#Speech to text platform

[bhavanameti]

TOP 10 COMPANIES IN SPEECH-TO-TEXT API MARKET

The Speech-to-text API Market is projected to reach $10 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 17.3% from 2023 to 2030. This market's expansion is fueled by the widespread use of voice-enabled devices, increasing applications of voice and speech technologies for transcription, technological advancements, and the rising adoption of connected devices. However, the market's growth is restrained by the lack of accuracy in recognizing regional accents and dialects in speech-to-text API solutions.

Innovations aimed at enhancing speech-to-text solutions for specially-abled individuals and developing API solutions for rare and local languages are expected to create growth opportunities in this market. Nonetheless, data security and privacy concerns pose significant challenges. Additionally, the increasing demand for voice authentication in mobile banking applications is a prominent trend in the speech-to-text API market.

Top 10 Companies in the Speech-to-text API Market

Google LLC

Founded in 1998 and headquartered in California, U.S., Google is a global leader in search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, and more. Google’s Speech-to-Text is a cloud-based transcription tool that leverages AI to provide real-time transcription in over 80 languages from both live and pre-recorded audio.

Microsoft Corporation

Established in 1975 and headquartered in Washington, U.S., Microsoft Corporation offers a range of technology services, including cloud computing and AI-driven solutions. Microsoft’s speech-to-text services enable accurate transcription across multiple languages, supporting applications like customer self-service and speech analytics.

Amazon Web Services, Inc.

Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Washington, U.S., Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides scalable cloud computing platforms. AWS’s speech-to-text software supports real-time transcription and translation, enhancing various business applications with its robust infrastructure.

IBM Corporation

Founded in 1911 and headquartered in New York, U.S., IBM Corporation focuses on digital transformation and data security. IBM’s speech-to-text service, part of its Watson Assistant, offers multilingual transcription capabilities for diverse use cases, including customer service and speech analytics.

Verint Systems Inc.

Established in 1994 and headquartered in New York, U.S., Verint Systems specializes in customer engagement management. Verint’s speech transcription solutions provide accurate data via an API, supporting call recording and speech analytics within their contact center solutions.

Download Sample Report Here @ https://www.meticulousresearch.com/download-sample-report/cp_id=5473

Rev.com, Inc.

Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Texas, U.S., Rev.com offers transcription, closed captioning, and subtitling services. Rev AI’s Speech-to-Text API delivers high-accuracy transcription services, enhancing accessibility and audience reach for various brands.

Twilio Inc.

Founded in 2008 and headquartered in California, U.S., Twilio provides communication APIs for voice, text, chat, and video. Twilio’s speech recognition solutions facilitate real-time transcription and intent analysis during voice calls, supporting comprehensive customer engagement.

Baidu, Inc.

Founded in 2000 and headquartered in Beijing, China, Baidu is a leading AI company offering a comprehensive AI stack. Baidu’s speech recognition capabilities are part of its diverse product portfolio, supporting applications across natural language processing and augmented reality.

Speechmatics

Founded in 1980 and headquartered in Cambridge, U.K., Speechmatics is a leader in deep learning and speech recognition. Their speech-to-text API delivers highly accurate transcription by training on vast amounts of data, minimizing AI bias and recognition errors.

VoiceCloud

Founded in 2007 and headquartered in California, U.S., VoiceCloud offers cloud-based voice-to-text transcription services. Their API provides high-quality transcription for applications such as voicemail, voice notes, and call recordings, supporting services in English and Spanish across 15 countries.

Top 10 companies: https://meticulousblog.org/top-10-companies-in-speech-to-text-api-market/

[philomaela]

Rhaena was cruel to Androw Farman, especially after Elissa stole the eggs and ran away, sure. But I think it’s really obtuse to take Androw Farman’s dying revenge speech at face value. Like look at some of the things he says!

“I could have made laws and been wise and given you council.” Except he was not wise; he could not read either.

“I could have been a warrior.” When he had no skill at sword or axe.

“I could have killed your enemies as easily as I did your friends.” Forget the fact that Rhaena has a dragon… what enemies? What enemies were there for Androw to kill?

Anyway, my point is none of these things are Rhaena’s fault, it’s not her fault that Androw isn’t wise or a great warrior; it’s not on her that he couldn’t do these things. These are his own issues and the book tells us he makes no effort to correct them. I don’t think not being able to read is a moral failing; but if he wants to be wise you’d think he would enlist someone to read for him or to teach him. If he wanted to be a great warrior, you’d think he’d train with the other warriors himself rather than never doing anything. If he wanted to be the lord of dragonstone, you’d think he’d take his horse outside the castle gates and get to know the land.

[jadeharleyinc]

"i am the strawman you just made up, OP! i'm even worse than you think, let me double down!"

"this is DEFINITELY written by AI, I can tell because it uses the writing quirks that AI uses (because it was trained on real people who write with those quirks)"

c'mon dudes we have got to do better than this

[innova7ions]

Engage Audiences Effortlessly Using Deep Brain AI!

Deep Brain AI is revolutionizing the video generation industry with its cutting-edge platform, offering powerful AI solutions like avatars and video generators. Imagine creating high-quality generative AI videos from just a script! These photorealistic avatars can speak in multiple languages, thanks to advanced text-to-speech capabilities.

This versatile tool is a game changer for various industries, including retail, education, and media. It enables businesses to produce professional-grade videos swiftly and efficiently. With Deep Brain AI, the future of content creation is here—making it easier than ever to engage audiences and streamline production processes.

#DeepBrainAI

#VideoGeneration

[smsgatewayindia]

Voice Call Software - SMPPCenter.com | OBD Voice Call Solutions

Discover SMPPCenter.com's advanced OBD voice call software. Rent or buy licensed software to send OTP voice calls, connect with HTTP vendors, use Text to Speech, and more. Engage globally with high throughput, secure platform, and comprehensive management tools.

[youthguk]

CUM LAUDE | JJK (M) | 📚🎓

Welcome back to his bed. Office hours just got a lot more complicated — turns out your academic rival holds a grudge... and knows exactly where to put it.

warnings: smut, professor x student (uni), explicit sexual content (18+), enemies with lingering desire, angst + hate sex, power play lite 

⚠️minors dni ⚠️

Your heart plummeted into the abyss of your stomach, a free-fall of dread that left you breathless. It couldn't possibly be him. The universe wouldn't be that cruel, would it? Out of every goddamn face in New York City, why him?

"My name is Jeon Jungkook," he announced, voice like honey dipped in the kind of self-assurance that didn’t ask to be liked, but assumed it. You didn’t need the name. Every cell in your body was already burning like it had been branded. 

“Calling me ‘professor’ sounds ridiculous, right? I’m only four years older than most of you. I just graduated recently, but I’ll be your guest lecturer this semester.”

He laughed, the sound soft and tinged with a practiced modesty that didn't fool you for a second. Your heart remained stubbornly unmoved while the girls around you dissolved into giggles, their cheeks flushing pink. Yes, those infuriating dimples could charm the skin off a snake. 

How utterly predictable. You snorted silently, contempt burning in your throat. What twisted cosmic joke had brought him here? You'd been certain he was Boston University's golden boy, so what dark bargain had landed him at NYU's doorstep?

"This semester, we'll be studying Human Conflict, Power & Ethics in Global Systems, and I'll try to..." His gaze wandered across the sea of adoring faces until, inevitably, it crashed into yours.

For the briefest fraction of a heartbeat, his face bloomed into a satisfied smile that made your blood simmer. The audacity of him, behaving like you shared some secret history, like you were anything but strangers with tangled pasts. Your fingers tightened around your pencil until your knuckles bleached white, nails carving crescent moons into your palm.

"Tell me," he said, voice shifting into something colder,the professor persona slipping on like a well-tailored suit that somehow still looked ridiculous on him. "When two countries are at war, who bears the guilt? Where does the ethical blame lie: with the soldier who pulls the trigger, the general who gave the order, or the historian who will distort everything in their texts? Or perhaps the blame lies with political leaders who shake hands behind closed doors?"

A whisper of unease unfurled, students exchanging glances. Not everyone had anticipated this abrupt tonal shift, this plunge into intellectual waters. A brave soul's hand twitched upward before wilting beneath the weight of Jungkook's expectant gaze.

“We talk about conflict as if it’s spontaneous. Like it’s a thunderstorm,” he said, voice wrapping around each syllable with deliberate precision. “But war doesn’t fall out of the sky.”

Your eyes tracked him like a predator follows prey; this wasn't the Jungkook you once knew. He'd evolved into something more dangerous, his confidence no longer a garment. And God, he knew it. Words of surprising eloquence cascaded from those infuriating lips. 

"We build conflict brick by meticulous brick, in whispered agreements and handshakes exchanged in rooms where cameras dare not venture, in the rustling of expensive fabrics as world leaders embrace."

He prowled across the front of the room, Jungkook wasn’t just lecturing; he was performing, and you knew from the first word that he’d rehearsed this speech. 

He'd crafted it for an audience hungry to be moved, to quote him on social media as if his words had changed the way they breathed.

“These classes,” he said, pausing near the edge of the platform and planting one hand casually on the desk as though the space belonged to him now, "won't offer neat answers tied with pretty bows. We'll wade through questions that leave mud on your conscience and dirt under your fingernails. I promise you'll squirm – " the corner of his mouth quirked upward, "– because we'll dissect the systems that cradle us while crushing others. You'll shift in your seats," he smirked, perching against the desk with casual dominance, surveying his kingdom of captivated minds. 

A flicker of amusement danced across his face. “You will be uncomfortable here. And you should be. Because our comfort is paid for by someone else’s misery.”

You had to admit that the rhythm of his delivery was maddeningly effective. It had the rise and fall of something built for headlines and retweets, like the kind of TED Talk that people pretend changed their lives while they keep sipping overpriced lattes and refreshing their news feeds.#ProfessorJungkook would undoubtedly trend by nightfall. He looked out over the crowd, and you could practically hear the collective swoon, as if they’d all just been anointed into some intellectual cult, and you felt your fingers itch with the urge to smudge that perfect composure of his, to scatter his performance to the winds.

You permitted yourself a single, sharp smirk. Quiet enough to pass unnoticed by most, but just audible enough to slice through the sanctity of Jungkook's carefully cultivated moment. His eyes found yours instantly (of course they did), eyebrows lifting as something that looked dangerously like hope flickered across features too perfect to be trustworthy.

"Would you like to say something?" his voice cut through. 

You smiled with the kind of smile that carries knives behind teeth, not believing at the exquisite timing the universe had handed you.

“Yes, actually. Sorry, maybe I misheard,” you batted your eyelashes with practiced innocence. “But did you say this course would be taught by someone who… graduated less than a year ago?”

You widened your eyes in theatrical shock, the gasp that rippled through the lecture hall. Jungkook's composure flickered for a heartbeat but long enough for you to catch it like a butterfly in cupped palms. The microexpression of panic that crossed his face was sweeter than any dessert you'd tasted in months.

"I completed my education and received a position here as a visiting lecturer based on..." he began, voice steady but eyes betraying him.

 “Connections?” you offered helpfully, your voice all sugar-dipped politeness. “Oh, I’m sorry! Recommendations, is that what we call it now?” You tilted your head, all faux curiosity, watching his jaw flex with restraint. Your politeness was cellophane-thin, the aggression beneath it visible to anyone who cared to look. 

“It’s just…” you glanced around, pretending to look for support, “some of us were expecting, you know, an actual representative of the academic body? Not someone whose biggest credential is quoting Sun Tzu on LinkedIn.”

A ripple of barely-suppressed laughter from the front row validated your performance. Watching Jungkook's jaw tighten sent a thrill through you that was almost electric, his eyes darkening to something stormy and dangerous that should have warned you away but only pulled you closer to the precipice.

"If you have concerns about credentials," he said, each word measured and careful, like someone crossing thin ice, "you're welcome to speak with the department chair."

Your thoughtful nod was Oscar-worthy. “Oh, I just might. I mean, I’m sure my parents would want a refund or at least a discount if they knew they were paying forty grand a semester to stroke the ego of a nepo baby playing professor.”

That one landed.

You'd gone too far, and the knowledge sat warm in your stomach like good whiskey. The muscles in Jungkook's jaw worked visibly beneath his skin, his bitten cheek a silent testament to restraint that clearly cost him .The room burst into hushed whispers and shifting bodies, the heat of anticipation thick in the air.

“I’ll say it again,” Jungkook bit out, voice clipped, every syllable polished with rage, “any questions or objections may be directed to the dean. Directly.”

Gone was the easy charm, the practiced charisma. He walked back to the desk, posture stiff. The presentation flickered to life on the screen, but the damage was done. His carefully cultivated aura of infallibility lay in elegant ruins at his feet. And all thanks to you. 

You bit your lip, satisfaction curling through you. No one was going to ruin your fresh start. Not even him.

Four years ago.

“Don’t do this, Jungkook. Please.”

The words tore from your throat desperately hanging in the air between you like a prayer or a curse.Your chest ached with that peculiar pain that only comes from watching something precious slip through your fingers. There he stood, golden and untouchable, completely oblivious to how he was shattering your universe with each passing second. 

God, it was humiliating but what did you know of anything else? What has your life ever taught you if not how to ache quietly, how to swallow back the lump in your throat and pretend it didn’t burn going down?

But this time it was different, it was about Jungkook. And he was standing in front of you, perfect in that effortless, cruel way that your fifteen year old self was head over heels for. 

And he was about to ask someone else to be his girlfriend. Not just someone else but your sister! Your older, golden sister. The one the world seemed to orbit like a second sun.

"I don't understand!" Those eyes…god, those eyes! Fixed on you with genuine confusion. You remember thinking how unfair it was that he could look at you like that while breaking you. “Why?”

You could’ve laughed at that. How do you explain to someone that they’ve been your world since the first time you saw them?

Ever felt the ground beneath you dissolve into quicksand? That terrible sensation of sinking while remaining perfectly still? There you were, watching your sister steal another piece of your existence. First your parents' adoration, then your identity at school where you were only ever "Riri's little sister," and now Jungkook, the one treasure you'd foolishly believed might be yours alone. 

Living in her shadow has become your default state of being. The hurt had calcified into something almost comfortable: a chronic pain you'd learned to carry with practiced indifference. Your ego had long since retreated to dark corners, curled up small and quiet like a wounded animal that knows better than to cry out.

But Jungkook? You couldn’t hand him over so easily. 

And so your fifteen-year-old self, drunk on desperation and teen movies, made the kind of beautiful, terrible mistake that shapes a person forever. The butterflies in your stomach flapped violently, furious little wings threatening to break you apart as you inhaled once, twice, then took the plunge.

What if this was your movie moment? What if he looked at you and everything changed? What if the script flipped and you weren't the supporting character anymore?

“Because I like you,” you blurted, words colliding in your throat as they rushed to escape.

Usually, the mere thought of him painted your cheeks with betraying warmth.

But at that moment? Nothing but ice in your veins. A tremor starting somewhere deep and radiating outward. His face softened into that particular smile and you knew it before he spoke. 

That wasn't the smile of someone whose world had just been rearranged by your confession. That was the smile of someone already looking past you, toward someone else. 

“Sugar… you’re not serious, right?” He still smiled at you with the kind of smile people reserve for little kids who say silly things and don’t know any better. You wanted the floor to crack open beneath your feet, for the sky to rip wide and swallow you whole. Anything to make this moment vanish from the timeline of your life.

But the worst part was that you didn’t even feel embarrassed.

There was no room for shame in a body that felt like it had been gutted from the inside out. You were nothing but sharp pieces now, fragments of a heart too small to contain everything you felt, scraping and cutting at whatever softness was left inside of you.

“Oh God… you’re serious?” Jungkook’s voice faltered, just for a second, like he hadn’t seen this coming. Like the idea of you loving him wasn’t something that had ever crossed his mind. He took a small careful step forward like you were a wounded animal. 

But you flinched away anyway, as if just the air between you hurt to breathe. Your eyes stung, the tears gathering at your lashes felt like betrayal. 

“Sugar,” he said, voice low and laced with regret, “you’re like a little sister to me…”

Six ordinary words, blade met bone. He didn’t even know he was holding the knife. But he twisted it anyway.

"No, don't say that," you whispered, each word cracking like thin ice beneath a weight it couldn’t hold. Everything around you was already on fire, sinking fast into a place you wouldn’t know how to crawl out of.

“I’m four years older than you,” he continued gently, like that was enough to erase the ache. “This’ll pass, I promise.”

He reached for you again.

“I hate you,” you breathed, barely able to shape the words. Your lips trembled so hard it hurt to speak. “I hate you.”

His face fell, and for the first time, he looked like he didn’t know what to say.

“Sugar,” he tried again, softer now. “Please. This isn’t worth your tears. You believe me, right?”

But you were already turning, already running. Feet carrying you away before your heart could convince you to stay. That was the last time you saw Jungkook face to face: a moment forever frozen in time. 

It was also the first time you understood with absolute clarity that in this vast, crowded world, no one stood on your side of the line you'd just drawn.

Present time. 

Hatred has a color. Sometimes it bleeds into the jealous emerald of envy, that emotion you're not supposed to name, the one that burns beneath your ribcage at 3am. But you've never allowed yourself the luxury of envy, have you? 

You weren’t allowed to, not as the black sheep in a house built to worship someone else’s light. Riri did this. Riri won that. Riri, Riri, Riri her name looped through your childhood like a song you never asked to learn, the chorus ringing in every quiet pause at the dinner table.

The curse of being born second is that someone always got there first, claimed everything worth having, left you nothing but scraps and shadows. No matter how bright you burn, you're always just a little too dim, a little too not enough.

Why can’t you be more like Riri? They never said it directly but it was stitched into your life with thread too fine to see, but tight enough to choke. Invisible stitches holding together the patchwork of your identity.

Here's the thing about pedestals, though: even golden things rot from the inside out. Sometimes people fall so madly in love with their favorite possession, they fail to see that it was never gold to begin with, just something shiny under the right light.

So when your older sister, after eighteen years of being the sun around which your family orbited, graduated high school and chose to stay in your sleepy town, enrolling at the local college instead of chasing some glittering dream out in the world, people blinked. Surprised, sure. But not shattered. Even your parents simply nodded, disappointed but resigned. Maybe this is just the level of our family, they seemed to think. Nothing extraordinary. Just enough.

You didn't celebrate her downfall (okay, maybe a little, in the privacy of your bedroom). She still had Jungkook, after all. Yes, you avoided him when he came home from Boston for long weekends and holidays, when he'd show up at the house to see her. You’d slip upstairs or vanish out the back door like a ghost. 

But memories are persistent things, aren't they? And some wounds never quite close properly. You remembered him. Or more accurately, you remembered the precise weight of your heart as it shattered against the floor at his feet.

When it came time to apply for universities, no one really paid attention. All eyes were on Riri’s looming graduation, on the future she was supposedly about to inherit. 

You worked in the shadows. Each Ivy League application is a perfectly crafted weapon, each essay a bullet aimed at the heart of your family's low expectations. Your academic profile wasn't just good—it was immaculate. But who had time to notice the quiet girl's quiet rebellion when the favorite child commanded every spotlight?

Revenge, as they say, is a dish best served cold. And patience is the secret ingredient. Victory isn't about winning every skirmish—it's about identifying which battles actually matter. You lost a thousand tiny wars throughout your childhood, but silently prepared to win the one that would define your future. The long game requires stillness, requires calculated moves made in the spaces between breaths.

“NYU?!” your mother shrieked, holding the thick envelope in both hands like it had caught fire.

“That can’t be right!” your father muttered, fumbling for his reading glasses to get a better look.

Riri stayed quiet, lost in her own thoughts. You knew she was genuinely happy for you, because beneath the rivalry and the comparisons, there existed this unbreakable thing called sisterhood. And even though you absolutely despised Jungkook for breaking her heart (the audacity, truly), there was this tiny, treacherous part of you that felt... relief? Satisfaction? You'd never admit it, not even in your diary. 

But late at night, in those too-honest hours before the world begins to stir, and  honesty creeps in through the cracks of your carefully constructed defenses... that's when you allow yourself to acknowledge it: you fucking won. You played the long game, and everything aligned exactly as it should.

Second semester at NYU, biochem major with a GPA that would make your academic advisor weep with joy. Life wasn't just good – it was intoxicating.

Victory tastes like city lights after rain, like those expensive croissants you treat yourself to before morning classes, like strong coffee that wakes up your mind. In this big city, you've become new. Your name belongs just to you now. No one says "Riri's sister" anymore.

You were the girl who made it out.The girl who left behind the town too small to hold her, and for the first time in your life, you were exactly where you needed to be.

This semester, your focus was razor-sharp: every assignment, every discussion, every line of every textbook was a stepping stone toward something bigger. You had your eyes set on an internship at the World Health Organization, a rare opportunity that demanded extra credits and a broader academic profile, which meant branching out into unfamiliar territory. So you did what any strategist does mid-battle: you adapted.

You enrolled in an interdisciplinary course far outside your comfort zone: Human Conflict, Power & Ethics in Global Systems, a class steeped in geopolitics and moral philosophy, rooted more in theory than fact, full of endless reading and open-ended questions with no right answers. You didn’t love it. But you were ready for anything now.

Or at least, you thought you were. Because no amount of prep work or ambition could have prepared you for what happened next.

Apparently the universe has a twisted sense of humor, and its name is Jeon fucking Jungkook.

“What the hell got into you?” Dery whispered sharply from the row beside you, leaning over the armrest. 

It was a fair question, one you didn’t really have an answer for. Because it wasn’t like you had some solid reputation at NYU yet, not in a place this sprawling, this crowded with ambition and brilliance. But even in a sea of students, people had already begun to recognize you as the kind of girl who stayed quiet during lectures unless she had something brilliant to say. Definitely not the type to confront a guest lecturer on his first day with barbed sarcasm. 

“Just felt like it,” you muttered back, waving her off with the flick of your hand as though it hadn’t meant anything. 

The rest of the lecture unfolded without much tension as Jungkook regained his footing, and the classroom returned to its rhythm, but you didn’t miss the way a few students still glanced at him with a glint of uncertainty in their eyes, seeds of doubt planted about his qualifications, blooming in real time. 

The rational part of your brain knew Jungkook wasn't actually terrible at this. He spoke with conviction, referenced compelling research, asked thought-provoking questions. And if it had been anyone else standing up there, any other young academic with a promising resume and a slightly self-satisfied smile, you wouldn’t have said a word. But rational thought had abandoned you approximately 45 minutes ago, right when those damned dimples made their first appearance. 

You had barely gathered your notebook and slung your bag over your shoulder when his voice found you again, weaving through the crowd of students flooding toward the door.

“Miss Y/L,” he called, that signature calm barely covering the steel underneath. “Can I have a moment?”

Your brow arched instinctively, surprised not just that he spoke up but that he dared. Because if there was one thing you’d always known about Jeon Jungkook, it was that he didn’t shy away from a challenge. 

“What do you want?” you asked, not bothering to mask the irritation in your voice. 

He stepped closer, lowering his voice to something softer. "Why are you like this, sugar?" he asked, voice dropping to that honeyed whisper that used to make your knees weak. The endearment landed like a slap. 

"What kind of fucking sugar am I to you?" you hissed, feeling heat crawl up your neck. "Haven't you figured it out yet?"

"Listen, I'm sorry about what happened with your sister," he leaned in, words meant for you alone. His cologne was different now, less boyish and more intentional, momentarily short-circuited your brain. "I didn't want to hurt her..."

"Shut UP!" The words tore from your throat with such force that a few lingering students turned to stare.

“You think you understand anything about life? You think just because you got a fancy degree and a title, you suddenly have something worth teaching? You understand nothing, Jungkook. Not about the world, not about people, and definitely not about me.”

The poison of those words left a humiliation on your tongue as you turned away, disappearing into the steady stream of students leaving the hall, letting the crowd swallow you whole.

***

You never really thought of yourself as someone particularly persuasive. That was something you only discovered in the aftermath, in the lingering glances exchanged between students during lectures, in the slight shift of the room’s energy every time Jungkook spoke and someone hesitated before nodding along.

You had managed to plant doubt. Somehow, your little performance (half impulse, half years of pent-up resentment) had actually left a mark. And sure, you weren’t proud of it exactly, but the satisfaction came uninvited, curling warm and smug in your chest whenever you caught someone side-eyeing Jungkook’s lecture slides a little too critically.

But every action has its consequence, and this one came sharp-edged and dressed in tailored black, standing at the front of the classroom with a microphone clipped neatly to his collar and a vengeance stitched into the seams of his lecture notes. 

Suddenly Human Conflict, Power & Ethics in Global Systems wasn't just another class, it became your personal battlefield. While other students breezed through readings, you found yourself hunched over textbooks at 3AM, fluorescent highlighting your fingertips yellow, preparing for the intellectual ambush he'd undoubtedly set. 

Because Jungkook, with those eyes that still held galaxies you refused to name, had developed quite the talent for serving your own medicine back to you on a silver academic platter.

And today you sat at the auditorium in your pleated skirt and neatly buttoned white blouse, the picture of academic obedience, perfectly framed in one of the front rows where the projector glow cast soft light over the desk, your color-coded notes spread open like a ritual. You reviewed every line until your eyes burned and the words bled into your dreams the night before. 

You looked like a student whom any professor would favor. Except for Jeon Jungkook, but given your emotional burst during his first class, it was expected. Expected but still annoying for you. 

And now he stood there, leaning against the desk like it was his stage, sleeves pushed to the elbows, a pen spinning idly between his fingers. Jeon Jungkook, in black slacks and quiet confidence, posture relaxed and voice low.

“Let’s look at the third case in your packet,” he says, flipping the slide, a black-and-white image of post-conflict infrastructure crumbling behind rows of civilians. “This one’s particularly tricky: UN-led food distribution under military escort, but all local leadership is compromised. Humanitarian assistance becomes an extension of the occupying force. What’s the ethical liability here?”

His gaze sweeps lazily across the room, pausing just long enough to let a few hesitant hands hover in the air before settling on you like it’s the most natural thing in the world, as if this choice was inevitable from the start.

“Y/N. Walk us through it.”He is so casual, but you feel that sudden, unmistakable sting beneath your fingertips, like invisible needles pricking at your skin. 

“The liability depends on intent, but more importantly on perceived neutrality,” you begin, slow but clean. “Even if the UN distributes resources fairly, using military convoys undermines trust and violates the humanitarian principle of impartiality. It turns food into propaganda. Aid becomes a weapon. In that case, the UN has an ethical obligation to restructure the delivery even if it slows response time.”

You wait for his reaction with practiced nonchalance, spine straight with the confidence of someone who's memorized the textbook just to spite him. His smile blooms slow, the way that something an untrained eye might mistake for approval. 

“A polished answer,” he says lightly, turning back to the whiteboard, “but not a correct one.”

Your body goes rigid, pen clutched between white knuckles. The room suddenly feels three degrees colder.

"Your analysis rests on idealism," he continues, chalk scratching across the board in elegant strokes: operational ethics. The words hang there like an accusation. "But ethics in live conflict zones are governed by function, not theory. The UN's obligation isn't to appear neutral—it's to keep people alive. If military escort is the only option, it becomes ethically necessary, not unethical."

You breathe deep, oxygen scraping down your throat while whispers flutter behind you like startled birds. 

“So,” Jungkook says, turning back toward you with a calm you could rip apart with your bare hands, “while your answer sounds compelling, what you delivered was a moral argument. Not an ethical one. And certainly not a strategic one.”

"But the Geneva principles—" Your voice rises slightly, refusing surrender. The academic hill you've chosen to die on suddenly feels very steep and very lonely.

“Don’t apply here,” he says, cutting clean through your sentence without raising his voice. “This is post-resolution occupation, not an active declared conflict. You’ve applied the wrong framework entirely.”

His expression is neutral, unbothered, as if he’s correcting a child who mixed up vocabulary words. 

"And this is the third time in four weeks that you've made rhetorical choices over analytical ones," he adds with devastating smoothness, returning to his desk like he hasn't just set fire to your academic reputation. "Which is probably why your last paper earned you a C-minus."

Your leg starts bouncing beneath the desk. C-minus. The grade is so foreign it might as well be written in hieroglyphics. You don't get C-minuses. You've never gotten a C-minus. The unfamiliarity of academic failure expands in your chest, your eyes widening in silent horror.

This class wasn't even supposed to matter, just a wildcard requirement adjacent to your pristine science track. But it carries strategic weight you can't ignore. Without it and an excellent grade your application for the WHO internship you've been manifesting since high school crumbles to dust. 

And Jungkook, with his perfectly tailored button-downs and devastating dimples, seems determined to salt the earth where your dreams once grew.

“I’ve sent feedback,” he continues, still maddeningly calm. “You’ll need to schedule weekly consultations with me if you want to pass. Otherwise, it’s unlikely you’ll meet the minimum grade required for departmental credit.”

The final brick hurled through the stained glass window of your academic heart. You feel your nails digging into the paper. You stare at him, mouth tight, as he meets your gaze with the same even expression he wears when assigning reading, like he hasn’t just taken a wrecking ball to your semester in front of twenty-five silent witnesses. 

***

You don’t wait for any official invitation or carefully arranged office hour. You storm into his office the moment your last class ends, your backpack still slung halfway off one shoulder, your chest tight with a fury that’s been simmering.

He's there, of course. The inside of his office is insultingly calm. The blinds are half-closed against the pale afternoon light, casting thin, diagonal shadows across the desk where his laptop glows quietly, illuminating the sharp angles of his face in soft blue. He’s seated in the worn leather chair behind his desk, one hand cradling a coffee cup, the other idly scrolling through something on the screen. 

“What the fuck is this bullshit, Jungkook?” You don’t soften your tone, and you certainly don’t censor your language. He doesn’t deserve that. “I swear to god, if you ruin this semester for me…”

If you sabotage my academic future the way you once shattered my heart, you think viciously, though you don’t say it aloud. You won’t give him the pleasure of knowing how deep the wound still runs beneath your ribcage.

He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t even turn to look at you. His silence is infuriating, calculated, and cold, and it makes your rage bloom hotter in your chest, rising up like heat from pavement.

You just move, crossing the floor in sharp strides, planting your palms flat against the edge of his desk with enough force to rattle the ceramic mug beside his laptop, leaning over so you’re standing directly in his eyeline, close enough to steal the oxygen between you.

Only then does he look up.

"Perhaps," he says, each syllable pressed like a bruise, "you should have considered the consequences before your little performance. The dean calls me weekly now because someone," his gaze flicks over you like you're a particularly disappointing term paper, "has students questioning my qualifications."

He’s angry too, but he’s still holding it together.

“I don’t give a fuck,” you bite back, each word sharp, your voice trembling with the effort it takes to keep from shaking with pure rage. “I need this internship. You will not destroy this for me with your petty grading."

For a second, you think you’ve said too much, that he might see how close this is to breaking you. But then he started to laugh. And just like that, the blood in your veins begins to boil.

Jungkook rose slowly from his chair, his movement unhurried yet heavy with something that made your breath catch mid-throat, and as his body straightened, you instinctively stepped back, your legs brushing against the edge of the desk behind you, a pulse of heat already rising beneath your skin before he even reached you. 

He didn’t stop moving until the air between you had thinned to the width of a single breath, and his voice, low and husky now, came like smoke curling beneath your skin.

“You’ve been misbehaving, sugar,” he murmured, and the rasp in his tone made your stomach twist so tightly you almost forgot to breathe. “And you know what that means — consequences. Whether you like them or not.”

You swallowed hard, spine stiffening as your fingers gripped the edge of the desk behind you, your body pinned between the cold metal and the growing heat of his presence. There was nowhere to run.

“You can’t do this to me,” you spat, but the words came out thinner than you meant them, your voice trembling. And gods, how pathetic it felt, because suddenly, standing this close, feeling his body so near yours that your skin was already humming, it wasn’t anger that was pouring out of you anymore. It was everything you’d buried. You hated that your voice cracked like you were fifteen again, like you were still that stupid girl who once loved him blindly.

He tilted his head slightly, one brow rising in quiet amusement, and for the first time, his gaze dropped. It moved over you with maddening slowness; over your parted lips, down the delicate line of your throat, across the thin white blouse you suddenly realized was still missing its last buttons. His eyes caught on the shape of your skirt as it hit mid-thigh, and you felt your cheeks burn hot with the realization of just how little you were wearing. When his eyes returned to yours, darker now, he swallowed hard, and your stomach clenched.

“You’ve changed,”his voice was close enough to brush your cheek like velvet. “But I don’t understand the hatred, not really. We used to be close, didn’t we?”

His eyes stayed locked to yours with a kind of quiet intensity that made your knees ache with the effort to stay upright, and when you couldn’t bear it anymore, you turned your head away, eyes darting across the room, anywhere but his face, because you could already feel yourself slipping into him, and you couldn’t afford to drown.

But he saw it. 

“So that’s it, isn’t it?” he whispered, more realization than question, his voice curling around the corners of your thoughts like a noose. “It’s still about that confession, isn’t it?”

Your fingers curled tighter around the edge of the desk. How dare he bring it up. How dare he take something you’d buried alive years ago and speak it aloud like it still had power over you. 

“Don’t flatter yourself, asshole,” you said with a forced scoff, tossing your head back as if the memory didn’t sting. “You’re not that important.”

He raised an eyebrow, slowly, like he could smell the lie on your breath. 

Then he stepped closer. And suddenly, the desk pressed harder against your hips, your back arching to avoid the full weight of him, but not fast enough, because Jungkook moved like gravity, and the heat of his body rolled into yours like a tide you couldn’t outrun. He didn’t touch you but his breath fanned across your cheek, and it made you tremble in a way that only made everything worse.

And then his hand slid down, his fingers ghosted across the outside of your thigh, just the faintest touch, like he was testing a theory, like he wanted to know exactly how much it would take to make you unravel. Your body flinched against the contact, your breath catching so fast it burned. You gripped the desk harder behind you, fighting the moan that tried to claw its way out of your throat. The humiliation was dizzying.

His hand slid higher, palm warm and maddeningly slow as it followed the line of your leg, the pads of his fingers brushing against your skin. He watched your reaction, eyes flicking between your parted lips and the tremor in your jaw.

You lifted your chin, defiantly, as if to tell him you weren’t going to break even as your thighs trembled and heat bloomed between them. Maybe you had once loved him. Maybe everything you’d done since then was colored by that stupid, impossible crush. And you hated yourself for the way your barely-there panties were already soaked from nothing more than the brush of his hands.

But you weren’t the only one affected.

You could feel now the hard press of his arousal against your stomach, thick and hot beneath the fabric of his slacks, the way his body tensed ever so slightly when you shifted your hips. He was breathing harder now, his control slipping by the second.

“Seems to me,” he murmured, low and wicked, his mouth nearly brushing your ear, “that those feelings of yours didn’t stay in the past like you wanted to believe.”

His fingers reached the damp heat of your thongs, dragging slowly along the soaked fabric stretched over your folds, and when you gasped, finally unable to hide it, he smiled against your cheek.

“Tell me, sugar,” he whispered, voice dripping, hand pressed flush between your thighs now, “do you still hate me... even when your body’s begging for this?”

“It’s just physiology,” you breathed, head tipping back as your spine arched against the edge of the desk, your voice laced with defiance, though your thighs already trembled from the weight of your own want. Everything around you felt like fire and pretending no longer served you. 

There was no shame left to hide behind, no mask of resistance you could wear without it slipping. But even through the haze of heat clouding your thoughts, you still wondered, stupidly, how far he would take it.

He leaned in closer his mouth brushing the shell of your ear, the low rasp of his voice turning your skin to static.

“Is that so?” he whispered, soft and sweet like poisoned honey. “Just biology, sugart?”

You barely had time to register the way his hand dipped lower before you felt the ghost of his fingers slipping past the delicate fabric of your panties. The moment he touched you, everything inside you collapsed in on itself, your body clenching around a pressure. 

His fingertip circled your clit in slow, deliberate motion, and the world behind your eyelids bloomed white-hot as you gasped, your head knocking gently back against the wall behind you, lips parting with a sound you didn’t mean to let slip.

“You like being the center of my attention, don’t you?” he hissed, and before you could even think of an answer he slid a single finger inside you, coaxing another breathless moan from your throat as your body instinctively clenched around the intrusion. “There you go, sugar. You’ve got all of me now.”

You swore you could feel the heat of his words pool low and deep, your body arching into his hand before your mind could stop it. When he pressed a second finger inside, stretching you slowly, rhythm tightening, you didn’t know whether to curse him or beg for more.

His pace picked up, fingers moving with practiced confidence, curling just enough to make your knees nearly buckle. Each slow thrust stoked the fire beneath your skin higher and higher, until you had to bite your lip to keep from sobbing out his name.

“Fuck, Jungkook!” you gasped, your voice breaking, your grip tightening against the edge of the desk.

He chuckled darkly, the sound vibrating against your throat.

“Such filthy little words from a mouth that pretends to argue so well,” he murmured, voice silken with mockery. And before your trembling body could make sense of the shift, he gripped your waist, spun you to face the desk, and bent you forward with one sharp motion

You barely had time to gasp as your cheek pressed to the cool surface, his hand spreading across the small of your back, holding you there.

“You’ve been acting out, haven’t you?” he said low against your ear, no longer even pretending to sound kind. “Sabotaging my lectures. Cursing in my office. You think that earns you mercy?”

“My job,” he said, the words slow and terrible as his hand slid down again, now pressing firmly between your thighs, “is to correct my students when they misbehave.”

His words crackled through you like electricity licking across skin, each syllable laced with a dangerous promise that made your whole body tighten in anticipation for what might follow such a bold command.

When his finger brushed across your lips, your body responded before thought could interrupt, your mouth parting reflexively in invitation, lips closing gently around the pad of his thumb as you welcomed him.

You sucked him in without hesitation, eyes fluttering shut as your lips closed around him, tasting his skin while the other hand he hadn’t withdrawn yet kept moving lower between your thighs where you were already wet and pulsing and embarrassingly needy.

You arched your back instinctively, pressing closer to him, desperate to feel more: the firm shape of him pressed against your lower back through the thin barrier of clothing, the way your hips angled just right to rub against the heat of him as you offered yourself without a word. Every glide of his fingers between your slick folds was driving you mad with the sharp sweetness of pleasure that kept building. 

“God, Jungkook,” you gasped around his thumb, your voice muffled and shameless, hips rocking into the rhythm of his hand, “please, fuck!”

You didn’t need to see his face to feel the way your voice affected him. The sudden tension in his shoulders, the way his breath hitched, the way the rhythm of his fingers grew faster, more forceful, like he wanted to drag every sound from you and then some. He pulled his thumb from your mouth with a wet pop, and the air that rushed into your lungs felt too sharp, compared to the heat inside your mouth and between your legs.

“Such filthy words again, sugar,” he growled low in his throat, voice rough with restraint as he yanked the hem of your skirt up over your hips, exposing your bare skin to the chill of the air. His palm came down hard and fast — a single slap across the curve of your ass that echoed through the quiet room.

You gasped, head jerking back, but it wasn’t pain that rushed through you, but something dizzying and primal and maddening. You wanted to see him, you needed to see with your own eyes how all of this was driving him insane too.

 Your body twisted before you could stop yourself, craning your neck, just to catch a glimpse of the way his jaw was clenched and the way his chest rose and fell unevenly, the way his eyes darkened when they met yours

He leaned in, mouth brushing the shell of your ear, voice barely more than a breath now. “Go on,” he whispered, every word poured from his mouth like molten heat, “show me what you’ve got.”.

His hand slid up, fingers curling gently but firmly around your throat while the other resumed its rhythm inside you, deeper now, precise and merciless, curling just right each time he thrust into you, his touch finding that edge inside you with brutal accuracy. 

You clung to the desk, body trembling, your knees barely holding as the pressure built and built and broke.

You came with a cry you didn’t recognize as your own, every muscle in your body tensing and shuddering as the wave of it washed through you, and Jungkook’s grip only tightened, one arm wrapped around your waist now, anchoring you as your body collapsed into the high. He held you like he wasn’t done, like he could keep you there for as long as he wanted.

“That’s it,” he breathed against your shoulder, his voice shaking with effort now, his lips grazing your skin. “Just like that…”

Time folded in on itself being slow and suspended, and somehow already gone. And you stood there, your body still humming, thoughts in pieces scattered across the hardwood floor, your heart racing not just from pleasure, but from the terrifying realization that this had actually happened.

You finally turned to face him, heart still thundering in your chest, and you met his drunk gaze. His pupils were blown wide, lips parted like he was still trying to catch his breath, and your eyes instinctively dropped down the line of his chest, lower, where the evidence of just how affected he was strained boldly against the front of his pants.

He was watching you with that look again, the one that made your knees ache, the one that made your thighs press together with anticipation, and the predator in him returned the moment you reached for his belt, fingers curling around the buckle as your lower lip caught between your teeth.

“You want me to help?” you asked with silky voice that was still breathing unsteadily. And you didn’t need to wait for his answer, because you already knew. The heat in your belly roared to life again at just the thought of what could happen next.

But then something shifted. 

It was barely perceptible at first: just the flicker in his eyes, the way the fire in them dulled like someone poured water on the flame. And before you could register it fully, he was pulling away from you, untangling from your reach like it had never happened at all.

You blinked, confused, not understanding what just broke the air so violently between you. He ran a hand through his hair, pacing a few steps like he needed to physically shake the moment off.

“Shit,” he muttered with a tight voice, as if trying to clear fog from his mind. “I’m sorry. I don’t…I don’t know what came over me.”

He turned away completely now, and you felt the unmistakable burn of humiliation rising fast from the pit of your stomach.

“What the fuck?” you said sharply, your tone snapping like a whip through the room. “Are you kidding me, Jungkook?”

You reached out and grabbed his arm, pulling him back toward you, needing to see his face. What kind of game this was?

You knew you probably looked like a mess with hair tousled, skirt still bunched around your hips, but you didn’t care. He needed to look at you when he broke you.

“T/N, you’re… fuck, you’re Riri’s little sister.” And just like that, everything inside you stopped.

There it was again. Even now. In this goddamn room, in this city where you had fought so hard to start over, to be someone other than the shadow of the girl your parents praised and the boy you could never have chose.

You laughed but there was nothing funny about the way it felt inside your chest.

“Fuck you, Jungkook,” you spat, throat closing around the words as you saw the guilt beginning to creep over his face. But he had no right.

“Sugar, you have to understand,” he tried, his tone still soft, and maddeningly tender like he hadn’t just shattered the moment. “It’d be…fuck, it’d be weird. Don’t you see how fucking weird this is?”

He reached for you, palm open, voice almost pleading now, but you only scoffed, stepping back like the touch might burn.

“Wow,” you said, laughing without humor, shaking your head in disbelief. “You’re unbelievable. You had your fingers inside me not even five minutes ago, made me come on your hand, and now you remember it would be weird?”

You watched the way your words hit him and it hurt, god. Because he wasn’t wrong, and no matter how far you tried to run, your sister was always ahead of you, always waiting to remind you that there was nowhere on this earth you could be where Jungkook hadn’t already been hers.

“Sugar,” he whispered,  voice breaking now. “Please don’t be mad at me. But…”

But he stopped, because he didn’t know what came after “but” . 

A single traitorous and cruel tear slid down your cheek before you could stop it, and you wiped it away fast, angry at your own weakness.

“You’re a fucking idiot, Jungkook,” you said, your fists clenched at your sides. “And I hate you. Because I begged you back then. Four years ago.”

He looked stunned, like something old and buried was suddenly bleeding to the surface.

“I told you,” you whispered, choking on the memory. “I begged you not to go after her. I told you it would ruin everything. Because I knew that even if you ever realized… even if you ever felt something for me… I’d never be able to be with someone who touched my sister.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” he said finally, his voice flat and full of disappointment. Maybe it was disappointment in you, in this situation or in the way fate had written your names. You wouldn’t know either way. “I can’t change the past. I can’t erase who I dated and who I thought I loved.”

“Yeah,” you snapped. “Because you’ve always been an idiot.”

And maybe you were, too, for ever believing this could have gone any other way. You weren’t that fifteen-year-old girl anymore, but the wound still opened like it was fresh.

But before either of you could speak again, a sharp knock rattled against the office door, jerking you both out of the moment like a plunge into cold water.

You exchanged a look. He cleared his throat first, tugged down the front of his shirt to hide the tension still visible beneath it, and dropped quickly into his chair.

“Come in,” he called, voice gravelly but steady now, his face slipping back into the mask of authority like nothing had happened at all.

You wiped your tears on the cuff of your shirt, pretending the fabric didn’t tremble under your fingers.

The moment had shattered, but you stood anyway, straightening your shoulders, chin high, just as the office door creaked open behind you. 

A young man stepped into the room, his face bright with the flush of hallway wind and something eager beneath his skin. He looked about your age, maybe a year older, and though he opened his mouth to speak, his gaze faltered the second it landed on you. He froze in place, words caught behind parted lips, his eyes trailing down the curve of your figure and then darting upward again in a panic as if he’d seen something he wasn’t supposed to.

“Professor Jeon…” he managed, voice hesitant and stilted, but his expression was still hooked on you, caught between confusion and awe.

You might have been flattered by that look if the man sitting behind the desk hadn’t just broken your heart for the second time in your life.

The boy kept glancing at you, obviously intrigued. 

Jungkook’s voice cut through the air like a blade. “Dan,” he said, each syllable clipped and flat, “what do you need?”

Dan flinched slightly, blinking himself back into awareness and tearing his eyes from you.

“Sorry. Sorry,” he said quickly, clearing his throat and looking at Jungkook again. “I wanted to ask about the STEM partnership track. I’m having trouble finding someone for the collaborative project.”

You narrowed your eyes just a little, you had no idea what he was referring to yet, but you were already intrigued. You could feel the familiar stirring of a plan writing itself. 

Jungkook waved a hand, visibly irritated now. “Let’s talk about it later,” he said. “Not now.”

But your voice rose before Dan could disappear under pressure of Jungkook’s rising rage.

“No, actually, I’d love to hear more,” you said, your tone far too sweet to be innocent, your smile sharpened at the edges just enough to make Jungkook tense. “Tell me everything, Dan.”

You turned to him fully then, giving him your full attention like a gift, while Jungkook swallowed hard behind you, clearly regretting every second of letting you in this room.

“Oh, I’m Y/N,” you added, with a slow blink and a sly smile, extending your hand before Dan could hesitate.

Dan’s face lit up like a bulb and he reached for your hand, shaking it with more enthusiasm than was strictly necessary, looking like he’d just won something by accident.

“Wow. That’s perfect,” he said, clearly trying to stay composed and failing. “I’m looking for a STEM major to co-author a research paper for submission to the International Undergraduate Ethics Review. I’m in International Relations, but I’m working on a project called Capital and Cure, which searches on the Ethics of Commercial Science. I need someone with a biology background to co-analyze the pharmaceutical case data.”

Your lips curled slowly, pleasure unfurling in your chest like silk. For a moment, you just looked at him, relishing how perfectly the universe had decided to reward you the moment it had tried to break you.

This was it. This was fate, pulling you out of Jungkook’s orbit and handing you a new path lined in gold. A co-authored study. A project that could very well secure you the internship at the WHO you had been chasing.

And the best part? It would pull you away from Jungkook entirely.

“Well, Dan,” you purred, tilting your head with a soft laugh. “You might just be the luckiest man alive.”

Out of the corner of your eye, you saw Jungkook tense, his fingers curling against the edge of his desk, jaw locked.

“Because I just happen to be exactly the kind of student you need.”

“No,” Jungkook said, and his voice dropped like a stone. You and Dan both turned toward him at once.

“No?” you echoed, raising a single brow, pretending to be confused. “And why exactly not?”

You knew he had no real answer. There was nothing in the rulebook stopping you from joining the project. 

His voice lost the edge of command when he answered. “It’s a serious time commitment,” he muttered, not meeting your eyes. “You’re already overloaded. You wouldn’t be able to manage both.”

You laughed at the audacity. How dare he.

“In that case,” you said with a shrug, your tone so casual it bordered on cruel, “I’ll just drop Human Conflict classes”

That made him finally look at you. His eyes widened, and you watched the panic bloom in them as the weight of your words hit him like an avalanche.

Dan was still standing awkwardly to the side, clearly trying to process the tension between you, but you didn’t care. 

“Wait,” Jungkook said quickly, his voice low, almost pleading now. “Y/N, don’t make rash decisions just because you’re upset.”

You were already exhausted by his backpedaling. You turned back toward Dan, your smile softening only for him, and your voice honeyed with victory.

“I’m not being rash,” you said. “This class has never been my strength. I was struggling before, and now? Let’s be honest, there’s no saving it. But this project? A published article in a peer-reviewed ethics journal?” You laughed again, almost breathlessly. “That’s what will get me into the WHO program. Not some useless grade in a class I don’t need.”

You watched Jungkook’s face shift, watched him reach for control and come up empty.

He said your name again, softer now, but there was something dangerous behind it.

But you had already turned away. You looked back at Dan, radiant now, almost glowing from the inside, and fluttered your lashes once for good measure.

“So,” you said sweetly, “when do we start?”

Dan beamed, still caught off guard by how quickly this was unfolding, his posture straightening with excitement.“Right now, if you want.”

You nodded and turned toward the door, your spine straight, your shoulders square, your heart still bruised but pulsing with fire instead of heartbreak. 

***

Unknown Number: You’ve only missed three weeks of class. You can still come back.

Another message. You let out a long, tired breath as you stared at the notification lighting up your screen, the same kind that had been arriving several times a week, always on the days when his class was scheduled. You had never saved his number as there had never been a need. Your photographic memory, once your greatest weapon, had turned against you this time, because no matter how hard you tried, you had never forgotten Jungkook’s number from four years ago. And he, for some reason, had never seen a reason to change it.

You never open his messages. 

Life, for once, was moving forward exactly how you had always hoped it would. There was peace again, the kind of measured quiet that came from knowing you were exactly where you needed to be. The research project with Dan was going smoothly, maybe even too smoothly. Somewhere along the way, things with him had become more…private.

Dan: what are you up to, babe?

The message arrived just as you were thinking about him, and your lips curled before your fingers even moved. You weren’t busy. In fact, you’d been missing his hands, his teasing mouth and the way he made you forget about things like Jungkook and his unread messages begging you to come back. Dan was a perfect distraction, and more importantly, he reminded you that Jungkook didn’t have the power to control your thoughts anymore.

You reached up and unfastened two buttons from your shirt, just enough to reveal the push-up bra you had worn today, the one that lifted your cleavage perfectly, and you caught a glimpse of yourself in the mirror. You looked effortlessly sexy, polished but not trying too hard, it would make a photo that wouldn’t even raise eyebrows on your feed, though tonight you didn’t want it seen by anyone except Dan. You hiked your already-short skirt a little higher, tilted your phone above you at just the right angle, and snapped a shot.

You looked it over, smiled in satisfaction, and typed out your message.

You: got any ideas? I’m free tonight ;)

With the photo attached, you hit send and tossed your phone onto the bed, the familiar flicker of confidence warming your skin. Dan would love it. And with any luck, he’d come over within the hour and erase the last remnants of Jungkook from your bloodstream.

But instead silence followed. Which wasn’t like him, normally, he responded within seconds, usually with a string of messages and a location pin. It was odd, but maybe he was busy. What a shame. Tonight's script will need rewriting – a solo performance rather than the duet you'd been anticipating.

When your phone finally comes alive with notifications – once, twice, three times – relief washes over you. There's Dan you know.

The moment you picked up the screen, your heart dropped, then began hammering violently in your chest. Your fingers went cold.

Oh fuck. Oh fuck. Oh FUCK.

Unknown number: I don't understand Unknown number: sugar, what is this Unknown number: Wait, fuck, I don't understand, who was this meant for?

Horror dawns you as you open the chat where Jungkook has been delivering his monologues about you returning to his class. The universe has a terrible sense of humor, and you are its punchline. 

You clutched your head in disbelief, tossing the phone across the bed like it had burned you. How could you be so stupid?

More notifications came in, and with every buzz, your stomach twisted.

Unknown number: sugar, you better tell me this was for me 

You read the words again and again, staring at them as if they'd rearrange themselves into something less possessive. The entitlement bled through each message.And how dare he? After rejecting you (not once, for god’s sake! but twice!) he had the nerve to act like this?

You: I’m not going to lie. It was a mistake, yes. it was meant for Dan.

You hit send with a shaking hand, your pulse drumming in your ears, and you barely had time to exhale before your screen lit up again. This time, it was a call.

You rejected it instantly. Who the hell did he think he was?

You: don’t call me. I don’t want to talk to you. it was accident.

Seconds later, the messages returned, one by one.

Unknown Number: Mercer Street. Apartment 27R. Unknown Number: Come get what you really need. Unknown Number: I’ll make sure Dan never even crosses your mind again.

You stared at the screen, blinking in disbelief. He can’t be serious.

You: fuck you. I’d rather spend the night alone than waste another second on you.

And you meant it as you hit send. And even as the next message slid in like a threat wrapped in velvet, you felt the fury rise to your throat.

Unknown Number: Sugar, don’t piss me off. That never ends well.

You let out a breathless, scornful laugh, half in shock, half in rage, your body burning from the nerve of him. He had no right to speak to you like that. No right to want you back now that someone else had your attention.

Your hands shook as you opened your messages with Dan, determined to make sure that this time, you would not make another mistake.

🖤read part 2 🖤

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an: this was such a hard month, I literally was moving from one country to another while starting a new job but still found time for this, which surprised me too. I wanted to write something like this for so long. I really hope you enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed writing this. Share your feedback 🖤

[mostlysignssomeportents]

With Great Power Came No Responsibility

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in NYC TONIGHT (26 Feb) with JOHN HODGMAN and at PENN STATE TOMORROW (Feb 27). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

Last night, I traveled to Toronto to deliver the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto's Innis College:

The lecture was called "With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It." It's the latest major speech in my series of talks on the subject, which started with last year's McLuhan Lecture in Berlin:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

And continued with a summer Defcon keynote:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

This speech specifically addresses the unique opportunities for disenshittification created by Trump's rapid unscheduled midair disassembly of the international free trade system. The US used trade deals to force nearly every country in the world to adopt the IP laws that make enshittification possible, and maybe even inevitable. As Trump burns these trade deals to the ground, the rest of the world has an unprecedented opportunity to retaliate against American bullying by getting rid of these laws and producing the tools, devices and services that can protect every tech user (including Americans) from being ripped off by US Big Tech companies.

I'm so grateful for the chance to give this talk. I was hosted for the day by the Centre for Culture and Technology, which was founded by Marshall McLuhan, and is housed in the coach house he used for his office. The talk itself took place in Innis College, named for Harold Innis, who is definitely the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan. What's more, I was mentored by Innis's daughter, Anne Innis Dagg, a radical, brilliant feminist biologist who pretty much invented the field of giraffology:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

But with all respect due to Anne and her dad, Ursula Franklin is the thinking person's Harold Innis. A brilliant scientist, activist and communicator who dedicated her life to the idea that the most important fact about a technology wasn't what it did, but who it did it for and who it did it to. Getting to work out of McLuhan's office to present a talk in Innis's theater that was named after Franklin? Swoon!

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

Here's the text of the talk, lightly edited:

I know tonight’s talk is supposed to be about decaying tech platforms, but I want to start by talking about nurses.

A January 2025 report from Groundwork Collective documents how increasingly nurses in the USA are hired through gig apps – "Uber for nurses” – so nurses never know from one day to the next whether they're going to work, or how much they'll get paid.

There's something high-tech going on here with those nurses' wages. These nursing apps – a cartel of three companies, Shiftkey, Shiftmed and Carerev – can play all kinds of games with labor pricing.

Before Shiftkey offers a nurse a shift, it purchases that worker's credit history from a data-broker. Specifically, it pays to find out how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and whether it is overdue.

The more desperate the nurse's financial straits are, the lower the wage on offer. Because the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come and do the gruntwork of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying.

Now, there are lots of things going on here, and they're all terrible. What's more, they are emblematic of “enshittification,” the word I coined to describe the decay of online platforms.

When I first started writing about this, I focused on the external symptology of enshittification, a three stage process:

First, the platform is good to its end users, while finding a way to lock them in.

Like Google, which minimized ads and maximized spending on engineering for search results, even as they bought their way to dominance, bribing every service or product with a search box to make it a Google search box.

So no matter what browser you used, what mobile OS you used, what carrier you had, you would always be searching on Google by default. This got so batshit that by the early 2020s, Google was spending enough money to buy a whole-ass Twitter, every year or two, just to make sure that no one ever tried a search engine that wasn't Google.

That's stage one: be good to end users, lock in end users.

Stage two is when the platform starts to abuse end users to tempt in and enrich business customers. For Google, that’s advertisers and web publishers. An ever-larger fraction of a Google results page is given over to ads, which are marked with ever-subtler, ever smaller, ever grayer labels. Google uses its commercial surveillance data to target ads to us.

So that's stage two: things get worse for end users and get better for business customers.

But those business customers also get locked into the platform, dependent on those customers. Once businesses are getting as little as 10% of their revenue from Google, leaving Google becomes an existential risk. We talk a lot about Google's "monopoly" power, which is derived from its dominance as a seller. But Google is also a monopsony, a powerful buyer.

So now you have Google acting as a monopolist to its users (stage one), and a monoposonist for its business customers (stage two) and here comes stage three: where Google claws back all the value in the platform, save a homeopathic residue calculated to keep end users locked in, and business customers locked to those end users.

Google becomes enshittified.

In 2019, Google had a turning point. Search had grown as much as it possibly could. More than 90% of us used Google for search, and we searched for everything. Any thought or idle question that crossed our minds, we typed into Google.

How could Google grow? There were no more users left to switch to Google. We weren't going to search for more things. What could Google do?

Well, thanks to internal memos published during last year's monopoly trial against Google, we know what they did. They made search worse. They reduced the system's accuracy it so you had to search twice or more to get to the answer, thus doubling the number of queries, and doubling the number of ads.

Meanwhile, Google entered into a secret, illegal collusive arrangement with Facebook, codenamed Jedi Blue, to rig the ad market, fixing prices so advertisers paid more and publishers got less.

And that's how we get to the enshittified Google of today, where every query serves back a blob of AI slop, over five paid results tagged with the word AD in 8-point, 10% grey on white type, which is, in turn, over ten spammy links from SEO shovelware sites filled with more AI slop.

And yet, we still keep using Google, because we're locked into it. That's enshittification, from the outside. A company that's good to end users, while locking them in. Then it makes things worse for end users, to make things better for business customers, while locking them in. Then it takes all the value for itself and turns into a giant pile of shit.

Enshittification, a tragedy in three acts.

I started off focused on the outward signs of enshittification, but I think it's time we start thinking about what's going in inside the companies to make enshittification possible.

What is the technical mechanism for enshittification? I call it twiddling. Digital businesses have infinite flexibility, bequeathed to them by the marvellously flexible digital computers they run on. That means that firms can twiddle the knobs that control the fundamental aspects of their business. Every time you interact with a firm, everything is different: prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations.

Which takes me back to our nurses. This scam, where you look up the nurse's debt load and titer down the wage you offer based on it in realtime? That's twiddling. It's something you can only do with a computer. The bosses who are doing this aren't more evil than bosses of yore, they just have better tools.

Note that these aren't even tech bosses. These are health-care bosses, who happen to have tech.

Digitalization – weaving networked computers through a firm or a sector – enables this kind of twiddling that allows firms to shift value around, from end users to business customers, from business customers back to end users, and eventually, inevitably, to themselves.

And digitalization is coming to every sector – like nursing. Which means enshittification is coming to every sector – like nursing.

The legal scholar Veena Dubal coined a term to describe the twiddling that suppresses the wages of debt-burdened nurses. It's called "Algorithmic Wage Discrimination," and it follows the gig economy.

The gig economy is a major locus of enshittification, and it’s the largest tear in the membrane separating the virtual world from the real world. Gig work, where your shitty boss is a shitty app, and you aren't even allowed to call yourself an employee.

Uber invented this trick. Drivers who are picky about the jobs the app puts in front of them start to get higher wage offers. But if they yield to temptation and take some of those higher-waged option, then the wage starts to go down again, in random intervals, by small increments, designed to be below the threshold for human perception. Not so much boiling the frog as poaching it, until the Uber driver has gone into debt to buy a new car, and given up the side hustles that let them be picky about the rides they accepted. Then their wage goes down, and down, and down.

Twiddling is a crude trick done quickly. Any task that's simple but time consuming is a prime candidate for automation, and this kind of wage-theft would be unbearably tedious, labor-intensive and expensive to perform manually. No 19th century warehouse full of guys with green eyeshades slaving over ledgers could do this. You need digitalization.

Twiddling nurses' hourly wages is a perfect example of the role digitization pays in enshittification. Because this kind of thing isn't just bad for nurses – it's bad for patients, too. Do we really think that paying nurses based on how desperate they are, at a rate calculated to increase that desperation, and thus decrease the wage they are likely to work for, is going to result in nurses delivering the best care?

Do you want to your catheter inserted by a nurse on food stamps, who drove an Uber until midnight the night before, and skipped breakfast this morning in order to make rent?

This is why it’s so foolish to say "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." “If you’re not paying for the product” ascribes a mystical power to advertising-driven services: the power to bypass our critical faculties by surveilling us, and data-mining the resulting dossiers to locate our mental bind-spots, and weaponize them to get us to buy anything an advertiser is selling.

In this formulation, we are complicit in our own exploitation. By choosing to use "free" services, we invite our own exploitation by surveillance capitalists who have perfected a mind-control ray powered by the surveillance data we're voluntarily handing over by choosing ad-driven services.

The moral is that if we only went back to paying for things, instead of unrealistically demanding that everything be free, we would restore capitalism to its functional, non-surveillant state, and companies would start treating us better, because we'd be the customers, not the products.

That's why the surveillance capitalism hypothesis elevates companies like Apple as virtuous alternatives. Because Apple charges us money, rather than attention, it can focus on giving us better service, rather than exploiting us.

There's a superficially plausible logic to this. After all, in 2022, Apple updated its iOS operating system, which runs on iPhones and other mobile devices, introducing a tick box that allowed you to opt out of third-party surveillance, most notably Facebook’s.

96% of Apple customers ticked that box. The other 4% were, presumably drunk, or Facebook employees, or Facebook employees who were drunk. Which makes sense, because if I worked for Facebook, I'd be drunk all the time.

So on the face of it, it seems like Apple isn't treating its customers like "the product." But simultaneously with this privacy measure, Apple was secretly turning on its own surveillance system for iPhone owners, which would spy on them in exactly the way Facebook had, for exactly the same purpose: to target ads to you based on the places you'd been, the things you'd searched for, the communications you'd had, the links you'd clicked.

Apple didn't ask its customers for permission to spy on them. It didn't let opt out of this spying. It didn’t even tell them about it, and when it was caught, Apple lied about it.

It goes without saying that the $1000 Apple distraction rectangle in your pocket is something you paid for. The fact that you've paid for it doesn't stop Apple from treating you as the product. Apple treats its business customers – app vendors – like the product, screwing them out of 30 cents on every dollar they bring in, with mandatory payment processing fees that are 1,000% higher than the already extortionate industry norm.

Apple treats its end users – people who shell out a grand for a phone – like the product, spying on them to help target ads to them.

Apple treats everyone like the product.

This is what's going on with our gig-app nurses: the nurses are the product. The patients are the product. The hospitals are the product. In enshittification, "the product" is anyone who can be productized.

Fair and dignified treatment is not something you get as a customer loyalty perk, in exchange for parting with your money, rather than your attention. How do you get fair and dignified treatment? Well, I'm gonna get to that, but let's stay with our nurses for a while first.

The nurses are the product, and they're being twiddled, because they've been conscripted into the tech industry, via the digitalization of their own industry.

It's tempting to blame digitalization for this. But tech companies were not born enshittified. They spent years – decades – making pleasing products. If you're old enough to remember the launch of Google, you'll recall that, at the outset, Google was magic.

You could Ask Jeeves questions for a million years, you could load up Altavista with ten trillion boolean search operators meant to screen out low-grade results, and never come up with answers as crisp, as useful, as helpful, as the ones you'd get from a few vaguely descriptive words in a Google search-bar.

There's a reason we all switched to Google. Why so many of us bought iPhones. Why we joined our friends on Facebook. All of these services were born digital. They could have enshittified at any time. But they didn't – until they did. And they did it all at once.

If you were a nurse, and every patient that staggered into the ER had the same dreadful symptoms, you'd call the public health department and report a suspected outbreak of a new and dangerous epidemic.

Ursula Franklin held that technology's outcomes were not preordained. They are the result of deliberate choices. I like that very much, it's a very science fictional way of thinking about technology. Good science fiction isn't merely about what the technology does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.

Those social factors are far more important than the mere technical specifications of a gadget. They're the difference between a system that warns you when you're about to drift out of your lane, and a system that tells your insurer that you nearly drifted out of your lane, so they can add $10 to your monthly premium.

They’re the difference between a spell checker that lets you know you've made a typo, and bossware that lets your manager use the number of typos you made this quarter so he can deny your bonus.

They’re the difference between an app that remembers where you parked your car, and an app that uses the location of your car as a criteria for including you in a reverse warrant for the identities of everyone in the vicinity of an anti-government protest.

I believe that enshittification is caused by changes not to technology, but to the policy environment. These are changes to the rules of the game, undertaken in living memory, by named parties, who were warned at the time about the likely outcomes of their actions, who are today very rich and respected, and face no consequences or accountability for their role in ushering in the enshittocene. They venture out into polite society without ever once wondering if someone is sizing them up for a pitchfork.

In other words: I think we created a crimogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society, that have therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making in our firms and states, leading to a vast enshittening of everything.

And I think there's good news there, because if enshittification isn't the result a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones and emerge from the enshittocene, consigning the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, a mere transitional state between the old, good internet, and a new, good internet.

I'm not going to talk about AI today, because oh my god is AI a boring, overhyped subject. But I will use a metaphor about AI, about the limited liability company, which is a kind of immortal, artificial colony organism in which human beings serve as a kind of gut flora. My colleague Charlie Stross calls corporations "slow AI.”

So you've got these slow AIs whose guts are teeming with people, and the AI's imperative, the paperclip it wants to maximize, is profit. To maximize profits, you charge as much as you can, you pay your workers and suppliers as little as you can, you spend as little as possible on safety and quality.

Every dollar you don't spend on suppliers, workers, quality or safety is a dollar that can go to executives and shareholders. So there's a simple model of the corporation that could maximize its profits by charging infinity dollars, while paying nothing to its workers or suppliers, and ignoring quality and safety.

But that corporation wouldn't make any money, for the obvious reasons that none of us would buy what it was selling, and no one would work for it or supply it with goods. These constraints act as disciplining forces that tamp down the AI's impulse to charge infinity and pay nothing.

In tech, we have four of these constraints, anti-enshittificatory sources of discipline that make products and services better, pay workers more, and keep executives’ and shareholders' wealth from growing at the expense of customers, suppliers and labor.

The first of these constraints is markets. All other things being equal, a business that charges more and delivers less will lose customers to firms that are more generous about sharing value with workers, customers and suppliers.

This is the bedrock of capitalist theory, and it's the ideological basis for competition law, what our American cousins call "antitrust law."

The first antitrust law was 1890's Sherman Act, whose sponsor, Senator John Sherman, stumped for it from the senate floor, saying:

If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity. 

Senator Sherman was reflecting the outrage of the anitmonopolist movement of the day, when proprietors of monopolistic firms assumed the role of dictators, with the power to decide who would work, who would starve, what could be sold, and what it cost.

Lacking competitors, they were too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care. As Lily Tomlin used to put it in her spoof AT&T ads on SNL: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.”

So what happened to the disciplining force of competition? We killed it. Starting 40-some years ago, the Reagaonomic views of the Chicago School economists transformed antitrust. They threw out John Sherman's idea that we need to keep companies competitive to prevent the emergence of "autocrats of trade,"and installed the idea that monopolies are efficient.

In other words, if Google has a 90% search market share, which it does, then we must infer that Google is the best search engine ever, and the best search engine possible. The only reason a better search engine hasn't stepped in is that Google is so skilled, so efficient, that there is no conceivable way to improve upon it.

We can tell that Google is the best because it has a monopoly, and we can tell that the monopoly is good because Google is the best.

So 40 years ago, the US – and its major trading partners – adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly competition policy.

Now, you'll be glad to hear that this isn't what happened to Canada. The US Trade Rep didn't come here and force us to neuter our competition laws. But don't get smug! The reason that didn't happen is that it didn't have to. Because Canada had no competition law to speak of, and never has.

In its entire history, the Competition Bureau has challenged three mergers, and it has halted precisely zero mergers, which is how we've ended up with a country that is beholden to the most mediocre plutocrats imaginable like the Irvings, the Westons, the Stronachs, the McCains and the Rogerses.

The only reason these chinless wonders were able to conquer this country Is that the Americans had been crushing their monopolists before they could conquer the US and move on to us. But 40 years ago, the rest of the world adopted the Chicago School's pro-monopoly "consumer welfare standard,” and we got…monopolies.

Monopolies in pharma, beer, glass bottles, vitamin C, athletic shoes, microchips, cars, mattresses, eyeglasses, and, of course, professional wrestling.

Remember: these are specific policies adopted in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned, and got rich, and never faced consequences. The economists who conceived of these policies are still around today, polishing their fake Nobel prizes, teaching at elite schools, making millions consulting for blue-chip firms.

When we confront them with the wreckage their policies created, they protest their innocence, maintaining – with a straight face – that there's no way to affirmatively connect pro-monopoly policies with the rise of monopolies.

It's like we used to put down rat poison and we didn't have a rat problem. Then these guys made us stop, and now rats are chewing our faces off, and they're making wide innocent eyes, saying, "How can you be sure that our anti-rat-poison policies are connected to global rat conquest? Maybe this is simply the Time of the Rat! Maybe sunspots caused rats to become more fecund than at any time in history! And if they bought the rat poison factories and shut them all down, well, so what of it? Shutting down rat poison factories after you've decided to stop putting down rat poison is an economically rational, Pareto-optimal decision."

Markets don't discipline tech companies because they don't compete with rivals, they buy them. That's a quote, from Mark Zuckerberg: “It is better to buy than to compete.”

Which is why Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram for a billion dollars, even though it only had 12 employees and 25m users. As he wrote in a spectacularly ill-advised middle-of-the-night email to his CFO, he had to buy Instagram, because Facebook users were leaving Facebook for Instagram. By buying Instagram, Zuck ensured that anyone who left Facebook – the platform – would still be a prisoner of Facebook – the company.

Despite the fact that Zuckerberg put this confession in writing, the Obama administration let him go ahead with the merger, because every government, of every political stripe, for 40 years, adopted the posture that monopolies were efficient.

Now, think about our twiddled, immiserated nurses. Hospitals are among the most consolidated sectors in the US. First, we deregulated pharma mergers, and the pharma companies gobbled each other up at the rate of naughts, and they jacked up the price of drugs. So hospitals also merged to monopoly, a defensive maneuver that let a single hospital chain corner the majority of a region or city and say to the pharma companies, "either you make your products cheaper, or you can't sell them to any of our hospitals."

Of course, once this mission was accomplished, the hospitals started screwing the insurers, who staged their own incestuous orgy, buying and merging until most Americans have just three or two insurance options. This let the insurers fight back against the hospitals, but left patients and health care workers defenseless against the consolidated power of hospitals, pharma companies, pharmacy benefit managers, group purchasing organizations, and other health industry cartels, duopolies and monopolies.

Which is why nurses end up signing on to work for hospitals that use these ghastly apps. Remember, there's just three of these apps, replacing dozens of staffing agencies that once competed for nurses' labor.

Meanwhile, on the patient side, competition has never exercised discipline. No one ever shopped around for a cheaper ambulance or a better ER while they were having a heart attack. The price that people are willing to pay to not die is “everything they have.”

So you have this sector that has no business being a commercial enterprise in the first place, losing what little discipline they faced from competition, paving the way for enshittification.

But I said there are four forces that discipline companies. The second one of these forces is regulation, discipline imposed by states.

It’s a mistake to see market discipline and state discipline as two isolated realms. They are intimately connected. Because competition is a necessary condition for effective regulation.

Let me put this in terms that even the most ideological libertarians can understand. Say you think there should be precisely one regulation that governments should enforce: honoring contracts. For the government to serve as referee in that game, it must have the power to compel the players to honor their contracts. Which means that the smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to permit.

So even if you're the kind of Musk-addled libertarian who can no longer open your copy of Atlas Shrugged because the pages are all stuck together, who pines for markets for human kidneys, and demands the right to sell yourself into slavery, you should still want a robust antitrust regime, so that these contracts can be enforced.

When a sector cartelizes, when it collapses into oligarchy, when the internet turns into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four," then it captures its regulators.

After all, a sector with 100 competing companies is a rabble, at each others' throats. They can't agree on anything, especially how they're going to lobby.

While a sector of five companies – or four – or three – or two – or one – is a cartel, a racket, a conspiracy in waiting. A sector that has been boiled down to a mere handful of firms can agree on a common lobbying position.

What's more, they are so insulated from "wasteful competition" that they are aslosh in cash that they can mobilize to make their regulatory preferences into regulations. In other words, they can capture their regulators.

“Regulatory capture" may sound abstract and complicated, so let me put it in concrete terms. In the UK, the antitrust regulator is called the Competition and Markets Authority, run – until recently – by Marcus Bokkerink. The CMA has been one of the world's most effective investigators and regulators of Big Tech fuckery.

Last month, UK PM Keir Starmer fired Bokkerink and replaced him with Doug Gurr, the former head of Amazon UK. Hey, Starmer, the henhouse is on the line, they want their fox back.

But back to our nurses: there are plenty of examples of regulatory capture lurking in that example, but I'm going to pick the most egregious one, the fact that there are data brokers who will sell you information about the credit card debts of random Americans.

This is because the US Congress hasn't passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when Ronald Reagan signed a law called the Video Privacy Protection Act that bans video store clerks from telling newspapers which VHS cassettes you took home. The fact that Congress hasn't updated Americans' privacy protections since Die Hard was in theaters isn't a coincidence or an oversight. It is the expensively purchased inaction of a heavily concentrated – and thus wildly profitable – privacy-invasion industry that has monetized the abuse of human rights at unimaginable scale.

The coalition in favor of keeping privacy law frozen since the season finale of St Elsewhere keeps growing, because there is an unbounded set of way to transform the systematic invasion of our human rights into cash. There's a direct line from this phenomenon to nurses whose paychecks go down when they can't pay their credit-card bills.

So competition is dead, regulation is dead, and companies aren't disciplined by markets or by states.

But there are four forces that discipline firms, contributing to an inhospitable environment for the reproduction of sociopathic. enshittifying monsters.

So let's talk about those other two forces. The first is interoperability, the principle of two or more things working together. Like, you can put anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, anyone's gas in your gas tank, and anyone's lightbulbs in your light-socket. In the non-digital world, interop takes a lot of work, you have to agree on the direction, pitch, diameter, voltage, amperage and wattage for that light socket, or someone's gonna get their hand blown off.

But in the digital world, interop is built in, because there's only one kind of computer we know how to make, the Turing-complete, universal, von Neumann machine, a computing machine capable of executing every valid program.

Which means that for any enshittifying program, there's a counterenshittificatory program waiting to be run. When HP writes a program to ensure that its printers reject third-party ink, someone else can write a program to disable that checking.

For gig workers, antienshittificatory apps can do yeoman duty. For example, Indonesian gig drivers formed co-ops, that commission hackers to write modifications for their dispatch apps. For example, the taxi app won't book a driver to pick someone up at a train station, unless they're right outside, but when the big trains pull in that's a nightmare scene of total, lethal chaos.

So drivers have an app that lets them spoof their GPS, which lets them park up around the corner, but have the app tell their bosses that they're right out front of the station. When a fare arrives, they can zip around and pick them up, without contributing to the stationside mishegas.

In the USA, a company called Para shipped an app to help Doordash drivers get paid more. You see, Doordash drivers make most of their money on tips, and the Doordash driver app hides the tip amount until you accept a job, meaning you don't know whether you're accepting a job that pays $1.50 or $11.50 with tip, until you agree to take it. So Para made an app that extracted the tip amount and showed it to drivers before they clocked on.

But Doordash shut it down, because in America, apps like Para are illegal. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and section 1201 of the DMCA makes is a felony to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work," with penalties of $500k and a 5-year prison sentence for a first offense. So just the act of reverse-engineering an app like the Doordash app is a potential felony, which is why companies are so desperately horny to get you to use their apps rather than their websites.

The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it's a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.

Around the world, we have enacted a thicket of laws, we call “IP laws,” that make it illegal to modify services, products, and devices, so that they serve your interests, rather than the interests of the shareholders.

Like I said, these laws were enacted in living memory, by people who are among us, who were warned about the obvious, eminently foreseeable consequences of their reckless plans, who did it anyway.

Back in 2010, two ministers from Stephen Harper's government decided to copy-paste America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act into Canadian law. They consulted on the proposal to make it illegal to reverse engineer and modify services, products and devices, and they got an earful! 6,138 Canadians sent in negative comments on the consultation. They warned that making it illegal to bypass digital locks would interfere with repair of devices as diverse as tractors, cars, and medical equipment, from ventilators to insulin pumps.

These Canadians warned that laws banning tampering with digital locks would let American tech giants corner digital markets, forcing us to buy our apps and games from American app stores, that could cream off any commission they chose to levy. They warned that these laws were a gift to monopolists who wanted to jack up the price of ink; that these copyright laws, far from serving Canadian artists would lock us to American platforms. Because every time someone in our audience bought a book, a song, a game, a video, that was locked to an American app, it could never be unlocked.

So if we, the creative workers of Canada, tried to migrate to a Canadian store, our audience couldn't come with us. They couldn't move their purchases from the US app to a Canadian one.

6,138 Canadians told them this, while just 54 respondents sided with Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement. Then, James Moore gave a speech, at the International Chamber of Commerce meeting here in Toronto, where he said he would only be listening to the 54 cranks who supported his terrible ideas, on the grounds that the 6,138 people who disagreed with him were "babyish…radical extremists."

So in 2012, we copied America's terrible digital locks law into the Canadian statute book, and now we live in James Moore and Tony Clement's world, where it is illegal to tamper with a digital lock. So if a company puts a digital lock on its product they can do anything behind that lock, and it's a crime to undo it.

For example, if HP puts a digital lock on its printers that verifies that you're not using third party ink cartridges, or refilling an HP cartridge, it's a crime to bypass that lock and use third party ink. Which is how HP has gotten away with ratcheting the price of ink up, and up, and up.

Printer ink is now the most expensive fluid that a civilian can purchase without a special permit. It's colored water that costs $10k/gallon, which means that you print out your grocery lists with liquid that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion.

That's the world we got from Clement and Moore, in living memory, after they were warned, and did it anyway. The world where farmers can't fix their tractors, where independent mechanics can't fix your car, where hospitals during the pandemic lockdowns couldn't service their failing ventilators, where every time a Canadian iPhone user buys an app from a Canadian software author, every dollar they spend takes a round trip through Apple HQ in Cupertino, California and comes back 30 cents lighter.

Let me remind you this is the world where a nurse can't get a counter-app, a plug-in, for the “Uber for nurses” app they have to use to get work, that lets them coordinate with other nurses to refuse shifts until the wages on offer rise to a common level or to block surveillance of their movements and activity.

Interoperability was a major disciplining force on tech firms. After all, if you make the ads on your website sufficiently obnoxious, some fraction of your users will install an ad-blocker, and you will never earn another penny from them. Because no one in the history of ad-blockers has ever uninstalled an ad-blocker. But once it's illegal to make an ad-blocker, there's no reason not to make the ads as disgusting, invasive, obnoxious as you can, to shift all the value from the end user to shareholders and executives.

So we get monopolies and monopolies capture their regulators, and they can ignore the laws they don't like, and prevent laws that might interfere with their predatory conduct – like privacy laws – from being passed. They get new laws passed, laws that let them wield governmental power to prevent other companies from entering the market.

So three of the four forces are neutralized: competition, regulation, and interoperability. That left just one disciplining force holding enshittification at bay: labor.

Tech workers are a strange sort of workforce, because they have historically been very powerful, able to command high wages and respect, but they did it without joining unions. Union density in tech is abysmal, almost undetectable. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. There weren't enough workers to fill the jobs going begging, and tech workers are unfathomnably productive. Even with the sky-high salaries tech workers commanded, every hour of labor they put in generated far more value for their employers.

Faced with a tight labor market, and the ability to turn every hour of tech worker overtime into gold, tech bosses pulled out all the stops to motivate that workforce. They appealed to workers' sense of mission, convinced them they were holy warriors, ushering in a new digital age. Google promised them they would "organize the world's information and make it useful.” Facebook promised them they would “make the world more open and connected."

There's a name for this tactic: the librarian Fobazi Ettarh calls it "vocational awe." That’s where an appeal to a sense of mission and pride is used to motivate workers to work for longer hours and worse pay.

There are all kinds of professions that run on vocational awe: teaching, daycares and eldercare, and, of course, nursing.

Techies are different from those other workers though, because they've historically been incredibly scarce, which meant that while bosses could motivate them to work on projects they believed in, for endless hours, the minute bosses ordered them to enshittify the projects they'd missed their mothers' funerals to ship on deadline these workers would tell their bosses to fuck off.

If their bosses persisted in these demands, the techies would walk off the job, cross the street, and get a better job the same day.

So for many years, tech workers were the fourth and final constraint, holding the line after the constraints of competition, regulation and interop slipped away. But then came the mass tech layoffs. 260,000 in 2023; 150,000 in 2024; tens of thousands this year, with Facebook planning a 5% headcount massacre while doubling its executive bonuses.

Tech workers can't tell their bosses to go fuck themselves anymore, because there's ten other workers waiting to take their jobs.

Now, I promised I wouldn't talk about AI, but I have to break that promise a little, just to point out that the reason tech bosses are so horny for AI Is because they think it'll let them fire tech workers and replace them with pliant chatbots who'll never tell them to fuck off.

So that's where enshittification comes from: multiple changes to the environment. The fourfold collapse of competition, regulation, interoperability and worker power creates an enshittogenic environment, where the greediest, most sociopathic elements in the body corporate thrive at the expense of those elements that act as moderators of their enshittificatory impulses.

We can try to cure these corporations. We can use antitrust law to break them up, fine them, force strictures upon them. But until we fix the environment, other the contagion will spread to other firms.

So let's talk about how we create a hostile environment for enshittifiers, so the population and importance of enshittifying agents in companies dwindles to 1990s levels. We won't get rid of these elements. So long as the profit motive is intact, there will be people whose pursuit of profit is pathological, unmoderated by shame or decency. But we can change the environment so that these don't dominate our lives.

Let's talk about antitrust. After 40 years of antitrust decline, this decade has seen a massive, global resurgence of antitrust vigor, one that comes in both left- and right-wing flavors.

Over the past four years, the Biden administration’s trustbusters at the Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice and Consumer Finance Protection Bureau did more antitrust enforcement than all their predecessors for the past 40 years combined.

There's certainly factions of the Trump administration that are hostile to this agenda but Trump's antitrust enforcers at the DoJ and FTC now say that they'll preserve and enforce Biden's new merger guidelines, which stop companies from buying each other up, and they've already filed suit to block a giant tech merger.

Of course, last summer a judge found Google guilty of monopolization, and now they're facing a breakup, which explains why they've been so generous and friendly to the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, in Canada, our toothless Competition Bureau's got fitted for a set of titanium dentures last June, when Bill C59 passed Parliament, granting sweeping new powers to our antitrust regulator.

It's true that UK PM Keir Starmer just fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-boss of Amazon UK boss.But the thing that makes that so tragic is that the UK CMA had been doing astonishingly great work under various conservative governments.

In the EU, they've passed the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and they're going after Big Tech with both barrels. Other countries around the world – Australia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea and China (yes, China!) – have passed new antitrust laws, and launched major antitrust enforcement actions, often collaborating with each other.

So you have the UK Competition and Markets Authority using its investigatory powers to research and publish a deep market study on Apple's abusive 30% app tax, and then the EU uses that report as a roadmap for fining Apple, and then banning Apple's payments monopoly under new regulations.Then South Korea and Japan trustbusters translate the EU's case and win nearly identical cases in their courts

What about regulatory capture? Well, we're starting to see regulators get smarter about reining in Big Tech. For example, the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act were designed to bypass the national courts of EU member states, especially Ireland, the tax-haven where US tech companies pretend to have their EU headquarters.

The thing about tax havens is that they always turn into crime havens, because if Apple can pretend to be Irish this week, it can pretend to be Maltese or Cypriot or Luxembourgeois next week. So Ireland has to let US Big Tech companies ignore EU privacy laws and other regulations, or it'll lose them to sleazier, more biddable competitor nations.

So from now on, EU tech regulation is getting enforced in the EU's federal courts, not in national courts, treating the captured Irish courts as damage and routing around them.

Canada needs to strengthen its own tech regulation enforcement, unwinding monopolistic mergers from the likes of Bell and Rogers, but most of all, Canada needs to pursue an interoperability agenda.

Last year, Canada passed two very exciting bills: Bill C244, a national Right to Repair law; and Bill C294, an interoperability law. Nominally, both of these laws allow Canadians to fix everything from tractors to insulin pumps, and to modify the software in their devices from games consoles to printers, so they will work with third party app stores, consumables and add-ons.

However, these bills are essentially useless, because these bills don’t permit Canadians to acquire tools to break digital locks. So you can modify your printer to accept third party ink, or interpret a car's diagnostic codes so any mechanic can fix it, but only if there isn't a digital lock stopping you from doing so, because giving someone a tool to break a digital lock remains illegal thanks to the law that James Moore and Tony Clement shoved down the nation's throat in 2012.

And every single printer, smart speaker, car, tractor, appliance, medical implant and hospital medical device has a digital lock that stops you from fixing it, modifying it, or using third party parts, software, or consumables in it.

Which means that these two landmark laws on repair and interop are useless. So why not get rid of the 2012 law that bans breaking digital locks? Because these laws are part of our trade agreement with the USA. This is a law needed to maintain tariff-free access to US markets.

I don’t know if you've heard, but Donald Trump is going to impose a 25%, across-the-board tariff against Canadian exports. Trudeau's response is to impose retaliatory tariffs, which will make every American product that Canadians buy 25% more expensive. This is a very weird way to punish America!

You know what would be better? Abolish the Canadian laws that protect US Big Tech companies from Canadian competition. Make it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak and modify American technology products and services. Don't ask Facebook to pay a link tax to Canadian newspapers, make it legal to jailbreak all of Meta's apps and block all the ads in them, so Mark Zuckerberg doesn't make a dime off of us.

Make it legal for Canadian mechanics to jailbreak your Tesla and unlock every subscription feature, like autopilot and full access to your battery, for one price, forever. So you get more out of your car, and when you sell it, then next owner continues to enjoy those features, meaning they'll pay more for your used car.

That's how you hurt Elon Musk: not by being performatively appalled at his Nazi salutes. That doesn't cost him a dime. He loves the attention. No! Strike at the rent-extracting, insanely high-margin aftermarket subscriptions he relies on for his Swastikar business. Kick that guy right in the dongle!

Let Canadians stand up a Canadian app store for Apple devices, one that charges 3% to process transactions, not 30%. Then, every Canadian news outlet that sells subscriptions through an app, and every Canadian software author, musician and writer who sells through a mobile platform gets a 25% increase in revenues overnight, without signing up a single new customer.

But we can sign up new customers, by selling jailbreaking software and access to Canadian app stores, for every mobile device and games console to everyone in the world, and by pitching every games publisher and app maker on selling in the Canadian app store to customers anywhere without paying a 30% vig to American big tech companies.

We could sell every mechanic in the world a $100/month subscription to a universal diagnostic tool. Every farmer in the world could buy a kit that would let them fix their own John Deere tractors without paying a $200 callout charge for a Deere technician who inspects the repair the farmer is expected to perform.

They'd beat a path to our door. Canada could become a tech export powerhouse, while making everything cheaper for Canadian tech users, while making everything more profitable for anyone who sells media or software in an online store. And – this is the best part – it’s a frontal assault on the largest, most profitable US companies, the companies that are single-handedly keeping the S&P 500 in the black, striking directly at their most profitable lines of business, taking the revenues from those ripoff scams from hundreds of billions to zero, overnight, globally.

We don't have to stop at exporting reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to Americans! We could export the extremely lucrative tools of technological liberation to our American friends, too.

That's how you win a trade-war.

What about workers? Here we have good news and bad news.

The good news is that public approval for unions is at a high mark last seen in the early 1970s, and more workers want to join a union than at any time in generations, and unions themselves are sitting on record-breaking cash reserves they could be using to organize those workers.

But here's the bad news. The unions spent the Biden years, when they had the most favorable regulatory environment since the Carter administration, when public support for unions was at an all-time high, when more workers than ever wanted to join a union, when they had more money than ever to spend on unionizing those workers, doing fuck all. They allocatid mere pittances to union organizing efforts with the result that we finished the Biden years with fewer unionized workers than we started them with.

Then we got Trump, who illegally fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, leaving the NLRB without a quorum and thus unable to act on unfair labor practices or to certify union elections.

This is terrible. But it’s not game over. Trump fired the referees, and he thinks that this means the game has ended. But here's the thing: firing the referee doesn't end the game, it just means we're throwing out the rules. Trump thinks that labor law creates unions, but he's wrong. Unions are why we have labor law. Long before unions were legal, we had unions, who fought goons and ginks and company finks in` pitched battles in the streets.

That illegal solidarity resulted in the passage of labor law, which legalized unions. Labor law is passed because workers build power through solidarity. Law doesn't create that solidarity, it merely gives it a formal basis in law. Strip away that formal basis, and the worker power remains.

Worker power is the answer to vocational awe. After all, it's good for you and your fellow workers to feel a sense of mission about your jobs. If you feel that sense of mission, if you feel the duty to protect your users, your patients, your patrons, your students, a union lets you fulfill that duty.

We saw that in 2023 when Doug Ford promised to destroy the power of Ontario's public workers. Workers across the province rose up, promising a general strike, and Doug Ford folded like one of his cheap suits. Workers kicked the shit out of him, and we'll do it again. Promises made, promises kept.

The unscheduled midair disassembly of American labor law means that workers can have each others' backs again. Tech workers need other workers' help, because tech workers aren't scarce anymore, not after a half-million layoffs. Which means tech bosses aren't afraid of them anymore.

We know how tech bosses treat workers they aren't afraid of. Look at Jeff Bezos: the workers in his warehouses are injured on the job at 3 times the national rate, his delivery drivers have to pee in bottles, and they are monitored by AI cameras that snitch on them if their eyeballs aren't in the proscribed orientation or if their mouth is open too often while they drive, because policy forbids singing along to the radio.

By contrast, Amazon coders get to show up for work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand. They get to pee whenever they want. Jeff Bezos isn't sentimental about tech workers, nor does he harbor a particularized hatred of warehouse workers and delivery drivers. He treats his workers as terribly as he can get away with. That means that the pee bottles are coming for the coders, too.

It's not just Amazon, of course. Take Apple. Tim Cook was elevated to CEO in 2011. Apple's board chose him to succeed founder Steve Jobs because he is the guy who figured out how to shift Apple's production to contract manufacturers in China, without skimping on quality assurance, or suffering leaks of product specifications ahead of the company's legendary showy launches.

Today, Apple's products are made in a gigantic Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou nicknamed "iPhone City.” Indeed, these devices arrive in shipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles in a state of pristine perfection, manufactured to the finest tolerances, and free of any PR leaks.

To achieve this miraculous supply chain, all Tim Cook had to do was to make iPhone City a living hell, a place that is so horrific to work that they had to install suicide nets around the worker dorms to catch the plummeting bodies of workers who were so brutalized by Tim Cook's sweatshop that they attempted to take their own lives.

Tim Cook is also not sentimentally attached to tech workers, nor is he hostile to Chinese assembly line workers. He just treats his workers as badly as he can get away with, and with mass layoffs in the tech sector he can treat his coders much, much worse

How do tech workers get unions? Well, there are tech-specific organizations like Tech Solidarity and the Tech Workers Coalition. But tech workers will only get unions by having solidarity with other workers and receiving solidarity back from them. We all need to support every union. All workers need to have each other's backs.

We are entering a period of omnishambolic polycrisis.The ominous rumble of climate change, authoritarianism, genocide, xenophobia and transphobia has turned into an avalanche. The perpetrators of these crimes against humanity have weaponized the internet, colonizing the 21st century's digital nervous system, using it to attack its host, threatening civilization itself.

The enshitternet was purpose-built for this kind of apocalyptic co-option, organized around giant corporations who will trade a habitable planet and human rights for a three percent tax cut, who default us all into twiddle-friendly algorithmic feed, and block the interoperability that would let us escape their clutches with the backing of powerful governments whom they can call upon to "protect their IP rights."

It didn't have to be this way. The enshitternet was not inevitable. It was the product of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals.

No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets, intoning Tony Clement, James Moore: Thou shalt make it a crime for Canadians to jailbreak their phones. Those guys chose enshittification, throwing away thousands of comments from Canadians who warned them what would come of it.

We don't have to be eternal prisoners of the catastrophic policy blunders of mediocre Tory ministers. As the omnicrisis polyshambles unfolds around us, we have the means, motive and opportunity to craft Canadian policies that bolster our sovereignty, protect our rights, and help us to set every technology user, in every country (including the USA) free.

The Trump presidency is an existential crisis but it also presents opportunities. When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. We once had an old, good internet, whose major defect was that it required too much technical expertise to use, so all our normie friends were excluded from that wondrous playground.

Web 2.0's online services had greased slides that made it easy for anyone to get online, but escaping from those Web 2.0 walled gardens meant was like climbing out of a greased pit. A new, good internet is possible, and necessary. We can build it, with all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0.

A place where we can find each other, coordinate and mobilize to resist and survive climate collapse, fascism, genocide and authoritarianism. We can build that new, good internet, and we must.

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/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#enshittification-eh

[rainbow-banana-slug]

[id: anime style drawing of colorful pastel person with long hair sitting in fantasy manual tilt/rotation-in-space wheelchair.

in terms of details: they long blue hair in two low pig tails with stars in them, hair long to ground n go beyond frame. rainbow horn with rainbow shapes (crystals) on it, light skin, long ears. they wear pastel purple lolita jsk dress with carousel motif, n white long sleeve blouse with pink translucent short sleeve over blouse but under dress. they wear mismatch stockings, one side blue sky n clouds, another side rainbow. they wear pink platform mary jane.

wheelchair: seating is pastel pink arm-chair like with diamond tufting. headrest is similar but wing shaped. the frame / foot rest is shaped swirly n pastel rainbow gradient colored. tilt in space mechanism shaped like rocking horse with galaxy n roses. base is green. yellow wheels they can self propel with. end id]

——

literature ✨

(they/them)

artfight character profile

——

Record No.: [#####]

Date of Record: [xx/xx/xxxxx]

Diagnosis Summary:

Autism Spectrum Disorder, Level 3 (“Requiring Very Substantial Support”) — Nonverbal; high support needs

Congenital Wing Absence — Diagnosis: developmental disability syndrome, as observed in certain crownwing* variants

Mobility & Communication Aids: Custom manual tilt/rotation-in-space wheelchair with adaptive seating (full time); Symbol based AAC device, speech generating (full time)

(*crowning = (technically hybrid) species with horn + wings. think combine unicorn + pegasus but people shaped)

——

design notes

design elements: carousel, rocking horse, dusk/dawn, stars, pastel

symbol based AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) reference: proloquo2go

manual tilt/rotation-in-space wheelchair reference: quickie iris

why specifically rotation in space vs just tilt: bc center of gravity not change when u rotate (“tilt”) (website linked above have better explanation lol) :>

note the advanced seating position needs support!: lateral support wings on each side of waist (the white literal-wing-shaped things! that technically part of wheelchair n not clothing), headrest, “stroller” style push handles for easy caregiver propel

if u recognize the design have deja vu yes it bc it a giant redesign based on older character that’s technically different person but also not different person ✨ mm

——

[id:

1: character sheet. text mostly functionally described above.

2: their wheelchair. described above. lateral support wings not pictured. end id.]

[annabelle--cane]

I don't mind if people wanna read out my posts in youtube shorts over subway surfers or minecraft or anything, I like reposted content funneled directly into my eye sockets via my preferred social media platform as much as the next guy, but I do request that whoever reads them out puts a little sauce into it. make some delivery choices, goddammit. do a funny little voice if I'm scarequoting something. method act to get into my twisted mind if you need to. and for the love of god don't just leave it to text to speech.

[lokiinmediasideblog]

If you care about activism and DON'T WANT TO USE YOUR GOVERNMENT ID TO ACCESS THE INTERNET please contact your representatives.

THEY WILL BLOCK CRITICISM OF ISNOTREAL, SEX ED, LGBTQIA+ TOPICS, CRITICAL RACE THEORY, HISTORY, NSFW CONTENT, ETC.

FOR REPUBLICAN REPS:

FOR DEMOCRAT REPS:

Image captions credit to @fr0ggs

[image id 1: black text on a white background reading:

"My name is (blank underlines) and I'm one of your constitutents. I'm calling to urge you to vote NO on KOSA - the Kids Online Safety Act. The bill's sponsors claim it will protect kids by placing a duty of care on online platforms to prevent anything that could be harmful, but who decides what's harmful and what's free speech?

(next line) The power to decide has been ceded to the FTC. FTC leadership is made by presidential appointment. Current president Lina Khan, a Biden appointee, will have one agenda, but what happens when the someone even farther left than Joe Biden is in the Oval Office?

(next line) Imagine a President Gavin Newsom or Letitia James: Do you trust their appointee not to abuse this enforcement power to scrub information about your children's second amendment rights from the internet?

(next line) KOSA claims to protect kids, but it's poorly designed and will absolutely, without question, (underlined) harm (end underline) children, adults, and anyone who values free speech online. Vote No on KOSA." /end id.]

[image id 2: black text on a white background reading:

"My name is and I'm one of your constituents. I'm calling to urge you to vote NO on KOSA - the Kids Online Safety Act. The bill's sponsors claim it will protect kids by placing a duty of care on online platforms to prevent anything that could be harmful.

(next line) The power to decide what's harmful has been ceded to the FTC. FTC leadership is made by presidential appointment. Current president Lina Khan may proceed fairly, but what happens when the next Donald Trump is in the Oval Office? What if it's Trump himself? Do you trust a Trump appointee not to abuse this enforcement power?

(next line) KOSA claims to protect kids, but it's poorly designed and, given time, it will absolutely and without question, (underlined) harm (end underline) LGBTQ children, adults, and anyone who needs information on reproductive health or abortion.

(next line) KOSA author, Senator Marsha Blackburn, said she introduced KOSA in part - and I quote - "to protect minor children from the transgender in our society." The Heritage Foundation proudly said they'll apply pressure through KOSA to block information about abortion, reproductive health, & LGBTQ issues.

(next line) Vote NO on KOSA."

[ellipsus-writes]

Each week (or so), we'll highlight the relevant (and sometimes rage-inducing) news adjacent to writing and freedom of expression. (Find it on the blog too!) This week:

Censorship watch: Somehow, KOSA returned

It’s official: The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is back from the dead. After failing to pass last year, the bipartisan bill has returned with fresh momentum and the same old baggage—namely, vague language that could endanger hosting platforms, transformative work, and implicitly target LGBTQ+ content under the guise of “protecting kids.”

… But wait, it gets better (worse). Republican Senator Mike Lee has introduced a new bill that makes other attempts to censor the internet look tame: the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act (IODA)—basically KOSA on bath salts. Lee’s third attempt since 2022, the bill would redefine what counts as “obscene” content on the internet, and ban it nationwide—with “its peddlers prosecuted.”

Whether IODA gains traction in Congress is still up in the air. But free speech advocates are already raising alarm bells over its implications.

The bill aims to gut the long-standing legal definition of “obscenity” established by the 1973 Miller v. California ruling, which currently protects most speech under the First Amendment unless it fails a three-part test. Under the Miller test, content is only considered legally obscene if it 1: appeals to prurient interests, 2: violates “contemporary community standards,” and 3: is patently offensive in how it depicts sexual acts.

IODA would throw out key parts of that test—specifically the bits about “community standards”—making it vastly easier to prosecute anything with sexual content, from films and photos, to novels and fanfic.

Under Lee’s definition (which—omg shocking can you believe this coincidence—mirrors that of the Heritage Foundation), even the most mild content with the affect of possible “titillation” could be included. (According to the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, the proposed definition is so broad it could rope in media on the level of Game of Thrones—or, generally, anything that depicts or describes human sexuality.) And while obscenity prosecutions are quite rare these days, that could change if IODA passes—and the collateral damage and criminalization (especially applied to creative freedoms and LGBT+ content creators) could be massive.

And while Lee’s last two obscenity reboots failed, the current political climate is... let’s say, cloudy with a chance of fascism.

Sound a little like Project 2025? Ding ding ding! In fact, Russell Vought, P2025’s architect, was just quietly appointed to take over DOGE from Elon Musk (the agency on a chainsaw crusade against federal programs, culture, and reality in general).

So. One bill revives vague moral panic, another wants to legally redefine it and prosecute creators, and the man who helped write the authoritarian playbook—with, surprise, the intent to criminalize LGBT+ content and individuals—just gained control of the purse strings.

Cool cool cool.

AO3 works targeted in latest (massive) AI scraping

Rewind to last month—In the latest “wait, they did what now?” moment for AI, a Hugging Face user going by nyuuzyou uploaded a massive dataset made up of roughly 12.6 million fanworks scraped from AO3—full text, metadata, tags, and all. (Info from r/AO3: If your works’ ID numbers between 1 and 63,200,000, and has public access, the work has been scraped.)

And it didn’t stop at AO3. Art and writing communities like PaperDemon and Artfol, among others, also found their content had been quietly scraped and posted to machine learning hubs without consent.

This is yet another attempt in a long line of more “official” scraping of creative work, and the complete disregard shown by the purveyors of GenAI for copyright law and basic consent. (Even the Pope agrees.)

AO3 filed a DMCA takedown, and Hugging Face initially complied—temporarily. But nyuuzyou responded with a counterclaim and re-uploaded the dataset to their personal website and other platforms, including ModelScope and DataFish—sites based in China and Russia, the same locations reportedly linked to Meta’s own AI training dataset, LibGen.

Some writers are locking their works. Others are filing individual DMCAs. But as long as bad actors and platforms like Hugging Face allow users to upload massive datasets scraped from creative communities with minimal oversight, it’s a circuitous game of whack-a-mole. (As others have recommended, we also suggest locking your works for registered users only.)

After disavowing AI copyright, leadership purge hits U.S. cultural institutions

In news that should give us all a brief flicker of hope, the U.S. Copyright Office officially confirmed: if your “creative” work was generated entirely by AI, it’s not eligible for copyright.

A recently released report laid it out plainly—human authorship is non-negotiable under current U.S. law, a stance meant to protect the concept of authorship itself from getting swallowed by generative sludge. The report is explicit in noting that generative AI draws “on massive troves of data, including copyrighted works,” and asks: “Do any of the acts involved require the copyright owners’ consent or compensation?” (Spoiler: yes.) It’s a “straight ticket loss for the AI companies” no matter how many techbros’ pitch decks claim otherwise (sorry, Inkitt).

“The Copyright Office (with a few exceptions) doesn’t have the power to issue binding interpretations of copyright law, but courts often cite to its expertise as persuasive,” tech law professor Blake. E Reid wrote on Bluesky.As the push to normalize AI-generated content continues (followed by lawsuits), without meaningful human contribution—actual creative labor—the output is not entitled to protection.

… And then there’s the timing.

The report dropped just before the abrupt firing of Copyright Office director Shira Perlmutter, who has been vocally skeptical of AI’s entitlement to creative work.

It's yet another culture war firing—one that also conveniently clears the way for fewer barriers to AI exploitation of creative work. And given that Elon Musk’s pals have their hands all over current federal leadership and GenAI tulip fever… the overlap of censorship politics and AI deregulation is looking less like coincidence and more like strategy.

Also ousted (via email)—Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. According to White House press secretary and general ghoul Karoline Leavitt, Dr. Hayden was dismissed for “quite concerning things that she had done… in the pursuit of DEI, and putting inappropriate books in the library for children.” (Translation: books featuring queer people and POC.)

Dr. Hayden, who made history as the first Black woman to hold the position, spent the last eight years modernizing the Library of Congress, expanding digital access, and turning the institution into something more inclusive, accessible, and, well, public. So of course, she had to go. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The American Library Association condemned the firing immediately, calling it an “unjust dismissal” and praising Dr. Hayden for her visionary leadership. And who, oh who might be the White House’s answer to the LoC’s demanding and (historically) independent role?

The White House named Todd Blanche—AKA Trump’s personal lawyer turned Deputy Attorney General—as acting Librarian of Congress.

That’s not just sus, it’s likely illegal—the Library is part of the legislative branch, and its leadership is supposed to be confirmed by Congress. (You know, separation of powers and all that.)

But, plot twist: In a bold stand, Library of Congress staff are resisting the administration's attempts to install new leadership without congressional approval.

If this is part of the broader Project 2025 playbook, it’s pretty clear: Gut cultural institutions, replace leadership with stunningly unqualified loyalists, and quietly centralize control over everything from copyright to the nation’s archives.

Because when you can’t ban the books fast enough, you just take over the library.

Rebellions are built on hope

Over the past few years (read: eternity), a whole ecosystem of reactionary grifters has sprung up around Star Wars—with self-styled CoNtEnT CrEaTorS turning outrage to revenue by endlessly trashing the fandom. It’s all part of the same cynical playbook that radicalized the fallout of Gamergate, with more lightsabers and worse thumbnails. Even the worst people you know weighed in on May the Fourth (while Prequel reassessment is totally valid—we’re not giving J.D. Vance a win).

But one thing that shouldn't be up for debate is this: Andor, which wrapped its phenomenal two-season run this week, is probably the best Star Wars project of our time—maybe any time. It’s a masterclass in what it means to work within a beloved mythos and transform it, deepen it, and make it feel urgent again. (Sound familiar? Fanfic knows.)

Radicalization, revolution, resistance. The banality of evil. The power of propaganda. Colonialism, occupation, genocide—and still, in the midst of it all, the stubborn, defiant belief in a better world (or Galaxy).

Even if you’re not a lifelong SW nerd (couldn’t be us), you should give it a watch. It’s a nice reminder that amidst all the scraping, deregulation, censorship, enshittification—stories matter. Hope matters.

And we’re still writing.

Let us know if you find something other writers should know about, or join our Discord and share it there!

- The Ellipsus Team xo

[vellihor]

unspoken. chapter 3. sylus.

cw: sylus x non-mc reader, idiots in love, mute reader, knives, blood, violence, gore, trauma, angst, fluff, reader is painfully oblivious! (in the beginning at least), SLOW BURN, intentional lowercase, inspiration from og LADS lore but may contain altered versions :)

word count -> 890

italics mean reader’s thoughts

bold italics are sound effects

quotes are for phone texts

“normal text in quotes are speech”

“italicised text in quotes are signed speech”

author's note: sylus's pov! ok i just needed the extra angst.

< previous chapter next chapter >

the doors didn’t stand a chance.

sylus blew through them with a scream of metal and fury, evol flaring so violently the walls sparked in protest. gunfire echoed behind him—standard security patrols. he didn’t care. he wasn’t here to survive.

he was here to burn this place to the ground.

he turned a corner and dragged his hand through the air—glass and steel crushed in his wake. the next wall burst inward, revealing a corridor of sterile light and mechanical whirring. his boots pounded against the floor, tracking blood and soot behind him.

“where are they?” he snarled, grabbing the next guard by the collar and slamming him into the wall hard enough to crack his skull. the body slumped before he even finished the sentence.

then—

a hum. a flicker.

the corridor lit up, and the wall ahead dissolved into a vast, cold chamber.

in its center, a circular platform rose. monitors encased its rim, and in the middle stood a podium with two large buttons.

above it, a hologram crackled to life.

oliver.

grinning.

“sylus,” he said, voice slick with mock sympathy. “welcome. took you long enough.”

sylus surged forward, fists glowing with red mist, but the platform responded with an invisible barrier—one that flared to life the second he struck it. energy crackled around his fists as he reeled back.

oliver laughed. “oh, don’t waste your strength. you’ve already lost it.”

the screens around him blinked on.

and there they were.

two containment pods.

one: her. the woman who had followed him into every fire, even when he left her to burn. her face was calm—resigned. like she already knew. like she was already letting go.

two: miss hunter. drenched in sweat, shaking, screaming at the glass. clawing for freedom. mouthing his name.

“i see you recognize the stakes,” oliver continued, his projection stepping around the console leisurely. “only one can be saved. a morality algorithm, you might call it. one lives. the other dies. simple input.”

the buttons pulsed beneath sylus’s fists.

his heart slammed against his ribs, hammering wildly at the decision.

“don’t worry,” oliver added. “we’ve calculated it all. instinct, sentimentality, heroism. let’s see how predictable you really are, the great sylus.”

sylus’s hands hovered.

her eyes found the camera. she smiled.

that damned smile. quiet. steady. like always.

she mouthed something.

“it’s okay.”

why do you always do that?

he pressed his hand against the glass. “no,” he whispered, voice cracking.

the hologram blinked.

“time’s ticking.”

5.

his hands shook. wavered as it hovered above the buttons.

4.

miss hunter’s face twisted in horror. please—please sylus please—

3.

the figure in the second pod simply closed her eyes. not out of fear. out of peace.

2.

his hand moved.

1.

he slammed it down.

the button glowed.

a hiss echoed from the screen. a hydraulic release.

her pod dropped.

“no—NO—”

he screamed as the screen faded to black, pounding his fists on the console, voice breaking into something raw, something not human.

oliver’s hologram flickered.

“predictable,” he murmured.

then vanished.

leaving sylus alone in the flickering light.

and a silence that would never leave him.

-

the sky split open as sylus dropped through it.

wind roared in his ears as he tore through the clouds, descending like a meteor, evol burning across his spine. his jaw clenched, blood still on his knuckles. he hit the ground hard enough to crater it, smoke and gravel erupting around him. before the dust even cleared, he was moving. his boots splashed through puddles of seawater and blood.

the facility’s lower docks stretched out before him, half-crumbled from internal explosions. sparks flew from broken lights. a warning siren somewhere sputtered and died. the air stank of metal, ozone, and—

gunpowder.

he dove into the water. the ocean swallowed him whole, but he kept going, driving himself lower and lower. light died above him. pressure crushed in around him. his eyes adjusting, scanning.

then he saw it.

red.

a bloom of crimson swirling like ink in the water, spreading and curling in ribbons around him. blood. fresh. too much.

his breath caught in his throat.

she had been here.

the water thrummed with the aftermath—residue from ruptured evol signatures, pulses of scorched heat still clinging to shattered debris. he scanned the wreckage of the capsule—its outer shell cracked open like an egg, torn from the inside. burn marks laced the metal.

her body…

wasn’t here.

no trace. no rise toward the surface. no sinking deeper into the abyss. just that terrible red, curling through the sea like a ghost’s final breath.

“boss,” came luke’s voice, distorted and distant in his ear. “do you see her? do you see anything?”

he didn’t respond.

he hovered in the water, frozen. the murk swirled around him, glowing faintly from his suit. for a moment, he felt like he was standing in a tomb.

“...boss?” kieran’s voice unsteady.

she had bled out here. destroyed by the capsule from within.

but her body…

like the ocean had swallowed her whole, claimed her as its own, and refused to give her back.

sylus clenched his fists, trembling in silence.

there were no words left.

just the red.

and the crushing weight of everything he had not chosen.

blood curdling screams rang in the air.

< previous chapter next chapter >

taglist: @animegamerfox@justpassingdontworry@loreleis-world@zhongtar@lunia-likes-pomegranet@babyx91@huuvu@imnikki@angelichiaro@jb-hope94@elegantdeerlady@idkmanimjusthorny@beesin03@anixx1

[confessedlyfannish]

Writing Prompt #11

It's an innocent ("please," Jason sneers, "there's nothing innocent about a plagiaristic propaganda machine encouraging minors to dance for sick ol' pervs while it spews misogynistic hate speech.'"

"okay, boomer,"

"the fuck did you just call me, replacement?") TikTok, one of those ones that kind of simmers in the background for a few weeks until someone with a decent enough following posts it on the Platform Formerly Known as Twitter and from there it seriously catches traction, blowing up until Tim knocks on Bruce's office door, phone in hand. Damian stands behind him, arms crossed and clearly simmering.

Bruce, fresh off a series of zoom conferences, raises an eyebrow.

"Okay, so you haven't seen it," Tim decides, striding forward.

Bruce's eyebrow jumps a smidge higher, on the edge of concern, as Tim thrusts his phone into his grasp.

"So," he begins, reaching over to refresh the mobile page "there's a video that's been making the rounds on Twitter and—well you should probably see it," He sighs over Damian's scoff as he clicks through the pop-up asking him to sign in or join TikTok, and presses "Watch Again", unmuting the video.

🎶 "Doo, badoo-badoo-badoo Badoo-badoo-badoo-badoo,"🎶 an upbeat background song hums as someone, presumably a student, films a school hallway with their phone. They walk past students talking near their lockers, some of whom flash peace signs and silly grins as the camera swings their way before continuing on.

But the main point Bruce gets stuck on is the all lowercase white text at the center of the screen that an automated woman's voice awkwardly narrates:

"when you go to school with bruce wayne's other long lost lovechild"

The student filming comes up behind a much taller student who faces away from him, in conversation with a black haired pale teenaged girl. She spots the cameraman and shoots him a confused, disgruntled look, saying something to the boy who then turns around.

Bruce quietly observes as the camera zooms in on a boy around Tim's page, possibly older. Tall and broad-shouldered, with a strong jaw, he raises an eyebrow at the one filming, looking beyond the camera, pitch black hair with blue undertones falling into his blue eyes. The camera momentarily zooms too far into those eyes then abruptly pulls back as he quirks a puzzled smile at the viewer, mouthing out an easily understandable "hi?".

The TikTok ends and seamlessly transitions to a person balancing their cat on an exercise ball with minimal success and this time Bruce presses the Watch Again button. The heart on the right side claims 750k likes.

Damian scoffs, louder, as it ends. "Clearly it is a hoax, but it has been popular among my classmates."

"The board hasn't made much noise about it—" Tim starts.

"And they won't," Bruce says, lifting his eyes from his phone. "Wayne Industries doesn't give statements on videos like these, no matter how viral they become. I've been getting lovechild claims since before I adopted Dick."

Which Tim knows, which is why his insistence on showing Bruce this one raises his hackles. He pins Tim down with a stare and despite Tim's perfected PR mask, he can see Tim is unsettled.

"B...he really, really looks like you." Tim admits. Damian scoffs for a third time and Tim shoots him a glare, "I get it, you don't see it, but you haven't seen the pictures of Bruce when he was younger."

"I don't need to!" Damian says angrily. "You're all being ridiculous!"

"All?" Bruce asks. Tim shifts awkwardly. "The family group chat has been talking," he says.

"I see," Bruce says. Because he does. Many claim Damian to be his doppelganger, but the boy actually favors Talia not just in skin tone but in the shape and color of his eyes, as well as the soft slope of her mouth and ears. Whether those features will sharpen once he goes through puberty is anyone's guess.

But this young man has Bruce's eyes. Martha's eyes.

That night they have a suspiciously full house for dinner, with even Jason dropping in, but no one says anything until Barbara wheels in for dessert, carrying a manila folder on her lap.

"What?" she says, when everyone stares. "Dick told me it was crème brûlée today!"

Bruce extends a hand wordlessly, and Barbara sheepishly hands the folder over.

"Bruce," she says, before he can open it, "I wouldn't have looked into this normally, but,"

"Just say it," Jason says, leaning back in his chair. "Take away the gray hairs, the receding hairline, and the wrinkles and the kid's a dead match."

"Take it back, Todd," Damian growls, "Father has a very full head of hair!"

"Not to mention a failed track record at keeping it in his pants, Exhibit A," Jason continues, pointing a fork at Damian, "oh wait," he says gleefully, "kid is definitely 18, so I guess that would make you Exhibit B!"

The table erupts, cutlery tinkling as Damian gets a knee up on the table to hurl himself at a cackling Todd, Dick jumping up to grab him as the others lean out of the way—

"Ahem!" Everyone stops cold as Alfred stands in the doorway, porcelain ramekins of crème brûlée stacked perfectly on a silver tray. Under his gaze, everyone sits back down, Damian and Jason both quietly uttering a "Sorry Alfie/Alfred," as they straighten up.

Bruce is oblivious to the chaos, Barbara biting her lip beside him as he stares blankly inside the folder at the printed copy of an adoption certificate.

Two days and several million likes later, another TikTok goes viral from the same user. Caught in the moment as whoever is filming runs up to the group, the same young man is chatting with a blonde in a red letterman jacket, a partially formed crowd around them. Even with one leg still in the cafeteria table, he towers over everyone.

"—sh. Look, we're all possibly Bruce Wayne's son!" the boy snarks. He has his hands out, palms up as if he's making a great point, and as he looks around he catches sight of the cameraman and his smirk drops.

"Ah Mac, c'mon dude not again—" and the TikTok ends.

[homunculus-argument]

I feel like I have the same curse as you of whenever I make a tumblr post, someone immediately shows up to miss the point in the most random way (if it's a post just saying "this thing is like that") or answer a *completely* different question than what i asked (if i was asking a question, no matter how well i thought i explained the context and specified what particular thing i was asking about). And i'm not even half as tumblr famous as you are

Granted that I mostly post about fandom nonsense, and because 1) that's a silly little hobby so whatever the post was about usually doesn't matter, 2) i just don't have the time and energy for arguing with people, and 3) i'm not as good with words as you and can't come up with similarly good responses, I generally don't reply or reply only once because the argument doesn't seem worth my effort. But it's still like, okay wow, genuinely how do people manage to misinterpret it like *that*

I would almost wonder if it's something about how Finnish people are used to talking and explaining things, but i don't think two people is enough data to tell, and i guess more likely it's just the nature of tumblr in general

I think that's just tumblr tbh. For a platform that's very text-heavy, there's an astonishing amount of people who can't read. I never understood why "reading comprehension" was tested in school, because before Tumblr it had not occurred to me that there are people out there who are capable of reading the words, but not understand the text.

And to be fair I grew up in a family where the default assumption about anything I said was that I must be wrong somehow, to the point that even if I said something that I knew they agreed with, they'd go out of their way to find a way to interpret it as something disagreeable. I had this skill honed to the point where I could do the "so you think darkness is your ally" Bane Speech about it.

[tf2heritageposts]

it’s time to start emailing and calling!

find your

senate representative: https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

house representative:

use this script if your representative is a republican

[description: text that reads “My name is (blank where you’d say your name)

and I'm one of your constituents.

I'm calling to urge you to vote NO on KOSA - the Kids Online Safety Act. The bill's sponsors claim it will protect kids by placing a duty of care on online platforms to prevent anything that could be harmful, but who decides what's harmful and what's free speech?

The power to decide has been ceded to the FTC. FTC leadership is made by presidential appointment. Current president Lina Khan, a Biden appointee, will have one agenda, but what happens when the someone even farther left than Joe Biden is in the Oval Office?

Imagine a President Gavin Newsom or Letitia James: Do you trust their appointee not to abuse this enforcement power tol› scrub information about your children's second amendment rights from the internet.

KOSA claims to protect kids, but it's poorly designed and will absolutely, without question, harm children, adults, and anyone who values free speech online. Vote NO on KOSA. end description]

use this if your representative is democrat

[description: text that reads “My name is (blank where you’d say your name)

and I'm one of your constituents.

I'm calling to urge you to vote NO on KOSA - the Kids Online Safety Act. The bill's sponsors claim it will protect kids by placing a duty of care on online platforms to prevent anything that could be harmful.

The power to decide what's harmful has been ceded to the FTC.

FTC leadership is made by presidential appointment. Current president Lina Khan may proceed fairly, but what happens when the next Donald Trump is in the Oval Office? What if it's Trump himself? Do you trust a Trump appointee not to abuse this enforcement power?

KOSA claims to protect kids, but it's poorly designed and, given time, it will absolutely and without question, harm LGBTQ children, adults, and anyone who needs information on reproductive health or abortion.

KOSA author, Senator Marsha Blackburn, said she introduced KOSA in part - and I quote - "to protect minor children from the transgender in our society." The Heritage Foundation proudly said they'll apply pressure through KOSA to block information about abortion, reproductive health, & LGBTQ issues.

Vote NO on KOSA.” end description]

only call/email once! be honest and accurate with your information!