#?efa

[mostlysignssomeportents]

You can’t fight enshittification

Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller Red Team Blues and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11.

I need to tell you something unsatisfying: your personal consumption choices will not make a meaningful difference to the amount of enshittification you experience in your life.

Oh sure, you can tinker in the margins, and you should! Get a repairable laptop, like the Framework, which is the greatest computer I've ever owned, and run Linux on it (I use Ubuntu, which is easy to install). You'll spend two weeks looking around the UI for the thing you need to click on and then you'll stop noticing it altogether, forever:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame

Access the internet via RSS, and avoid all the algorithmic twiddling and surveillance that subjects you and yours to the depredations of the worst people on earth and their feral algorithms:

https://www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-rss/

Give preference to high-security, private, open messaging tools like Signal. Open an account on a federated social media service, like Mastodon, and make it a first-class home for your online social life:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

Do all this! Do more! You'll make your life somewhat better, and in some cases, much better. But you're not going to fight enshittification this way. Enshittification is not the result of people making bad choices: it's the result of bad policies that produce bad systems.

Enshittification makes for a neat descriptive account, talking about how platforms go bad:

Here is how platforms die: first, they 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.

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

But the most important part of enshittification is its causal hypothesis: the answer it proposes to why this degradation is happening everywhere, right now:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#franklinite

Here's why you're getting enshittified: we deliberately decided to stop enforcing competition laws. As a result, companies formed monopolies and cartels. This means that they don't have to worry about losing your business or labor to a competitor, because they don't compete. It also means that they can handily capture their regulators, because they can easily agree on a set of policy priorities and use the billions they've amassed by not competing to capture their regulators. They can hold a whip hand over their formerly powerful tech workers, mass-firing them and terrorizing them out of any Tron-inspired conceits about "fighting for the user." Finally, they can use IP law to shut down anyone who makes technology that disenshittifies their offerings.

You can take care to avoid enshittification, you can even make a fetish out of it, but without addressing these systemic failings, your individual actions will only get you so far. Sure, use privacy-enhancing tools like Signal to communicate with other people, but if the only way to get your kid to their little league game is to join the carpool group on Facebook, you're going to hemorrhage data about everything you do to Meta.

Likewise, you can use privacy-preserving adblockers in your browser, but the instant you've got to do business with a monopoly that requires you to use their app, you will be totally helpless before them, because anti-circumvention law felonizes modifying an app so it preserves your privacy. An app is just a webpage skinned with the right kind of IP law to make it a jailable offense to install an ad-blocker:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

When all your friends are going to a festival, are you really going to opt out because the event requires you to use the Ticketmaster app (because Ticketmaster has a monopoly over event ticketing)? If so, you're not gonna have a lot of friends, which is a pretty shitty way to live.

If you turn your personal campaign to live an enshittification-free life into a set of rigid practices that isolate you from your community, you will be miserable – and you will undermine your ability to address the systemic roots of enshittification.

That's because systemic problems have systemic solutions. They are addressed through mass movements, impact litigation, political action, street uprisings, mutual aid, and other forms of solidarity and community.

The monsters who benefit from the status quo don't want you to know this. They want to brainwash you with Margaret Thatcher's mantra, "There is no such thing as society." They want you to think that you are a pathetic, atomized individual. They want you to die in a heatwave while gasping out your profound regret for not recycling more diligently and taking more care with your "carbon footprint." They want you to drive around for hours looking for an independent cardboard seller to make your protest sign with, convinced that it's more important to avoid shopping on Amazon than it is to actually show up at the protest outside the Amazon warehouse. They want you to curse yourself for failing to cycle and take the bus in your city where there are no bike lanes and the buses run every 45 minutes and stop at 8PM. If you wanted a livable city, you should have made better consumption choices! Perhaps you could dig your own subway, ever think of that, hmmm?

You, me and everyone we know have all been subjected to a 40-year blitz of anti-solidaristic propaganda, aimed at convincing us that we are only allowed to fight the system as individuals. Don't like your health care? Shop around! Don't like your boss? Quit your job! Under no circumstances should you advocate for either a union or socialized health-care. You're an individual, there is no such thing as society.

"There's no such thing as society" is what you say if you benefit from society (which absolutely exists) and don't want it to change.

To make changes, you have to exist in society. Yes, the Democratic Party is a weak and pathetic failed gerontocracy, but the Democratic Socialists, the Sunrise Movement, and other political groups that are independent of the Dems but still drag them into doing something good, sometimes, all deserve your support.

Yes, the union movement squandered the Biden years, refusing to spend its record-setting cash reserves on organizing, despite the millions of workers begging to join unions. But workplace democracy remains the only way that we ever have – or ever will – defeat capital, so join a union, form a union, support a union:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/29/which-side-are-you-on-2/#strike-three-yer-out

Yes, plastic recycling is a scam cooked up by the petrochemical industry and all the plastic you stick in your blue bin either goes to an incinerator or a landfill, but if you don't support (and join up with) real environmental activists, you're going to roast alive:

https://heated.world/cp/169762317

Yes, Israel is committing a genocide and Brown, Columbia, and other elite universities are capitulating to Trump, whose evangelical base believes that war in Israel will hasten the Second Coming, when all Jews will be cast into eternal damnation. But that doesn't relieve you of your responsibility to act to defend our Palestinian brothers and sisters from the death rained down on them with the weapons our governments send to Israel. That goes double for us Jews, in whose name the slaughter is being committed:

https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2025/07/31/miriam-margolyes-hitler-comments/

My book on Enshittification is coming out in a couple of months, and the early reviews are already coming in, and they are gratifyingly glowing. But there's a trend in these reviews, a caveat that reviewer after reviewer has raised: my book is "short on individual solutions."

You're goddamned right it is. Because this isn't an individual problem, it's a systemic one.

Sure, live the best life you can, making the best choices you can. But don't kid yourself that this is fighting enshittification.

The reason corporations spy on you isn't because you're too cheap to pay for media, so they must resort to surveillance advertising. Whether or not you pay a tech company, they will absolutely spy on you:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

The reason they can spy on you is that the US hasn't had a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act banned video store clerks from disclosing which VHS cassettes you took home. This is the last technological threat to our privacy that Congress has addressed. The reason you are spied upon is because there are no systemic consequences for this surveillance:

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

The reason gig work companies misclassify their workers as contractors in order to abuse them, steal their wages, and deny them workplace protections is because they can – not because workers are insufficiently choosy about their employment arrangements.

To fight systemic problems you need to be part of a systemic solution.

For 23 and a half years, I've worked for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the most enshittification-fighting organization in the world:

https://eff.org

EFF is a member-supported nonprofit. We rely on donors like you, and we squeeze our budget hard. For as long as I've been with EFF, I've heard smears about how we're secretly shills for Big Tech and dependent on them for our funding (hilariously I once heard that EFF's reps to a meeting were transported to it in a stretch limo paid for by Intel – except I was the rep at that meeting, and I took the bus). Here's all of our financial disclosures, see for yourself:

https://www.eff.org/about/annual-reports-and-financials

Donating to EFF is one way to fund the systemic rejection of enshittification. But if you want to join the fight – if you want to be part of a community that fights back – then you need to know about the Electronic Frontier Alliance (EFA):

https://efa.eff.org/allies

EFA is a network of independent community groups that EFF helps coordinate and advise. When one group is in trouble, we connect it with other groups that have overcome the same troubles. When one group scores a victory, held other groups replicate its successes in their towns. Our organizers also help people in communities that don't have EFA affiliates start groups and join the network.

I get it: this is harder work than changing your consumption habits. But it's infinitely more rewarding. You're more than a consumer. You can aspire to more dignity than is afforded to an ambulatory wallet:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/16/through-the-meat-grinder/#hells-kitchen

No one is coming to save us except us. There is such a thing as society, and you're a part of it, and so am I, and so are the rest of us:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/they-are-going-to-take-everything

You can't fight enshittification. But together, we can.

Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.

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/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

[zeilenziege]

Ich kann gar nicht beschreiben, wie sehr ich dieses Bild liebe! 🫶🏻

[garadinervi]

Simone Fattal, Music for Our Time, (lithograph), «Portraits for Blank Forms», Blank Forms / Blank Forms Editions, Brooklyn, NY, 2025, Produced at the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, New York, NY, Edition of 30 [© Simone Fattal]

[robertseanleonardthinker]

do u know things abt wilsons actor :)

i do!! hmmm lemme think of some fun facts for u

- he won a tony for his role in the invention of love (link to watch below)

- apparently, he also won "tv's favorite doctor" from people's choice awards (i didn't know that, but i read it while making sure i had the right play)

- he describes himself as very lazy. he actually does not really like working. his passion is theater, not tv or film. tv/film acting is more for money for him, since he's got a family to support

- he's left-handed

- he did work for broadway cares/equity fights AIDS! they're an organization that raises money for AIDS/HIV patients. this was in the early 2000s, so unfortunately, it's hard to find info about his role with them :/ i know he performed at a fundraising event in 2000, but that's about all i could find

- robert sean leonard is his stage name! his birth name is robert lawrence leonard, and sean is his brother's name. there was another actor who shared his name, plus that doesn't roll off the tongue as well, so he went with his brother's name

ermmm that's all i can think of right now. here's the invention of love if you'd like to watch (audio is not the best, it's kinda hard to follow along)

and here is a fun playlist of various videos of rsl, courtesy of deelaundry!

[hiamihilarious]

I‘m looking for a fic I read on Elysian Fields, but can’t find anymore. It was a story where Willow’s spell during Tabula Rasa took place at the same time as Sweet‘s spell was active. Angel was also there and lost his memories. A doctor dealt with the scoobies without memories and her husband is the chief of police or something, they both know about vampires and Buffy. Xander and Anya break up and he becomes interested in the doctor‘s daughter after he starts attending a support group for family members of alcoholics.

I‘m sorry, this is a rambling description, but I’m really hoping someone will be able to help me find the story!

[gumi-artpoidd]

low effort 3 minute sketch. its uncanny how easy it is

[efa-solheim]

Another Polaroid from today’s outing. Skye took this one as Jayce is obviously… incapacitated.

[spacerangersam]

that hairstyle meme with simon-o :)

[scurvgirl]

Just a conversation I thought of between my Rook, Efa Mercar, and Emmrich. She is NOT romancing him.

-

Emmrich had asked her a question and she had not quite given an answer, or at least, a thorough one. She walks into his study to see him standing by a bookcase. Manfred lingers close with a tea tray. A memory of herself rises unbidden. A younger, smaller Efa, standing by the skirts of Mistress waiting to be called upon.

"Rook! What a delight to see you, tea?"

"I'm alright, thanks. I wanted to tell you something...about when I die."

"Oh, of course. Let me get my quill." She watches him gather his things and opens a large, well-kept journal. He turns to a page upon which she spies her name. Right, not creepy. He's a necromancer, this is what he does.

"I do not wish to be cremated. Buried is good as I said. I just...none of my body is to be used for one of these skeletons, alright? I left servitude, I'm not going back to it. Even dead."

Emmrich pauses, sets his quill down and looks at her with shocked sympathy.

"Rook, I had no idea -

She gives him a quizzical look, "I'm an elf. I'm from Tevinter. My handwriting is shite and not because I don't practice."

"Yes, the thought did cross my mind when we first me but I heard you were adopted."

She shrugs, "Sure, at sixteen after running away. Took me ten years to figure out how to claim my own body." She gestures to her dyed hair and the extensive tattoos running down her arm. "Every time we go to the Necropolis and I see those skeletons, I think 'were they like me? Did they run only to be shackled again? Made to do the bidding of another mage?'"

"Oh goodness, no! Rook, if I had known you had these concerns, I would have brought this up weeks ago. All of our working dead were donated by Nevarran citizens who understood how their bodies would be used. Or...sometimes we make use of the bodies of invaders, such as the Venatori. I would never dream of...of....-

"Enslaving someone?" She provides dryly.

"Never! There are no slaves on Nevarran soil."

"Yes, but what about below the soil?"

Emmrich stops, horror creeping into his expression. "It is our way, Rook. The bodies of the departed are donations and not everyone participates."

She shifts on her feet, arms crossed as the discomfort of the situation settles in. "I know, Emmrich. And I know my experiences are coloring how I see it, but I can't help but fear it."

"There is no need to apologize, Rook. I will ensure your remains are respected, undisturbed in their freedom. You have my word."

[celestialteapot]

Efa x Cullen smooch

[stoner-butch-blues]

can someone with better ears PLEASE tell me what the fuck theyre saying here

[briannasroger]

Would People Fall in Love with Your OC? Tag Game

Thank you @tiredtruffle @celestialteapot @dragonagedorks for tagging me!! ♥ link to the quiz

For my Herald of Andraste, Ophelia Trevelyan.

here's your answer: yes, they would. falling in love with you feels like falling for your childhood best friend. it's warm, cozy, just feels so natural. it feels right. you're someone who knows how to make people feel comfortable around you; soft spoken, sweet, gentle, such a caring soul. it's hard not to like you. even though i don't really know you, somehow i feel like i have a weak spot for you already; you remind me so much of one of those plaid blankets, the ones you would wrap around your shoulders on a rainy day, and of the tepid sunlight that creeps through the curtains in the early morning. will you be mine?

tagging @joneskillian (someday you'll respond, sometimes I can still hear your voice) uhhh @ellenembee @theluckywizard and I need more people for a tag list haha

[klakoala]

Experte Für Alles - S1 F8

[efa-solheim]

Jayce made us get some “outside time” away from the lab today. Just to prove it happened he took this Polaroid of Vik and I, and now it hangs on the wall. Jayce can’t stop giggling.

[hoarah-babylon]

2nd DLC session round-up yupppp

Started to explore a settlement called Belurat, v beautiful, I love all the draped cloth over the buildings and the beautiful trees. I found a key and unlocked a door that opened a storeroom, with an old woman and a horned lion head inside. She wasn't too happy to see me

damn they really hate Marika lmao. I find it so interesting that these 'hornsent' people are identifying me as something aligned with Marika/Messmer, and cursing me for it. We go through the whole game being shunned for being Tarnished because we are people stripped of grace, now we're being shunned for (I'm assuming) being a creation of Marika. It's super interesting. no one fucks with me fr

I continued on through the settlement and climbed the tower, and eventually got to the first major boss!! It's the Lion-Dancer we saw in the DLC trailers, and it's a really beautiful boss fight. It takes place on a stage, and the theatrics of it all are really so awe-inspiring. It wields different elemental damage in different parts of the fight - lightning, wind/storm, and frost. There's also lion sculptures with horned heads dotted around the stage and settlement. You can summon Freyja to help fight it :) not an easy fight at all, but eventually he went down and I got the reward of its remembrance, along with the lion head itself as a helm.

I absolutely love that this culture took their skills in theatrical performance and repurposed these skills for battle, that's just. I love it it's so cool. Another helm that makes you weaker to sleep, like the golden mask I found previously. The prayer it's talking about is heard at the beginning of the fight in the opening cutscene, and it is said by the old woman I found earlier. The map identifies her as 'Hornsent Grandam'.

I did something I'm not super proud of. But I read messages that alluded to it and mama I'm trying to research. I put the lion head on and went to talk to her again to see if anything would change. Her reaction made me feel really bad... she was so relieved to see a 'sculpted keeper' and was overcome with emotion. She mentioned something about wanting her son to fight alongside me (the keeper) against Messmer, and take revenge. And then she promised to sing for me and gave me an incantation.

Now the description of the incantation just about blew my head off. It referred to this woman as the 'Empyrean Grandam'. Empyrean??? I was not expecting to see that. I looked up grandam and apparently it's an old word for grandmother. Empyrean grandmother... does this mean she is/was an Empyrean, or she's the grandmother of an Empyrean? I'm surprised that Empyreans exist in this realm, considering how hidden everything and everyone is in this place. Can the Greater Will still reach this place? She does mention her son, does he have children? Empyrean children? So intriguing. I assume it's not her son because it seems like TGW/two fingers choose non-men as Empyreans (Miquella has ambiguous gender and a feminine alter-ego St. Trina).

Went back to the second Miquellan cross and met Sir Moore. I love him. I love him I would die for him if anything happens to him I'm going to scream from the rooftops

!!! I explored the river running through Gravesite Plain and found a couple of sleep/night adjacent items. The deep purple lily got me super excited because TRINAAA I could use some tbh I haven't been sleeping well. can you tell

Found a ghost down there too, these lines are making me Think about the connection between sleep and death. What if Miquella is really dead in some way, and this gives way to St. Trina being alive in his place... or something. I don't know but I'm Thinking

Even the turtles have horns here!! Found a new more powerful stamina talisman that depicts a two-headed turtle. There's a lot of depictions in this realm of two converging intertwining objects like trees, turtles, Miquella's sigil/needle is intertwining too.

Went back to Roundtable hold to see what the Remembrance rewards are. I wasn't sure in my last session but after watching some old lore videos to refresh my memory - divine in the context of ER seems to refer to the Crucible or aspects of it. What does it mean that they are messengers of the heavens though? The only other thing in game that I could relate to that are Two Fingers considering they commune with TGW. I have no idea

Was exploring and MET ANOTHER TRAILER GUY. He was sitting by another Cross of Miquella. Identifies himself as a Tarnished named Thiollier. Has 0 self confidence, says he's unintelligent and bad at fighting. Kinda weird for a Tarnished? Makes me wonder how he got there too, he's literally like just behind an encampment of Messmer soldiers. His special interest is poison, and sells you poison things. His armour is super interesting, the cloth/white hair is braided a lot like Miquella/Radagon's, and there's a gold figure in the middle of his chest. The mask is the most striking to me though, and looks like its lined with silver thorns. I just had a thought - who else do we know that wears masks like this and is all about poison? House Marais! Idk what the link could be but, something to keep in mind I guess

Got jumpscared by this guy yelling in pain. He yelled about someone he called 'vile Bayle' so I assume they're the person that maimed this guy. "Exquisite pain" though... reminds me of Mohg/Varré. Then I got invaded by an 'Ancient Dragon-Man'. I followed that path down and found a draconic cave, where I fought the real Dragon Man at the end. He was kicking my ass I can't lie. But I got him eventually and the reward was hmm-inducing

Anti-dragon spray. Wait what, what is the Dreaded One???? And what do you mean it's devoured by people?? What does any of this mean bruh. It sounds like an outer god but if people eat it (?) it can't be. Uhhhhhhhh ok I don't understand and I'm tired. I opened the door at the back of the boss room and...

Hell yeah. It led me out to a precipice overlooking the jagged peak I could see in the distance from where I entered the DLC. There's dragons sleeping below. I took some baller pics of my Tarnished.

I have so much to figure out I still can't really believe all this, it's so jarring running around not knowing anything. it's awesome i love this game

[also small PSA it's fine if anyone reading this wants to reply with their thoughts, but please don't spoil anything, this is my blind playthrough and i want it to stay that way :)]

[triocat]

New animation lol