#metaverse cost to make

[vijay01]

Metaverse Development Cost becoming the next frontier in digital innovation. As businesses and individuals alike show increasing interest in developing and participating in the metaverse, understanding the associated costs is crucial. India,Scope and Complexity,Development Team Composition, Duration of the Project,Hourly Rates for Professionals, Estimated Project Costs, Additional Costs

[personishfive]

in which the metaverse is a dangerous place

[samarecharm]

Man. Goro being in strikers wouldve been soooo fucking good. Especially w the surprisingly good writing and plot??? You have to live w the consequences of your mistakes? You dont get to just Die and leave the mess you made behind? You have to confront the people youve hurt and accept that they may never forgive you? That people who care about you and love you will support you even when youre at rock bottom as long as u show a willingness to change and do better? This wouldve been a perfect way to tie up Goros whole story in neat little bow 😔😔😔

[akkivee]

my hypster fc magazine came in the mail, and it was full of bangers as usual, but it is so important to me that you all know that kuukou, out of concern for the youth who can’t afford to travel to a temple, or that it’s too far etc etc, has decided to create a temple in the metaverse and therefore accessible from your smartphone LOL

[megaderping]

I feel like when people compare Akechi to Light Yagami, they fundamentally misunderstand his character. Their similarities really end at their designs, and Light is the kind of person Akechi would despise. Light Yagami lives a pretty privileged life at the start of Death Note. He has a stable home, with two parents and a sister who care about him. He's a successful student. There isn't really inherent tragedy to his life. The whole reason he starts using the Death Note is a mix of curiosity and a jaded worldview, and when it works it empowers him, very quickly goes to his head, as he believes he is one who can be a god of a "new world" once the shock of his initial kills wears off. While his first kill was to help someone, that altruism didn't last. He is in charge of his choices, while Ryuk mostly vibes and maybe eggs him on a little. Fundamentally, Light has something Akechi lacks: agency, and a comfortable life he took for granted. Meanwhile, Akechi is someone who lived on the bottom rung of Japanese society. His very existence is shameful there, between his mother being a sex worker, his status as an illegitimate/"throw away" child, and his mother's suicide. Years languishing in a foster system that is notoriously inhumane, in a country where 90% of the adoptions are grown men for inheritance and patriarchal reasons, while very few children in the system find permanent homes. When Akechi awakens his power, he approaches Shido not because he wants to kill people but for a stupid revenge plan cooked up by a traumatized child who's been nudged along by a malevolent god. He wants to build Shido up so that at the height of his power, he can expose him for the monster he really is, while another part of him genuinely wants to be useful to Shido, as Cogkechi later calls out. His feelings are a mess of contradictions, and so it's no surprise that Shido was able to mold him into his assassin at only 15 years old. It's also worth noting that Akechi only approaches Shido with his ability to cause psychotic breakdowns. Shido is the one who teaches and instructs him to do shutdowns. He's still complicit, very sunk cost with his revenge plan, but as I spoke of here, even if he wanted to quit, he couldn't alone. Shido's cleaner and control of the law and ability to effortlessly turn him in would render the Metaverse his only safe haven. I think people look at 11/20 Akechi and Akechi in the early parts of the engine room and assume that's just his "true self," when in reality it's another mask. Royal makes it very clear because in Rank 7, he outright warns Joker of what's to come via a pool metaphor and offers an out (though he's MUCH happier if you don't take it/stick to your principles), and in Rank 8, he goes on that big "I hate you" speech... while Sunset Bridge is playing. Y'know, the song that plays at the end of most confidants to reaffirm bonds. So when he smiles as he shoots what he assumes to be Joker, that doesn't mean he's genuinely happy. More likely, he's an emotional clusterfuck, given he also is disoriented enough to namedrop "Shido-san" over the phone, and in the subsequent meeting with Shido, tells him not to kill the Phantom Thieves and that Morgana is "just a cat." Yes, he says they'll make them fear for the rest of their lives, but remember, he's talking to Shido. The things he says are likely all incredibly calculated to sound appealing to Shido. And when you consider that he planned to utterly destroy Shido's reputation after the election, the "delay" makes even more sense.

Later, Akechi goes on about how the people he induced shutdowns on were deserving of their fates, but I don't think he believes it so much as it's the only way he could convince himself that it was worth it, and given how much society failed him, and given how many of the people he targeted were likely rivals/competitors or rich fucks, I think he'd be less inclined to assume good faith. Kunikazu Okumura was not an innocent little victim, after all. He was one of the people who requested breakdowns and shutdowns the most. I think Akechi enjoyed killing him not because of how it'd hurt Haru, but because of catharsis. Because Okumura is just as monstrous as Shido, so why should he feel remorse? However, I don't believe he feels the same about Wakaba, as when he discusses her with Shido, he mentions how her fate was because she refused to willingly work for him. It's another justification, but I personally think Wakaba's death was the most painful for him because he was effectively making Futaba just like him. That's why I think his reaction to Sae threatening Sojiro's custody was genuine. Anyway, evil grinning Akechi is just another mask, as I said. Keep in mind, this is someone who laments not meeting Joker years ago, someone who Morgana outright points out is lying about his hatred. And that's the thing. Light Yagami, while a really fascinating character, is not someone who had all this childhood suffering or lack of agency. He does not regret his actions in the slightest and goes down due to his own hubris in both the anime and the manga. While you can argue that Ryuk set him up by dropping the Death Note, Light was the one who picked it up and chose to use it. Any nudging from Ryuk didn't coerce Light into doing it because Light seized the opportunity. No, if Light Yagami is like anyone in Persona 5, it's Masayoshi Shido, not Goro Akechi. Both believe they are god/god's chosen, that they are the ones who will reshape the world to their ideals, and to be frank, both use and abuse women to serve their own purposes. Goro Akechi goes down sacrificing himself for the Thieves and pleading with them to stop his father and again in Maruki's reality when he refuses to let Joker accept a gilded prison of a world for his sake when he knows better than anyone what it's like to have no true freedom. If you max his confidant, you see him in the postcredits, leaving his survival entirely possible, and I think it works because at the end of the day, Akechi was meant to be a victim and a foil. Light is a villain protagonist and a cautionary tale. Though its his POV we follow, he isn't someone we're meant to root for, but I definitely don't think enjoying the character is a bad thing at all. He's really interesting! I just think that a lot of the Akechi and Light comparisons are surface level at best.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Zuck’s gravity-defying metaverse money-pit

Tomorrow (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

Think of everything that makes you miserable as being caught between two opposing, irresistible, irrefutable truths:

"Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops" (Stein's Law)

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" (Keynes)

Both of these are true, even though they seemingly contradict one another, and no one embodies that contradiction more perfectly than Mark Zuckerberg.

Take the metaverse.

Zuck's "pivot" to a virtual world he ripped off from a quarter-century old cyberpunk novel (reminder: cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion) was born of desperation.

Zuck fancies himself an avatar of the Emperor Augustus (that's why he has that haircut) (no, really). The emperors of antiquity are infamous for getting all weepy when they run out of lands to conquer.

But the lachrymosity of emperors has little causal relationship to the anxieties of tech monopolists! Alexander weeps because he just loves a good conquest and when he finishes conquering the world, he's terminally bored. That's not Zuck's problem at all. When Zuck attains monopoly status, his company develops an autoimmune disorder, as his vicious princelings run out of enemies to destroy and begin to knife one another.

Any monopoly faces these destructive microincentives, but tech is exceptional here because tech has the realtime flexibility and speed that brick-and-mortar businesses can never match:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Sociopaths with tech monopolies are worse for the same reason that road-rage would be worse in a flying car: adding new capacity to indiscriminate self-destructive urges turns ordinary car crashes into low-level airburst warfare:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

The flexibility of digital gives tech platforms so much latitude to break things in tiny increments. A tech platform is like a Jenga tower composed of infinitely divisible blocks. The Jenga players are the product managers and executives who have run out of the ability to grow by attracting new business thanks to their monopoly dominance. Now they compete with one another to increase the yield from their respective divisions by visiting pain upon the business customers and end users their platform connects. By tiny increments, they increase the product's cost, lower its reliability, and strip it of its utility and then charge rent to restore its functionality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/24/cursed-bigness/#incentives-matter

This is the terminal stage of enshittification, the unstoppable autocannibalism of platforms as they seek to harvest all the value created by business customers and end users, leaving the absolute minimum of residual value needed to keep both stuck to the platform. This is a brittle equilibrium, because the difference between "I hate this service but I just can't stop using it," and "Get me the fuck out of here" is razor-thin.

All it takes is one tiny push – a whistleblower, a livestreamed mass-shooting, a Cambridge Analytica – and people bolt for the doors. This triggers the final stage: the "pivot," which is a tech euphemism for "panic."

For Zuck, the pivot got real after a disappointing earnings call triggered a mass sell-off of Facebook stock, history's worst one-day value incineration, which lopped a quarter of a trillion dollars off the company's market cap:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-19/dramatic-stock-moves-of-2022-led-by-meta-dive-nordic-flash-crash

This was when the metaverse became the company's top priority.

Now, in my theory of enshittification, the step that follows the pivot is death: "Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die":

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

Many people have asked me about the conspicuous non-death of Facebook! That's where I have to fall back on Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Facebook can't continue to annihilate value, alienate its workers, harm the public, hemorrhage money in support of a mediocrity's cherished folly forever. Can it?

Admittedly, it sure seems like it can. Facebook's metaverse pivot has thus far cost the company $46,500,000,000. That is: $46.5 billion. That's even more money than Uber torched, seeking to maintain the illusion that they will be able to create monopolies on both transport and the labor market for driving and recoup the billions the Saudi royal family let them use for the con:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft

Don't worry: the Saudi royals are fine! They cashed out at the IPO, collecting a tidy profit at the expense of retail investors who assumed that a pile of shit as big as Uber must have a pony under it, somewhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

Uber has doubled the cost of rides and halved drivers' wages, using illegal gimmicks like "algorithmic wage discrimination" to squeeze a little more juice out of the nearly exhausted husks of its workforce:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But Stein's Law hasn't been repealed. Drivers can't drive for sub-subsistence wages. Do that long enough and they'll literally starve: that's what "subsistence" means. We lost a decade of transit investment thanks to the Uber con, at the same time as traditional taxi drivers were forced out of the industry. Uber can't be profitable and still pay a living wage, and the fantasy of self-driving cars as a means of zeroing out the wage-bill altogether remains stubbornly, lethally unworkable:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Which means we're at the point where you can get off a commuter train at a main station and find yourself stranded: no taxis at the taxi-queue, no busses due for an hour, and no Uber cars available unless you're willing to pay $95 for a ten-minute ride in a luxury SUV (why yes, this did happen to me recently, thanks for asking).

As more and more of us are exposed to these micro-crises, the political will to do something will increase. This can't go on forever. "Don't use commuter rail" isn't a viable option. "Walk three miles each way to the commuter rail station" isn't viable either. Neither is "Pay $95 for an Uber to get to the station." Something's gotta give…eventually.

"Eventually" is the key word here. Remember the corollary of Stein's Law: Keynes's maxim that "markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Sure, anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, but that is no guarantee of a soft landing. You can't smoke two packs a day forever – but in the absence of smoking cessation, the eventual terminus of that habit is stage-four lung cancer. Keep hammering butts into your face and your last smoke will come out a crematorium chimney.

Zuckerberg hasn't merely blown a whole-ass Twitter on the metaverse with nothing to show for it – he's gotten richer while doing it! In the past year, his net worth increased by 130%, to $59 billion, thanks to an increase in Facebook's share-price, driven by investors who stubbornly remain irrational, keeping the Boy Emperor solvent long past any reasonable assessment of his performance.

What are these investors betting on? One possibility is that the rise and rise of Facebook's share-price represents a bet on technofeudalism. Since the Communist Manifesto, Marxists have been predicting the end of capitalism. That end seems to have come, but what followed capitalism wasn't socialism, it was the return of feudalism, an economic system where elites derive their wealth from rents, not profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Profit is the income you get from investing in capital – machinery, systems, plant – and then harvesting the surplus value created by workers who mobilize this capital. Capitalism produces massive returns for its winners – in the Manifesto's first chapter, Marx and Engels just geek out about how productive and dynamic this system is.

But capitalism is also a Red Queen's Race, where the winners have to run faster and faster to stay in the same place. Capitalism drives competition, as other would-be winners pile into the sector, replicating the systems that the current winners are using and then improving on them. This is why the prophets of capitalist end-times like the FBI informant Peter Thiel say that "competition is for losers."

Capitalism's "profits" stand in contrast to the feudalist's "rents." Rents are income you get from owning something that other people need to produce things. The capitalist owns the coffee-shop, but the feudalist owns the building. When a rival capitalist opens a superior coffee-shop and drives the old shop out of business, the capitalist loses, but the rentier wins. Now they can rent out an empty storefront in the neighborhood everyone's coming to because of that hot new cafe.

Feudal and manorial lords also made their fortunes by extracting surplus value from workers, but these rentiers don't care about owning the means of production. The peasant in the field pays for their own agricultural equipment and livestock – control over the means of production is necessary for worker liberation, but it's not sufficient. The worker's co-op that owns its factory can still find the value it produces bled off by the landlord who owns the land the factory sits on.

The jury's still out on whether American workers really see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," but America's capitalists have a palpable, undeniable loathing for capitalism. The dream of an American "entrepreneur" is *PassiveIncome: money you get from owning something capitalists and/or workers use to create value. Digital technology creates exciting new possibilities for rent-extraction: a taxi-operator had to buy and maintain a car that someone else drove. Uber can offload this hassle onto its drivers and rent out access to the chokepoint it created between drivers and riders, charging all the traffic can bear. This is feudalism in the cloud – or as Yannis Varoufakis calls it, cloudalism.

In Varoufakis's Technofeudalism, he describes Amazon as a feudal venture. From a distance, Amazon seems like a bustling marketplace of manic capitalism, with sellers avidly competing to offer more variety and lower costs in a million independently operated storefronts. But closer inspection reveals that Amazon is a planned economy, not a market.

Every one of those storefronts pays rent to the same landlord – Amazon – which determines which goods can be offered for sale. Amazon sets pricing for those goods, and extracts 45-51% of every dollar those sellers make. Amazon even controls which goods are shelved at eye-height when you enter the store, and which ones are banished to a dusty storeroom in a distant sub-basement you'll never find:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/14/flywheel-shyster-and-flywheel/#unfulfilled-by-amazon

Zuck's metaverse is pure-play technofeudalism, Amazon taken to the logical extreme. It's easy to get distracted by the part of Zuck's vision that will convert us all into legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-resolution cartoon characters. But the real action isn't this digitization of our fleshy wants and needs. Zuck didn't spend $46.5B to torment us.

The cruelty isn't the point of the metaverse.

The point of the metaverse is to rent us out to capitalists.

Zuck doesn't know why we would use the metaverse, but he believes that if he can convince capitalists that we all want to live there, that they'll invest the capital to figure out how to serve us there, and then he can extract rent from those capitalists and start earning "passive income." It's an Uber for Cyberpunk Dystopias play.

Zuck's done this before. Remember the "pivot to video?" Zuckerberg wanted to compete with Youtube, but he didn't want to invest in paying for video production. Videos are really expensive to produce and the median video gets zero views. So Zuck used his captive audience to trick publishers into financing his move into video. He fraudulently told publishers that videos were blowing up on Facebook, outperforming boring old text by vast margins.

Publishers borrowed billions and raised billions more in the capital markets, financing the total conversion of newsrooms from text to video and precipitating a mass extinction event for print journalists. Zuck kept the con alive by giving away (fewer) billions to some of those publishers, falsely claiming that their videos were generating fortunes in advertising revenue. These lucky, credulous publishers became judas goats for their industry, luring others into the con, the same way that the "lucky" guy a carny lets win a giant teddy-bear at the start of the day lures others into putting down $5 to see if they can sink three balls in a rigged peach-basket.

But when we stubbornly refused to watch videos on Facebook, Zuck stopped spreading around these convincer payouts, and precipitated a second mass-extinction event in news media, as the new generation of video journalists joined their predecessors in Facebook-driven unemployment. Given this history, it's surreal to see publishers continue to insist that Facebook is stealing their content, when it is so clearly stealing their money:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

Metaverse is the new Pivot to Video. Zuckerberg is building a new world, which he will own, and he wants rent it to capitalists, who will compete with one another in just the way that Amazon's sellers compete. No matter who wins that competition, Zuckerberg will win. The prize for winning will be a rent increase, as Zuckerberg leverages the fact that your "successful" business relies on Facebook's metaverse to drain off all the value your workers have produced:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/

This can't last forever, but how long until Zuck's reality distortion field runs out of battery? That's the $46.5B question.

The market can certainly remain irrational for a hell of a long time. But the market isn't the only force that regulates corporate outcomes. Regulators also regulate. Europe's GDPR is now seven years old, and it plainly outlaws Facebook's surveillance.

For nearly a decade, Facebook has pretended that this wasn't true, and they got away with it. Mostly, that's thanks to the fact that Ireland is a corporate crime-haven with a worse-than-useless Data Protection Commission:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

But anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. Facebook has finally been dragged into EU federal jurisdiction, where it will face exterminatory fines if it continues to spy on Europeans:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/07/luck-of-the-irish/#schrems-revenge

In response, Facebook has rolled out a subscription version of its main service and its anticompetitive acquisition, Instagram:

https://about.fb.com/news/2023/10/facebook-and-instagram-to-offer-subscription-for-no-ads-in-europe/

For €10/month, Facebook will give you an ad-free experience across its service offerings (it's €13/month if you pay through an app, as Facebook recoups the 30% #AdTax rents that the feudal Google/Apple mobile duopoly extracts).

But this doesn't come close to satisfying Facebook's legal obligations under the GDPR. The GDPR doesn't ban ads, it bans spying. Facebook spies on every single internet user, all the time. The apps we use are built with "free" Facebook toolkits that extract rent from the capitalists who make them by harvesting our data as we use their apps. The web-pages we visit have embedded Facebook libraries that do the same thing for web publishers. Facebook buys our data from brokers. Facebook has so many ways of spying on us that there's almost certainly no way for Facebook to stop spying on you, without radically transforming it operation.

To comply with the GDPR, Facebook must halt surveillance advertising altogether. There's no way to square "spying on users" with "you can't surveil without explicit consent, and you can't punish people for refusing."

And of course, "not spying" isn't the same as "not advertising." "Contextual advertising" – where ads are placed based on the thing you're looking at, not who you are and what you do – is hundreds of years old. Context ads underperform surveillance ads by a slim margin – about 5% – but they're vastly more profitable for publishers. That's because surveillance ads are feudal, controlled by rentiers like Facebook, who own vast troves of the surveillance data needed to run these ads. Traditional ad intermediaries (agencies, brokers) took 10-15% out of the total advertising market. Ad-tech companies – the Google/Facebook duopoly – take 51% out of every ad dollar spent.

Eliminate surveillance ads and you torch their feudal estates. Facebook will always know more about someone reading a news article than the publisher – but the publisher will always know more about the article than Facebook does:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

There are rents under capitalism, just as there are profits under feudalism. The defining characteristic of a system is what happens when rents and profits come into conflict. If profits win – for example, if productive companies beat patent trolls, or if news publishers escape Facebook's rent-extraction – then the system is capitalist. If rents win – if investors continue to bet large on the metaverse as its losses pass $50 billion and head for the $100 billion mark – then the system is feudal.

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. The question isn't whether the platforms will eventually become so enshittified that they die – the question is whether they will go down in an all-consuming fireball, or whether they'll go down in a controlled demolition that lets us evacuate the people they've trapped inside them first:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/09/let-the-platforms-burn/

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/2023/10/30/markets-remaining-irrational/#steins-law

Image: Diego Delso (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puente_de_las_cataratas_Victoria,_Zambia-Zimbabue,_2018-07-27,_DD_10.jpg

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

[txttletale]

Can I ask you what you think of this?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/02/google-ai-emissions

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-microsoft-ai

https://x.com/tsarnick/status/1842401670225125539?s=46

I’ve been reading a lot lately on how energy consuming ai actually isn’t, but then I see stuff like this and I get confused?

the two real sources that you've linked are using topical headlines for clicks--you will note that they both actually only describe power usage of datacenters. the percentage of any given datacenter that is used for AI is not publicly divulged but sources from google suggested a while ago that it's 10% or so. if you snapped your fingers and made LLM technology disappear overnight, microsoft and google would still be constantly expanding their datacenter capacity because they operate two of the biggest cloud systems in the world--there is a very misleading trick in these headlines where they say 'microsoft uses one morbillion kwh to power AI' and then you read it and they're just opening a datacenter.

now you might argue that constantly opening datacenters with huge power costs is still not good regardless of why, but that's a symptom of an economic system that demands endlessly climbing growth and profits, not of AI being scary and evil. if nobody had ever invented LLMs these tech companies would still be trying to make crypto or the metaverse happen and if nobody had invented those things they'd be making up some new solution in search of a problem to sell to anyone gullible enough to buy it--hell, they'd probably still be on Google Glass.

the last thing you linked is the CEO of google talking--& do you think perhaps there might be a vested interested for the CEO of a company who's put billions into LLMs to spread the message that the demand for LLMs is going to stay high and keep climbing forever and ever? not worth taking any more seriously than when elon musk says ai is going to make ready player one real or whatever

[thedaythatwas]

something I appreciate about akechi as a character is that he never seems to think hmm, maybe I should emotionally distance myself from joker, because being invested in him could end up being bad for me when I need to kill him. the vengeance-oriented character goro is made out to be at first glance ought to think like this, but NO! goro akechi is NOT (just) that guy!

from the beginning, akechi goes above and beyond the minimum requirements of getting intel on joker and gaining his trust. he says, I’ll go the extra mile! I’m going to follow him around, inside and outside the metaverse. we’re going to talk about my dead mom. I’m going to insist that we’re RIVALS! I’ll spend so long thinking about all the reasons I hate him that it’ll become obvious to everyone around me— even joker’s (not a) cat— that what I feel isn’t really hate but something much more complex. obviously, this will make killing him that much more gratifying, because our lives are now intertwined! HA! take that joker! I WIN!

I believe this… interesting… thought process has something to do with akechi’s central motivation being more than just a desire for vengeance. he also desperately craves approval and recognition. akechi is not actually all that pragmatic. he’s highly driven by emotion, sometimes at the cost of logic (I mean… his revenge plot isn’t all that mature or well-thought through. it’s basically suicidal).

this considered, it seems that becoming akiren’s rival would be second nature to goro. it gives him a veritable cornucopia of things he craves. winning their “game” allows him to feel recognized for his worth. just playing it gives him opportunities to feel seen and known. being a rival is addictive. he gets the chance to embrace the anger he cultivates towards akiren and the rush of putting him at the center of his thoughts. their rivalry is by far the most intimate relationship akechi has. and so, he gets more and more tangled up with joker— and in his feelings about joker— regardless of any risk that poses to his plans. distancing himself would go against goro’s every instinct.

being akiren’s rival is tied to akechi’s vengeance, but somewhere along the line, “besting joker” evolves to be about more than plotting against shido. this is probably for similar reasons as to why akechi’s desire for vengeance against his father was never purely about “vengeance” at all.

of course, this comes with the pesky, entirely predictable side effect of akechi getting a bit obsessed. oh well! it doesn’t end up stopping him from trying to carry out his order to kill akiren.

regardless of how events actually unfold, akechi’s feelings are a clean-cut liability to his revenge plot. a rational character would probably want to avoid such an obvious crack in his armor. this to say, as intelligent as akechi is, he’s not really all that rational. there’s a difference! he’s not who he appears to be at first glance, or even second or third glance. he’s not the detective prince, or an assassin with tunnel vision for vengeance, or even just plain angry. akechi wants to be needed, and he’ll do anything to chase that feeling.

so yeah, it would’ve been nice if he had found a homoerotic rival before the shido revenge plot debacle happened! alas.

[ayeforscotland]

I like shoving something on in the background while I cook, and I’ve been rewatching Folding Ideas’ The Future is a Dead Mall Metaverse documentary and, to state the obvious, the one thing that sticks out in contrast to the GenAI hype at the moment is the lack of big tech endorsement.

Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft and to a lesser extent Apple have didn’t heavily invest in the metaverse in the same way they’ve done with GenAI - in fairness Meta did and got their arses kicked.

This is the only reason GenAI is being pushed the way it is. There’s yet to be a genuine money-making/cost-saving way to use GenAI, and I don’t think there will be.

GenAI models are plagiarism machines that have stunted people’s ability to analyse documents and write reports.

[kayas-kosmos]

Because of what's happening on Twitter...

I've made a little diagram to demonstrate why billionaires and the ultra-wealthy are bad for society.

(Text in Image)

"If we view society as a body, every sector is like a different organ within the body that serves a function and works in harmony with other organs to maintain balance. Every part of the body is important for the whole thing to function."

"The ultra-wealthy want you to believe they are the beating heart and thinking mind of the society – they are the innovators who create our jobs and their brilliance drives society forward. They deserve to be at the top of society because they have earned that. Without them, the body won’t function because they are the most important part."

"In reality, they are more like a malignant tumour, sucking all of the blood (resources) away from everything else (people and the planet) to fuel its own infinite growth, depriving the rest of the body and slowly killing it. Workers create all of the innovation and keep things running, the ultra-wealthy take all the credit."

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This is a public domain image so feel free to pinch it for whatever.

Elon Musk has put the careers of thousands of small business owners who depend on Twitter (myself included) in jeopardy by completely running it into the ground. Before this, Mark Zuckerberg had already been doing the same when he started pursuing Metaverse, making Instagram and Facebook much more unusable for artists. Do I really need to go into other examples of CEOs and very normalised practise of wage theft?

Meanwhile, the UK currently has the richest Prime Minister in its history. What is this man doing with this wealth? Continuing the Tory legacy of austerity in order to line his pockets and the pockets of his crony friends. This has resulted in a devastating cost of living crisis that continues to ravage the country as people's energy bills skyrocket out of control.

My diagram is pretty basic and lacks nuance, there's definitely more I could elaborate on with this comparison but I really don't have time. I just want people to get the basic point of how billionaires view themselves vs what function they actually serve. I'm also not here to debate whether some organs are more important than others since I'm not a doctor, that's not really the point here. And no, I don't care if people think I'm being harsh by comparing billionaires to a tumour. If they don't want to be compared to one they should stop acting like one. Jeff Bezos could end world hunger right now and chooses not to.

Also, I know a lot of people are going to come at me with the argument that billionaires give away massive amounts of money. First off, people like Jeff Bezos only give large sums of money to charity a.) for the sake of improving their public image and b.) because giving to charity allows them to write it off in their taxes. Also, charities in of themselves have a lot of problems, but that's a blog post for another day. Mutual Aid is a better way to help people directly. Really, the ultra wealthy need to be taxed, of course they do everything within their power to avoid taxes.

Also:

"Earning a lot of money" and "holding onto a lot of money" are two different things. You cannot be a multi-millionaire unless you hold onto that money. If you give away massive chunks of it to enrich society, you cease to be a billionaire.

Oh and this is worth a watch, too.

Furthermore:

Also before the inevitable great man comments:

Being a billionaire is a moral failing. Nobody needs that much money.

[Slight edit here - I made the assertion that a billionaire could not spend all of their money in their lifetime, but as someone in the comments pointed out it's very easy for them to completely waste billions in no time. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have shown that].

Anyway, if you would like to see more anti-Capitalist art from me, I am currently working on a webcomic called "Flowerpunk" - a story about a group of anarchists who are trying to save the city of Wyrdon from a supernatural plague known as "the rot." The comic heavily discusses disaster Capitalism and how the rich will use mass death and destruction as an opportunity to further line their pockets.

I also like to do little anti-Capitalist doodles relating to this project, which I plan to make into posters at some point.

Please consider donating a Ko-Fi also if you would like to help support this project. I am really struggling at the moment because I've basically lost a massive chunk of my client base due to this Twitter implosion and also because of the AI BS that has made it impossible for me to get any reach nowadays. The last year or so has been an absolute nightmare for my career because of all of this.

Thank you all for your continued support! Hopefully I can re-establish my audience here on Tumblr and wherever else I decide to go.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Once the AI bubble bursts, that doesn’t mean chatbots and image generators will be relegated to the trash bin of history. Rather, there will be a reassessment of where it makes sense to implement them, and if attention moves on too fast, they may be able to do that with minimal pushback. The challenge visual artists and video game workers are already finding with employers making use of generative AI to worsen the labor conditions in their industries may become entrenched, especially if artists fail in their lawsuits against AI companies for training on their work without permission. But it could be far worse than that. Microsoft is already partnering with Palantir to feed generative AI into militaries and intelligence agencies, while governments around the world are looking at how they can implement generative AI to reduce the cost of service delivery, often without effective consideration of the potential harms that can come of relying on tools that are well known to output false information. This is a problem Resisting AI author Dan McQuillan has pointed to as a key reason why we must push back against these technologies. There are already countless examples of algorithmic systems have been used to harm welfare recipients, childcare benefit applicants, immigrants, and other vulnerable groups. We risk a repetition, if not an intensification, of those harmful outcomes. When the AI bubble bursts, investors will lose money, companies will close, and workers will lose jobs. Those developments will be splashed across the front pages of major media organizations and will receive countless hours of public discussion. But it’s those lasting harms that will be harder to immediately recognize, and that could fade as the focus moves on to whatever Silicon Valley places starts pushing as the foundation of its next investment cycle. All the benefits Altman and his fellow AI boosters promised will fade, just as did the promises of the gig economy, the metaverse, the crypto industry, and countless others. But the harmful uses of the technology will stick around, unless concerted action is taken to stop those use cases from lingering long after the bubble bursts.

16 August 2024

[vijay01]

Metaverse Development Cost becoming the next frontier in digital innovation. As businesses and individuals alike show increasing interest in developing and participating in the metaverse, understanding the associated costs is crucial. India,Scope and Complexity,Development Team Composition, Duration of the Project,Hourly Rates for Professionals, Estimated Project Costs, Additional Costs

[skyberia]

so I’ve been turning over the question in my mind of why exactly Goro stays loyal to (/aligns himself with) Shido for so long, and wanted to get your thoughts. do you think the sink-cost fallacy just has that much of a chokehold? or other factors combined with fear, despite goro’s confidence in his abilities, since shido has yakuza connections and ways of contracting murder outside of the metaverse? or, I think it’s evident from the engine room dialogue & more that on some level he does want acknowledgement from shido.

in fanworks that explore him refusing to carry out akira’s execution, that usually comes with the realization that someone does in fact want him around and that he’d be a fool to throw that away, but maybe that’s reading too much of the player’s emotions into Joker’s actions/dialogue—still, I do think it’s clear from their confidant that joker is written to care about Goro. so then it makes me wonder why Goro was willing to throw that away, or if he didn’t think it was genuine, or if it just wasn’t enough.

u clearly have many thoughts abt akechi and I love how you write in your comics, so I hope you don’t mind me asking for your take on this!

maybe this is kind of a boring take but i do think it's a sunk cost fallacy thing at the end of the day. the other factors you've brought up might play into it a bit too but i really think that the main thing is: this is a revenge plan he's dedicated the last two whole years to And ruined countless lives over (including, i'd argue, his own) AND by the point we see him in game it feels like it's nearing the final stages. this is as far as one can get from a point where you'd be able to just admit your plan sucks and abandon it!!

comparatively speaking to all that, akira is really just a distraction & obstacle in the face of the Grander Scheme. whatever he can offer goro will obviously just pale in comparison to finally getting the revenge he's worked soooo hard for. any other hesitations can just be looked over with the idea that killing him means he's won & that he's better than him <3

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

I was thinking about Joker being the person Futaba feels most comfortable around and how he’s immediately very protective of her, and urges her to take chances and bond with the others while telling her he’ll be right there for support.

And then I thought back to the beginning of the game and I just wonder if he related to Futaba at all. He didn’t start off the confident leader that he became. He was angry and indignant, yes, but also quiet and hurt. Zoned out and disoriented and passive, even catching himself wondering if what he did was right after all, if this is the cost. He tries to delete the Metaverse app multiple times, outright refusing the call of anything abnormal, because he is trying so so hard to be normal. It doesn’t work. Everyone hates him and doesn’t even give him a chance to explain. They intentionally outcast him. His hands shake when he has to sign his name. Morgana implies he hasn’t been eating well. Attempting to study while students are whispering rumours over his head gets him very little Knowledge - it’s mostly Guts.

He urges Futaba to bond with his friends because he actually tried to isolate himself right at the very start, and honestly? Where would he be if he hadn’t had that support or direction; if Ryuji and Morgana and Ann hadn’t shoved their way into his life?

Ren’s managed to help people because of the Metaverse and Joker, but where would he be as well without the Metaverse and all it gave him?

He might not have had as much of a reason to bond with Ryuji. He would’ve been alone. He felt helpless and unable to change his situation, and without his awakening, he likely would’ve remained feeling that way - aimless and without a capacity to voice his outrage against this injustice.

He keeps his head even lower. It doesn’t work. He zones out more. A teacher is hurting the students. A girl jumps. He watches the aftermath bitterly, and can’t do a thing. The teacher doubles down until he can’t even breathe without someone commenting behind his back. He’s a criminal. He’s dangerous. The school should kick him out. He can’t focus. His test scores drop. The school should never have taken him in. Lost cause. He should just disappear. Maybe something happens one day. He finally snaps, gets into an actual altercation, gets suspended. Maybe he just can’t take the whispers or his own helplessness anymore. He stops going to school. He stops leaving the attic.

Sojiro ends up with not one, but two hikikomori, and is left completely at a loss for what to do.

He keeps making curry.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The antitrust case against Apple

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (Mar 22) in TORONTO, then SUNDAY (Mar 24) with LAURA POITRAS in NYC, then Anaheim, and beyond!

The foundational tenet of "the Cult of Mac" is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Call it "Apple exceptionalism" – the idea that Apple, alone among the Big Tech firms, is virtuous, and therefore its conduct should be interpreted through that lens of virtue. The wellspring of this virtue is conveniently nebulous, which allows for endless goal-post shifting by members of the Cult of Mac when Apple's sins are made manifest.

Take the claim that Apple is "privacy respecting," which is attributed to Apple's business model of financing its services though cash transactions, rather than by selling it customers to advertisers. This is the (widely misunderstood) crux of the "surveillance capitalism" hypothesis: that capitalism is just fine, but once surveillance is in the mix, capitalism fails.

Apple, then, is said to be a virtuous company because its behavior is disciplined by market forces, unlike its spying rivals, whose ability to "hack our dopamine loops" immobilizes the market's invisible hand with "behavior-shaping" shackles:

http://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

Apple makes a big deal out of its privacy-respecting ethos, and not without some justification. After all, Apple went to the mattresses to fight the FBI when they tried to force Apple to introduced defects into its encryption systems:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/fbi-could-have-gotten-san-bernardino-shooters-iphone-leadership-didnt-say

And Apple gave Ios users the power to opt out of Facebook spying with a single click; 96% of its customers took them up on this offer, costing Facebook $10b (one fifth of the pricetag of the metaverse boondoggle!) in a single year (you love to see it):

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/facebook-makes-the-case-for-activity-tracking-to-ios-14-users-in-new-pop-ups/

Bruce Schneier has a name for this practice: "feudal security." That's when you cede control over your device to a Big Tech warlord whose "walled garden" becomes a fortress that defends you against external threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#manorialism

The keyword here is external threats. When Apple itself threatens your privacy, the fortress becomes a prison. The fact that you can't install unapproved apps on your Ios device means that when Apple decides to harm you, you have nowhere to turn. The first Apple customers to discover this were in China. When the Chinese government ordered Apple to remove all working privacy tools from its App Store, the company obliged, rather than risk losing access to its ultra-cheap manufacturing base (Tim Cook's signal accomplishment, the one that vaulted him into the CEO's seat, was figuring out how to offshore Apple manufacturing to China) and hundreds of millions of middle-class consumers:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-vpn/apple-says-it-is-removing-vpn-services-from-china-app-store-idUSKBN1AE0BQ

Killing VPNs and other privacy tools was just for openers. After Apple caved to Beijing, the demands kept coming. Next, Apple willingly backdoored all its Chinese cloud services, so that the Chinese state could plunder its customers' data at will:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-censorship-data.html

This was the completely foreseeable consequence of Apple's "curated computing" model: once the company arrogated to itself the power to decide which software you could run on your own computer, it was inevitable that powerful actors – like the Chinese Communist Party – would lean on Apple to exercise that power in service to its goals.

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese state's appetite for deputizing Apple to help with its spying and oppression was not sated by backdooring iCloud and kicking VPNs out of the App Store. As recently as 2022, Apple continued to neuter its tools at the behest of the Chinese state, breaking Airdrop to make it useless for organizing protests in China:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/11/foreseeable-consequences/#airdropped

But the threat of Apple turning on its customers isn't limited to China. While the company has been unwilling to spy on its users on behalf of the US government, it's proven more than willing to compromise its worldwide users' privacy to pad its own profits. Remember when Apple let its users opt out of Facebook surveillance with one click? At the very same time, Apple was spinning up its own commercial surveillance program, spying on Ios customers, gathering the very same data as Facebook, and for the very same purpose: to target ads. When it came to its own surveillance, Apple completely ignored its customers' explicit refusal to consent to spying, spied on them anyway, and lied about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Here's the thing: even if you believe that Apple has a "corporate personality" that makes it want to do the right thing, that desire to be virtuous is dependent on the constraints Apple faces. The fact that Apple has complete legal and technical control over the hardware it sells – the power to decide who can make software that runs on that hardware, the power to decide who can fix that hardware, the power to decide who can sell parts for that hardware – represents an irresistible temptation to enshittify Apple products.

"Constraints" are the crux of the enshittification hypothesis. The contagion that spread enshittification to every corner of our technological world isn't a newfound sadism or indifference among tech bosses. Those bosses are the same people they've always been – the difference is that today, they are unconstrained.

Having bought, merged or formed a cartel with all their rivals, they don't fear competition (Apple buys 90+ companies per year, and Google pays it an annual $26.3b bribe for default search on its operating systems and programs).

Having captured their regulators, they don't fear fines or other penalties for cheating their customers, workers or suppliers (Apple led the coalition that defeated dozens of Right to Repair bills, year after year, in the late 2010s).

Having wrapped themselves in IP law, they don't fear rivals who make alternative clients, mods, privacy tools or other "adversarial interoperability" tools that disenshittify their products (Apple uses the DMCA, trademark, and other exotic rules to block third-party software, repair, and clients).

True virtue rests not merely in resisting temptation to be wicked, but in recognizing your own weakness and avoiding temptation. As I wrote when Apple embarked on its "curated computing" path, the company would eventually – inevitably – use its power to veto its customers' choices to harm those customers:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

Which is where we're at today. Apple – uniquely among electronics companies – shreds every device that is traded in by its customers, to block third parties from harvesting working components and using them for independent repair:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

Apple engraves microscopic Apple logos on those parts and uses these as the basis for trademark complaints to US customs, to block the re-importation of parts that escape its shredders:

https://repair.eu/news/apple-uses-trademark-law-to-strengthen-its-monopoly-on-repair/

Apple entered into an illegal price-fixing conspiracy with Amazon to prevent used and refurbished devices from being sold in the "world's biggest marketplace":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/10/you-had-one-job/#thats-just-the-as

Why is Apple so opposed to independent repair? Well, they say it's to keep users safe from unscrupulous or incompetent repair technicians (feudal security). But when Tim Cook speaks to his investors, he tells a different story, warning them that the company's profits are threatened by customers who choose to repair (rather than replace) their slippery, fragile glass $1,000 pocket computers (the fortress becomes a prison):

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

All this adds up to a growing mountain of immortal e-waste, festooned with miniature Apple logos, that our descendants will be dealing with for the next 1,000 years. In the face of this unspeakable crime, Apple engaged in a string of dishonest maneuvers, claiming that it would support independent repair. In 2022, Apple announced a home repair program that turned out to be a laughably absurd con:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/22/apples-cement-overshoes/

Then in 2023, Apple announced a fresh "pro-repair" initiative that, once again, actually blocked repair:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

Let's pause here a moment and remember that Apple once stood for independent repair, and celebrated the independent repair technicians that kept its customers' beloved Macs running:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/29/norwegian-potato-flour-enchiladas/#r2r

Whatever virtue lurks in Apple's corporate personhood, it is no match for the temptation that comes from running a locked-down platform designed to capture IP rights so that it can prevent normal competitive activities, like fixing phones, processing payments, or offering apps.

When Apple rolled out the App Store, Steve Jobs promised that it would save journalism and other forms of "content creation" by finally giving users a way to pay rightsholders. A decade later, that promise has been shattered by the app tax – a 30% rake on every in-app transaction that can't be avoided because Apple will kick your app out of the App Store if you even mention that your customers can pay you via the web in order to avoid giving a third of their content dollars to a hardware manufacturer that contributed nothing to the production of that material:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

Among the apps that Apple also refuses to allow on Ios is third-party browsers. Every Iphone browser is just a reskinned version of Apple's Safari, running on the same antiquated, insecure Webkit browser engine. The fact that Webkit is incomplete and outdated is a feature, not a bug, because it lets Apple block web apps – apps delivered via browsers, rather than app stores:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax

Last month, the EU took aim at Apple's veto over its users' and software vendors' ability to transact with one another. The newly in-effect Digital Markets Act requires Apple to open up both third-party payment processing and third-party app stores. Apple's response to this is the very definition of malicious compliance, a snake's nest of junk-fees, onerous terms of service, and petty punitive measures that all add up to a great, big "Go fuck yourself":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

But Apple's bullying, privacy invasion, price-gouging and environmental crimes are global, and the EU isn't the only government seeking to end them. They're in the firing line in Japan:

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Japan-to-crack-down-on-Apple-and-Google-app-store-monopolies

And in the UK:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cma-wins-appeal-in-apple-case

And now, famously, the US Department of Justice is coming for Apple, with a bold antitrust complaint that strikes at the heart of Apple exceptionalism, the idea that monopoly is safer for users than technological self-determination:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline

There's passages in the complaint that read like I wrote them:

Apple wraps itself in a cloak of privacy, security, and consumer preferences to justify its anticompetitive conduct. Indeed, it spends billions on marketing and branding to promote the self-serving premise that only Apple can safeguard consumers’ privacy and security interests. Apple selectively compromises privacy and security interests when doing so is in Apple’s own financial interest—such as degrading the security of text messages, offering governments and certain companies the chance to access more private and secure versions of app stores, or accepting billions of dollars each year for choosing Google as its default search engine when more private options are available. In the end, Apple deploys privacy and security justifications as an elastic shield that can stretch or contract to serve Apple’s financial and business interests.

After all, Apple punishes its customers for communicating with Android users by forcing them to do so without any encryption. When Beeper Mini rolled out an Imessage-compatible Android app that fixed this, giving Iphone owners the privacy Apple says they deserve but denies to them, Apple destroyed Beeper Mini:

https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-moving-forward

Tim Cook is on record about this: if you want to securely communicate with an Android user, you must "buy them an Iphone":

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/7/23342243/tim-cook-apple-rcs-imessage-android-iphone-compatibility

If your friend, family member or customer declines to change mobile operating systems, Tim Cook insists that you must communicate without any privacy or security.

Even where Apple tries for security, it sometimes fails ("security is a process, not a product" -B. Schneier). To be secure in a benevolent dictatorship, it must also be an infallible dictatorship. Apple's far from infallible: Eight generations of Iphones have unpatchable hardware defects:

https://checkm8.info/

And Apple's latest custom chips have secret-leaking, unpatchable vulnerabilities:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/03/hackers-can-extract-secret-encryption-keys-from-apples-mac-chips/

Apple's far from infallible – but they're also far from benevolent. Despite Apple's claims, its hardware, operating system and apps are riddled with deliberate privacy defects, introduce to protect Apple's shareholders at the expense of its customers:

https://proton.me/blog/iphone-privacy

Now, antitrust suits are notoriously hard to make, especially after 40 years of bad-precedent-setting, monopoly-friendly antitrust malpractice. Much of the time, these suits fail because they can't prove that tech bosses intentionally built their monopolies. However, tech is a written culture, one that leaves abundant, indelible records of corporate deliberations. What's more, tech bosses are notoriously prone to bragging about their nefarious intentions, committing them to writing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Apple is no exception – there's an abundance of written records that establish that Apple deliberately, illegally set out to create and maintain a monopoly:

https://www.wired.com/story/4-internal-apple-emails-helped-doj-build-antitrust-case/

Apple claims that its monopoly is beneficent, used to protect its users, making its products more "elegant" and safe. But when Apple's interests conflict with its customers' safety and privacy – and pocketbooks – Apple always puts itself first, just like every other corporation. In other words: Apple is unexceptional.

The Cult of Mac denies this. They say that no one wants to use a third-party app store, no one wants third-party payments, no one wants third-party repair. This is obviously wrong and trivially disproved: if no Apple customer wanted these things, Apple wouldn't have to go to enormous lengths to prevent them. The only phones that an independent Iphone repair shop fixes are Iphones: which means Iphone owners want independent repair.

The rejoinder from the Cult of Mac is that those Iphone owners shouldn't own Iphones: if they wanted to exercise property rights over their phones, they shouldn't have bought a phone from Apple. This is the "No True Scotsman" fallacy for distraction-rectangles, and moreover, it's impossible to square with Tim Cook's insistence that if you want private communications, you must buy an Iphone.

Apple is unexceptional. It's just another Big Tech monopolist. Rounded corners don't preserve virtue any better than square ones. Any company that is freed from constraints – of competition, regulation and interoperability – will always enshittify. Apple – being unexceptional – is no exception.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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/2024/03/22/reality-distortion-field/#three-trillion-here-three-trillion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

[vashtijoy]

thank you for such a comprehensive answer! does make me wonder though — the game clearly has no qualms with saying that akechi did kill people directly and did cause deaths indirectly (e.g. the bus incident explicitly stated to have caused fatalities). so why on earth does p5 say the subway train derailment caused no deaths?? this is probably a very weird detail to zero in, but i feel like a heavier train in an enclosed space carrying more people than a bus is much more dangerous. ngl it broke my immersion on my first playthrough a little lol

I know what you mean, lol. Tbh, Akechi is obviously intended to be sympathetic—to be the worst case example of what happens when a kid is exploited by rotten adults and has nobody to help them.

This is why there are so many parallels between his tragic backstory and the stories of a lot of the PTs—he has Futaba's abusive family background, Ryuji's single mom, Yusuke's orphanhood and exploitative father figure, Haru's terrible father, and I'm sure there's something there for Makoto as well.

This is why, at the end of the engine room, he's met not with condemnation but with grace and understanding. This is why, though he does feel sorry for himself at the end and mourn what he's lost, he doesn't squirm and beg and justify himself like the earlier palace bosses—with the exception of Sae. This is why he gets a dramatic self-sacrifice and gets to come back as an antihero, who goes all-out to save the world at the cost of his life in passing, because it's in his personal interests to do so. Akechi is intended to have been sinned against as much, or more, than he has sinned.

At the end of the day, Akechi is a Phantom Thief, even though he's not really on the team, doesn't align with their motives, and almost nobody really likes him—just like them, he's a kid who was placed in an impossible situation, and they all get that. Even while they understand the reality of who he is and what he's done.

This raises the complicated "is he a victim" question again, of course, and the reality is that he's both a victim and perpetrator—like, of course, most criminals. Akechi isn't special. His backstory lets us understand what he's done; it doesn't undo it—and he knows that.

So what's going on, if I can go all Doylian for a second, is that there's an attempt to soft-soap the reality of what Akechi does—to keep him sympathetic. He doesn't shoot people in real life, for instance (with two notable attempted exceptions)—he gives them "mental shutdowns", giving him a layer of insulation from not only the physical reality of murder, but the moral reality of it.

Like the moment he sees Futaba unexpectedly in Leblanc, and ends up chattering oh shit, you're Wakaba Isshiki's— Like the moment on 10/11 that he walks up to Sae to see what she has on her laptop, and it's the Okumura death video, and he nearly vomits; he claps a hand over his eyes, and only then moves it to cover his mouth.

This is the reason he's so visibly unsettled a lot of the time in the interrogation room, why he stares at that dead guard wide-eyed for so long, and stares at dead "Joker" for so long during that cutaway to Sojiro that the gun stops smoking. He is—and we are—almost always insulated from the reality of his acts. tl;dr: you aren't meant to have to think too much about what it means that the pretty boy is a murderer and terrorist, if you don't want to. And that's fine! There is no wrong way to understand the game, no wrong way to play. A huge part of interpreting a work of fiction is what we bring to it ourselves.

But if you want to dig into that reality, it is there to be found. The fact that psychotic breakdowns obviously can be fatal, that Akechi performs them for Shido from the start, from two years before canon. That he performs so many of them that he becomes a detective, to make sure they're properly "cleaned up" himself. The fact that he makes two of the Phantom Thieves orphans. That Shido considers "proper use of the Metaverse" to be eliminating those in his way. That he sells Akechi's services to anyone suitably wealthy and controllable he can find. That, at the start of the game, all of Tokyo is terrified of this plague of accidents, of psychotic breakdowns, and that, per Sae, the incidents have been going on at least since Wakaba Isshiki died—two years before canon.

You also have things like the fact that he clearly negotiates what he does, as you can see in the post-interrogation room conversations with Shido—he can talk his way out of kill orders, or postpone them, as long as he doesn't push it, and he does this. There's no reason to think this isn't part of their dynamic all along. Shido manipulates Akechi with praise, sure, but Akechi also manipulates Shido as much as he can get away with.

There's also the SIU Director, on 7/10, complaining about how "he" (Akechi) is insufficiently brutal and doesn't come up with usably brutal plans. On the other hand, Akechi will, later, come up with the vicious detail of the plan to murder Joker in the interrogation room; that's his plan. He's told what to do (we join that incriminating phone call conveniently halfway), but he comes up with the details himself. He's on an arc, albeit one that isn't always obvious, and a large part of it is that Joker is slowly driving him out of his mind.

I just think Akechi is way more interesting, and that his manner and behaviour make far more sense, if he has done a lot of these things. The main thing that draws my eye is the visible lack of response he has to the atrocities he causes. Going back to that nice conversation you both have on 7/11, you know what he's almost certainly just done there? He's triggered the Goodness Foods car crash, which the evening news will report takes place at 8am on 7/11.

(and writing about this clarified so many things that it, again, became its own post oops.)

The crash kills four people. By the time you're on the train to school, the news is reporting this. Akechi seems completely fine with it all, better than fine—except there are tiny suggestions of something else, if you squint, something far below the numbness to what he does and what he's become; far below the bright surface. Something that will later be riveted in disbelief to the dead guard on the floor of the interrogation room.

That's interesting.