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i have midterms tomorrow and here i am 

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Horses are easy to draw and their anatomy makes perfect sense

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Some Like It Hot (1959) dir. Billy Wilder

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Today's Seal Is: Partaking In The Limitless Spring

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FINALLY got around to dumping Spotify after their CEO continued to prove he's a fresh turd. (As if being a billionaire, not paying musicians, shoving AI garbage at us, and having an atrocious carbon footprint wasn't bad enough, he's now the chair of a AI-based weapons manufacturing company.)

I used TuneMyMusic ($24 annual fee you can cancel immediately, effectively paying only once) to transfer almost every single song from our Spotify account to Tidal. Tidal already has much better sound quality and they pay their artists much better. It migrated over 99% of our music, too, so there wasn't a huge loss.

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I've said it before, and I'll say it again: one of the only few bad things about Tolkien's legendarium is that it makes 90% of all other fantasy worlds look either completely or somewhat mediocre in comparison.

Like, what do you mean you don't have a fictional language for your fantasy world? WEAKLINGS

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Four Horses, details from a 17th century Persian manuscript.

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Megfulladok

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classicists will make the ugliest least functional website in the history of html and it will contain the entire library of fragmentary papyri of the works of aeschylus. for free

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Become unoptimizable

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/2025/08/20/billionaireism/#surveillance-infantalism

Forget surveillance capitalism – let's talk about surveillance infantalism: the drive by the wealthy to spy on you in order to pursue the toddler's goals of getting everything they want from the people around them, without any reciprocal obligations.

After the Snowden revelations, I started to wonder about something fundamental: why spy at all?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/10/nsa-gchq-technology-create-social-mobility-spy-on-citizens

The answer I came up with at the time is that the ultra-rich (and the states they have suborned) have a fundamental understanding that the more unfair a society is, the less stable it is. The more unstable a state is, the more its ruling class have to expend on private security. No captain of industry wants to arise from his sarcophagus of a morning, only to discover a mob of hoi polloi building a guillotine on his lawn.

As Thomas Piketty argues, there comes a point where it's cheaper to make society more fair – say, by building hospitals and schools – than it is to pay for all the gaiter-wearing gun-thugs you'll need to weed out the guillotine-building projects that spontaneously erupt under conditions of gross unfairness:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

Mass surveillance shifts the guillotine equilibrium in favor of being greedier, by making it cheaper to identify and neutralize incipient guillotine-builders, which means that you can raise the greediness floor without seeing a concomitant rise in your guard labor bill.

And there's lots of money to be made by raising the greediness floor, the corollary of which is that any time you fail to act with sufficiently shameless greed, you leave a ton of money on the table. That's the substance of the shareholder lawsuit against Unitedhealthcare, alleging that after Luigi Mangione allegedly murdered United CEO Brian Thompson‡, United failed to screw enough patients hard enough:

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/unitedhealthcare-sued-shareholders-reaction-ceos-killing-rcna205550

‡ Luigi didn't do it. I saw him playing pinochle in Los Angeles that night, and I'll swear to it in court.

But there's another way in which surveillance abets rampant billionaireism: when companies spy on us, they can change the rules of their services to increase how much we pay them, and decrease how much they pay us. When companies do this to their customers, they call it "personalized pricing" – but everyone else calls it what it is, surveillance pricing:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/#algorithmic-pricing

When a company charges you more than someone else for the same service (say, Uber jacking up the price of a ride because your phone battery is about to die, or an airline charging you extra because they know you have a funeral to attend), they're effectively re-valuing the dollars in your bank account. The fact that the cab-ride that costs you $20 and costs someone else $15 means that your dollar is only worth $0.75.

But companies also do this to the workers they pay, something Veena Dubal calls "algorthmic wage discrimination":

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

For example, the apps that hospitals use to hire contract nurses first buy their recent financial information from an unregulated data-broker, checking to see whether the nurse has a lot of credit-card debt, because if you owe a lot on your Visa, the app can offer you a lower hourly wage and you'll still take the shift:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

This is re-valuing your labor. If my credit-card debt means that I get $20/hour for a shift that would pay you $25/hour, the app is saying that my hours are only worth 80% of what yours are worth.

This kind of price-fixing is an example of a phenomenon I call "twiddling," which is when a company changes its underlying business logic (prices, costs, recommendations, search rankings) on a per-user, per-session basis to shift value from customers and suppliers to shareholders:

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

There's lots of kinds of twiddling: the fact that apps generate so much fine-grained, up-to-the-second surveillance telemetry about our use of them means that zuckermuskian social media bosses can make pretty good guesses about how many ads and boosted posts they can enshittify into our feeds without us switching off the app:

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

If you were studying all this stuff in an MBA program, they'd call it "optimization." Mass surveillance allows the optimization of guard-labor, by identifying threats to the status quo for targeted enforcement, which is much cheaper and effective than indiscriminate enforcement. Commercial surveillance allows buyers to figure out the most an individual consumer will pay, and raise prices accordingly; and to calculate the lowest wage a worker will accept, and lower pay accordingly. Commercial surveillance allows companies to "optimize" their products to be nearly so enshtitified that we quit them, but not quite, maximizing the value they can shift from us to them.

To be free people, we don't merely need to be ungovernable.

We need to become unoptomizable.

How do we do that? Well, there are lots of policies that would make it harder for the ultra-rich to "optimize" us so that we are easier to fleece and abuse, but every "optimization" starts with surveillance. After all, you treasure what you measure, and if you can't observe a worker or a customer – or a citizen getting ready to build a guillotine – you can't optimize them.

That's where "privacy first" comes in. There are a lot of people angry about a lot of problems that are all rooted in the unregulated, unrestricted practice of mass surveillance by governments and their corporate partners:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

Pulling together people angry about being turned into deepfake porn, people angry about parents who've gone Maga or kids who've become anorexic; Fox News cultists angry about the use of reverse warrants to identify Jan 6 rioters or Tiktok millennials quoting Osama Bin Laden; immigrants angry about ICE plundering commercial databases to locate their next victim; and people angry about online racial financial, hiring and housing discrimination makes for a hell of a coalition.

If we make it illegal to spy, we make end the conditions for rampant billionaireism. We become unoptimizable.

Billionaires are overgrown toddlers, after all. They don't acknowledge the humanity of others – indeed, they probably don't even believe that the rest of us are really real (we're "NPCs"):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/seeing-like-a-billionaire/#npcs

The point of billionaireism is to escape: to escape any mutual obligations to others, any duty to give moral consideration to your workers or your customers or the voters you're trying to hoodwink with a torrent of manipulative, dishonest media messages. It's to do whatever you want, to move fast and break things, from rocketships to the night sky. It's being able to shout down anyone who says "NO!"

That's the drive behind "libertarian exit" projects, where people dying of terminal billionaireism attempt to colonize some "empty place" where they owe nothing to anyone:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/14/this-way-to-the-egress/#terra-nullius

It's why billionaires are obsessed with tunnels and skycars (escaping the inescapable geometric reality that the only way to move a lot of people through a city is on public transit):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/24/geometry-hates-cars/#dogshit-unit-economics

It's why they build luxury bunkers, so they can wait out "the Event" in comfort while the not-quite-real people on the outside rebuild civilization, whereupon they can emerge with their AR-15s, bomb-collared mercenaries, and thumb-drives full of bitcoin and assume their rightful place as Frazetta warlords with a harem in every fortress:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

It's a life without friction, because all of that friction has been offloaded onto us, through the process of optimization. The gig economy lets a billionaireist enjoy the pleasures of round-the-clock staff without having to pay workers to sit idle. You just summon a worker whenever you want a burrito or a massage or a blunt, and they only get paid while they're "on the clock" for your task. The fact that this means that an ever-larger fraction of the world has to scramble in mounting desperation to stay clothed, fed and housed is a hell of a lot of friction, but it's not your friction. They've been optimized – to your purposes.

Become unoptimizable.

In a fair society, we'd have transparency for the powerful and privacy for everyone else: we'd know every time Elon Musk's jet took off and where it was going so we could surround the landing strip with angry protesters – and Musk wouldn't know a single thing about his workers, his users, or anyone else. He would experience us through the same veil of total ignorance through which he experiences his children.

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fuck it, Nova Mafia AU be upon ye

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"There are cathedrals everywhere, for those who have the eyes to see" is such a raw fucking line, to be from a tweet by Jordan Peterson about the light shining through a bottle of water.

I had to look that up to be sure, hadn't heard this one before, and you are 100% correct about it being kinda wrong to be from a tweet like this, but then again.

Robert Rodriguez wrote this line for Steve Buscemi to say while playing a scientist that's inventing miniature animals in a Spy Kids movie.

Then if you look up "you cannot kill me in a way that matters" you get all kinds of inspirational shirts and posters, many of whom seem to know the origin of the phrase, and others that obviously don't

We're a odd species, we drop poignant phrases all the time without knowing it.

Just now we have many of them getting written down because we do them in tweets.

like this gem

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i keep thinking about the graphic designer pride flag