#revealed preferences

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Freedom of reach IS freedom of speech

The online debate over free speech suuuuucks, and, amazingly, it’s getting worse. This week, it’s the false dichotomy between “freedom of speech” and “freedom of reach,” that is, the debate over whether a platform should override your explicit choices about what you want to see:

https://seekingalpha.com/news/3849331-musk-meets-twitter-staff-freedom-of-reach-new-ideas-on-human-verification

It’s wild that we’re still having this fight. It is literally the first internet fight! The modern internet was born out of an epic struggled between “Bellheads” (who believed centralized powers should decide how you used networks) and “Netheads” (who believed that services should be provided and consumed “at the edge”):

https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/

The Bellheads grew out of the legacy telco system, which was committed to two principles: universal service and monetization. The large telcos were obliged to provide service to everyone (for some value of “everyone”), and in exchange, they enjoyed a monopoly over the people they connected to the phone system.

That meant that they could decide which services and features you had, and could ask the government to intervene to block competitors who added services and features they didn’t like. They wielded this power without restraint or mercy, targeting, for example, the Hush-A-Phone, a cup you stuck to your phone receiver to muffle your speech and prevent eavesdropping:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone

They didn’t block new features for shits and giggles, though — the method to this madness was rent-extraction. The iron-clad rule of the Bell System was that anything that improved on the basic service had to have a price-tag attached. Every phone “feature” was a recurring source of monthly revenue for the phone company — even the phone itself, which you couldn’t buy, and had to rent, month after month, year after year, until you’d paid for it hundreds of times over.

This is an early and important example of “predatory inclusion”: the monopoly carriers delivered universal service to all of us, but that was a prelude to an ugly, parasitic, rent-seeking way of doing business:

https://lpeproject.org/blog/predatory-inclusion-a-long-view-of-the-race-for-profit/

It wasn’t just the phone that came with an unlimited price-tag: everything you did with the phone was also a la carte, like the bananas-high long-distance charges, or even per-minute charges for local calls. Features like call waiting were monetized through recurring monthly charges, too.

Remember when Caller ID came in and you had to pay $2.50/month to find out who was calling you before you answered the phone? That’s a pure Bellhead play. If we applied this principle to the internet, then you’d have to pay $2.50/month to see the “from” line on an email before you opened it.

Bellheads believed in “smart” networks. Netheads believed in what David Isenberg called “The Stupid Network,” a “dumb pipe” whose only job was to let some people send signals to other people, who asked to get them:

https://www.isen.com/papers/Dawnstupid.html

This is called the End-to-End (E2E) principle: a network is E2E if it lets anyone receive any message from anyone else, without a third party intervening. It’s a straightforward idea, though the spam wars brought in an important modification: the message should be consensual (DoS attacks, spam, etc don’t count).

The degradation of the internet into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of text from the other four” (h/t Tom Eastman) meant the end of end-to-end. If you’re a Youtuber, Tiktoker, tweeter, or Facebooker, the fact that someone explicitly subscribed to your feed does not mean that they will, in fact, see your feed.

The platforms treat your unambiguous request to receive messages from others as mere suggestions, a “signal” to be mixed into other signals in the content moderation algorithm that orders your feed, mixing in items from strangers whose material you never asked to see.

There’s nothing wrong in principal with the idea of a system that recommends items from strangers. Indeed, that’s a great way to find people to follow! But “stuff we think you’ll like” is not the same category as “stuff you’ve asked to see.”

Why do companies balk at showing you what you’ve asked to be shown? Sometimes it’s because they’re trying to be helpful. Maybe their research, or the inferences from their user surveillance, suggests that you actually prefer it that way.

But there’s another side to this: a feed composed of things from people is fungible. Theoretically, you could uproot that feed from one platform and settle it in another one — if everyone you follow on Twitter set up an account on Mastodon, you could use a tool like Movetodon to refollow them there and get the same feed:

https://www.movetodon.org/

A feed that is controlled by a company using secret algorithms is much harder for a rival to replicate. That’s why Spotify is so hellbent on getting you to listen to playlists, rather than albums. Your favorite albums are the same no matter where you are, but playlists are integrated into services.

But there’s another side to this playlistification of feeds: playlists and other recommendation algorithms are chokepoints: they are a way to durably interpose a company between a creator and their audience. Where you have chokepoints, you get chokepoint capitalism:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

That’s when a company captures an audience inside a walled garden and then extracts value from creators as a condition of reaching them, even when the audience requests the creator’s work. With Spotify, that manifests as payola, where creators have to pay for inclusion on playlists. Spotify uses playlists to manipulate audiences into listening to sound-alikes, silently replacing the ambient artists that listeners tune in to hear with work-for-hire musicians who aren’t entitled to royalties.

Facebook’s payola works much the same: when you publish a post on Facebook, you have to pay to boost it if you want it to reach the people who follow you — that is, the people who signed up to see what you post. Facebook may claim that it does this to keep its users’ feeds “uncluttered” but that’s a very thin pretense. Though you follow friends and family on Facebook, your feed is weighted to accounts willing to cough up the payola to reach you.

The “uncluttering” excuse wears even thinner when you realize that there’s no way to tell a platform: “This isn’t clutter, show it to me every time.” Think of how the cartel of giant email providers uses the excuse of spam to block mailing lists and newsletters that their users have explicitly signed up for. Those users can fish those messages out of their spam folders, they can add the senders to their address books, they can write an email rule that says, “If sender is X, then mark message as ‘not spam’” and the messages still go to spam:

https://doctorow.medium.com/dead-letters-73924aa19f9d

One sign of just how irredeemably stupid the online free expression debate is that we’re arguing over stupid shit like whether unsolicited fundraising emails from politicians should be marked as spam, rather than whether solicited, double-opt-in newsletters and mailing lists should be:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/republican-committee-sues-google-over-email-spam-filters/

When it comes to email, the stuff we don’t argue about is so much more important than the stuff we do. Think of how email list providers blithely advertise that they can tell you the “open rate” of the messages that you send — which means that they embed surveillance beacons (tracking pixels) in every message they send:

https://www.wired.com/story/how-email-open-tracking-quietly-took-over-the-web/

Sending emails that spy on users is gross, but the fucking disgusting part is that our email clients don’t block spying by default. Blocking tracking pixels is easy as hell, and almost no one wants to be spied on when they read their email! The onboarding process for webmail accounts should have a dialog box that reads, “Would you like me to tell creepy randos which emails you read?” with the default being “Fuck no!” and the alternative being “Hurt me, Daddy!”

If email providers wanted to “declutter” your inbox, they could offer you a dashboard of senders whose messsages you delete unread most of the time and offer to send those messages straight to spam in future. Instead they nonconsensually intervene to block messages and offer no way to override those blocks.

When it comes to recommendations, companies have an unresolvable conflict of interest: maybe they’re interfering with your communications to make your life better, or maybe they’re doing it to make money for their shareholders. Sorting one from the other is nigh impossible, because it turns on the company’s intent, and it’s impossible to read product managers’ minds.

This is intrinsic to platform capitalism. When platforms are getting started, their imperative is to increase their user-base. To do that, they shift surpluses to their users — think of how Amazon started off by subsidizing products and deliveries.

That lured in businesses, and shifted some of that surplus to sellers — giving fat compensation to Kindle authors and incredible reach to hard goods sellers in Marketplace. More sellers brought in more customers, who brought in more sellers.

Once sellers couldn’t afford to leave Amazon because of customers, and customers couldn’t afford to leave Amazon because of sellers, the company shifted the surplus to itself. It imposed impossible fees on sellers — Amazon’s $31b/year “advertising” business is just payola — and when sellers raised prices to cover those fees, Amazon used “Most Favored Nation” contracts to force sellers to raise prices everywhere else.

The enshittification of Amazon — where you search for a specific product and get six screens of ads for different, worse ones — is the natural end-state of chokepoint capitalism:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

That same enshittification is on every platform, and “freedom of speech is not freedom of reach” is just a way of saying, “Now that you’re stuck here, we’re going to enshittify your experience.”

Because while it’s hard to tell if recommendations are fair or not, it’s very easy to tell whether blocking end-to-end is unfair. When a person asks for another person to send them messages, and a third party intervenes to block those messages, that is censorship. Even if you call it “freedom of reach,” it’s still censorship.

For creators, interfering with E2E is also wage-theft. If you’re making stuff for Youtube or Tiktok or another platform and that platform’s algorithm decides you’ve broken a rule and therefore your subscribers won’t see your video, that means you don’t get paid.

It’s as if your boss handed you a paycheck with only half your pay in it, and when you asked what happened to the other half, your boss said, “You broke some rules so I docked your pay, but I won’t tell you which rules because if I did, you might figure out how to break them without my noticing.”

Content moderation is the only part of information security where security-through-obscurity is considered good practice:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

That’s why content moderation algorithms are a labor issue, and why projects like Tracking Exposed, which reverse-engineer those algorithms to give creative workers and their audiences control over what they see, are fighting for labor rights:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/tracking-exposed-demanding-gods-explain-themselves

We’re at the tail end of a ghastly, 15-year experiment in neo-Bellheadism, with the big platforms treating end-to-end as a relic of a simpler time, rather than as “an elegant weapon from a more civilized age.”

The post-Twitter platforms like Mastodon and Tumblr are E2E platforms, designed around the idea that if someone asks to hear what you have to say, they should hear it. Rather than developing algorithms to override your decisions, these platforms have extensive tooling to let you fine-tune what you see.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/08/locus-of-individuation/#publish-then-filter

This tooling was once the subject of intense development and innovation, but all that research fell by the wayside with the rise of platforms, who are actively hostile to third party mods that gave users more control over their feeds:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/27/og-app-promises-you-an-ad-free-instagram-feed/

Alas, lawmakers are way behind the curve on this, demanding new “online safety” rules that require firms to break E2E and block third-party de-enshittification tools:

https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/online-safety-made-dangerous/

The online free speech debate is stupid because it has all the wrong focuses:

Focusing on improving algorithms, not whether you can even get a feed of things you asked to see;

Focusing on whether unsolicited messages are delivered, not whether solicited messages reach their readers;

Focusing on algorithmic transparency, not whether you can opt out of the behavioral tracking that produces training data for algorithms;

Focusing on whether platforms are policing their users well enough, not whether we can leave a platform without losing our important social, professional and personal ties;

Focusing on whether the limits on our speech violate the First Amendment, rather than whether they are unfair:

https://doctorow.medium.com/yes-its-censorship-2026c9edc0fd

The wholly artificial distinction between “freedom of speech” and “freedom of reach” is just more self-serving nonsense and the only reason we’re talking about it is that a billionaire dilettante would like to create chokepoints so he can extract payola from his users and meet his debt obligations to the Saudi royal family.

Billionaire dilettantes have their own stupid definitions of all kinds of important words like “freedom” and “discrimination” and “free speech.” Remember: these definitions have nothing to do with how the world’s 7,999,997,332 non-billionaires experience these concepts.

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

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

William Shaw Antliff (modified) https://www.macleans.ca/history/this-canadian-private-wrote-and-saved-hundreds-of-letters-during-the-first-world-war/

Public domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_Canada#Posthumous_works

[Image ID: A handwritten letter from a WWI soldier that has been redacted by military censors; the malevolent red eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey has burned through the yellowing paper.]

[counting-stars-gayly]

I’m actually LOVING how Rick Riordan, and the other writers of the show, took his initial concept of a Percabeth rivalry fueled by that of their parents and kind of turned it on its head?

Now, instead of Annabeth being wary of Percy because he’s a son of Poseidon, he’s wary of her because she made a callous impression on him. They get off to a rocky start even before finding out who Percy’s father is, and when they finally do, Annabeth doesn’t care. Instead of them fighting because of who their parents are, they’re fighting over their own opposed worldviews.

Then, instead of them arguing over which of the gods is cooler and who was right in the story of Medusa, they realize that, just like Medusa, Annabeth is a victim of her mother and that, unlike Medusa, she is a far kinder and stronger person, unwilling to repeat the cycle of hurt. They realize that, like his father, Percy often acts without considering potential consequences and that, unlike his father, he is a far kinder and stronger person, willing to step up for someone he wronged and whom he cares about.

Instead of Percy and Annabeth’s rivalry being focused on that of their parents, it’s focused on who they are, themselves. But the path to friendship is still the same: a realization that they have each other’s backs, no matter what, because they’re not their parents after all.

[0fps]

JANE DOE ❖ undercover r&b

The big bad daddy who cussed you out every day is gone and yet you still miss him. What are you, a bunch of daddy's boys?

[beescake]

back in the day we had pantskat

now we have sagg sollux

[daydreamerwonderkid]

Okay, but y'all can't deny she fucking ate though

[tblsomedoodles]

The Preferable Alternative-prologue-part 2

Start - Previous (just start) - Next

And here we go! : )

[rocketrouquine]

What are we putting on the wall now to replace the Francis Bacon ?

(…)

Ok let’s leave it bare for now… wait for revelation.

This is the wall in question. And the revelation, you guessed it.

They are insane.

[bet-on-me-13]

The one where Bruce is the asshole (again)

So! We have a typical story where the JLA finds out about the Situation in Amity.

Whichever way they find out doesn't matter, but either way they end up sending Batman to do a threat analysis and review of whether this requires their attention.

And while there, he runs into a Kid who obviously needs to be saved from his Abusive Home. Look at him, he's far too thin, his grades are horrible, he has many unexcused absences, and he has bruises hidden under his clothes.

Even after figuring out that Danny is Phantom the local Hero, he thinks Danny needs to be saved from his Parents.

I mean, it's plain to see! They Hates Ghosts with a Passion, negelct their son very often, shoot at him nearly every day, and are probably the ones who killed him in the first place!

So, with no input from Danny himself, Bruce calls CPS on the Fentons and uses his Wealth to expedite the process and avoid the actual Investigation. (I mean, why would you even need one? It's so obviously a bad home!)

The Fenton's are arrested, and Bruce reveals that Danny is Phantom to convince the Courts that they are horrible people for shooting at their own son, and that they should be locked up (ignoring the horrified looks on their faces, probably cause they were living with a Ghost for so long, thats probably why).

He immediately offers to adopt Danny, even when Danny vehemently refuses his offer. He knows that Danny will come around to it, he's doing this for his own good. He still thinks his Parents were good people, and not thr Villains they really were.

Meanwhile Danny's life has been completely uprooted thanks to the self-righteous machinations of an Adoption Crazed Fruitloop! And not even the usual one!

Sure his parents were often busy with their work, but they Always set aside time to hang out with their kids and make sure they were okay. They never abused him, the neglect was only for like a month or two when the portal before they got their act together and apologized for it, and (most importantly) THEY DIDN'T KNOW he was a Halfa when they shot at him! They only found out when the ASSHOLE revealed his Identity in Court!

And Danny is Extra enraged by that part. The Adoption Crazed Fruitloop had revealed his secret identity for the ENTIRE WORLD TO HEAR!

He would never be able to live a normal life anymore, even if he managed to get away from the Moron who caused all this!

Bruce Wayne was a Villain in his eyes.

He ripped him from his home and from his family (basically kidnapped), revealed his identity to the world so he was forced to stay with him for fear of the GIW, and spun the whole story so that it looked like he was the Good Guy in this!?

It was official. Danny Hates Bruce Wayne, possibly more than anyone else in the World.

And that's a High Bar.

[kewpiekills]

commission for arlosexual on twitter of Shorty, i had such a fun time working on him! pinups are my favorite, but i’m especially fond of martini pinups!!

[14dayswithyou]

[REVOKED] [RETAINED] [RED̴A̸C̵͍̔T̵̰̓E̸̘̽D̸̳̻͕́̒]̵̱̈́̋

[pillowspace]

The occasional urge to doodle what my original theory on Loop was that I firmly believed to be true until the very moment of the reveal, for sheer fondness of the completely false and oblivious world I lived in for my playthrough

[charamuscadmango]

But when Harmonia shines...

[t00thpasteface]

here's a quick reference list of a lot of the fonts i've used (and overused) on this blog, just in case anyone was curious to try one of these out with their own stuff!

[benevolenterrancy]

@hereticcryptid I appear to be slowly but surely developing an entire series about how Hensheng and Baxia apparently get fed up with their owners' inability to express their feelings and take matters into their own hands...

[charmac]

How are you feeling about S17? I'm getting reaaal worried that it's going to be terrible. No Glenn in the writers room? A crossover episode?? Rob's gradual transformation into pondslime??? Help

Pondslime 😭Lmfao

I'm feeling more than fine about 17, really truly. I don't think anyone should be worried at all.

I think sometimes my interactions with Glenn come off a little more serious or abrasive than they really happened in real life (because we have to shout due to how loud it is in the bars), and my immediate transcription is just to get people *information*, which really doesn't convey tone.

For example, reporting that Glenn said "you don't want to know" in response to me asking for any teasers (as to plots this season) was met with a lot of "oh so this season is gonna suck" on Twitter, and that could not be further than the truth (sorry to the people I split-react blocked for saying that lol). In hindsight I get the reaction, because written out it's a response that can be easily misinterpreted and reads as potentially concerning, but know that when Glenn said "you don't want to know" he looked like this:

And when I was genuinely just asking for script information (regarding writers of individual scripts after he mentioned they had broken already) and mentioned Nina (Inflates) and Ross (DTAMHD), he gushed about both of them and then said, transcribed word for word, "It's been a good room, I'll say this it's been a great room. It's been an all-star room, it's been...like, breaking the stories this year has been really fun. [Me: Yeah?] Yeah. [That's great, that is great to hear.] It's been really fun."

So the idea of "no Glenn in the writers room" is really much more akin to Season 16 than 13/14. He was there to break stories (meaning he was in the room when they were brainstorming plot ideas and when they settled on which plots would be turned into scripts) but Rob and Charlie are taking the brunt of writing their (RCG's) scripts because of Sirens. This is the same thing that happened with The Gang Goes Bowling. Glenn's name is on the script, but Rob and Charlie wrote the majority of it while Glenn was shooting Blackberry. (I remember originally being convinced it was a mistake Glenn was listed as a writer for Bowling, lmfao). And Glenn is definitely still contributing, will be on revisions for the non-RCG scripts, and will classically change or improv whatever he thinks is best for Dennis when he's on set (see: the Risk E. Rats script).

Also, I know the crossover is concerning to a lot of people just given the nature of it, but as of what we know right now it's only on Abbott, so it's really just as if this season's The Gang Cracks the Liberty Bell or The Janitor Always Mops Twice took place on a different show instead of ours...

I promise promise promise Glenn was clearly holding his tongue for good things coming up, and Friday night very much restored my confidence that Season 17 will be good. (But..if you don't think Glenn has good contributions to Sunny or understands the agenda, then sorry this response probably sucks lmfao)

[ave661]

Weird question but do you have the 3D model of Ghost without his mask? I want to get his haircut.

There is no such thing as Ghost's hair in the game, all renders on the internet are artists' visions. Officially there is nothing except this one scene from cinematic, where you can see the back of his head (cinematic models are different from game models)

In that one big reddit leak of his face at the end of 2022 someone used Graves hair, but normally his model is bald OMG SHES BALD SHES BALD AND SHES TORTURING PEOPLE WHO HAVE HAIR

And I'm sorry but I don't plan to publish Ghost's full face because I don't want to get involved in leaks. For me Ghost is "ghost" and I want to stick with it. Unless COD changes their mind and officially shows his face, then maybe I'll start doing it👍

Sorry I didn't help but I hope you understand