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xzaddyzanakinx · 3 months

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Not That Kind of Guy

Part Four: Stalker!Anakin Skywalker × femme reader series

Warnings: stalking, weirdo behavior, psychotic/delusional behavior, possessive/protective, sexism/misogyny, one-sided relationship, sexual content, pervy behavior, male masturbation, panty kink, sex daydreams [eventual warning for smut; be sure to pay attention to future warnings in the series]

Info: Anakin is doing his very best, he just loves you and wants you to be comfy around him. Just let him worm his way into your heart babe [diary entries from Ani] extremely not proofread. I’m illiterate so apologies in advance MDNI 18+

Diary Entry: July 8th

Mr. Nelson’s funeral was today, it really was a beautiful ceremony as I look back on it. Even more so when my inner self smears the background enough to bring you to the front of the mental image.

You’d spoken to the man a handful of times, but I didn’t expect you to come. When I saw you accept the invite to the event on Facebook I thought surely it was a mistake. That was until you messaged Luke and asked him to accompany you, funerals make you nervous, but feeling obligated to do something and avoiding it makes you more nervous.

So your moral support was happy to attend and fight off dear old Alan’s corpse should he rise from the casket and set his sights on you.

And I though I had irrational fears, geez babydoll, how old were you when you watched Night of The Living Dead for the first time? If I had to guess it was too young. It’s alright though I get it, you know what movie traumatized me? The Mummy. Heebied my fucking Jeebies so bad I avoided the beach on family vacations.

You’re telling me there’s not a sarcophagus under all that sand? There’s at least one under there and you can’t convince me otherwise.

Solid ground for me only, please and thank you.

🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤

I had a thought that I initially considered to be a sweet reminder of my dear friend Alan. His obituary was in the newspaper and I happened to swipe one from the guest book table at the viewing as well. Have you ever scrapbooked before? I bet you’ve at least tried it.

Well I thought it would be nice to make him a page in my journal. A little celebration of life for the man who gave me an opportunity to grow and nurture my love for you.

Then I realized mid-glue stick on the newspaper clipping that the idea was something that a clinically insane person would do.

I’m not that guy. That guy’s not me.

But the glue was already on there and it felt wrong to toss Alan’s wrinkly old face into the trash so I pasted him into my journal anyway.

Crazy people don’t know that they’re crazy. I’m well aware that little idea was less than tasteful, just felt like I should mention that.

Date:

July 28th

Anakin Skywalker hadn’t been this happy since… ever. The previous record being his discovery of you, was now toppled into second place and overshadowed by ‘Move In Day’.

He could hardly contain himself. It was a dopamine high that he would ride out until he’d drained every last drop.

The movers lugged in box after box, furniture and books, until finally they dropped off the last load and thanked Anakin for the business. He eagerly shook their hand and shoved them out. He had preparations to make.

He set up his Tv, screen mirroring the live feed of the apartment building entrance to the big screen so that he could easily keep an eye out for you while he unpacked his kitchen.

He’d planned your ‘meet-cute’ meticulously, looking to your bookshelf and streaming services to gather intel on your ideal scenario. You were an odd bird, but he liked that about you. It’s part of your charm, it’s part of the challenge. You’re not as predictable in your tastes and interests as others can be.

Anakin formulated the interaction step by step, frame by frame in the storyboard of his imagination until he had the perfect scene. His box office hit that he’d replay over and over again until the next time he stood face to face with you.

It took quite some time and a load of practice. Discarded dialogue, awkward movements that made him feel stiff and less than human when he practiced them in the mirror. Endless options of clothes, shoes, and hair.

Should he get a new piercing? He wanted to. So he did, he knew you’d like it.

It’d match the one he already had on the opposite nostril. It made him feel more complete to add something so permanent to his body, he wished he could do something similar with you. He wanted you to be permanent, so maybe it’s his subconscious’s way of telling him that this was going in the right direction.

He was on the right path. His journey of life alone was coming to a close and a new trail would reveal itself. No more rocky, unsteady tread. No more sharp turns and blind spots, no more impossible inclines.

Scraped knees and bloodied hands would be distant memories. Maybe even distant enough that he could toss them into The Pit.

He would have no need for anger or sorrow anymore.

How could he feel anything but the warm embrace of love as he strolled down the flowered path ahead with you?

Who knew that you could position one box in 83 different ways and hate every single one of them? Anakin was so thankful there weren’t any actual surveillance cameras in the apartment building. It’d be really difficult to explain why he was in the hallway for an hour with his hands on his hips, scooting a box of books a centimeter or two at a time. Turning it sideways and then making sure the book on top was perfectly positioned and would effectively fall to the ground to catch your attention.

He checked his watch nonstop, stared at his Tv screen, willing you to just hurry the fuck up before he vomited from anxiety. He’d waited months for this. If he fucked it up now he’d… well he’d probably keel over on the spot.

Which would promptly traumatize you and not even his ghost would be able to peacefully haunt you. It’s hard to peacefully haunt someone if they watched you die, or at least Anakin assumed it would be difficult. He wasn’t willing to test that theory though.

So, he puffed up his chest and walked back into his apartment and rehearsed the upcoming conversation a few more times. He needed, desperately needed to ensure his facial expressions conveyed what he wanted.

Soft, trustworthy, dependable, safe, caring.

He practiced softening his eyes, knowing sometimes he stared alittle too hard. He worked on his facial fidget; chewing on the inside of his cheek was a quick tell of his nervousness. He didn’t want to be perceived as nervous, he wanted to be confident and sure of himself so that you would be confident in your soon to blossom affection for him.

His eyebrows, that’s a hard one, but he’d meticulously watched bar goers trying to flirt. The successful ones he learned, sometimes use their eyebrows in place of questions or words. A difficult concept, but one he studied until he mastered it.

Now, the other facial expressions and mannerisms… he gathered that information from your watch lists on your streaming services. For the visible examples at least, but your books were just as helpful in describing how he should approach you, speak to you, and simply exist near you.

He hadn’t realized these things were this important until now. Standing and posture was surprisingly very, very important to women. As well as hand movements and subtle glances and minuscule changes of expression.

You were worth the time and effort it took to learn all of it. He’d read and research and practice until he couldn’t stand to look at himself in the mirror any longer. He was determined to make sure you were happy with the results.

He was startled by a loud ping, someone had entered to building and holy shit it was you.

Anakin shook out his hands frantically, remembering the breathing techniques he’d learned as a child, he grounded himself quickly.

It’s okay.

‘She’s gonna love you. She’ll warm up to you quickly, you know everything you need to know about her to make her comfortable and loved.’

‘There’s no way she won’t fall head over heels.’

He smoothed out his band-tee and ran his hands through his hair quickly and headed to his door that was propped open slightly. A few boxes sat in the hall, including the most important one, the one instrumental to his plan.

The apartment hallway was ridiculously tiny, which worked in his favor in this situation.

He heard you come up the stairs, counted your steps until he knew you were almost at the door, 17 and a half steps. Then he swung open the door and bent down to grab one of the boxes.

As expected, he startled you and you dropped your keys. You always wore your backpack on one shoulder, one strap. So when you quickly went to scoop up your keys, your bag swung out of place and toppled a few books from one of the boxes.

Perfect. Absolutely perfect.

Anakin could gloat to himself about his magnificent setup later, right now he needed to woo you with his sweet words.

“Oh, sweetheart I’m sorry.” He said softly, coming over to offer you a hand up.

“It’s okay, my bad.” You laughed, taking his hand.

He managed to keep calm and collected despite his insides boiling him alive at the willing skin contact.

“No, not at all. It’s my fault for startling you like that.” He chuckled, squeezing your upper arm and using his hand already in yours to give you a small handshake. Smooth.

“I’m Anakin.” He said with a bashful smile, dropping your hand and reveling in the lingering warmth your palm left on his.

You introduced yourself in return, gesturing to his apartment door.

“So I take it that you’re my new neighbor huh?” You said, making small talk as you crouched down to pick up the books you’d knocked over.

“No I’m just a one man moving crew.” He grinned.

“Very funny.” You laughed, standing up as you looked through the titles. “Hmm, you’ve got good taste.”

“You think so?” He asked, remembering to make his eyebrows swoop up toward the middle of his forehead to give a quizzical look.

“Oh yeah, this is one of my favorites.” You said, showing him the cover of The Silmarillion by Tolkien.

“Not many people actually read that one, I’m impressed.” He smiled.

“Impressed? Yeah well I’m jealous.” You laughed.

“What?” He chuckled, holding his hands out to take the other books from you.

“This is a really nice edition, it’s similar to mine. I recently lost it.” You sighed. “I think I must’ve left it the park or maybe it fell out of my bag or something.”

“Ah, that sucks… well, I mean I’ve read that one a few times now. It’s been well loved.” He said tipping the books in his arms toward the one you were holding. “Why don’t you keep it?”

He shrugged, acting nonchalant as though this didn’t mean the entire world to him and if you said no he’d sob about it later.

“You’re serious?” You asked in surprise, he was offering you a 50$ special edition book and you’d barely known him for a minute.

“Yeah, ‘course sweetheart.” He said with a cute, crooked smile. “Think of it as a… reverse house warming gift.” He chuckled.

“Thank you, I- this means a lot to me.” You said, grinning widely. “That’s real sweet of you Anakin. I owe you one.”

“No worries.” He chuckled, “I’m sure we’ll find a way to make it even sweetheart.” His gaze flickered quickly from your eyes to your lips, and he turned to go back into his apartment after giving you an almost-missed wink.

You stepped inside your home, and went straight to the bookshelf to put your new-to-you book where it belonged. After the fact you stood there and buffered, just staring at it.

‘There’s no way, this guy has to be too good to be true.’

But he seemed… so genuine. He didn’t ogle you, he didn’t make you feel weird or like he just felt obligated to speak to you.

He seemed to actually, really be a good guy.

Rare. Few and far of those exist in this day and age. It’s uncommon to meet someone who would do something, even as simple as giving you a used book, without expecting anything in return.

But he didn’t seem to expect anything. He didn’t seem to even expect a thank you, it was like he’d already decided he would give it to you before he even offered.

What are the odds that a hot, tattooed and pierced man moves in next door and gifts you an expensive book that just so happens to be an even better replacement for the one that you just lost? That couldn’t happen twice even if you tried to make it happen again.

What kind of second dimension did you step into? The land of dreamy men?

Diary Entry: July 28th

It’s late. But I have to write to you, it can’t wait til tomorrow.

Everything went more perfectly than I could’ve imagined. Thank you so much for being you sweet girl. It made my job of curating the scenery so much easier, you clumsy little thing. I am sorry for having to spook you though, but it worked didn’t it?

Research pays off. Always.

And of course there’s the issue of your book, I hated to see your frustration and your mad scowl when you realized it was missing from your backpack. I really did.

But I’d do it every goddamn day if I knew I’d get the same reaction out of you from giving you that new copy.

Oh god you’re… you’re beautiful. You’re so beautiful. You look angelic when you sleep but you look like competition for Aphrodite when you smile at me.

You smiled, grinned. You smiled all the way up to the corners of your bright and beautiful eyes. For me.

You even laughed for me.

It was so sweet I could taste it. The honey of your voice, I could fucking bathe in it. Just the sound of you speaking, knowing you were speaking to me. Really speaking to me.

In the flesh.

It’s intoxicating. It’s emboldening, it’s dangerous. I’ve never been more worked up in my life. I’m torn all to pieces from at two minute and 6 second conversation.

I think I’ll have to fucking recover from this like a damn hangover.

But what has me so drunk you might ask? Was it your laugh at my stupid jokes? Was it your perfect smile, your radiant glow, your soulful eyes? The softness of your skin or you willingness to let me touch you?

No baby. It’s how you said my name.

I wish I could’ve stayed longer, I wish I could’ve spoken to you more. But it’s so hard to concentrate when my dick is leaking precum down my leg at a rate that should probably be concerning.

The minute you closed that door I shoved those boxes into my apartment and locked the door. Took my elated ass straight to the couch and watched you in your living room, admiring your gift from me while I fucked my fist with a pair of your dirty panties in my mouth.

I couldn’t have your honeyed lips soothing my angry red cock just yet, but I sure as hell could imagine licking your gorgeous little cunt while I tasted you.

I tugged my balls and pumped my cock for over half an hour until I was a fucking mess for you in my new living room’s floor. The cool hardwood letting the heat from my flushed skin seep away from me as I came back down to earth.

I made myself dizzy. Didn’t give myself a break, didn’t slow down, just stroked my cock like the desperate little manwhore that I am for you. The only thing missing was you being there to watch me fall apart.

I think you’d like that wouldn’t you? Watching a man like me get on his knees and beg for you?

Diary Entry: July 29th

I’ve replayed that moment in my head for hours on end. The beginning always stays the same, but the ending… that’s been subject to many changes. It started off simple, we’d chat alittle longer, I’d ask you how your day was; you’d tell me it was ‘fine, thank you’.

Or you’d ask me why I decided to move in, why I chose this side of town, this side of town, this apartment building, across from you. That one always ended questionably and I’d rather not explore that one on paper.

My favorites however were the ones where you’d laugh at a stupid pick-up line and somehow we’d end up in your bed. The bed I’ve sat and watched you sleep in. Those were the best additions.

Now, I’ve been fortunate enough that you’ve been loyal, faithful and devoted to only me since the very beginning. So I don’t really have a clue what you’d actually be like in bed.

But god it’s so fun to imagine it.

You’ve got such pretty, soft skin. You let me mar it up with my teeth and soothe it with my tongue. You let me grip the pillowy flesh of your thighs to spread you open for me. You let me pinch and roll and pull your nipples until they were raw and begging for a break. You let me caress the sensitive slick covered folds between those beautiful pussy lips, plunge my fingers in as far as they’d go.

I took you from behind, watching your perky little ass bounce off my cock while I plowed into you. Your face smushed against the couch cushions and your body folded over the arm rest for me to fuck you like the good little girl that you are.

Against the wall with your arms around my neck while I’ve got my hands holding you spread open and in place by the crook of your knees. You promised you stay real still so that I could drill up into you like you deserved.

God damn. Do you know how good you look like that? Back arched against the wall, tits jiggling in my face with every thrust. Your legs pushed up and back to the sides of your torso, to pin you in place?

It was like a pretty pink flower had bloomed and spread its buttery smooth petals just for me.

Don’t even get me started on how good you suck cock. Have you ever been told you could be mistaken for a warm, wet Hoover? No? Didn’t think so cause that would be rude as hell, but I bet someone’s thought it before.

(Me. It’s me, I thought that.)

Fuck those soft lips. Fuck that smooth snake of a tongue. Fuck that tight, hot throat that just loves to take a beating from my dick.

Can’t wait to prove my imagination right.

Speaking of, my dick has been beat. Like actually. If one didn’t know any better they’d assume it’s on life support, but I’m a freak of nature. Cumming upwards of 16 times in the span of 40ish hours would probably put a weaker man in a hospital bed. Or maybe a psych ward.

But I am not a weak man even if my dick feels raw. I’d still fuck you if you asked.

I’d be curious to know if I’d be able to stave off cumming longer from all the abuse or if I’d be so fucking sensitive that I wouldn’t make it in half an inch.

Probably the latter.

Diary Entry: August 2nd

Being so close to you is killing me. Truly it is.

You’ve sunken your claws so deeply into my very soul and you don’t even realize it. It’s torture. To you, I’m just the new guy, nice dude who gave you a book. But to me? You’re my entire world.

I’ve been told I have the personality of a guard dog. Soft and squishy on the inside, dangerous and fierce on the outside. Which I suppose could be true, but really I think it’s for a different reason. For a human, a dog is one small but very impactful blip in your life. But for the dog? You are it’s life.

Am I comparing myself to a dog right now? Yes I am.

I’ll beg for you to throw me the scraps of your affections until you finally toss me a bone.

Bark.

🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤

I’ve been trying my best to give you space. To plan accordingly and in advance. I have our next two interactions simmering on the back burner.

I know that if I go too hard, too fast, you’ll be overwhelmed. That’s the last thing I want. I never want to be the thing that causes you stress, I want to siphon it from you. So, in one week I will set out to help you with a few of your errands and plant a few seeds.

But until then, we have late night snacks and couch chats with Boogie.

I’ve also been doing- you guessed it- more research to do with helpful vitamins and medicines. You’ve responded so well to your SleepyTime tea and since I’ve started making sure your birth control packet is plainly visible in the countertop basket directly beneath that cabinet, you’ve been taking it so well.

I’m so proud of you sweetheart, that’s my girl, look at you taking care of yourself. You’ve done so well in fact, that it’s in my personal opinion that you have earned a very special reward.

Anakin sat on his couch, the live feed of your living room screen mirrored to his Tv. He was watching you cook dinner, he knew you’d be making a stir fry. He’d seen it in your planner, so he’d taken the liberty of ordering himself the same, it’d be here any minute. As would your good friend Sam.

Anakin had originally burned red hot with jealousy at the thought of you inviting a man over to your apartment, that he hadn’t vetted via social media and a quick drop-in. But he was relieved to discover that Sam was just a girl from your book club.

This wasn’t one of his well thought out plans, this was decided upon this morning after you’d returned from book club. So, he was anxious to see if his hunches served him well. Sam seemed like a punctual gal, at least from what he’d seen on social media and the text messages between the two of you from weeks/months before.

Anakin had the wonderful idea to log into your cell service providers website to pull your deleted messages from their data bank. You really should have better passwords.

The thing he was most worried about was his door dasher arriving on time. It was rare that one was too far off on arrival time, but it would be his shit luck and lack of planning that could ruin this little glimpse of you.

The minutes ticked by and he was alerted to the new motion sensors he’d placed near the LED pathway lights on the paved entrance to the apartment building. He quickly switched over to the hallway feed at the front door, seeing that it was his door dasher.

Damn you Trevor. How dare you get there before Sam.

Not to worry, he’d call for the door code and Anakin wouldn’t answer the first time. It wasn’t much but it would buy him a few seconds.

Though it seemed to be that luck was on his side as it often was when it came to you. Sam was so kind, kind enough to let the delivery guy into the building. Which is technically a security concern but Trevor didn’t seem like the type of guy who’d be able to remember a 6 digit door code.

He was too busy staring at your friends ass to pay attention to the numbers she entered anyway.

The footsteps approached your door and his, Anakin waited until he heard Sam knock on your door before he opened his. Trevor stood patiently as Anakin slowly counted out his tip in cash and thankfully you were quick to let your friend inside. After the exchange was complete Anakin gave you a smile and wave.

He could’ve had a heart attack at the response you gave him.

A flirty little finger waggle and smile.

He had to remind himself to breathe and keep his expression a happy-neutral. He’d hate for you to see his blushing cheeks this early on.

“Have a good night girls.” He said as he closed his door and to his surprise you actually answered.

“You too!”

If he weren’t confident that you were a sweet and loving soul, he’d think you were trying to kill him with the siren song of your voice.

Stir fry had never tasted so fucking good.

Diary Entry: July 8th

Grocery day baby, here I come.

I love that you’re so predictable. I love that you’re so fucking cute and always try to strong arm your groceries in one trip. I love that it takes at least two good whacks to the trunk of your shitty old Nissan to properly close it.

It’s cute to watch you struggle with it, the annoyed huffs and angry scowl.

I thought you’d combust on the spot once when your paper grocery bag of flour and sugar ripped open and sent a plume of flour up on your black jeans. The parking lot was very empty and I was very glad because I’d hate for someone to have seen the cursing contest you had with yourself as you picked up your spilled items. Very unladylike you know. But it’s you so I don’t mind, I just like to hear you talk.

It’s almost time. I’ve been sitting in my car for about 10 minutes. Gotta account for the traffic on highway 76. Do you really have to shop all the way out there just because of the Whole Foods? C’mon baby they have the same shit at Kroger.

I’ve been watching your little blue dot on my phone and you’re rounding the corner so I’ll write you later doll.

I love you.

You pulled into the parking lot and sat in your car for a moment. Giving yourself the much need quiet to decompress from your work day and the grocery trip. After you’d checked your messages and scrolled for a moment you decided it was time to head inside before your frozen foods got… not so frozen.

You popped the trunk and fumbled with the faulty latch, your fingers feeling blindly under the metal lip until it finally detached and you were able to open the trunk.

You took a deep breath and scolded yourself for buying the extra few things that could’ve waited till next time. Second trips are for wimps and you weren’t one. So you loaded up your left arm bag by bag until you heard a humored puff of air and the beep of a car locking behind you.

“Need a hand sweetheart?” Anakin grinned, shoving his keys into his front pocket.

He waltzed over and took a few bags off your hands without waiting for a response. It took you aback, not because he hadn’t waited for permission, but because of the way he exuded an odd charm that made you falter.

“Anakin, really it’s alright I can get it.” You said, eyebrows furrowed together in confusion by his kind gesture.

“Mmm no, this seems like a two man mission sweet girl.” He smiled, gathering up a few the last few bags from the trunk and shutting it with one solid push.

“You really don’t have to-“

“I know I don’t have to.” He said tilting his head toward the apartment building to encourage you to walk with him. “I want to.”

“Thank you, that’s… thanks.” You smiled, a light blush creeping across your cheeks.

“Atta girl.” He chuckled, tapping in the door code and holding it open for you despite holding many more bags than you.

Something about the low tone of voice or maybe just the way he looked at you with his icey blue eyes… just sent a chill down your spine. A quick one that was gone in an instant, replaced by a warm glow in the center of your chest.

“Guess chivalry’s not dead.” You joked.

“I’m no knight.” He laughed, “but you’re sure as hell a princess.”

‘Oh that was smooth.’ You thought, trying to ignore the heat at the bottom of your stomach.

What is happening? How on earth can one man be so… everything? Kind, caring, chivalrous and gorgeous to boot.

You felt a wave of embarrassment at the squeaky giggle you let out. He had you tore up from one little comment.

True to the gentleman he seemed to be, he chose not to push it and tease you about your beet red cheeks. He just waited patiently for you as you unlocked your door.

“Do you want me to bring these in for you?” He asked, watching your movements closely.

“Oh that would be great.” You said in relief, leading him into your kitchen.

“Cute little place.” He said, looking around the kitchenette and over to the living room.

He sat down your bags on the counter and started unloading them neatly into rows.

“Oh, you-“

“Mmm mmm.” He shook his head with a smirk, “Just let me help, it’s no big deal.”

You let out a puff of air in an amused sort of amazement and pulled out your little step stool to open up the cabinets. Anakin snickered from behind you as you stepped up and started putting things away.

You shot him a glare over your shoulder and almost said something snarky until you realized he was folding your paper grocery bags in the same way that you always do.

“Huh.” You laughed. “I thought I was the only one who did that.”

“Did what?” He asked, his head cocked to the side.

“Fold the bags.” You said, turning back around to continue placing your things where they belonged.

“Oh,” he chuckled, “I dunno it’s just a habit I guess. Fits better in that stupid slot on the recycling bin this way.”

“Yeah I never really understood why they made them that way? I guess so people don’t just shove other trash in there.” You mused.

“Mmhm probably.” He agreed, stacking them neatly and gathering it in his hands. “Do you want me to take these out back for you?”

“I can do-“ You stopped yourself when Anakin raised his eyebrow and cocked his head to the side with a crooked smirk.

You sighed and gave him a downturned smile. “Yes, I would love for you to take them out back for me.”

“Good girl.” He nodded, clicking his tongue and heading for the door. “See ya princess.”

After he shut the door you let yourself breathe alittle easier, blowing out the air in a short puff through your nose. Maybe even letting a little smile cross your lips before you finished up your task.

You’d be thinking about that low rumble of his voice later. Good girl? Shit.

PART FIVE

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 months

Text

My McLuhan lecture on enshittification

IT'S THE LAST DAY for the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

youtube

Last night, I gave the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin. The event was sold out and while there's a video that'll be posted soon, they couldn't get a streaming setup installed in the Canadian embassy, where the talk was held:

https://transmediale.de/en/2024/event/mcluhan-2024

The talk went of fabulously, and was followed by commentary from Frederike Kaltheuner (Human Rights Watch) and a discussion moderated by Helen Starr. While you'll have to wait a bit for the video, I thought that I'd post my talk notes from last night for the impatient among you.

I want to thank the festival and the embassy staff for their hard work on an excellent event. And now, on to the talk!

Last year, I coined the term 'enshittification,' to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers, it really hit the zeitgeist. I mean, the American Dialect Society made it their Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I'm definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).

So what's enshittification and why did it catch fire? It's my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters – and what we can do about it.

We're all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.

It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für Englisch Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let's examine how enshittification works.

It's a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Let's do a case study. What could be better than Facebook?

Facebook is a company that was founded to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that.

When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and k-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It told them: “Yes, I know you’re all using Myspace. But Myspace is owned by Rupert Murdoch, an evil, crapulent senescent Australian billionaire, who spies on you with every hour that God sends.

“Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world, and we will compose a personal feed consisting solely of what those people post for consumption by those who choose to follow them.”

That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end-users. Those end-users proceeded to lock themselves into FB. FB — like most tech businesses — has network effects on its side. A product or service enjoys network effects when it improves as more people sign up to use it. You joined FB because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there.

But FB didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem.

It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. You and your six friends here are going to struggle to agree on where to get drinks after tonight's lecture. How were you and your 200 Facebook friends ever gonna agree on when it was time to leave Facebook, and where to go?

So FB’s end-users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then FB exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end-users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers, and publishers.

To the advertisers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? We lied. We spy on them from asshole to appetite. We will sell you access to that surveillance data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting, and we will devote substantial engineering resources to thwarting ad-fraud. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it.'

To the publishers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? We lied!Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link, and we will nonconsensually cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetize as you please, and those users will become stuck to you when they subscribe to your feed.' And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too, dependent on those users.

The users held each other hostage, and those hostages took the publishers and advertisers hostage, too, so that everyone was locked in.

Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders.

For the users, that meant dialing down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers.

For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen by a person.

For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt, until anything less than fulltext was likely to be be disqualified from being sent to your subscribers, let alone included in algorithmic suggestion feeds.

And then FB started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting fulltext feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetization, via the increasingly crooked advertising service.

When any of these groups squawked, FB just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learned in the Darth Vader MBA: 'I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.'

Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus, and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders.

But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service but I can’t bring myself to quit it,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit? Get me the hell out of here!” is razor thin

All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then FB discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword.

If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go, too.

That’s terminal enshittification, the phase when a platform becomes a pile of shit. This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech bros euphemistically call 'pivoting.'

Which is how we get pivots like, 'In the future, all internet users will be transformed into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world called "metaverse," that we ripped off from a 25-year-old satirical cyberpunk novel.'

That's the procession of enshittification. If enshittification were a disease, we'd call that enshittification's "natural history." But that doesn't tell you how the enshittification works, nor why everything is enshittifying right now, and without those details, we can't know what to do about it.

What led to the enshittocene? What is it about this moment that led to the Great Enshittening? Was it the end of the Zero Interest Rate Policy? Was it a change in leadership at the tech giants? Is Mercury in retrograde?

None of the above.

The period of free fed money certainly led to tech companies having a lot of surplus to toss around. But Facebook started enshittifying long before ZIRP ended, so did Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Some of the tech giants got new leaders. But Google's enshittification got worse when the founders came back to oversee the company's AI panic (excuse me, 'AI pivot').

And it can't be Mercury in retrograde, because I'm a cancer, and as everyone knows, cancers don't believe in astrology.

When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that's a sign that the environment has changed, and that's what happened to tech.

Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.

The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honorable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality, and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty.

There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses.

First: competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices.

Second: regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.

These two forces affect all industries, but the next two are far more tech-specific.

Third: self-help. Computers are extremely flexible, and so are the digital products and services we make from them. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing-complete Von Neumann machine, a computer that can run every valid program.

That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company's shareholders. Think of a board-room table where someone says, 'I've calculated that making our ads 20% more invasive will net us 2% more revenue per user.'

In a digital world, someone else might well say 'Yes, but if we do that, 20% of our users will install ad-blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, forever.'

This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory maneuver will prompt their users to google, 'How do I disenshittify this?'

Fourth and finally: workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn't mean that tech workers don't have labor power. The historical "talent shortage" of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage over their bosses. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another job – a better job.

They knew it, and their bosses knew it. Ironically, this made tech workers highly exploitable. Tech workers overwhelmingly saw themselves as founders in waiting, entrepreneurs who were temporarily drawing a salary, heroic figures of the tech mission.

That's why mottoes like Google's 'don't be evil' and Facebook's 'make the world more open and connected' mattered: they instilled a sense of mission in workers. It's what Fobazi Ettarh calls 'vocational awe, 'or Elon Musk calls being 'extremely hardcore.'

Tech workers had lots of bargaining power, but they didn't flex it when their bosses demanded that they sacrifice their health, their families, their sleep to meet arbitrary deadlines.

So long as their bosses transformed their workplaces into whimsical 'campuses,' with gyms, gourmet cafeterias, laundry service, massages and egg-freezing, workers could tell themselves that they were being pampered – rather than being made to work like government mules.

But for bosses, there's a downside to motivating your workers with appeals to a sense of mission, namely: your workers will feel a sense of mission. So when you ask them to enshittify the products they ruined their health to ship, workers will experience a sense of profound moral injury, respond with outrage, and threaten to quit.

Thus tech workers themselves were the final bulwark against enshittification,

The pre-enshittification era wasn't a time of better leadership. The executives weren't better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power.

So what happened?

One by one, each of these constraints was eroded until it dissolved, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittoscene.

It started with competition. From the Gilded Age until the Reagan years, the purpose of competition law was to promote competition. US antitrust law treated corporate power as dangerous and sought to blunt it. European antitrust laws were modeled on US ones, imported by the architects of the Marshall Plan.

But starting in the neoliberal era, competition authorities all over the world adopted a doctrine called 'consumer welfare,' which held that monopolies were evidence of quality. If everyone was shopping at the same store and buying the same product, that meant it was the best store, selling the best product – not that anyone was cheating.

And so all over the world, governments stopped enforcing their competition laws. They just ignored them as companies flouted them. Those companies merged with their major competitors, absorbed small companies before they could grow to be big threats. They held an orgy of consolidation that produced the most inbred industries imaginable, whole sectors grown so incestuous they developed Habsburg jaws, from eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer.

Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with 'predatory pricing' that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold.

When Diapers.com refused Amazon's acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100m on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until diapers.com went bust, and Amazon bought them for pennies on the dollar, and shut them down.

Competition is a distant memory. As Tom Eastman says, the web has devolved into 'five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four,' so these giant companies no longer fear losing our business.

Lily Tomlin used to do a character on the TV show Laugh In, an AT&T telephone operator who'd do commercials for the Bell system. Each one would end with her saying 'We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.'

Today's giants are not constrained by competition.

They don't care. They don't have to. They're Google.

That's the first constraint gone, and as it slipped away, the second constraint – regulation – was also doomed.

When an industry consists of hundreds of small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is a mob, a rabble. Hundreds of companies can't agree on what to tell Parliament or Congress or the Commission. They can't even agree on how to cater a meeting where they'd discuss the matter.

But when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel.

Five companies, or four, or three, or two, or just one company finds it easy to converge on a single message for their regulators, and without "wasteful competition" eroding their profits, they have plenty of cash to spread around.

Like Facebook, handing former UK deputy PM Nick Clegg millions every year to sleaze around Europe, telling his former colleagues that Facebook is the only thing standing between 'European Cyberspace' and the Chinese Communist Party.

Tech's regulatory capture allows it to flout the rules that constrain less concentrated sectors. They can pretend that violating labor, consumer and privacy laws is fine, because they violate them with an app.

This is why competition matters: it's not just because competition makes companies work harder and share value with customers and workers, it's because competition keeps companies from becoming too big to fail, and too big to jail.

Now, there's plenty of things we don't want improved through competition, like privacy invasions. After the EU passed its landmark privacy law, the GDPR, there was a mass-extinction event for small EU ad-tech companies. These companies disappeared en masse, and that's fine.

They were even more invasive and reckless than US-based Big Tech companies. After all, they had less to lose. We don't want competition in commercial surveillance. We don't want to produce increasing efficiency in violating our human rights.

But: Google and Facebook – who pretend they are called Alphabet and Meta – have been unscathed by European privacy law. That's not because they don't violate the GDPR (they do!). It's because they pretend they are headquartered in Ireland, one of the EU's most notorious corporate crime-havens.

And Ireland competes with the EU other crime havens – Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and sometimes the Netherlands – to see which country can offer the most hospitable environment for all sorts of crimes. Because the kind of company that can fly an Irish flag of convenience is mobile enough to change to a Maltese flag if the Irish start enforcing EU laws.

Which is how you get an Irish Data Protection Commission that processes fewer than 20 major cases per year, while Germany's data commissioner handles more than 500 major cases, even though Ireland is nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent.

So Google and Facebook get to act as though they are immune to privacy law, because they violate the law with an app; just like Uber can violate labor law and claim it doesn't count because they do it with an app.

Uber's labor-pricing algorithm offers different drivers different payments for the same job, something Veena Dubal calls 'algorithmic wage discrimination.' If you're more selective about which jobs you'll take, Uber will pay you more for every ride.

But if you take those higher payouts and ditch whatever side-hustle let you cover your bills which being picky about your Uber drives, Uber will incrementally reduce the payment, toggling up and down as you grow more or less selective, playing you like a fish on a line until you eventually – inevitably – lose to the tireless pricing robot, and end up stuck with low wages and all your side-hustles gone.

Then there's Amazon, which violates consumer protection laws, but says it doesn't matter, because they do it with an app. Amazon makes $38b/year from its 'advertising' system. 'Advertising' in quotes because they're not selling ads, they're selling placements in search results.

The companies that spend the most on 'ads' go to the top, even if they're offering worse products at higher prices. If you click the first link in an Amazon search result, on average you will pay a 29% premium over the best price on the service. Click one of the first four items and you'll pay a 25% premium. On average you have to go seventeen items down to find the best deal on Amazon.

Any merchant that did this to you in a physical storefront would be fined into oblivion. But Amazon has captured its regulators, so it can violate your rights, and say, "it doesn't count, we did it with an app"

This is where that third constraint, self-help, would sure come in handy. If you don't want your privacy violated, you don't need to wait for the Irish privacy regulator to act, you can just install an ad-blocker.

More than half of all web users are blocking ads. But the web is an open platform, developed in the age when tech was hundreds of companies at each others' throats, unable to capture their regulators.

Today, the web is being devoured by apps, and apps are ripe for enshittification. Regulatory capture isn't just the ability to flout regulation, it's also the ability to co-opt regulation, to wield regulation against your adversaries.

Today's tech giants got big by exploiting self-help measures. When Facebook was telling Myspace users they needed to escape Rupert Murdoch’s evil crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, 'Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here'

It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your Myspace username and password, and it would login to Myspace and pretend to be you, and scrape everything waiting in your inbox, copying it to your FB inbox, and you could reply to it and it would autopilot your replies back to Myspace.

When Microsoft was choking off Apple's market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac – so that offices were throwing away their designers' Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator – Steve Jobs didn't beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office.

He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office, and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could perfectly read and write Microsoft's Word, Excel and Powerpoint files.

When Google entered the market, it sent its crawler to every web server on Earth, where it presented itself as a web-user: 'Hi! Hello! Do you have any web pages? Thanks! How about some more? How about more?'

But every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, that was progress. If you try to do it to them, that's piracy.

Try to make an alternative client for Facebook and they'll say you violated US laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and EU laws like Article 6 of the EUCD.

Try to make an Android program that can run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple's media stores and they'd bomb you until the rubble bounced.

Try to scrape all of Google and they'll nuke you until you glowed.

Tech's regulatory capture is mind-boggling. Take that law I mentioned earlier, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Bill Clinton signed it in 1998, and the EU imported it as Article 6 of the EUCD in 2001

It is a blanket prohibition on removing any kind of encryption that restricts access to a copyrighted work – things like ripping DVDs or jailbreaking a phone – with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

This law has been so broadened that it can be used to imprison creators for granting access to their own creations

Here's how that works: In 2008, Amazon bought Audible, an audiobook platform, in an anticompetitive acquisition. Today, Audible is a monopolist with more than 90% of the audiobook market. Audible requires that all creators on their platform sell with Amazon's "digital rights management," which locks it to Amazon's apps.

So say I write a book, then I read it into a mic, then I pay a director and an engineer thousands of dollars to turn that into an audiobook, and sell it to you on the monopoly platform, Audible, that controls more than 90% of the market.

If I later decide to leave Amazon and want to let you come with me to a rival platform, I am out of luck. If I supply you with a tool to remove Amazon's encryption from my audiobook, so you can play it in another app, I commit a felony, punishable by a 5-year sentence and a half-million-dollar fine, for a first offense.

That's a stiffer penalty than you would face if you simply pirated the audiobook from a torrent site. But it's also harsher than the punishment you'd get for shoplifting the audiobook on CD from a truck-stop. It's harsher than the sentence you'd get for hijacking the truck that delivered the CD.

So think of our ad-blockers again. 50% of web users are running ad-blockers. 0% of app users are running ad-blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that's a felony (Jay Freeman calls this 'felony contempt of business-model').

So when someone in a board-room says, 'let's make our ads 20% more obnoxious and get a 2% revenue increase,' no one objects that this might prompt users to google, 'how do I block ads?' After all, the answer is, 'you can't.'

Indeed, it's more likely that someone in that board room will say, 'let's make our ads 100% more obnoxious and get a 10% revenue increase' (this is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website).

There's no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn't install a counter-app that coordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold.

No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete, or in other words: 'IP law.'

'IP' is just a euphemism for 'a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers.' And 'app' is just a euphemism for 'a web-page wrapped enough IP to make it a felony to mod it to protect the labor, consumer and privacy rights of its user.'

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.

But what about that fourth constraint: workers?

For decades, tech workers' high degrees of bargaining power and vocational awe put a ceiling on enshittification. Even after the tech sector shrank to a handful of giants. Even after they captured their regulators so they could violate our consumer, privacy and labor rights. Even after they created 'felony contempt of business model' and extinguished self-help for tech users. Tech was still constrained by their workers' sense of moral injury in the face of the imperative to enshittify.

Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?

Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.

Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.

And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired last year six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.

Workers are no longer a check on their bosses' worst impulses

Today, the response to 'I refuse to make this product worse' is, 'turn in your badge and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.'

I get that this is all a little depressing

OK, really depressing.

But hear me out! We've identified the disease. We've traced its natural history. We've identified its underlying mechanism. Now we can get to work on a cure.

There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labor.

To reverse enshittification and guard against its reemergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these.

On competition, it's actually looking pretty good. The EU, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and China are all doing more on competition than they have in two generations. They're blocking mergers, unwinding existing ones, taking action on predatory pricing and other sleazy tactics.

Remember, in the US and Europe, we already have the laws to do this – we just stopped enforcing them in the Helmut Kohl era.

I've been fighting these fights with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 22 years now, and I've never seen a more hopeful moment for sound, informed tech policy.

Now, the enshittifiers aren't taking this laying down. The business press can't stop talking about how stupid and old-fashioned all this stuff is. They call people like me 'hipster antitrust,' and they hate any regulator who actually does their job.

Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has run more than 80 editorials trashing Khan, insisting that she's an ineffectual ideologue who can't get anything done.

Sure, Rupert, that's why you ran 80 editorials about her.

Because she can't get anything done.

Even Canada is stepping up on competition. Canada! Land of the evil billionaire! From Ted Rogers, who owns the country's telecoms; to Galen Weston, who owns the country's grocery stores; to the Irvings, who basically own the entire province of New Brunswick.

Even Canada is doing something about this. Last autumn, Trudeau's government promised to update Canada's creaking competition law to finally ban 'abuse of dominance.'

I mean, wow. I guess when Galen Weston decided to engage in a criminal conspiracy to fix the price of bread – the most Les Miz-ass crime imaginable – it finally got someone's attention, eh?

Competition has a long way to go, but all over the world, competition law is seeing a massive revitalization. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put antitrust law in a coma in the 80s – but it's awake, it's back, and it's pissed.

What about regulation? How will we get tech companies to stop doing that one weird trick of adding 'with an app' to their crimes and escaping enforcement?

Well, here in the EU, they're starting to figure it out. This year, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act went into effect, and they let people who get screwed by tech companies go straight to the federal European courts, bypassing the toothless watchdogs in Europe's notorious corporate crime havens like Ireland.

In America, they might finally get a digital privacy law. You people have no idea how backwards US privacy law is. The last time the US Congress enacted a broadly applicable privacy law was in 1988.

The Video Privacy Protection Act makes it a crime for video-store clerks to leak your video-rental history. It was passed after a right-wing judge who was up for the Supreme Court had his rentals published in a DC newspaper. The rentals weren't even all that embarrassing!

Sure, that judge, Robert Bork, wasn't confirmed for the Supreme Court, but that was because he was a virulently racist loudmouth and a crook who served as Nixon's Solicitor General.

But Congress got the idea that their video records might be next, freaked out, and passed the VPPA.

That was the last time Americans got a big, national privacy law. Nineteen. Eighty. Eight.

It's been a minute.

And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned Grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden?

Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google?

Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics?

Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms?

Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

Having a federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems. There's a big coalition for that kind of privacy law.

What about self-help? That's a lot farther away, alas.

The EU's DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You'll be able to use Whatsapp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind.

But if you want to reverse-engineer one of those Big Tech products and mod it to work for you, not them, the EU's got nothing for you.

This is an area ripe for improvement, and I think the US might be the first ones to open this up.

It's certainly on-brand for the EU to be forcing tech companies to do things a certain way, while the US simply takes away tech companies' abilities to prevent others from changing how their stuff works.

My big hope here is that Stein's Law will take hold: 'Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop'

Letting companies decide how their customers must use their products is simply too tempting an invitation to mischief. HP has a whole building full of engineers thinking of new ways to lock your printer to its official ink cartridges, forcing you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink to print your boarding passes and shopping lists.

It's offensive. The only people who don't agree are the people running the monopolies in all the other industries, like the med-tech monopolists who are locking their insulin pumps to their glucose monitors, turning people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers.

Finally, there's labor. Here in Europe, there's much higher union density than in the US, which American tech barons are learning the hard way. There is nothing more satisfying in the daily news than the latest salvo by Nordic unions against that Tesla guy (Musk is the most Edison-ass Tesla guy imaginable).

But even in the USA, there's a massive surge in tech unions. Tech workers are realizing that they aren't founders in waiting. The days of free massages and facial piercings and getting to wear black tee shirts that say things your boss doesn't understand are coming to an end.

In Seattle, Amazon's tech workers walked out in sympathy with Amazon's warehouse workers, because they're all workers.

The only reason the tech workers aren't monitored by AI that notifies their managers if they visit the toilet during working hours is their rapidly dwindling bargaining power. The way things are going, Amazon programmers are going to be pissing in bottles next to their workstations (for a guy who built a penis-shaped rocket, Jeff Bezos really hates our kidneys).

We're seeing bold, muscular, global action on competition, regulation and labor, with self-help bringing up the rear. It's not a moment too soon, because the bad news is, enshittification is coming to every industry.

If it's got a networked computer in it, the people who made it can run the Darth Vader MBA playbook on it, changing the rules from moment to moment, violating your rights and then saying 'It's OK, we did it with an app.'

From Mercedes renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dishsoap, enshittification is metastasizing into every corner of our lives.

Software doesn't eat the world, it enshittifies it

But there's a bright side to all this: if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification.

Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive, it's unstoppable.

The cynics among you might be skeptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn't "enshittification" the same as "capitalism"?

Well, no.

Look, I'm not going to cape for capitalism here. I'm hardly a true believer in markets as the most efficient allocators of resources and arbiters of policy – if there was ever any doubt, capitalism's total failure to grapple with the climate emergency surely erases it.

But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and wooly internet, a space where people with disfavored views could find each other, offer mutual aid, and organize.

The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crapgadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand-names, and cryptocurrency scams.

The internet isn't more important than the climate emergency, nor gender justice, racial justice, genocide, or inequality.

But the internet is the terrain we'll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it's joined.

We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device.

We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to coordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, and save our planet and our species.

Martin Luther King said 'It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.'

And it may be true that the law can't force corporate sociopaths to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut-bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation.

But it can make that exec fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity, even if he doesn't think you deserve it.

And I think that's pretty important.

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/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel/a>

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

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#pluralistic #transmediale #lectures #enshittification #big tech #berlin #mcluhan lecture #Youtube

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after-witch · 26 days

Text

Damn Your Eyes Chapter 2 [Yandere Ren Hana x Reader]

Title: Cream and Sugar [Damn Your Eyes Chapter 2] [Yandere Ren Hana x Reader]

Synopsis: A fateful meeting at a bookstore between you and Ren Hana, years upon years after your escape from Strade, turns into a coffee shop date. You're not supposed to accept drinks from strangers, but Ren's not a stranger--so it's fine, right?

Word count: 5,322

notes: yandere, descriptions of violence/death/wounds, drugging

AO3 LINK

How did one get over something like Strade? Get over that house and that basement? How do you move on with your life when you’ve seen someone’s guts spill out of their body while they’re still alive, and you’ve been instructed to pick them up and play with them for the delight of sick fucks watching it all on a paid stream?

The pretty answer, the one everyone recites when asked, because that’s what you do: with therapy and time and forgiveness for yourself. You take it one day at a time. You treat yourself.

The real answer: You didn’t. You don’t. You can’t.

Not fully. Because “getting over” something like that means it will eventually no longer affect you, no longer being a part of you.

And sure. You will, eventually, go about something that feels like an ordinary life.

You will walk into a grocery store with a tidy little list, you will roll your eyes at the rising cost of laundry detergent, you will smile at a cashier who says they like your outfit. You will date and drink coffee and sway to your favorite song while making dinner.

But inside, inside of you , you are still there--still hovering at the last step of the basement stairs, listening to someone’s guttural shrieks as their skin is blow-torch melted down. Still clinging to Ren in the middle of the night, flinching when his hands wander over a recent gouge, a hastily stitched cut--an accident, he whispers, and you’re never sure if you believe him.

And that is what happened to you.

It took years, of course, to even get close to that semblance of normalcy. A few years were spent in feverish hiding, running from place to place with no paper trails that might lead some gorehound that subscribed to Strade’s torture porn sniffing at your door, hungry for more.

But you settled down, in time. Slowly. Bit by bit, piece by piece, inch by inch.

That took years, too--the settling.

It started with staying in an apartment for more than three months at a time. It started with going to the grocery store wearing only sunglasses, instead of sunglasses, a wig, and the most nondescript clothing you could fish out of a bargain bin. It started with applying for real jobs, not just seedy work that paid cash, quick.

It ended here, in this quaint little home that you shared with your husband for the past five years, though you’d lived together for longer. It ended here, with a modest marketing career that you’d built up after going back to college. It ended here, with a life you built for yourself; frail and a bit unorthodox, but a life nonetheless.

You wouldn’t have been able to survive, if you hadn’t adapted. There is only so much terror the human man can manage before breaking entirely, and so--adaptation.

It was a gift that your husband didn’t mind your… differences. The heavy insistence on home security, the desire for privacy, the slow way you gave trust to strangers--if you gave it at all.

Some things did bother him. He grumbled about your lack of social media presence, and you’d once had an awful fight when his sister put a photo of you on Facebook that you’d demanded, in furious tears, be taken down.

But, deep down, it wasn’t like you could blame your husband for bucking against your near tantrum-like reaction. For the way he sometimes sighed as you locked the front door with triple locks, and an electric sensor. For the way his jaw sometimes set, when you did something that wasn’t normal to anyone who hadn’t been the extended torture victim of a serial killer that doubled as a snuff porn producer.

Because you knew--deeper down--that you were still haunted by the ghosts in that basement. Strade and the torture victims and Ren and yourself, shaking like a leaf, bleeding onto concrete. You knew, even if the man you slept beside in a bed every night had no inkling of it, that you could never step back across that threshold and be the way you were before.

But.

And there’s always a but, isn’t there?

But… that was okay. It was okay that you could never go back; it was okay that you were someone new; it was okay that you weren’t okay, and you’d never be okay in the fullest sense of the word.

Your life was a life you created out of shaking fingers, something clawed out with dirty fingernails. It wasn’t perfect, but it was yours.

What more could you ask for, after Strade?

What more could you ask for, after anything ?

Books are a vice. More than smoking, more than sex. You could give up sex, you could swear you’ll never buy another pack of smokes, but you could never give up books.

Okay, okay. You’re being over dramatic and theatrical. But how can you think of books as anything other than a sinful pleasure when you’re surrounded by these shelves and stacks, imagining that one day you can afford an extension on your home and dedicate an entire room (or two--why not, in a daydream?) solely to books?

You’re not even supposed to be here today. It was your day off, and your calendar was packed to the brim with mundane errands. Today’s schedule certainly didn’t leave room for indulgently browsing at a bookstore, but sometimes you just have to live a little, don’t you?

Although if you come home with yet another bag of books, your husband is bound to shove his face into the nearest couch cushion and scream. But c’mon. It wasn’t your fault that you’d long since run out of shelf space and were prone to stuffing the books into boxes that cluttered the closests.

Your fingers wander over the spines of the books crammed onto the shelves, catching the uneven mismatched spaces between with every dip. The spines are often worn and weathered, some of them even peeling a little.

This was why you preferred secondhand bookstores. No neat lines of fresh new books set up to catch the eye and make a sale here. No, instead there were countless books shoved together with no care for size or color or sometimes (depending on who was stocking that day) even genre.

For instance, today you find a battered paperback copy of Carrie by Stephen King right next to a suspiciously pristine How to Keep Your House from Drowning that probably still has an uncracked spine. That poor soul, with a messy house. Maybe they should have read the book.

You’re about to keep moving when, on second thought: Your partner might get a kick out of finding that book on his nightstand. Or he’ll chuck it at your head (lovingly) for bringing it into the house. It’s a 50/50 gamble that you’re willing to take.

And so you go to pull it out, a private little grin on your face, just as another hand reaches across for Carrie.

Fingers and elbows bump together and you feel that slight flush of awkward embarrassment rush to your cheeks as you sputter out, “Sorry!” Your voice even goes up an octave, an annoying habit that you’ve been trying to train out of yourself.

The stranger pulls away and mutters their own low apology. They sound just as awkward as you, which makes you feel a little better, at least, so you turn to look at them and offer an embarrassed smile and you think, briefly, maybe you’ll grab Carrie for them or cheekily ask if they were going for the cleaning book--

But when you turn to look at them, all thoughts and cheek are snuffed out.

Not because the man in front of you is wearing a nicely tailored business suit and matching fedora hat; a dark gray complimented by a muted burgundy tie. Like he’s off to a meeting or comes from a big city where such outfits are often found in shops and cafes during lunch hours.

Not because the man in front of you is attractive, with red hair with a bit of ever so slightly silver sticking out from underneath his hat; his cologne, soft but spicy, tickles your nose.

But because the man in front of you is Ren.

Older, yes. His hair and face peppered with signs of time, just like yours. There are scars on his face that you remember--some etched onto his flesh right in front of you, and some from that gray area of before, when Strade had yet to take you--and some you don’t.

Your body is lead, your throat is closed up. Speech and movement are now foreign, unknowable things, because Ren is standing right in front of you.

It takes you a moment to shake it off; no, two moments. No, three.

And then you can finally speak, although the word comes out hoarse and whispered, like every ounce of spit in your mouth vanished the instant you saw him. Perhaps it did.

“ Ren ?”

He blinks. His eyes narrow, eyebrows furrowing. For a terrible moment, you find yourself thrown back down the basement steps, when knowing the difference between Strade’s brows furrowing in annoyance or amusement could mean the difference between the degree of your upcoming burns.

And then his expression opens, widens, just enough for you to recognize that he knows who you are now and you’re here, in a bookshop, decades on; not there, not in the basement, where you left Strade’s corpse to rot.

Ren--for he is Ren, and you know it--lifts his hat, his lips turning up in a smile that makes your heart twist painfully, and shows just the bottom edges of his ears in greeting.

He says your name and your ears ring, high and tinny. Out of the corner of your eye, you see a cashier standing at the till rearranging trinkets while clearly spying on whatever bit of vaguely interesting gossip this might turn into during their lunch break.

You had, in truth, imagined this moment before. Countless times. Usually at night, though you weren’t terribly picky; a long trip on a bus, head pressed against the window glass, was also a great time for such thoughts.

You’d imagined finding Ren some day, in many different ways.

In some fantasies, you look him up in the phonebook (a stupid idea fit only for a fantasy, because Ren would never put himself out there like that, just as you hadn’t) and give him a call and meet up at a park and you apologize until your lungs stop working. In another, you run into him somewhere else, a store or park; a coincidence just like this one. In still others, he finds you, offering to meet in a public space because he knows you’d be scared and he wants you to be comfortable and Ren would definitely think of things like that, considering your shared experiences.

In your daydreams, you had a speech prepared. It was always moving, of course. It culminated in a soft, unbearably sweet hug where the two of you squeezed out the pain from the preceding decades and parted in mutual understanding. Maybe with each other’s phone numbers on slips of paper.

But those were daydreams. This is real life.

In real life, your throat feels closed up; your eyes burn with hot tears that want to spill out, and everything from your chest to your cheeks feels hot and swollen. In real life, it is not the daydreams but your nightmares that worm their way into your brain: those nightmares you have (yes, have, still--even this far down the line) where he hates you, where he tells you that you left him there like he’s nothing, where he throws back all your whispered conversations in the dark back in your face.

In real life, you can only stammer out, expecting the nightmarish worst: “Ren. I’m s…sorry. I’m sorry . I shouldn’t--I shouldn’t have --”

Ren raises his hand; his brows furrow again. He says your name, once, twice. Softer. Gentler.

“It’s okay,” he says, low. You don’t know if he means that it’s okay that you left him (it isn’t, is it?) or that it’s going to be okay or that he’s okay or--

Ren must sense your upcoming lack of steady breathing, because he places one steady hand on your shoulder. The way he used to do, when you started thinking about the fact that you were going to die in that house, and it would be an awful death, and the thought of it made you want to tear into your own skin.

It brings you back down to the ground, which only makes you want to cry for a different reason.

Ren’s face has a touch of sticky pity on it when he smiles at you.

“Why don’t we go somewhere we can sit down and talk?”

You are sitting in a coffee shop across the way from a fox man who used to be tortured with you in the basement of a serial killer's home that doubled as a snuff film studio. There are people around you, but they might as well be invisible, be nothing at all.

Because every nerve in your body is focused squarely on Ren, sitting in front of you with a muted awkward expression as the pair of you wait silently for the barista to call up your order.

Neither of you have spoken since you sat down.

Sweat is beginning to stick to your neck, but you don’t want to move without warning--don’t want to startle Ren. If you do, maybe he’ll run off, and… no. He wouldn’t run off now. You can tell. He’s not like he used to be, and neither are you.

There are decades between you, and yet--and yet that thread is still there, isn’t it? You could never fully cut it. Maybe it pulled, instead. Pulled and pulled and eventually lost all of its slack on this unassuming afternoon, when the two of you met again in a bookstore. Reaching for books with cracked and weathered spines, lines creasing over the paper like scars on the skin.

Your scars. His scars.

How many times have you traced over the marks on your skin? How many times has he? Maybe he didn’t do it anymore. Maybe he was in a much better space than you, and that’s why he looks so awkward and you feel like your heart is about to pound right out of its chest. Because he’s moved on and you, stupid thing, just woke up in the basement in the middle of a sunny afternoon.

His shoulders straighten; you imagine, under his hat, that his ears have perked. For a moment,, a familiar sensation washes through you. Danger. He’s coming down the stairs and it’s going to hurt.

But Strade is dead. And you are alive, and Ren is alive, and his attention only raised because the barista set both of your coffees down on the counter. Nothing more than that.

Slowly, the world seems like it regains its normal gravity. The sweat clinging to your neck feels silly and not ominous. You can breathe, and the world of the coffee shop seems to settle around you like it would have on any other day.

“I’ll get them,” Ren says, quietly, eyeing you with wariness–like he’s the one worried about you bolting. Fuck. He’s probably right to think that; a moment ago, you might have been the one to run.

Ren pauses after he stands up, and there’s something soft and sad in his eyes when he looks at you. Part of you thinks he’s about to say that he’s going to leave, that this was a mistake. But instead, his lips curl and the softest of smiles, and he asks:

“You still like cream and sugar?”

Oh.

“Yes,” you say, automatically. But you don’t. Not anymore. Tastebuds change and you drink it black with no cream, when you do bother to drink it. It’s not worth correcting, and you don’t. You just watch as he grabs both cups and heads over to the counter on the far side of the coffee shop, where there’s oodles of sugars (and sugar substitutes); creamers; and little tins of milk to add to your drink.

Then your phone vibrates, and the “fuck!” that comes out of your mouth is involuntary. It was about the time that you should have been heading home, bookstore stop notwithstanding. What were you going to say to him? That you’d run into someone from your past that used to get tortured with you? That you remember what Ren looks like when his flesh is sliced into and pulled apart?

You heading home? Took ground beef out for dinner. Tacos?

Your thumb hovers over the phone screen. You’re going to lie. You already know that. Even if you were ready to tell him about your past, it would not be like this. Even you, not particularly attuned to mobile etiquette, knew it was better to confess something like this in person. Although the temptation to confess it all and add silly emojis to punctuate the gritty details was very strong.

Ran into an old friend , you type, finally. They want to hang out a bit. Tacos are fine, don’t wait up! Xoxoxo.

It feels so normal. And that’s okay, isn’t it? That you’re being normal right now. It’s a sign that you’ve come so far, if anything. And you’ll take any of those signs that you can manage to get, so when the text comes in–

Can’t wait to hear about it!

I don’t guarantee there will be tacos left.

Kidding.

… Maybe.

–you let that normalcy wash over you, and it helps you settle as Ren returns, coffee mugs in hand.

His expression is lighter, too. He probably notices the weight off your shoulders, the way you’re trying to look interested and perhaps even excited to see him, rather than looking like you’re about to throw up on a half-empty stomach.

He slides your mug across the table and you can tell at a glance that it’s going to be sweet. A hesitant sip, your tongue curling back from the warmth and inevitable sugar, confirms it. Milky and creamy, just like you used to take it.

“Do you live around here?” Ren asks, taking a sip from his own mug.

Such an average question. It’s almost enough to make you snort. Really, you should be asking him when he got out of that basement and whether or not he ever thought about cutting you open and if he still had dreams, like you did.

Instead, he’s asking something you might ask an old high school friend that you haven’t seen in twenty years.

Fuck. What a world you live in.

Maybe he senses your thoughts. Maybe the two of you really are in tune from what you went through together. Because he cracks a smile, the edge of a sharp tooth showing. And then the smile spreads and turns into a little chuckle. It’s not the giggling snort he would sometimes fall into at the house. It’s something older and more reserved, but that shouldn’t surprise you. You’re the same way.

You take another sip of the coffee. It really is too sweet. That’s how you took it at the house, though. It was better to drown your sorrows in creamer and packets of sugar–pilfered from diners that Strade went to, sometimes to scope for victims–than mope about them all the time.

“I really am curious,” he says, voice light. “If you’re okay with telling me.” Something different in his tone. Offense, maybe? God, it’s strange, being on the lookout for what someone’s tone really means again.

But it’s just Ren. You shouldn’t be so worried about it.

“It’s fine,” you say, just as light. “Yeah, maybe about half an hour away? I have a little house…”

Ren’s eyebrows raise. Not in surprise, exactly. But in interest. It relieves you, just a little, that he didn’t let out some sarcastic remark about having your own place away from him.

“Do you have a garden?” He asks. “You always did talk about getting one.”

A twinge in your heart. Bittersweet and old. Sometimes at night, when the two of you were allowed to curl up together, you would talk about a fantasy world. A world where you never came here; where you’d be and what you’d do. Sometimes, you’d be in a pretty little cottage with a pretty little garden in a pretty little town.

Well. Your garden is pretty, even if your house isn’t an adorable cottage and you live at the edge of sprawling suburbs where you have to drive 20 minutes to get to anything useful. Close enough?

You tell him about it. The house and the garden. You even tell him about your partner, and maybe his smile does quirk down a little, then. But you could be imagining it.

“Do you have kids?” Ren asks, next. If he were anyone else, it would be a mundane question--the kind you ask every couple who's been together a while. In Ren, it feels different. Serious. Sincere. He tilts his head a little, taking another sip of his coffee, which prompts you to do the same.

Kids. Hah. It wasn’t like the thought had never crossed your mind. But it didn’t happen. For a lot of reasons, it didn’t happen. Mind and body and the basement worked against you, and maybe there was a part of you that was afraid to bring anything into the world, because you knew it could be taken away. Taken to someone’s basement and hurt and hurt and hurt –

Ren says your name.

Ren’s hand is on yours.

You glance down at his hand–see a familiar scar, see that your hand underneath his is curled up and tense–and then look up at his face.

Oh, the passing of time.

“Me neither,” he says, softly. Like he knows why you didn’t and couldn’t, and maybe he was the same way.

It hurts too much to think about. So you clear your throat and slowly pull your hand away, letting it rest on the now cooling mug of coffee. You take another swig, despite it not being to your taste anymore. Ren really did put in a lot of creamer.

“What about you?”

His head tilts, almost slow, almost curious.

“Me?”

He blinks.

You blink back.

“Do you live around here?”

A smile–an Ahhh sort of smile.

“No,” he says, simply. He shakes his head. “I travel a lot.” He nods his head. “For business.”

“Oh,” you say. “What sort of business?”

A flicker in his gaze. Something sharp and familiar. It’s gone too soon to matter.

“This and that,” is all he says.

And there’s a strange sort of realization in your head. A fuzziness that seems to spread right to your scalp. This is all too casual, too normal. It’s not at all what it was supposed to be, when you met. Asking about homes and gardens and kids and what you do for work; fuck, you two had been tortured together. Had watched people die. Had helped other people die.

This should have been about more than banal pleasantries. This should have been about reconnecting. About that thread between the two of you that couldn’t be cut, even now.

Maybe it’s that fuzziness in your scalp and maybe it’s the lurching of your heart, but you reach out your hand again towards Ren; your hand and your heart reaching and aching –

“Why did you run that day?” Soft and to the point. All the years have led to this question.

The question drops your hand straight to the table. The thud feels harder than it sounds. What ease your heart had mellowed to earlier melts away entirely, and you can feel adrenaline beginning to pump, your heart pounding and racing. Your ears hurt.

Why did you run? It’s the question you wanted him to ask, isn’t it? The question that would lead to your big sappy explanation and apology and the sentimental hug before you two parted ways, perhaps with phone numbers in your pockets?

But now that Ren is real again; now that he’s here, lines around his eyes and a touch of silver in his hair, you don’t know how to answer.

You ran because you were scared. Scared of people from Strade’s fucked up streams finding you in that house. Scared of Strade’s corpse rotting in the basement. Scared, too, of Ren. Of being chained to him, or by him, and you could never be sure which was more likely.

You ran because you weren’t strong enough to face whatever was left behind for you in that fucking house.

Thickness lodges in your throat but you swallow against it. This is not a daydream. This is real life. And you have to own up to what you did now.

“Ren, I–”

The words don’t come, because the world suddenly spins. The fuzziness prickling on your scalp, your ears ringing, your heart going too fast–this has all been too much for you, you should have known that. There are brief thoughts–heart attack, stroke, fuck, fuck, FUCK–and then Ren’s hand is gripping your upper arm so you don’t fall out of the chair.

“Are you okay?” Your vision is clear enough to see the concern in his face. His brows furrow together and he looks around, telling someone– ”Yes, I'm going to get her home” --and you’re about to tell him not to take you to the hospital because your insurance has a high deductible for the emergency room when another dizzy spell hits you, and you’d rather be in debt than dead.

“Should I call an ambulance?” He asks, voice low, calming. Your mind latches onto it. You’re not alone, it’s going to be okay. Someone is here to take care of you, and if you have to go to the emergency room, well, it couldn't have happened at a better time.

Ambulances cost too much money, though, and Ren

“Could you drive me?” Even as you talk, you know something’s wrong. The words come out too slow, a little slurry. Almost like you’re drunk.

Ren starts to shake his head and your dizzy self makes a pitiful sound.

You swear you can see Ren’s ears twitching underneath his hat. You don’t have the presence of mind to think about why–where and when he’s heard that pitiful whimper before–so you just cling to him as he gently pulls you out of your chair.

He grabs your purse and carefully leads you out of the shop. Someone holds the door open, and he tells them that you’re going to the emergency room, thank you for the concern. Your head swims and you might mumble thank you to them, too, but you’re not entirely sure. Are you dying? Is it a stroke? Will the last thing you texted the love of your life be about dinner? It’s funny in that awful, delirious sort of way.

“Ren?” You ask, helpless. You’re holding onto him as tightly as you can, but your fingers feel fuzzy. Your whole body feels fuzzy, actually. Heavy and strange. Drunk and leaden.

“It’s all right,” he murmurs. “Let’s get you into my car, all right?”

You don’t have the presence of mind to wonder why his car is already out on the curb, running, with a driver in the front seat. You aren’t coherent enough to think about things like that; but then, even before you drank the coffee cup laced with a sedative, you didn’t notice the black car following the pair of you down the road to the coffee shop.

You didn’t notice it follow you to the bookstore, either, nor did you give it a second glance when it pulled out of the lot after you stopped in at the grocery store to pick up a few miscellaneous items.

You really had lost your touch after all these years.

Ren grips you carefully while he opens the back door to the car. It’s roomy, expensive. Clean black leather seats that probably don’t show stains. Up front, a driver sits, wearing a hat and sunglasses and a uniform.

There’s a brief thought–Jesus, what does Ren do for a living to afford this?--before Ren is helping you crawl into the backseat.

The movement only makes you dizzier, and you’re telling the person in the front seat, whoever they are, that you need to get to the nearest hospital please.

They don’t even turn to look at you. It’s strange. But then Ren is there in the backseat with you, and you’re mumbling the same thing to him. Rattling off your symptoms–dizzy, fuzzy, confused, tingling hands. You try to remember the test for a stroke but can’t.

Ren smiles at you.

Why is he smiling? That thought comes through loud and clear, but it doesn’t stick for very long.

“Ren,” you say, slurring. “The hospital, the nearest one is… I think it’s… you have to…”

And those words, difficult as they are to get out, slowly drop away. Because while your mind is not capable of many things right now, it is capable of registering something unusual.

Ren.

He doesn’t look worried anymore. No more concern furrowing his brow, no more softness.

Instead, he looks pleased. There’s a smug smile on his face, and you’ve seen it before, but it’s older now. Wiser. Less impulsive and more assured.

A cat–a fox–that caught the canary. And you, what little remains of your logical mind tells you, are one dumb bird.

And he knows that you know. Because he jerks his chin at the driver in the front, who must press some kind of button; the doors lock. Loud. Hard. Your numb hands fumble for the door handle but no matter how much you try to shove the door open, it doesn’t budge.

You're locked in.

“Back to the hotel for now,” Ren says. Not to you. To the driver. Who–to your horror–begins to pull away from the curb.

“Oh, no–” You try to scream. It’s not quite loud enough. Not quite sharp enough. but maybe someone can see you, even through the tinted windows. Or they’ll hear you and tell someone, who will maybe tell someone else, who might call the cops. If you’re lucky.

Ren’s hand cups your mouth firmly.

“Don’t waste your energy, you’ll need it soon.” The hand moves from your lips to your cheek, resting there. The look in Ren’s eyes is blurry–whatever he drugged you with is making it hard to focus–but you recognize bits of it, because you felt the same damn thing.

The awful mixture of nostalgia, regret and ache.

Maybe if you explain everything. Tell him why you ran. Apologize like hell. You won’t be hugging after this, but you won't be drugged up (what did he give you?) in the back of his car, either.

“Ren– the hous e–I ran–I–let me explain, it–”

Ren’s hand trails back to your mouth. The sharp edges of his nails graze against your nose.

“Hush. We’ll talk about all that later.”

Later?

Oh, fuck –

There’s an awful, stabbing pain in your thigh–you look down and see Ren pulling away a syringe with a bright silver needle.

Ren–you try to say his name, but when you open your mouth, nothing comes out. Your lips gape and close and words no longer form.

Your head is swimming now, all highs and lows, dipping and rising over waves that never seem to end. It’s like you're falling asleep in the worst way, hard and rocky.

Like you’re falling backwards down the basement stairs.

Ren’s voice is the last thing you hear before you black out.

“Sweet dreams.”

#the price of flesh #boyfriend to death #ren hana #ren hana x reader #tpof x reader #afterwitch writes #thank you voice to text you saved my marriage. i mean my fic. same thing.#i feel like I'm aiming for... 4 chapters? Maybe 5. Definitely 4 though.

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gallifreyriver · 1 year

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Reminder that Zuckerberg actively lobbied with Republican PR firms to make TikTok illegal because he couldn't compete with it.

Reminder that for all its faults TikTok has brought tons of awareness to important issues that barely got any coverage until they blew up on TikTok, and more that still barely got any mainstream coverage even after they did.

Reminder that TikTok has become the largest and easiest place for people to come together and organize, and has 150 million active users in the US.

Reminder that congress, especially conservatives, stand to gain a lot by banning it, because it means less people will hear about all the problematic (fascist) shit they're trying to pass, such as the 300+ anti-trans bills, the bills seeking to make abortion a felony punishable by death, or how they're trying to remove the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). They also get to 'look tough' against China.

Reminder that claims of concerns over data privacy are bullshit, because China could literally just buy our data if they wanted it. Tech companies just like and including Facebook collect and sell our data all the time. China wouldn't need to build an app to get it.

Reminder that banning TikTok sets a precedent that Congress could come for literally any other social media they deem 'a threat' and ban that too. Yes, even your personal favorite one.

Reminder that we should care about this and instead of saying "Good Riddance TikTok!" we should be actively trying to stop this violation of free speech and stop handing more power to fascists just because we personally don't like a thing or think it's cringe. This is bigger than your personal tastes.

Please sign this letter from the ACLU to your members of Congress and urge them to listen. There's also a hearing this Thursday on March 23rd at 10am EST in DC where the TikTok CEO will be testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The hearing will be open to the public and will also be live streamed online.

I don't care if you hate TikTok or think it's "cringe." If you all actually hate Facebook and fascists as much as you say you do, then you won't stand for letting them win this fight to ban it.

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14dayswithyou · 2 months

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Sending a kiss to renren 😍😘

How would Ren react if mc were to request for him to live with them? Also if mc were to go on a vacation out in a cruse then would he follow along? It would he watch from the cameras? What if there are no cameras on the cruise?

✦゜ANSWERED: I think this is already a given, but Ren would be ecstatic if Angel asked him to move in with him! He would also follow Angel if they went on vacation — even if it's on a cruise around the Bay ^^

I'd like to think that all cruise ships have security cameras (like... What if someone fell overboard? Stole someone's luggage? Snuck into restricted areas? Security would need to monitor that!!), but if there were none, Ren would probably just hack some random Aunty's phone while she's live-streaming to her friends on Facebook lmao

#💌 — answered.#💖 — 14 days with queue.#uniqbliss-blog

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scavengedluxury · 2 years

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Having seen this Reddit post I think there are millions of people who care and notice. The last few years have been very instructive on how the rich wage class war on us, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say the Tories have created a tinderbox atmosphere among working people. It’s just very rare to hear dissenting voices in the media which cranks out an endless stream of articles like this:

The people who get their news from the Newscorp and Facebook bubble tend to live in well off areas where they don’t see the long queues of families waiting outside food banks come heatwave or torrential rain, but it’s pretty obvious to everyone else something is about to snap. Rent and bills spiraling, real wages falling, the cost of living crisis is going to drive millions into poverty; it’s even more serious than the poll tax which brought Thatcher down. But it is encouraging to see things like the resurgence in union membership, Mick Lynch challenging the bosses’ lies on TV, the Don’t Pay campaign and Enough is Enough.

#uk politics #cost of living crisis #tory scum

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holyplacechurch · 2 years

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Welcome To Holy Place Church How may we pray for you today? “Music Provided by the Whoop Triggerz Plus® App (http://www.WhoopTriggerz.com).” CCLI Streaming Plus License 21242130 Copyright license 21242123 Submit your prayer requests via the Holy Place Church website https://www.holyplacechurch.org Or via the Good Tidings Interdenominational Evangelistic Association website https://www.gtiea.org The simulcast is available live @7am everyday on Facebook, Twitch and YouTube. #praying4u #FaithPrayers #prayeroffaith #prayforme #newnanga #answeredprayers #prayingforyoutoday #prayer #mayweprayforyou #wantprayer #ineedprayer #intercession #prayerrequest #cowetacounty #intercessoryprayer #verseoftheday #helpmeplease #verseofthedayprayer #churchplant #churchplanters #helpmeplantthelordschurch #whyamihere #amen #prayerworks #prayerstillworks #forgiven #dailyprayer #faith #salvation #forgiveness #prophetic #repentance #tryjesus

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hungermakesmonsters · 7 months

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Catch Me If You Can

Plot summary : When your friend interviews for a position at Anvil, you have a chance encounter with Billy Russo. He takes you for coffee and, by the time you’re done , Billy decides he’s anything but done with you.

Pairing : Billy Russo x Reader

Story Rating : R

Chapter Rating : this one is pretty PG

Warnings : [This is a fic for 18+ only, minors DNI] Nothing in this chapter is warning worthy, but the story in general is going to turn pretty smutty from chapter 3 onwards and there will be strong language throughout. I’m not going to list all the different ways things get smutty unless I think it’s something that could be considered triggering. Please check the warnings on each chapter if you choose to follow this story.

Word Count : ~4.5k

A/N : this started life as an original piece that I couldn’t finish, so I decided to make a few little changes and turn it into a fanfic. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a tumblr, so sorry if I fuck this up. The story as a whole is going to veer recklessly between cute fluff and some much darker things with themes of obsession, will-they-won’t-they, and running from past trauma. Both Billy and reader are messy AF.

CHAPTER ONE

You checked your phone for what had to be the hundredth time. A measly two minutes had passed but the August heat made it feel longer. You found yourself thinking about how you were going to kill your roommate for making you chauffeur her around in the height of summer, trying to ignore the way the sticky New York heat made your tank top cling to your body beneath your unzipped hoodie.

You’d given up on waiting in the car after the first ten minutes - the AC in the old VW was busted, making it even less comfortable than sitting on the hood of the car under the glaring sun. Still, the parking lot was nicer than some of the places you’d found yourself waiting for your roommate over the years. That was the thing with Tammy; everyone around her lived on her schedule, did what she wanted to do. And you were no exception.

Actually, this whole thing was your idea. A friend, albeit in a very loose sense of the word, had told you that ANVIL were hiring office staff, and you’d passed the message along to Tammy who’d - well, she’d turned her nose up at it at first, she’d even laughed at you. But Tammy needed a job and ANVIL had a reputation for paying well.

So, you agreed to drive her to the interview and even agreed to wait.

Every now and then someone would appear - honestly, it looked like a steady stream of models leaving the building, the sorts that Tammy fit well with - but, for the most part, it was just you, mindlessly scrolling Instagram, trying not to think.

Until you saw him.

He came out the door and just stopped. It looked like he was breathing a sigh of relief at being out of there, and you couldn’t help but smirk a little at that. Poor guy.

Despite the weather he was dressed in a suit, dark hair slicked back, tall and slender. You suddenly felt out of place, like you shouldn’t be there, like you shouldn’t keep watching him, but the longer it went without him noticing you, the harder it was to try and tear away your eyes. He answered his phone as you watched, even without being able to hear a word, you knew he wasn’t happy. When he turned you got your first glimpse of his face and -

Fuck.

Your eyes dropped back to your phone, knowing that he’d seen you watching him. Fingers swiped across the screen, jumping from Instagram to emails to Facebook, looking for anything to reply to. Your eyes stayed fixed on the phone even as you heard the shuffle of boots on gravel moving towards you, trying to act like you hadn’t been staring at him even as his shadow fell over you.

“Do you make a habit of hanging out in parking lots or are you here to interview?” His voice didn’t sound quite the way you’d imagined - though you weren’t really sure why you’d been imagining his voice to begin with. There was an edge to it, something that sent a shiver up your spine.

“I’m waiting for someone,” you answered, squinting as you looked up and the light seemed to halo around him.

“Friend?” he asked.

“Roommate,” you answered awkwardly before shaking your head, “but, yeah, she’s my friend too.”

You weren’t expecting him to laugh at that, for him to smile the sort of smile that probably had women all across the five boroughs ready to drop their panties. (And that was another thought you weren’t sure you should be having.)

He didn’t move, for a few moments he just looked at you as if he was taking measure, and all you could think about was how there was a bead of sweat rolling down your back. You probably looked completely gross while he was standing there in what looked like a professionally tailored suit that probably cost more than you could make in a year, with not a hair out of place despite the oppressive heat.

“Does she make you wait around for her a lot?” He asked as if it was the strangest thing he’d ever heard, like he’d never allow anyone to put him in your position.

“She doesn’t drive,” you shrug, “anyway, this is nicer than most of the places she drags me to.”

“Yeah?” he prompted with little more than a raise of his eyebrow.

“Tammy’s an actress - at least, she wants to be. So I end up waiting around while she auditions.”

The look he gave you was surprisingly sympathetic. “Actresses can be hard work.” You didn’t think to ask how he knew that.

“Yeah, I’m just glad she gets to keep her clothes on for this interview,” the words slipped out and you instantly grimaced but if he noticed that, he didn’t let it show. “Not like - I mean, she’s not doing porn or anything. Not that there’s anything wrong with women wanting to -”

You could see him fighting back a laugh the more flustered you got.

“I mean, it’s not the nudity that’s a problem - you should read some of the scripts, they’re just so bad.” You finally managed. “It’s like ‘oh no the serial killer caught me with his knife and now my tits are out’.”

Silence fell again and you watched him glance away, daring to hope that he was done with you. He’d walk away and forget all about you, and you’d spend the rest of the day replaying this moment in your mind, cringing at how ridiculous you are.

“I was going to grab a coffee, your friend is probably going to be another hour or so, so if you want you could always join me?”

You quickly started coming up with reasons why you couldn’t, why you shouldn’t. But, it was just coffee, it wasn’t like he was asking you to leave the country with him. And, besides, you weren’t sure you could stand the heat much longer.

“There’s a place nearby that does amazing iced coffee,” like he was reading your mind. And that sold it.

“Yeah, sure, that sounds great,” you decided, sliding off the hood of the car in a less than graceful manner.

Once you were standing you could really appreciate the height difference between the two of you; you almost had to tilt your head to look at him. You pushed the thought away, taking a moment to check that your car was locked up, following after him when he started to leave the way.

As you walked, it dawned on you that you still didn’t know his name, so you clumsily introduced yourself.

“Billy,” he responded with a smile, realising that he’d made the same mistake you had, “come on, it’s just across the street.”

You both fell into silence as you left the parking lot, but it wasn’t long before it got to be too much for you in an awkward, uncomfortable sort of way. It struck you that he didn’t look uncomfortable though, in fact you were already pretty certain that he wasn’t the kind of man to get uncomfortable easily.

“So, do you work at Anvil?” You asked him, wanting to fill the silence but also wanting to know a little bit more about him. You weren’t sure what he found so funny about the question but the smirk he shot you left you feeling like you were missing something obvious and he found your ignorance amusing. You started to fiddle with your sleeves, gaze dropping from his.

“Yeah, I work at Anvil.” And then silence fell again.

When you looked up again you were outside a little coffee shop that was so small and non-descript that you’d completely missed it when you drove by it earlier. He held the door open for you and let you slip inside before following, watching as you breathed a sigh of relief as the cool air from the AC hit. When you moved towards the counter, you realised he was only a step behind, towering over you almost possessively.

The girl behind the counter smiled at him first before bothering to spare you a glance.

“What would you like?” He asked. You quickly realised that he was intending to pay and that just unsettled you further.

“I can get mine,” you were quick to tell him. You didn’t need him paying for you and you’d never been the sort to accept drinks from men you didn’t know, not even coffee. So, you ordered your drink, your favourite iced coffee with syrup, before he ordered his, an americano with an extra shot of espresso. But before you could pay, he reached over and tapped his phone on the reader, flashing you what you could only describe as a darkly mischievous smile.

“You didn’t have to -” you started to tell him.

“I know, but I wanted to,” Billy shrugged, “besides, I owe you for keeping me company.”

The girl behind the counter shot you the sort of look that made you think that she would have been more than happy to keep Billy company herself and that she saw your presence there as an annoyance. You guess that was probably the effect he had on a lot of women.

“Here you go, Billy, just how you like it,” she smiled as put your drinks on the counter, leaning and fluttering her eyelashes at him, completely ignoring you. Billy gave her a muttered thanks and you had to bite your lip to keep from laughing as you reached for your drink.

As you turned, Billy placed a hand on your back, leading you towards a table by the window, far enough from the counter that it felt a little more private. You sat on the edge of your seat, eyes nervously wandering towards the door for a second and, when you looked back, you found him watching you. There was a confidence about him that was getting harder and harder to ignore, he was clearly a man who knew what he wanted and exactly how to get it - so, what did he want from you?

Company? Or maybe you were being used to make the barista jealous? No, that didn’t feel right, he’d barely even looked at her, anything between them was obviously one-sided. Maybe you were there to keep her at bay so he could drink his coffee in peace? Though from looking at him you knew he had to be used to women fawning over him, with those dark eyes that looked right through you and the shirt that fit so perfectly you could make out the muscles beneath as he shrugged off his jacket.

“What?”

Shit. You realised that you’d been staring at him and your cheeks started to warm. He didn’t look bothered, in fact he was still smiling at you, amused, almost as if he wanted you to look.

“Sorry,” you apologised, dropping your eyes to the table, quickly thinking of a way to move the conversation along, “so how long have you worked for Anvil?”

“Too long,” he answered and, again, there was that little laugh, that little smirk telling you that you were missing something. Billy obviously didn’t want to talk about himself though. “What about you? What do you do?”

“Bike messenger, mostly...” you shrugged awkwardly knowing how guys like him looked down on people like you. You weren’t ashamed of what you did; it paid the rent, put food on the table, you just hated having to defend it to someone like him who probably made money in his sleep. He surprised you by not reacting - there was no look of superiority, no pity, just a nod of his head.

“Mostly?”

“What?”

“You said mostly,”

“Oh, right, yeah. I do some work as a photographer. Just freelance and a couple of exhibitions,” you shrugged again, “it’s actually how I found out that Anvil were hiring.”

“Really?” It was hard not to notice how intently he was looking at you, like he was hanging on your every word. You started fiddling with your sleeve again.

“Yeah, sometimes I do work for The Bulletin if someone is out sick, and my friend Karen knew Tammy was looking for a job, so -”

“Karen? Frank’s girl?”

“Yeah,” you’d never met him but Karen had been talking about him a lot since they got together, “we were talking and I guess I let slip that we might have to move to a smaller apartment if Tammy can’t find a job…”

“High rent?”

You nodded. “Higher than either of us can really afford, but Tammy’s parents pay half and we split the rest.”

“Her parents still pay for her?”

“They’re loaded and I guess they didn’t want her having to live anywhere that might be ‘dangerous’,” you offered, but you knew how it sounded. You and Tammy were both in your thirties , it was strange that they still went out of their way to provide for her, but you didn’t fault them for wanting to look after their child, something that your own parents had never seemed inclined to do. The thought sent you down a rabbit hole and had you falling silent, wondering how he’d look at you if he knew the truth about you.

You took a drink, letting your eyes drift to the window and the street beyond. His eyes stayed firmly on you and you could almost feel him watching you. It made you tense and shift uncomfortably.

“What kind of photography are you into?”

“Mostly candids, but since I moved to New York, I’ve been really getting into urban stuff and I’ve been playing around with architecture shots.” Billy listened, looking interested in everything you had to say in a way that had you smiling again.

“And you put on exhibitions?”

“Little shows sometimes, yeah.”

“I’d love to see one sometime.” He kept smiling at you, all his focus completely on you, and you found that you didn’t entirely mind it. It was nice talking to someone who seemed to care about what you were actually saying. “Did you study photography in college or -”

“No, I never got to go to college.” It wasn’t until you’d said it that you realised how much it gave away; that college wasn’t your choice, that you’d been stopped from going.

“I never went to college either,” Billy offered, as if he sensed your sudden discomfort. You nodded, eyes dropping to your fingers, tugging at your sleeve again. “Do I make you nervous?” He asked suddenly, pulling your attention back towards him. He was still smiling, still looking at you in a way that made you feel like he was taking you apart in his mind, piece by piece.

“What? No - that’s not -” you stumbled over your words, embarrassed that he’d caught on so easily. You took a second before letting out a sigh. “It’s not you, I just don’t do this a lot.”

“Which part?”

“The whole going for coffee with a random guy I’ve never met before.”

“Is that because guys don’t ask or because you don’t normally say yes?” He asked but didn’t give you time to respond. “Don’t worry, I’m sure I already know the answer.”

An eyebrow raised, unimpressed by the assumption; the situation might have been making you nervous but you weren’t going to take shit from a stranger. “Oh yeah, and how’s that?”

“You’re too attractive for men to ignore.” Billy shrugged and your eyes rolled. Yikes, what a fucking line.

“Maybe I’ve got a boyfriend,” you retorted, “or a girlfriend.”

Billy laughed. “You know that wouldn’t stop most guys, right?”

“Would it have stopped you?” You were pretty sure you knew the answer to that.

“I dunno, do you have a boyfriend?” He asked. “Or a girlfriend?”

“Do you?”

“Have a boyfriend?”

“Or a girlfriend.”

“Would you be here having coffee with me if I did?” He asked, turning the tables so effortlessly that it made it seem like flirting was an olympic sport and he was a gold medallist.

“Would you have asked me if you did?” You answered back, trying to fight back a smirk of your own at how ridiculous this was becoming.

“Do you always answer innocent questions with more questions?” It was obvious he was enjoying whatever this was, his dark eyes practically shining with excitement as he watched you from the other side of the table.

“You call that an innocent question?” You retorted, letting out a snort of laughter.

Billy let out another laugh, holding up his hands and signalling surrender.

“Maybe you should come work for Anvil, I bet you’re a pro at interrogations.” And that really made you laugh, and the sight of it had his gaze fixing more intently on you and his smile widening.

“I don’t think I have the necessary qualifications to work somewhere like that,” you shrug, “besides, I like my job.”

“Really?” Usually his question would have pissed you off, but there was something in the way he asked that made it seem like he was genuinely curious to hear your reasons rather than it being some kind of judgement.

“Yeah, I get to see the whole city, there’s no office politics to deal with, and I get to listen to music all day,” you found yourself shrugging again, and his eyes were still fixed on you, like he was fascinated. So, it felt like your turn to ask; “what?”

“Nothing,” he sat back and lifted his mug, taking a long drink, “I think it’s great that you like your job, there’s a lot to be said for enjoying your work.”

“Do you? Enjoy what you do, I mean. With Anvil?” Whatever that was.

“Some days more than others,” he smiled at you.

“And today?” You asked stupidly, before considering the implications and how it might sound.

“Today’s definitely getting better.”

Your eyes dropped to your drink again, teeth running over your bottom lip. He wasn’t talking about you, he couldn’t be talking about you, but some part of you wished he was. But you wouldn’t have known even if he was, you’d never been good with those sorts of things, flirting and separating a little bit of fun from something more. Billy was an enigma to you in the same way that most people were, but there was something about him that made you almost want to break all of your rules, just to see what might happen.

“What do you do for Anvil?”

“These days I mostly deal with the bureaucracy,” and the look on his face told you just what he thought of that.

“So you don’t - I don’t know, go on missions, all Seal Team 6, kicking down doors?”

Billy let slip a laugh that was equal parts amused and offended.

“Seal Team 6?”

“What?” You laughed, awkwardly.

“You know a lot of Anvil are ex-Marine Corps, right? I’m an ex-Marine.”

“Is there a difference?” You knew there was though, honestly, you couldn’t remember exactly what it was, and the look on his face was priceless enough that you didn’t regret asking.

“Okay, wow, you’re really going to make me explain it to you?” You nodded in response. “Okay, it’s -“

Before he could start on whatever lecture he was about to give, your phone started to ring, loudly - loud enough to make you almost jump out of your skin. (You must have knocked the volume while you’d been frantically trying to look like you hadn’t been spying on him earlier.)

“Fuck, it’s Tammy,” you tell him before answering.

Moments later, you’d wish that you hadn’t. She was at the car waiting for her ride home and you were nowhere to be found, which was apparently so inconsiderate of you. You finished the call with a sigh and looked at Billy.

“Guess her interview didn’t go well,” you took one final drink before pushing back your chair and getting to your feet. “I’ve got to go, if I leave her standing around out there I’ll never hear the end of it, it’s been -“ you stopped as he got to his feet.

“I’ll walk you back.”

“No, that’s fine, really, you don’t have to.”

“I insist.” His tone making it clear that he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

“I’m sorry, she’s just -“

“You don’t have anything to apologise for.”

When you started towards the door, he was right behind you, again staying close to you. Outside the oppressive heat hit you again and it pissed you off; you’d been having a nice time and Tammy just had to ruin it. Now it was over and you’d never see him again.

Billy didn’t say anything, even as you picked up the pace. You wanted to get this all over and done with, you wanted to drive Tammy back to the apartment and - you didn’t know. All you knew was that you didn’t want to be around her, you didn't want to have to deal with her bullshit, and you didn’t want to think about the man walking a step behind you.

You didn’t see him frown at you, you didn’t dare look back because it just felt childish. You’d met him forty minutes ago, he’d probably forget you by the end of the day.

You rounded the corner, about to cross the street when you felt his fingers around your wrist. All it took was one gentle pull and you were turning back towards him, stumbling into his arms. It felt like a moment pulled from some romcom; you spilled forward into his arms, your hands against his chest. And then you looked up, finding those impossibly dark eyes staring down at you.

Billy looked at you like he was trying to decide something, fingers still wrapped around your wrist. The, less than a second later, he was kissing you, pulling your body against his. And you let him. Later you’d tell yourself that it was shock but, in that moment, you wanted him to kiss you for no other reason than he was nice; you’d had fun getting coffee with him. It took you a moment to return to your senses, to use the hands on his chest to gently push him away.

“Billy —”

“Sorry, couldn’t help myself. I’ve been thinking about doing that for the last thirty minutes.” He grinned. “Go to dinner with me.” You couldn’t tell if he meant it as a question or a command, but it definitely sounded more like the latter. Maybe he was just that used to women doing what he wanted them to do.

“I think you’re supposed to ask that before kissing someone,” was all you could think to say with a nervous laugh.

“Well, now I’ve asked…” And a second later, his lips were on yours again, tongue running against the seam of your lips, desperately wanting to deepen the kiss, and you let him. For a few sweet moments, you gave yourself over to him - to a random stranger you’d known for all of forty minutes.

Finally, you pushed him again, taking a step back, out of his arms and back to reality.

“I can’t,” is what you told him once you’d managed to find your voice again.

“Can’t or won’t?” He dared to try and take a step closer, forcing you to take another step back.

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me.”

“Why?” Honestly not sure you even wanted an answer from him.

“So I can figure out how to change your mind.” He explained, like he thought it would really be that simple

“You can’t.” But that just made him laugh.

“Sweetheart, you’ve got no idea what I’m capable of.” And there was something dangerous in that; you didn’t know what he was capable of. “And I can be very persuasive when I want to be.”

“I told you; I don’t do this.”

“This can be whatever you want it to be. I’m very adaptable.” He reached for you again, fingers brushing your cheek before you managed to pull away.

He looked ready to say something else, like he had some line on the tip of his tongue that he was sure would convince you, his lips even parted ready, but nothing came out. You weren’t sure why until a moment later.

“Oh my god, there you are! Do you know how long I’ve been standing around waiting for you?”

Tammy. You didn’t know whether to be glad of the interruption or pissed at the tone she was taking with you.

“Sorry,” Billy stepped around you, towards Tammy, “I distracted her.”

“That’s -“ and then the impossible happened. Tammy actually fell silent. You decided that it must just be the effect that Billy tended to have on women.

“I’m Billy,” he offered out his hand and Tammy was quick to take it, no doubt falling for his charms already. And Billy, well, obviously he’d managed to get over whatever momentary insanity he’d been suffering from when he kissed you and had moved onto the next victim.

Only that wasn’t exactly what happened.

“Oh, I know who you are, Mr Russo. I’m Tammy.”

“Wait… what?” If anyone heard you, neither bothered to respond. How did Tammy know who he was?

“I hear you’ve just been interviewing to come work for me,”

For him. Not with him.

Your stomach dropped, remembering something Karen had said about a Russo, about how Frank called him a pretty boy and Karen thought he was a bit of a womaniser. He kept talking to Tammy but you barely caught a word, too stuck on everything that had happened and how you’d let it.

“Come on, Tammy,” finally, you snapped out of it and started to walk, “if you want a ride home we need to go now.”

You didn’t even wait for an answer, you just let her say her goodbyes to Billy.

“Let me know when you’re free to go for that dinner,” Billy called after you, You chose not to answer, some part of you hoping that Tammy wasn’t going to follow because you knew what would come next.

Fumbling for your keys, you had them in hand before you got back to your car, not daring to look behind you. What had just happened? Your lips still tingled from his kiss, you could still taste him, could still feel his hand on your hip. And some part of you was inexplicably still annoyed that the moment was over.

Tammy followed behind you, calling after, barely making it into the passenger seat before you started the car.

“Oh my god,” she exclaimed and you steeled yourself for the oncoming argument, “you are the best friend ever.”

There was no sarcasm, no anger - she was actually smiling at you. What the hell did she think you’d done?

“What?” Throwing the car into reverse and trying to ignore the fact that Billy was there, watching you as he made his way back towards the office building, his office building. There was something unknowable in his dark gaze as it followed you and, again, you found yourself thinking about how you had no idea what he was capable of.

“Flirting with Billy-fucking-Russo to get me a job at Anvil.”

CHAPTER TWO

END NOTES : if you made it this far, thanks for sticking around. Like I said, this is something that started out as an original piece and I was struggling to find the energy to finish it. I’ll be trying to release a new chapter at least once a week, though the second part will probably be up in a few days time because the first two chapters are really just to help set things up, and I know that’s not what people are interested in. I already have the first five chapters pretty much written, they just need some editing before going in the queue and, in total, I have around 20 chapters planned. I’ll be working on this through NaNoWriMo too, so how much I get done might change the posting schedule a little.

Likes, reblogs, and follows are appreciated, though this fic will be posted regardless of engagement because I just need to get this story out of my head once and for all.

Anyway thanks for stopping by, I hope you have a wonderful day wherever you are!

#billy russo #billy russo x reader #the punisher #billy russo fanfic #billy russo x female reader #cmifyc ff

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shiroikabocha · 4 months

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I have new followers so here are some answers to FAQ about the Homestuck wedding:

the homestuck wedding is a gay wedding. wife 1 (me) is she/her, wife A (the one that’s not me) is she/they

We are technically already married! We originally planned to wed on 4/13/2024, but a member of our state legislature flipped parties in April 2023, and suddenly Republicans had a veto-proof majority in both houses of a state whose citizens had already voted to ban our marriage once before. In a fit of minor panic, we grabbed our immediate family and took a trip to the courthouse for a Surprise Emergency Wedding on 4/13/2023. The “wedding” we’re planning is actually a first anniversary party!

I’m not live-streaming/live-blogging/live-anything the event. I’m going to be pretty busy that day

it’s flattering that so many of you want to attend the Homestuck Wedding but please don’t, I don’t have that kind of catering budget

I’ll share pictures here, no need to track down my dad’s facebook page

The wedding website encourages guests to wear “anything that makes you feel comfortable and fancy,” plus an additional “pop of color” based on this curiously specific list of 12 colors assigned to 12 different ranges of birthdates haha it’s not mandatory don’t worry about it

(I don’t know what’s worse: guests reading the suggested dress code and thinking I’m into Homestuck, or guests reading the suggested dress code and thinking I’m into astrology)

(that’s a lie, it would be so much worse if they thought I was into astrology)

The guests, for the most part, do not know homestuck. I intend to keep it that way. I do NOT want my aunts and uncles googling “homestuck,” christ

My brother knows. When we told the family our planned wedding date, he said nothing, but gave me one of those I Know What You Are stares and all I can say is well buddy this is your fault, if you didn’t want to be the best man at the Gay Homestuck Wedding then you shouldn’t have showed your sister “this neat webcomic I found” all those years ago! Reap what you sow, bro!!

We’re not having children, but during a joke discussion of what would happen if my wife’s sister went into labor at our wedding, we said she’d have to name the baby Casey or Billious Slick or Rosemary or Davekat or something… which is how “Rosemary” ended up on my in-laws baby name shortlist

I know I will not see the gates of heaven, it’s fine, I’ve made peace with the consequences of my actions

#homestuck #homestuck wedding #wedding qaplanning

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markscherz · 3 months

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With tumblr going to shit, besides your main website are you on any other social media?

Is tumblr actively going to shit? I hadn’t really noticed that. They’re changing how they staff it, but so far I haven’t noticed any loss of quality. But perhaps I am desensitised by having felt the loss of Twitter so very sharply, and having already lived through the pornbot plague on tumblr, where it became literally unusable for quite a while.

You can find me basically everywhere. I’ll try most platforms once, and stick around on some. Mostly I am now on tumblr and Bluesky, though I still occasionally use Twitter, and I live-stream sometimes on Facebook or Instagram. I might eventually start doing things on Twitch, but we’re not there yet. You can also check my website, www.markscherz.com.

#tumblr #about me

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astroismypassion · 2 years

Text

Social media poppin’

Or how to use the energy of your MC while on social media

Credit goes to my astrology blog @astroismypassion

Aries MC, ruler of the 10th house in the 1st house, Aries degree (1, 13, 25)

Post a picture of you hiking, climbing or being at the top of the mountain, photo of you in action/while doing something or intensely focusing on something, work out photos. Fresh starts. Selfies or where you are on the photo on your own. You in athleisure or work out clothes. Reaction videos. Live TikTok videos. TikTok challenges. Gym selfies. Running videos.

Taurus MC, ruler of the 10th house in the 2nd house, Taurus degree (2, 14, 26)

Post flowers, food, meals that you cooked/baked, new clothing. Photos of homemade goods (jams, pie, pizza). Photo of you in the grass or field of flowers. Photos of you at a coffeeshop with baked pastry. Teenage photos. Landscape photos. Photos of nature. What I Eat in a Day videos. Dance video. Cooking videos. Photos of you with a bouquet of flowers. Singing videos. Doing my makeup video.

Gemini MC, ruler of the 10th house in the 3rd house, Gemini degree (3, 15, 27)

Post a photo of what you did with your hands (pastry, vase etc.), what you’re currently learning (coding, pottery), show your face without makeup, start a blog, start a running journal and post it online. Sell things you don’t need. Facebook Marketplace. Write a short story. Or the story of when you almost gave up. Photos in the library. Hands photos or couple holding hands. Whiteboard videos. Unboxing videos. Gaming videos. Animated videos. Tutorial videos. Language channel. Grammar video. Photos of you at your old elementary or high school. Live stream.

Cancer MC, ruler of the 10th house in the 4th, Cancer degree (4, 16, 28)

Showcase your close friend, family members (especially your mother) and other siblings. Photos of you in childhood or your home, before and after photos, photos of your family members generations ago, whatever you’re collecting. Family game nights. Photos of the rain. You in a vineyard or a wine gathering. Baby photos. Photo of the Moon. Post about children’s rights. Christmas video. Home/family videos. Birthday collage of photos. Singing videos.

Leo MC, ruler of the 10th house in the 5th house, Leo degree (5, 17, 29)

Show your doodles, drawings, the latest creative project. People just love your personality, so showcase whatever makes your personality stand out more. Photos from a date, a picnic. Soft launches. Photos from a live concert. Photos of you at a theatre. Love song. Love poem. Photo of you doing something creative with children or young adults. Posts about politics. Photos of your back. Music video. Short film. Lip-sync (singing) videos. Post about education. Dance video. Video essay. Fan made video.

Virgo MC, ruler of the 10th house in the 6th house, Virgo degree (6, 18)

Showcase your drawings, doodles, paintings, sculptures, collages. Review foods, describe your daily duties and reaponsibilities at your workplace, start a blog, photo of you in an actual shop. Journaling, news. Content about how to organize, eat in a more balanced manner. Masquerade photo. Photo with you reading in it. You on the bicycle. Workout videos. Ask me anything videos. Educational videos. Draw my life videos. Product reviews. Study with me video. Study with me video. “Choki” type of comforting videos. Etiquette videos. Language channel. Day in my life video. Video about a job profile.

Libra MC, ruler of the 10th house in the 7th house, Libra degree (7, 19)

Post cakes, cookies, pastries, you enjoying your meal in a nice restaurant. Couple photos. High-key launching of your partner (people LOVE to see who you’re paired with), wedding photos, engagement photo. Furniture pictures in your home. Photos celebrating love. Dressed up photo. Autumn photos. Photos of nature. Photos of jewellery. Brand deals. Lifestyle blog. Dance video. Doing nails. Get ready with me video. Beauty vlogs. Make-up artist videos. Cooking channel. Sip’n’Paint videos. Couple cooking recipes. Relationship advice videos.

Scorpio MC, ruler of the 10th house in the 8th house, Scorpio degree (8, 20)

People love to see you wear leather, black matte clothes, stockings, tight clothing and everything black or red. Working out photos, ‘just ran a marathon’ photo, black cat photos. Photos of you from behind. You staring directly in the camera. Halloween photos. Photos of your eyes. Photos with a scarf. Swimsuit photos. Transformation videos. Weightloss journey. Behind the scences videos. Short documentary. Storytime/Tea time videos. “Haunted house” video.

Sagittarius MC, ruler of the 10th house in the 9th house, Sagittarius degree (9, 21)

Post videos, vlog, diary entries from your travels (especially long-distance ones), show that photo of your college degree, photo of you in an airport or in a foreign country. Motivational quotes. Inspiring stories from your life. Travel vlogs. Challenge videos. Study with me video. Representing your University (like those Day in life at University of Cambridge etc.). Language channel. Day in my life video. Videos about your native country. Geography channel. Travel vlogs with a friend or a partner (videos from date trips). Photos of you at your university. Graduation photo.

Capricorn MC, ruler of the 10th house in the 10th house, Capricorn degree (10, 22)

People love to see you in a uniform, full on suit, they love when you give off CEO AND parent energy. Post new career milestone that makes you look like a good provider. Photo of you being presented an award. Photo from the workplace. Photo with your parents on your birthday. Photos of mountains. Photos of your (grand) parents. Study with me video. Day in my life video.

Aquarius MC, ruler of the 10th house in the 11th house, Aquarius degree (11, 23)

Photos of a nature scavanger hunt. Photos of you volunteering. Photos of group gatherings. Astrology tiktoks. You coding or learning something new. Photos of you at a protest or a social activism gathering. Photo of the night sky or of the stars. Influencer content. Webinar. Drone shoots. Space food videos. Videos about electric cars. Tarot. Videos explaining astrology placements. Trailer. Zoom call video. Conference video.

Pisces MC, ruler of the 10th house in the 12th house, Pisces degree (12, 24)

Songs, poems, your love letter to someone, illustrations, tarot videos or tiktoks. Do yoga and document it. Selfcare videos. Movie night. A sleepover. Photos of you at the sea. Of you painting. Photos of the rain. Photos of you in a gallery, museum or a hospital. Astrology tiktoks. You at the movies. River/ocean/sea/waterfall photo. Animated videos. Short film. Paint with me video. Acting video. Open love letter to someone/your boyfriend.

Credit goes to my astrology blog @astroismypassion

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morganbritton132 · 1 year

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Ik you said some of Eddie’s “fans” don’t like Steve but do you think any of Eddie’s fan would go out of their way to harass Steve purposely? Either out in public, through his Facebook, or even like physical mail? Like how would Eddie even react to that especially after the doctor’s office video debacle?

I absolutely think that some people would go out of their way to harass Steve.

Eddie uses his socials to showcase his life so you get a very real and authentic view of who he is, and sometimes you get even more than he intended to show because he never remembers to end his live streams. I think it’s inevitable that some fans are going to feel like they know him personally, but it becomes a problem when they think they know what’s best for Eddie.

People loved Steve when Eddie was posting funny videos about his clumsy husband. They loved him more when Eddie got serious and spoke about Steve’s health issues. It was only once Steve stopped being perfect that they started speaking up.

And though, it is few. They speak loudly.

Steve’s not on any social media other than Facebook, but his Facebook page is private. He doesn’t accept friend requests from people he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t use Facebook Messenger because he refuses to download the app.

What Steve does get on Facebook is a lot of people tagging him in posts about how much they hate him or how awful he is. He gets a lot of ads on his timeline with TMZ articles about how Eddie should end his marriage, and he gets people commenting under them knowing that Steve sees them.

And it’s upsetting, but the letters are worse.

The first one is mailed to his school. It wouldn’t be that hard to figure out where Steve taught. Some of his students are in Eddie’s comments and some post videos of themselves wearing their school colors.

Steve shreds the first letter.

He doesn’t know what to do with it and he doesn’t know what to say when Eddie asks him later that day how school was. He swallows hard and says, “It was fine. Nothing interesting happened.”

And Eddie smiles, and lie doesn’t feel so bad.

The second letter is mailed to their house.

It’s sitting on top of a stack of bills with his name printed neatly on top when he gets home from work. Eddie mentions that he got something from a former student, and Steve smiles even as he reads the first of many hateful paragraphs, and he says, “Thank you.”

This letter stays neatly folded in his nightstand with the third letter, and the fourth that details how they want Steve to have a seizure and die. He never says anything. He doesn’t even know how to begin to have that conversation, and he doesn’t want to.

He doesn’t want Eddie to be upset, so – so why is Steve so upset when he comes back inside after taking their trash to the curb and sees Eddie holding them. Why is he angry? Why is his ears ringing when Eddie asks how long this has been going on, and Steve just snaps, “Why are you going through my things? Who – who gave you the right?”

“I was checking to see if you needed a refill on your migraine medication before I go out of town,” Eddie snapped back, yanking the letters away when Steve reached for them, “What the fuck, Steve? How long has this been going on for?”

“Eddie, stop-“

“Were you planning on telling me that someone is sending you death threats?”

“No.”

Eddie stops long enough for Steve to snatch the letters back and rip them to shreds like he should have done in the first place. Steve’s angry with himself for getting caught and for the sad kicked puppy look on Eddie’s face, and if he wasn’t so – Why is he crying? He’s not even upset so why is he crying? Why can’t – “What did I do wrong? I don’t understand why people don’t like me."

“Stevie,” Eddie says, voice weak the way it is when he’s trying not to cry and this is Steve’s fault too. He didn’t want to upset Eddie and now he’s going to cry. “Baby, you didn’t do anything wrong. You’re perfect, Stevie. You’re perfect for me and if some – some fucking asshole with stamps can’t see that then that’s on them. Not you.”

“You don’t – no one deserves this shit, okay?” Eddie tells him, practically begs him to understand that. “This is serious, Steve. They have our address and they’re making threats. You can’t hide something like this. You have to understand that.”

“I didn’t want to upset you.”

“I’m upset, babe. I’m upset that my so-called fans are treating you like this and that you’ve looked so miserably lately, and you felt like you couldn’t tell me why. You are more important to me than any of this, and if I have to stop doing shows or posting online than-“

“No,” Steve snaps at him, rubbing at his eyes. “I don’t want you to stop, Eddie. I don’t want this to be another thing you can’t do because of me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know, Ed. I don’t know, but you stopped touring because of me. You can’t kiss your husband at the top of a rollercoaster like you want to because my head’s too fucked up. You can’t even sleep half the time because you can’t trust me to not leave. You can’t have flashing lights at your shows, or watch fun movies, or –“

“Steve, I don’t give a fuck about those things. Do you think I’m unhappy?”

“The whole world thinks you’re unhappy, Eddie!”

“I don’t care about the world, Steve. I care about you.”

There comes a point where the conversation fizzles out and the anger leaves, but the sadness remains. Steve goes to bed because there’s nothing else to do, and Eddie goes to his studio.

He sets up his phone and he records a short Tiktok saying, “The meet-and-greet in Indianapolis this Friday is canceled and I won’t be attending the Corroded Coffin concert this weekend or any following weekend indefinitely. You can thank the fucker sending death threats to my family.”

#I left out someone confronting Steve in public because that’s terrifying and also I didn’t read the prompt very well #eddie munson tiktok saga #steve harrington #eddie munson

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 months

Text

Tech workers and gig workers need each other

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

We're living in the enshittocene, in which the forces of enshittification are turning everything from our cars to our streaming services to our dishwashers into thoroughly enshittifified piles of shit. Call it the Great Enshittening:

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

How did we arrive at this juncture? Is it the end of the zero rate interest policy? Was it that the companies that formerly made useful things that we valued underwent a change in leadership that drove them to make things worse? Is Mercury in retrograde?

None of the above. There have been many junctures in which investors demanded higher returns from firms but were not able to force them to dramatically worsen their products. Moreover, the leaders now presiding over the rapid unscheduled disassembly of once-useful products are the same people who oversaw their golden age. As to Mercury? Well, I'm a Cancer, and as everyone knows, Cancers don't believe in astrology.

The Great Enshittening isn't precipitated by a change in how greedy and callous corporate leaders are. Rather, the change is in what those greedy, callous corporate leaders can get away with.

Capitalists hate capitalism. For a corporate executive, the fact that you have to make good things, please your customers, pay your workers, and beat the competition are all bugs, not features. The best business is one in which people simply pay you money without your having to do anything or worry that someday they'll stop. UBI for the investor class, in other words.

Douglas Rushkoff calls this "going meta." Don't sell things, provide a platform where people sell things. Don't provide a platform, invest in the platform. Don't invest in the platform, buy options on the platform. Don't buy options, buy derivatives of options.

A more precise analysis comes from economist Yanis Varoufakis, who calls this technofeudalism. Varoufakis draws our attention to the distinction between profits and rents. Profit is the income a capitalist receives from mobilizing workers to do something productive and then skimming off the surplus created by their labor.

By contrast, rent is income a feudalist derives from simply owning something that a capitalist or a worker needs in order to be productive. The entrepreneur who opens a coffee shop earns profits by creaming off the surplus value created by the baristas. The rentier who owns the building the coffee shop rents gets money simply for owning the building.

The coffee shop owner can never rest. At any moment, another coffee shop can open down the street and lure away their customers and their baristas. When that happens, the coffee shop goes bust and the owner is ruined. But not the landlord! After the coffee shop goes bust, the landlord's asset is more valuable – an empty storefront just down the street from the hottest coffee shop in town.

Capitalists hate capitalism. Faced with a choice of retaining their workers by paying them a fair wage and treating them well, or by saddling them with noncompetes that make it impossible to work for anyone else in the same field, and obligations to repay tens of thousands of dollars for "training" if they quit, bosses will take the latter every time. Go meta, baby.

Same for competition. Faced with the choice of competing to win the most customers with the best products, or merging so that customers have nowhere else to go, even the bitterest of rivals find it remarkably easy to intermarry until our corporations landscape is so interbred the dominant firms all have Habsburg jaws. Think: Facebook-Instagram. Disney-Fox. Microsoft-Activision:

https://locusmag.com/2021/07/cory-doctorow-tech-monopolies-and-the-insufficient-necessity-of-interoperability/

Enshittification has complex underlying dynamics and a reliable procession of stages, but the effect is quite straightforward: things are enshittified when they become worse for the people who use them and the suppliers who makes them, but nevertheless, the users keep using and the suppliers keep supplying.

There are four forces that stand in the way of enshittification, and as each of these forces grows weaker, enshittification proliferates.

The first and most important of these constraints is competition. Capitalists claim to love competition because it keeps firms sharp: they must constantly find ways to improve products and cut costs or be swept away by a superior alternative. There's a degree of truth here, but that's not the whole story.

For one thing, competition can "improve" things that we would rather see abolished. Critics of the GDPR, the EU's landmark privacy law, often point to the devastation that enforcing privacy law had on the European ad-tech industry, driving small firms out of business. But these firms were the most egregious privacy offenders, because they had the least to lose, lacking the dominant position of US-based Big Tech surveillance companies.

Having the least to lose, they were the most reckless with their privacy invasions – but they were also the least equipped to pay expensive enablers from giant corporate law firms to hold off European enforcers, and so they were obliterated. The resulting lack of competition is fine, as far as privacy goes: we don't want competition in the field of "who is most efficient at violating our human rights":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/fighting-floc-and-fighting-monopoly-are-fully-compatible

But there's another benefit to competition: disorganization. A sector with hundreds of medium-sized, competing companies is a squabbling mob, incapable of agreeing on the site for an annual meeting. An industry dominated by a handful of firms is a cartel, handily capable of presenting a unified front to policy makers, and their commercial coziness provides them with vast war-chests they can use to suborn governments and capture their regulators:

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

Competition is the first constraint. When there's competition, corporate managers fear that you will respond to enshittification by defecting to a rival, costing them money. They don't care about your satisfaction, but they do care about your money, and competition hitches their ability to satisfy you to their ability to get paid by you.

Competition has been circling the drain for 40 years, as the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust, hatched by Reagan's court sorcerers at the University of Chicago School of Economics, took hold. This theory insists that monopolies are evidence of "efficiency" – if everyone shops at one store, that's evidence that it's the best store, not evidence that they're cheating.

For 40 years, we've allowed companies to violate antitrust law by merging with major competitors, acquiring fledgling rivals, and using investor cash to sell below cost so that no one else can enter the market. This has produced the inbred industrial hulks of today, with five or fewer firms dominating everything from eyeglasses to banking, sea freight to professional wrestling:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

The endless and continuous weakening of competition has emboldened corporate enshittifiers, who operate on the logic of Lily Tomlin in her role as an AT&T spokeswoman: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company":

https://vimeo.com/355556831

But the drawdown of competition has also enabled regulatory capture, by converting cutthroat adversaries to kissing cousins. These companies have convinced their regulators not to enforce privacy, consumer protection or labor laws, provided that the gross violations of these laws are accomplished via apps.

This is where tech exceptionalism is warranted: while the bosses that run these companies aren't any nobler – or more wicked – than the Robber Barons of yore, they are equipped with a digital back-end for their businesses that let them change the rules of the game from moment to moment.

Think of labor law: as Veena Dubal writes, gig-work companies practice algorithmic wage discrimination, turning your paycheck into a slot machine that pays out more when you are more selective about which jobs you take, and which then docks your pay by tiny increments as you become less discriminating about answering the app's call:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

This is a plain violation of labor law, but the fiction that gig workers are contractors, combined with the opacity and speed of the wage discrimination back-end, lets the companies get away with it.

But the monsters who hatched this scam are no worse than their forebears, nor are they any smarter. Any black-hearted coal-boss memorialized in a Tennessee Ernie Ford song would have gladly practiced algorithmic wage discrimination – but there just weren't enough green-eyeshade accountants in the back office to change the payout from second to second.

I call this "twiddling" – turning the knobs on the back end to continuously adjust the business logic that the firm operates on:

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

Twiddling is everywhere, and it is only possible because "it's not a crime if we use an app" has been accepted by (captured) regulators. Think of Amazon's "pricing paradox," where deceptive search results – which Amazon makes $38b/year on – allow the company to offer lower prices, but charge higher ones:

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

The first constraint on enshittification is competition – the fear that you'll lose money when a disgusted customer take their business elsewhere. The second constraint is regulation – the fear that a regulator's punishment will eat up all the expected gains from an enshittificatory move, or even exceed those gains, leading to a net loss.

But the less competition there is in a sector, the easier it is for the remaining companies to capture their regulators. Say goodbye to that second constraint.

But there's another constraint – another one that's unique to technology, and genuinely exceptional. That's self-help. Digital technology is infinitely flexible, which is why managers can twiddle the business logic and change the rules on a dime.

But it's a double-edged sword. Users can twiddle back. The universal nature of digital products means it's always technically possible to disenshittify the enshittified products in your world. Mercedes wants to charge you rent on your accelerator pedal via a monthly subscription? Just mod the car by toggling the "subscription paid" bit and get the accelerator for free:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

HP tricks you into installing a "security update" that sneakily disables your printer's ability to recognize and use third-party ink? Just roll back the operating system and you won't be forced to spend $10,000/gallon to print out your boarding passes and shopping lists:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Self-help – AKA "adversarial interoperability" – isn't just a way to override the greedy choices of corporate sadists. It's a way to hold those sadists in check. It's a constraint.

Imagine a boardroom where someone says, "I calculate that if we make our ads 25% more invasive and obnoxious, we can eke out 2% more in ad-revenue." If you think of a business as a transhuman colony organism that exists to maximize shareholder value, this is a no-brainer.

But now consider the rejoinder: "If we make our ads 25% more obnoxious, then 50% of our users will be motivated to type, 'how do I block ads?' into a search engine. When that happens, we don't merely lose out on the expected 2% of additional revenue – our income from those users falls to zero, forever."

Self-help is the third constraint on enshittification. But when competition fails, and regulatory capture ensues, companies don't just gain the ability to flout the law – they get to wield the law, too.

Tech firms have cultivated a thicket of laws, rules and regulations that make self-help measures very illegal. This thicket is better known as "IP," a term that is best understood as meaning "any policy that lets me control the conduct of my competitors, my customers and my critics":

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

To put an ad-blocker in an app, you have to reverse-engineer it. To do that, you'll have to decrypt and decompile it. That step is a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. Beyond that, ad-blocking an app would give rise to liability under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (a law inspired by the movie Wargames!), under "tortious interference" claims, under trademark, copyright and patent.

More than 50% of web users have installed an ad-blocker:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But zero percent of app users have installed an ad-blocker, because they don't exist, because you'd go to prison if you made one. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it.

This is why self-help, the third constraint, no longer applies. When a corporate sadist says, "let's make ads 25% more obnoxious to get 2% more revenue," no one says, "if we do that, our users will all install blockers." Instead, the response is, "let's make ads 100% more obnoxious and get an 8% revenue boost!"

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/16/23763227/uber-video-advertising-ads-taxi-food-delivery-apps

Which brings me to the final constraint: workers.

Tech workers have historically enjoyed enormous bargaining power, thanks to a dire shortage of qualified personnel. While this allowed tech workers to command high salaries and cushy benefits, it also led many workers to conceive of themselves as entrepreneurs-in-waiting and not workers at all.

This made tech workers very exploitable: their bosses could sell them on the idea that they were doing something heroic, which warranted "extremely hardcore" expectations – working 16 hour days, sleeping under your desk, sacrificing your health, your family and your personal life to meet deadlines and ship products ("Real artists ship" – S. Jobs).

But the flip side of this appeal to heroism is that it only worked to the extent that it convinced workers to genuinely care about the things they made. When you miss you mother's funeral and pass on having kids in order to meet deadline and ship a product, the prospect of making that product worse is unthinkable.

Confronted by the moral injury of enshittifying a product you care about, and harming the users you see yourself as representing, many tech workers balked at the prospect. Because tech workers were scarce – and because there were plenty of employment prospects for workers who quit – they could actually prevent their bosses from making their products worse:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But those days are behind us, too. Mass tech worker layoffs have gutted tech workers' confidence. When Google lays off 12,000 tech workers just months after a stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, they deliver two benefits to their shareholders. It's not just the short-term gains from the financial engineering – there's the long-term gain of gutting worker power and stripping away the final impediment to enshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

No matter how strong an individual tech worker's bargaining power was, it was always brittle. Long before googlers were being laid off in five-digit cohorts, they were working in an environment where harassment and predation were just part of the job. The 20,000+ googlers who walked off the job in 2018 were an important step towards replacing the system where each tech worker's power was limited to their moment-to-moment importance to their bosses' plans with a new system based on a collective identity.

Only through collective action and solidarity – unions – could tech workers hope to truly resist all the moral injuries of their bosses enshittification imperatives. No surprise then, that tech unions are on the rise:

https://abookapart.com/products/you-deserve-a-tech-union

But what is a little surprising – and very heartening! – is what happens when techies start to self-identify as workers: they come to understand that they share common cause with the other workers at the bottom of the tech stack. Think of Amazon's tech workers walking out in solidarity with Amazon's warehouse workers:

https://gizmodo.com/tech-workers-speak-out-in-support-of-amazon-warehouse-s-1842839301

Superficially, the bottom rank of the tech industry is as different from the tech workers at the top as you can imagine. Tech workers are formally employed, with stock options, health care and theme-park "campuses" with gyms and gourmet cafeterias.

The gig workers who pack, drive, deliver and support tech products aren't even employees – they're misclassified as contractors. They don't get free massages – they get AI bosses that monitor their eyeballs and dock their paychecks for peeing:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

Gig workers desperately need unions, but they also derive extraordinary benefits from self-help measures. When an app is your boss, another app can make all the difference to your working conditions. Take Para, an app that fights algorithmic wage discrimination by allowing gig workers to collectively and automatically refuse any job where the pay is below a certain threshold, forcing the algorithm to pay everyone more:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition

Para is fighting a grim legal and technical battle against companies like Doordash, whose margins depend on atomized workers with atomized apps, prohibited from countertwiddling. This is a surprisingly effective tactic: in Indonesia, gig workers co-ops create suites of "tuyul" apps that modify the behavior of their bosses' apps', unilaterally securing concessions that they lack the bargaining power to secure by other means:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

Tuyul apps and other forms of countertwiddling aren't a substitute for unionization, they're an adjunct to it. The union negotiator whose rank-and-file are able to modify the apps that monitor and control their working conditions operates from a position of strength. "Please give my members more bathroom breaks" is a lot weaker than, "If you want my members to stop hacking their apps so they can piss when they need to, you're going to have to give them official bathroom breaks."

This is where solidarity between the high-paid tech workers at the keyboard and low-paid tech workers on the delivery bikes comes in. Together, they can wring more concessions from their bosses, sure. But unionized coders can give their unionized delivery riders the apps they need to countertwiddle and increase the bargaining leverage of all the workers in the union. And when unionized coders' bosses force them to put enshittifying anti-features in the apps they care about, unionized front-line workers can run counter-apps that disenshittify them.

Other sectors are already working through versions of this. The ouster of the old corrupt leadership of the Teamsters ushered in a new, radical era that produced historic wage and working condition gains for drivers and the abolition of the two-tier contract system that eventually destroys any union that tries it.

That change in leadership was possible because the Teamsters organized the Harvard Grad Students, and those Harvard kids memorized the union rulebook. At the historic conference where the old guard was abolished, it was teamwork between the union rank-and-file and the rules-lawyers from Harvard that turned the proceedings around:

https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/

We are deep into the enshittocene and it is terribly demoralizing. But by understanding the constraints that kept enshittification at bay, we can rebuild them, and shore them up. Labor organizing among all kinds of tech workers isn't just a way to get a better deal for those workers – it's key to the disenshittification of all our lives.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

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/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions

#pluralistic #jennifer abruzzo #labor #tech unions #tech layoffs #enshittification #para #tuyul apps #solidarity #union density

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