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ms-demeanor · 1 year ago

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any thoughts on the new post that staff went scorched earth on which is now making the rounds abt tumblr live? it basically screenshots all the tos and claims if you've ever opened the app (or in some rbs, unsnoozed live) tumblr has gotten your data. on the one hand i feel like this is fearmongering, but on the other its true that MOST sites have your data as is so its pretty standard. you seem pretty knowledgeable abt data gathering so i was wondering abt your take

This is going to be pretty unkind but watching tumblr users interact with staff and live is a great primer on how conspiracy theories happen.

Nobody on this fucking website knows how to read a ToS, nobody on this website knows how anything fucking works (sorry, this is not a dig at you but how would tumblr "get" your data from you clicking or unclicking live; the only data that tumblr has on you is the data that you have put on tumblr what data do people think that clicking the "new" button is scooping up that is anything beyond interactions or posts or IP addresses which are the things that tumblr already has information about like you do not introduce new information into the tumblr ecosystem by clicking a button you haven't installed anything you haven't changed permissions on your browser if everyone is so goddamned scared about live stealing their data i strongly recommend they stop using anything but public internet through an anonymizer and making sure location data is shut off on all of their devices and anyone who is flipping their shit about the type of data that live is collecting but who is using chrome on any device needs to chill the fuck out about live and flip the fuck out about google)

this is like that post about twitter's content policy that circulated the other day or that post about deviantart's content policy that circulated ten fucking years ago nobody knows how to read legal documents and nobody knows how to read technical documentation and this comes together into unholy matrimony on the no reading comprehension at all moral panic website

live never violated the GDPR it was just rolled out in the US first but the entire userbase decided that because it hadn't been rolled out simultaneously in the EU and the US that it was SO UNSPEAKABLY PRIVACY VIOLATEY THAT THE EU HAD BANNED IT FOR ITS CRIMES with, like, nothing whatsoever backing that up because, again, even at its most intrusive Live collects about as much data as Twitter or Yelp, both of which are *capable* of meeting GDPR standards with that level of data collection (even if musk sometimes makes decisions that violate GDPR).

Live is significantly less intrusive than any facebook product, than Amazon, and than any Google product. If you use youtube logged in, don't worry about live, the horse is out of the barn and tumblr is the least of your worries *regardless* of live. If you regularly use Google as a search engine please god learn how to evaluate and compare risks across platforms because Live is like a coughing baby compared to about a dozen things that most highly online people interact with every single day.

If you don't want to use live don't use live. Clicking the button doesn't magically transfer your secret FBI file to tumblr and even agreeing to the ToS doesn't share anything that tumblr doesn't already have if you don't continue to interact - if you don't interact with live after agreeing to the ToS it's not collecting any data except your non-interaction.

For everyone who is losing it over Live just turn off your goddamned location on your fucking cellphone and turn off your location on your goddamned computers and that's it, you're good, you're fine, relax. If your response to "turn off your location" is "but I need it for _____" then don't worry about Live, whatever "_____" is was already collecting and selling your data.

Do you use an activity tracker? Congrats, you have much, much bigger privacy issues to worry about than tumblr live.

Okay but also I yelled about that post and the very many ways in which it was incorrect in January.

And I happened to take an archive of the page at that time because I'm a paranoid motherfucker.

And if you want my guess as to why staff went "scorched earth" on that post it's probably because if you scroll down to the bottom of the page on the archive, OP calls on everyone looking at the post to send a kind fuck you to the CEO then tagged his tumblr.

If you look at the other posts that went scorched earth in relation to tumblr staff they were also posts that very pointedly directed a lot of ire at a single staff member.

I don't think that any individual tumblr staff members are above criticism and I don't think that staff as a whole is above criticism but part of learning to read a ToS is understanding that someone can be shitty and vague and use TERF talking points and skirt the line and be technically okay under the ToS while someone can have a legitimate gripe about another user being horrible and manage to violate the ToS by accidentally spinning up a harassment campaign or suicide baiting someone.

Shitty people like nazis and terfs thrive on being edge cases. They are very good at finding a boundary and standing juuuuuuuuust on this side of it and going "la la la I'm not violating the ToS, you can't stop me!" and that blows and it leads to a lot of people encountering a lot of shitty stuff on a lot of websites but personally I'm pretty glad that there's a lot of gray area because when you cut out gray area that's when you see things like It's Going Down getting banned as extremist content alongside white supremacists. Please continue to report nazis and terfs, and when possible go deep into their pages to report because a pattern of behavior is more likely to get recognized as hate speech than a single post that gets reported a hundred times. Please block as many people who it's harmful for you to interact with as possible because it's clear that staff is not going to do the kind of work protecting users that users would like staff to do.

However I just can't get angry on behalf of a blogger who got nuked for saying "Hey everyone who hates this feature that we all hate please go tell the CEO to fuck himself at this URL specifically" - that is an extremely clear violation of the ToS because it is absolutely targeted harassment.

So now tumblr-the-userbase is going off on its merry conspiracy way skipping through fields and lacking reading comprehension and saying "users are getting banned for reporting the crimes of tumblr live and its gdpr violations" and ignoring the fact that the post was nuked because the last line was saying "hey everyone, let's all individually tell the CEO to fuck off in messages sent directly to him that are certainly not going to include any threats, exaggerations, gore, etc. etc. etc."

If I were to make a post that had 50k notes and the last line was "and while you're at it, please send tumblr-user-ms-demeanor a personalized message telling them why they're a terrible person so they know what we think of them" it would absolutely be reasonable to say that was harassing that user. And that post did it with the CEO. Who is not above criticism (and I have my criticisms! I don't think he really gets tumblr and that's a problem!), but jesus fucking christ don't tag the goddamned CEO or any other staff member in a call to action asking users to send them messages saying "fuck off" this is literally the stupidest thing I've ever seen a tumblr conspiracy theory coalesce around.

Anyway thank you for giving me a place to vent i've been getting more and more pissed about this for three days. Everyone feel free to kindly tell tumblr user ms demeanor to fuck off.

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villains4hire · 1 year ago

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//I think the only real qualms I have with anything is taking a canon gay character and making them purely into something else as I'd be fine with them into it heavily but vaguely into their original thing?

Even trans characters I do this to though, like canon trans women I have use he/him a lot of the time along with she/her. Some of my ppl leaning toward one or the other depending on who it is. Even then, I would probably just block someone even if I vehemently disliked them for turning an already low character list of trans women into cis or otherwise etc. I give the same courtesy to trans men characters and generally do not touch? But yeah. I think sexuality is more fluid than canon genders, but canon genders even then are pretty fluid as a concept.

If I had a real problem with anyone. I'd block them, but even I have exceptions in some cases? Regardless most of my blocks are just if I find someone really annoying or mostly if they just do not interest me at all, but usually leave the door open kinda vaguely.

#ooc #spicy goopy #//The more twitter dies and I see this the more tempted turning off anon becomes lol #//Like I have an ip tracker for my askbox for that very reason but ppl still like to run their mouth

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madamepestilence · 8 months ago

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Just as a reminder as I've just noticed myself - arab.org has more pages to support on

In case you're unfamiliar with how this site works, it confirms ad revenue via your clicks, which allows them to donate money to various funds

These go to:

Children -> UNICEF (United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund)

Fight Poverty -> UNDP (United Nations Development Programme)

Environment -> Greenpeace MENA (Middle East and North Africa)

Palestine -> UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency [for Palestine Refugees in the Near East])

Refugees -> UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees)

Women -> UN Women

Do more with your daily clicks! You can help each one once per individual (perhaps per IP address?) per day, letting you help out with six things at once?

US-specific advice for helping Palestine below cut.

Side note I'm keeping beneath the cut since it's relevant to US folks only: if you're really determined to help Palestine, vote for Dr. Cornel West, Ph.D. for President of the United States.

He's the most openly vocal about a free Palestine and is the only candidate who has demonstrably shown he is the most committed and prepared to immediately cease US support to Israel.

Joe Biden isn't going to cave if he gets re-elected. We all know that. Voting third party is a lot less risky than you've been taught - the two party system can replace one or both parties with new parties if they lose public favour.

We have both the people and the ability to unseat the Democratic party and install Socialism, and between Socialism and Republicans, Socialism is going to lock in place immediately and become the dominant political force in America.

Cornel West's Platform

Cornel West's Volunteer Events

Cornel West's Ballot Access Tracker and Ballot Access Plans

Tumblr thread I have of Primary/Caucus polling dates in the US (includes US territories)

Not on your Primary/Caucus ballot? Write-in, "Cornel West," on your ballot, or urge your Caucus representatives to do the same.

In a state where it's difficult for Independent candidates to get ballot access? Dr. Cornel West, Ph.D. thought ahead and has created a new party for those states called the Justice for All Party.

(Addendum: Claudia de la Cruz is not a viable alternative. The Party for Socialism and Liberation has a Conservative 5th Column and has frequent issues with discrimination.)

Free Palestine. Vote for Cornel West.

#palestine #gaza #free palestine #free gaza #good news #arab.org #world news #world politics #global news #global politics #us news #us politics #american news #american politics #cornel west #un #united nations

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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Gig apps trap reverse centaurs in Skinner boxes

Enshittification is the process by which digital platforms devour themselves: first they dangle goodies in front of end users. Once users are locked in, the goodies are taken away and dangled before business customers who supply goods to the users. Once those business customers are stuck on the platform, the goodies are clawed away and showered on the platform’s shareholders:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

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/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Enshittification isn’t just another way of saying “fraud” or “price gouging” or “wage theft.” Enshittification is intrinsically digital, because moving all those goodies around requires the flexibility that only comes with a digital businesses. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can’t rapidly change the price of eggs at Whole Foods without an army of kids with pricing guns on roller-skates. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can change the price of eggs on Amazon Fresh just by twiddling a knob on the service’s back-end.

Twiddling is the key to enshittification: rapidly adjusting prices, conditions and offers. As with any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Tech monopolists aren’t smarter than the Gilded Age sociopaths who monopolized rail or coal — they use the same tricks as those monsters of history, but they do them faster and with computers:

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

If Rockefeller wanted to crush a freight company, he couldn’t just click a mouse and lay down a pipeline that ran on the same route, and then click another mouse to make it go away when he was done. When Bezos wants to bankrupt Diapers.com — a company that refused to sell itself to Amazon — he just moved a slider so that diapers on Amazon were being sold below cost. Amazon lost $100m over three months, diapers.com went bankrupt, and every investor learned that competing with Amazon was a losing bet:

https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-bezos-went-thermonuclear-on-diapers-com.html

That’s the power of twiddling — but twiddling cuts both ways. The same flexibility that digital businesses enjoy is hypothetically available to workers and users. The airlines pioneered twiddling ticket prices, and that naturally gave rise to countertwiddling, in the form of comparison shopping sites that scraped the airlines’ sites to predict when tickets would be cheapest:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin

The airlines — like all abusive businesses — refused to tolerate this. They were allowed to touch their knobs as much as they wanted — indeed, they couldn’t stop touching those knobs — but when we tried to twiddle back, that was “felony contempt of business model,” and the airlines sued:

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/30/airline-sues-man-for-founding-a-cheap-flights-website.html

And sued:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/business/southwest-airlines-lawsuit-prices.html

Platforms don’t just hate it when end-users twiddle back — if anything they are even more aggressive when their business-users dare to twiddle. Take Para, an app that Doordash drivers used to get a peek at the wages offered for jobs before they accepted them — something that Doordash hid from its workers. Doordash ruthlessly attacked Para, saying that by letting drivers know how much they’d earn before they did the work, Para was violating the law:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition

Which law? Well, take your pick. The modern meaning of “IP” is “any law that lets me use the law to control my competitors, competition or customers.” Platforms use a mix of anticircumvention law, patent, copyright, contract, cybersecurity and other legal systems to weave together a thicket of rules that allow them to shut down rivals for their Felony Contempt of Business Model:

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

Enshittification relies on unlimited twiddling (by platforms), and a general prohibition on countertwiddling (by platform users). Enshittification is a form of fishing, in which bait is dangled before different groups of users and then nimbly withdrawn when they lunge for it. Twiddling puts the suppleness into the enshittifier’s fishing-rod, and a ban on countertwiddling weighs down platform users so they’re always a bit too slow to catch the bait.

Nowhere do we see twiddling’s impact more than in the “gig economy,” where workers are misclassified as independent contractors and put to work for an app that scripts their every move to the finest degree. When an app is your boss, you work for an employer who docks your pay for violating rules that you aren’t allowed to know — and where your attempts to learn those rules are constantly frustrated by the endless back-end twiddling that changes the rules faster than you can learn them.

As with every question of technology, the issue isn’t twiddling per se — it’s who does the twiddling and who gets twiddled. A worker armed with digital tools can play gig work employers off each other and force them to bid up the price of their labor; they can form co-ops with other workers that auto-refuse jobs that don’t pay enough, and use digital tools to organize to shift power from bosses to workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

Take “reverse centaurs.” In AI research, a “centaur” is a human assisted by a machine that does more than either could do on their own. For example, a chess master and a chess program can play a better game together than either could play separately. A reverse centaur is a machine assisted by a human, where the machine is in charge and the human is a meat-puppet.

Think of Amazon warehouse workers wearing haptic location-aware wristbands that buzz at them continuously dictating where their hands must be; or Amazon drivers whose eye-movements are continuously tracked in order to penalize drivers who look in the “wrong” direction:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur

The difference between a centaur and a reverse centaur is the difference between a machine that makes your life better and a machine that makes your life worse so that your boss gets richer. Reverse centaurism is the 21st Century’s answer to Taylorism, the pseudoscience that saw white-coated “experts” subject workers to humiliating choreography down to the smallest movement of your fingertip:

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

While reverse centaurism was born in warehouses and other company-owned facilities, gig work let it make the leap into workers’ homes and cars. The 21st century has seen a return to the cottage industry — a form of production that once saw workers labor far from their bosses and thus beyond their control — but shriven of the autonomy and dignity that working from home once afforded:

https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk-463e2730ef0d

The rise and rise of bossware — which allows for remote surveillance of workers in their homes and cars — has turned “work from home” into “live at work.” Reverse centaurs can now be chickenized — a term from labor economics that describes how poultry farmers, who sell their birds to one of three vast poultry processors who have divided up the country like the Pope dividing up the “New World,” are uniquely exploited:

https://onezero.medium.com/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs-b2e8d5cda826

A chickenized reverse centaur has it rough: they must pay for the machines they use to make money for their bosses, they must obey the orders of the app that controls their work, and they are denied any of the protections that a traditional worker might enjoy, even as they are prohibited from deploying digital self-help measures that let them twiddle back to bargain for a better wage.

All of this sets the stage for a phenomenon called algorithmic wage discrimination, in which two workers doing the same job under the same conditions will see radically different payouts for that work. These payouts are continuously tweaked in the background by an algorithm that tries to predict the minimum sum a worker will accept to remain available without payment, to ensure sufficient workers to pick up jobs as they arise.

This phenomenon — and proposed policy and labor solutions to it — is expertly analyzed in “On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination,” a superb paper by UC Law San Franciscos Veena Dubal:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

Dubal uses empirical data and enthnographic accounts from Uber drivers and other gig workers to explain how endless, self-directed twiddling allows gig companies pay workers less and pay themselves more. As @[email protected] explains in his LA Times article on Dubal’s research, the goal of the payment algorithm is to guess how often a given driver needs to receive fair compensation in order to keep them driving when the payments are unfair:

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-04-11/algorithmic-wage-discrimination

The algorithm combines nonconsensual dossiers compiled on individual drivers with population-scale data to seek an equilibrium between keeping drivers waiting, unpaid, for a job; and how much a driver needs to be paid for an individual job, in order to keep that driver from clocking out and doing something else. @ Here’s how that works. Sergio Avedian, a writer for The Rideshare Guy, ran an experiment with two brothers who both drove for Uber; one drove a Tesla and drove intermittently, the other brother rented a hybrid sedan and drove frequently. Sitting side-by-side with the brothers, Avedian showed how the brother with the Tesla was offered more for every trip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UADTiL3S67I

Uber wants to lure intermittent drivers into becoming frequent drivers. Uber doesn’t pay for an oversupply of drivers, because it only pays drivers when they have a passenger in the car. Having drivers on call — but idle — is a way for Uber to shift the cost of maintaining a capacity cushion to its workers.

What’s more, what Uber charges customers is not based on how much it pays its workers. As Uber’s head of product explained: Uber uses “machine-learning techniques to estimate how much groups of customers are willing to shell out for a ride. Uber calculates riders’ propensity for paying a higher price for a particular route at a certain time of day. For instance, someone traveling from a wealthy neighborhood to another tony spot might be asked to pay more than another person heading to a poorer part of town, even if demand, traffic and distance are the same.”

https://qz.com/990131/uber-is-practicing-price-discrimination-economists-say-that-might-not-be-a-bad-thing/

Uber has historically described its business a pure supply-and-demand matching system, where a rush of demand for rides triggers surge pricing, which lures out drivers, which takes care of the demand. That’s not how it works today, and it’s unclear if it ever worked that way. Today, a driver who consults the rider version of the Uber app before accepting a job — to compare how much the rider is paying to how much they stand to earn — is booted off the app and denied further journeys.

Surging, instead, has become just another way to twiddle drivers. One of Dubal’s subjects, Derrick, describes how Uber uses fake surges to lure drivers to airports: “You go to the airport, once the lot get kind of full, then the surge go away.” Other drivers describe how they use groupchats to call out fake surges: “I’m in the Marina. It’s dead. Fake surge.”

That’s pure twiddling. Twiddling turns gamification into gamblification, where your labor buys you a spin on a roulette wheel in a rigged casino. As a driver called Melissa, who had doubled down on her availability to earn a $100 bonus awarded for clocking a certain number of rides, told Dubal, “When you get close to the bonus, the rides start trickling in more slowly…. And it makes sense. It’s really the type of shit that they can do when it’s okay to have a surplus labor force that is just sitting there that they don’t have to pay for.”

Wherever you find reverse-centaurs, you get this kind of gamblification, where the rules are twiddled continuously to make sure that the house always wins. As a contract driver Amazon reverse centaur told Lauren Gurley for Motherboard, “Amazon uses these cameras allegedly to make sure they have a safer driving workforce, but they’re actually using them not to pay delivery companies”:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88npjv/amazons-ai-cameras-are-punishing-drivers-for-mistakes-they-didnt-make

Algorithmic wage discrimination is the robot overlord of our nightmares: its job is to relentlessly quest for vulnerabilities and exploit them. Drivers divide themselves into “ants” (drivers who take every job) and “pickers” (drivers who cherry-pick high-paying jobs). The algorithm’s job is ensuring that pickers get the plum assignments, not the ants, in the hopes of converting those pickers to app-dependent ants.

In my work on enshittification, I call this the “giant teddy bear” gambit. At every county fair, you’ll always spot some poor jerk carrying around a giant teddy-bear they “won” on the midway. But they didn’t win it — not by getting three balls in the peach-basket. Rather, the carny running the rigged game either chose not to operate the “scissor” that kicks balls out of the basket. Or, if the game is “honest” (that is, merely impossible to win, rather than gimmicked), the operator will make a too-good-to-refuse offer: “Get one ball in and I’ll give you this keychain. Win two keychains and I’ll let you trade them for this giant teddy bear.”

Carnies aren’t in the business of giving away giant teddy bears — rather, the gambit is an investment. Giving a mark a giant teddy bear to carry around the midway all day acts as a convincer, luring other marks to try to land three balls in the basket and win their own teddy bear.

In the same way, platforms like Uber distribute giant teddy bears to pickers, as a way of keeping the ants scurrying from job to job, and as a way of convincing the pickers to give up whatever work allows them to discriminate among Uber’s offers and hold out for the plum deals, whereupon then can be transmogrified into ants themselves.

Dubal describes the experience of Adil, a Syrian refugee who drives for Uber in the Bay Area. His colleagues are pickers, and showed him screenshots of how much they earned. Determined to get a share of that money, Adil became a model ant, driving two hours to San Francisco, driving three days straight, napping in his car, spending only one day per week with his family. The algorithm noticed that Adil needed the work, so it paid him less.

Adil responded the way the system predicted he would, by driving even more: “My friends they make it, so I keep going, maybe I can figure it out. It’s unsecure, and I don’t know how people they do it. I don’t know how I am doing it, but I have to. I mean, I don’t find another option. In a minute, if I find something else, oh man, I will be out immediately. I am a very patient person, that’s why I can continue.”

Another driver, Diego, told Dubal about how the winners of the giant teddy bears fell into the trap of thinking that they were “good at the app”: “Any time there’s some big shot getting high pay outs, they always shame everyone else and say you don’t know how to use the app. I think there’s secret PR campaigns going on that gives targeted payouts to select workers, and they just think it’s all them.”

That’s the power of twiddling: by hoarding all the flexibility offered by digital tools, the management at platforms can become centaurs, able to string along thousands of workers, while the workers are reverse-centaurs, puppeteered by the apps.

As the example of Adil shows, the algorithm doesn’t need to be very sophisticated in order to figure out which workers it can underpay. The system automates the kind of racial and gender discrimination that is formally illegal, but which is masked by the smokescreen of digitization. An employer who systematically paid women less than men, or Black people less than white people, would be liable to criminal and civil sanctions. But if an algorithm simply notices that people who have fewer job prospects drive more and will thus accept lower wages, that’s just “optimization,” not racism or sexism.

This is the key to understanding the AI hype bubble: when ghouls from multinational banks predict 13 trillion dollar markets for “AI,” what they mean is that digital tools will speed up the twiddling and other wage-suppression techniques to transfer $13T in value from workers and consumers to shareholders.

The American business lobby is relentlessly focused on the goal of reducing wages. That’s the force behind “free trade,” “right to work,” and other codewords for “paying workers less,” including “gig work.” Tech workers long saw themselves as above this fray, immune to labor exploitation because they worked for a noble profession that took care of its own.

But the epidemic of mass tech-worker layoffs, following on the heels of massive stock buybacks, has demonstrated that tech bosses are just like any other boss: willing to pay as little as they can get away with, and no more. Tech bosses are so comfortable with their market dominance and the lock-in of their customers that they are happy to turn out hundreds of thousands of skilled workers, convinced that the twiddling systems they’ve built are the kinds of self-licking ice-cream cones that are so simple even a manager can use them — no morlocks required.

The tech worker layoffs are best understood as an all-out war on tech worker morale, because that morale is the source of tech workers’ confidence and thus their demands for a larger share of the value generated by their labor. The current tech layoff template is very different from previous tech layoffs: today’s layoffs are taking place over a period of months, long after they are announced, and laid off tech worker is likely to be offered a months of paid post-layoff work, rather than severance. This means that tech workplaces are now haunted by the walking dead, workers who have been laid off but need to come into the office for months, even as the threat of layoffs looms over the heads of the workers who remain. As an old friend, recently laid off from Microsoft after decades of service, wrote to me, this is “a new arrow in the quiver of bringing tech workers to heel and ensuring that we’re properly thankful for the jobs we have (had?).”

Dubal is interested in more than analysis, she’s interested in action. She looks at the tactics already deployed by gig workers, who have not taken all this abuse lying down. Workers in the UK and EU organized through Worker Info Exchange and the App Drivers and Couriers Union have used the GDPR (the EU’s privacy law) to demand “algorithmic transparency,” as well as access to their data. In California, drivers hope to use similar provisions in the CCPA (a state privacy law) to do the same.

These efforts have borne fruit. When Cornell economists, led by Louis Hyman, published research (paid for by Uber) claiming that Uber drivers earned an average of $23/hour, it was data from these efforts that revealed the true average Uber driver’s wage was $9.74. Subsequent research in California found that Uber drivers’ wage fell to $6.22/hour after the passage of Prop 22, a worker misclassification law that gig companies spent $225m to pass, only to have the law struck down because of a careless drafting error:

https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2021-08-23/proposition-22-lyft-uber-decision-essential-california

But Dubal is skeptical that data-coops and transparency will achieve transformative change and build real worker power. Knowing how the algorithm works is useful, but it doesn’t mean you can do anything about it, not least because the platform owners can keep touching their knobs, twiddling the payout schedule on their rigged slot-machines.

Data co-ops start from the proposition that “data extraction is an inevitable form of labor for which workers should be remunerated.” It makes on-the-job surveillance acceptable, provided that workers are compensated for the spying. But co-ops aren’t unions, and they don’t have the power to bargain for a fair price for that data, and coops themselves lack the vast resources — “to store, clean, and understand” — data.

Co-ops are also badly situated to understand the true value of the data that is extracted from their members: “Workers cannot know whether the data collected will, at the population level, violate the civil rights of others or amplifies their own social oppression.”

Instead, Dubal wants an outright, nonwaivable prohibition on algorithmic wage discrimination. Just make it illegal. If firms cannot use gambling mechanisms to control worker behavior through variable pay systems, they will have to find ways to maintain flexible workforces while paying their workforce predictable wages under an employment model. If a firm cannot manage wages through digitally-determined variable pay systems, then the firm is less likely to employ algorithmic management.”

In other words, rather than using market mechanisms too constrain platform twiddling, Dubal just wants to make certain kinds of twiddling illegal. This is a growing trend in legal scholarship. For example, the economist Ramsi Woodcock has proposed a ban on surge pricing as a per se violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act:

https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-105-issue-4/the-efficient-queue-and-the-case-against-dynamic-pricing

Similarly, Dubal proposes that algorithmic wage discrimination violates another antitrust law: the Robinson-Patman Act, which “bans sellers from charging competing buyers different prices for the same commodity. Robinson-Patman enforcement was effectively halted under Reagan, kicking off a host of pathologies, like the rise of Walmart:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

I really liked Dubal’s legal reasoning and argument, and to it I would add a call to reinvigorate countertwiddling: reforming laws that get in the way of workers who want to reverse-engineer, spoof, and control the apps that currently control them. Adversarial interoperability (AKA competitive compatibility or comcom) is key tool for building worker power in an era of digital Taylorism:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

To see how that works, look to other jursidictions where workers have leapfrogged their European and American cousins, such as Indonesia, where gig workers and toolsmiths collaborate to make a whole suite of “tuyul apps,” which let them override the apps that gig companies expect them to use.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

For example, ride-hailing companies won’t assign a train-station pickup to a driver unless they’re circling the station — which is incredibly dangerous during the congested moments after a train arrives. A tuyul app lets a driver park nearby and then spoof their phone’s GPS fix to the ridehailing company so that they appear to be right out front of the station.

In an ideal world, those workers would have a union, and be able to dictate the app’s functionality to their bosses. But workers shouldn’t have to wait for an ideal world: they don’t just need jam tomorrow — they need jam today. Tuyul apps, and apps like Para, which allow workers to extract more money under better working conditions, are a prelude to unionization and employer regulation, not a substitute for it.

Employers will not give workers one iota more power than they have to. Just look at the asymmetry between the regulation of union employees versus union busters. Under US law, employees of a union need to account for every single hour they work, every mile they drive, every location they visit, in public filings. Meanwhile, the union-busting industry — far larger and richer than unions — operate under a cloak of total secrecy, Workers aren’t even told which union busters their employers have hired — let alone get an accounting of how those union busters spend money, or how many of them are working undercover, pretending to be workers in order to sabotage the union.

Twiddling will only get an employer so far. Twiddling — like all “AI” — is based on analyzing the past to predict the future. The heuristics an algorithm creates to lure workers into their cars can’t account for rapid changes in the wider world, which is why companies who relied on “AI” scheduling apps (for example, to prevent their employees from logging enough hours to be entitled to benefits) were caught flatfooted by the Great Resignation.

Workers suddenly found themselves with bargaining power thanks to the departure of millions of workers — a mix of early retirees and workers who were killed or permanently disabled by covid — and they used that shortage to demand a larger share of the fruits of their labor. The outraged howls of the capital class at this development were telling: these companies are operated by the kinds of “capitalists” that MLK once identified, who want “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.”

https://twitter.com/KaseyKlimes/status/821836823022354432/

There's only 5 days left in the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon's Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they're DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: Stephen Drake (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Analog_Test_Array_modular_synth_by_sduck409.jpg

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

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

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

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Louis (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chestnut_horse_head,_all_excited.jpg

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

[Image ID: A complex mandala of knobs from a modular synth. In the foreground, limned in a blue electric halo, is a man in a hi-viz vest with the head of a horse. The horse's eyes have been replaced with the sinister red eyes of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'"]

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lesinquietes · 10 months ago

Text

Summary: You talk shit to the wrong person on a discussion forum. Idly, you troll one user who’s really into the Paranormal Liberation Front’s new leader, Tomura Shigaraki. You’ve heard he’s being heralded as the Villain of Villains, though you’re not sure that’s a valid title. You decide it’s time to make your opinion known. “Idk if I’d give him that title… lol he’s giving insecure incel.”

Mean!Yandere!Shigaraki x Bimbo!Reader

⚠️ mdni. degradation. incel. misogyny. noncon. oral. panic attacks. shigaraki is a mean dom. slut-shaming. yandere.

Next l

You snicker as you press enter. Admittedly, you don’t know enough about the white-haired criminal to make that judgement call. You’re basing your statement solely on appearance. What can you say? Making ignorant comments is the essence of shitposting. You get to act a fool online because no one will ever discover who you are.

Until the user you mouthed off to replies.

Crumbleking: the fuck do you know?

Crumbleking: and you think a guy like him wouldn’t get women? he has a fucking army you stupid bitch he can have anyone he wants. that’s not insecure.

You roll your eyes, noticing he didn’t address the incel comment.

(Your username): I literally do not give a fuck lol do you want him @ crumbleking? Seeing as you know so much about his personal life and all

Crumbleking: you should be thankful he hasn’t killed you yet

(Your username): I’m not hearing a no

Crumbleking: get fucked

(Your username): Apparently shig is doing enough of that for both of us lmao

Crumbleking: you’re asking for it

You block the user. How many times has some moron threatened you online? Too many. But you take solace in the fact that, just like you, everyone’s simply a keyboard warrior. At the end of the day, it’s not like any of this shit is serious.

Right? :)

Well, a few days after this incident, you login to your social media account and notice a message in your mailbox. You lift a brow. It’s probably a meme from your best friend. You’re surprised to find a notification next to Requests. Someone you aren’t friends with has messaged you.

Hastily, you tap the Requests tab. You don’t know why your heart is pounding, or why you have a horrid feeling about this. Perhaps you’re under too much stress lately, or perhaps your intuition is trying to tell you something — that you’re in danger.

The request is from someone named Shigaraki. You know it can’t be the real villain. You clue in that it’s likely that freak who was defending him on the forum. He must have determined who you are somehow and resorted to messaging you on your private social.

Shigaraki: hello you dumb slut

Shigaraki: remember me?

Yeah, it’s definitely him. You wonder what his goal is, what he wants from you; normal behaviour doesn’t include stalking. You debate on whether or not to reply. You could play dumb or own up to your role. Of course, it’s far easier to do the former.

You: no?

It’s simple and to-the-point. You see him typing back right away. You hold your breath when he stops. Then, the screenshots from the forum come, reminding you of the conversation.

Shigaraki: i know you’re (username).

You resort to the IP tracker on your laptop, figuring you’ll spook him and he’ll leave you alone. You power it up and click eagerly. When you’re halfway through locating him, it’s as though he’s read your mind.

Shigaraki: if you think I’m not using a vpn then you’re stupider than I thought

The panic really sets in now. You’re hyperventilating. The message shoots you into a panic attack — the kind when your throat constricts and your lungs heave stale air. You scratch at your chest and gasp. You feel like you’re dying. You can’t breathe. With quivering fingers, you type a nasty message to him.

You: what the fuck is wrong with you. why the hell do you care what i think this much???? please leave me alone. blocking you.

That’ll end this terror once and for all. Or will it?

Shigaraki: Don’t you fucking dare you whore

His response is nearly instantaneous.

Shigaraki: if you block me I’ll find you irl

Shigaraki: i just showed you how easy it was to find your social media profile

Shigaraki: i’ll fucking find you

Shigaraki: and we’ll see if you feel the same about me when we’re face to face

You can’t stand it. You press the block button and exit the app. You turn off your phone — as if that’ll help — and throw it onto your bed. You shut down your laptop place it gently atop your desk. That’s enough for tonight. You have to remind yourself that the person threatening you is just a persistent troll, that the Tomura Shigaraki would never waste his precious time bantering with a random person on the Internet. You get to bed using that precise logic.

Except you’re wrong.

A few weeks pass, and you make the foolish mistake of thinking you’re safe. You start to throw caution into the wind, glancing over your shoulder less and walking home from work at night. You don’t notice the pale man trailing you. He watches you at work, as you hustle under pressure, and at home, before you close the curtains. He’s seen you naked twice. He assumes you meant to show off your body to an audience, that you like a bit of exhibitionism. Well, he’ll keep that in mind when he extensively plots out your payback.

Finally, one evening, he strikes. You come home from work and close the door. Securing the locks, you don’t see him until it’s too late.

He wraps a hand around your neck, keeping his pinky lifted to prove a point. He could kill you if he wanted. He could turn you to dust and be done with this stupid shit. In truth, he doesn’t know why he let his anger overtake him to the point where he had to find you. The problem is, he can’t stop his pursuit. If you escaped him right now, he would find you again.

And again.

And again, until he’s able to teach you a fucking lesson.

“Thought you could get away from me, huh?” He rasps next to your ear. “I found your social media account. Didn’t think I’d find your address?” He cackles venomously. “Stupid whore.”

You know immediately who you’re being held captive by. It’s the guy you were talking shit to online. It also happens to be Tomura Shigaraki, in the flesh. You realize, at once, that your luck is positively atrocious. Like, honestly, how the fuck did this happen to you? You can’t make sense if the madness.

He drags his knuckles along your cheek, stroking it. You feel his index finger trace the outline of your lips. Instantly, your heart sinks. On cue, he hums.

“I bet these can suck dick better than they talk shit,” he remarks darkly. “Wanna find out?”

You don’t, but he does.

“Take off your jacket, or I’ll crumble it off with the first two layers of your pretty skin.”

He takes away his hand to allow you space. The way you understand it, if five of his fingers make contact with your body, you’ll begin to fall apart. You’ve seen footage of what he’s done to heroes who have defied him. It causes you to wonder why he’s chosen to torture you, of all people.

The answer lies in his discovery of your social media account. Before he saw what you look like, he was content to merely leave you a little scare. Then, he started diving into your life, going through each and every one of your photos. It turns out you’re quite the socialite. You with your friends. You with your family members. You with animals. Food. Music. Video games. With all these posts, he was granted a perfect snapshot of what it is you do. And now, he wants to watch everything you ever loved decay.

“Why the hell are you doing this?” You hiss, daring to make eye contact tact with your stalker. “Don’t you have better things to do, you fucking freak?”

You spit the last two words with as much vitriol as you can muster. He doesn’t miss the effort you pour into your distaste. He rewards you with a callous cackle.

“Aw, what’s wrong?” He cooes, scarred lips contorting into a smile. “We’re on a first name basis, aren’t we?”

You lick your lips. You can’t recollect if you referred to him by name. Everything is a rapid blur.

“Shig.” He prompts you. “You’re the first and only person that’ll call me that.”

Heat rushes to your cheeks. You didn’t consider it overstepping at the time because you didn’t think you were interacting with Shigaraki. You can see how it might have been construed as intimate in his eyes, given your casual use of the pseudonym. The least you can do is apologize. It won't save your ass, but perhaps it will urge him to go lighter on you.

"I-I'm sorry," you squeak. "T-to be fair, I—“

“To be fair, I should wrap my hand around your throat and watch you beg me for air as your whole body turns to dust.” He interrupts you venomously. “Take off your fucking jacket.”

You unzip the garment and throw it onto your sofa. Next comes your hat and scarf. You finish his request when you’re in only your sweater, pants, socks, and undergarments. He smirks at the result of your swift labour, drinking in your silhouette. He’s seen enough photos of you outdoors to know what lies beneath the rest. Thirst traps, you’d probably call them. Little did you know they’d be used against you one day.

He removes his phone from the back pocket of his jeans. With a languid thumb, he swipes it to life. He logs into his fake social media account and finds yours. It’s bookmarked as a favourite tab, of course, especially considering how many times he’s used your pics to jerk off. If you only knew how many nights his cock twitched, begging to be sheathed in your soft pussy, you’d probably be petrified.

He grins.

“What were you thinking, posting shit like this?”

He twists the screen around for you to see. It’s a photo of you and your bestie in bikinis. Your hair is wet from spending time in the ocean. You and your friend were vacationing at a beach, and you wanted to look your best. Beside her, your lips are coiled around a lollipop, cheeks hollowed out from sucking on it. A thirst trap? Absolutely. But not for him.

He stares at the image one more time before putting the phone away. His crimson orbs lock with yours. A smirk settles across his lips.

“Get on your knees.”

Your eyelids clamp shut. Wordlessly, you lower yourself to the ground. It feels utterly humiliating. You have no choice but to let him use you. There has to be a way out of this situation, but how? If you’re serious about surviving, you have to cook up an escape route.

Shigaraki nears your submissive form. He wishes he brought something to tie you up. You’d look gorgeous bound for him. Helpless and barely willing is how he likes his lovers.

He wasn’t lying when he told you he gets women. Since establishing the Paranormal Liberation Front, people have been throwing themselves at him. They’re attracted to his power. He doesn’t have an interest in any of them, though; there are better things to do, and more enticing partners to find. You fit the bill quite nicely.

He hovers over you, leering at you with his crotch mere centimetres from your face. His jeans smell like laundry detergent — you didn’t expect that. You guess he’s not as crusty as he seems, with his scraggly hair and raspy voice.

Suddenly, he grasps the back of your head with four fingers and pushes your face against his clothed erection. He grinds it along your cheek, twitching in his underwear, yearning to feel the warmth of your slutty mouth. Soon you’ll serve him, but not yet.

“Look what you do to me,” he groans, lulling his head back. “I’ve been waiting for you to fix this problem. Won’t kill you until I’ve had my fill.”

You shiver. You’ve got to get to fuck out of here. If you can distract him, you can jump out of the window and get help. It’s risky, but you don’t have much of a choice.

He releases you and moves to unzip his pants. Your breath hitches. You don’t want this to extend any longer than it has to — not if you can help it. Who knows when he’ll get bored and murder you? He’s unhinged. The time to act is now.

“Wait,” you mumble. “Sh-shirt.”

Shockingly, he lets up for a moment. You take the opportunity to gesture to the garment you’re wearing. It’s your work uniform. Nothing special. He doesn’t have to know that, though.

“Lemme take this off,” you insist. “P-please. I-I don’t wanna ruin in.”

If you remove your shirt, that’ll leave you in merely a bra and pants. Fortunately for you, Shigaraki isn’t a stupid man when it comes to his own satisfaction. He decides to offer you reprieve. Robotically, he steps back to give you space. He’s seen them from afar; he knows they’ll be impressive up close.

“Hurry up.”

He doesn’t anticipate you being a skillful little idiot.

You roll backwards and stumble to your feet. Bolting towards the window, you’re grateful that he didn’t make you strip completely. The hesitation of humiliation and shame might have prevented you from leaping out from the second floor. It’s with luck that you don’t break anything upon hitting the ground.

Shigaraki lunges for your hair a millisecond too late. He catches himself on the window frame. At the same time, you get to your feet and sprint. By the time he reaches the street, panting and growling with fury, you’ve disappeared; there’s not a trace of you left behind.

He suspects you’re off to alert a local hero or police officer. That’s fine. He doesn’t expect them to believe you, and even if they do, how will they protect you? He can feel his power accumulating; moreover, after the impending procedure that’s set to occur in the coming months, he’ll be unstoppable. He doesn’t mind killing those who get in his way.

Thus, with a heavy huff, he lets you go. You obviously want to play, and he’s a master gamer. He knows you want this just as much as he does. After all, didn’t you grasp that he was serious about finding you as many times as you manage to flee from him — that he’ll keep his pursuit steady until you no longer have the strength to run? You must want to be hunted, like pretty prey reserved only for the best.

You have no idea who you’re fucking with.

#minors dni #tw misogyny #tw noncon #shigaraki tomura #yandere shigaraki #yandere tomura shigaraki #yandere shigaraki x reader #tomura x reader #shigaraki x reader #shigaraki smut #afab reader #fem reader #bimbo reader #shigaraki x bimbo reader

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