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bluelockmaniac · 4 months ago

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˖⋆࿐໋ "PLEASE, COME BACK."

★ ft. itoshi rin, itoshi sae, michael kaiser, alexis ness, mikage reo, nagi seishiro, don lorenzo, oliver aiku, isagi yoichi & otoya eita (honourable mentions). synopsis. your ex-partners are desperate for you and need you back.

ᯓᡣ𐭩 content warning. general: pet names (princess, baby, etc). sae: suggestive. ness: mentions of stalking, obsessive, creepy ngl. reo: parental humiliation, mother reader. oliver: cheating (duh), he gets slapped lmfao.

notes. total word count: 3.3k !! , angsty ? fem!reader .

୨ৎ 𝐈𝐓��𝐒𝐇𝐈 𝐑𝐈𝐍

rainy days were the worst, you mused bitterly, recalling how rin had chosen a stormy day, much akin to this, to break things off with you.

you sneezed into your elbow, feeling the tiny droplets of water cascade down, peppering your bare skin relentlessly. you shivered as you sat on a random bench in the nearest park, regretting your decision to skip checking the weather app today.

wrapping your arms around yourself, cold and damp, you anxiously waited for a certain someone to pick you up.

suddenly, the freezing, stinging sensation of the raindrops on your skin ceased. you noticed a pair of legs in front of you and tilted your head up, meeting the familiar gaze of the man you had once called yours. his arm was outstretched, holding an umbrella above your head.

“y/n…” rin's voice was quiet, barely audible over the splattering rain.

your eyes widen, quickly darting down to stare at your empty lap. your fingers gripped the bench tightly. "hi," you mumbled, the word barely escaping your lips. this was probably the first time he had ever initiated a conversation with you; in your past relationship, that had always been your role. what was he doing here, anyway?

as if reading your mind, he spoke up awkwardly, “i just finished my afternoon jog…” he paused, shuffling his feet slightly. “do you want a ride?”

you finally looked up at him again, shaking your head subtly. “no, thank you... i'm waiting for someone right now.”

“ah, i see.” he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. he internally cursed himself for his clumsy attempt and for possibly making things worse by asking in the first place.

a few moments of uncomfortable silence passed between you, but when the tension was too unbearable to handle, he broke the silence.

“i'm… fuck, i'm sorry, okay?” he lowered his head, biting the inside of his cheek in frustration. “for everything in the past. for always ignoring you and neglecting you... if you want, we can–”

the loud honking sound of a car in the distance caught the attention of both you and rin. his brows furrowed in confusion as you stood up and walked a few steps towards the car, throwing him a faint smile.

“ah, it seems like my boyfriend is here.”

୨ৎ 𝐈𝐓𝐎𝐒𝐇𝐈 𝐒𝐀𝐄

by no means was your relationship with sae horrible; in fact, it was quite the opposite. he consistently spoiled you with gifts and favourite snacks, treated you better than his teammates and the public, and always made you feel like the only girl in the universe.

so why had you both mutually agreed to call things off? the challenges of a long-distance relationship became overwhelming.

his frequent travels abroad for football games and the substantial timezone difference made regular communication difficult. every time you called, he would be asleep, and by the time you woke up, you’d see numerous missed calls from him.

nonetheless, it was safe to say that there were still lingering feelings between you both.

you sat down on your plush couch, turning on the television. immediately, the exclusive football channel that your tv always seemed to be tuned into appeared, and this time, it featured a live interview with your ex-boyfriend.

“sae…” you whispered softly upon seeing him.

it seemed as though the interviewer had already wrapped up the important questions, and was now delving into more personal topics.

“thank you, itoshi-san. next question, is there anything in particular that you enjoy doing?”

the football prodigy rolled his eyes and sighed audibly. with a blank expression, he replied, “my girlfriend.”

you felt your face heat up at the suggestive implication, pressing your hands to your warming cheeks– he had never had a girlfriend besides you and had promised he wouldn’t date anyone else. he was talking about you.

to make matters worse for your fragile heart, sae stared right into the camera lens with a subtle smirk, as if he knew you would be watching. the shallow stirring in your heart has confirmed what you already feared: you hadn’t gotten over him, and you knew you never would.

silence louder than a roaring engine filled the enclosure, before the interviewer broke the awkward stillness. “... s-sorry?” the lady was clearly caught off-guard, blinking at him once, twice.

sae scoffed impatiently, “did you not hear me the first time?”

“a-ah, yes, of course.” the woman stammered quickly, trying to recover her professionalism. “you... enjoy doing your girlfriend, yes.”

“used to,” he muttered under his breath, but the interviewer caught it.

“oh, i'm sorry,”

“yeah.”

unfortunately, the lady decided to press on, pushing her luck to pry more information from him. “so, itoshi-san, why did you break up with your girlfriend? could you provide your fans more information regarding your love li–”

he frowned deeply, shoving his hands into his pockets and abruptly standing up to leave, his manager pathetically following behind him. “shut up. you're annoying, leave me alone, ugly.”

later that day, you received a text message from sae.

'i need you back asap. i can help you settle here in spain and i'll pay for the plane ticket and shit.'

you would have never responded so quickly to a single text message had you still been in the long distance relationship. but, you still had a life here– your family, your childhood memories. you hesitated, leaving him on read for now, until you could think of something to reply with later.

a few weeks passed.

୨ৎ 𝐌𝐈𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐄𝐋 𝐊𝐀𝐈𝐒𝐄𝐑

in a way, you blame yourself for thinking you could play the ‘i can change him,’ game. despite this, your efforts, though minimal, were somehow significant. he became increasingly dependent on you, seeking your comfort whenever he was upset over a game or haunted by memories of his harsh past.

he particularly loved resting his head on your comfortable lap as you raked your fingers through his blond hair, or when you kissed the tattoo on his neck, assuring him that everything would be okay.

but it had become exhausting. too repetitive. irritating, even. his daily venting sessions had taken a toll on your mental well-being, and you simply could not bear it any longer.

unfortunately, the breakup ended on bad terms, with both of you hurling insults and belittling each other.

you happened to run into him at the airport. quickly, you shifted your gaze away, hoping that he had not taken notice of you. but luck seemed to mock you, and you could already hear his distinctive footsteps approaching.

"hey," he said nonchalantly, tapping on your shoulder to get your attention. “look at me, talk to me.”

your expression wavered as you hesitantly met his gaze, pursing your lips unsurely. “hi, michael,” you muttered softly.

a shallow line etched between his brows. “michael? you know that's not my name. say it properly.”

“it's not micha anymore, though,” you retorted, turning and walking toward the airplane boarding aisle as the passenger announcement was made.

“tch,” he scoffed, quickly making his way to his team, who were boarding the plane from the exclusive gate reserved for the elite football team of bastard münchen.

it was unfortunate that he had to board the same plane as you, but this was just a layover for you- you still had another flight to take before reaching your final destination.

closing your eyes, you leaned your head against the circular window, drifting off to sleep. when you slowly opened your eyes, however, you were not met with the kind gaze of the old lady who had been sitting next to you.

instead, you found yourself staring into a pair of cerulean eyes. he rested his chin on his hand, his elbow propped up on the armrest, watching you intently.

instantly, your eyes flutter fully open and a hurried gasp escaped your lips. “m-michael, you scared me,” you stuttered.

he rolled his eyes, turning his gaze away. “the old hag was more than happy to sit in the exclusive seats section,” he muttered simply.

“i still haven't forgiven you,” he added, his eyes darting back to you. “but, fuck, come back already. stop being so stubborn.”

you sighed softly, taking his hands in yours. “michael, your rants aggravated my own anger issues. it literally wasn't good for my mental and emotional health.”

he mumbled something incoherent under his breath. when the plane finally descended one minute later, kaiser stood up, opening the overhead compartment above your seat, and handed you your two small suitcases.

placing his hand on your cheek, he leaned down to press his forehead against yours. “...don't block my number. i still want to see you. and talk to you.”

you nodded reluctantly, thanking him for the suitcases. as you looked at him once more before walking away, you spoke softly,

“please, consider going to therapy, micha.”

୨ৎ 𝐀𝐋𝐄𝐗𝐈𝐒 𝐍𝐄𝐒𝐒

what's better than returning home, exhaustion from work gnawing at your bones, only to find your ex-boyfriend lounging comfortably on a couch in your living room as if he owned the place?

you froze mid-step, breath catching in your throat. “alexis, what the fuck?” you spat angrily.

“y/n!” he immediately sprang up, his face lighting up alarmingly as he flashes you an innocent smile.

he casually strides towards you– as if he had no concept of personal space– and holds up a familiar DVD case. “schatz, remember this? i thought we could watch it, since i remember it was your favourite…”

your pulse quickened, instinctively stepping back. but, ness intercepted, possessively coiling his arms around you and enveloping you in a firm hug. his grip tightened slightly as you attempted to withdraw– but he was careful not to hurt you.

ness buried his face into the crook of your neck, inhaling your scent. “you'll watch it with me, won't you?” he smiled, his warm breath grazing your skin.

"alexis, how the fuck did you even get in?" you demanded, mustering the strength to break free and pry his arms off, snatching the remote and turning off the television.

he pouted, "i had the spare key you gave me! now won't you—"

“you're just as creepy and obsessive as ever,” you shot back, feeling intruded and unsettled, “there's a reason i broke up with you.”

his expression crumbled and his fists clenched tightly at his sides. “d-don't say that, remember all the good times we had? we belong together!” his voice quivered with desperation as he leaned pathetically against the wall.

“yeah, i thought so too,” you countered, “until i caught you, lurking in the corner of my eye, watching me with a friend at the mall.” you gestured towards the door. “leave, now, and give me back the damned key.”

tears formed in his eyes, threatening to spill over as he reluctantly handed back the key. his fingers lingered against yours for a moment longer than necessary. he stepped out of your apartment and threw a weak smile at you over his shoulder. he whispers, “i love you, and i always will.”

you slammed the door shut.

୨ৎ 𝐌𝐈𝐊𝐀𝐆𝐄 𝐑𝐄𝐎

you heard the doorbell ring as you were occupied with chopping tiny pieces of carrots for your young daughter. with a sigh, you set down the knife on the cutting board, wiping your hands on your apron and reluctantly heading towards the door.

there was no need to check the peephole; you instinctively knew it was your ex-husband, reo.

his monthly visits to hand over the child support had become a begrudgingly predictable routine. you swung the door open, and immediately, his desperate gaze met yours.

“y/n—” he started, but you cut him off with an uninterested glare.

“she's on the play mat in the living room. put the check on the table.” you said indifferently, already turning back toward the kitchen. before you could take a step, his fingers gently wrapped around your wrist. it's nothing you didn't expect, however; it happened every single month.

“reo, let go,” your voice was firm yet tired.

“baby, please,” he insisted, pulling you towards his chest and embracing you tightly. you felt the warmth of his body against yours, inhaling the familiar scent of his cologne. “i miss you. i really do. do you know how painful it is for me to slowly watch you become a stranger?”

you remained motionless for a moment before shaking your head, gently pushing him away. “no... just no,” you asserted softly, “your parents always humiliated me during our marriage— whether it be in front of guests at social events or large family dinners. i've never felt enough. and worse, you've always ignored it.”

his face twisted into one of guilt as he attempted to draw you back into his embrace. “i promise i'll–”

“reo!” your strangled voice accidentally yells out. “put the check on the table and leave!” the words leave your mouth impulsively in frustration.

you quickly brought a hand to your mouth, then clutched your chest, taking a deep breath to calm yourself as tears welled up in your eyes. in a quieter tone, you pleaded, “reo, please, just leave…”

albeit reluctantly, he complied, retreating with a heavy heart. but, as per the habitual routine, he returned the next month, pleading for your forgiveness and begging to be taken back.

୨ৎ 𝐍𝐀𝐆𝐈 𝐒𝐄𝐈𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐑𝐎

dating nagi was tedious, and even that was an understatement.

"seishiro, i'm seriously considering blocking you if keep calling me every single day, begging me to take you back."

you exasperated, frustration clear as you sat on your bed with the phone on speaker, going through your nighttime skincare routine. you could hear nagi exhale deeply on the other end.

“... 'mm, angel, please,” he whined, his voice growing louder and more desperate. “i miss you, i'm all alone, my apartment's a mess and—”

you scoff, tossing the moisturizer tube onto your bed as you swabbed some onto your face. “your apartment's a mess? i wonder why that is… almost like your girlfriend was doing all the work around the house for you?”

a soft, frustrated groan escaped his lips at your sarcasm. he swallowed hard, his voice cracking, “listen, baby, 'm sorry for takin' you for granted, i want you back in my arms, i want to cuddle w'you like we used to. please, forgive me.”

a long pause hung heavy in the air, his breath hitching in his throat as he waited for your reply, hoping that you'd use what's left of your love for him–if any–to forgive him and return. with a tired sigh, you finally spoke up.

“... no, seishiro. i'm tired. being with you felt like a chore, to be honest. i was the one looking after you– making sure you ate your breakfast and lunch, doing your laundry that's scattered everywhere in your apartment, even reminding you to get off your video games. i'm not your mother...”

you let out all your pent-up frustration once and for all, hoping this would finally put an end to his persistent calls. it was clear you had reached your limit, knowing deep down that you deserved someone who appreciated your time and effort.

“seriously, why don't you get yourself a maid? dating you was a hassle.”

you stated firmly before hanging up on him.

“dammit, angel…” nagi sighed defeatedly, his slumped body flopping down onto his bed. he lazily tossed his phone aside, feeling drained and overwhelmed. “i'm too tired for this.”

୨ৎ 𝐃𝐎𝐍 𝐋𝐎𝐑𝐄𝐍𝐙𝐎

“pleaase, come backkk,”

great. the last thing you had wanted today was to run into your ex as you stood in line at the popcorn stand. you wished the ground below you would rupture and swallow you whole as he clung onto you shamelessly, drawing the attention of those around you.

“please, baby, i need you!” he whined. you felt the embarrassment from his dramatic display heat up your cheeks, shifting uncomfortably as you mouthed apologetic words to the vendor lady.

“stop it, get off me, you're embarrassing me!” you hissed softly, trying to push his head away. his grip was too strong, maintaining his hold on you as his grin widened, revealing his shiny set of golden teeth.

“only if you get back with me?” he bargained, stepping back anyway as he sensed your growing irritation (and embarrassment).

you crossed your arms, shooting him an accusatory glare. “no way in hell. and you don't need me— you were after my money all along, weren't you?”

“t-that's... come on, don't be like that,” he stammered, his face paling as he avoided eye contact.

“you've only ever seen me as your personal walking credit card, hm?” you continued, “thank you, you've drained me of all my money.”

he watched as you received your medium-sized popcorn bucket, thanking the vendor with a polite nod before turning to leave. the lady called out his name, his own popcorn waiting on the counter, still unpaid for.

his head snaps back to you, that absurd, signature smirk curling on his lips, “wait, y/n, aren't you going to p–”

without turning to face him, you muttered under your breath, “no, i'm not paying for your popcorn.”

୨ৎ 𝐎𝐋𝐈𝐕𝐄𝐑 𝐀𝐈𝐊𝐔

you felt a large pair of hands gently rest on your shoulders, giving them a slight squeeze. you stopped swirling your glass of wine, tilting your head up to meet a pair of beautiful, heterochromic eyes.

unfortunately, those eyes belonged to your fucking cheater of an ex.

“don't touch me, jerk,” you spat, cocking your head back down as you brought the glass to your lips and took a sip of the crimson drink.

he chuckled lowly, patting your head before shamelessly taking a seat beside you. wrapping his arm around the backrest of the sofa, he pulled you closer.

“c’mon, princess, don't be like that,” he winked, taking a sip of his own drink. he paused as he took in your irritated expression. “...are you really still mad at what happened a year ago?”

you shot him a dirty glare, and he immediately raised his hands in front of him in mock surrender. “sorry, sorry, i was only kidding.”

you finally downed the wine, standing up from the soft comfort of the sofa. before you could move away, his fingers encircled your wrist, pulling you back onto the couch, causing you to lean onto him with your hand on his chest.

“okay, but seriously, baby,” he said, delicately gripping your chin between his fingers and leaning in until his lips hovered right above yours. “i really messed up, i'm sorry, i swear she didn't mean anything, you're the one for m–”

“what the fuck do you think you're doing?!” you yelled, slapping his cheek hard enough to whip his head toward the dance floor where numerous women in skimpy outfits were dancing. his gaze lingered on their movements for a while before he felt you pulling away from him.

“yeah, i'm sure you're toootally torn up about it, huh?” you scoffed sarcastically, “keep your eyes wandering, i can see you're overflowing with regret.”

“baby, i only care for y–”

“your sincerity is blinding.”

˗ˏˋ 𝗛𝗢𝗡𝗢𝗨𝗥𝗔𝗕𝗟𝗘 𝗠𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡𝗦 ˎˊ˗

𝐈𝐒𝐀𝐆𝐈 would never push you to the point of discomfort or pressure. instead, he’d approach you casually, genuinely apologizing for any past incidents that might have upset you enough to end things. if you both decided on a mutual break up, then he would definitely try to preserve your relationship to at least that of friends. his main focus would be rebuilding trust between you two, hoping that time and space would allow you both to reconcile in the future. overall, it would be very unlikely for him to verbally express how desperate he is for you, but subtle physical touches are a different topic.

𝐎𝐓𝐎𝐘𝐀 would literally show up at your doorstep, begging on his knees for you. he'd be desperately pleading for your forgiveness– he really didn't want to reveal that he had initially been dating you because of a dare, or rather, a bet from his friends. it just slipped out forcefully. he just really, really, really needed that ps5. despite the bet, his feelings for you had genuinely developed over the five-month dating period. however… to earn that prize, he was required to expose his original intent, resulting in heartbreaks, tears, insults, and many “i hate you”s from your side.

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chimkin-samich · 28 days ago

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Posted it on the clock app right here

Context under the cut

But basically we came up with a new AU that I've been calling "Unphotogenic" for simplistic obvious reasons in which it diverts from our og au and it involves Tari working as a photographer (used more as a backpack carrying assistant) for a studio affiliated with fazcorp and situated in the pizzaplex to take care of every picture to take for birthdays and events, discouraging ppl to use their own cameras, phones, flashes, or hire other groups of photographers unfamiliar with safety rules and obstructing passage to important vacating areas for staff.

In this au the boys didn't get their upgrade either, the best they got is a fix to their face's internal mechanisms to be able to move eyebrows, close eyelids and slightly move the corners of their mouths , but that's about it.

I tried, truly, to go with the full biblically accurate look but I, as a person, am so unserious I had to grant them at least the bare minimum of expression or I was going to giggle my checks off every serious scene.

Also... I want to curse you with the knowledge that the age I went by is approximately canonical to the time they've been built and activated first.

They're OLD OLD lmao

Even if they consider themselves to have "two birthdays each, one is the system date, the other is when they gained full sentience and emotional spectrum.

#mod Feral #arts #comics #videos #dca art #daycare attendant fnaf #dca au #unphotogenic au #dca x reader #dca x self insert #dca x oc #dca x y/n #dca x you #semi biblically accurate dca #biblically accurate sundrop #sunrise fnaf

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staff · 2 years ago

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Hello, Tumblr. Tumblr here. We’re launching live streaming on Tumblr, and we’re calling it...well, Tumblr Live.

Tumblr Live brings streaming directly to the dashboard, meaning your Tumblr audience and your streaming audience can converge. What’s that, you say? Synergy? Beautiful.

Initially, we’re rolling Tumblr Live out to the US only via our Android and iOS apps. Desktop and international streaming and viewing will follow in time.

Here’s how it works:

The little 🎥 at the bottom of your dashboard in your mobile app will take you to a Tumblr Live tab, where you’ll be able to scroll through streams that are live at that time—indicated by a green dot. (Your search bar is still there! It now lives in the top right corner of your screen.)

As long as you keep it clean, you can stream anything that takes your fancy by tapping the “Go Live!” button—ducks in the park, the wonky snowman you built, your cursed cross stitch, etc.

Streaming works with both front and back cameras, so if you’re camera-shy, you can stream without showing your face.

You can bestow bouncer status upon your most trusted and loyal viewers, which means they can help you moderate your stream for any nasties while you’re live.

You can tap on any live avatar to jump into their stream—whether you follow that blog or not.

You can send little gifts to the streamer during their stream if you’re enjoying what they’re up to.

You can collect your favorite streamers in a special tab for later.

And that’s it for now. Just imagine! Gaming live streams! Book clubs! Live fungi feed! D’n’D campaigns! Artist live draws! Shark facts! GRWMs! Cosplay and con casts! Knitting hour! Photography tutorials! Storytime! Plant parenting tips! Living room concerts! Furby workshop! Museum tours! Crabs! (just crabs!)

It’s a whole new ball pit out there. We’re so excited to see what you come up with.

#features #tumblr live

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atypi-cals · 2 years ago

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why does the earthquake app have to be called THAT

#so we have this earthquake app because... we love on a fault line. spent our whole lofe expecting The Big One tm yk #and we have anxiety. and psychosis that means sometimes we hallucinate earthquakes so we got an app that tell you if earthquake.#and we have a few. but the best one we have has. an unfortunate name.#now its IS called emsc. the organization.#which stands for euro Mediterranean seismological centre i believe #but bc its international #the uh. app icon. has the acronym for multiple languages.#one is emsc. the other. is csem. and with my particular background i always feel uh. FUCKING YUCKY about it.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months ago

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“Disenshittify or Die”

youtube

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the fuck happened to the old, good internet?

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

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

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

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

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

I’m talking about enshittification.

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

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

There’s so many ways to lock in users.

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

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

No way.

Can you agree on where to go next?

Hell no.

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

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

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

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

Sometimes, it’s a grab bag:

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

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

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

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

Think Different, amirite?

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

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

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

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

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

Bullshit!

Bull.

Shit.

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

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

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

"But wait!" I hear you say!

[Come on, say it!]

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

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

[Any guesses?!]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I mean, you love to see it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except you can’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So companies aren’t constrained by competition or regulation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Any guesses why?]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To do that, we have to install constraints.

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

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

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

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

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

[Can anyone guess why?]

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

So yeah, that was pretty fucking epic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next up: regulation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

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

@[email protected] (cropped)

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/112963252835869648

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

#pluralistic #defcon #defcon 32 #hackers #enshittification #speeches #transcripts #disenshittify or die #Youtube

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wiptw · 4 months ago

Text

Pokémon Stadium Series

Nintendo 64 - Nintendo - 2000 to 2001

You as a Pokémon fan are absolutely fucking spoiled these days. Aside from the mainline games you have spinoffs and fangames offering different experiences, you have entire websites dedicated to documenting everything down to the internal maths of the series, there's no end to the free content you can access with an internet connection between emulators and battle sites like 'Showdown!', and it's now socially acceptable in most circles to be older than 13 and have something with Pikachu's face plastered on it (especially if you're female presenting, especially if your friend group is also infected with the Pokémon hype). Back in my day™ you had almost none of this. You had the anime on Saturday mornings, you had the early run Pokémon licensed merch which WOULD get you called a baby if you continued buying past 10-12, and you had the games. Those sweet, sweet games that indoctrinated a generation of young people into being gamers and awoke a horde of JRPG addicts.

Literally Me

So remember this when I tell you that Pokémon Stadium, both one and two, aren't great games because they do something back then that you can't get today; they're great for what they did back then. So Pokemon Stadium 1&2 were a duology of games from 2000 and 2001 respectively that allowed players to battle Pokemon in 3D, with the addition of some side content such as minigames included to prevent the game from being 100% Pokemon battles. Because otherwise, the game is in fact navigating a series of menus and completing Pokémon battles with 3D models.

Whether it's taking on the gym gauntlets, the marathon of battles in the Pokémon cups, or just free battles with friends and loved ones, 98% of the experience is either selecting Pokémon from a roster of pre-built 'rentals' or transferring them from a saved game using the Transfer Pak, then fighting them in a series of 3D environments. An experience which you can definitely do today using web apps but as I said earlier, we didn't have that.

The peak of Pokémon battles in 2000

So if you're buying Pokémon Stadium (either version really) you're already probably a Pokémon fan right? So that means you have Red/Blue/Yellow/Gold/Silver/Crystal, so why not just play that game and get the full experience? The fun of exploring, talking to NPCs, discovering new and exotic locations? Simple, because in those games battles looked like this

While in Stadium, battles looked like this

If you grew up watching the anime while playing the Gameboy games, there was this special kind of dissonance where you might find yourself saying "Yeah, (for the time) these graphics are RADICAL but I wish I had something closer to these cool Pokémon Battles they had in the anime." As you hide under the covers with your Gameboy Color worm light, nestled in your Ash Ketchum pajamas while you attempt for the 100th time to capture a ditto. Pokémon Stadium was the answer to this dissonance, providing you with vibrant 3D graphics unlike anything you'd ever seen before; bringing Pokémon to life in a way that would be unmatched until Colosseum came out during the Gamecube era.

So, to actual mechanics, you play both games pretty similarly; by building a team of Pokémon (either on your handheld or by using the rental mons the game provides) and take part in a series of battles to become the ultimate battle master. To use your own Pokémon, you'd need to use the aforementioned 'Transfer Pak' to plug in a copy of Red/Blue/Yellow (for 1) or Gold/Silver/Crystal (for 2) with a game saved to the cartridge; otherwise the rental Pokémon covered all released Pokémon (except for some hidden ones) allowing you to build your dream team, sans a few caveats here and there.

Evolved Pokémon have better stats but worse moves, while weaker Pokémon tend to have better moves to compensate

In terms of WHERE you can battle, there's two choices: Either in the Gym Leader Castle, or the Tournaments held in the center of the map on either game. Either way, the game will then have you battle through a series of 3v3 matches versus a set number of trainers who will also select 3 random mons from their full team of six.

A bit bare bones, but there's some spice to how things are run. For one, the rental system was a huge thing for us younger players back in the day. Even if you had the games some Pokémon were hard to catch, had evolution requirements some players couldn't complete (like the trade-mons), or were locked to a version you didn't have. The rental mons give you a list of every Pokémon (some exceptions, but not many) and then lets you build your dream team. Sure, you can't set their moves, EVs, IVs, and it's the era before abilities and natures but I CAN HAVE A MEOWTH/PERSIAN ON MY TEAM. Do you know what I had to do as a child to have this Pokémon outside of Stadium? I had to find someone in the American South who also enjoyed Pokémon, hoped they had Blue instead of Red, hoped they had a link cable, then get them to agree to a trade despite both of us being children (and therefore, objectively terrible) which likely meant giving away a rare Pokémon in exchange for what amounted to common garbage in their game because it was Version fucking Exclusivity™ and everyone seemed to know that meant you'd do anything to get that one fucking Pokémon you wanted.

In the handheld games, if you wanted to build your dream team then likely you'd have to put in some more effort than other games of the time would've required of you. With Stadium, your dreams come true, and if you already have that dream team you can just import them to fight in glorious 3D. Circumventing the fact that rental Pokémon are kinda terrible overall.

Don't feel like building? The challenge cup mode that gives you randomized team comps that has it's own charm (for masochists)

Not to say all of them were bad but construct a normal distribution of 'Good' to 'Bad' picks then that graph is gonna skew left so hard you'd be forgiven for thinking it was just a straight line. To keep every choice 'viable' Pokémon rentals were balanced around stats and moves. More powerful evolved Pokémon and Pokémon with high Base Stat Totals (BST) were given weaker moves and first form and low BST Pokémon were given generally better moves. Charizard might have better stats than Charmeleon and Charmander but his only fire type move is going to be something like Fire Spin. Conversely, Charmander might have Fire Blast but his stats are gonna make him an easy target for the computer's pokemon, which are not bound to the same builds as the rental mons you're using.

Once your team is assembled, then you're off to battle trainer after trainer after trainer with beautifully scored (for the Nintendo 64) soundtracks giving you an unearned sense of importance every step of the way. Battles themselves are conducted with a weird, but functional control layout where A and B access sub menus you then check with the R button before finalizing with the c-buttons, which on original hardware or a USB N64 controller is fine but on emulation with a more modern controller like Logitech, can be a little nerve wracking as you worry about whether your 'up' input on the control stick was up enough for the game or if you accidentally drifted right or left using an unintended move.

fun fact: the name of imported Pokémon affects their coloration in Stadium

Battles are also largely regulated by (at the time) tournament standard rules. Little and Pokecup have level restrictions, and all three non-random cups include clauses for sleep, held items, and repeat Pokémon. Additionally, in any cup if you win the round with all 3 Pokémon still in tact, you're granted a continue; meaning you can retry the battle if you lose. Additionally, there is no 'draw' outcome in these games. Use a move like Explosion or Selfdestruct and the game will register it as your loss on your final Pokémon, regardless of whether you took down the opposing fighter with you or not.

You'll be doing a LOT of back-to-back fights here against trainers with varied team comps, but even with over 246 Pokémon in the available potential lineup you'll get tired fast of fighting. This is, however, slightly mitigated by the 3v3 nature of the matches but even so be ready to here the same Pokémon noises, watch the same effects play out, and wait for the same health bars to tick down over and over as you claw your way to the spot of Pokémon Master.

The art style of non-battle scenes like the main map and minigame plaza have that nice, 90's charm to them as well.

If you do get tired of battling it out, then Stadium 1 and 2 both offer minigames for players to partake in. Either in a tournament format or by using the free-play browser, players are able to take part in a multitude of different Mario Party-esque (without the hand burning) minigames featuring the Pokémon as stars. Minigames consist of stick twirling, button mashing, and point collecting all while controlling fan favorite Pokémon such as Togepi, Eevee, Scyther, and Pichu with no real rhyme or reason behind why these game exist aside from a amusement park theming the minigame zones have for their icons and menus.

You won't get a real explanation as to why you're racing Donphans, cutting logs as Scythers and Pinsirs, or playing Simon Says with a bunch of Clefairy, but you don't really need that either. The games are fun, the models are charming, and watching Clefairy get smacked in the head for each wrong input brings me a level of joy I should probably talk about with my therapist. You won't likely spend hours in this mode, but it's a nice breather from the onslaught of battles otherwise.

fun fact: I still won't talk to some people because of the outcomes to Rampage Rollout over two decades ago. You know who you are.

Additionally there's a quiz minigame separate from the main selection of minigames with easy/normal/hard difficulty selections. Players compete to see who can be the first to get a number of questions correct before anyone else based on facts about the Pokémon (typing, size, silhouette, etc) or facts about the game (where you can find things in the game, names of routes and towns, names of figures in the game).

It's not the most challenging on easy or normal, but playing on hard the game will try to screw you with trick questions so playing with others becomes a balance of "do I let the question play out, or attempt to steal it before someone else can answer correctly?"

Sometimes even playing the game won't prepare you for how out of pocket the questions can get

The real advantage of 2 over 1 is that, in addition to minigames, the game has the trainer academy; a kind of in-depth battle tutorial to teach players not only the basics of Pokémon fighting, but also some secrets as well

You can learn about held items, a feature new to the second generation, as well as participate in mock battles to demonstrate the materials you've been reading and quizzed on. Some of this information for the time too was obscure or hidden knowledge, like the fact that using Defense Curl before using Rollout would boost the damage significantly or that using Stomp on an opponent who used minimize would double the damage.

Some type matchups just make sense, like Ground v Electric.

Overall though what really makes this game is the presentation. The soundtrack does a great job selling the feeling Nintendo wants you to experience, climbing the ladder in a tournament or the Gym Leaders Castle makes you feel powerful, and the little details on top of it all just tie it together in a nice package.

The fights, for example, are also narrated by "The Announcer". A bombastic voice shouting over every detail of a fight. When you score a crit, when you apply a status effect, even using certain moves will get the announcer loudly narrating each detail like a Pokémon prize fight. Seeing the ground rip apart when you use Earthquake is only half the charm, the other half comes from that man yelling in your ears "A DEVESTATING EARTHQUAKE ATTACK!". Clearing gyms or clearing opponents in one of the cups grants you gym badges, a dream for any child growing up on the handheld classics or watching the anime who wished they too could earn shiny bits of metal that gave them an inflated sense of importance.

I would literally kill everyone I came across if it'd get me a real life Zephyr Badge.

Stadium 1 and 2 aren't evergreen classics. They're stuck in Gens 1 and 2 respectively, the roster of Pokémon while impressive is largely useless and makes collecting trophies way harder than it has to be, and the games were made before things like abilities and double battles were introduced, leading to the Pokémon battling game missing out on the generation of Pokémon that made battling more fun (Revolution doesn't count, Revolution is dead to me and disappoints me more than I disappoint myself.)

But for the time especially, it gave fans an opportunity to experience a form of Pokémon more advanced than what the handhelds could output. It was a window into a world of potential that wouldn't be truly fulfilled until arguably the 3DS era of Pokémon released, and gave fans a fun little romp handcrafted for them at every twist and turn. Whether you were a gamer or you enjoyed the anime, there was something here for you.

Overall: 7/10 Sound: 8/10 (for the time) Graphics: 9/10 (for the time) Memorable Moments: Stadium 1: Hearing about Mewtwo, thinking he was an urban legend, then finding out he wasn't Stadium 2: Finally beating the elite 4 using only rental mons.

#wiptw #video games #gaming #pokemon #pokemon stadium #pokemon stadium 2 #pkmn #review #7/10 #Nintendo #nintendo 64 #n64 #retro #retro gaming

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