#so many norts so little time

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Disenshittify or Die”

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

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

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

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

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

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

==

What the fuck happened to the old, good internet?

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

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

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

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

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

I’m talking about enshittification.

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

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

There’s so many ways to lock in users.

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

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

No way.

Can you agree on where to go next?

Hell no.

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

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

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

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

Sometimes, it’s a grab bag:

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

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

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

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

Think Different, amirite?

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

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

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

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

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

Bullshit!

Bull.

Shit.

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

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

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

"But wait!" I hear you say!

[Come on, say it!]

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

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

[Any guesses?!]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I mean, you love to see it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except you can’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So companies aren’t constrained by competition or regulation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Any guesses why?]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To do that, we have to install constraints.

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

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

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

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

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

[Can anyone guess why?]

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

So yeah, that was pretty fucking epic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next up: regulation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@fak3r@mastodon.social (cropped)

https://mamot.fr/@fak3r@mastodon.social/112963252835869648

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

[flygutzz]

MOAR SONIC FANKIDS

Me n @nortsauce 's characters!

nort: Davy & Chime Mine (Fly): Wivie & Blink

more about them under the cut!

Name: Wisteria-Vineyard "Wivie/Wivy/YV/Wist/Vinny" Rose Age: 15-16 Pronouns: he/him Basic Description Wivie is an empathetic and upbeat hedgehog created by the master emeralds as a counter weight to a great evil that was spawned in the world. he was found by knuckles and adopted by Amy. Hes obsessed with legends and becoming a hero. unfortunately he kinda sucks at everything and has a lot of work ahead of him. He has a high emotional intelligence and wishes to help people any way he can. After discovering his special abilities he trains under sonic to become control his powers and protect his world and the ones he loves

Extra

at first he looked nothing like a mobian when he was first found but as he grew he seemed to to take a more hedgehog like appearance

Mama’s boy!! Always suspicious abt any of Amy’s girlfriends

Loves skirts and dresses.

can read tarot cards thanks to his mom aswell as palm readings

can skate/hoverboard

Name: Davy “Jokes” Leavian Age: 15-16 Pronouns: she/her Basic Description An aggressive and headstrong girl. She's tough and a skilled fighter and is always ready to show off her talents. She doesn’t talk about her past due to her not trusting who’s in the Codfather’s mafia gang that she is in deep trouble with. She’s obviously connected with the forbidden parts of the deep sea in mobius but never questioned why. She lives on her own, and has trouble keeping friends, but wants to prove herself. Can be blunt but means well.

Extra

Leviathan child

Glows when powered up

can shoot her back “petals” to poison or grab things

Name: Chime (Chee-Mei OR just Chime either works) Age: 15 Pronouns: she/her Basic Description Chime is an excitable girl of few words who is an apprentice of Espio. She’s not always silent but prefers to be as quiet as possible, hard to do when she’s got 100 pound weights on her hair and a bell she never takes off. She’s loyal and loves making friends, but she also is very skilled and deft with any sharp object. She’s precise and cunning, but her lack of any sort of magical or enhanced physical abilities make her a little insecure. She’s said to be a part of a group protecting… something.

Extra

Very Fast and Agile

Skilled in “cutting” weapons (knives, swords, any bladed thing)

Very quiet

likes tea parties

due to her being very quiet and skilled many people feel threatened by her but she's a sweetie

She’s also forced to wear the bell bcs she kept sneaking up and scaring people

Name: Blink the Hedgehog Age: young??? Pronouns: Gender fluid, changes any chance they get Basic Description: Blink an eccentric kid who wants to become as strong as they possible can be. They love to run around and mess with people with pranks, especially at Team Dark. Blink has some violent tendencies because of how they were raised by mercenaries and a war machine, so Shadow tries to keep them away from a lot of people. They have a close but complicated relationship with shadow and a distant relationship with sonic, with either of them barely even knowing that each other existed for the first few years of Blinks life.

Extra

slower than sonic but higher endurance

calls his parents "pops" or by their names interchangeably (great relationship guys 👍)

has a clock on their right glove and a compass on their left glove: this helps blink control and reorient themself after "blinking*" through time and space

Abilities

Blink*: can bring them in and out of existence as a form of "teleportation"

Speed break: bursts of speed that allow them reach point A to point B in less than a second (tracer from OW)

No-Clip (lol) : can phase through objects (generally used during speed breaks)

Time Control (Only With a Chaos Emerald)

[ego-meliorem-esse]

Staying alive for centuries, if not millennia, and enduring trauma that spans for generations is bound to transform even saints into rats. Day-to-day life in the middle-ages was batshit dystopian (especially in Europe). I'm of the belief that older nations (think england, france, china, india) are far more rat-like and cynical than their much younger counterparts who have witnessed far less war, strife, prejudice and just aren't as burnt out as them (with some major exceptions). Mega bonus points if the youngins received some form of parental care, even if it's not perfect (like zee, australia, alfred).

I love how you emphasize that "Arthur is not a good man". But in his defense, I think none of the oldies are good men. There are personifications that predate Arthur by many millennia (e.g. India, China). To them, Arthur looks like a teenager. They lost power to a pasty little rat completely drunk on power, and so a part of them knows their colonization wouldn't last, so they endure it with an air of haughty annoyance and impatience, I'd like to think. They're still working against Arthur, but there's no seething rage as one might expect. They master the stiff upper lip far, far better than Arthur. Which I imagine makes him envious. I know you don't talk about India or China, but I think their personal interactions with Arthur would be extremely fascinating, be it in the 19th century or present-day. sorry for the long rant, luv your blog

👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆👆

(I am so sorry i took a millenia to answer this but i always wnated to give a structured and thought out oppinion but never had the time in the last few months to sit down and think.

Having said that Im gonna answer as many older asks as i possibly can. Im sorry once again and your mind is a palace decorated with interesting and fascinating ideas)

So many have come before him. Too many died not having been recorded by the watchfull eye of history.

Arthur is not the oldest of the oldies. He is young compared to someone like China or Syria.

To start off with i think China is the most interesting Helltalia character there is. Just the years and cultures and dynasties and changing political systems and rise to power and fall and rise and again and again. The splitting and putting back together the regions. The innovation and influence. Ahvdnajxbnzksbx

So much creative liberty there and so much to learn and look into.

None of these nations, old or young are good or bad. They also are. In a way that a sparrow is bad for crop growth and good for locust population control.

"Arthur is not a good man" is not a general idea. They are Arthurs own words, about himself. He does not believe himself to be a good man. But then again, there are few nations who think of themselves as 'good' or 'righteous'. Years come and years pass. Now multiply that by a few thousant times. Good decisions lead to bad concequences and bad decisions lead to good ones. Good ideas are good until there are better ones pointing out the horrors of the past ideas. If you try to protect yourself and your family and damn another are you a bad person? Or are you a bad person if you damn your own family to save others? 'Good' is different for every nation. It just so happens that Arthur does not consider who he is to be righteous or benevolent. He has made decisions that damned his own soldiers for the sake of his own blood, his children. But he has sacrificed the lives of his progenies to advance himself and his empire. Its not the fact that he sacrificed his children or soldiers that he thinks make him bad, but he believes his hypocracy to be the thing that makes him "not a good man".

I think the older countries like China, Syria, ancient Rome and Egypt, Norte-Chico, Aksum (etc etc) didnt have what younger nations today got. At least not as frequently and directly. Alfred got a father willing to burn down villages and string up reverends to make sure his son didnt see the hangmans knot ever again. His brother and sister and their weird and tall french brother got to live a life as vomfotable as possible for them at that particular time growing up. They didnt see the world change. They were born into it already having shifted. That goes for other younger nationfolk. Some had harder lives than others but the world was connected and integrated to a certain degree when they were born. Loneliness is the main topic of the ancient nation personifications. If you asked a human in a town or village a few thousand years ago what the characteristics of his nation was he would respond with loneliness and reclusivity. So few knew eachother and fewer interacted regularly. A nation born is a nation doomed or abandoned by their parent nation if they had one. If by death or otherwise.

So what i think really set appart the oldies from the noobs are the inreactions they have with eachother. Old nations have learned and expect the sort of "stiff upper lip" you mentioned more than newer nations. If thats even possible. They grew up lonely, and and to a certain degree every nation is lonely, but the ancient world saw too much. So they stay even more lonely.

As ive mentioned, China is such an interesting character to me. He is very smart and he has lived through double the shit these old Europeans have. The oppium wars is something i studied recently and i kept thinking of how Yao would see all of this: "the gall of that young man to come to my shores and demand to do proper business while pointing a loaded gun to my head".

And after a few more decades he sees this European powerhouse get knocked down by none other than the mans very own bastard boy. As a human man, Yao finds comfort and amusment in that. The irony is rich and plentiful. The revenge tastes sweet.

But as a nation, that is extremly scary. The higherarchy is changing, so that means he has to change. And if he has to change that means old wounds will be reopen and new ones will take their place beside the old ones. And he does change. He adapts and tries to understand. Lots of new wounds are reddening his clothes. Lots of new wounds are reddening the clothes of others. In that change, there is loneliness. He keeps it to himself. Saving face is what he knows how to do. Just as most nations do.

Yao has long ago decided to drop the words good/bad from his personal lexicon. The concept of good is noble but not advantageous when it comes to their kind. Nations are purely bad in some situations, yet they are entirely good in others.

Anyyywayyyyy, im rambling too much at this point. I might do more hcs on China, but i think i should stop here for now. This isnt coherent or logical so lemme stop myself from further embarassment lol

[yoroshiu]

Moments of Love in KH That Make Me Lose it Just a Little (Only Just a Little I'm so NORMAL About This I Promise) (In no particular order)

Player willing to act possessed by Darkness so they can sacrifice themselves because they KNEW Ephemer wouldn't attack them otherwise. To trap the rest of the Darknesses, they trapped themselves altogether until the end. THEY KNEW WHAT THIS WOULD MEAN FOR THEM.

RIKU DREAMEATER RIKU DREAMEATER RIKU DREAMEATER What do you mean that, EVEN WITHOUT KNOWING, this guy SENSED that Sora was in danger, DIVED into his dreams, and became HIS DREAMEATER, a being that PROTECTS SOMEONE from NIGHTMARES. And I must reiterate that Riku did NOT know until told.

So you're telling me that even though Xion was SUPPOSED to be completely wiped from people's memories, Axel/Lea's grief ran so deep that he still could vaguely recall her and shed tears at just the blurry sight of her. Roxas kinda makes sense since both he and Xion were inside Sora at this point (still hits me like a truck anyway), but something about this happening to Axel/Lea in KH3 makes me tear up a bit!!!

TERRA, through the SHEER WILLPOWER of wanting to protect his friends and make things right (+ Doom Slayer type rage), was able to leave a will that possessed his empty armor and beat THE CRAP out of Terra-Nort to the point of AMNESIA. Not only that, he was willing to destroy his own body if it meant if he could protect Aqua and Ven. Bro endured YEARS of being torn apart and spread to different people and places, but still was able to help others in those times of need (When Aqua fights Terra-nort (though you can defeat him without encountering the Terra thing), when Aqua was in the RoD, when the Guardians of Light were in Trouble, etc.))

And that's not even mentioning what Aqua and Ven did for the sake of the others in their trio. Aqua saving Terra and letting herself fall into the RoD, or Ven willing to completely shatter his heart for Terra and Aqua if it meant taking down Vanitas.

Riku Replica, even though he learned that his own existence and memories were farces, still cared for Naminé so genuinely that he fought to give her a body so she can go on living.

When everything went to crap and Sora and the others pretty much died, Kairi had managed to HOLD onto Sora so he could still remain in the world

Sora is so concerningly self-sacrifical that this guy can easily STAB himself AND break universal taboos that lead to him being wiped by the universe to save his loved ones (he should really stop doing that >.>)

Also Sora telling Roxas that he deserved to be his own person has me going FERAL, I am BITING and SCREAMING. The fact that through EVERYTHING, the reality of the existence of Nobodies hits him, and he takes away that Roxas is his OWN person (and this was right before Roxas dumped all his memories on him) and tells him as such word for word. I AM IN SHAMBLES.

And there's so many examples I could go on about! I've definitely missed a lot of big ones. I promise I'm normal about this series, I promise!!!!

[demispark]

Alright, my dearest friends, mutuals, followers, and other assorted Tumblr users, I have made a decision. April Fools is more fun as a time to be silly than a time to lie and confuse people, so I'm going to do something that people will hopefully find stupid and fun.

On April 1st 2024, I'm going to be very cringe and make a post where I get to explain something from a franchise that I am very passionate about, Kingdom Hearts.

Since I will be posting it here on Tumblr - thereby subjecting you all to my autistic rambling - I have decided to make a poll to ask you (who knows little to nothing about the series) what I should talk about!

I'm also just genuinely curious about what options will be picked. I'm gonna tag some people that I especially want to see, and it would be fun if anyone who votes leaves which option they picked (just say #1-6 the actual options are way too long-) and why!

Anyway, if y'all wouldn't mind - @mintchocolatemagic @ril-ard @ancestorlegacy @pink-bandita

Hopefully this ends up being a fun way to tell people about stuff I'm passionate about, and I might even do it again some other time :3

[cepheusgalaxy]

Oh you're Brazilian, correct? *saw ur bio*

I was wondering if there's anything I should or shouldnt do when making a Brazilian OC.

Oh hi!

First of all, thank you for the ask :) I'm very happy you decided to make a brazilian oc, whatever is the reason (if any at all lol) 👍 Keep up the good work.

Now, generally, what you should avoid are the most common stereotypes assossiated with latin people in general (like the Latino Lover stereotype), and some specifically assossiated with us a lot:

The Soccer Player ("every brazilian [black] guy obv plays soccer"), the Samba Dancer ("every brazilian black girl dances samba"), the Sexy Brazilian (everybody has their preferences ig but try to step away from fetishization--also falls into the latino lover a little) and the Carnival Party Person ("brazil is a very big carnival party all of the time") are some examples of stuff you should avoid.

Some things I would advise you to consider aside from this are A. Their race, B. The area they're from and C. Cultural differences (I'm gonna list them in a bit).

I mention race here because a very common thing in Brazil, actually (at least if you don't consider the South/South East) is the miscigenation phenomena. Long story short, some centuries ago, the colonizers had an... "idea" of toning down the population of black people in the country, so interracial relationships were very incentivated to "breed" lighter skinned black people. Results: On this day, most brazilian people in the Northern areas are not 100% black, but very very mixed (like me). A lot of people have dark skin, though.

Now, the area where they are from would also play a big factor in the things you want to consider, because Brazil is big, so we generally divide it into five areas (this division was made in 1969 i think, by the IBGE--the brazilian institute of geography and statistics): The North, North East, Central West, South East and South. If you search for a map with this categorization you'll be able to see it.

Culturally, these areas are very different, but I'll go through them briefly here.

North - most of the indigenous folk are concentrated here (for many historical reasons) and here is also the Amazonic forest (a bit of it is in other countries' territorries but I don't remember exactly which). The demographic density (which is the amount of people per say, mile) is very sparse, and despiste it being the largest area out of the five it isn't the most populated. Indigenous cultural heritage is the strongest here.

Nort East - warmest area in the country. The majority of people here are black or brown (for a lot of other historical reasons i unfortunately can't go on about here but they are very interesting if you wanna search up) and African cultural heritage is the strongest here.

Central West - has a very little amount of states here, and also the Federal District--aka the capital, Brazilia (fun fact: Brazilia isn't localized in any state, like the capital used to be, it is separated, so that's why we say Brazil has 26 states + one federal district). I don't know a lot about this one, so I'm gonna rely on Google a little, but basically:

That's the only area that is not bathed by the Atlantic, so no sea here at all, and back in Colonization Days, it was a very explored area for mineration (one of the states here, Minas Gerais, was named because of that, fun fact). Most of the population here is white (50,5%) and brown [mixed race] (43%) source (wikipedia page for the Central West in portuguese).

South East - as we go down here, the areas start getting cooler and whiter. The biggest cities of the country are here: São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. White population, as I said before, is strongly concentrated here, because Back In Colonization Days, a lot of europeans (mainly italians and germans i think, although i might be wrong on this one) migrated to there and the South because the climate is more like in Europe than in the northern areas. This is probably what most people think when they say 'Brazil' (that or the amazonic forest, ofc), because media wise, it covers mostly carioca Carnival (Carnival from Rio de Janeiro) or the super urban city of São Paulo. Fun fact: One of the Seven World Wonders, the Christ The Redeemer statue is located there, in the RJ.

South - smallest area in the country. There are literally just three states here. It's also the coolest area out of the five, and there is even snow here! The European heritage is very strong here, also because of the migration from a few centuries ago.

If you want more insight on a certain specific area for your character, I'd be very happy to help! :) I myself am from the North East, so I have the most information about that, tho.

Now about the cultural differences in general.

A few important things that really differ are:

The culinary (depends of the area, though: up north it will have more african and indigenous dishes, down south there will be more european dishes and stuff)

The climate (if your character is from the northern areas, they will have a hard time adapting to any cool areas they might be in now--in the North East we're used to an average 25º C, or 70º F, for example, so if things go cooler they're gonna want to be very warm)

The measurements (celsius degreees vs farhenheit, miles vs kilometers, centimenters vs feet and inches, etc.)

The calendar: In the South Hemisphere, unlike in the North Hemisphere, summer is on the last and first months of the year and winter is in the middle. Basically, the seasons are inverted up there in relation to here

The school year also works a bit differenly, for that matter: Janurary and the first week of February are summer vacations, and then the year starts. A few weeks later, we have a few more weeks off for Carnival, so no school then too, and *then* you could say the year actually starts. In June (winter), we have a 10-day break for São João festivities (at least in the North East because São João is a cultural "festival"--if that's the right word), and then summer break starts around the end of November or the end or December, depending on the exact school.

Oh yeah, and one more big difference your character might find strange assuming they're in the US or a similar country now: In Brazil we have a thing called SUS - the Unique Health System (Sistema Único de Saúde), which is a free health service for everybody, funded by taxes. I heard that in the US all medical care is private, so I wanted to highlight that in Brazil we have free public healthcare and then also the private hospitals, so that could cause some cultural chock, lol

Same thing for college: There are a lot of public universities. There are actually many differences between usamerican and brazilian education system, but the main ones are that.

If you have any further asks, feel free to send them, I'd love to go deeper into one single thing if you want it. Good luck with your oc <2

[mintytealfox]

So we have Survivor Nort Decucts... And now we have Hunter Nort deducts... Put them together and what do we get?

You get a hella tragic story oh my GOSHHHH 😭😭😭😭

The set up will be: 1-Surv!Norton 1-Hunt!Norton -Then my thoughts 😏

1-Kindness: Is that an Olive Branch you just threw or... (A Good Deed: Norton, a Miner, Always visited the hospice and cared for all of the homeless old miners) 1-Shrewd 'Each step requires long-term planning' (Shrewd: An old, folded letter: Yellow and brittle. It was once abandoned in a dust corner. Signed, Benny.) -This is interesting 👀 These are both the first which automatically makes me think they are connected. I wonder if the Olive Branch thrown is from Benny? Or if its from Norton with the helping out with the people around Benny? Either way Benny ends up sending a letter to Norton. Maybe it saying something like 'want to meet up? I have stuff that might interest you' or something. Which adds to my -squinting- at Benny. Sounds like Norton was alone even though Benny was around all that time? hmmm

2-Diligence: The more effort, the more rewards? (Work Record: Norton Campbell is always the first to go down into the mines and the last to leave it.) 2-Lonely: 'The loneliness of separation must be endured on the climb up' (A coin: Stained by ash, footprints, tears, and dirt from the slums.) -Brings up the whole 'he had nobody' not even Benny vibe again -squints- Where was Benny during all of this? Seems like Norton would work and work and work so he couldn't feel or notice how alone he is. Like work was his only constant and 'friend' to keep himself from going nutty, but in the hours where work couldn't be used as a distraction he was miserable 😿Crying as he clings to what little he has...my gosh. That coin was so important to him man, I wonder if it was the last thing he got from his dad or something, cause he takes it everywhere and it pops up all the time in the trailer orz which means he never spent it just held onto it enough where you see TEAR STAINS ON IT! I CANNOT-- 😭😭😭😭

3-Efficiency: We need more trials. (A stack of Recommendation Letters: It can be seen that every one of Norton's previous employers appreciated his hard work and expressed their regret at being unable to keep him for long.) 3-Sophisticated 'wear a mask for the sake of survival' (A note on the back: What a detestable Person! Wagging his tail like a dog in front of the overseer!) -This one I can’t quite grasp yet -squints- is this referring to the back of the letter from Benny? Why write that there? Is Benny talking smack about Norton being so good at wearing a mask and pleasing the employers? Or is Norton talking smack about himself? Or is Norton pissed about others doing what he is doing? Wearing a mask to just survive or what the heck? 🤣 This one is still baffling me fr fr Oh wait a min....Seems like he had to jump job from job cause employers kept needing to fire workers, unable to keep him on as an employee. Likely becoming more jaded that him working hard and being good isn't working much for him since he keeps getting let go. Then seeing some fresh faced bushy tailed worker beside him would likely piss him off lol 'Why are you acting like that we are all getting fired anyways' Yea I super don't know with this one, I am juggling so many possibilities for this one.

4-Persistence: People won't be unlucky forever, right? (1-Page Note: There are 13 items listed. The first 12 appear to be names of places, and the last one is crossed out.) 4-Willful 'Those who persist will encounter more opportunities' (A page from a diary: I found that old man's notes. Now, it belongs to the one who lives long.) -He doesn’t sound all that fond of Benny pff like there is a hint of a dig there and/or him trying to convince himself that he is going to break out of here and live. Did he decide to set a plan in motion after getting the letter from Benny? Or was it after meeting with Benny?

5-Patience: Next time... (Diary: Tomorrow, I will go to the last place recorded by the old man. If there's still nothing, then I hope he...) 5-Gloomy 'The other side of Kindness and affability' (Abandoned junk: A tattered quilt, a chisel, an unsent letter, and a small piece of wrapped and hardened white bread) -This one I don't see much of a connection other than reference to old man and then there is that QUILT that could have possibly been the one Benny had made for Norton when the Dad was still alive. 'Then I hope he...' sounds hella ominous now lol -squints- Then Is this stuff found with Benny or was it found where Norton abandoned everything? Did Norton not send a letter? Maybe he meant to go back to get his things but never got to cause of the damage the explosion deed had on his mind ah. This one also gives me more questions than answers lol

6-Courage: The more dangers, the more opportunities. (A Geological Report: Part of the tunnel had been blocked by an unidentified object. One small mistake could cause the inner structure of the mine to collapse.) 6-Greedy 'Merely retaking what the heavens owe' (A map: Several crossed-out mines and a red circle.) -I am thinking Greedy and Gloomy should switch here cause Greedy goes well with the Patience with reference to 'go to the last place recorded' BUT what the frig is that 'unidentified object' -squints- Did Norton set that up?? Was that in the red circled mine? Was the place just found like that and Norton was like -cough cough- "whatever nothing is stopping me". Is this all just setting up how Norton was willing to go anywhere to find what he is looking for? hmmmm Willing to go where no man has gone before. Smash Greed and Courage together and ya thats what you get lol A desperate dude that has nothing to loose and only to gain if this all goes right. aahh

7-Alert: You need to be more cautious. (News: Due to the use of gunpowder and detonators, the era of simple rock drilling is coming to an end. 7-Arrogant 'Only by being bolder can you challenge destiny' (Torn paper: Record the blasting's depth, distance between holes… and the amount of explosives used.) -He uhhhhh, yea he definitely ends up using explosives lol. And its interesting that he made sure that everything was measured and counted in every way. Bro knew what he was doing 1000%. He had it all down to the second, the inch! He was careful alright, careful to make sure this goes perfect AH

8-Share: You need more helpers. (Mining Precautions: Theft of explosives is illegal and will be reported to the police once discovered.) 8-Hypocrite 'Important moments must be witnessed by companions' (A memo: Two bottles of the cheapest whine for those drunkards to wet their throats. And toss some fatty meat to the guard dog.) -BRO STOLE THE HELL OUTTA THEM EXPLOSIVES LOOOOOOOL AND HE DID IT IN THE MOST CLICHE WAY EVER AND IT WORKED IIMMMMM--LOOOOOOOOOOOOOL Like How many laws did he end up breaking by the end of all this?? LIKE GEEZZ And people are so used to him being kind and caring, none were the wiser! This Duddddeeeee!! He played the LONG GAME GOLLY

9-Wisdom: Smart people know when to hold on and when to let go. (An Accident Report: An explosion collapsed a mine on the outskirts of the city. It's suspected that the miners had mishandled the explosives, and the police expressed that there's little chance for anyone to survive) 9-Ruthless 'Exploding from deep within like an ignited explosive' (A page from a diary: Those journalists and policemen are gone. So it's just that simple?) -Bro played everything! The people, the system, the science, the math?? LIKE DUDE! If it was an accident, he wouldn't have survived. Norton had this planned to the T! Every 'i' was dotted and ever 't' was crossed, he knew he was surviving that explosion if everything went perfect like he was planning for OH MY GOSH. Bro playing chess while everyone else was LEARNING CHECKERS

10-Luck: That's only because the rest are just unlucky. (1-Page Case: Moderate burns to the face. Suspected to have been caused by direct exposure to excessive temperatures) 10-Numb 'Forget them and stay away from the dark underground' (A magnet: "Maybe it can keep me away from misfortune and darkness.") -He really didn't get much out of this did he. Like, all he got was trauma, burnt up, and a magnet. And boi is he clinging to that magnet with is all. His new coin; his new thing to cling to orz He really lies to himself a lot 😿He keeps finding out far too late that what he thought would change everything just made everything worse 🙃like yes everything changed, but changed for the worst. That tunnel vision hitting him so hard he never stops to go 'huh, this is a horrible idea, how would this possibly change my fate??' Its like he is trying so hard to convince himself that it was all worth it cause he got this crazy magnet orz gooooossshhhhhhhhhhhh Instead of using this as a wake up call it seems he is pressing on that sigma grind. Nothing like a plague doctor bird man monster to set things right LOOOOL

[loominggaia]

Uno parpadea y ya está navidad a la esquina, así que como continuación de la comida argentina, hoy tenemos comidas navideñas argentinas:

Sándwiches de miga: un sándwich que usa un pan de miga, sabroso en textura y sabor. Usualmente se le pone jamón y queso, pero también puede llevar tomate, jamón crudo, queso, lechuga, etc

Helado: el helado es el postre más popular en las calurosas navidades argentinas. De hecho junto con la carne, el helado es de las comidas que más consumen los argentinos

Ensalada rusa: una ensalada que típicamente lleva papa, zanahoria, jamón y mayonesa. Hay muchas versiones, la original llevaba carne de codorniz y trufas, pero la actual se originó en la clase trabajadora de la unión soviética, el lugar de origen de esta ensalada

Arrollado de carne: una carne plana que se rellena con huevos, pimientos entre otras cosas. Se puede hacer al horno, o hervirlo

Arrollado: el arrollado es un pan de miga relleno usualmente con atún, aceitunas y huevo, aunque también se puede hacer dulce

Mantecol: un postre hecho con almíbar y mani, el mantecol es un postre muy típico en estas fechas, es adictivo. Aunque engorda fácilmente, un poco de vez en cuando no hace mal

Budín, Pan dulce: una especie de pan que puede ir relleno de frutos secos, pasas, frutos secos, o de chocolate. El budín es esencialmente lo mismo

Extra: no es comida de halloween, por qué en argentina no se celebra mucho. Lo más cercano que tenemos es en el norte, donde celebran el día de muertos

(Translated with Google Translator)

One blinks and Christmas is around the corner, so as a continuation of Argentine food, today we have Argentine Christmas meals:

Crumb Sandwiches: A sandwich using a crumb bread, tasty in texture and flavor. Ham and cheese are usually added, but it can also include tomatoes, raw ham, cheese, lettuce, etc.

Ice Cream: Ice cream is the most popular dessert during the hot Argentine Christmas. In fact, along with meat, ice cream is one of the foods that Argentines consume the most.

Russian salad: a salad that typically has potatoes, carrots, ham and mayonnaise. There are many versions, the original had quail meat and truffles, but the current one originated in the working class of the Soviet Union, the place of origin of this salad

Meat roll: a flat meat that is filled with eggs, peppers among other things. It can be baked or boiled.

Arrollado: Arrollado is a crumb bread usually filled with tuna, olives and egg, although it can also be made sweet.

Mantecol: a dessert made with syrup and peanuts, mantecol is a very typical dessert on these dates, it is addictive. Although you gain weight easily, a little from time to time doesn't hurt

Pudding, Sweet bread: a type of bread that can be filled with nuts, raisins, nuts, or chocolate. Pudding is essentially the same Extra: it is not Halloween food, because in Argentina it is not celebrated much. The closest we have is in the north, where they celebrate the day of the dead

-----

Very educational, thank you! This kind of stuff is inspiring. I will be making more cuisine posts in the future, and it never occurred to me to make holiday-themed ones until you sent this.

I googled some these dishes to see what they look like, and they all look amazing. If I could eat peanuts, I would make some mantecol right now! I know that peanuts are very high-calorie, so this seems like this food would be popular with heavyweight species on Looming Gaia. I bet the Etiosi people eat this a lot.

*

Questions/Comments?

Lore Masterpost

Read the Series

[simp-is-here]

God Help The Outcasts (Obey Me! Simeon x Reader)

(Obviously this is inspired by the song God Help The Outcasts from The Hunchback of Norte Dame but with a couple lyric changes to fit. And kinda had this thing in mind)

(Also. I am working on the requests sent to me it’s just a little difficult for me to write what I think is worthy enough for you guys)

Warning: possible OOC Simeon, his Angel ranking is different in this I believe, supposed to be set a bit farther back in time, slightly implied societal unfairness

Summary: Simeon sits in the rafters of the cathedral and writes down every prayer to give to God later on. Then he ends up hearing a prayer that isn’t like everyone else’s.

(I suck a summaries 😭)

Here high in the rafters of the stone church sits an angel, doing his assigned task of collecting the prayers of the humans below him, finally obtaining silence as each one left. The sound of the church doors opening caused his hand to pick up his scroll, readying for another uncharitable request to God.

“I don’t know if you can hear me, or if you’re even there. I don’t know if you would listen to my prayers”

(I am now slightly tipsy from drinking wine while doing world building for a webtoon idea. So let’s see if I can still do this 😂)

Simeon hands lowered his eyes towards towards you who gazed at the cross in front of you, leaning against the stone pillar, uncertainty fixed your eyes.

“Yes, I know I’m just an outcast. I shouldn’t speak to you. Still I see your face and wonder, we’re you once an outcast too?”

Your fingered trailed behind you, running across the pews while your feet carried you. The sunlight that shone through the coloured windows reflected in your eyes, drawing Simeon in like a welcoming embrace.

His wings fluttered softly, following you from above, completely enchanted by you.

“God help the outcasts hungry from birth, show them the mercy they don’t find on earth. God help my people, we look to you still. God help the outcasts or no body will.”

He was taken aback from this request, he had sat on those rafters many times, but hardly ever had he heard someone pray for someone else without demanding something in return. Earlier’s prayers repeated in his mind, seeing just how different people could be.

‘I ask for wealth’

‘I ask for fame’

‘I ask for glory to shine on my name’

‘I ask for love I can possess’

‘I ask for God and his angels to bless me’

The selfless words spoke over them, drowning out the prayers in his head.

“I ask for nothing, I can get by. But I know so many less lucky than I.”

The angels feet barely made a sound when they touched the floor, his chest beating like a melody to your words.

“Please help my people, then poor and down trod. I thought we all were children of God.”

The cross loomed over you once more, falling to your knees as through the weight of it was pushing you down.

“God help the outcasts, children of God.”

You lingered there for a moment, tears falling down your cheeks. A gasp left your lips at the feeling of a finger gently clearing the tear from your face.

He is infront of you, eyes that held a gentleness as he knelt beside you, his hand never leaving it’s spot.

“Don’t be discouraged.”

~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~

Thank you for reading. If you have any requests just send them to me and I’ll try to write them to the best of my ability

And remember you are a fantabulous human being and that is my opinion to which you can not change my opinion so better just accept that you’re an amazing person who is doing a fantastic job. Keep up the great work. Have a good day or night or whatever you’re reading this at

[suolainensilakka]

favorite kingdom hearts characters. for science

WELL, gently taps the current pinned post of this blog, that one's a freebie ^__^

Anyway. BOY ranking them all is really hard bc so many characters in the series have permanently set up camp in my head by now and arent particularly inclined to leave any time soon, but if I had to list off just a couple examples that have caused me the most brain damage so far, itd be:

- Terra, hands down my number 1 most specialest guy in the whole world. Instantly became enamored with him from the moment I first set eyes on him and then proceeded to have all of my ribs carefully and meticulously pulled out of my chest one by one throughout the entirety of bbs and the entire rest of the series after that. Its so dire man I literally cannot look at any images of him now without physically having to hold myself back from making a long strangled whine Out Loud With My Mouth every time

- the entire Wayfinder Trio as a collective unit + Vanitas also tbh. Terra's obviously my Primary Favorite but the wayfinders as a whole also make my heart hurt so fucking bad man. My partner and I choose to interpret them all as siblings bc it leads to some exceptionally delicious and painful rs dynamics to explore imo and something abt it just makes The Miseries hit that much harder in ways that have literally had me writhing on the couch with a thousand yard stare rapidly cycling through the five stages of grief on loop. I'm also counting Vanitas as part of the unit bc he's just so closely tied to Ven in my brain that separating them (lol.) feels Wrong (lmao.), and. God. Vanitas might just be one of THE most tragic characters in literally any media I've experienced and I say this without a single hint of irony. The current total wordcount of the rps that I've written abt the wayfinders with my partner so far has probably shot past 50k by now. Why am I hurds

- Kairi. I was originally mostly ambivalent/neutrally intrigued abt her but kept getting increasingly more pissed abt her treatment and constant sidelining by the writing to the point where I got to kh3/mom and something in me snapped entirely, and from that moment onwards I decided to love her entirely out of spite. She instantly shot up to become one of my favorites after that and if I think abt her meta and story potential for longer than five minutes at a time I start frothing at the mouth

- Sora, naturally. I have so so so so many thoughts on this little darling boy that could easily double the wordcount of this ask just by themselves but the most important thing to mention here in lieu of that, for now, is that he's is the One (1) and ONLY child ive ever seen, whether real or fictional, that has made me experience emotions anywhere Close to resembling baby fever. I want to dribble him like a basketball but also gently pinch his cheek affectionately and also spoil him silly like a grandma seeing her beloved grandson again for the first time in months

- Xigbar. This fucko is the one I'm the most mad about ending up liking as much as I do, not because hes a bad character, absolutely far from it I fucking ADORE this terrible bodyhopping little cunt, but because it happened by complete accident after I realized he shares a lot of (surface) similarities with my favorite blorbo from another entirely unrelated franchise and I then got mad about realizing I have a very easily clockable Type (which I've affectionately dubbed the Guys That Suck category. I have more too obv but its the funniest one I have). He's also infuriatingly fun to write. Get me OUT of here

- Xemnas, Terranort and Ansem SoD. Everyone in the Nort Collective counts tbh but those three are the ones I lose sleep over the most, particularly the first two; Xemnas bc he makes me feel an unfathomably deep and haunting sense of grief (brought on by me finishing bbs and then realizing days later the exact way his creation connects to Terra's story and hearing the sound of fucking glass shattering at the back of my head instantly), and Terranort bc I'm fucking terrified of him and he also makes me want to eat gravel whenever I think abt him in context with him interacting with the rest of the wayfinders. He's also really fun to write and this fact Upsets Me. Ansem's listed bc you can never go wrong with the ol reliable mad scientist. The rest of the norts I would probably also be a lot more insane over once I actually get off my damn ass and start picking through the mobile games but that's an endeavor for Future Salty (i am very excited and terrified)

- the Lingering Will. I'm counting it as a separate entity from Terra and the rest of the Terra Collective on a technicality bc (LOUD TELEVISION STATIC AS I GESTURE FRANTICALLY AND FURIOUSLY @ THE JUMBLED BALL OF YARN LABELED "my thoughts on the physical and psychological effects of being a guy who got his soul and entire being shattered into like five million distinct pieces for over 10 Whole Entire Years" THAT I HAVE NOT EXPLAINED THE ENTIRETY OF TO A SINGLE OTHER SOUL ON EARTH) but. Eah. This fucking haunted hunk of metal has been eating holes through my brain tissue ever since I first saw the kh2 secret superboss and I'm distraught over it every single day of my life. This thing is like a weird bug to me. Do you understand. (tearign up) Do you get me. Do I have to pull out the Lingering Will/The Hollow Knight venn diagram

And as for the other fuckos haunting my cranium on the daily I can only mention a couple other honorary picks that honestly could also very well have made it to the main list if not for the fact that this post is already long enough as it is, and these following characters are therefore mostly delegated to Sleeper Agent Blorbos who I don't think about QUITE as often as the ones listed above but whenever I Do I get just as distraught and ailed over them. Anyway, shoutout to the entire Seasalt Trio, Demyx, Riku, Repliku, Naminé and Saïx and probably many others I'm forgetting rn bc it is currently 2 am and I'm running on approximately 5-6 hours of sleep and a prayer 👍 god bless and amen

[goldenguillotines]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! give me all you got this is a stickup.

Dedicating this one to ocs I don't talk about/too new :3c Just for you Claire. Though some might have some shorter information due to uh.. kicking rocks. Found out I have a lot of drinkers/vampires on this post whoops

(Design/Art by @trollbriidge !)

Darius Xheime | Lime Blood Seadweller | Scene | Troll hot topic employee

Darius is a loud silly.. They don't know how loud they're being or maybe it's all the fuckinf music playing overhead on loop that makes it hard for them to hear just how loud they're being. Sporting a energy drink addiction and a penchant for collecting the cans..

(Design/Art by @damistrolls )

Dimvis Asyoqa | Fuchsia Blood Seadweller | Actor | Rainbowdrinker | Poet

Dimvis is an eccentric man.. You know that theater kid? Yeah that was him, now he's an adult and he's worse. Currently the face of a certain company and can be found on the silver screen or on stage

(Design/Art by @leethetrashpage )

Vieden Pasele | Indigo | Bodyguard | Maid | Tea maker

Vieden is one of Nasuki's loyal Maids.. She is her bodyguard and fiercely loyal at that. Ex fleet.. she left her position on Cormai's crew to serve her mistress. She's quiet and a listener more than a talker. She'll remember information you've forgotten!

(Design/Art by @leethetrashpage )

Krazel Eshket | Purple blood | Clown | Informant | Trapeze artist

Krazel is Natani's loyal right hand man.. ok maybe not as close as Taeyon is to Natani.. But right up there. Krazel has been serving the Yaukul family for some time and sees this as a rather good change of pace between his time at the circus. Don't underestimate him just based on all those sparkles.. he's rather devoted and dangerous.

(Design/Art by @norts-trolls )

Monark Keehvu | Mutant Bronze | Fae | Mutant | Forest Guardian

Monark was a Fae just like any other.. but beholding the terrors warped them into their current form. Moonkeeper had exiled them from their community.. and now ghost among the forest as a rumored "monster".. They miss the days where they met The Sun in person for comfort..

(Design/Art by @trollbriidge )

Silias Fvyoni | Bronze Sea Dweller | Rainbowdrinker | Cowboy

Silias stop causing problems. Thank you. A young man with bitey tendencies.. hes known for dine and dashing after hookups. Being know as the town menace.. though not as bad as everyone makes him out to be. Keeps some.. unsightly things out of the town and does so to keep order.

(Design/Art by @greedkinggreaser )

Dorain Liesce | Jade Blood | Rainbowdrinker | Rich | Writer

Dorian is a very smug Rainbowdrinker, a fortune at his finger tips that he has either amassed over the eons from 'work' or swindling from his many devotees and fans. He's made a large collection or books that can be found in almost every library, horror stories and romance stories.. all thought out wirh upmost detail.. Kinda a little too much detail. Almost feels real..

(Design/Art by @shinsart / @/ambivalence-and-torpor )

Ashoku Erceim | Jade Blood | Rainbowdrinker | Lounge singer | Guitarist

Ashoku is one of Navika's loyal students! Brought in by her girlfriends ♤ ( Fuetre, Cherie and Siyahi), she's been a rather interesting character among their students. More brash and prickly than the others.. not a fan of dressing up for their performances either.. She does bend and dress up for it. She's got a lot of potential.. maybe if she was just as dedicated as some others others

(Design/Art by @cadavertrolls )

Merlot Camfae | Rust Blood | Fae | Record shop owner | Piercer

Merlot is one of the older Fae around, escaped their village as a young adult, they chose to seek after the moon and sun in secret. Rather than under someone else's orders. They do so in secret.. often some interesting looking butterflies can be found flapping about on the search. Luckily, Wicatas magic does wonders to hide their Fae presence..

(Design/Art by @leethetrashpage )

Jisoou Hayeun | Cyan Blood Seadweller | Idol | Mafia | Jewlery maker

Jisoou is Otromes twin! Who's blood color is the original one? uh.. Pass? After some sweeps as a Trainee she's finally made it at 7sins! Apart of one of the smaller girl groups.. she's known for having a very bubbly personality, often sticking close to Yufaun and spreading some sunshine where she goes! A very smiley gal

[spacialshrimp]

[♡]My little child who isn't so small[♡]

Part 6

Warnings: Trauma, Swear Words, injuries

{Nightime memories}

----------------------------

It was one of those nights, when its late but, you don't want to sleep yet , one of those lonely nights, in the dark of the room, memories start to appear in you're head, in you're mind.

Daniel, was laying on his bed, in his lonely room, in his lonely house, when those memories appeard in his mind.

He rememberd when he was young, a couple of scars, he rememberd that, when he was 6 years old, he meet one of the spacial hunters for the first time, they were talking with his mother, about something he didn't understand.

The spacial hunter looked at him, as the shy child he used to be, he tried to hide behind his mother, but that didn't worked, then the spacial hunter clicked like a giggle, and offerd the child a little bird looking skull.

Daniel accepted it, now he wasn't so scared, he was intrigged about that massive alien, that looked so scary but was so gentle.

The hunter left after a while, but unlike daniel and his mother, his father didn't liked the hunters, and when that man saw the little skull, he screamed in rage to his wife.

"HOW COULD YOU LET THOSE PEOPLE NEAR TO HIM?! THEY ARE THE DEVIL THEY ARE DANGEROUS!"

Daniel got scared , he dosen't like screaming he hates it, it hurts his ears and its scary.

The his mother said

"Arthur, please, they are very gentle, he even gifted him a little skull-"

"I DON'T CARE, THOSE BASTARDS KILLED MANY PEOPLE IN THE JUNGLE"

" go to you're room Daniel, .....YOU WEREN'T EVEN RELATED TO THEM, AND JUST BECAUSE SOME DID SOMETHING BAD THAT DOSEN'T MEAN THAT ALL OF THEM ARE THE SAME"

"OH! SO SUDENLY IM THE BAD GUY NOW!, LET ME BE LESS OF A MAN AND PUT OUR SON IN DANGER!"

"YOU ALREADY ARE LESS OF A MAN YOU UNEMPLOYED ADDICTED BASTARD"

"OH SHUT UP! YOU ALIEN FUCKER WHORE!"

Meanwhile, little daniel listen to them, he went to his room when his mother told him to.

That happend every day, there was always a reason to fight.

Then his memories showed him when he graduated from "Norland" as a babysitter, but not any babysitter, an elite one, he was instructed in daily tasks such as cooking and sewing, but he is also instructed in martial arts, cyber security, and advanced driving, as well as first aid.

Also he He also has a degree in cell biology.

He is specialized in the care of both humans and yautjas, he study hard to achieve it, not much after the graduation he joined the U.S Army, once he was ready,he went with his team and some teams from the French Army to the nort of France, because a Xenomorph nest was localized there, and it needed to be "neutralized", but there was a little problem, there were land mines, old ones from WW1 , so with a mine detector the teams walked slowly to the nest.

But unluckly, a xeno saw them and, all the teams... they could only run and gun, praying that the unlocated mines would not explode.

They killed some ,sadly many of the soldiers on landmines and.. well, theyre life ended, there.

Daniel could only run in fear and horror, his feet didn't reach a safe place, and then everything was blurry, his general picked him up, and then he fainted.

When he waked up...he was in a white room, everything was white but one of his eyes wasn't open, daniel assumed that it needed to heal and that it was covered by a patch,he looked at his hand but upon looking, his hand was gone, only a few small segments of fingers remained exposed and the rest of the stump had been bandaged, with his eye wide open, he tried to stand up but he fell, and when he looked, his leg was gone too.

At that moment, Daniel came out of his memories, sweaty as if he had slept while the memories passed, he looked at his now robotic hand and later looked at the time, 5:30 AM, it was time to get up and go to work.

[seekingdandelions]

Does Kingdom Hearts BBS Pass the Bechdel Test?

Kingdom Hearts is one of the most well-known video game franchises of the 2000s. It’s notorious for long development times, being somewhat jarring (seeing Donald Duck in the same vicinity as Sephiroth is wild), and having a very complicated story. 

What it isn’t well known for, are its strong, female characters.

The series has a few female characters - such as Kairi, who’s been around since the first instalment - but the number of male characters leaves them drastically outnumbered. However, in Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep we finally saw a female-led adventure… sort of. 

Birth by Sleep has three playable characters, and the player has to choose whose story to follow. To get the full story, all three routes should be played. The protagonists of this game are; Aqua, Terra, and Ventus. 

Enter Aqua, the female protagonist for the title. Aqua has a few core qualities; she’s responsible, kind and deeply cares for her friends. Of the three, she is the only main character to be given the title of ‘Keyblade Master’, suggesting that she is the most skilled of the three key-slinging heroes. 

The Bechdel Test is one of the most well-known metrics for the representation of women in media. It is most commonly applied to films, but it can also be applied to books and video games. On the whole, it’s theoretically easier for a video game to pass the Bechdel Test, especially when compared with film. Video games tend to have longer run times, and so, more opportunities to pass it. 

Because Kingdom Hearts is intrinsically tied to Disney properties, there are quite a few female Disney characters in the game (Cinderella, Snow White, and Aurora, to name a few). Now, that raises an important question: Of the Kingdom Hearts exclusive characters in this title, how many are female?

​Three of them. In this game, there are only three original Kingdom Hearts characters.

Aqua, Kairi and Kairi’s Grandma.

For context, there are fifteen male characters of exclusive Kingdom Hearts origin. To list them all off we have: 

Ventus, Terra, Master Eraqus, Sora, Riku, Xehanort (both young and old, since they’re sorta two different characters… and Terra-nort too), Ansem the Wise, Aeleus, Braig, Dilan, Even, Ienzo, Isa, Lea and Vanitas.

That ratio doesn’t look too good, does it?

Now that we’re familiar with the situation, let’s go over the rules of the Bechdel Test:

The piece of media must have more than two female characters

Both of these characters should be named

They have to engage in a conversation about something other than a man

Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep contains fourteen worlds, though two of them don’t have any story behind them (one is exclusively a board game). For this little ‘investigation’, let’s split this up by world. How many of them pass the Bechdel Test?

For the sake of clarity, we’ll just investigate Aqua’s story, since she’s the focus of this little experiment. Interactions between two female Disney characters won't count either, as most of those come from their source material. Additionally, we’ll cross rule one from the list, as both Kairi and Aqua are named, as well as the cast of Disney characters.

We’ve got approximately three hours of cutscenes to comb through; let’s get started.

There are a few worlds that we can cross off straight away, as they don’t have any female characters in them, with Aqua being the exception. Destiny Islands, Keyblade Graveyard, Land of Departure, Mysterious Tower and Olympus Coliseum are out of the running. 

Five worlds eliminated already. That was fast.

Once Aqua leaves the hub world, we head to Castle of Dreams. 

After wandering around for a bit, Aqua finally gets stopped by the Fairy Godmother. The two discuss light and darkness (classic Kingdom Hearts banter) making that the first pass. Lady Tremaine briefly asks Aqua why she’s in her house (a valid concern), but that doesn’t quite cut it as a conversation. Just before she leaves the world, she talks to the Fairy Godmother once more. It’s worth noting that Aqua does briefly speak the Cinderella, but it’s about Terra and isn’t long enough to be considered a true ‘conversation’.

The next world is Dwarf Woodlands, Snow White’s already eaten the apple, so Aqua walks in on her funeral. A bit awkward, but still, we press on. There isn’t an awful lot in this world; Aqua and Snow White never really interact, and Aqua doesn’t see the Evil Queen at any point. Unfortunately, this world fails the test.

Moving onto Enchanted Dominion, Aqua arrives at the castle. She finds Maleficient pretty quickly, and the two talk about the power of the keyblade. Terra pops up a few times in the conversation, but it’s not enough to void it. The two chat again towards the end of the story, so Enchanted Dominion hits the pass requirements.

Next up is Radiant Garden, home to Kairi and her unnamed grandmother. Aqua meets Kairi, who’s running away from the Unversed (this game’s stand-in for Heartless). Mickey Mouse helps Aqua defeat them, and Kairi doesn’t say anything. After a nail-biting wait, Kairi finally speaks, offering Aqua flowers. They have a very wholesome conversation, which is probably the most interesting conversation we’ve seen, as far as the Bechdel Test is concerned. Kairi runs over to her grandmother, and she tells Kairi a story. Radiant Garden passes with flying colours.

Next, we’re off to Disney Town! Minnie Mouse introduces herself to Aqua, and it’s a quick win. Aqua saves the day, Minnie banishes Pete to another dimension, and we’re on our way.

After Olympus Coliseum (which is a skip), it’s Deep Space time. The only other female character here is the Grand Councilwoman, and in a pleasant turn of events, the two actually cross paths. Deep Space also gets the stamp of approval. As far as the Disney characters go, this is probably the strongest female interaction we’ve seen so far. The two actually talk a few times before Aqua has to leave.

After Aqua leaves Deep Space, she visits Neverland. The only other female character there is Tinkerbell… who doesn’t actually talk. Well, she can communicate, but Peter Pan seems to be the only one that can understand her. So, this world gets marked down as a fail.

Neverland is the last of the Disney worlds, so Aqua rounds off her journey by visiting Destiny Islands, Mysterious Tower (technically a Disney world, but it’s mainly relevant to Kingdom Hearts, so it’ll be counted as such), and then Keyblade Graveyard. Those three have already been crossed off, so that brings us to the end of our investigation. 

Of the twelve investigated world, five pass the Bechdel Test, whereas, seven do not. Of these worlds, the only Kingdom Hearts original world to pass was Radiant Garden. 

So… what does this actually mean? Is Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep suddenly sexist? Not necessarily, no. It just shows the underwhelming representation of female characters throughout the game, reflecting the franchise’s issue with it on the whole.

Throughout the Kingdom Hearts series, the only original female characters seen (within console releases, because I don’t mess with the mobile games) are; Kairi, Naminé, Aqua, Xion, Larxene/Elrena, Olette, Ava, Invi, Kairi’s Grandma and Strelitzia (who has appeared in trailer form only… unless we’re counting that one time where she was probably a star). When compared with the number of original male characters (which is way too many to get into), this is a staggeringly low amount of female characters. This is rather odd, given that Disney properties contain an array of iconic and fleshed-out female characters. Why was this skipped on Kingdom Hearts?

Of these listed female characters, a lot of them are side characters, who have only had a little bit of screen time. Ava’s only appearance outwith the mobile games is in Kingdom Hearts χ Back Cover, which is a collection of cutscenes. Kairi’s Grandma gets limited screen time, and Olette is only marginally better, being locked to Twilight Town. 

The Bechdel Test isn’t the be-all and end-all of female representation; it’s ultimately just an example of how low the bar is for women in media. It isn’t hard to have two named women converse about something other than the men in their life, and yet so many pieces of media fail the Bechdel Test. Whenever a piece of media passes the Bechdel Test, it shouldn’t be commended on that alone. 

It’s the bare minimum. 

Following from that hellishly low bar, a piece of media can pass the Bechdel Test, and can still put forward a bad portrayal of women.

The worlds in Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep (again, limited to Aqua’s story) fail the Bechdel Test more times than they pass it, but that’s purely down to a lack of female characters. The majority of the original male characters present in Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep are future organisation members; an organisation that only ever had two female characters (Larxene and Xion). Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep’s shortcomings are products of the entire franchise’s shortcomings.

We can only hope that as the plot of Kingdom Hearts grows, its representation of female characters can improve over time. 

The first Kingdom Hearts game was released in 2002. Change is long overdue.

(Originally posted on https://seekingdandelions.weebly.com/)

[mechanicalbride16]

Day 3: Favorite Single

Sorry if I'm late for a few days on this one HAHAHAHAHAHA school just got in the way again grrrrrrrrr... btw, I just edited this because I confused the "single" with the "music video". So as for my favorite single, it would be Angst.

I'm not a fan of this music video because I don't like how it was edited. But one thing that I loved about Angst that makes it remarkable for me is the imagery and ofc, its storyline.

Watching the music video and reading the translated lyrics made me smile because finally, there's a Rammstein song that I can relate to HAHAHAHAHAHA

if you ever wanna continue reading, here's a reminder that this is a very long post and it mostly contains politics.

3 months before the release of the music video was our presidential election. In case you didn't know, Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. was our current president. He was the son of our former dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. Thanks to the machinery and the historical distortion that was created by his family, he won the election.

Decades after EDSA Revolution, the Marcoses were already plotting and making advances on how they will change the image of their family. Little by little, each one in their clan is starting to gain a seat in the government until they start ruling Ilocos Norte again.

The historical distortion became prevalent in the last 2016 election. People were starting to paint Ferdinand Marcos as a hero who uses dictatorship to protect the country from insurgents and to instill discipline in the Filipinos. There was also false information spreading around on Facebook during those times about Marcos's alleged credentials. A lot of shit was going around during those times that helped the popularity of Bongbong Marcos to rise. Because of the disinformation, many people looked up to him, hoping that he was as "intelligent" as his father.

Just like how it was portrayed in the music video, the cheerleaders reminded me of the admins on those Facebook pages who were posting false information to lift up the Marcoses. Fast forward to now, some of their critics became their supporters and many people voted for him to be our president. I know that there's machinery involved there, but I can't deny the fact that he has lots of supporters.

During the recent election period, people were too busy scrolling on their social media, reading the posts about the presidential candidates. They were too absorbed with the content they were watching and reading, to the point that they believed everything that is posted there. That is why I literally face-palmed myself at the part in the music video where the band is facing the monitor screen because it reminded me of what happened during the campaign period.

While some people need to be held accountable for not being responsible enough in checking the information they're consuming, we can't blame those who are too tired from their responsibilities in real life to even fact-check the information they're reading.

So what was the aftermath of that election?? Well, a few weeks after Marcos was elected, my classmates and I were paranoid about our safety that's why we decided to create a group chat in Telegram for a while. When our fear and paranoia subsides, we transferred back to Messenger again.

I was hoping that it will be the last time I'll experience that kind of paranoia. But just a few weeks ago, some people from a certain university suspected that there were intelligence officers disguised as civilians who were roaming around the campus. I don't know what their reasons are, but the only reason that I could think of as of now is that they're searching for people who are activists and members of NatDem organizations.

I guess I gotta thank my meds for helping me not to be anxious about the political issues, and I honestly think that I'm already numb from all the shits happening here.

[cyruscabaral]

•••[ BLOG ]•••

"CELEBRATES LITTLE SUCCESSES"

NAME:CYRUS KIM C CABARAL PERFORMANCE TASK

SECTION:G-11 ST.FRANCIS

I.WHO ARE YOU?

I am Cyrus Kim C. Cabral. 16 years old and living In Barangay Calancuasan Norte Bayan ng Cuyapo province of Nueva Ecija. I study in a private and catholic school, the St. Pius X Institute of Cuyapo. I am a joker, my friends laugh, and I also like the colors black and white. I like this color because it suits my clothes, and I'm not smart. I'm the second of our three siblings. I'm a helpful inperson, especially to my parents. I help with selling at our place in the market, which is our livelihood, and I also help with household chores such as washing, sweeping, and tidying our house. I also want to finish school one day so that I can repay the blood and sweat that I have put into my business. Our elders will suffer just to support us as brothers and sisters. I am also the type of person who is easily angry, brave, and has a fear of God. God Is Important because he Is what we care about. Even if we have a problem or are sick, let's just pray always so that the Lord God will guide us because he gave us our life and It Is our loan to him. And my hobbies are playing cell phones, riding bikes, and tinkering with machinery such as motors and others.

II. HOW ARE YOU?

I'm doing great In last month I continue doing my best In school. And making myself busy so that at the same time I spend more time with my friends when I have nothing to do, and even If there are problems that come, I can overcome them because I have faith In our Lord .The weakness I see In myself Is the mistakes I made because I don't think about what I do before I do It, whether It Is right or wrong. This is a part of our lives when we are young people becoming mature In ourselves, and many have done new things. while we are growing up. And my strengths my parents because our family, and let's never forget Jesus because he Is precious In our lives. My family gives me Iqnspiration because she's the one who gives me advice on my studies. I realized that I have more weaknesses than strengths, and I realized that my weaknesses didn't exist for nothing; they exist for me to grow and mature.

III. MESSAGES AND HOPE AND ENCOURAGEMENT

Existing truly Is harsh

It’s like performing a march

It’s been breaking our hearts

But we’ll soon witness the stars

[librarianrafia]

Aug 2024)

Today's links

"Disenshittify or Die": My speech from Defcon 32.

Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.

This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023

Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.

Recent appearances: Where I've been.

Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.

Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.

Colophon: All the rest.

"Disenshittify or Die" (permalink)

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

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

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

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

==

What the fuck happened to the old, good internet?

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

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

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

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

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

I’m talking about enshittification.

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

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

There’s so many ways to lock in users.

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

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

No way.

Can you agree on where to go next?

Hell no.

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

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

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

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

Sometimes, it’s a grab bag:

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

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

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

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

Think Different, amirite?

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

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

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

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

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

Bullshit!

Bull.

Shit.

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

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

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

"But wait!" I hear you say!

[Come on, say it!]

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

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

[Any guesses?!]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I mean, you love to see it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except you can’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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