#tempted to changed that 2020 to ?

[mad-as-a-box-of-frogs]

First off, “imaginary friend” is more of a descriptive term. How you just said it? That was a little... offensive, just to be honest. 

Just My Imagination (11x08): Supernatural (2005-2020) [135/?]

[tendebill]

i have this old ass unfinished sketchbook tour video from 2021/2022 that i just rediscovered (again) while browsing my old WIP folders and its kinda cringe but also i still find it funny..... but the idea of finishing it...? no.... i shan't.... unless...?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The US Copyright Office frees the McFlurry

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

I have spent a quarter century obsessed with the weirdest corner of the weirdest section of the worst internet law on the US statute books: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law that makes it a felony to help someone change how their own computer works so it serves them, rather than a distant corporation.

Under DMCA 1201, giving someone a tool to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work" is a felony punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine – for a first offense. This law can refer to access controls for traditional copyrighted works, like movies. Under DMCA 1201, if you help someone with photosensitive epilepsy add a plug-in to the Netflix player in their browser that blocks strobing pictures that can trigger seizures, you're a felon:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-media/2017Jul/0005.html

But software is a copyrighted work, and everything from printer cartridges to car-engine parts have software in them. If the manufacturer puts an "access control" on that software, they can send their customers (and competitors) to prison for passing around tools to help them fix their cars or use third-party ink.

Now, even though the DMCA is a copyright law (that's what the "C" in DMCA stands for, after all); and even though blocking video strobes, using third party ink, and fixing your car are not copyright violations, the DMCA can still send you to prison, for a long-ass time for doing these things, provided the manufacturer designs their product so that using it the way that suits you best involves getting around an "access control."

As you might expect, this is quite a tempting proposition for any manufacturer hoping to enshittify their products, because they know you can't legally disenshittify them. These access controls have metastasized into every kind of device imaginable.

Garage-door openers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Refrigerators:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#filtergate

Dishwashers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/03/cassette-rewinder/#disher-bob

Treadmills:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#jane-get-me-off-this-crazy-thing

Tractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

Cars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

Printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty

And even printer paper:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#dymo-550

DMCA 1201 is the brainchild of Bruce Lehmann, Bill Clinton's Copyright Czar, who was repeatedly warned that cancerous proliferation this was the foreseeable, inevitable outcome of his pet policy. As a sop to his critics, Lehman added a largely ornamental safety valve to his law, ordering the US Copyright Office to invite submissions every three years petitioning for "use exemptions" to the blanket ban on circumventing access-controls.

I call this "ornamental" because if the Copyright Office thinks that, say, it should be legal for you to bypass an access control to use third-party ink in your printer, or a third-party app store in your phone, all they can do under DMCA 1201 is grant you the right to use a circumvention tool. But they can't give you the right to acquire that tool.

I know that sounds confusing, but that's only because it's very, very stupid. How stupid? Well, in 2001, the US Trade Representative arm-twisted the EU into adopting its own version of this law (Article 6 of the EUCD), and in 2003, Norway added the law to its lawbooks. On the eve of that addition, I traveled to Oslo to debate the minister involved:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

The minister praised his law, explaining that it gave blind people the right to bypass access controls on ebooks so that they could feed them to screen readers, Braille printers, and other assistive tools. OK, I said, but how do they get the software that jailbreaks their ebooks so they can make use of this exemption? Am I allowed to give them that tool?

No, the minister said, you're not allowed to do that, that would be a crime.

Is the Norwegian government allowed to give them that tool? No. How about a blind rights advocacy group? No, not them either. A university computer science department? Nope. A commercial vendor? Certainly not.

No, the minister explained, under his law, a blind person would be expected to personally reverse engineer a program like Adobe E-Reader, in hopes of discovering a defect that they could exploit by writing a program to extract the ebook text.

Oh, I said. But if a blind person did manage to do this, could they supply that tool to other blind people?

Well, no, the minister said. Each and every blind person must personally – without any help from anyone else – figure out how to reverse-engineer the ebook program, and then individually author their own alternative reader program that worked with the text of their ebooks.

That is what is meant by a use exemption without a tools exemption. It's useless. A sick joke, even.

The US Copyright Office has been valiantly holding exemptions proceedings every three years since the start of this century, and they've granted many sensible exemptions, including ones to benefit people with disabilities, or to let you jailbreak your phone, or let media professors extract video clips from DVDs, and so on. Tens of thousands of person-hours have been flushed into this pointless exercise, generating a long list of things you are now technically allowed to do, but only if you are a reverse-engineering specialist type of computer programmer who can manage the process from beginning to end in total isolation and secrecy.

But there is one kind of use exception the Copyright Office can grant that is potentially game-changing: an exemption for decoding diagnostic codes.

You see, DMCA 1201 has been a critical weapon for the corporate anti-repair movement. By scrambling error codes in cars, tractors, appliances, insulin pumps, phones and other devices, manufacturers can wage war on independent repair, depriving third-party technicians of the diagnostic information they need to figure out how to fix your stuff and keep it going.

This is bad enough in normal times, but during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, hospitals found themselves unable to maintain their ventilators because of access controls. Nearly all ventilators come from a single med-tech monopolist, Medtronic, which charges hospitals hundreds of dollars to dispatch their own repair technicians to fix its products. But when covid ended nearly all travel, Medtronic could no longer provide on-site calls. Thankfully, an anonymous hacker started building homemade (illegal) circumvention devices to let hospital technicians fix the ventilators themselves, improvising housings for them from old clock radios, guitar pedals and whatever else was to hand, then mailing them anonymously to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#medtronic-again

Once a manufacturer monopolizes repair in this way, they can force you to use their official service depots, charging you as much as they'd like; requiring you to use their official, expensive replacement parts; and dictating when your gadget is "too broken to fix," forcing you to buy a new one. That's bad enough when we're talking about refusing to fix a phone so you buy a new one – but imagine having a spinal injury and relying on a $100,000 exoskeleton to get from place to place and prevent muscle wasting, clots, and other immobility-related conditions, only to have the manufacturer decide that the gadget is too old to fix and refusing to give you the technical assistance to replace a watch battery so that you can get around again:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255074/former-jockey-michael-straight-exoskeleton-repair-battery

When the US Copyright Office grants a use exemption for extracting diagnostic codes from a busted device, they empower repair advocates to put that gadget up on a workbench and torture it into giving up those codes. The codes can then be integrated into an unofficial diagnostic tool, one that can make sense of the scrambled, obfuscated error codes that a device sends when it breaks – without having to unscramble them. In other words, only the company that makes the diagnostic tool has to bypass an access control, but the people who use that tool later do not violate DMCA 1201.

This is all relevant this month because the US Copyright Office just released the latest batch of 1201 exemptions, and among them is the right to circumvent access controls "allowing for repair of retail-level food preparation equipment":

https://publicknowledge.org/public-knowledge-ifixit-free-the-mcflurry-win-copyright-office-dmca-exemption-for-ice-cream-machines/

While this covers all kinds of food prep gear, the exemption request – filed by Public Knowledge and Ifixit – was inspired by the bizarre war over the tragically fragile McFlurry machine. These machines – which extrude soft-serve frozen desserts – are notoriously failure-prone, with 5-16% of them broken at any given time. Taylor, the giant kitchen tech company that makes the machines, charges franchisees a fortune to repair them, producing a steady stream of profits for the company.

This sleazy business prompted some ice-cream hackers to found a startup called Kytch, a high-powered automation and diagnostic tool that was hugely popular with McDonald's franchisees (the gadget was partially designed by the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang!).

In response, Taylor played dirty, making a less-capable clone of the Kytch, trying to buy Kytch out, and teaming up with McDonald's corporate to bombard franchisees with legal scare-stories about the dangers of using a Kytch to keep their soft-serve flowing, thanks to DMCA 1201:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Kytch isn't the only beneficiary of the new exemption: all kinds of industrial kitchen equipment is covered. In upholding the Right to Repair, the Copyright Office overruled objections of some of its closest historical allies, the Entertainment Software Association, Motion Picture Association, and Recording Industry Association of America, who all sided with Taylor and McDonald's and opposed the exemption:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/us-copyright-office-frees-the-mcflurry-allowing-repair-of-ice-cream-machines/

This is literally the only useful kind of DMCA 1201 exemption the Copyright Office can grant, and the fact that they granted it (along with a similar exemption for medical devices) is a welcome bright spot. But make no mistake, the fact that we finally found a narrow way in which DMCA 1201 can be made slightly less stupid does not redeem this outrageous law. It should still be repealed and condemned to the scrapheap of history.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

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/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

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

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

[mariacallous]

A lawsuit filed Wednesday against Meta argues that US law requires the company to let people use unofficial add-ons to gain more control over their social feeds.

It’s the latest in a series of disputes in which the company has tussled with researchers and developers over tools that give users extra privacy options or that collect research data. It could clear the way for researchers to release add-ons that aid research into how the algorithms on social platforms affect their users, and it could give people more control over the algorithms that shape their lives.

The suit was filed by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University on behalf of researcher Ethan Zuckerman, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts—Amherst. It attempts to take a federal law that has generally shielded social networks and use it as a tool forcing transparency.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is best known for allowing social media companies to evade legal liability for content on their platforms. Zuckerman’s suit argues that one of its subsections gives users the right to control how they access the internet, and the tools they use to do so.

“Section 230 (c) (2) (b) is quite explicit about libraries, parents, and others having the ability to control obscene or other unwanted content on the internet,” says Zuckerman. “I actually think that anticipates having control over a social network like Facebook, having this ability to sort of say, ‘We want to be able to opt out of the algorithm.’”

Zuckerman’s suit is aimed at preventing Facebook from blocking a new browser extension for Facebook that he is working on called Unfollow Everything 2.0. It would allow users to easily “unfollow” friends, groups, and pages on the service, meaning that updates from them no longer appear in the user’s newsfeed.

Zuckerman says that this would provide users the power to tune or effectively disable Facebook’s engagement-driven feed. Users can technically do this without the tool, but only by unfollowing each friend, group, and page individually.

There’s good reason to think Meta might make changes to Facebook to block Zuckerman’s tool after it is released. He says he won’t launch it without a ruling on his suit. In 2020, the company argued that the browser Friendly, which had let users search and reorder their Facebook news feeds as well as block ads and trackers, violated its terms of service and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In 2021, Meta permanently banned Louis Barclay, a British developer who had created a tool called Unfollow Everything, which Zuckerman’s add-on is named after.

“I still remember the feeling of unfollowing everything for the first time. It was near-miraculous. I had lost nothing, since I could still see my favorite friends and groups by going to them directly,” Barclay wrote for Slate at the time. “But I had gained a staggering amount of control. I was no longer tempted to scroll down an infinite feed of content. The time I spent on Facebook decreased dramatically.”

The same year, Meta kicked off from its platform some New York University researchers who had created a tool that monitored the political ads people saw on Facebook. Zuckerman is adding a feature to Unfollow Everything 2.0 that allows people to donate data from their use of the tool to his research project. He hopes to use the data to investigate whether users of his add-on who cleanse their feeds end up, like Barclay, using Facebook less.

Sophia Cope, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, says that the core parts of Section 230 related to platforms’ liability for content posted by users have been clarified through potentially thousands of cases. But few have specifically dealt with the part of the law Zuckerman’s suit seeks to leverage.

“There isn’t that much case law on that section of the law, so it will be interesting to see how a judge breaks it down,” says Cope. Zuckerman is a member of the EFF’s board of advisers.

John Morris, a principal at the Internet Society, a nonprofit that promotes open development of the internet, says that, to his knowledge, Zuckerman’s strategy “hasn’t been used before, in terms of using Section 230 to grant affirmative rights to users,” noting that a judge would likely take that claim seriously.

Meta has previously suggested that allowing add-ons that modify how people use its services raises security and privacy concerns. But Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center, says that Zuckerman’s tool may be able to fairly push back on such an accusation.“The main problem with tools that give users more control over content moderation on existing platforms often has to do with privacy,” she says. “But if all this does is unfollow specified accounts, I would not expect that problem to arise here."

Even if a tool like Unfollow Everything 2.0 didn’t compromise users’ privacy, Meta might still be able to argue that it violates the company’s terms of service, as it did in Barclay’s case.

“Given Meta’s history, I could see why he would want a preemptive judgment,” says Cope. “He’d be immunized against any civil claim brought against him by Meta.”

And though Zuckerman says he would not be surprised if it takes years for his case to wind its way through the courts, he believes it’s important. “This feels like a particularly compelling case to do at a moment where people are really concerned about the power of algorithms,” he says.

[most-normal-eccles-cake-ignorer]

Good Omens: Lockdown and Crowley not mentioning his living situation in S2*

*till S2E6 when he asks if he can have his apartment back bc he's bored of living in his car but Aziraphale doesn’t hear bc mentally he’s in Alpha Centauri.

Having read the 'Crowley doesn't tell him' Neil Gaiman ask close to when I first listened to Lockdown (I lived under a rock until recently), my initial thought was HAS HE BEEN LIVING IN HIS CAR FOR YEARS?! but I think he was still in his apartment in 2020:

as far as Hell knows, Crowley just had a pool party in holy water (the holiest) so the higher-ups are probably willing to give him some space (plus Beelzebub is busy going on pub dates w Gabriel)

while there should be ~8 months between the end of Season 1 events (The Very First Day of the Rest of Their Lives on Sunday, Aug 25, 2019) and the Lockdown phonecall (on or near the 30 year anniversary on May 1, 2020), I can't imagine that's a very long time for Hell, especially if you're understaffed and busy dealing with fallout from Almostgeddon / going on pub dates

Shax dropping off mail and asking about the boiler seems like something one does in the first few months of living somewhere, not ~3 years in (if S2 is in 2023)

That said, I think the phone call underlines why Crowley never directly tells Aziraphale that he is living in the Bentley in S2, and it's just a great conversation (all hail Gaiman) sooo I wrote about it:

***Note: This post analyzes the Lockdown phonecall from Crowley's perspective only. Our heroine is feeling quite emotionally vulnerable at this point in time so things are going to hit him harder than they normally would.

I do not think Aziraphale meant to cause him pain (!!) but Crowley can't see that yet and I've written this post in a way that reflects that missing insight. (I explain in more detail in this reblog if you are interested) I am working on a companion post for Aziraphale's side of this conversation and how I think it affects his behavior in S2 because if we know anything about these two, it's that their exactlys are different exactlys.***

Crowley’s habit of sleeping to skip time like an RPG character by a campfire amuses me to no end, but in this context it feels heavy. Crowley already worries about losing time with what he loves and he probably hoped things would be different between him and Aziraphale after the events of S1. But things don’t change much. Then lockdowns start, and Crowley is trapped in his apartment alone, transcendentally bored, and unable to make his brain shut up. Sleeping a month away starts to sound less awful.

But Crowley hasn’t given up yet; he’s still awake when Aziraphale calls, and he’s even giving it two more days. Was he waiting for Aziraphale to call? Is it even possible not to at least kind of wait for someone’s call when you are cut off from everything and the caller has been your only friend and crush for millennia?

Aziraphale asks why Crowley isn't "out and about" tempting people or setting a bad example and he responds:

C: Everyone's so miserable and cooped up right now anyway, and I just… well… don't have the heart for it. A: *glowing audibly* I'm not miserable~ C: Really?

Crowley sounds genuinely surprised at Aziraphale's happiness and quickly assumes it's because the angel has been around people. He's so lonely/depressed/in his own head that he hadn't even considered someone enjoying being 'cooped up'. *sob*

Aziraphale goes No actually I put the closed sign up in the window and I'm having the Time of My Life, never had so few customers, not in 200 years!, etc. Although, he says:

A: …There were a few young lads a couple of nights ago who broke in through the back and tried to steal the cashbox! But they soon saw the error of their ways~ C: *clearly amused* Did you smite them with your wroth? A: Well I certainly gave them a good talking to, and I sent each of them home with cake~ C: *annoyed, swooning* Cake? A: Quite a lot of cake, actually. C: *physically ill from having such a giant crush on this dumbass baker/security guard* eeeekkkgghhh I'm gonna regret asking but.. ...rrgh.. *30 seconds of Aziraphale joyfully describing his baking while Crowley probably tries very hard not to imagine the angel eating each item in sensual slow motion* I stg you can hear him struggling in the background once or twice

A: …And once I've baked them, I have to eat them all myself, which was why I was so delighted— C: To send your burglars home laden with baked goods, yes, nnyeaayeah I follow…

Crowley interrupts, finishing Aziraphale's sentence in his nervous hurry to say the next bit:

C: *loud inhale* You know, I could.. hunker down at your place. … Slither over and watch you eat cake. I could bring a bottle--a case of… something… drinkable…?

He's trying to sound so casual about it but this is someone who was rejected/abandoned by actual literal God after asking what he thought were welcome, uncontroversial questions. Asking makes him vulnerable. He's supposed to be the rescuer, not a demon in distress. He does not feel casual about asking.

Crowley knows it's unlikely but he's so miserable and desperate for company that he can't help but ask, just in case. Even the smallest chance of spending time trapped indoors with Aziraphale—with nothing to do but drink, watch him eat, and talk about things they'd normally avoid—is too tempting.

A: *panicking* Oh I— I— I— I— I'm afraid that would be Breaking All The Rules! *nervous breathing* Out of the question! I'll see you… when this is over. C: Right. gnnehh. I'm setting the alarm clock for July. Good night, angel. *dial tone*

And just like that, Crowley doesn't need two days to decide. The depression nap doubles in length. He doesn't hear how badly Aziraphale wants to say yes behind the fear, or maybe he does and it hurts worse because why isn't Crowley enough for him? You can almost hear the spiralling:

SHOCKING, asking made it worse. It always does doesn’t it? Why even bother? you just embarrass yourself.. SLITHER over? why did I say that *grumble grumble* of COURSE His Holy Holiness, your only friend in the universe, would rather eat cake by himself while everything goes to shit than ~deign~ to have you in his presence. "AsK aND yE sHaLl ReCeIvE" bugger this for a lark im going to bed

(a bit dramatic but we've all been there)

I imagine sleep doesn't come right away. Maybe his thoughts drift to when he sat beside the angel at a dark Tadfield bus stop after a rather eventful Saturday. Crowley must've felt a tiny bit hopeful when he invited Aziraphale to stay with him: Heaven had withdrawn its favor and the bookshop was gone; Aziraphale was like him now. Didn't that mean things would change?

"I don't think my side would like that." Apparently not.

In the end, Aziraphale did ride the bus back to Crowley's apartment and stayed till the next morning when he caught a cab, but only to sell the illusion. Crowley understood that as far as sides went, the angel was still on Heaven's, even if Heaven wasn't on his.

And now this: the entire world is shut down; there is nothing for Aziraphale to do but stay in and read and bake in his magically reconstituted bookshop and he still won't invite Crowley in. Burglars and un-fallen angels only—nobody who asks questions.

So... of course Crowley doesn't tell Aziraphale when he loses his apartment. He already knows what answer he would get; the angel has told him so many times. Aziraphale is a company man first, a companion to one very sad owl when convenient.

If Crowley works up the courage to say 'please take me in, I have nowhere else to go' and Aziraphale goes 'sorry, no, far too political, but I WILL risk being erased from the Book of Life to protect this nude amnesiac former coworker who always hated me,' it's going to be too much. You can't sleep long enough for that type of hurt to go away. Better not to say anything.

"Then nothing has to change, does it?"

[power-chords]

You know it’s funny, on the one hand things are harder than they’ve ever been and yet at the same time I am managing the stress better than I ever have in my life. I was diagnosed with both ADHD and cyclothymia as a preteen – not that I put all that much stock in diagnostic labels – but it took the pandemic in 2020/progression to full blown bipolar I in 2024 for me to be properly medicated for both. On 30 mg of extended release amphetamines and 1800 mg of lithium I feel the most normal I have ever felt in my life. The change has been so dramatic I am often tempted to pinch myself. I have no idea how I spent the first 36 years of my life made of emotional glass, or with the executive function of a particularly obstinate and unruly cat. I am pretty sure this is the mood and attention state that is as close to “ordinary” as someone of my biological constitution is likely to get. To say it’s been eye-opening is an understatement.

[mclalan]

Corp Zomphis, 2020s Design Speculation

I want to talk about Corp Memphis again— that corporate style of gangly, dead-eyed characters trapped in a neoliberal purgatory, posed between pot plants and spreadsheets.

I don't need to go too far into describing it. Heaven knows there are already so many takes on it that you're probably sick of hearing about it. However, I think a succinct description of it can be found at the end of that Wired magazine article from a few years back:

Wired: Corporate Memphis: The Tech Industry’s Favourite New Art Style

"But, despite all this, it may not be worth lamenting the immense reach of Corporate Memphis or the design possibilities we’ve been deprived of because of it. The style is, after all, simply a reflection of big tech, and how it has constructed a world with users on one side and executives on the other.

A more interesting and visually rich digital space would mean more than coming up with a new illustration style—it would require a change in how the tech economy is run. Until then, Corporate Memphis is likely to stick around, bendy arms and all."

This touches on why Corporate Memphis looks the way it does: it's a reflection of the material reality it's made in and the economic conditions it serves.

To work in a design job today often involves being a "multi-practitioner"— corp speak for a jack of all trades. You might have multiple platforms to manage, need to create a mix of media (motion graphics, branding, illustrations, etc.), and produce multiple pieces of content, all for some pointless product consumed by placated consumers.

And that’s all in a day's work, to be repeated the next. It's gruelling, unforgiving, mind-numbing work—especially if you take pride in what you do. Life doesn't become easier, but it does become bearable if the medium you're working in isn't fighting against you. A style that can work across platforms, can be easy enough for anyone in the department to use, but versatile enough to allow effort when there's time and money. It's homogeneous to the point where the messy, qualitative complications of art direction don't come into play. You can download a vector stock or make it in-house with relative ease and speed, and it looks good enough. The consumer, despite being fatigued by it all, seems to find it good enough. And that's what marks the style really: it's "good enough." It's a style linked to speed and practicality in the face of intense demand and pressure, low industry wages, accessible skills for entry levels, and high corporate barriers as everything's locked within Adobe's infrastructure.

But its strength as this homogeneous vector glob style, with its lack of any real individual identity, is also its biggest weakness. Although I'm sure some designers might enjoy working in this style, it's not really a style designed for creative individual expression. It's called "corporate" for a reason. If you want something different, you might be tempted to try freelancing...

Outside the corporate design department, you might think you're finally free to create in your own style, no longer having to work in that dreaded Corporate Memphis one anymore. But it’s hard enough to work in your own individual style under the best of circumstances. That's because the whole economy is based on the same structures of endless content production for algorithmically optimised consumption that allowed Corp Memphis to thrive, so you're still facing familiar obstacles—creating vast amounts of content, quickly, for wide and insatiable consumer audiences. So, in a way, we have this algorithm-enforced market of content, favouring those who have optimised their style to be better seen by it. It's no wonder Corporate Memphis has endured past its welcome.

However, despite all that, illustrators and artists still plod on. They end up making stuff, somehow navigating these systems— either playing them like a fiddle, outright rejecting them, or going accelerationist about it, like with something such as Corecore. Self-expression can take many forms, and that potential untapped capital value is tantalisingly mouthwatering to corporate capitalists.

Corp Memphis is optimised to a fault. It's too polished, too automated, and fits too well with the well-oiled design apparatus. Thus, it's developed a semiotics to reflect this—it's cheap and it's perceived as cheap. That's why an art director (typically) won’t just stick some Corp Memphis imagine on an album cover or use it to illustrate a particular lifestyle magazine. It wouldn't suit it, it's signalling the wrong stuff. Culture, art, ideas, aesthetics are reflected in work created by practitioners with an artistic vision, or that taps into what's going on in the present. And this is reflected in their art style, something Corp Memphis can't easily do, if at all.

That's why there's still a kind of fringe freelance industry with a speciality in design identity, otherwise known in the industry as "creatives", albeit small and closely gatekept by the likes of legacy institutions such as Goldsmiths and corporate industry leaders like The HudsonBec Group. If a corporation needs design to be spiced up with some kind of creative identity, it'll turn to these agencies or freelancers from this background rather than use Corp Memphis.

But the sad thing is how a corporation doesn't have total control over the process and thus can't control the value and pricing since they have to deal with hiring these pesky freelancers. But how does a corporation even know who to hire? With moodboards, of course! It’s easier to hire someone in-house with "good taste," who can simply curate hot practitioners to hire, like a dragon collecting .png gems. Although a corporation will try to get the best deal it can, these pesky freelancers can potentially negotiate a price for themselves, especially if they’re some big shot who holds a lot of cultural capital.

But another benefit of a moodboard is that it can be converted into a design guide. Simply share the sorts of designers and illustrators that a corporation dreams of hiring but with a cheaper designer, and ask if they can copy the desired style for less. Failing that, they can just outright steal the style anyway. If the creator is small enough, who cares?

But the value and cultural capital that corporations must seek outside their infrastructure, the very thing Corp Memphis cannot do, comes at the price of what Corp Memphis can do. Freelancers are annoying to corporations. They’re inconsistent, outside their remit, and expensive—since any level of lost capital is an expense. And worse of all, they don’t own them. Work made in-house in a corporation is completely theirs to be used forever, however they see fit. A freelance gig is limited to the contract, and typically you have to keep paying for different uses, or pay a lot if it’s expected to be used for something big.

How dare these skilled workers... sorry, freelancers, leverage themselves. If only we, the corporation, could control and treat the work of freelanced art direction like we do Corporate Memphis. Well, maybe we can—with AI.

AI is a whole can of worms of its own. But I will outline how AI shares a lot with Corp Memphis in terms of mechanics, but it's not "good enough" like Corp Memphis is in terms of its aesthetics.

Let's put it like this, if Corp Memphis is above a stock image, which is above clip art, which is above a farting Elsa asset-flip mobile game, then AI-generated images are below that, sharing the same disdainful semiotics of a YouTube thumbnail. AI renders are synonymous with trash, with viewers combing over images seeking out any sniff of AI to decry it. This is, of course, unfortunate for corporations, because AI is wonderfully cheap and efficient to produce. The problem with even "the best" AI is that it still reeks of AI, because it's trained on relatively limited data sets that are the wrong semiotics that corporations typically use and that their consumers are typically familiar with. It's not consistent with typical standards and trends. But even the AI art styles synonymous with AI are really that of unfortunate ArtStation artists whose work has been stolen, scraped, and trained into these models. But none of it is directed, follows trends, or should I say, reflects trends favoured by brands.

Design industry standard work is also bolstered by their industry standing. Their "credibility" sets them apart from, as Mark Zuckerberg puts it, the worthless creators and publishers who ‘overestimate their value’. Sure Zuckerberg might say design is worthless, but let's not forget that Facebook Alegria, the design language developed for Facebook by the mega studio Buck Design in 2017, pretty much started Corp Memphis! I don't know how much that would have cost Zuck, but given how huge Buck is, I don't know, close to $1 million if I had to speculate. So what Zuck is actually saying is you are worthless, without your titles and industry standing, and are ripe for the scrapping.

I still think it would appear crass to the wider public if someone as tactless as Zuck were to steal wholesale from something like It’s Nice That's list of featured artists, due to the "prestigious" tutelage and culture capital of such trendy practitioners. Good luck if you're on your own though.

There's also the issue of copyright. I've no idea how litigious David Rudnick is, maybe he wouldn't even mind, but perhaps it would be legally safer to just hire a copycat of him rather than train an AI on his work. There's no shortage of copycats of him after all, and they'd probably do a better job than AI anyway.

No, a corporation if it wants to avoid all this mess will instead use AI this way:

Step One: Moodboardism

Directed by their little Pinterest moodboards and Instagram saves, a corporation will find the next latest and strongest trend that they want to utilise, be it Y2K or whatever's current on the human ant colony-as-algorithm site, Carri Institute's aesthetics.

Step Two: The Sellout

Hire an on trend freelancer with a large sack of money marked with a dollar sign to do a year's worth of graphic content in a particular on trend style. This is all then fed into their in-house AI database model.

Step Three: Rise and Grind

It's then handed over to the in-house sweatshop graphic designers as the latest toolset that they have to use. They're now tasked with grinding out prompts in this trendy style with the consistency, efficiency, and speed once only achievable with Corp Memphis.

So congratulations, now we have AI that isn't generic Facebook shrimp Jesus trash; it'll be its own unique trash. And sure, perhaps some AI artefacts might come through, but that's what the in-house graphic designers are for— to Photoshop those fingers. The corp no longer needs to put up with some meddlesome expensive freelance art director, as the AI model is consistent enough that someone in-house can direct it, just like Corporate Memphis. And even then, if it still comes across as AI-ish, the hope is that for the general public, it's "good enough", just like Corp... You get the idea.

And this is possible because a freelancers' perceived autonomous strength as corporate mercenaries is also their biggest weakness. They think they can dance with the devil and win, making essentially veneers for capitalists, never once thinking the corporations will one day come to extract capital from them too. Corporate Memphis is never going to die; it's going to mutate into a corporate zombie... Corp Zomphis?

Why bother hiring individual skilled freelancers to do a job in a specific style when you have a year's worth of art, seeded by one of them, to prompt out your own "unique" designs in their style. It's more efficient and cheaper to approach design as a egragore hungry for its next feed, rather than pay for a single illustration. But you'll just have to trust me when I say that I'm not making this up; annual hires to train their own ai is genuinely what big corporation are doing.

But what about the industry, are they just gonna let it happen? I don't know. But I think freelancers don't typically see themselves as a working class, but instead as individualistic, competitive even, little businesses. This is why I think corps will be able to steamroll over freelance designers and illustrators with AI driven Corp Zomphis, because there's no solidarity amongst designers and illustrators, unlike US animators with their union and perception of themsleves as workers. If one freelancer rejects that devil deal to make the annual quantity of prompt feed for a corp, then the next hire will. I remember even hearing the AoI stressing how it wasn't a union, as if union was a dirty word. Instead its existence is to help one interface with their corporate client overlord. Well, soon enough that interfacing will be about betraying your industry freelance brethren to a corporate egragore, basically turning everything into a potential Corporate Memphis reskin. If Corporate Memphis is the design logic of the economy of the 2010s, then I wouldn't be surprised to see people nostalgic for it in the future, if the speculative 2020s model I've described turns out to be true.

[being-of-rain]

I'm dumping here my various inconsequential thoughts about the seventh Doctor audio that was just announced.

So Naomi and Harry's travels are coming to an end! Around a year after their first chronological appearance, two and a half years after they started travelling with Seven, and three and a half years after their first release. It's nice to see some interconnectedness between different Doctors I suppose, as well as an arc that went for more than one season and was actually finished. Big Finish has a bit of a habit of just dropping companions without an ending- the newly returning Ray puts me in mind of other '80s characters brought back on board the TARDIS before being dropped. Mags, Mel, and Peri, at last count (with Nyssa being the exception). Also, I've already listened to Ray and Seven together in Classic Doctors New Monsters; at this point it's almost more surprising when Big Finish publishes a companion's story in the right order 😂

I haven't listened to the Seventh Doctor Adventures except for The Last Day, but so far it has seemed like the weakest and least focused of all the Doctors' post-2021 audio lines. So the kind of language they use in the news article about Past Forward interests me: "an important point in [Seven's] ongoing story" and "a pivotal story in the Seventh Doctor’s lifetime." It was The Last Day that made me feel like Big Finish were no longer capable of making big consequential event stories- and I don't know if this changes my mind about that, but it's a little refreshing to see them act like Seven actually has an ongoing story, and not just a series of one-shots.

I think Past Forward is given an important vibe not only by having the companions leave, but by introducing a new companion join in the same story. As someone pointed out to me, companion starts and ends overlapping isn't really done on New Who or Big Finish, so it's an interesting approach, and it makes it feel like this release is actually leading to future things in an ongoing story.

If Big Finish does want to stress that this is an event, it's a little strange that the cover doesn't lean into it more by including the Weeping Angels and Ray. But I'm not really complaining; Rafe Wallbank continues to be my favourite cover artist working at Big Finish right now. Maybe he was consciously trying to avoid the Marvel-Poster-esque cluttered look (that The Last Day is an example of). And hey, Seven has his smiley face pin! Cute.

With John Dorney writing on top of everything else, I'm actually tempted to listen to the Harry and Naomi audios so that I can eventually listen to this one. It's caught my attention, and not in a 'watching a car crash' way that The Last Day did. Sorry to dunk on The Last Day so much, it was relevant.

Other random thoughts: Past Forward means that Big Finish has now paired the Weeping Angels off with all of their surviving classic Doctors (Four through Eight). And when looking at the Seventh Doctor Adventures line so far, I noted that there's been no Ace in it apart from the older Ace in The Last Day. In fact, this month's River Song set is the first audio drama (rather than narrated audiobook) to include a younger Ace since the end of 2020! And the Doctor isn't even in the River Song set.

[fall0utmind]

i love your a/b/o fic SO much i’m so so excited

i was thinking - would it be fun to write a couple race scenes where marc really suffers during race starts, because literally EVERYONE in the pack he isn’t meant to be close to is surrounding him, and so riding way in front of them and winning is a relief not only because yay winning but also because the further away he gets from the others, the less it hurts? and even when he crashes he’s still far away, so crashes are sometimes a relief? and then of course in contrast, when the honda starts being shit during 21/22/23, he is just constantly surrounded by everyone, and it’s awful, and another reason he HAD to leave honda to go to gresini & a better bike, because he couldn’t continue on like that

alsooo i dont know how much of vale’s pov you want to get into, but to make it mildly less awful on his side, perhaps alpha commands don’t affect people you don’t have a pack bond with - and he thought marc had betrayed him, and so is convinced that even if he had used it, it couldn’t have affected marc, and the only reason marc is avoiding everyone is because vale sussed him out? i just want vale to be redeemable 😭

also - what about santi!! how does he look after marc during the whole time? surely he’s noticed something is going on - do he and luca end up teaming up? that could be funny actually.

(by the way, it’s better to put forward slashes between a/b/o because without it it spells a slur for aboriginal people! in case you didnt know 🫶)

Hi,

Firstly!! I am so sorry about the abo vs A/b/o thing - I had NO idea, or I absolutely would never have used it. I have gone through and changed my tag to #a/b/o sick fic - and all the posts are now under that instead. Again, big sorry if it's caused any offence or upset!!!!!!!

Secondly, your ideas!!!!

Absolutely incredible idea about the start of races - I never thought about that! Also media days, where they all have to be next to each other, wow that's insane actually, i really like the idea of playing that discomfort into it and how much it hurts but he HAS to do it. Because it would hurt more not to race!

And yes of course, winning, and especially winning by a lot - means less pain - woo. But the podium is awful, the hugging in the paddock makes him sick. Also, ohmygod.im, so sorry, guys, but I just had an idea. What is Argentina 2018, when he knocked rossi, what if it was because Vale got close and the pain flared and marc just wasn't prepared!!!!!!!!!!!! So it hurt so much more when Vale lashed out, and that's also kind of why marc Massively begins to repress???? Heartbreaking but such a good idea.

Also, the crashing out?? The races hurt so much that crashing is almost a relief.. in the same way that Jerez 2020 is obviously awful, but there's a tiny slither of marc, which is... relieved. It's sickening. I do really like the way it links in with leaving honda too because I feel like in this universe, with Honda being some of his only support, I didn't have a very good excuse for it and so this actually works really well! So thank you. I will defo include.

I wholeheartedly agree with your thoughts on Vale. I have to be careful because he does have to be redeemable 😂😂 or i will never be able to swing a rosquez ending! I really like the idea of Valentino assuming nothing has happened because Marc shouldn't be affected because he's not bonded or pack! It would also make a lot of sense about alphas only being about to use their voices on pack members. Or it could be incredibly bad in this universe, and I don't want to think about it 😭 so yeah that's another idea I'm probably gonna steal!

Okay, santi!!! Defo marcs main protector - alpha,? I think. He takes a big brother role in this. It could be very tempting to make him a love interest, but I might cave and end up making it a non- rosquez ending.... so big brother energy. He's defo noticing what's going on. I want to say that he works it out? Or begins to/ has some kind of idea, without knowing what actually happened. He defl provides a lot of the pack support in Honda, and is pivitol in making sure the atmosphere is good for marc there (although marc doesn't realise it - santi makes sure there's little things around - soft blankets, a spare hoodie. And then post 2018, he asks marcs crew to tone down their scents a little on race weekends, pretends he's having medical issues to cover for marc etc.)

I love the idea of him teaming up with luca, especially once marc leaves and luca joins Honda!!! Fantastic idea.

So many super good ideas in this ask so thank you so so much! I appreciate it 😊😊

[theothin]

I wasn't old enough to vote in 2008, but I paid a lot of attention to the election regardless. I was excited to see Obama elected, and hopeful for how much he would change things.

By 2012, that excitement had faded. After a couple of years of his presidency, my enthusiasm gave way to frustration with ways he and other Democrats didn't feel like enough of an improvement over the Republicans. Rather than voting for him for re-election, I cast my first vote for president for Jill Stein, hoping that others would take care of re-electing him but that my own vote would play a role in paving the way to something better.

Obama succeeded in winning re-election, but the votes for Stein didn't show any sign of accomplishing anything. Still, in 2016, an alternative emerged: Bernie Sanders.

I supported Sanders in the primary, and was disappointed when he lost to Clinton. I felt tempted to repeat the same thing I had done in 2012, but as the election loomed closer, I realized that the prospect of a Trump presidency was too dangerous to risk in the name of sending a message. I concluded that Clinton needed all the support she could get, and voted for her as well as encouraging others to do the same.

It turned out that the support Clinton needed was even more than what she got. Trump won that election, and the consequences were catastrophic.

In the 2020 primaries, I voted for Elizabeth Warren, but recognized that Biden's lead was insurmountable. This time, I went in prepared to adapt. I knew that there were things I didn't like about Biden and that more would turn up in the future, especially if he became president. I also knew that his opposition would still be far worse, and promised myself that none of that would change my support for Biden in the general elections. I voted for him, and thankfully, he won.

Over the years since then, Biden faced accusations of not being progressive enough, just like Obama had. This time, I held to my commitment not to let those accusations sway me again. If he had continued to run, I would have gladly voted for him again. But he didn't, and so the same reasoning passed to Kamala Harris.

I voted for Harris this morning, and I hope the support she's gathered is enough.

[theresattrpgforthat]

Do you have any recommendations for solo TTRPGs about time travelling or being in time loops? Thank you, and happy gaming!

Theme: Solo Time Travel.

Hello friend, I have a good number of games for you to choose from, as well as a few games at the end of this that I’ve talked about previously, or that I think are somewhat relevant.

Dos Milennia, by ell0.

In another reality, the world ended in 2020 and a time machine called Dos Millennia was created to travel to the past. You find yourself holding this device.

Playable as a solo game or as a supplement to another game where you (or a game master) wish to implement time travel to the past.

Judging by what I can get from the comments on the store page, this game can be used alongside something that you read, although it looks like it can also be combined with another ttrpg of your choice. Since it’s only 24 words long, it should be pretty simple to pick up and use.

Revisionist Historian Training Module I, by Amida Bosatsu.

This is a solo journaling TTRPG about being empowered to travel to your past to make changes. The premise is that you are a new employee of Ret-Chron, a company that employs time travel to revise history. Your first training session involves an event in your past. It is assumed that altering an event you know well, in a familiar surrounding will be a good way to ease you into the profession.

I really really like the premise of this game. You use a pair of d4s to determine how successful you are at doing something (Caltrop Core), and provides a series of prompt questions to help you build up the moment in your character’s past that you would like to change. Your character won’t arrive exactly at that event, but rather a few hours before it happens - and so you’ll have time to try and change it.

I think you could potentially experience a good amount of character bleed when you play this game, especially if you replicate an event that’s actually happened in your real life. That might be something that draws you to this game, or something to keep in mind if you pick it up. The rules definitely work for whatever setting you like, so your imagination can fill in a lot of the blanks here.

You own this game if you picked up the Solo But Not Alone 3 bundle!

Out of Time, by GinGal Games.

In this Solo Journaling TTRPG, you are a person out of time who can travel anywhere along the timeline. As you travel you will encounter people and feel large and small emotions. This journal is the record of your travels. 

Out of Time casts you as a member of a super-secret organization, employed with a stopwatch that will allow you to transport yourself to a different moment 15 times. Your role is observation, not intervention - although I think the game is designed to try and tempt you into intervening. You journal while pulling cards from a deck and rolling a d4 to determine when the moments happen, with words attached to the value of the card that you drew. The game itself feels like you can make it rather personal, so if you want to entwine your character with the timeline, you might be interested in this game.

Timeshapers, by Beth & Angel Make Games.

You’ve found a Timeshaper: an object able to change your perception of time. You don’t know how to control it yet, though; each time you touch it, it randomly affects your perception of time. Embrace your new relationship with time.

This is meant to be a game that works for both a group of people or a single person. For a group of people, I think it works best for folks who prefer largely free-form role-play; for a solo player, you could use it by itself, or add Timeshapers to another solo game in order to complicate things, especially if you’re interested in horror or sci-fi genres. The rules themselves are rather simple; it’s basically a roll table with different ways time might affect your character.

Dead Ends, by kay w.

I see it in the rearview mirror. I see it in the middle of the road. It knows. It could kill me right now. It's killed me a hundred times already. If I can just make it for long enough, then I can find the exit. I don't have to be this person forever.

DEAD ENDS is a solo tabletop roleplaying game about a road trip that never ends. In it, you play someone hunted by the Shape, looping again and again through the same four Stretches of the highway. Something you did brought you here, and now there is only one option: keep driving and hope there's an escape.

This is a game where a time loop is one of the fundamental ingredients for horror. It uses a deck of cards to determine the reason why your character is stuck in a time loop, as well as an oracle to determine more about your experience, your memories, and more. I think this game is something worth checking out if you like games that are meant to make your character suffer - if you’re a fan of Wretched & Alone games, you might also like this, even if it doesn’t work exactly the same way.

You Can’t F☆ck with the Timeline, by Lady Tabletop.

You're a traveler and all you can do is watch.

A thought-game for one player.

This is a solo game that you can pretty much play anywhere, about a time traveler who cannot change the timeline; only witness it. It allows you to game-ify people-watching, coming up with answers to questions and creating stories in your head. It can last for as long as you need to wait somewhere, or while you’re on a commute. The game is also short enough that you could probably copy it out onto a small card, and keep it with you as you travel.

A Moment Too Late, by toribee.

Guide a tortoise through the annals of history. However, due to the inherent slowness characteristic of a tortoise, you always arrive just after the major historical events have unfolded. Each time you draw a card, it represents a historical event described with vague and sensory details.

Your task is to interpret these scenes through the eyes of the tortoise, often leading to whimsical and humorous misinterpretations due to its limited understanding of human culture and history.

As you journey through different eras, from ancient battles to key moments of technological innovation, you'll document your adventures in a journal, creating a narrative that blends historical curiosity with the charming perspective of a tortoise.

This is a really funky twist on playing with time, that uses a deck of cards to bring you (and a tortoise) through big historical moments. It looks like you can use this game to play either a specific romp through history (with hints towards what event is going on) or allow the “clues” to keep you and your turtle equally befuddled. If you like cute animals and games that don’t feel too rushed, this might be a game for you.

Other Solo Games In The Ballpark…

The Diner Out of Time, by Mystic Mushroom Press.

Project Ecco, by Elliot Davis.

You can also check out my Time Travel and Solo Games recommendation posts for more!

[probablyasocialecologist]

The richest 1% globally has been responsible for 23% of total emissions growth since 1990 (Chancel 2022). Over the past 25 years, this “polluter elite” (IPCC 2022, 524) has contributed to more than twice as much carbon pollution compared to the three billion people that comprise the poorest half of humanity (Oxfam 2020; see also Gössling and Humpe 2023). Similar inequalities are evident in the (over)consumption of other resources. Savelli et al. (2023) show that the excessive water use by elites exacerbates urban water crises as much as climate change or population growth. Additionally, maintaining economic inequality close to current levels results in a doubling of the energy required to ensure decent living standards for all, allowing all people on Earth to have their basic needs covered (Millward-Hopkins 2022). At the same time, it is now clear that those who suffer most from environmental degradation have contributed the least to it (Chancel 2020). These selective vignettes underscore a simple but powerful truth: today’s climate and broader ecological crises are, at their core, distributional crises, where excess and deprivation, overshoot and shortfall are interconnected (see also Gough 2017; Büchs et al. 2023). Despite these realities, prevailing climate research and policy, deeply entrenched in an ecomodernist, green-growth paradigm, tend to frame the climate crisis as a matter of decoupling resource use and emissions from economic growth. This is envisioned to be achieved through technological advancements (efficiency gains) and adjustments of the price system to correct market failures (internalising “externalities”). However, this techno-economic approach to climate research and policy has not only failed to resolve its own problem definition, as there is no empirical evidence supporting the existence of absolute decoupling anywhere near the speed and scale needed (Parrique et al. 2019; Haberl et al. 2020; Wiedmann et al. 2020; Vogel and Hickel 2023). Efficiency improvements and price adjustments also constitute responses to a problem framing that considers inequality at best an afterthought. As leading climate economist Gernot Wagner proclaims: “It’s tempting to want to stick it to the man. We instead need to stick it to carbon. (…) Inequality is a real (…) problem. But we can’t delay climate action even further for the false hope of solving all the world’s other ills” (cited in Harvey 2023). Such mindsets cannot provide answers to ecological crises as distributional crises.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Algorithmic feeds are a twiddler’s playground

Next TUESDAY (May 14), I'm on a livecast about AI AND ENSHITTIFICATION with TIM O'REILLY; on WEDNESDAY (May 15), I'm in NORTH HOLLYWOOD with HARRY SHEARER for a screening of STEPHANIE KELTON'S FINDING THE MONEY; FRIDAY (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

Like Oscar Wilde, "I can resist anything except temptation," and my slow and halting journey to adulthood is really just me grappling with this fact, getting temptation out of my way before I can yield to it.

Behavioral economists have a name for the steps we take to guard against temptation: a "Ulysses pact." That's when you take some possibility off the table during a moment of strength in recognition of some coming moment of weakness:

https://archive.org/details/decentralizedwebsummit2016-corydoctorow

Famously, Ulysses did this before he sailed into the Sea of Sirens. Rather than stopping his ears with wax to prevent his hearing the sirens' song, which would lure him to his drowning, Ulysses has his sailors tie him to the mast, leaving his ears unplugged. Ulysses became the first person to hear the sirens' song and live to tell the tale.

Ulysses was strong enough to know that he would someday be weak. He expressed his strength by guarding against his weakness. Our modern lives are filled with less epic versions of the Ulysses pact: the day you go on a diet, it's a good idea to throw away all your Oreos. That way, when your blood sugar sings its siren song at 2AM, it will be drowned out by the rest of your body's unwillingness to get dressed, find your keys and drive half an hour to the all-night grocery store.

Note that this Ulysses pact isn't perfect. You might drive to the grocery store. It's rare that a Ulysses pact is unbreakable – we bind ourselves to the mast, but we don't chain ourselves to it and slap on a pair of handcuffs for good measure.

People who run institutions can – and should – create Ulysses pacts, too. A company that holds the kind of sensitive data that might be subjected to "sneak-and-peek" warrants by cops or spies can set up a "warrant canary":

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

This isn't perfect. A company that stops publishing regular transparency reports might have been compromised by the NSA, but it's also possible that they've had a change in management and the new boss just doesn't give a shit about his users' privacy:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90853794/twitters-transparency-reporting-has-tanked-under-elon-musk

Likewise, a company making software it wants users to trust can release that code under an irrevocable free/open software license, thus guaranteeing that each release under that license will be free and open forever. This is good, but not perfect: the new boss can take that free/open code down a proprietary fork and try to orphan the free version:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772562

A company can structure itself as a public benefit corporation and make a binding promise to elevate its stakeholders' interests over its shareholders' – but the CEO can still take a secret $100m bribe from cryptocurrency creeps and try to lure those stakeholders into a shitcoin Ponzi scheme:

https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/03/11/kickstarter-blockchain-a16z-crypto-secret-investment-chris-dixon/

A key resource can be entrusted to a nonprofit with a board of directors who are charged with stewarding it for the benefit of a broad community, but when a private equity fund dangles billions before that board, they can talk themselves into a belief that selling out is the right thing to do:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/how-we-saved-org-2020-review

Ulysses pacts aren't perfect, but they are very important. At the very least, creating a Ulysses pact starts with acknowledging that you are fallible. That you can be tempted, and rationalize your way into taking bad action, even when you know better. Becoming an adult is a process of learning that your strength comes from seeing your weaknesses and protecting yourself and the people who trust you from them.

Which brings me to enshittification. Enshittification is the process by which platforms betray their users and their customers by siphoning value away from each until the platform is a pile of shit:

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

Enshittification is a spectrum that can be applied to many companies' decay, but in its purest form, enshittification requires:

a) A platform: a two-sided market with business customers and end users who can be played off against each other; b) A digital back-end: a market that can be easily, rapidly and undetectably manipulated by its owners, who can alter search-rankings, prices and costs on a per-user, per-query basis; and c) A lack of constraint: the platform's owners must not fear a consequence for this cheating, be it from competitors, regulators, workforce resignations or rival technologists who use mods, alternative clients, blockers or other "adversarial interoperability" tools to disenshittify your product and sever your relationship with your users.

he founders of tech platforms don't generally set out to enshittify them. Rather, they are constantly seeking some equilibrium between delivering value to their shareholders and turning value over to end users, business customers, and their own workers. Founders are consummate rationalizers; like parenting, founding a company requires continuous, low-grade self-deception about the amount of work involved and the chances of success. A founder, confronted with the likelihood of failure, is absolutely capable of talking themselves into believing that nearly any compromise is superior to shuttering the business: "I'm one of the good guys, so the most important thing is for me to live to fight another day. Thus I can do any number of immoral things to my users, business customers or workers, because I can make it up to them when we survive this crisis. It's for their own good, even if they don't know it. Indeed, I'm doubly moral here, because I'm volunteering to look like the bad guy, just so I can save this business, which will make the world over for the better":

https://locusmag.com/2024/05/cory-doctorow-no-one-is-the-enshittifier-of-their-own-story/

(En)shit(tification) flows downhill, so tech workers grapple with their own version of this dilemma. Faced with constant pressure to increase the value flowing from their division to the company, they have to balance different, conflicting tactics, like "increasing the number of users or business customers, possibly by shifting value from the company to these stakeholders in the hopes of making it up in volume"; or "locking in my existing stakeholders and squeezing them harder, safe in the knowledge that they can't easily leave the service provided the abuse is subtle enough." The bigger a company gets, the harder it is for it to grow, so the biggest companies realize their gains by locking in and squeezing their users, not by improving their service::

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

That's where "twiddling" comes in. Digital platforms are extremely flexible, which comes with the territory: computers are the most flexible tools we have. This means that companies can automate high-speed, deceptive changes to the "business logic" of their platforms – what end users pay, how much of that goes to business customers, and how offers are presented to both:

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

This kind of fraud isn't particularly sophisticated, but it doesn't have to be – it just has to be fast. In any shell-game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

Under normal circumstances, this twiddling would be constrained by counterforces in society. Changing the business rules like this is fraud, so you'd hope that a regulator would step in and extinguish the conduct, fining the company that engaged in it so hard that they saw a net loss from the conduct. But when a sector gets very concentrated, its mega-firms capture their regulators, becoming "too big to jail":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Thus the tendency among the giant tech companies to practice the one lesson of the Darth Vader MBA: dismissing your stakeholders' outrage by saying, "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Where regulators fail, technology can step in. The flexibility of digital platforms cuts both ways: when the company enshittifies its products, you can disenshittify it with your own countertwiddling: third-party ink-cartridges, alternative app stores and clients, scrapers, browser automation and other forms of high-tech guerrilla warfare:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

But tech giants' regulatory capture have allowed them to expand "IP rights" to prevent this self-help. By carefully layering overlapping IP rights around their products, they can criminalize the technology that lets you wrestle back the value they've claimed for themselves, creating a new offense of "felony contempt of business model":

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

A world where users must defer to platforms' moment-to-moment decisions about how the service operates, without the protection of rival technology or regulatory oversight is a world where companies face a powerful temptation to enshittify.

That's why we've seen so much enshittification in platforms that algorithmically rank their feeds, from Google and Amazon search to Facebook and Twitter feeds. A search engine is always going to be making a judgment call about what the best result for your search should be. If a search engine is generally good at predicting which results will please you best, you'll return to it, automatically clicking the first result ("I'm feeling lucky").

This means that if a search engine slips in the odd paid result at the top of the results, they can exploit your trusting habits to shift value from you to their investors. The congifurability of a digital service means that they can sprinkle these frauds into their services on a random schedule, making them hard to detect and easy to dismiss as lapses. Gradually, this acquires its own momentum, and the platform becomes addicted to lowering its own quality to raise its profits, and you get modern Google, which cynically lowered search quality to increase search volume:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

And you get Amazon, which makes $38 billion every year, accepting bribes to replace its best search results with paid results for products that cost more and are of lower quality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

Social media's enshittification followed a different path. In the beginning, social media presented a deterministic feed: after you told the platform who you wanted to follow, the platform simply gathered up the posts those users made and presented them to you, in reverse-chronological order.

This presented few opportunities for enshittification, but it wasn't perfect. For users who were well-established on a platform, a reverse-chrono feed was an ungovernable torrent, where high-frequency trivialities drowned out the important posts from people whose missives were buried ten screens down in the updates since your last login.

For new users who didn't yet follow many people, this presented the opposite problem: an empty feed, and the sense that you were all alone while everyone else was having a rollicking conversation down the hall, in a room you could never find.

The answer was the algorithmic feed: a feed of recommendations drawn from both the accounts you followed and strangers alike. Theoretically, this could solve both problems, by surfacing the most important materials from your friends while keeping you abreast of the most important and interesting activity beyond your filter bubble. For many of us, this promise was realized, and algorithmic feeds became a source of novelty and relevance.

But these feeds are a profoundly tempting enshittification target. The critique of these algorithms has largely focused on "addictiveness" and the idea that platforms would twiddle the knobs to increase the relevance of material in your feed to "hack your engagement":

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/04/has-dopamine-got-us-hooked-on-tech-facebook-apps-addiction

Less noticed – and more important – was how platforms did the opposite: twiddling the knobs to remove things from your feed that you'd asked to see or that the algorithm predicted you'd enjoy, to make room for "boosted" content and advertisements:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/z9j7uy/what_happened_to_instagram_only_ads_and_accounts/

Users were helpless before this kind of twiddling. On the one hand, they were locked into the platform – not because their dopamine had been hacked by evil tech-bro wizards – but because they loved the friends they had there more than they hated the way the service was run:

https://locusmag.com/2023/01/commentary-cory-doctorow-social-quitting/

On the other hand, the platforms had such an iron grip on their technology, and had deployed IP so cleverly, that any countertwiddling technology was instantaneously incinerated by legal death-rays:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/10/google-removes-the-og-app-from-the-play-store-as-founders-think-about-next-steps/

Newer social media platforms, notably Tiktok, dispensed entirely with deterministic feeds, defaulting every user into a feed that consisted entirely of algorithmic picks; the people you follow on these platforms are treated as mere suggestions by their algorithms. This is a perfect breeding-ground for enshittification: different parts of the business can twiddle the knobs to override the algorithm for their own parochial purposes, shifting the quality:shit ratio by unnoticeable increments, temporarily toggling the quality knob when your engagement drops off:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

All social platforms want to be Tiktok: nominally, that's because Tiktok's algorithmic feed is so good at hooking new users and keeping established users hooked. But tech bosses also understand that a purely algorithmic feed is the kind of black box that can be plausibly and subtly enshittified without sparking user revolts:

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

Back in 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg was coming to grips with Facebook's success, he boasted to a friend that he was sitting on a trove of emails, pictures and Social Security numbers for his fellow Harvard students, offering this up for his friend's idle snooping. The friend, surprised, asked "What? How'd you manage that one?"

Infamously, Zuck replied, "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me.' Dumb fucks."

https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zuckerberg-called-people-who-handed-over-their-data-dumb-f/

This was a remarkable (and uncharacteristic) self-aware moment from the then-nineteen-year-old Zuck. Of course Zuck couldn't be trusted with that data. Whatever Jiminy Cricket voice told him to safeguard that trust was drowned out by his need to boast to pals, or participate in the creepy nonconsensual rating of the fuckability of their female classmates. Over and over again, Zuckerberg would promise to use his power wisely, then break that promise as soon as he could do so without consequence:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362

Zuckerberg is a cautionary tale. Aware from the earliest moments that he was amassing power that he couldn't be trusted with, he nevertheless operated with only the weakest of Ulysses pacts, like a nonbinding promise never to spy on his users:

https://web.archive.org/web/20050107221705/http://www.thefacebook.com/policy.php

But the platforms have learned the wrong lesson from Zuckerberg. Rather than treating Facebook's enshittification as a cautionary tale, they've turned it into a roadmap. The Darth Vader MBA rules high-tech boardrooms.

Algorithmic feeds and other forms of "paternalistic" content presentation are necessary and even desirable in an information-rich environment. In many instances, decisions about what you see must be largely controlled by a third party whom you trust. The audience in a comedy club doesn't get to insist on knowing the punchline before the joke is told, just as RPG players don't get to order the Dungeon Master to present their preferred challenges during a campaign.

But this power is balanced against the ease of the players replacing the Dungeon Master or the audience walking out on the comic. When you've got more than a hundred dollars sunk into a video game and an online-only friend-group you raid with, the games company can do a lot of enshittification without losing your business, and they know it:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/10/24153809/ea-in-game-ads-redux

Even if they sometimes overreach and have to retreat:

https://www.eurogamer.net/sony-overturns-helldivers-2-psn-requirement-following-backlash

A tech company that seeks your trust for an algorithmic feed needs Ulysses pacts, or it will inevitably yield to the temptation to enshittify. From strongest to weakest, these are:

Not showing you an algorithmic feed at all;

https://joinmastodon.org/

"Composable moderation" that lets multiple parties provide feeds:

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

Offering an algorithmic "For You" feed alongside of a reverse-chrono "Friends" feed, defaulting to friends;

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

As above, but defaulting to "For You"

Maturity lies in being strong enough to know your weaknesses. Never trust someone who tells you that they will never yield to temptation! Instead, seek out people – and service providers – with the maturity and honesty to know how tempting temptation is, and who act before temptation strikes to make it easier to resist.

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/2024/05/11/for-you/#the-algorithm-tm

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

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

--

djhughman https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Modular_synthesizer_-_%22Control_Voltage%22_electronic_music_shop_in_Portland_OR_-_School_Photos_PCC_%282015-05-23_12.43.01_by_djhughman%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[marvelsmostwanted]

I haven’t even watched this yet but I’m posting it here because truly, not enough people are taking this election seriously and it is giving me violent flashbacks to 2016. By all means take your time figuring out how to vote. Make sure you are fully informed. Make sure you fully understand the consequences before you decide. And once you do, I don’t think it will take very long to choose who to vote for.

If you’re already voting and feel like this doesn’t involve you, maybe consider how you can help others understand the importance of this election. Can you talk to someone in your life about it? Can you send postcards or texts? Or call voters? Volunteer or canvass? It’s tempting to sit on the sidelines and think you have no role in what happens here. That it’s simply up in the air and out of your hands. But if there’s one thing we should have learned from 2016, it’s that every single vote counts.

I’ve seen so much discourse about this election and far too much of it discounts the power you - specifically young voters - have to change things. “Voting doesn’t matter” “it didn’t change anything” Statements like these are not only meant to disenfranchise you, they are also blatantly untrue (see below - the two potential futures depending on the outcome of this election are, to understate it, substantially different). I could make a whole other post about the enormous list of things that have changed for the better because we voted in 2020 - and 2021, 2022, and 2023, by the way - but the point is, please don’t silence yourself by not voting because a random person online posted rage bait that told you it’s not cool. Instead, educate yourself about the choice and work toward the democracy you want to live in. Vote.

[flodaya]

I could see Zendaya being present in the talks with Kaz and Claire. I mean, it’s obvious marriage has been on the table for a while, she just didn’t know when the actual question was gonna be asked. And if TMZ is correct, he talked to Kaz a few months ago. And I believe People Magazine said he asked Claire. It sort of seems like maybe Claire was in town of the actual engagement day. Maybe she was in charge of getting Zendaya out of the house. I want to hear the story so bad, but they’ll never share it. And you know what, good for them!

seriously like I saw so many people discuss which they’d rather hear the details about: how they got together, the breakup/getting back together story, or every detail of the proposal and while I’m still slightly partial to the messiness of 2019-2020 (especially August to October 2020), I’m so tempted to change my answer and beg for every single detail of their engagement because I’m an absolute sucker for romance 🥺

[obeymefanfiction]

Beel: I Miss You

Obey Me! Fanfiction (Aug 2020) Masterlist Featuring: Beelzebub x Reader Word Count: 900 Disclaimer: Obey Me! Characters are the rightful property of Solemare. Warnings: Fluff/Angst, with allusions to depression.

The knock at the door pulled you back to reality. Your eyes were still stinging and sore from crying and you were tempted to put on sunglasses before you answered. What if it was just some poor delivery person who had the wrong door? You hadn’t ordered anything recently anyway… you’d only been back in the human realm for about a week and the things you brought with you were more than sufficient for your needs. Also, it was hard to… well want to.

It was hard to do anything really. This aching loneliness in your chest just wouldn’t leave you alone. It felt like your heart was starving to death and it didn’t make any sense because technically you were “home” now. This was where you belonged… but it wasn’t. Not anymore. You sighed and ran a hand through your hair blinking a few times in hopes of clearing some of the redness from your eyes. It wasn’t anyone’s fault that your time in the devildom had changed so much about you. It changed your favorite music, your favorite food, your favorite games… all the things you once loved just seemed to pale in comparison. Especially when it came to… You opened the door before you could fall into the endless pit that always engulfed you when you were thinking about him. The brightness of the light from outside—so unlike the devildom—made you squint uncertainly at the person standing at the door. When your tired eyes focused, however, and you saw that vibrant hair—those amethyst eyes—and his uncertain smile? You forgot to breath. “I brought you your favorite.” The tall broad-shouldered demon held out the bag to you. A familiar blush made his cheeks appear especially ruddy in the sunlight. “I know I’m not supposed to come see you, but… I couldn’t bring myself to eat it without you because it made me miss you too much.” You managed to take an unsteady breath but when you tried to speak nothing came out. Beelzebub was here? He came… here? “I’m sorry it just… hurts to be away from you like this _. I’ll let Lucifer string me up or whatever as a consequence. I just couldn’t keep missing you! So, I brought you dinner.” He looked like a puppy that expected to be scolded, so when you threw your arms around his neck and held on with all your strength it took him a moment before he hugged you back. “I missed you too Beel.” When the bag of food hit the ground by your feet you looked up in surprise. You barely registered his expression before his mouth crashed into yours. One large hand mover to cradle the back of your head with a familiar gentleness. His kiss was so hungry, however, that it felt as though you would become his next meal. The intensity of his affection had always been slightly restrained before now. As though he was holding back for fear of hurting you. At times it made you wonder if he felt as strongly toward you as you felt toward him. The sweet tender kisses he had always given you before now—even the gentle caress of his hand on you face—they were always so careful. Yet this separation seemed to have broken through Beel’s control. He kissed you so hard it almost hurt. Held you so close it was difficult to breathe. Yet, you simply kissed him back. Unleashing the intensity of your own feelings. You held him back as though he were your only lifeline. Your anchor to safety and happiness and anything else you could dream of wanting. When he pulled back to let you catch your breath you almost panicked. “Don’t let go!” The words came out before you could even think what they’d sound like. Still, the way he looked at you made your embarrassment obsolete. “I couldn’t if I wanted to.” He admitted, kissing you gently on the forehead. “Do you mind if I come inside your… what is this place? It’s so tiny?” He asked scrutinizing your doorway as though it were some kind of cave. You laughed a little and couldn’t resist hugging him again. “It’s certainly not home is it? But yes, we can eat inside.” You smiled up at him. “Thank you for bringing me dinner.” “It might be a little more tossed than usual now.” He blushed reaching down to pick up the bag he dropped on the ground. “I promise I don’t mind.” “Then you’d better lead the way before I start kissing you again.” He sighed. “Because tossed and cold isn’t the kind of food I wanted to bring you.”