#technology news aggregator

[yellowmanula]

Dear Friends,

On November 29th-30th, the Aggregate, Electroacoustic Music Festival will take place in Berlin. This event merges tradition with electronic music, as through the use of MIDI, artists metaphorically awaken the spirit of the machine slumbering within the organ. Therefore, the festival features artists deeply connected to movements such as algorave—a type of event where the artist writes code in real-time, generating music—and electroacoustic traditions.

The festival’s approach to the relationship between musician and instrument is retro-futuristic, drawing from the ideas of electroacoustic avant-garde figures like Kotoński, Schaeffer, Varèse, Stockhausen, and many others. However, it raises new questions about how computer-controlled instrumental music, with its virtuosity, transcends the boundaries of perception in highly compressed musical events. It explores the intersections between electronic and acoustic music, objective interpretation, and the effects of mechanically precise performance.

Curators: gamut inc

Check the events: https://de.ra.co/events/1993705

[treasure-mimic]

So, let me try and put everything together here, because I really do think it needs to be talked about.

Today, Unity announced that it intends to apply a fee to use its software. Then it got worse.

For those not in the know, Unity is the most popular free to use video game development tool, offering a basic version for individuals who want to learn how to create games or create independently alongside paid versions for corporations or people who want more features. It's decent enough at this job, has issues but for the price point I can't complain, and is the idea entry point into creating in this medium, it's a very important piece of software.

But speaking of tools, the CEO is a massive one. When he was the COO of EA, he advocated for using, what out and out sounds like emotional manipulation to coerce players into microtransactions.

"A consumer gets engaged in a property, they might spend 10, 20, 30, 50 hours on the game and then when they're deep into the game they're well invested in it. We're not gouging, but we're charging and at that point in time the commitment can be pretty high."

He also called game developers who don't discuss monetization early in the planning stages of development, quote, "fucking idiots".

So that sets the stage for what might be one of the most bald-faced greediest moves I've seen from a corporation in a minute. Most at least have the sense of self-preservation to hide it.

A few hours ago, Unity posted this announcement on the official blog.

Effective January 1, 2024, we will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee that’s based on game installs. We will also add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no extra cost to Unity subscription plans this November. We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.

Now there are a few red flags to note in this pitch immediately.

Unity is planning on charging a fee on all games which use its engine.

This is a flat fee per number of installs.

They are using an always online runtime function to determine whether a game is downloaded.

There is just so many things wrong with this that it's hard to know where to start, not helped by this FAQ which doubled down on a lot of the major issues people had.

I guess let's start with what people noticed first. Because it's using a system baked into the software itself, Unity would not be differentiating between a "purchase" and a "download". If someone uninstalls and reinstalls a game, that's two downloads. If someone gets a new computer or a new console and downloads a game already purchased from their account, that's two download. If someone pirates the game, the studio will be asked to pay for that download.

Q: How are you going to collect installs? A: We leverage our own proprietary data model. We believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project. Q: Is software made in unity going to be calling home to unity whenever it's ran, even for enterprice licenses? A: We use a composite model for counting runtime installs that collects data from numerous sources. The Unity Runtime Fee will use data in compliance with GDPR and CCPA. The data being requested is aggregated and is being used for billing purposes. Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs? A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data. Q: What's going to stop us being charged for pirated copies of our games? A: We do already have fraud detection practices in our Ads technology which is solving a similar problem, so we will leverage that know-how as a starting point. We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will make available a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team.

This is potentially related to a new system that will require Unity Personal developers to go online at least once every three days.

Starting in November, Unity Personal users will get a new sign-in and online user experience. Users will need to be signed into the Hub with their Unity ID and connect to the internet to use Unity. If the internet connection is lost, users can continue using Unity for up to 3 days while offline. More details to come, when this change takes effect.

It's unclear whether this requirement will be attached to any and all Unity games, though it would explain how they're theoretically able to track "the number of installs", and why the methodology for tracking these installs is so shit, as we'll discuss later.

Unity claims that it will only leverage this fee to games which surpass a certain threshold of downloads and yearly revenue.

Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee: Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs.

They don't say how they're going to collect information on a game's revenue, likely this is just to say that they're only interested in squeezing larger products (games like Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, Fate Grand Order, Among Us, and Fall Guys) and not every 2 dollar puzzle platformer that drops on Steam. But also, these larger products have the easiest time porting off of Unity and the most incentives to, meaning realistically those heaviest impacted are going to be the ones who just barely meet this threshold, most of them indie developers.

Aggro Crab Games, one of the first to properly break this story, points out that systems like the Xbox Game Pass, which is already pretty predatory towards smaller developers, will quickly inflate their "lifetime game installs" meaning even skimming the threshold of that 200k revenue, will be asked to pay a fee per install, not a percentage on said revenue.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Hey Gamers!

Today, Unity (the engine we use to make our games) announced that they'll soon be taking a fee from developers for every copy of the game installed over a certain threshold - regardless of how that copy was obtained.

Guess who has a somewhat highly anticipated game coming to Xbox Game Pass in 2024? That's right, it's us and a lot of other developers.

That means Another Crab's Treasure will be free to install for the 25 million Game Pass subscribers. If a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous dent in our income and threatens the sustainability of our business.

And that's before we even think about sales on other platforms, or pirated installs of our game, or even multiple installs by the same user!!!

This decision puts us and countless other studios in a position where we might not be able to justify using Unity for our future titles. If these changes aren't rolled back, we'll be heavily considering abandoning our wealth of Unity expertise we've accumulated over the years and starting from scratch in a new engine. Which is really something we'd rather not do.

On behalf of the dev community, we're calling on Unity to reverse the latest in a string of shortsighted decisions that seem to prioritize shareholders over their product's actual users.

I fucking hate it here.

-Aggro Crab - END DESCRIPTION]

That fee, by the way, is a flat fee. Not a percentage, not a royalty. This means that any games made in Unity expecting any kind of success are heavily incentivized to cost as much as possible.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A table listing the various fees by number of Installs over the Install Threshold vs. version of Unity used, ranging from $0.01 to $0.20 per install. END DESCRIPTION]

Basic elementary school math tells us that if a game comes out for $1.99, they will be paying, at maximum, 10% of their revenue to Unity, whereas jacking the price up to $59.99 lowers that percentage to something closer to 0.3%. Obviously any company, especially any company in financial desperation, which a sudden anchor on all your revenue is going to create, is going to choose the latter.

Furthermore, and following the trend of "fuck anyone who doesn't ask for money", Unity helpfully defines what an install is on their main site.

While I'm looking at this page as it exists now, it currently says

The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.

However, I saw a screenshot saying something different, and utilizing the Wayback Machine we can see that this phrasing was changed at some point in the few hours since this announcement went up. Instead, it reads:

The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming or web browser is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.

Screenshot for posterity:

That would mean web browser games made in Unity would count towards this install threshold. You could legitimately drive the count up simply by continuously refreshing the page. The FAQ, again, doubles down.

Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games? A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included).

And, what I personally consider to be the most suspect claim in this entire debacle, they claim that "lifetime installs" includes installs prior to this change going into effect.

Will this fee apply to games using Unity Runtime that are already on the market on January 1, 2024? Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.

Again, again, doubled down in the FAQ.

Q: Are these fees going to apply to games which have been out for years already? If you met the threshold 2 years ago, you'll start owing for any installs monthly from January, no? (in theory). It says they'll use previous installs to determine threshold eligibility & then you'll start owing them for the new ones. A: Yes, assuming the game is eligible and distributing the Unity Runtime then runtime fees will apply. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.

That would involve billing companies for using their software before telling them of the existence of a bill. Holding their actions to a contract that they performed before the contract existed!

Okay. I think that's everything. So far.

There is one thing that I want to mention before ending this post, unfortunately it's a little conspiratorial, but it's so hard to believe that anyone genuinely thought this was a good idea that it's stuck in my brain as a significant possibility.

A few days ago it was reported that Unity's CEO sold 2,000 shares of his own company.

On September 6, 2023, John Riccitiello, President and CEO of Unity Software Inc (NYSE:U), sold 2,000 shares of the company. This move is part of a larger trend for the insider, who over the past year has sold a total of 50,610 shares and purchased none.

I would not be surprised if this decision gets reversed tomorrow, that it was literally only made for the CEO to short his own goddamn company, because I would sooner believe that this whole thing is some idiotic attempt at committing fraud than a real monetization strategy, even knowing how unfathomably greedy these people can be.

So, with all that said, what do we do now?

Well, in all likelihood you won't need to do anything. As I said, some of the biggest names in the industry would be directly affected by this change, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they're not just going to take it lying down. After all, the only way to stop a greedy CEO is with a greedier CEO, right?

(I fucking hate it here.)

And that's not mentioning the indie devs who are already talking about abandoning the engine.

[Links display tweets from the lead developer of Among Us saying it'd be less costly to hire people to move the game off of Unity and Cult of the Lamb's official twitter saying the game won't be available after January 1st in response to the news.]

That being said, I'm still shaken by all this. The fact that Unity is openly willing to go back and punish its developers for ever having used the engine in the past makes me question my relationship to it.

The news has given rise to the visibility of free, open source alternative Godot, which, if you're interested, is likely a better option than Unity at this point. Mostly, though, I just hope we can get out of this whole, fucking, environment where creatives are treated as an endless mill of free profits that's going to be continuously ratcheted up and up to drive unsustainable infinite corporate growth that our entire economy is based on for some fuckin reason.

Anyways, that's that, I find having these big posts that break everything down to be helpful.

[reasonsforhope]

"Scientists have developed a way to dramatically reduce the cost of recycling certain electronic waste by using whey protein.

Their method allows for the easy recovery of gold from circuit boards at a cost of energy and materials amounting to 50 times less than the price of the gold they recover—these are the numbers that big business likes to see.

Indeed, the potential for scalability depends on this sort of cost savings, something traditional e-waste recycling methods just can’t achieve.

Professor Raffaele Mezzenga from ETH Zurich has found that whey protein, a byproduct of dairy manufacturing, can be used to make sponges that attract trace amounts of ionized gold.

Electronic waste contains a variety of valuable metals, including copper, cobalt, and gold. Despite gold’s public persona as being either money or jewelry, thousands of ounces of gold are used in electronics every year for its exceptional conductive properties.

Mezzenga’s colleague Mohammad Peydayesh first “denatured whey proteins under acidic conditions and high temperatures, so that they aggregated into protein nanofibrils in a gel,” writes the ETH Zurich press. “The scientists then dried the gel, creating a sponge out of these protein fibrils.”

The next step was extracting the gold: done by tossing 20 salvaged motherboards into an acid bath until the metals had dissolved into ionized compounds that the sponge began attracting.

Removing the sponge, a heat treatment caused the gold ions to aggregate into 22-carat gold flakes which could be easily removed.

“The fact I love the most is that we’re using a food industry byproduct to obtain gold from electronic waste,” Mezzenga says. In a very real sense, he observes, the method transforms two waste products into gold. “You can’t get much more sustainable than that!” ...

However the real dollar value comes from the bottom line—which was 50 times more than the cost of energy and source materials. Because of this, the scientists have every intention of bringing the technology to the market as quickly as possible while also desiring to see if the protein fibril sponge can be made of other food waste byproducts.

E-waste is a quickly growing burden in global landfills, and recycling it requires extremely energy-intensive machinery that many recycling facilities do not possess.

The environmental value of the minerals contained within most e-waste comes not only from preventing the hundreds of years it takes for them to break down in the soil, but also from the reduction in demand from new mining operations which can, though not always, significantly degrade the environments they are located in.

[Note: Absolutely massive understatement, mining is incredibly destructive to ecosystems. Mining is also incredibly toxic to human health and a major cause of conflict, displacement, and slavery globally.]

Other countries are trying to incentivize the recycling of e-waste, and are using gold to do so. In 2022, GNN reported that the British Royal Mint launched an electronically traded fund (ETF) with each share representing the value of gold recovered from e-waste as a way for investors to diversify into gold in a way that doesn’t support environmentally damaging mining.

The breakthrough is reminiscent of that old fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin who can spin straw into gold. All that these modern-day, real-life alchemists are doing differently is using dairy and circuit boards rather than straw."

-via Good News Network, July 19, 2024

[probablyasocialecologist]

Ending mass human deprivation and providing good lives for the whole world's population can be accomplished while at the same time achieving ecological objectives. This is demonstrated by a new study by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and the London School of Economics and Political Science, recently published in World Development Perspectives. About 80% of humanity cannot access necessary goods and services and lives below the threshold for "decent living." Some narratives claim that addressing this problem will require massive economic growth on a global scale, multiplying existing output many times over, which would exacerbate climate change and ecological breakdown. The authors of the new study dispute this claim and argue that human development does not require such a dangerous approach. Reviewing recent empirical research, they find that ending mass deprivation and provisioning decent living standards for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments. This would ensure that everyone in the world has access to nutritious food, modern housing, high-quality health care, education, electricity, induction stoves, sanitation systems, clothing, washing machines, refrigerators, heating/cooling systems, computers, mobile phones, internet, and transport, and could also include universal access to recreational facilities, theaters, and other public goods. The authors argue that, to achieve such a future, strategies for development should not pursue capitalist growth and increased aggregate production as such but should rather increase the specific forms of production that are necessary to improve capabilities and meet human needs at a high standard, while ensuring universal access to key goods and services through public provisioning and decommodification. In the Global South, this requires using industrial policy to increase economic sovereignty, develop industrial capacity, and organize production around human well-being. At the same time, in high-income countries, less-necessary production (of things like mansions, SUVs, private jets and fast fashion) must be scaled down to enable faster decarbonization and to help bring resource use back within planetary boundaries, as degrowth scholarship holds.

July 25 2024

[seat-safety-switch]

For a couple years, I worked in a video store in a small town. In many ways, this was the culmination of a childhood dream: routine, unchallenging labour. If you were a particularly annoying labour analyst, all I actually ever “did” was ring up rentals, restock returns in the morning, and clean the windows. Customer service has its own way of filling the space left by the actual work, though.

People who have worked retail are a sort of elite corps. For one thing, you’re never rude to another retail employee for the entire rest of your life. You’ve been in the trenches, too, and even if you somehow managed to escape, you’d still have had that shared trauma to know how bad that shift could get for that shelf-stocker at Maybe’s Drugs off I-40.

I have all the usual complaints, but there’s something else, too. My unique problem is this: I had this one customer who came in every Monday morning, asking for the same movie. We never had that movie, which is the crux of our conflict. He – and I can’t remember his name anymore, even if the electroshock therapy had been effective – never took “no” for an answer, and would come back the next week. He’d ask for the same thing, by title. No other details: no barcode, no publisher, no actors. Not even a description of the plot (he hadn’t seen it yet, obviously.) Now, this was before broadband internet was widely available, so I’d have to dial up after hours to America Online, and see if the movie had been added to their database. It never did, except one night I saw some folks talking about it in a video store chat room.

Their customers, too, were asking for this film. Insistently. After talking about it that night, we decided that we would form a bit of a trade union group. If any of us heard anything on this mysterious VHS, we would share the knowledge with the rest of the group. That retail-worker camaraderie at work again, you see. Nothing ever came of it, but I did end up becoming good friends with a manager at a Hobart’s Movies in Ames, Iowa, and we were even roommates for awhile before he got a new job at Seaworld. I moved on, too, making my slow, but inevitably in retrospect, drift towards the coast. Still, the whole thing bothered me. For years afterward, I would turn on my computer every Monday night, long after I had left the job, and search for any clue as to the existence of this film.

Once, on a day off, I called a librarian, who got pissy at me for even asking about it, and demanded to know who had put me up to calling her as a prank. I hung up in a panic, but she called back for hours. Obviously, she was also undergoing the same situation, and I felt shame at having brought a momentary pain to another proud Retail-American.

Now, video rental stores are a thing of the past. Even in small towns, they have been reduced to just a fond memory and an abandoned corner of a strip mall. Maybe my customer’s quest doesn’t matter anymore. The aggregation of the world’s knowledge into one hissing, unseen beast at the centre of our collective technological hallucination is complete. If they don’t have it, pick a different one. All I know is that, one day, someone will find a copy of this movie, and I’ll be able to go back to that town and shove it in the ground where the video store once stood. On that day, I can finally rest, freed from the slavedriver that is Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 6, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUL 7, 2023

The payroll processing firm ADP said today that private sector jobs jumped by 497,000 in June, far higher than the Dow Jones consensus estimate predicted. The big gains were in leisure and hospitality, which added 232,000 new hires; construction with 97,000; and trade, transportation and utilities with 90,000. Annual pay rose at a rate of 6.4%. Most of the jobs came from companies with fewer than 50 employees. 

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is a way to measure the stock market by aggregating certain stocks, dropped 372 points as the strong labor market made traders afraid that the Fed would raise interest rates again to cool the economy. Higher interest rates make borrowing more expensive, slowing investment. 

Today, as the Washington Post’s climate reporter Scott Dance warned that the sudden surge of broken heat records around the globe is raising alarm among scientists, Bloomberg’s Cailley LaPara reported that the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act for emerging technologies to address climate change have long-term as well as short-term benefits. 

Dance noted that temperatures in the North Atlantic are already close to their typical annual peak although we are early in the season, sea ice levels around Antarctica are terribly low, and Monday was the Earth’s hottest day in at least 125,000 years and Tuesday was hotter. LaPara noted that while much attention has been paid to the short-term solar, EV, and wind industries in the U.S., emerging technologies for industries that can’t be electrified—technologies like sustainable aviation fuel, clean hydrogen, and direct air capture, which pulls carbon dioxide out of the air—offer huge potential to reduce emissions by 2030. 

This news was the backdrop today as President Biden was in South Carolina to talk about Bidenomics. After touting the huge investments of both public and private capital that are bringing new businesses and repaired infrastructure to that state, Biden noted that analysts have said that the new laws Democrats have passed will do more for Republican-dominated states than for Democratic ones. “Well, that’s okay with me,” Biden said, “because we’re all Americans. Because my view is: Wherever the need is most, that’s the place we should be helping. And that’s what we’re doing. Because the way I look at it, the progress we’re making is good for all Americans, all of America.”

On Air Force One on the way to the event, deputy press secretary Andrew Bates began his remarks to the press: “President Biden promised that he would be a president for all Americans, regardless of where they live and regardless of whether they voted for him or not. He also promised to rebuild the middle class. The fact that Bidenomics has now galvanized over $500 billion in job-creating private sector investment is the newest testament to how seriously he takes fulfilling those promises.”

Bates listed all the economic accomplishments of the administration and then added: “the most powerful endorsement of Bidenomics is this: Every signature economic law this President has signed, congressional Republicans who voted “no” and attacked it on Fox News then went home to their district and hailed its benefits.” He noted that “Senator Lindsey Graham called the Inflation Reduction Act ‘a nightmare for South Carolina,’” then, “[j]ust two months later, he called BMW’s electric vehicles announcement ‘one of the most consequential announcements in the history of the state of South Carolina.’” “Representative Joe Wilson blasted the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law but later announced, ‘I welcome Scout Motors’ plans to invest $2 billion and create up to 4,000 jobs in South Carolina.’ Nancy Mace called Bidenomics legislation a…‘disaster,’ then welcomed a RAISE grant to Charleston.” 

“[W]hat could speak to the effectiveness of Bidenomics more than these conversions?” Bates asked.

While Biden is trying to sell Americans on an economic vision for the future, the Republican leadership is doubling down on dislike of President Biden and the Democrats. Early on the morning of July 2, Trump, who remains the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, shared a meme of President Biden that included a flag reading: “F*CK BIDEN AND F*CK YOU FOR VOTING FOR HIM!” The next morning, in all caps, he railed against what he called “massive prosecutorial conduct” and “the weaponization of law enforcement,” asking: “Do the people of this once great nation even have a choice but to protest the potential doom of the United States of America??? 2024!!!”

Prosecutors have told U.S. district judge Aileen Cannon that they want to begin Trump’s trial on 37 federal charges for keeping and hiding classified national security documents, and as his legal trouble heats up, Trump appears to be calling for violence against Democrats. On June 29 he posted what he claimed was the address of former president Barack Obama, inspiring a man who had been at the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to repost the address and to warn, “We got these losers surrounded! See you in hell,…Obama’s [sic].” Taylor Tarranto then headed there with firearms and ammunition, as well as a machete, in his van. Secret Service agents arrested him. 

Indeed, those crossing the law for the former president are not faring well. More than 1,000 people have been arrested for their participation in the events of January 6, and those higher up the ladder are starting to feel the heat as well. Trump lawyer Lin Wood, who pushed Trump’s 2020 election lies, was permitted to “retire” his law license on Tuesday rather than be disbarred. Trump lawyer John Eastman is facing disbarment in California for trying to overturn the 2020 election with his “fake elector” scheme, a ploy whose legitimacy the Supreme Court rejected last week. And today, Trump aide Walt Nauta pleaded not guilty to federal charges of withholding documents and conspiring to obstruct justice for allegedly helping Trump hide the classified documents he had at Mar-a-Lago. 

Trump Republicans—MAGA Republicans—are cementing their identity by fanning fears based on cultural issues, but it is becoming clear those are no longer as powerful as they used to be as the reality of Republican extremism becomes clear. 

Yesterday the man who raped and impregnated a then-9-year-old Ohio girl was sentenced to at least 25 years in prison. Last year, after the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, President Biden used her case to argue for the need for abortion access. Republican lawmakers, who had criminalized all abortions after 6 weeks, before most people know they’re pregnant, publicly doubted that the case was real (Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost told the Fox News Channel there was “not a damn scintilla of evidence” to support the story). Unable to receive an abortion in Ohio, the girl, who had since turned 10, had to travel to Indiana, where Dr. Caitlin Bernard performed the procedure.

Republican Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita complained—inaccurately—that Bernard had not reported child abuse and that she had violated privacy laws by talking to a reporter, although she did not identify the patient and her employer said she acted properly. Bernard was nonetheless reprimanded for her handling of privacy issues and fined by the Indiana licensing board. Her employer disagreed.

As Republican-dominated states have dramatically restricted abortion, they have fueled such a backlash that party members are either trying to avoid talking about it or are now replacing the phrase “national ban” with “national consensus” or “national standard,” although as feminist writer Jessica Valenti, who studies this language, notes, they still mean strict antiabortion measures. In the House, some newly-elected and swing-district Republicans have blocked abortion measures from coming to a vote out of concern they will lose their seats in 2024. 

But it is not at all clear the issue will go away. Yesterday, those committed to protecting abortion rights in Ohio turned in 70% more signatures than they needed to get a measure amending the constitution to protect that access on the ballot this November. In August, though, antiabortion forces will use a special election to try to change the threshold for constitutional amendments, requiring 60% of voters rather than a majority.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[mariacallous]

RealPage says it isn’t doing anything wrong by suggesting to landlords how much rent they could charge. In a move to reclaim its own narrative, the property management software company published a microsite and a digital booklet it’s calling “The Real Story,” as it faces multiple lawsuits and a reported federal criminal probe related to allegations of rental price fixing.

RealPage’s six-page digital booklet, published on the site in mid-June, addresses what it calls “false and misleading claims about its software”—the myriad of allegations it faces involving price-fixing and rising rents—and contends that the software benefits renters and landlords and increases competition. It also said landlords accept RealPage’s price recommendations for new leases less than 50 percent of the time and that the software recommends competitive prices to help fill units.

“‘The heart of this case’ never had a heartbeat—the data clearly shows that RealPage does not set customers’ prices and customers do what they believe is best for their respective properties to vigorously compete against each other in the market,” the digital booklet says.

But landlords are left without concrete answers, as questions around the legality of this software are ongoing as they continue renting properties. “I don’t think we’re seeing this as a RealPage issue but rather as a revenue management software issue,” says Alexandra Alvarado, the director of marketing and education at the American Apartment Owners Association, the largest association of landlords in the US.

Alvarado says some landlords are taking pause and asking questions before using the tech. Software like RealPage “has made it much easier to understand what is happening in the market,” Alvarado says. “Technology has helped us in so many ways to make all these processes more efficient. In this case, it’s now borderline too efficient.” And members of the AAOA are asking questions about the legality of revenue management, she says. “The first thing landlords typically think is, what is the legal repercussion? Am I going to be in trouble for using this software? If the answer is maybe, it’s usually off the table.”

Dana Jones, president and CEO of RealPage, said in a statement released alongside the booklet that “the time is now to address a number of false claims about RealPage’s revenue management software, and how rental housing providers operate when setting rent prices.” RealPage did not respond to WIRED’s queries asking what prompted the lengthy statement in June. Officials appear to be narrowing in on RealPage, as the Justice Department is allegedly planning to sue the company, according to a report from Politico last week. The company declined a request to comment on the latest in the ongoing Department of Justice probe.

Allegations of price-fixing that may constitute antitrust violations have dogged the software company since late 2022, when ProPublica published an investigation alleging that RealPage’s software was linked to rent rises in some US cities, as the company used private, aggregated data provided by its customers to suggest rental prices. (In response to ProPublica's reporting, RealPage commented that it “uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner.”)

RealPage’s software is powerful because it anonymizes rental data and can provide landlords and property managers with nonpublic and public data about rentals, which may be different from that advertised publicly on platforms like real estate marketplace Zillow. The company contends that it’s not engaging in price-fixing, as landlords are not forced to accept the rents that RealPage’s algorithm suggests. Sometimes it even recommends landlords lower the rent, RealPage claims. But antitrust enforcers have alleged that even sharing private information via an algorithm and using it for price recommendations can be as conspiratorial as back-room handshake deals, even if landlords don’t end up renting apartments at those rates. The reported antitrust investigation is ongoing.

RealPage’s algorithmic pricing model is among one of the first subject to scrutiny, perhaps due to its involvement in housing, a necessity that has ballooned in price as housing supply languishes. Typical rent in the US is just under $2,000, according to Zillow, up from around $1,500 in early 2020. “Housing affordability is a national problem created by economic and political forces—not by the use of revenue management software,” Realpage says. But renters can’t tell whether their rates are rising because of algorithms or not.

“It’s almost impossible to know if you are just a spectator or a victim,” says Shanti Singh, legislative and communications director with Tenants Together, a California-based coalition of tenants activists. If tenants call a hotline over raised rent or fees, “we’re not necessarily going to be able to see or connect that their landlord is using RealPage.”

The state of Arizona sued RealPage and nine landlords in February, claiming a conspiracy between the company and landlords led renters in Phoenix and Tucson to pay “millions of dollars” more in rent. That followed a similar lawsuit out of Washington, DC. In the capital’s greater metropolitan area, more than 90 percent of rental units in large apartment buildings were priced using RealPage software, according to DC’s attorney general.

The cases against RealPage puts algorithmic pricing to the test; as the technology becomes more common, antitrust law has yet to keep pace. Officials have other concerns around algorithms used for alleged hotel price fixing, as well as e-commerce algorithms. “The concern of regulators that algorithms can be used in ways that harm competition—that idea is here to stay,” says Ed Rogers, a partner at law firm Ballard Spahr who focuses on antitrust cases. “RealPage could end up really being a test case, not just for the real estate rental industry but for this aspect of AI and software and its role in a competitive landscape.”

The impact of algorithmic pricing varies greatly. Amazon has been accused of pushing up prices with a secret algorithm. (Amazon has said the “allegation that we somehow force sellers to use our optional services is simply not true.”) But others operate in plain sight, like dynamic pricing for rideshare costs, and don’t involve multiple companies sharing information. Not all of these algorithms are engaged in activity that may be considered anticompetitive. A Nevada judge in May dismissed a suit brought by hotel guests against several Las Vegas hotel operators, finding there was no agreement among them to fix prices using shared algorithms.

Yardi Systems, another US property management company, is also facing a class action suit regarding antitrust violations for artificially inflating rent prices. The company has said it did “nothing illegal,” as it does not mandate rent prices through its software or make “collusive pricing decisions.”

Typical rental costs in Phoenix have increased by more than about $500 a month from April 2020 to 2024, and by around $400 in Washington, DC, in the same period, according to Zillow.

Renters have also filed numerous class action suits against RealPage and property owners that have been consolidated. Some landlords named in those settled claims earlier this year. The court threw out a lawsuit regarding price fixing for student housing but has said the class action from renters can go forward. Attorneys representing some of the plaintiffs in the class action did not respond to requests to comment.

RealPage laid off about 4 percent of staff in June. “RealPage is hyper-focused on innovation and accelerating its business growth in 2024 and beyond, and as a result has made the decision to eliminate a small number of roles within the company,” Jennifer Bowcock, a spokesperson for the company, says. The layoffs were not connected to the antitrust lawsuit, she says. Thoma Bravo, the owner of RealPage, did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

As of 2020, RealPage said it was collecting data on some 16 million rental units across the US. There are 44 million renter households in the US, and nearly 22 million rental units are owned by for-profit businesses. RealPage grew when it acquired Lease Rent Options (LRO) in 2017, after clearing antitrust scrutiny by the Justice Department. The DOJ did not comment on questions from WIRED about its reported investigation into RealPage or its approval of RealPage’s acquisition of Lease Rent Options in 2017.

When asked about the latest in the probe, RealPage referred to a portion of its recent lengthy statement, which said: “The DOJ extensively reviewed LRO and YieldStar in 2017, without objecting to, much less challenging, any feature of the products.” RealPage also says that its “products are fundamentally the same today” as they were when the acquisition received approval.

In June, The New York Times asked assistant US attorney general Jonathan Kanter, the Justice Department’s top antitrust official, if he would view an AI tool communicating pricing information as the same as humans colluding, with the question referencing the reported RealPage investigation. Kanter replied: “I often say that if your dog bites somebody, you’re responsible for your dog biting somebody. If your AI fixes prices, you’re just as responsible.”

The Justice Department also last year filed a statement of interest in the RealPage combined class action lawsuit, as the case could become a precedent setter in algorithmic pricing. The statement mirrored Kanter’s argument that the method of price setting doesn’t matter, and algorithms are just the latest evolution in information gathering and sharing.

“In-person handshakes gave way to phone and fax, and later to email. Algorithms are the new frontier,” the Justice Department argued in a statement of interest it filed in the class action lawsuit against RealPage and landlords. “And, given the amount of information an algorithm can access and digest, this new frontier poses an even greater anti-competitive threat than the last.”

[pearwaldorf]

Have you heard about what's happening on dreamwidth/FFA and volunteers talking about the dysfunction happening in the OTW and the CSEM incident?

I have! It's real fucked up!

(Blanket warning for discussion of CSAM/CSEM, as well as exposure to such in a volunteer context, in text and links below.)

For those who are unaware, failfandomanon (FFA) is an anonymous meme community on Dreamwidth for people to discuss all things fandom, serious or not. I think it tends towards kneejerk anti-purity wank, but it is one of the few places where people can talk openly about fandom things without it being traced back to a publicly identifiable handle. This context will become important later on.

You may remember last year AO3 got hit with emails containing CSAM and they had to lock everything down while they dealt with it.

A few days ago somebody on FFA asked about what happened re: the AO3 volunteers working through that period. Here is the tweet chain where I found out about it, with screencaps from FFA. Basically, said volunteers got a list of links to mental health hotlines and the names of people who volunteered themselves as resources for dealing with this stuff. Yeah. (As a tangent, the OTW has an estimated ~$2mm cash reserve. At no point did they decide to hire a counselor or any other sort of professional help to assist their volunteers in dealing with this.)

Impertinence has a good rundown of the timeline of events.

azarias, the person who became the defacto CSAM resource person (a truly horrifying statement), was traumatized dealing with this. The OTW used this opportunity to force her out because people on the Board didn't like her, realized they wouldn't have a defacto CSAM person, and reinstated her, expecting that she would go back to doing what she did previously. This goes beyond benign neglect into real actual harm inflicted upon volunteers.

Then! Then! THEN!! This message (FFA original) was sent out to everybody in the OTW volunteer Slack. Which basically says to volunteers "If we don't like you we'll come down on you like a ton of bricks if you talk about how we abused you."

I don't know who's keeping up on this on Twitter, but somebody started a Dreamwidth aggregating most of what you see above.

I know this is a lot of information to throw at people. I encourage you to read it and process at your own pace because this is important to understand. And while I believe this is trustworthy information (as far as I can tell), I'm not a substitute for your own personal judgment and brain.

It is clear to me the Organization of Transformative Works has abrogated its responsibility to its volunteers as people and as laborers on behalf of the organization. There is no formal mechanism for us as AO3 users or as people the organization claims to represent (members of fandom) to demand remediation on behalf of azarias or other volunteers who have been traumatized by this.

I expect there will be a lot more people than usual at the next board meeting (I do not see one scheduled currently), but they still don't really answer to us. If you donated at least $10 during the last pledge drive you're eligible to vote in the board elections, but that does not fix the current situation or the culture that lead to it.

As somebody who has been in fandom longer than some of you have been alive, and as somebody who's had an AO3 account since 2009, it grieves me to come to terms with the rot in the OTW culture, which is deeper than I could have imagined. It's one thing to see an organization drag its feet on things it promised to do years ago or misread the room regarding new technology. It is a whole other thing to have evidence it harmed people through active malice because they didn't like them and refused to make amends when confronted. That is not something I can support, regardless of what it may have done for fandom in the past.

[dk-thrive]

So you’ve written that our attention is getting fracked. What do you mean by that?

D. GRAHAM BURNETT: Fracking. I suspect most of your listeners have heard that term. Fracking is mostly associated with this idea of getting petroleum resources out of the earth. But it’s a new technology for doing that. In the old days, pre major exploitation of petroleum resources, there were these big, juicy zits of high-value crude oil just sitting there in the earth, waiting to geyser up if you tapped them. Drill a hole — whew, gusher.

We’ve tapped all that out. The only way you can get the remaining petroleum and natural gas resources out of the deep earth is to pump down in there high pressure, high volume detergent, which forces up to the surface this kind of slurry, mixture of natural gas, crude oil, leftover detergent, and juice and nasty stuff, which you then separate out, and you get your monetizable crude.

This is a precise analogy to what’s happening to us in our contemporary attention economy. We have a, depending on who you ask, $500 billion, $3 trillion, $7 trillion industry, which, to get the money value of our attention out of us, is continuously pumping into our faces high-pressure, high-value detergent in the form of social media and non-stop content that holds us on our devices. And that pumping brings to the surface that spume, that foam of our attention, which can be aggregated and sold off to the highest bidder.

— D. Graham Burnett, from “Ezra Klein Interviews D. Graham Burnett” (NY Times, May 31, 2024)

[warningsine]

A small new trial published in the journal Nature Medicine describes what would be two firsts for Parkinson's disease, if they pan out: a diagnostic test and a potential immune-based treatment that works similarly to a vaccine. The research is still early, but researchers are excited by the prospect of advances for a disease that lacks good diagnostics and treatments.

The target of both innovations is alpha synuclein, a protein that takes an abnormal form in Parkinson's patients—aggregating in their brains and destroying nerve cells involved in motor and some cognitive functions. While researchers have long known that these proteins are involved in the disease, finding ways to measure and target them has not been easy.

The (potential) Parkinson's vaccine

The Florida-based biotech company Vaxxinity developed a vaccine, or what it calls an active immune medicine, to train the immune system to attack only abnormal versions of the protein—which are improperly folded—and not the regular forms. This would essentially help people's bodies treat themselves.

“The idea is that patients should recognize their own misfolded proteins, and it is personalized because their own immune systems are doing the work,” says Dr. Mark Frasier, chief scientific officer at the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, which funded the testing part of the study.

The Parkinson's test

The new diagnostic test for Parkinson’s, which was developed by researchers at University of Texas and Vaxxinity, uses samples of cerebrospinal fluid to measure a person's levels of abnormal alpha synuclein. If the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) grants it full approval, it will become the first test for diagnosing Parkinson's. (The FDA classified it as a breakthrough device in 2019, a status that expedites access to innovative technologies where there is unmet need.) “Without [such a test], you’re kind of shooting in the dark,” says Mei Mei Hu, CEO and co-founder of Vaxxinity.

Alpha synuclein has been tricky to measure in the body for several reasons, says Frasier. While everyone has the protein, abnormal forms of it occur in relatively small amounts, so they're harder to detect via imaging. This type of alpha synuclein also tends to clump inside cells rather than outside of them, making it even harder to see. If clumps are large enough to become detectable, they can look structurally similar to amyloid or tau—the proteins implicated in Alzheimer’s disease—so imaging tests might misdiagnose people with Alzheimer’s rather than Parkinson’s.

Read More: Michael J. Fox: Chasing Parkinson's Treatments

The test overcomes those hurdles by cleverly exploiting normal forms of the protein. Parkinson’s experts believe that tiny amounts of abnormal alpha synuclein circulate in the spinal fluid of patients, but are too small to be detected through imaging. To run the new test in the study, researchers take normal forms of the protein in the lab and add them to samples of spinal fluid from patients; that prompts any misfolded protein that might be present in the samples to pull the normal proteins into misfolded aggregates, amplifying the signal for the abnormal form. Scientists then use a fluorescent probe to detect how much antibody to the misfolded protein patients generated, resulting in a biomarker, or stand-in for the treatment effect.

This test would be a critical advance because it makes it possible to identify patients with abnormal alpha synuclein at the earliest stages of the disease, when treatments might be more effective.

With more data from patients, researchers hope to further refine what different levels mean, so that the test will be able to tell not just if a person has Parkinson's but whether someone might be at a greater risk of developing it. Currently the test is only used in research studies, but more results like these—as well as data on whether the same process can be applied to blood samples—could speed the test to getting approved for wider use.

What the study found

The trial—conducted by researchers at the University of Texas, the Mayo Clinic, the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, and Vaxxinity—included 20 people with Parkinson’s. It was just designed to test the safety of the approach, so the study only provided hints about the treatment's effectiveness. Everyone received three shots over nearly a year; some contained the treatment at different doses, and some contained a placebo.

Overall, people receiving the vaccine generated more antibodies against the abnormal alpha synuclein protein than those vaccinated with placebo, as measured by the Parkinson's test. Antibodies started to ramp up about four months after the vaccinations began.

“What is unique about our technology is that it can stimulate the immune system to produce very, very specific antibodies against toxic forms of alpha synuclein, and do it in a safe way, which is reassuring,” says Jean-Cosme Dodart, senior vice president of research at Vaxxinity and senior author of the paper.

According to the test results, about half of the patients in the trial showed high levels of antibodies against the misfolded alpha synuclein, and most of these patients received the highest dose of the vaccine. They also scored the highest on motor and cognitive tests. There were too few patients to adequately assess any changes of Parkinson’s symptoms, but the researchers believe that longer follow-up with those tests, and potentially more frequent or higher doses of the vaccine, could lead to improvements in those scores. “The results are very, very encouraging,” says Dodart.

“This paper demonstrates that in a small number of people, the vaccine is having an impact on misfolded alpha synuclein, which is really exciting,” says Frasier. “We are now in the biological era for Parkinson’s disease."

[darkmaga-returns]

Short of dot-com type of a bust, spending on AI data centers will continue to skyrocket, with attendant energy demand. Utility companies should be in panic mode to increase generating capacity, but they are not. The resulting squeeze will drive consumer prices through the roof and put exorbitant strain on the electric grid. But rest assured that AI companies will suffer no outages. ⁃ TN Editor

The rapid growth of data centers to support AI is significantly increasing global electricity demand.

This surge in demand threatens to outpace the development of renewable energy sources.

International regulations are needed to ensure tech companies use clean energy and minimize their impact on climate goals.

The global electricity demand is expected to grow exponentially in the coming decades, largely due to an increased demand from tech companies for new data centers to support the rollout of high-energy-consuming advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI). As governments worldwide introduce new climate policies and pump billions into alternative energy sources and clean tech, these efforts may be quashed by the increased electricity demand from data centers unless greater international regulatory action is taken to ensure that tech companies invest in clean energy sources and do not use fossil fuels for power.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) released a report in October entitled “What the data centre and AI boom could mean for the energy sector”. It showed that with investment in new data centers surging over the past two years, particularly in the U.S., the electricity demand is increasing rapidly – a trend that is set to continue.

The report states that in the U.S., annual investment in data center construction has doubled in the past two years alone. China and the European Union are also seeing investment in data centers increase rapidly. In 2023, the overall capital investment by tech leaders Google, Microsoft, and Amazon was greater than that of the U.S. oil and gas industry, at approximately 0.5 percent of the U.S. GDP.

The tech sector expects to deploy AI technologies more widely in the coming decades as the technology is improved and becomes more ingrained in everyday life. This is just one of several advanced technologies expected to contribute to the rise in demand for power worldwide in the coming decades.

Global aggregate electricity demand is set to increase by 6,750 terawatt-hours (TWh) by 2030, per the IEA’s Stated Policies Scenario. This is spurred by several factors including digitalization, economic growth, electric vehicles, air conditioners, and the rising importance of electricity-intensive manufacturing. In large economies such as the U.S., China, and the EU, data centers contribute around 2 to 4 percent of total electricity consumption at present. However, the sector has already surpassed 10 percent of electricity consumption in at least five U.S. states. Meanwhile, in Ireland, it contributes more than 20 percent of all electricity consumption.

[ultimateinferno]

There's a lot of talk about Spotify "using AI in their latest wrapped," and jokes about how there's no way in hell anyone hand crafted previous years' wrapped, and while not wrong, I do think it is an oversimplification.

There's a difference between fine tuning an algorithm to aggregate a Wrapped vs using a GenAI out of the box. Spotify and YT already had automation running the show, but the difference is that genre categorization was probably originally done using graph theory and nodes—comparing which songs are often listened together, which artists often collaborate, and how people themselves classify the songs vs GenAI which opens ChatGPT or one of its competitors and types "Name a genre/vibe from these list of songs," and that's it.

It's not even an issue of neural networks. I'm certain you can use machine learning that analyzes the mp3/.wav files to classify songs for you, using songs everyone already knows the genres of as training data to calculate the unknowns. Van Halen is Metal, TSwift is Pop, Zedd is EDM, Kendrick Lamar is Hip-Hop and Rap (I listen to none of these people). Even lesser known but still sizeable indie artists with passionate fans can do some of the categorizing for your data.

To me, it's the difference between using a calculator vs. asking chatgpt to help you with math. They're both computers doing all the work, but one is actually tailor made for this purpose and the other is touted as a cyber cure all.

I'm a programmer myself. I've made and ran neural networks before, including LLMs, but I think there is a massive failure of communication regarding this shit. There's already a meme among programmers about how people boast "Their new AI service" and it's just an API to ChatGPT rather than actually taking what technologies run under the hood and deciding how and if it should be applied.

[riseofthecommonwoodpile]

Hi Izzy! I remember back in the day you were a big fan of Sunspring and wrote a beautiful piece discussing it and talking about AI art. Do you think any AI art has surpassed Sunspring? Have changes in the development of AI changed your perspective on it at all? Asking bc I love that essay and I’m very curious :) thx

(context for those who don't know, Sunspring is a short film made about 8 years ago that used a relatively early LLM to generate its script, which was then filmed with a real cast and crew. if you want to watch it here it is, it's about 9 minutes, i highly recommend it)

i've thought about Sunspring a lot as AI art has become such a big topic in the past year or so, and I think the pieces i wrote about it i still stand behind, though i got a few things wrong that i'll bring up when i answer the second question.

to answer the first question: i personally haven't see any AI art that has impacted me emotionally nearly as much, but i also kinda dropped off watching new movies (most of the new-to-me movies i watch are found footage horror movies, 70's porno-chic also-rans, and shot on video movies from the 90's), and i would wager that, if i could somehow experience all of the AI art that exists, there'd be something that hit me in the same way again. there's too much of it for that not to be the case, and too many genuinely creative people experimenting with it. that said, what was so beautiful about Sunspring was how imperfect the tech used to create it was. Almost all of the script makes grammatical sense, but the way it flows, the directions sentences go, the phrasing used is so strange that the friction between the failures of the tech to be truly convincing and the actors trying to bridge the gap to make it still work is what was exhilarating and moving. as the models have gotten better and better, as the rough edges smooth off, that tension so often has just faded into a bland beige unflavored oatmeal of average aggregate language. some of the phrases in Sunspring that have stuck with me the most ("I think I could have been my life", "Whatever you want to know about the presence of the story, I’m a little bit of a boy on the floor.", etc.) wouldn't be created by any of the most popular LLMs today. they're too idiosyncratic, the phrasing is too odd, the grammar almost but not quite there. the plot is surreal and associative, the structuring bizarre and dreamlike. the lines Sunspring ends on— "He looks at me, and he throws me out of his eyes. And then he says he’ll go to bed with me."— are some of my favorites in any film, and it's because they are abstract, poetic, like the computer stumbled upon a phrase so evocative that no written-by-committee script would've let it through. he looks at me, and he throws me out of his eyes. this man who is supposed to love me looks at me in a way where his love of me has gone, where i'm barely even seen as me. it's not the kind of sentence most modern LLMs, with their focus on being convincing, are designed to create.

as far as the second question, i think the biggest change in my perspective is how my belief in the technology, both good and bad, has curdled. i bought into the hype that the technology would progress to the point where screenwriting could be turned into an assembly line, and maybe after that the rest of the parts of filmmaking as well. i had hoped it would become a new collaborative process between human and technology, and i feared it would become a way for movie execs to pay people less and eliminate jobs. the first i haven't seen much of, and the second, while certainly the dream of so many boosters of the tech, has largely been a failure (though plenty, plenty of people have still lost their jobs to LLMs despite that, and as a labor issue i still think it is a very important area of focus). i was too caught up in the possibilities that i didn't bother to research who was making the tech, where the money was coming from, what growth in the sector would look like materially, etc. i still believe LLMs can be used creatively, but most likely any interesting art coming from them will emerge out of models custom-molded by artists to have some of those same rough edges i loved in the first place. i think, in terms of mainstream film, any use of AI is in service to the same bland competence the rest of the industry is mired in, a determination to make products for everyone that inevitably become products for no one. i've become a lot more cynical about the trend towards mediocrity in entertainment, and that cynicism is due at least in part to much of what i've seen come out of the AI space. i do not have a knee-jerk hatred of the tech, but it has not at all panned out how i had hoped or dreaded.

[fipindustries]

What is Almost Nowhere? Is it okay if I ask this question here?

sure, it is the greatest work of fiction ever written. Written by nostalgebraist, author of the northern caves and the tumblr bot frank

Its genre i would descrive as conceptual science fiction, wherein it is not so interested in exploring new technologies or new scientific principles but new kinds of concepts. It is about earth being invaded by "aliens", where the aliens are not so much living creatures but the aggregate of epiphenomena that arises from the interactions of the laws of physics at extreme contexts.

It is bloody knotted, complicated, laberinthine, dense, with incredibly crunchy language that deals more in abstracts than concretes.

Its freaking weird, man. Its homestuck levels of weird, its a mix of navokov and joyce.

Its probably the best book ive read in my life

[animanga-bc-tournament]

What is animanga Before Crunchyroll

This is a period in time roughly from 2005-2014 when the world is fully post-internet and Japanese anime and manga was already fully integrated into international youth culture and readily available to people outside of Japan.

Animanga fans had access via legal offline channels such as: television, home video, libraries, and bookstores. And illegal online channels such as: Youtube, pirate streaming sites, and torrenting. It is also a period with a sudden change in our general media viewing and reading habits impacted by events and technological innovations like the 2008 financial crisis, the introduction of social media as a primary way to be online, smartphones, and the slow death of live TV

Why start this period in 2005?

This page will be primarily dedicated to the English language distribution and fandom around anime and manga. By this point in time we are well beyond the stage of “evangelizing” animanga as mediums and a canon of “must watch/read” series has already been established.

The above mentioned channels were well established and readily accessible. Depending on where you lived you had a higher chance of being able to go to the bookstore and read the latest Fruits Basket volume, go to anime conventions, watch anime on TV, or join your school’s anime club, than in say 1996. The media industry in several countries outside Japan has or will soon start investing in the distribution of translated animanga for the first time ever. The US manga bubble spearheaded by Tokyopop is also still a few years from bursting.

From this point on online fan communities dedicated to anime and manga also steadily expanded via forums, database sites, to eventually meme aggregator sites, or facebook groups around 2010. In 2005 Geocities pages dedicated to sharing information are mostly dead and platforms such as Livejournal become the new place to engage in fan activities and access unofficial translations until the site was en masse abandoned following its 2009 acquisition by SUP Media

Why end this period in 2014?

Short version: 2014 is when the Naruto manga ended a mere 2 years after the Bleach anime ended its Japanese broadcast. Marking the end of the chapter on a seemingly endless period where every week without fail you could expect not just a new chapter of the manga, but a new episode of the anime version for the mega hits Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach. Kids today will thankfully never know what it was like for years have all of these series as a constant presence in 2 mediums simultaneously. This trio was controversially called the “Big 3” by fans. I could also easily leave it to the fact that of course after 9 years fans have obviously grown up and moved on and the face of the industry itself is completely different. But was just the medium that changed? What about the way international fans interacted with it? I will now present my case on why we can use the popularity of Crunchyroll as a service to make a pre- and post- era in the way international fans consumed animanga.

When the US manga bubble burst after the 2008 financial crisis there was a massive shift in which manga was licensed. The publishers that survived the collapse had to downscale their output leading series to be cancelled or go out of print for several years. The cost of manga also went up turning translated print manga into bigger investments for consumers. Another major shift is online fan translations (scanlations) becoming more prominent and accessible, with new aggregator sites appearing one by one. Not only could you read as much manga as you wanted for free with unedited art and a translation that felt more “authentic”. The high output from the fan translators revealed not just how much manga was not being licensed; the international publishers were often really far behind and much slower than the original Japanese serial.

The popularity of scanlations has always caused obvious tension to the decisions on what US publisher would license as companies like Viz Media and Vertical inc repeatedly expressed the belief that fans would never buy a title they already read for free online. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that as the fansubbers of the 1990s proved, unpaid fan translators were and still are the most significant tastemakers and gatekeepers of Japanese media for an international audience.

This sets the stage for what i personally believe forever changed the way international fans watch anime (and in turn read manga): social media and the premiere of Kill la Kill and Attack on Titan. Prior to this the average international animanga fans experienced anime rather delayed. There is little awareness of what was actually new in Japan and to the average fan watching anime recommended in online or offline communities may have been enough. But how many official channels like TV, video rentals, and home video sales were actually available as distributors went out of business or lost their licenses how was a fan supposed to watch the series they wanted to see? And what if you didn’t even live in a country with any of these official channels? Fansubs or DVD rips uploaded to Youtube, torrenting sites, or other unauthorized streaming aggregators successfully democratized access to anime for anyone with a stable internet connection. The high output of fansubbers just like scanlators also revealed again just how far behind the official channels were. Why wait for the right to purchase something when you know you want it and can just get it for free online?

Enter Crunchyroll: the site was founded in 2006 as a for-profit media hosting site for east asian media. A lot of the media hosted was unauthorized and illegal but some distributors chose to look the other way. This was until Crunchyroll started securing more and more funding in turn letting them enter legal partnerships and distribution deals. Eventually striking gold with partnership with Studio Gonzo and the acquisition of the Naruto Shippuden anime rights. Eventually all unauthorized media was removed from the site as they built a catalogue of anime for consumers to legally stream, at a price. In parallel to this, by 2012 fansubbers could and were expected to keep up with just about every new anime airing in Japan.

Another change happened in our daily lives: smartphones became a piece of technology most people owned. And the abrupt consumer shift from live TV to streaming was right around the corner.

A gradually acquired awareness of just how far behind and slow official “legal” channels were was already completely reshaping the way the most avid fans viewed anime. So was our new phones. The smartphone wasn’t just good for watching anime while you were away from home it also made reading manga online an even easier experience. How were the official distributors supposed to compete with this?

Unfortunately most pirate streaming sites were slow to implement players that functioned on smartphones, Youtube was also not far from implementing an aggressive DMCA strike system preventing new anime uploads. A service like Crunchyroll became more and more attractive as it was available in almost any region outside of Asia. With a big catalogue of titles that put Netflix and hulu to shame and a smartphone app that worked smoothly, it didn’t seem like a bad deal for people who wanted to watch anime on their phones or other devices, not to mention the premium gave you HD quality. A luxury the illegal sites couldn’t always grant. And it offered what previously only fansubbers could: you got to see brand new episodes of subtitled anime only an hour after it aired in Japan. It’s second major selling point to younger and less financially free individuals was that free users could watch as much as they wanted as long as they sat through ads, were fine with SD quality, and being 1 week behind on brand new anime.

Socially the immediacy and size of large scale social media like Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter cultivated bigger and bigger and more public communities. It became more and more commonplace to not just watch and read whatever was recommended to you but to keep up as well as finding the next cool thing before anyone else. So what channels would keep you updated on everything new? Trustworthy sources were for many still difficult to discern. More and more fans were watching new anime at the same time as Japanese viewers via illegal and legal channels, but what would it even look like if everyone watched the same show the same time as Japanese viewers?

When Attack on Titan premiered in April of 2013 we learned. Its immediate success was unprecedented and shocking. In a matter of weeks previously unprecedented changes happened within the official channels. Not only could the US industry observe how overnight every online community was discussing this new series, Crunchyroll who streamed the series from episode 1 could provide them the actual numbers proving its success. For the first time the dub specialists Funimation would offer an unsubtitled and ongoing series for sale on iTunes. Kodansha America as well had lucked out by licensing the manga over a year prior giving the US industry another rare example of how a successful anime can give a previously niche series an unprecedented boost in sales. For fansubbers and anime and manga aggregators to keep up if a hit like this was to occur again they had to somehow work faster than Crunchyroll, or just steal from them.

Attack on Titan i think was the first time such a huge group of people all at once learned and experienced how to keep up with a brand new anime and still ongoing manga. October the same year Kill la Kill, an original story and the first work by Studio Trigger directed by the already acclaimed Hiroyuki Imaishi premiered. Once again there was an unprecedented amount of attention from international fans given to a series that was still airing in Japan. This new desire to be part of a series as it was happening was not just significant to the way international fans started viewing and evaluating anime and manga but also new opportunities for the industry to make a profit by investing more and more into “simultaneous” streaming

I didn’t read all that, sorry

Fans come to expect instant access to brand new anime and manga -> Crunchyroll is the only service able to fulfill that expectation and can do it faster than a fansubber -> in 2013 an unprecedented hit opens the eyes of the industry and anime fans alike -> now discussions and trends among international fans of anime and manga is more than ever centered around what’s “new”, a huge shift from when awareness around “newness” was vague or less relevant to how international fans interacted with animanga

How will you qualify an anime or manga as B.C. (Before Crunchyroll)

This blog and its polls will be primarily centered on the offline and online English speaking fan communities. English Second Language speakers are included in this.

Any survey will include works that received translations (official as well as unofficial) into the English language. And with consideration of these criteria

If anime: did it air on TV in the US, Canada, UK, or Australia? If so when and through which channels. Because the aforementioned delays in distribution this will matter more than when it first aired in Japan. I will continue to make 2005 my start point but exceptions might be made for series that were in some way rereleased or put in long term syndication. 2014 is the end point because of the above mentioned changes in how a lot of us watched anime was completely changed by this point in time.

Did it receive a fansub? When and by which group(s)? Identifying the groups also allows us to map out who were the tastemakers and what they wanted to make accessible to other fans. This is very key for anime that sustained popularity despite not being accessible through official channels for extended periods in the years 2005-2014. Also if you don’t live in the countries listed above it was most likely the only way you watched anime.

How often did it appear in “Anime is life” collages? (VERY IMPORTANT DATA!! how else are we supposed to quantify its cultural impact)

If manga: was it licensed by a US publisher? If so when and by who? This also matters more than when it was serialized in Japan. Viz Media’s Shojo Beat and Shonen Jump, and Tokyopop’s catalogue are very defining of the first half of this era and shaped our manga starter pack years after they stopped existing.

Did it receive a scanlation? When and which group(s)? Once again key to identifying the true tastemakers starting around 2010. Scanlations were not just key in bringing fans brand new manga hot off the Japanese presses faster than a US publisher could, but was very important in making manga that were neglected by publishers accessible in English.

Any criteria you want to suggest or already use yourself to determine eras of animanga? Or perhaps your own memories of this time? Feel free to share!!

[thefirstknife]

New week, new Veil Log entry, same me (insane).

Chioma: Chioma Esi, research log: Veil interface. Maya and I have finalized a prototype interface for the Veil. Hopefully, it'll allow our research team to investigate it in detail. The system's designed like an orchestra, with a central "conductor" directing a symphony of minds to act like a distributed network. The... idea came to us by watching how collective networks like SIVA and the Vex operate. The hope is we can aggregate and parse the vast amounts of psychic data emitting from the Veil. Turn it into something intelligible. If we're successful, the interface will provide us with a starting point for any future technological research tied to the Veil. The risks of — of such integration are high. The estimates mortality rates are... but I... I... I don't know what I'm doing. This is wrong. This is so wrong! We shouldn't — all she ever talks about is survival! "Think big picture!" What about your survival? What about your heart? My heart? [sighs tearfully] I can't keep doing this. I can't. I can't! Nimbus: Damn. Osiris: I... again, I see a shadow of myself in Maya Sundaresh. The man I could have become had I let obsession continue to rule me. I'm worried what the next recording will reveal. Nimbus: Me too.

This broke me. Chioma's VA is incredible.

But besides the emotional damage, this is once again super interesting. The prototype interface is one of the first things that we encounter as we're going towards the Veil from the final mission of the campaign. The first of the chairs we see is what Nimbus calls a CloudArk prototype:

It's here more generally referring to the room we're in itself; the room we're getting the logs from also features prototype interfaces that were used for initially communicating with and researching the Veil and matches the descryption of being designed like an orchestra. There's 12 of the chair-interfaces in there and they're all facing the Veil and there's a long walkway overlooking the facility that might be where the "conductor" would stand.

Either way, the early researchers found a way to tap into the Veil without getting physically close by plugging themselves into these machines. Having more people plugged in at the same time allowed them to spread the load of the psychic connection and limit casualties.

However, casualties were still happening. It's super interesting that Chioma is still reminding us that the base technology here was inspired by SIVA and the Vex because they're collective networks and they seem to have more success with this sort of thing. So the researchers have to also become a collective network by linking themselves through these machines with the Veil. Eerily similar now to how the Witness' people linked their minds.

This is all the beginnings of the CloudArk, where Neomuni upload themselves and live in a virtual reality. While their bodies are physically in cryo, their minds are in the CloudArk. Again, ominous now with the recent reveals about the Witness. I'm still of the belief that this ability will be important for us to be able to enter the portal. Really interesting re-reading this post now that we DO know about the Witness and that it merged its entire species into one being by using the knowledge of Darkness and the Veil; this now strengthens the possibility that in order to pass through the portal, we need to be psychically merged with... something. The CloudArk might end up being the technology we use to do it and we're being shown how the Neomuni discovered this technology and used it to make the CloudArk by imitating other "collective networks." So far only one "collective network" managed to successfully enter the portal: the Witness.

The rest of this, as I've said already, has broken me. Chioma's pain about Maya's descent into madness is truly heartbreaking and even more so with Osiris recognising his own obsessesion through Maya. Chioma's plea for Maya to stop this is also heartbreaking from our perspective because we know that they didn't stop. The technology was finished and constructed and is still in use today. And as an added beauty to this, it's a gay man finding a connection with a lesbian. I cannot even begin to express how incredible it feels to get this sort of insanely good scifi story where literally everyone involved in the quest is LGBT+.