#re-emigrate

[regina-del-cielo]

The mayor of the Italian town Oscar's ancestors emigrated from is putting together a genealogy/people's pictures and he's going to go meet Oscar on the Thursday before Imola to invite him to visit and give him the honorary citizenship

[bitchkovsky]

ngl i miss when i was fixating on actually layered and compelling media like patho and black sails but alas it is braindead girl summer

[mycological-mariner]

Hmm… Cornish Western story… hm

[dinnickhowellslikes]

So cool seeing Emigre's original drawings for their early pixel font Low-Res from the mid 1980s. Thanks the the Letterform Archive for sharing, and Emigre sharing their personal archives with them

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Billionaire-proofing the internet

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

During the Napster wars, the record labels seriously pissed off millions of internet users when they sued over 19,000 music fans, mostly kids, but also grannies, old people, and dead people.

It's hard to overstate how badly the labels behaved. Like, there was the Swarthmore student who was the maintainer of a free/open source search engine that indexed files available in public sharepoints on the LAN. The labels sued him for millions and millions (the statutory damages for digital copyright infringement runs to $150,000 per file) and, when he begged for a settlement, said that they would accept his life's savings, but only if he changed majors and stopped studying Computer Science.

No, really.

What's more, none of the money the labels extracted from teenagers, grandparents (and the dead) went to artists. The labels just kept it all, while continuing to insist that they were doing all this because they wanted to "protect artists."

One thing everyone agreed on was how disgusted we all were with the labels. What we didn't agree on was what to do about it. A lot of us wanted to reform copyright – say, by creating a blanket license for internet music so that artists could get paid directly. This was the systemic approach.

Another group – call them the "individualists" – wanted a boycott. Just stop buying and listening to music from the major labels. Every dollar you spend with a label is being used to fund a campaign of legal terror. Merely enjoying popular music makes you part of the problem.

You can probably guess which group I was in. Leaving aside the futility of "voting with your wallet" (a rigged ballot that's always won by the people with the thickest wallet), I just thought this was bad tactics.

Here's what I would say when people told me we should all stop listening to popular music: "If members of your popular movement are not allowed to listen to popular music, your movement won't be very popular."

We weren't going to make political change by creating an impossible purity test ("Ew, you listen to music from a major label? God, what's wrong with you?"). I mean, for one thing, a lot of popular music is legitimately fantastic and makes peoples' lives better. Popular movements should strive to increase their members' joy, not demand their deprivation. Again, not merely because this is a nice thing to do for people, but also because it's good tactics to make participation in the thing you're trying to do as joyous as possible.

Which brings me to social media. The problem with social media is that the people we love and want to interact with are being held prisoner in walled gardens. The mechanism of their imprisonment is the "switching costs" of leaving. Our friends and communities are on bad social media networks because they love each other more than they hate Musk or Zuck. Leaving a social platform can cost you contact with family members in the country you emigrated from, a support group of people who share your rare disease, the customers or audience you rely on for your livelihood, or just the other parents organizing your kid's little league game.

Hypothetically, you could organize all these people to leave at once, go somewhere else, and re-establish all your social connections. Practically, the "collective action problem" of doing so is nearly insurmountable. This is what platform owners depend on – it's why they know they can enshittify their services without losing users. So long as the pain of using the service is lower than the pain of leaving it, the companies can turn the screws on users to make their lives worse in order to extract more profit from them. This is why Musk killed the block button and why Zuck fired all his moderators. Why bear the expense of doing something nice for users if they'll still stick around even if you cut a ton of headcount and/or expensive compute?

There's a way out of this, thankfully. When social media is federated, then you can leave a server without leaving your friends. Think of it as being similar to changing cell-phone companies. When you switch from Verizon to T-Mobile, you keep your number, you keep your address book and you keep your friends, who won't even know you switched networks unless you tell them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/

There's no reason social media couldn't work this way. You should be able to leave Facebook or Twitter for Mastodon, Bluesky, or any other service and still talk with the people you left behind, provided they still want to talk with you:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

That's how the Fediverse – which Mastodon is part of – works already. You can switch from one Mastodon server to another, and all the people you follow and who follow you will just move over to that new server. That means that if the person or company or group running your server goes sour, you aren't stuck making a choice between the people you love who connect to you on that server, and the pain of dealing with whatever bullshit the management is throwing off:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies

We could make that stronger! Data protection laws like the EU's GDPR and California's CCPA create a legal duty for online services to hand over your data on demand. Arguably, these laws already require your Mastodon server's management to give you the files you need to switch from one server to another, but that could be clarified. Handing these files over to users on demand is really straightforward – even a volunteer running a small server for a few friends will have no trouble living up to this obligation. It's literally just a minute's work for each user.

Another way to make this stronger is through governance. Many of the great services that defined the old, good internet were run by "benevolent dictators for life." This worked well, but failed so badly. Even if the dictator for life stayed benevolent, that didn't make them infallible. The problem of a dictatorship isn't just malice – it's also human frailty. For a service to remain good over long timescales, it needs accountable, responsive governance. That's why all the most successful BDFL services (like Wikipedia) transitioned to community-managed systems:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/10/bdfl/#high-on-your-own-supply

There, too, Mastodon shines. Mastodon's founder Eugen Rochko has just explicitly abjured his role as "ultimate decision-maker" and handed management over to a nonprofit:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/mastodon-becomes-nonprofit-to-make-sure-its-never-ruined-by-billionaire-ceo/

I love using Mastodon and I have a lot of hope for its future. I wish I was as happy with Bluesky, which was founded with the promise of federation, and which uses a clever naming scheme that makes it even harder for server owners to usurp your identity. But while Bluesky has added many, many technically impressive features, they haven't delivered on the long-promised federation:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast

Bluesky sure seems like a lot of fun! They've pulled tens of millions of users over from other systems, and by all accounts, they've all having a great time. The problem is that without federation, all those users are vulnerable to bad decisions by management (perhaps under pressure from the company's investors) or by a change in management (perhaps instigated by investors if the current management refuses to institute extractive measures that are good for the investors but bad for the users). Federation is to social media what fire-exits are to nightclubs: a way for people to escape if the party turns deadly:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

So what's the answer? Well, around Mastodon, you'll hear a refrain that reminds me a lot of the Napster wars: "People who are enjoying themselves on Bluesky are wrong to do so, because it's not federated and the only server you can use is run by a VC-backed for-profit. They should all leave that great party – there's no fire exits!"

This is the social media version of "To be in our movement, you have to stop listening to popular music." Sure, those people shouldn't be crammed into a nightclub that has no fire exits. But thankfully, there is an alternative to being the kind of scold who demands that people leave a great party, and being the kind of callous person who lets tens of millions of people continue to risk their lives by being stuck in a fire-trap.

We can install our own fire-exits in Bluesky.

Yesterday, an initiative called "Free Our Feeds" launched, with a set of goals for "billionaire-proofing" social media. One of those goals is to add the long-delayed federation to Bluesky. I'm one of the inaugural endorsers for this, because installing fire exits for Bluesky isn't just the right thing to do, it's also good tactics:

https://freeourfeeds.com/

Here's why: if a body independent of the Bluesky corporation implements its federation services, then we ensure that its fire exits are beyond the control of its VCs. That means that if they are ever tempted in future to brick up the fire-exits, they won't be able to. This isn't a hypothetical risk. When businesses start to enshittify their services, they fully commit themselves to blocking anything that makes it easy to leave those services.

That's why Apple went so hard after Beeper Plus, a service that enhanced iMessage's security by making conversations between Apple and Android users as private as chats that were confined to Apple users:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/07/blue-bubbles-for-all/#never-underestimate-the-determination-of-a-kid-who-is-time-rich-and-cash-poor

It's why Elon Musk periodically freaks out and suspends users who list their Mastodon userids in their Twitter bios:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-suspends-mastodon-twitter-account-over-elonjet-tracking/

And it's why Meta will suspend your account if you link to Pixelfed, a Fediverse-based alternative to Instagram:

https://www.404media.co/meta-is-blocking-links-to-decentralized-instagram-competitor-pixelfed/

Once upon a time, we had a solid way of overcoming the problem of lock-in. We'd reverse-engineer a proprietary system and make a free, open alternative. We've been hacking fire exits into walled gardens since the Usenet days, with the creation of the alt.* hierarchy:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/altinteroperabilityadversarial

When the corporate owners of Unix started getting all weird about source-code access and user-modifiability, we didn't insist that Unix users were bad people for sticking with a corporate OS. We reverse-engineered Unix and set all those users free:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Project

The answer to Microsoft's proprietary SMB network protocol wasn't a campaign to shame people for having SMB running on their LANs. It was reverse-engineering SMB and making SAMBA, which is now in every single device in your home and office, and it's gloriously free as in speech and free as in beer:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/samba-versus-smb-adversarial-interoperability-judo-network-effects

In the years since, a thicket of laws we colloquially call "IP" has grown up around services and products, and people have literally forgotten that there is an alternative to wheedling people to endure the pain of leaving a proprietary system for a free one. IP has put the imaginations of people who dream of a free internet in chains.

We can do better than begging people to leave a party they're enjoying; we can install our own fucking fire exits. Sure, maybe that means that a lot of those users will stay on the proprietary platform, but at least we'll have given them a way to leave if things go horribly wrong.

After all, there's no virtue in software freedom. The only thing worth caring about is human freedom. The only reason to value software freedom is if it sets humans free.

If I had my way, all those people enjoying themselves on Bluesky would come and enjoy themselves in the Fediverse. But I'm not a purist. If there's a way to use Bluesky without locking myself to the platform, I will join the party there in a hot second. And if there's a way to join the Bluesky party from the Fediverse, then goddamn I will party my ass off.

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

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/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/#everybody-samba

[erebus0dora]

ok so i promised you a rant on Eric Bogosian, and i pinky promise i'll try to keep the story short (those beautiful people i've already privately spewed my fascination at deserve peace and love 💜)

TL;DR: Eric Bogosian is a good researcher and judge of human nature, which honestly shouldn't be surprising given his experience, links below

it is easy to google Eric (i'll call him that not out of disrespect, it's just shorter) and get to a conclusion he's just a slightly awkward old man who had extremely weird youth and gives off a powerful bi vibe just for shits and giggles; which is fair, given the wild way he handles most interviews

but hear me out, i'm not an expert, i'm just a book kind of girl. so i sought out the books, and into the books i looked.

back in 1988 he was nominated for Pulitzer's for his "Talk Radio", and i count that as one of the first cases of him using a real story to weave a (semi)fictional one. it is a powerful play, and a gut-punching movie, but I am mentioning it not because of its ehhh artistic value. in my book, it's a proof of the way he tends to critically re-imagine the things he sees and analyses.

keep that in mind when you google his "Operation 'Nemesis".

he initially started looking into the history of Armenian genocide as into the material worth developing into a plot for a movie. but, in his own words, and i quote, "I wrote this book because I had no choice. The Nemesis story required more attention than a simple screenplay."

he is still not a scientist, mind that - and his book reads as a work of fiction. say, there's no way one can look into the head of a deceased person and know their feelings, but one can guess; and Eric guesses, of course. but the fun part is that he makes educated guesses. nearly for each presumption there's a source. a footnote. a quote.

what really strikes me is that he looked into ONE plot line and fished out a complex slice of history, dripping with CONTEXT. White Russian emigration? it's in there. early stages of oil industry? check. the colourful background of Europe in early XX century? all there.

there's no wonder he spent seven years on this book.

i repeat: SEVEN. YEARS.

call me sapiosexual, but that was the moment when i stopped and thought: ok, THIS IS HOT.

what also impresses me is the way he speaks of his past. he admits he's done wild shit, and adds that the best part was the moment he understood he didn't need to be high to be creative. it's the underlying power of "yeah, been there, got better, SO CAN YOU" that gets me.

to keep things short, i'm adding links:

here's a vid where he speaks of the book on Armenian genocide (i had personal reasons to tear up a bit while listening, ngl)

and here's a vid where he speaks of acting, writing, and improv, that basically broke my art block, for which i am going to be grateful for fucking ever, i guess

(if you got to this point of my rant, you deserve a hug and a respectful kiss on the mouth if you're ok with that. go have a lovely day 💜)

[cosmereplay]

this is actually @stormlightarchivist but anyway PLEASE say more about how the Mink is your lab-designed character

Re: natequarter's post:

reading the stormlight archive is genuinely embarrassing because it feels like one of the characters was literally designed in a lab to appeal to me personally

Ok so the Mink is from the small country next to the big war-like country. There are more people who have emigrated from Herdaz than currently live there, due to war and economics. These are things I connect with deeply for different reasons.

He's also high ranking but he still relates easily to the people who work under him; he treats them with respect. Even when he's pranking them, they trust that he'll return. There's just something about a guy who has found a way to be fully himself even though it's kind of odd, who clearly has something wrong with him but he's taken on the responsibility for that himself; he doesn't treat others poorly for it and in fact he has earned their deep respect and trust.

He also has extremely good reason to not work with Dalinar; however he, more than anyone else in the series, demonstrates what it means to make peace, to work towards establishing a new fragile trust but not giving it away and not "forgiving and forgetting". He neither forgives nor forgets, but he works with his historical and personal enemy, Dalinar Kholin, and enforces his own terms. He KNOWS his worth and the worth of his people. He keeps Herdaz at the forefront of his mind and does things he personally finds distasteful (like aiding the man who invaded his kingdom) in order to benefit Herdaz today.

The way he's able to keep his cool while calling Dalinar out? The way he respects himself and stands up for Herdaz? AUGH it's so awesome, it's so understated, it's so overlooked, it's so brave, it requires so much confidence and internal stability. I fucking love him so much

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Hello Elanor (is it ok to call you that? It’s in your profile but sorry if not!) I have just re read your chris the massage boy saga and cried laughing again, and I had two questions; since your new massage lady also seems to be quitting, have you found a new one? And also do you have a specific tag for your funny stories? Or perhaps a book?

You can call me Elanor! No problem at all. Delighted you're enjoying my nonsense.

SO: she finally left last week, so now the hunt is back on. However, some of the girls she worked with are taking over in the same place, so I need to brave Facebook, go to her page, and see the contact details for them that she put up on the last day. I haven't done it yet, but I'll probably try for next week, so... tbc, I guess. Fingers crossed I don't somehow immediately drive them into early retirement/emigration/etc with my apparent Vibes.

Um, no specific tag for stories in general though, sorry. Although I do have tags for common stories I suppose? My vote for phil tag includes all my stories about my friend Phil, for example. And I suppose there's the Clownfall Saga. I should probably practice better tag hygiene.

Book-wise, I have written a silly werewolf erotica novel set in Wales, a thing I should look at publishing soon. So there's that lol. (It is very silly and I had an absolute blast writing it.)

[qqueenofhades]

Having seen what's currently happening in Venezuela, I feel so terrible for everyone to tried to vote Maduro out, and I worry about the US election. Will Trump and the GOP be able to do the same thing??

I agree that what's happening in Venezuela is bad and scary, but it's also not unexpected (unfortunately), and it doesn't correlate to the US election. It is very much a cautionary tale for us, but in the case of what could happen, not what has happened yet (and which we could and MUST still avoid). Here's why I think that.

First, Maduro is the heir of 25+ years of dictatorship (first the Chavez regime and then his), and that political machine has had a full generation to fix/control everything in Venezuela just as they want it. They've collapsed the economy, driven mass emigration/purges/brain drains, installed corrupt systems and destroyed civil society, staffed the government with cronies who will only ever do what Maduro personally says -- etc. In other words, exactly what Trump and the Republicans aspire to do here in America, but with 25 years' head start, so all those fixes are well entrenched. Outside observers were also warning well ahead of the Venezuelan vote that even an overwhelming majority for the opposition candidate might not be enough, because Maduro and co. can just fix the result however they want with imaginary fantasy numbers. (See Putin's "win" in the Russian presidential "election.") Because dictators all draw from the same playbook regardless of their professed ideological temperament, they always use the same tools.

Next, voting in Venezuela is all-electronic, which is obviously the easiest kind of voting to jigger, and which means that whatever the people actually select has little to no relevance to what gets published, recorded, or proclaimed. Now, despite the Republicans' constant screaming about ELECTION FRAUD, the 2020 elections in America were widely hailed as the safest, most accurate, and fraud-free in the nation's history. (For that matter, multiple investigations afterward have re-confirmed this, and the tiny handful of cases of election fraud that were found were committed by, you guessed it, Republicans.) This did not happen because of the Orange Fuhrer and co., who were busy trying to commit election fraud on their own behalves, but because America, however flawed, is still a participatory liberal democracy and citizens have the right to engage and to do so in a meaningful fashion. We had the entire investigation about how Russia meddled with the election in 2016, and changes were made. Cybersecurity experts were brought in; redundancies and failsafes were introduced; etc., and even the Russian campaign focused on psychological influence rather than actually, physically changing already-cast votes, because that is very, very hard to do in America. We are not an all e-voting nation; there are paper trails, hard-copy ballots, hand recounts, poll observers, election lawyers, and multiple other safeguards that exist. The Republicans have been attacking them as hard as they can, but they're still there.

Thirdly, the Evil Orange tried to fix the elections when he was the sitting president (don't forget the infamous "find me 11,780 votes" phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State that got him slapped with felony charges), but he couldn't do it even then. He also tried a coup as the sitting president, with full discretion as to whether, for example, the National Guard should be deployed to the Capitol on January 6, and that didn't succeed. As such, when he's a disgraced jobless felon who is not the commander-in-chief of the American military and holds no official or political role, he's definitely not getting it done now. There were reforms made to the Electoral Count Act to prevent another January 6, Biden and not Trump would be the president at any other attempted attack on the counting of electoral votes, and I can guarantee Biden would not sit around for three hours watching Fox News and cheering the rioters on if such a thing happened again. Trump has been threatening violence again because that's the only move in his playbook, and he wants to intimidate people into voting for him out of fear that he'll attack them if they don't give him what he wants, like any other psychopathic bully. But that does not mean he actually has the tools to successfully carry it off, and honestly, motherfucker? Try it one more fucking time. I double fucking dog dare you. Biden has 6 months left in his term and total immunity, according to your own SCOTUS. So.

Basically, Venezuela has already been a banana republic for 20+ years, the dictator has had a full generation to destroy it/remake it/turn it into his personal fiefdom, he allows elections only because he already knows they won't change anything or actually remove him from power, and that is precisely what Trump wants to do in the US -- but, and this is crucial, has not done yet. Which is why it is so, so important to Orange-Proof America and get rid of him once and for fucking all on November 5th. We can do it. So yes.

[teatime-tangents-and-toys]

Photos with Cupid Asteria from Monster High G3's Scary Sweet Birthday. I've always been fascinated by Cupid's odd meta-journey and rebooting back into the franchise she emigrated from was a big surprise. The factory failed her hair, though, so these photos are my re-curl! Read my review of her and how I evaluate her among the Cupid incarnations that precede her in this post here.

[mariacallous]

The Communist movement in the West is today made up of a handful of grizzled geriatrics standing around trestle tables exuding a flavour of moth balls. Yet as the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1963: ‘The right-winger needs his Communists badly, and is pathetically reluctant to give them up.’

Which is why braying Marxists are once again at the gates. According to Donald Trump, Joe Biden is ‘controlled’ by ‘Marxists, & Communists’. Elon Musk says ‘neo-Marxists’ and ‘full-on Communism’ are responsible for the estrangement of his daughter. ‘World renowned’ psychology professor Jordan Peterson rails against ‘post-modern Neo-Marxists’ and ‘cultural Marxists’. The conservative pundit James Lindsay claims that anti-racists want to impose a ‘total Racial Bolshevik Revolution’ on America.

There is no shortage of irony here. Isaiah Berlin once observed that a stratagem of totalitarian regimes is to present all situations as critical emergencies. Yet Berlin is too measured a thinker to carry weight among the frenzied populist currents sweeping today’s right. Instead we get initiatives like ARC (the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship) where a person only has to make a certain kind of noise to be welcomed onto the stage and into the fold. A Legatum and Paul Marshall-funded initiative, Arc’s stated aim is to ‘help re-lay the foundations of our civilisation’. In practice this means attacking ‘radical leftists’ and anyone it is expedient to pretend is a ‘radical leftist’. To paraphrase Lionel Trilling, the recent ARC event in East London saw a succession of speakers take turns unleashing a stream of ‘irritable mental gestures which sought to resemble ideas’. Kemi Badenoch claimed that western civilisation would fall without the Tories. Psychology professor Jordan Peterson said the West was in a ‘civilisational moment’. Douglas Murray talked of ‘civilisational renewal’.

Some, like the YouTube pundit Konstantin Kisin, spoke in a more optimistic key. Thanks to Trump’s election victory across the pond, ‘The tide is turning [and] our American friends are leading the way,’ Kisin proclaimed between hammy jokes about Chinese and trans people. ‘DEI, a system of anti-meritocratic discrimination, has been dismantled,’ crowed the alumnus of Clifton College Boarding School (term fees £17,650).

Were screens and short bursts of video not now the dominant sources of information about the world, I suspect a lot of these newly-minted culture warriors would be languishing noisily in obscurity. Instead, as we revert to a pre-literate oral culture, pre-literal pundits are in the ascendant (Kisin has appeared multiple times on BBC current affairs programmes and Badenoch has appeared on his podcast). Intellectuals are being knocked off their perches by influencers; politicians dislodged by game show hosts. As the Times columnist James Marriott has observed:

Among the attributes of oral societies are an addiction to the memorable, such as formulaic and cliché language, ‘heavy’ crudely-characterised personalities (like Cerberus or Donald Trump or Marvel superheroes) and to more violent forms of expression. This is in contrast to print which fosters subtlety, logical argument and emotional distance.

Kisin at least pays tribute to the vanishing world of letters. ‘Words are something of a speciality and a hobby,’ he writes in An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West (2022). Not that you would know it from the prose in this mercifully slim volume, which gurgles with cliches and off-the-shelf banalities. Censorious persons are ‘Orwellian’; bad ideas ‘spread like wild fire’; conversations about difficult subjects ‘have become a way to separate us rather than bring us together’.

Having emigrated to Britain from the Soviet Union aged 10, Kisin credits the West with ‘saving’ him. Today he wants to repay the favour despite nobody asking him to. ‘As people seek to destroy [the West], I want to save it in return,’ he writes. Clearly some are pining for a diminutive Russian saviour: the book was a Sunday Times bestseller. Yet as an expression of love it is the equivalent of a clump of sun-baked Chrysanthemums purloined from a petrol station forecourt. A potted history of the Soviet Union is followed by a torrent of whiney non-sequiturs. Portraits of life under Communism function as a warning that the West is facing ‘the exact same threat’ from progressive reformers.

Conservatives are often the left’s best students. As much as Kisin likes to rail against identity politics, he is quick to use its conventions as a cudgel when the need arrises. The most reactionary arguments in his book are cleverly placed in the mouths of women and token minorities. The pseudo-feminist Camille Paglia blames gender non-conformity for societal ruin. A Black Catholic cardinal is wheeled out to warn about an ‘invasion’ of the West by ‘other cultures’ (perhaps with Sunday Times readers in mind, Kisin wisely emits comments by the Cardinal comparing homosexuality to ‘Nazi-fascism’).

Elsewhere Kisin disparages the ‘lived experience’ of others while expecting us to defer to his own. We must ‘deal with reality as we find it’, warns Kisin, or else find ourselves subject to the ‘cruel lessons’ of the ‘Soviet virus’. It doesn’t take long for the 7 million Ukrainians who perished in the Holodomor to be similarly employed for the purposes of relativism. ‘This tragic chapter of Russia’s past [more tragic for Ukraine one would think] didn’t emerge overnight. It grew slowly from some well-intended but seriously misguided ideas…To a much lesser extent [italics mine], a similar thing is happening across the West in today’s society’.

From Butyrka to bathos. The most grizzled camp prisoner probably did less hard labour than those five words. All the same, it is good to see Kisin taking his own advice to heart and seeing reality as it really is.

Jordan Peterson has been a regular fixture on the lucrative culture war circuit since his confected ‘cancellation’ back in 2016. As the years have rolled by his outfits have taken on the timbre and hue of his politics: everything has become more zany, lurid and bilious. The Peterson of 12 Rules for Life (2018) has been replaced by a blazing eyed YouTube prophet. Somewhere in the Peterson household a dog-eared copy of Iron John is sitting in a drawer gathering dust; today he seeks to begin the reformation by nailing a copy of The Gospels to the boudoirs of ‘the modern whores of Babylon’ (i.e. pornstars and e-girls).

I recently wrote a profile about Douglas Murray for Prospect magazine. Murray comes close to Peterson in terms of popularity. However what most struck me during my research was the gulf between Murray’s public persona (erudite intellectual) and the underwhelming nature of much of his written work. As I wrote in the piece:

Whereas on YouTube anti-woke pugilists may be content to chase the same brass ring into the gutter, a published author (not least one with pretensions to be an intellectual) must work up something more substantive…Yet Murray’s research is sometimes sloppy and the opposition trenches in his culture war are largely manned by straw men.

InThe War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason (2022), Murray misquotes Karl Marx to make it sound like he was in favour of slavery. He also repeats a long-discredited claim that the French philosopher Michel Foucault was a child rapist. Not that these bungling forays into western civilisation are any impediment to claiming a monopoly of insight into how to ‘reconstruct’ it. Indeed, Murray has been lauded by the Wall Street Journal as ‘Europe’s Paul Revere’ (Murray’s radioactive forebodings about the ‘opportunistic infection’ of Islam are apparently redolent enough of Revere’s warnings to the Minutemen that ‘The British are coming’. Talk about waging a war on your own culture.)

Ukraine is a good litmus test as to whether the incessant bleating about western civilisation is anything more than a rhetorical weapon. Are Russian tanks and bullets more or less of an imminent danger than Islam, pronouns and Kamala Harris?

Hard to say, apparently. Prior to the American election, former prime minister Liz Truss stated on numerous occasions that Trump’s election victory was vital for ‘saving’ the West. ‘The world needs Trump,’ preened Kisin, who, like Murray, occasionally professes to care about Ukraine while acting as a stenographer for the politician who has been promising to sell the country out (and is presently doing so). Crawling out of the slimy entrails of Mar-a-Lago on election night, Murray declared triumphantly that Trump was going to ‘show what American leadership on the world stage actually looks like’.

A protection racket is what it looks like. It has taken less than a month for the self-serving prognostications of ‘heterodox’ intellectuals to collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. The hysterical cant about western civilisation was never about the defence of democratic principles - neither at home or from a revanchist Russia. Indeed, Peterson has blamed Nato for the war in Ukraine and pondered whether Putin might be on the right side in the civilisational struggle against ‘wokeness’. Not that it is hard to see why a partnership with Russia might be attractive to our own purveyors of reactionary piffle: the Kremlin also purports to be defending Christendom against gender freedoms and ‘spiritual catastrophe’.

‘This is the most important election of my lifetime,’ proclaimed the Somalian-born pundit (and one-time muse of ‘new’ atheist men of a certain age) Ayaan Hirsi Ali on 7 November 2024. ‘The situation could not be more dire. At stake is the very survival of our republic.’ Predictably enough these words formed part of a larger excretion on why she was voting for Trump. Concerns about the candidate who failed to concede the last election were merely symptomatic of (another stock phrase) ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’. Kamala Harris had to be stopped for the sake of the republic. ‘The Democratic Party is a machine, taken over by the far-left wing of the party,’ Hirsi Ali warned.

As you may have noticed by now, it isn’t only washed up pundits who see the left as the primary adversary to be conquered. American vice president JD Vance recently turned up in Munich (of all places) to lecture Europeans on the ‘threat from within’.

In 1963 the historian Richard Hofstadter noted of McCarthyism that:

Communism was not the target but the weapon, and it is for this reason that so many of the most ardent hunters of impotent domestic Communists were altogether indifferent to efforts to meet the power of international Communism where it really mattered - in the arena of world politics.

McCarthyism was more about discrediting democratic Socialists, social democrats, liberals and supporters of the New Deal than unearthing Soviet subversion. These days the orchestra may have changed but the conductor has not. Bureaucratic McCarthyist intrigue has merely been supplanted by algorithmic appeals to the mob. Hierarchies find new ways of authorising themselves. Every day the envelope is pushed a little further, the rhetoric ratcheted up a little more. As John Ganz has written, we have reached a point where Nazi salutes are treated as an irreverent lark.

It seems clear that Michael Anton’s infamous ‘Flight 93’ essay has been taken as more than a figure of speech by many conservatives. As the Intelligencer describes the piece:

Anton chose the arresting metaphor of Flight 93, the hijacked plane from September 11, 2001, whose passengers stormed the cockpit in a desperate bid to stave off certain death. Electing Trump, he conceded, was risky (like seizing a plane from terrorists midair), but the alternative of electing Hillary Clinton posed certain political and demographic death.

Following the events of January 6, 2021, Anton suggested that the Republicans should prevent a national popular vote from taking place altogether on the basis that it ‘guarantees a Democratic win in every presidential election henceforth’. He was wrong of course but don’t imagine the thought has gone away. In order to preserve a narrow and exclusionary vision of civilisation, many are willing to take such a gamble.

Lest anyone should think this is a North American problem, plenty of castor oil-ish proclamations are being emitted here in Britain. The race science movement appears to have infiltrated Westminster. GB News presenters bleat menacingly about ‘foreign’-looking people walking British streets and champion ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the AFD (following last week’s German election, apologists for the Waffen SS now sit alongside admirers of Putin in the party’s parliamentary group). Right-wing publications advocate for ‘Caesarism’ as an alternative to democracy; or for locking up ‘traitors’ in government for having the audacity to give away Britain’s last African colony. A Conservative peer has been hosting far-right activists in parliament.

Surveying the political landscape, I am reminded of Ignazio Silone’s description of fascism as ‘a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place’. Imaginary enemies can be just as powerful as real ones. You just have to convince enough people that all reform leads to revolution.

[justmenoworries]

I know this is real nitpick-y on my part, but here goes.

Everyone's been criticizing the cast bloat in EarthSpark, rightly so, there are way too many main characters, but what I haven't really seen people talk about is how simultaneously the world of EarthSpark feels really small?

The plot frequently introduces villains, conflicts and concepts that are supposedly world-spanning, like GHOST hunting down every Decepticon left on the planet, Mandroid wanting to wipe all Cybertronians off Earth and Transformers being either on the run or in the field world-wide. But the viewer is limited to one place most of the time with a few assorted characters.

This wouldn't be a problem if the plot was taking place solely in Witwicky, it's a small and isolated place, and if the conflicts were more small-scale and personal. But even here the show gets struck so often by what I like to call Empty World Syndrome. Everything just seems... deserted. There's like two or three people on the streets at any given time. You can easily tell some human models were re-used to add at least some life to the background. Mo and Robbie almost never meet or hang out with other kids. It's just them and their immediate family on a farm.

And that's just the humans. The Cybertronians in EarthSpark consist of two very small groups that even lose members as time goes on. It doesn't feel like those are the remnants of a people that used to populate an entire planet. EarthSpark establishes that most if not all Cybertronians emigrated to Earth with the Cybertronian civil war and that most of them were still on Earth when the space bridge was destroyed. So where are they?

Other shows with a small Cybertronian cast like Prime and Animated found a way around this by confirming that there are more Cybertronians than we see, but our main groups are the only ones currently on Earth, either because the war left the factions scattered across the universe or because the Cybertronians being on our planet was an accident to begin with.

Prime even makes this a point of conflict several times, establishing that the Autobots being severely outnumbered is actually a problem and that they have to manage their resources with the utmost care because they cannot afford to lose even one soldier. I don't get that sense of urgency and dread in EarthSpark. The fact that there are seemingly so few Cybertronians left is never addressed in any way.

And the most frustrating thing about this is that it would be so easy to fix. Establish that there are more Autobot bases on Earth than the one in Witwicky. Show us Optimus and the others contacting them from time to time. Have there be more Decepticons who are on the run, but outside of the US. Heck, maybe a lot of Cybertronians are completely unaligned after the war and just live their best life in other countries. You could even sneak in some really cool cameos that way!

And as for the humans, let the Maltos have relationships outside their families. Have Dot and Alex mention or hang out with people from their old jobs. Have Dot speak about the members of her and Megatron's unit more. Have Alex talk with colleagues and fellow Transformers-enthusiasts. Let Mo and Robbie make friends in school.

[typewritingyip]

Hi ! I don’t know what hour is it where u live but it’s pretty late for me so : apologies for this hehe

LETS BE HONEST HERE : I LOVE YOUR STORY ! Im currently only on like….chapter 4, but

BUT i love the world building, we can see you really thought about all of that deeply

And. *chief kiss*

I have a proposition my dear writer.

If you describe me how you see Hound, Sunstreaker, Sideswipe and Breakdown in this AU, both in human and mech form (important things, like weapons, or facial features for the human part)

Then I want to draw them. I don’t know if I will have the time to actually illustrate this but AT LEAST I wanna have a full image in mind when I read this blorbos in your (amazing) style

Also also it’s funny because I was reading your story and I saw your pfp and I’ve been like ‘eh ? I know this’

And yes. You are the kind person that always like and comment on my drawings and I wanted to say TYSM <333

Oh my gosh, Hi!

I’m so glad you love the story, it’s been entirely amazing to be able to write like I have been. You have made my entire day so much better, thank you!

As for the crew of Arcturus One, man, I don’t even know where to begin. I know I briefly described how the ingrained tech was different for each of them in a different post probably here, but actually describing them and their suits…

Hound is what I’ve pictured as the very typical run of the mill military guy, he’s in his late 20’s/early 30’s and has been piloting for around 10 years. Probably started between 20-22, younger but not the youngest to become a pilot. When I’ve spoken about him out loud, I kinda have described him as a better version of Duke from GI Joe, but a lot less blonde. He’s probably a brunette in my minds eye. He stands without the suit around 5’11, on the fitter side of things, and had perpetual eye-bag syndrome. Mans is always tired. He very much would have had that “boy next door” look about him in his younger days (when he first met his ex-wife *cough*) but yeah. That very typical American who is mostly white but generally has a bit of everything there. He has been known to have facial hair but prefers the military look, just cause he does emulate his father in that respect.

Breakdown is from Ukraine, he is the tall guy of the group like 6’ and above. Very stoic in appearance, but the guy is so kind that he is only really intimidating when you don’t know him. He’s on the older side of things, has been a pilot for around 15 years, and probably is one of the longest standing ones. His number came about when he emigrated to the US, getting things changed and re-organized so he has been a pilot longer than Jazz but not in the same programs till after Jazz was around. He’s the eastern block guy of the group, dry humor and certainly knows more English than he lets on. But he still learned a lot of it from movies and things. I’d put him on the slightly bulkier side of things, he’s put in a lot of hard labor and his mech is harder to control than the others. It’s older and heavier, but familiar.

Now the twins, I probably know the most about their appearance. Being born and raised in Florida, I wanted to give them a bit more history and culture, (make Hound feel like the odd one out, sort of) but their mom was from Cuba and their dad met her when he was visiting from New York. They are fraternal twins and Sides took after his dad while Sunny took after their mom. Meaning Sides got hella straight hair and Sunny has got curls, which he will be the first to say are the biggest pain in space. They both are around 6 foot, not taller than that and are pretty lanky. The reason they became pilots is cause they were going to get arrested for drug dealing and street racing, they weren’t dealing drugs but welcome to America. This happened around 16/17, and they’ve been pilots for about 7 or 8 years, so early to mid 20’s right now. Still pretty young.

So to just briefly explain, Hound remind me of just a better/older looking Duke from GI Joe (comics not movies), Breakdown is Ukrainian with the touches of scaring from growing up behind the iron curtain. Sunstreaker is Cuban-Italian, with more features from his mom’s side. Sideswipe is also Cuban-Italian, with more features from his dad’s side. They look incredibly alike and can be confused for identical but they certainly are fraternal.

Now for the Mech suits, the hardest part for me.

Hound is green and very military themed, kinda take War Machine from marvel but make it typical military green in a way. They still have the smoother edges and rounded corners, unlike the Cybertronian’s. The military wanted to make him look approachable to kids, so he sorta looks like a giant thing wearing a helmet to them, but his visor is whole face (like Soundwave sorta in TFP) It had the ability to light up and darken, it was newer tech that they were attempting to make the mechs seem less threatening (*cough cough* blame vortex *cough cough*) He does not have wings or additional thrusters other than the ones that help him stay upright, so he cannot fly/float. Hence the parachutes in chapter 4. His gun stores in part of his leg just cause there wasn’t many other places it would fit, it’s a hand gun with the ability to add a longer barrel to it to make a rifle. It’s not mounted or anything so it looks kinda like he’s unarmed most of the time.

Breakdown is very utilitarian, I mean it doesn’t look dissimilar from the mech suits that the Russian’s pilots in pacific rim on the bottom half, they got a bunch of regime contractors and engineers together to make a defense system and that’s what he pilots. The head was re-designed on his entering Mecha’s service to be more appealing towards marketing. Hence the orange battle mask, I really haven’t described it so much in person but his suit’s head looks much more cybertronian than the others, spots for eyes etc. I’d say his head is much more Earthspark shaped than TFP but that’s just me. His suit is mostly blue though like TFP. He had a soviet era anti-aircraft style cannon attached at the top of his arm/shoulder but that’s received some upgrades. I think I also mentioned other weapons for him but I can’t find it at the moment.

The twins suits aren’t dissimilar other than for the shape of their heads, weapon choice, and color. Their suit’s aren’t dissimilar in shape to Hot Rods here, but once again lack the door wings. They also only have the partial facial visors, mostly covering where eyes would be. They effectively have blades on the outer side of their arms, the bracers I mention in later chapters, for Sunny that is all he has preferring close combat because his mech is lighter and faster than most other pilots (other than Blur, which your design for him is peak I might add.) Sides has those but one side can pop out to be an actual sword/blade that he prefers to use. That took a lot of trial and error to make work.

—

Wow, that was a lot to write out. Also, if you want more information on them or other character's who will appear in later Arcturus missions (because I have a list, muhahaha) feel free to reach out! I love talking about these guys, I love writing them, and it’s just my current escape from the hellscape that is LSAT prep. Also for everyone, I live in eastern standard time, so New York time zone. Next part will hopefully be out tomorrow night at 4:30 ish.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

Many of us have left the big social media platforms; far more of us wish we could leave them; and even those of us who've escaped from Facebook/Insta and Twitter still spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the people we care about off of them, too.

It's lazy and easy to think that our friends who are stuck on legacy platforms run by Zuckerberg and Musk lack the self-discipline to wean themselves off of these services, or lack the perspective to understand why it's so urgent to get away from them, or that their "hacked dopamine loops" have addicted them to the zuckermusk algorithms. But if you actually listen to the people who've stayed behind, you'll learn that the main reason our friends stay on legacy platforms is that they care about the other people there more than they hate Zuck or Musk.

They rely on them because they're in a rare-disease support group; or they all coordinate their kids' little league carpools there; or that's where they stay in touch with family and friends they left behind when they emigrated; or they're customers or the audience for creative labor.

All those people might want to leave, too, but it's really hard to agree on where to go, when to go, and how to re-establish your groups when you get somewhere else. Economists call this the "collective action problem." This problem creates "switching costs" – a lot of stuff you'll have to live without if you switch from legacy platforms to new ones. The collective action problem is hard to solve and the switching costs are very high:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/

That's why people stay behind – not because they lack perspective, or self-discipline, or because their dopamine loops have been hacked by evil techbro sorcerers who used Big Data to fashion history's first functional mind-control ray. They are locked in by real, material things.

Big Tech critics who attribute users' moral failings or platforms' technical prowess to the legacy platforms' "stickiness" are their own worst enemies. These critics have correctly identified that legacy platforms are a serious problem, but have totally failed to understand the nature of that problem or how to fix it. Thankfully, more and more critics are coming to understand that lock-in is the root of the problem, and that anti-lock-in measures like interoperability can address it.

But there's another major gap in the mainstream critique of social media. Critics of zuckermuskian media claim those services are so terrible because they're for-profit entities, capitalist enterprises hitched to the logic of extraction and profit above all else. The problem with this claim is that it doesn't explain the changes to these services. After all, the reason so many of us got on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram is because they used to be a lot of fun. They were useful. They were even great at times.

When tech critics fail to ask why good services turn bad, that failure is just as severe as the failure to ask why people stay when the services rot.

Now, the guy who ran Facebook when it was a great way to form communities and make friends and find old friends is the same guy who who has turned Facebook into a hellscape. There's very good reason to believe that Mark Zuckerberg was always a creep, and he took investment capital very early on, long before he started fucking up the service. So what gives? Did Zuck get a brain parasite that turned him evil? Did his investors get more demanding in their clamor for dividends?

If that's what you think, you need to show your working. Again, by all accounts, Zuck was a monster from day one. Zuck's investors – both the VCs who backed him early and the gigantic institutional funds whose portfolios are stuffed with Meta stock today – are not patient sorts with a reputation for going easy on entrepreneurs who leave money on the table. They've demanded every nickel since the start.

What changed? What caused Zuck to enshittify his service? And, even more importantly for those of us who care about the people locked into Facebook's walled gardens: what stopped him from enshittifying his services in the "good old days?"

At its root, enshittification is a theory about constraints. Companies pursue profit at all costs, but while you may be tempted to focus on the "at all costs" part of that formulation, you musn't neglect the "profits" part. Companies don't pursue unprofitable actions at all costs – they only pursue the plans that they judge are likely to yield profits.

When companies face real competitors, then some enshittificatory gambits are unprofitable, because they'll drive your users to competing platforms. That's why Zuckerberg bought Instagram: he had been turning the screws on Facebook users, and when Instagram came along, millions of those users decided that they hated Zuck more than they loved their friends and so they swallowed the switching costs and defected to Instagram. In an ill-advised middle-of-the-night memo to his CFO, Zuck defended spending $1b on Instagram on the grounds that it would recapture those Facebook escapees:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagram-documents-emails-mark-zuckerberg-kevin-systrom-hearing

A company that neutralizes, buys or destroys its competitors can treat its users far worse – invade their privacy, cheap out on moderation and anti-spam, etc – without losing their business. That's why Zuck's motto is "it is better to buy than to compete":

https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/zuckerberg-its-better-to-buy-than-compete-is-facebook-a-monopoly-42243

Of course, as a leftist, I know better than to count on markets as a reliable source of corporate discipline. Even more important than market discipline is government discipline, in the form of regulation. If Zuckerberg feared fines for privacy violations, or moderation failures, or illegal anticompetitive mergers, or fraudulent advertising systems that rip off publishers and advertisers, or other forms of fraud (like the "pivot to video"), he would treat his users better. But Facebook's rise to power took place during the second half of the neoliberal era, when the last shreds of regulatory muscle that survived the Reagan revolution were being devoured by GW Bush and Obama (and then Trump).

As cartels and monopolies took over our economy, most government regulators were neutered and captured. Public agencies were stripped of their powers or put in harness to attack small companies, customers, and suppliers who got in the way of monopolists' rent-extraction. That meant that as Facebook grew, Zuckerberg had less and less to fear from government enforcers who might punish him for enshittification where the markets failed to do so.

But it's worse than that, because Zuckerberg and other tech monopolists figured out how to harness "IP" law to get the government to shut down third-party technology that might help users resist enshittification. IP law is why you can't make a privacy-protecting ad-blocker for an app (and why companies are so desperate to get you to use their apps rather than the open web, and why apps are so dismally enshittified). IP law is why you can't make an alternative client that blocks algorithmic recommendations. IP law is why you can't leave Facebook for a new service and run a scraper that imports your waiting Facebook messages into a different inbox. IP law is why you can't scrape Facebook to catalog the paid political disinformation the company allows on the platform:

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

IP law's growth has coincided with Facebook's ascendancy – the bigger Facebook got, the more tempting it was to interoperators who might want to plug new code into it to protect Facebook users, and the more powers Facebook had to block even the most modest improvements to its service. That meant that Facebook could enshittify even more, without worrying that it would drive users to take unilateral, permanent action that would deprive it of revenue, like blocking ads. Once ad-blocking is illegal (as it is on apps), there's no reason not to make ads as obnoxious as you want.

Of course, many Facebook employees cared about their users, and for most of the 21st century, those workers were a key asset for Facebook. Tech workers were in short supply until just a couple years ago, when the platforms started round after round of brutal layoffs – 260,000 in 2023, another 150,000+ in 2024. Facebook workers may be furious about Zuckerberg killing content moderation, but he's not worried about them quitting – not with a half-million skilled tech workers out there, hunting for jobs. Fuck 'em. Let 'em quit:

https://www.404media.co/its-total-chaos-internally-at-meta-right-now-employees-protest-zuckerbergs-anti-lgbtq-changes/

This is what changed: the collapse of market, government, and labor constraints, and IP law's criminalization of disenshittifying, interoperable add-ons. This is why Zuck, an eternal creep, is now letting his creep flag fly so proudly today. Not because he's a worse person, but because he understands that he can hurt his users and workers to benefit his shareholders without facing any consequences. Zuckerberg 2025 isn't the most evil Zuck, he's the most unconstrained Zuck.

Same goes for Twitter. I mean, obviously, there's been a change in management at Twitter – the guy who's enshittifying it today isn't the guy who enshittified it prior to last year. Musk is speedrunning the enshittification curve, and yet Twitter isn't collapsing. Why not? Because Musk is insulated from consequences for fucking up – he's got a huge cushion of wealth, he's got advertisers who are desperate to reach his users, he's got users who can't afford to leave the service, he's got IP law that he can use to block interoperators who might make it easier to migrate to a better service. He was always a greedy, sadistic asshole. Now he's an unconstrained greedy, sadistic asshole. Musk 2025 isn't a worse person than Musk 2020. He's just more free to act on his evil impulses than he was in years gone by.

These are the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints. If your users can't leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit.

That's why we got Jack Welch and his acolytes when we did. There were always evil fuckers just like them hanging around, but they didn't get to run GM until Ronald Reagan took away the constraints that would have punished them for turning GE into a giant pile of shit. Every economy is forever a-crawl with parasites and monsters like these, but they don't get to burrow into the system and colonize it until policymakers create rips they can pass through.

In other words, the profit motive itself is not sufficient to cause enshittification – not even when a for-profit firm has to answer to VCs who would shut down the company or fire its leadership in the face of unsatisfactory returns. For-profit companies chase profit. The enshittifying changes to Facebook and Twitter are cruel, but the cruelty isn't the point: the point is profits. If the fines – or criminal charges – Facebook faced for invading our privacy exceeded the ad-targeting revenue it makes by doing so, it would stop spying on us. Facebook wouldn't like it. Zuck would hate it. But he'd do it, because he spies on us to make money, not because he's a voyeur.

To stop enshittification, it is not necessary to eliminate the profit motive – it is only necessary to make enshittification unprofitable.

This is not to defend capitalism. I'm not saying there's a "real capitalism" that's good, and a "crony capitalism" or "monopoly capitalism" that's bad. All flavors of capitalism harm working people and seek to shift wealth and power from the public and democratic institutions to private interests. But that doesn't change the fact that there are, indeed, different flavors of capitalism, and they have different winners and losers. Capitalists who want to sell apps on the App Store or reach customers through Facebook are technofeudalism's losers, while Apple, Facebook, Google, and other Big Tech companies are technofeudalism's great winners.

Smart leftism pays attention to these differences, because they represent the potential fault lines in capitalism's coalition. These people all call themselves capitalists, they all give money and support to political movements that seek to crush worker power and human rights – but when the platforms win, the platforms' business customers lose. They are irreconcilably on different sides of a capitalism-v-capitalism fight that is every bit as important to them as the capitalism-v-socialism fight.

I'm saying that it's good praxis to understand these divisions in capitalism, because then we can exploit those differences to make real, material gains for human thriving and worker rights. Lumping all for-profit businesses together as identical and irredeemable is bad tactics.

Legacy social media is at a turning point. Two new systems built on open standards have emerged as a credible threat to the zuckermuskian model: Mastodon (built on Activitypub) and Bluesky (built on Atproto). The former is far more mature, with a huge network of federated servers run by all different kinds of institutions, from hobbyists to corporations, and it's overseen by a nonprofit. The latter has far more users, and is a VC-backed corporate entity, and while it is hypothetically federatable, there are no Bluesky services apart from the main one that you can leave for if Bluesky starts to enshittify.

That means that Bluesky has a ton of captive users, and has the lack of constraint that characterizes the enshittified legacy platforms it has tempted tens of millions of users away from. This is not a good place to be in, because it means that if the current management choose to enshittify Bluesky, they can, and it will be profitable. It also means that the company's VCs understand that they could replace the current management and replace them with willing enshittifiers and make more money.

This is why Bluesky is in a dangerous place: not because it is backed by VCs, not because it is a for-profit entity, but because it has captive users and no constraints. It's a great party in a sealed building with no fire exits:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

Last week, I endorsed a project called Free Our Feeds, whose goals include hacking some fire exits into Bluesky by force majeure – that is, independently standing up an alternative Bluesky server that people can retreat to if Bluesky management changes, or has a change of heart:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/#everybody-samba

For some Mastodon users, Free Our Feeds is dead on arrival – why bother trying to make a for-profit project safer for its users when Mastodon is a perfectly good nonprofit alternative? Why waste millions developing a standalone Bluesky server rather than spending that money improving things in the Fediverse.

I believe strongly in improving the Fediverse, and I believe in adding the long-overdue federation to Bluesky. That's because my goal isn't the success of the Fediverse – it's the defeat of enshtitification. My answer to "why spend money fixing Bluesky?" is "why leave 20 million people at risk of enshittification when we could not only make them safe, but also create the toolchain to allow many, many organizations to operate a whole federation of Bluesky servers?" If you care about a better internet – and not just the Fediverse – then you should share this goal, too.

Many of the Fediverse's servers are operated by for-profit entities, after all. One of the Fediverse's largest servers (Threads) is owned by Meta. Threads users who feel the bite of Zuckerberg's decision to encourage homophobic, xenophobic and transphobic hate speech will find it easy to escape from Threads: they can set up on any Fediverse server that is federated with Threads and they'll be able to maintain their connections with everyone who stays behind.

The existence of for-profit servers in the Fediverse does not ruin the Fediverse (though I wouldn't personally use one of them). The fact that multiple neo-Nazi groups run their own Mastodon servers does not ruin the Fediverse (though I certainly won't use their servers). Not even the fact that Donald Trump's Truth Social is a Mastodon server does anything to ruin the Fediverse (not using that one, either).

This is the strength of federated, federatable social media – it disciplines enshittifiers by lowering switching costs, and if enshittifiers persist, it makes it easy for users to escape unshitted, because they don't have to solve the collective action problem. Any user can go to any server at any time and stay in touch with everyone else.

Mastodon was born free: free code, with free federation as a priority. Bluesky was not: it was born within a for-profit public benefit corporation whose charter offers some defenses against enshittification, but lacks the most decisive one: the federation that would let users escape should escape become necessary.

The fact that Mastodon was born free is quite unusual in the annals of the fight for a free internet. Most of the internet was born proprietary and had freedom foisted upon it. Unix was born within Bell Labs, property of the convicted monopolist AT&T. The GNU/Linux project set it free.

SMB was born proprietary within corporate walls of Microsoft, another corporate monopolist. SAMBA set it free.

The Office file formats were also born proprietary within Microsoft's walled garden: they were set free by hacker-activists who fought through a thick bureaucratic morass and Microsoft fuckery (including literally refusing to allow chairs to be set for advocates for Open Document Format) to give us formats that underlie everything from LibreOffice to Google Docs, Office365 to your web browser.

There is nothing unusual, in other words, about hacking freedom into something that is proprietary or just insufficiently free. That's totally normal. It's how we got almost everything great about computers.

Mastodon's progenitors should be praised for ensuring their creation was born free – but the fact that Bluesky isn't free enough is no reason to turn our back on it. Our response to anything that locks in the people we care about must be to shatter those locks, not abandon the people bound by the locks because they didn't heed to our warnings.

Audre Lorde is far smarter than me, but when she wrote that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," she was wrong. There is no toolset better suited to conduct an orderly dismantling of a structure than the tools that built it. You can be sure it'll have all the right screwdriver bits, wrenches, hexkeys and sockets.

Bluesky is fine. It has features I significantly prefer to Mastodon's equivalent. Composable moderation is amazing, both a technical triumph and a triumph of human-centered design:

https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

I hope Mastodon adopts those features. If someone starts a project to copy all of Bluesky's best features over to Mastodon, I'll put my name to the crowdfunding campaign in a second.

But Mastodon has one feature that Bluesky sorely lacks – the federation that imposes antienshittificatory discipline on companies and offers an enshittification fire-exit for users if the discipline fails. It's long past time that someone copied that feature over to Bluesky.

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

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/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis

[scotianostra]

Happy 75th Birthday singer John Paul Young, born June 21st 1950.

Young was born John Inglis Young in Bridgeton, Glasgow, but age 11 his parents James and Agnes emigrated to Australia on board the SS Canberra where he quickly learned to imitate the local accent to avoid being teased by his classmates.

It was with this newly learned voice that he started singing, joining a production of Jesus Christ Superstar and becoming the lead singer for rock band Elm Tree in the 1970s. During one of their performances he was spotted by manager and sometimes-producer Simon Napier-Bell, who asked him to record an overdub for a song called "Pasadena." That song was written by Harry Vanda and George Young of the Easybeats, who were impressed enough with him to become John Paul Young's songwriters, penning a string of pop songs that gave him chart success in Australia as well as Europe and Asia.

t wasn't until the late '70s that he became world-famous, first for the disco song "Standing in the Rain," and then for the biggest hit of his career, "Love Is in the Air." John Paul Young attributed the song's success to the direction of George Young, who had told him to make the song casual by singing it as if it were a conversation. Subsequent singles either unsuccessfully attempted to re-create the disco formula of "Standing in the Rain" or turned towards rock, which gave him several more hits within Australia in the early '80s. Young eventually retired from singing to become a radio DJ, but came out of retirement in 1992 when a version of "Love Is in the Air" was used on the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann's film Strictly Ballroom and the song became a hit once again. After performing his old hits at live concerts for another decade, including a performance at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, he returned to the studio with Harry Vanda's Flashpoint Music in 2006 to record a new album, In Too Deep.

Young is arguably more well known in his adopted homeland and has appeared in many shows over there including their version of Strictly Come Dancing called Dancing with the stars. 2009, Young was inducted into the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Hall of Fame and Australia awarded him with the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for service to the performing arts as a singer and songwriter, and through support for a range of charitable organisations.

For many years, Young has supported children's charities, he is also an avid environmentalist, supporting Landcare projects in his local community. Last year he appeared at The 2019 Sydney Royal Edinburgh, a touring version of the show from the capital city.

In 2022, he released his first new song in 15 years, "Felt Like Love", and performed nationally on his anniversary tour 50 Years Young. Unfortunately e was forced to cancel much of the tour due to ongoing health issues.

[indignantlemur]

Various Andorian Headcanons:

The list became so long that tumblr wouldn't let me add more, so I'm breaking this up into separate posts.

Andorians and Food

Andorians and the Sea

Andorian Governing Bodies & The Role of Nepotism

Andorian Marriage Dynamics & Divorce

Andorian Proposals

Andorian Religion & Spirituality (And horror stories)

The Andorian Imperial Clan

Andorian Hair

Andorian Holidays

Andorian Courtship Ring Metallurgy

Andorian Medical Professionals

Andorian Awards and Commendations

Andorians and Figure Skating

Andorians and Dancing

Andorians and Currency

The Andorian Facepalm?

Andorian-Vulcan relations pre-ST:ENT

Andorian Language and Conlang

Andorian Weddings and Funerals

Andorian Attitudes on Interspecies Relationships

Andorian-Human Hybridization

The Am Tal and The Andorian Incident

Andorian Clan Identification and Chitin Patterns

Andorian Names

Andorians and Adoption

Clanless Andorians

Andorians and Rites of Passage into Adulthood

The Code of the Ushaan and the Holmgang

Andorian Fairy Tales

Kelenthor the Clanless and Watercolours

Human-Andorian First Contact headcanons

Andorian Fashion and Fabrics

Are Andorians Extroverts or Introverts?

Andorian Family Dynamics

Andorian Cosmetics and Perfumes

Andorian Arts: Theatre/Opera/Poetry/Etc

Andorian Quad Marriages vs Bonds

Temperatures on Andoria

Andorian Humour and Philosophy

The Spirits of Andoria

Andorian Blood Chemistry RE: Toxins and Cyanide

Andorian Homes and Decor

Star Trek Species in the Star Wars Universe

Andorian Mate Selection (Pheromones, Personality Traits, & More)

Andorians on Punks and Goths

Andorians on Diss Tracks

Andorians and Crime & Punishment

Andorian Etiquette vs Human Etiquette

Kelenthor the Clanless - More lore!

Andorian Lore & Character Lore tidbits

Character Lore Tidbits: Thoris

Character Lore Tidbits: Shral

Character Lore Tidbits: Thelen

Andorians and UV Exposure: Do Andorians Tan?

Andorians and Cave Diving

Character Lore: Shral's Family & Childhood

Andorian Conservation Efforts & Environmentalism

Andorian Education and Childcare

Andorians of Human Family Units & Thoris' POV in Ch 5

Andorian Quads and Larger Arrangements

Character Lore Tidbits: Thoris' Childhood

Thoris' Thoughts on Shral's Pining?

Vulcan and Andorian Cultural Compatibilities

Human-Andorian First Contact: Revisited

Andorian Opinions on Romulans

Andorians, Rodeos, and The Post-Scarcity Implications for the Terran Meat Industry

Andorian Jewelry

Shran, Archer, Trip, T'Pol and TATV in Emigre

Changes to Andorian Culture Over Time

Emigre Crew vs Carolers

What Dagmar Got Everyone For Christmas

Andorians and Salt

Thoris' Sleeping Arrangements in Emigre

Andorian Cryptids

What If the Mission in ENT 'Broken Bow' Had Failed?

If Shral Brought Dagmar to Meet His Family

Who Are Thoris' Spouses?

WIP Ask: Mirror 'Verse Emigre

How Old Is Thoris?: Andorian vs Human Lifespans

Character Lore: Emperor Rissithiath th'Zaa'Kor

Shrancher and Andorian Commando headcanons

Andorian Friendship & Human Antics

Andorian Superstitions

Transgender and Non-Binary Individuals in Andorian Society

Vilashral's Family and Potential Objections to Dagmar

Andorian Clans, Parentage, and Another Thoris Tidbit

The Cast Members' Guilty Pleasures

The Casts' Most Embarrassing Memories

Andorian Lawyers and Interplanetary Law

Headcanons about Andorian Doctors

Andoria's Historical Timeline

Am Tal Opsec

Broken Bow: Humans as a Client Species

-> RETURN to Master Post

-> GO TO Emigre Deep Lore Snippets

-> GO TO Emigre General Discussions