation as it is a financial obfuscation. "Fintech" is just a cynical synonym for "unregulated bank." Cryptocurrency enjoys a "byzantine premium" – that is, it's so larded with baffling technical nonsense that no one understands how it works, and they assume that anything they don't understand is probably incredibly sophisticated and great ("a pile of shit this big must have pony under it somewhere"):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/13/the-byzantine-premium/
There are two threats to the crypto bezzle: the first is that normies will wise up to the scam, and the second is that the government will put a stop to it. These are correlated risks: if the government treats crypto as a security (or worse, a scam), that will put severe limits on how shitcoins can be marketed to normies, which will staunch the influx of real money, so the sole liquidity will come from ransomware payments and transactions with tragically overconfident hitmen and drug dealers who think the blockchain is anonymous.
To keep the bezzle going, crypto scammers have spent the past two election cycles flooding both parties with cash. In the 2022 midterms, crypto money bankrolled primary challenges to Democrats by absolute cranks, like the "effective altruist" Carrick Flynn ("effective altruism" is a crypto-affiliated cult closely associated with the infamous scam-artist Sam Bankman-Fried). Sam Bankman-Fried's super PAC, "Protect Our Future," spent $10m on attack-ads against Flynn's primary opponent, the incumbent Andrea Salinas. Salinas trounced Flynn – who was an objectively very bad candidate who stood no chance of winning the general election – but only at the expense of most of the funds she raised from her grassroots, small-dollar donors.
Fighting off SBF's joke candidate meant that Salinas went into the general election with nearly empty coffers, and she barely squeaked out a win against a GOP nightmare candidate Mike Erickson – a millionaire Oxy trafficker, drunk driver, and philanderer who tricked his then-girlfriend by driving her to a fake abortion clinic and telling her that it was a real one:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/14/competitors-critics-customers/#billionaire-dilletantes
SBF is in prison, but there's no shortage of crypto millions for this election cycle. According to Molly White's "Follow the Crypto" tracker, crypto-affiliated PACs have raised $185m to influence the 2024 election – more than the entire energy sector:
https://www.followthecrypto.org/
As with everything "crypto," the cryptocurrency election corruption slushfund is a bezzle. The "Stand With Crypto PAC" claims to have the backing of 1.3 million "crypto advocates," and Reuters claims they have 440,000 backers. But 99% of the money claimed by Stand With Crypto was actually donated to "Fairshake" – a different PAC – and 90% of Fairshake's money comes from a handful of corporate donors:
https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-62/
Stand With Crypto – minus the Fairshake money it falsely claimed – has raised $13,690 since April. That money came from just seven donors, four of whom are employed by Coinbase, for whom Stand With Crypto is a stalking horse. Stand With Crypto has an affiliated group (also called "Stand With Crypto" because that is an extremely normal and forthright way to run a nonprofit!), which has raised millions – $1.49m. Of that $1.49m, 90% came from just four donors: three cryptocurrency companies, and the CEO of Coinbase.
There are plenty of crypto dollars for politicians to fight over, but there are virtually no crypto voters. 69-75% of Americans "view crypto negatively or distrust it":
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/10/majority-of-americans-arent-confident-in-the-safety-and-reliability-of-cryptocurrency/
When Trump keynotes the Bitcoin 2024 conference and promises to use public funds to buy $1b worth of cryptocoins, he isn't wooing voters, he's wooing dollars:
https://www.wired.com/story/donald-trump-strategic-bitcoin-stockpile-bitcoin-2024/
Wooing dollars, not crypto. Politicians aren't raising funds in crypto, because you can't buy ads or pay campaign staff with shitcoins. Remember: unless Andreesen-Horowitz manages to install Web3 crypto tollbooths all over the internet, the industries that accept crypto are ransomware, and technologically overconfident hit-men and drug-dealers. To win elections, you need dollars, which crypto hustlers get by convincing normies to give them real money in exchange for shitcoins, and they are only funding politicians who will make it easier to do that.
As a political matter, "crypto" is a shorthand for "allowing scammers to steal from working people," which makes it a very Republican issue. As Hamilton Nolan writes, "If the Republicans want to position themselves as the Party of Crypto, let them. It is similar to how they position themselves as The Party of Racism and the Party of Religious Zealots and the Party of Telling Lies about Election Fraud. These things actually reflect poorly on them, the Republicans":
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/crypto-as-a-political-characteristic
But the Democrats – who are riding high on the news that Kamala Harris will be their candidate this fall – have decided that they want some of that crypto money, too. Even as crypto-skeptical Dems like Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester see millions from crypto PACs flooding in to support their primary challengers and GOP opponents, a group of Dem politicians are promising to give the crypto industry whatever it wants, if they will only bribe Democratic candidates as well:
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/f/?id=00000190-f475-d94b-a79f-fc77c9400000
Kamala Harris – a genuinely popular candidate who has raised record-shattering sums from small-dollar donors representing millions of Americans – herself has called for a "reset" of the relationship between the crypto sector and the Dems:
https://archive.is/iYd1C
As Luke Goldstein writes in The American Prospect, sucking up to crypto scammers so they stop giving your opponents millions of dollars to run attack ads against you is a strategy with no end – you have to keep sucking up to the scam, otherwise the attack ads come out:
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-31-crypto-cash-affecting-democratic-races/
There's a whole menagerie of crypto billionaires behind this year's attempt to buy the American government – Andreesen and Horowitz, of course, but also the Winklevoss twins, and this guy, who says we're in the midst of a "civil war" and "anyone that votes against Trump can die in a fucking fire":
https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1813952816840597712/photo/1
But the real whale that's backstopping the crypto campaign spending is Coinbase, through its Fairshake crypto PAC. Coinbase has donated $45,500,000 to Fairshake, which is a lot:
https://www.coinbase.com/blog/how-to-get-regulatory-clarity-for-crypto
But $45.5m isn't merely a large campaign contribution: it appears that $25m of that is the largest the largest illegal campaign contribution by a federal contractor in history, "by far," a fact that was sleuthed out by Molly White:
https://www.citationneeded.news/coinbase-campaign-finance-violation/
At issue is the fact that Coinbase is bidding to be a US federal contractor: specifically, they want to manage the crypto wallets that US federal cops keep seizing from crime kingpins. Once Coinbase threw its hat into the federal contracting ring, it disqualified itself from donating to politicians or funding PACs:
Campaign finance law prohibits federal government contractors from making contributions, or promising to make contributions, to political entities including super PACs like Fairshake.
https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/federal-government-contractors/
Previous to this, the largest ever illegal campaign contribution by a federal contractor appears to be Marathon Petroleum Company's 2022 bribe to GOP House and Senate super PACs, a mere $1m, only 4% of Coinbase's bribe.
I'm with Nolan on this one. Let the GOP chase millions from billionaires everyone hates who expect them to promote a scam that everyone mistrusts. The Dems have finally found a candidate that people are excited about, and they're awash in money thanks to small amounts contributed by everyday Americans. As AOC put it:
They've got money, but we've got people. Dollar bills don't vote. People vote.
https://www.popsugar.com/news/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-dnc-headquarters-climate-speech-47986992
Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!
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/2024/07/31/greater-fools/#coinbased
#pluralistic#coinbase#crypto#cryptocurrency#elections#campaign finance#campaign finance violations#crimes#fraud#influence peddling#democrats#moneylike#bubbles#ponzi schemes#bezzles#molly white#hamilton nolan
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polling day on thursday so this is your notice that if you actively choose not to vote, then you have no fucking right to complain about the way things turn out.
"but i don't want to go to the polling station!" you had plenty of time to apply for a postal or proxy vote.
"they're both the same!" 1. no they're fucking not. 2. this isn't the us. voting for the greens or the lib dems or snp or independent or count fucking binhead does mean something.
"but the prime minister will be rishi sunak or kier starmer!" yes, probably, but politics is not just national. you will be represented by somebody, i suggest you look at your local candidates.
democracy literally only works if people participate. go and fucking vote.
#my vote will be heavily influenced by who my local candidates are#because only two candidates have bothered to do any real campaigning and i'm not voting for the thatcherite#uk politics#ge2024#general election 2024
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Sandra-Lynn and Sklonda are having a "What Do We Do About Kristen" phone call as we speak
#dimension 20#dimension 20 spoilers#brennan lee mulligan#fantasy high#fantasy high junior year#d20 fantasy high#dimension 20 fhjy#d20 fhjy#fhjy spoilers#fhjy#sklonda gukgak#sandra lynn faeth#riz gukgak#fig faeth#kristen applebees#like kristen IS a good friend and she DOES appreciate riz and fig but she is a mess#like as mothers of two deeply troubled children it makes sense they're comcerned#if my daughter the self-sacrificing ticking time bomb said she was ignoring a CURSE because she was busy with her friend's campaign???#or if my son needed me to pull over to take a nap because the SAME GIRL was stressing him out so much??#i think because we live outside the universe and love kristen it's easy to forget#kristen went from being the 'good kid' that the bad kids corrupted to the bad influence that worries their mothers#thinking about ally saying that kristen this season is when chaos is no longer cute#speaking of which this scene did make me realize how little the Thistlesprings check up on gorgug#ik they're trying though so imma give them a pass#like kristen has NO proper guidance on how to enter adulthood#i GUESS jawbone but Jawbone isn't raising her so much as he is housing her#What Kristen REALLY needs is to have one singular adult want to be her parent#She doesn't HAVE a proper sandra lynn or sklonda checking in on her#she has her ex-girlfriend's uncle#if kristen had someone looking out for her we wouldn't BE in this situation
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in honour of national emo day
#emo dnp will always be my bbys#fringe check#2009 phan#rawr xd#danisnotonfire#amazingphil#dan and phil#dip and pip#phan#daniel howell#phil lester#tit tour#dan and phil games#terrible influence#yes its the 20th in aus and its not even a holiday here but im starting a campaign to instate it as a public holiday#dnp#danandphil
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"I can help you win this war."
Oh, no.
bonus, the cast's reaction is just PRICELESS
#well there goes my theory that the Betrayer influenced this Cassida woman.#Nope ! no need ! She just thinks the “holy war” is worth doing and she wants to defeat the Betrayers !#OH NO#critical role#cr spoilers#cr campaign 3#CR3E100#downfall#critical role : downfall#cr downfall
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Over half of anti-Heard tweets were bots or paid trolls, many linked to Saudi government bots.
"According to an investigation by Tortoise Media, which examined more than one million tweets, more than 50 per cent of anti-Heard messages in the run-up to the 2022 defamation case were "inauthentic' - either from automated "bot" accounts or people hired to attack the actress."
"Bradley Hope, author of a book on Bin Salman, told the podcast that the pro-Depp tweets emanating from Saudi Arabia appear to be produced by "flies", a name for Saudi bot accounts."
"An intelligence professional who tracks online disinformation campaigns, said there was only a "0.1 per cent chance" that the hate directed at Heard was from genuine Depp fans.
The investigation also claims that bot networks in Thailand and Spain tweeted large numbers of pro-Depp messages."
"...more than 100 Twitter accounts sent 1,000 identical messages at exactly the same time to any company that had worked with Heard, reading: "This brand supports domestic violence against men."'
"The makers of the podcast argue that the criticism of Heard could have affected the jury in the 2022 US defamation trial which found in favour of Depp."
"So, if you couldn't tell the difference between a real-life Johnny Depp fan and a bot in 2022, then you probably won't be able to tell a Russian troll from a US election official in 2024. And that represents a serious problem for the security of our democracies."-Alexi Mostrous, presenter of the podcast.
"Johnny Depp and the Saudi Embassy did not respond to Tortoise's request for comment."
#Amber Heard#Depp v Heard#Johnny Depp#Johnny Depp Is A Wife-Beater#Johnny Depp Is A Rapist#Tortoise Media#Who Trolled Amber?#Mohammed bin Salman#Prince Bone Saw#Propaganda#Misinformation#Bots#Foreign Influence Campaign#Indict Johnny Depp#Indict Adam Waldman#Disbar Adam Waldman#Johnny Depp Is A Saudi Asset#Probably A Russian One Too#I Stand With Amber Heard
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“I made a pact with Vol, a pact of Blood”
Strahd von Zarovich and his very, very good friend.
#NONE OF THE OTHER PLAYER FOLLOWER ME HERE SO ITS FREE GAME TO POST HERE BAYBEE!#I get dm spoilers sometimes because that’s what happens when ur engaged to the dam#no but last sesh our dm told us vampyr/vol doesn’t matter like at all in base campaign and that feels so weird to me because it influences#our every move in our campaign it’s awesome#we’ll have to kill it too after killing Strahd and that’s fucked up#I hate it!!!#dnd#dnd art#strahd von zarovich#dnd Strahd#spoilers#cos#curse of Strahd#curse of strahd spoilers#cos spoilers#d&d#d&d art#art#fan art#my art#strahd#I love him!#vol#vampyr#fuck that guy tho all my homies hate him!#digital art#also this style of art is like way different than what I normally do but it was fun!
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#pro israel propaganda#influence campaign#us lawmakers#pro israel content#fake accounts#social media manipulation#israel's ministry of diaspora affairs#stoic marketing firm#chatgpt generated posts#misinformation watchdog#fakereporter analysis#fake news sites#online disinformation#us politics interference#social media bots#israel-palestine conflict#online influence operations#diaspora affairs denial#achiya schatz comments#new york times report
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As a hobby worldbuilder who works primarily in what I assume is the weird fiction zone (with fair sized fantasy or scifi elements, depending on the project), I sometimes get stuck about what to do with the sky. If reality doesn't work the same, how do I account for the sun? Should I even have a moon and stars? If I do, are they true moon and stars, or an equivalent?
While you can gently sweep the conundrum under a rug, it can of course become part of the game. Here's some examples of solutions I've enjoyed:
Midst: The natural state of the universe is, in fact, light. Darkness acts like a reality-warping, breathable liquid. Midst is an islet, which here means it's one of many floating planetoids. Midst specifically floats and rotates slowly at the border of light and dark, causing day and night. The moon is an even smaller floating body, but it's mostly just there to explode. Space is dangerous not for breathing or temperature reasons but because you'll get ripped to shreds by floating mica.
Campaign: Skyjacks: The sun is the creation of the Sovereign (now dead patriarch god), and the stars were his angels. The Morningstar is the only one that doesn't move, guarding the empty throne, but the few remaining stars (angels) do, and also aren't always up there, which makes navigation difficult. There are so few stars now as most angels were cast out of the heavens a couple centuries back (when The Sovereign was slain). The moon was created by The Forest Queen, allowing her to see by the light of it, which she could not by the Sovereign's sun. If you fly an airship above the moon, she cannot see you.
The Mistholme Museum: Specifically, in the world of The Beast and The Queen, the stars are beetles, which roam about on the dome that is the sky. The sun? Different beetle.
#Like if this reality began as a dream and has soap-bubbled it's way over the past few million years into solid existence#then it's super likely the organisms that initially dreamed it would've influenced it enough to have a sun at least.#So what the fuck is that sun now? Are there stars? What would an astronomer find to look at them? more suns? or holes in the soap bubble?#midst#campaign: skyjacks#the mistholme museum of mystery morbidity and mortality#skyjacks#midst podcast#the mistholme museum
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New article with more details (from Jason Schreier who first broke the story). If you can't see it, I'll copy the whole text under read more.
About 100 employees were laid off in total (8%) and one of the main reasons listed is "underperformance," "sharp drop in popularity" and "poor reception of Lightfall."
So you know when for the last year and a half content creators have been shitting and pissing on the game as a full-time job and the amount of negativity and ragebait content became the only thing to make content about for them? Well they certainly won't take the blame, but I will let it be known. These people either don't understand the influence they have or they do and they're doing it on purpose, and I don't know which of these two options is worse, but I am 100% confident that their campaign of rage and hate contributed to this.
You don't base your entire community around constantly hating everything about the only game you play (despite clearly not enjoying it anymore) and somehow avoid galvanising thousands and thousands of people into perceiving the game negatively. Imagine being employees who have barely worked there for 2 years and the only community reception they've seen is 24/7 hate train for their work and then they get fired because of "poor reception" and "drop in popularity." How can they not take that personally? I am absolutely devastated for these people who delievered a banger product and who were met with an unrelenting barrage of toxic gamer children which ended up having more sway over their boss than them.
Which brings me to the next bit and that's FUCK THE CEO. He is now my mortal enemy #1. I am projecting psychic blasts directly into his brain. What an absolute spineless coward who is more willing to bow down to fucking gamers than to protect his own employees. This is absolutely rage inducing because this has happened before. From the article from 2021 about the toxic culture at Bungie:
Reading this shit from the new article absolutely fucking sent me into blind rage because I immediately remembered this. Another instance of employees suffering because of comments on reddit. And because of toxic players. And proof that leadership is not protecting employees and is instead siding with players.
Match made in heaven. Asshole gamer content creators and asshole CEOs, all of whom sit at home on piles of money made from someone else's labour. I hope they all explode. None of the people that worked on this game deserve this.
Another article with an infuriating comment from the CEO:
In an internal town hall meeting addressing a Monday round of layoffs that impacted multiple departments, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons allegedly told remaining employees that the company had kept “the right people” to continue work on Destiny 2.
"Kept the right people." Really. Veteran composers weren't the right people? Die!
Bloomberg article in full:
Bungie’s decision to cut an estimated 100 jobs from its staff of about 1,200 followed dire management warnings earlier this month of a sharp drop in the popularity of its flagship video game Destiny 2. Just two weeks ago, executives at the Sony-owned game developer told employees that revenue was running 45% below projections for the year, according to people who attended the meeting. Chief Executive Officer Pete Parsons pinned the big miss on weak player retention for Destiny 2, which has faced a poor reception since the release of its latest expansion, Lightfall. The next expansion, The Final Shape, was getting good — not great feedback — and management told those present that they planned to push back the release to June 2024 from February, according the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The additional time would give developers a chance to improve the product. In the meantime, Parsons told staff Bungie would be cutting costs, such as for travel, as well as implementing salary and hiring freezes, the people said. Everyone would have to work together to weather the storm, he said, leaving employees feeling determined to do whatever was needed to get revenue back up. But on Monday morning the news got worse: Dozens of staffers woke up to mysterious 15-minute meetings that had been placed on their calendars, which they soon learned were part of a mass layoff. Bungie laid off around 8% of its employees, according to documentation reviewed by Bloomberg. Bungie didn’t respond to requests for comment. Employees who were let go will receive at least three months of severance and three months of Bungie-paid COBRA health insurance, although other benefits, such as expense reimbursements, ended Monday, sending some staff racing to submit their receipts. Laid-off staffers will also receive prorated bonuses, although those who were on a vesting schedule following Sony Group Corp.’s acquisition of Bungie in January 2022 will lose any shares that weren’t vested as of next month. The layoffs are part of a larger money-saving initiative at Sony’s PlayStation unit, which has also cut employees at studios such as Naughty Dog, Media Molecule and its San Mateo office. TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz wrote in a report Monday that “events over the last few days lead us to believe that PlayStation is undergoing a restructuring.” PlayStation president Jim Ryan announced last month that he plans to resign. Many of the layoffs at Bungie affected the company’s support departments, such as community management and publishing. Remaining Bungie staff were informed that some of those areas will be outsourced moving forward.
#destiny 2#bungie#long post#and like i don't care what's anyone's opinion on lightfall. it doesn't matter#the expansion is fine. there's some bad shit in there as there is in every expansion#literally nothing on this earth was so bad to deserve the amount of vitriol that lightfall got#it was purely motivated by hate and rage from people who have clearly lost their interest in the game a long time ago#no one else normal enough would respond even to a weaker expansion this way. and lightfall wasn't even weaker#literally nothing ever released in destiny deserves to have comments bad enough to end up affecting employees#there's been some bad expansions/dlcs/seasons. whatever. none of them were like... gollum level. not even close#people genuinely treated lightfall like it personally killed their dog. it was insane. the reaction to it was insane.#it stemmed from people who should have stopped playing a long time ago and stopped being content creators for one game#i can't even properly explain just how long and tireless the ragebait content campaign for destiny has been#opening youtube and seeing 10 videos in a row of just complaining and bitching#opening twitter and seeing thousands upon thousands of posts and comments dedicated solely to hating the game#imagine being an employee trying to maintain some communication with the community#hippy was relentlessly bullied by people I've seen suddenly lamenting that she was fired. you caused this#they will never accept even a miniscule portion of the blame for this ofc. they will just keep claiming they don't have that influence#but they do. it's been proven years ago. in the same way#community comments DO reach devs and community comments DO influence what happens to them and the game#'the event is bad' 'meta is bad' 'pvp is bad' 'raid is bad' 'story is bad' stop playing. no longer asking.#it's a video game. if you hate it stop playing. you don't have to justify it to hundreds of thousands of people and take them with you#especially when it leads to employees taking the fall#so to all content creators who are appalled and baffled after spending 2 years hating the game: you did this.#and to the ceo even more: explode into dust and be forgotten
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The Stigma of the Dark Ages.
What they’re talking about here is a society which has moved backwards, and is paying consequences already.
NPR - As the respiratory virus season approaches, where does the vaccination rate stand? November 27, 20244:47 AM ET Heard on Morning Edition By Rob Stein , Rob Schmitz Part of it is the lingering skepticism and outright hostility from the pandemic toward the COVID vaccine specifically and vaccines in general. Another factor is that people tend to underestimate how dangerous both viruses can be while overestimating vaccination risks. There's a lot of misinformation about how well the vaccines work and how safe they are. And finally, a lot of folks are just sick of vaccines because of all the shots they've gotten over the last few years. You know, put it all together and a lot of people are just feeling kind of done with vaccines. I talked about this with Dr. Gregory Poland. He's president of the Atria Academy of Science and Medicine in New York. GREGORY POLAND: “As a society right now, we're in a phase of rejecting expertise, of mistrust of any expert, whether it's science, meteorology, medicine, government - whatever it is.”
This is not unusual, there is no guarantee that society progresses forward. The Dark Ages happened, and that period was not the only time of regression on science.
MedPage Today - Nursing Homes Fell Behind on Vaccinating Patients for COVID — Billing complexities and patient skepticism partially to blame by Sarah Boden, KFF Health News December 5, 2024 Loveland has seen patients and coworkers at the nursing home where she works die from the viral disease. Now she has a new worry: bringing home the coronavirus and unwittingly infecting her infant daughter, Maya, born in May. Loveland's maternity leave ended in late June, when Maya wasn't yet 2 months old. Infants cannot be vaccinated against COVID until they are 6 months old. Children younger than that suffer the highest rates of hospitalization of any age group except people 75 or older. Between her patients' complex medical needs and their close proximity to one another, COVID continues to pose a grave threat to Loveland's nursing home -- and to the 15,000 other certified nursing homes in the U.S. where some 1.2 million people live. Despite this risk, a CDC report published in April found that just four in 10 nursing home residents in the U.S. received an updated COVID vaccine in the winter of 2023-24.
Going forward is a choice.
Public comment to CDC HICPAC committee November 2024 Infection control in healthcare. Chloe Humbert Nov 15, 2024 The Dark Ages was called that because society moved backwards from the technological advances that had come before. The fall of the Roman Empire was marked by elites who only cared about the status quo; they could’ve developed a steam engine as far back as Heron in 15 BC but didn’t bother. Going forward is a choice. In an article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases & Preventive Medicine there’s a description of what happened back then. “In medieval times, hospitals were hazardous places, Epidemic infections killed large numbers of hospital patients during this period. Hospital infection and death rates were high. When a sick person entered a hospital, his or her property was disposed of, and in some regions, a requiem mass was held, as if he or she had already died.” Going backward is a choice.
Stigma is part of a backward slide, and even if people don’t choose to go backward, we are all subject to community level leadership influences.
It’s called STIGMA. - wat3rm370n on tumblr - Oct 4th, 2024 When you hear that “people are tired of it” - that’s also part of stigma. And it’s not necessarily true that people are actually just sick of it - but they keep being told they should be.��Informational learned helplessness can do that to us. Stigma is leveraged and reinforced on purpose by big money industry interests who think any reminder of danger at all is bad for business. So it’s to some degree manufactured stigma.
#stigma#pandemic#public health#infection control#healthcare#politics#labor#government#disinformation#babies#cdc#infectious diseases#medical misinformation#influence#vaccine campaigns#vaccination#vaccines#anti-vax#hospitals#long term care#nursing homes#propaganda#roman empire#senior citizens#seniors#unvaccinated#anti vaxxers#vaccine uptake#CDC HICPAC#CDC
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batman part 2 definitely gonna be a political drama between bella real ( bruce wayne, harvey dent, jim gordon ) and oz cobb ( gotham's underworld ). he's been eyeing for that mayoral role for quite some time now.
#the batman#the penguin#the penguin spoilers#oswald cobblepot#bruce wayne#jim gordon#bella real#harvey dent#this is my games of thrones idc#a refreshing plot too#bruce wayne using his public persona because he realized how great his influence can sway the public to the right direction#harvey and bruce planning a campaign together yesss#*dc tag
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