#it shows service and yes I know I have and pay for data

[iwatcheditbegin]

My iPhone literally is unusable after this update. Cannot connect to cellular. Works fine with wifi, but completely usable once I go anywhere without wifi. I can’t even make calls

[sgiandubh]

I love your style, intelligent, down to earth, very practical, not in the 5-10 children in 7 years part of the fandom. Guess that’s why I’m very intrigued by your take on recent events. I feel a massive shift in their public behavior, very different from the last 6-7 years where they tried very hard to separate themselves from their characters and each other. Why do you think that is?

Dear @i-ship,

Thank you very much for the kind words. I try to keep things in check and base my opinions on solid facts. Not 'FACTS', mind you, but as much as possible publicly available documents and data. The not so public things (meaning you have to pay for those, which indicates a different confidentiality level) I keep for myself, because I am not an idiot: in no way, however, do they contradict the rest, in which case I would immediately recalibrate my analysis. I also know very well that confirmation bias has often been mentioned as a sad excuse across the street, when things didn't look good for them. That is wishful bullshit, because no legal professional would prostitute their skill in order to shoehorn reality into a given scenario. Papers speak by themselves - there is no need to stretch the information they contain, but yes, you can (and you should) interpret them. Therefore, all I did was to translate in everyday English what is often not accessible to everyone and wrap it in a bit of context. This is, apparently, a mortal sin and I know it is the main reason I am being hated with a passion, by many.

All of the above just to stress the fact that I am not easily swayed by sensational pics, tidbits and gifs. I may sound like a damned party pooper to you, but I prefer to patiently follow what I think is interesting, rather than childishly bounce on my chair every single time people see what they really saw a thousand times before, in eleven years of saga. Nor do I need to have confirmation four times a day of something that simply exists, irrespective of the fact I know about it or not.

I will say only this: C definitely looks as she DGAF about the whole circus anymore. It started with the piggyback pics, on March 25, continued with the Taylor Swift concert (the only time I allowed myself to oooh and awww at 4 AM) and is now seemingly confirmed by these new promo pics and interviews. Yes, they screeched 'it's fan service', but as far as I know nobody forced C to behave the way she clearly intends to show everyone. It's Season 7B, for Christ's sake, the script is hogwash and the acting is not so good (yes, I will need a rewatch to write something decently balanced about it), the audience numbers are dwindling and OL is on its way out. Hard truths, no matter how you turn it: why would she open again the door to 'speculation' (ah, but what's in a word?), especially considering this cesspool of a fandom's obsessive-compulsive collective behavior?

Unless...

Unless, @i-ship. Let's not write the script, but you got me. I hope this answers your question - at any rate, it was a pleasure trying to.

[whetstonefires]

Hello! For the reverse tropes writing prompts (if this catches your fancy) — murderbot diaries with fake amnesia and Really nice guy who hates only you

this is really not in the spirit of that second inverse trope, but for mb this was the only thing i could think of, and it was very funny.

=

"Gurathin," said Gurathin. "SecUnit, you know it's me."

"I don't think I know that," it said, pleasantly, in an okay but not excellent imitation of its creepy canned dialogue options. "Please present some identification, and we'll see."

Gurathin didn't bother sending his data over the feed again. Murderbot walked away, but left a drone eyeballing him. He resisted the urge to flip the drone off. "Come on," he told it, knowing SecUnit was paying attention. "Let me in."

He watched the SecUnit bend forward slightly to show two of Mensah's kids that it was paying attention to whatever they were saying, and then bend over further to help the toddler up onto a chair. It was just fucking with him now. On the other hand, if the prickly bastard started letting children hug it just to piss off Gurathin, who was the real loser?

It finished spoiling the children and moved over to smoothly de-escalate a brewing disagreement over the punch bowl. Gurathin tried to catch Pin-Lee's eye; she did not cooperate. Gurathin tried to walk through the open door; the hovering security drone took a potshot at him.

SecUnit got roped into conversation with Bharadwaj and her media colleagues. It said something that made everyone laugh. It wasn't scowling. It was faking looking people in the face pretty well; that was just creepy.

It went on like that; Gurathin had never seen it go this long interacting without pissing someone off. Presumably it was venting all of that impulse on him. Ratthi introduced it to his favorite cousin; zi was visibly charmed.

Gurathin goaded the drone into firing two more warning shots before the SecUnit circulated back over to him.

"SecUnit. Come on. You have known me for actual years. I helped you rob a place once."

"I don't recall."

"We met on that planetary survey mission, don't tell me you don't remember that one, it's the reason you're even here." That came out maybe a little harsh, but everyone was letting the SecUnit abuse the power of being entrusted with party security to bully him, he was allowed to be annoyed.

"Oh, were you there? That data must have been lost in a corrupted filetree," it said, with incredibly cutting blandness.

Gurathin groaned. "Okay! Okay. I'm sorry."

It technically counted as a reward when SecUnit stopped giving him the customer service face and switched to the hairy eyeball, which just showed how stupid this whole situation was. It was clearly not satisfied with just that.

"I'm sorry for using your personal name without permission. I wasn't trying to weaponize it or anything, it just slipped out, but I know that's not an excuse and it was a really inappropriate disrespect for your boundaries."

SecUnit kept looking at him. Gurathin knew two other SecUnits now, neither of whom was as supremely weird as this one; that was why he'd started mentally tagging it with its personal name, just to keep things tidy. Of course, if anyone else had done that and made the resulting mistake, SecUnit probably wouldn't have been half so mad.

Gurathin sagged.

"I'm sorry for going through your personal files and using your name against you back during the survey," he mumbled, wishing he kept drones around to control with his brain so he could watch SecUnit's extremely expressive face without having to look at it. "That was really shitty. Rim paranoia isn't a good enough excuse for refusing to see you as anything but a tool of the Company. Okay?"

SecUnit was looking as pained as though Gurathin had stripped naked in its presence. "Yes, fine, you can come to the party just stop having feelings," it said, in its normal voice.

"Great!" said Gurathin. "The spinach puffs had better not be all gone."

"I don't pay any attention to the things humans consume," it said, moving out of his way and taking its drone with it.

"I know," Gurathin acknowledged, rolling his eyes and trooping after it. Ratthi waved enthusiastically at him and Pin-Lee raised her cup in a welcoming toast. Apparently SecUnit's relenting returned him to the ranks of people who existed again. "Believe me, I remember this about you."

[rgr-pop]

sommmme support staff are mad that student employees are getting raises that they think are excessive, but most of them don’t work with student staff or write job descriptions like I do, so I figured I would round up the data on actually existing student staff wages, to illustrate that most student stuff remain at the lowest end of the scale, meaning that I needed to take the time to actually go through the job descriptions this afternoon, which was useful because I am working on writing a job description for a new archives student assistant position, etc., it’s a fight every day to get the college to pay my students enough to say yes to this job much less “support themselves,” mine are about to break $13.60 ($14.90 for technical services and that’s my aim in the archives). almost all students on campus—I mean all I knew of personally— make and will continue to make less than $15/ hour, but there are some mostly mythic level III students about to make $16.50 an hour and when certain staff see that in the board report (board sets student wages independent of bargaining) they are not happy based on a moral truth in their hearts which is that some people should never make more than they made in 1997, especially not people with more education and skills than they had in 1997, “students” (derogatory). so I figured I would show them that almost no students on campus actually have level III positions, to calm them and release the union from this insanely bad energy. the only level III student employee positions I knew of were students programmers, and other similar specialized/tech related positions that look more like internships. the level III student employee is mythic on campus— everyone points to their wages in the board reports to crusade against whatever, or in my case we write job descriptions hoping someday we’ll hit the magic word, etc. but I don’t know anyone who works with a level III student employee. not worth getting into the arguments about how to bargain around the student employee wages which I think are straightforward and also stupid, but there is also a folk paranoia that a support staff member or administrator lol could someday find themselves making more money hourly than a student employee whose work they direct , which actually isn’t as insane as it sounds because you know how administration could be unwilling to give easy things to union workers on principle, especially part time workers, and our students are (unfortunately but as is typical) not union, and I was hired in as a supervisor (directing not legal) at like $12/hr. so anyway I gather all the job descriptions and discover that contrary to what HR has been communicating to me, someone who works with student employees and on student employee job descriptions, two or three student staff positions have recently been added as level III, which is bureaucratically annoying but imo chill, except that I can’t actually deliver this information bc when these people see that there are potentially 3 student employees in the DEI office who could make as much as $16.50 an hour.. well

[bruinhilda]

So great. So many things going wrong, and suddenly my phone service has suddenly decided to shit the bed.

There is not an outage. I checked. Once I was home and had wifi, I pulled up the service app, as well as logging in via my desktop (because access through apps is always ass.)

According to my provider, I have zero minutes, zero data, and zero texts left. This is in spite of the fact that two days ago I reupped all of those (I have a pay as you go plan.) Via the website, I can see those orders and the totals. But the account is zero. In fact, when I first logged in the app, it showed the actual totals. And then flashed, and everything is zeroed out.

If I try to make a call, I get this "please wait while we connect you to customer service" message. It's loud. It repeats every two seconds. It's not going to connect me to customer service, because that only runs for certain hours EST and they won't reopen for another 4 hours.

And I am near meltdown as is because I have a phobia about calling people I don't know. And I have had no good experiences with calling customer service anything, because they make you jump through automated hoops, half of which I can't navigate because they expect me to have information I have no way of knowing or getting. Long before I reach a human, I can't function because of all the back and forth obliterating my careful rehearsal of what I need to communicate, BECAUSE TALKING ISN'T NATURAL TO ME.

Yes I tried their damn chat. All automated, and utterly useless because it will only let you go through their list of questions that don't actually cover *problems* you might be having with their service. At the end they recommend you call their customer service. Which is open 8 to 3 EST, fuck you for not living in that timezone or being free to sit around on hold during those hours.

And also, telling someone to just call customer service when the issue is WITH THEIR DAMN PHONE is enraging. Not everyone has access to another goddamn phone when theirs is fucked.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything

Cory Doctorow: Last year, I coined the term “enshittification” to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers; it really hit the zeitgeist. The American Dialect Society made it its Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I’m definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone). So what’s enshittification and why did it catch fire? It’s my theory explaining how the internet was colonised by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters and what we can do about it. We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the “great forces of history”, and into the material world of specific decisions made by real people; decisions we can reverse and people whose names and pitchfork sizes we can learn. Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It’s not just a way to say “things are getting worse”, though, of course, it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way. (It’s an English word. We don’t have ein Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free-for-all. Go nuts, meine Kerle.) But in case you want to be more precise, let’s examine how enshittification works. It’s a three-stage process: first, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die. Let’s do a case study. What could be better than Facebook?

Facebook arose from a website developed to rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that. When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and K-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It effectively told them: Yes, I know you’re all using MySpace. But MySpace is owned by a billionaire who spies on you with every hour that God sends. Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world.

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

But Facebook didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem. It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. So Facebook’s end users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then Facebook exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers and publishers.

To the advertisers, Facebook said: Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? Well, we do. And we will sell you access to that data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it. To the publishers, Facebook said: Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? Ha! Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link and we will cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetise as you please. And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too.

Users, advertisers, publishers — everyone was locked in. Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders. For the users, that meant dialling down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers. For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen. For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt. And then Facebook started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting full text feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetisation.

When any of these groups squawked, Facebook just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learnt in the Darth Vader MBA: “I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.” Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders. (This continued last week, when the company announced a quarterly dividend of 50 cents per share and that it would increase share buybacks by $50bn. The stock jumped.)

But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service, but I can’t bring myself to quit,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit?” is razor-thin.

[Thanks Robert Scott Horton]

[wanderingaldecaldo]

Messages keep getting clearer Radio's on, and I'm moving 'round my place I check my look in the mirror I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face ▶

From the first draft of the corpo!val longfic...

“Good afternoon, welcome. Are you checking in?”

He steps forward to the counter, releasing his touch on Val at last. “Yes. Mitch and Valerie Anderson.”

“Yes, Mr. Anderson, I see your reservation here: four weeks in our lovely Morro suite. It is fully stocked one bedroom with full service kitchen and balcony with a water view.”

“One bedroom?” he falters; he’s certain Val told him there would be two.

“Yes, sir. Is that a problem?”

His eyes slide over to Val as the visual distortion increases and more hormones pump into his system. She squeezes his bicep as she steps up to the counter.

“I believe we had a reservation for your two bedroom suite. I adore my husband,” she says, pausing to look up at him with a sweet smile, and her touch grounds him somewhat. “But this man snores like a fleet of AVs. If I have to share a bedroom with him, I will be suing you to pay for our divorce, and for damages.”

Val’s face lights up as she laughs and he follows her lead, throwing his head back and guffawing. 

“Please, for the sake of my marriage,” he says, still chuckling as he turns back to the receptionist. “Don’t wanna test that prenup.”

Val laughs and swats him with her other hand.

“Let me see what I can do,” the receptionist says and smiles politely. She resumes typing and moments later looks up at them. “I apologize for that oversight. I do have a two bedroom suite available. There will be a slight price difference.”

Mitch waves his hand dismissively. “Whatever Valerie wants, she gets.”

She gives a laugh that he can describe as sultry as she leans into him, and he slides his organic hand down her back to her waist, pulling her tight against his side. 

“Of course, sir. We have adjusted our records. One moment please.”

A new alert pops up in the corner of his HUD, SCAN INITIATED, and it’s time for the first real test of the soft. The new deck from Vik shows the data being received by the scanner:

MITCHELL ANDERSON DOB: 2028-04-29 NATIONALITY: NUSA .... 

The data flowing from his deck matches the info packet passed on by Val and he releases the breath he’s been holding. He glances over at Val who’s watching him, and he gives her a lopsided smile and presses a kiss to her forehead. The chemicals taper off and the disorientation plateaus but he continues to focus on Val, on the feel of her against his side and the soft skin of her arm under his calloused fingertips.

“Very well, you are all checked in,” the receptionist says. “Please let us know if there is anything you require, otherwise please enjoy your stay.”

“Thank you,” Val says with a warm smile, and he nods with an awkward smile.

When the valet directs them away from the desk, Mitch finally releases his grip on Val’s waist and follows her to a bank of elevators.

[x147]

op disabled reblogs so i'm pirating this post

written by Cory Doctorow 8 feb 2024

Last year, I coined the term “enshittification” to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers; it really hit the zeitgeist.

The American Dialect Society made it its Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I’m definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).

So what’s enshittification and why did it catch fire? It’s my theory explaining how the internet was colonised by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters and what we can do about it. We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying.

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

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It’s not just a way to say “things are getting worse”, though, of course, it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way. (It’s an English word. We don’t have ein Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free-for-all. Go nuts, meine Kerle.) But in case you want to be more precise, let’s examine how enshittification works. It’s a three-stage process: first, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die.

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

Facebook arose from a website developed to rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that. When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and K-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It effectively told them: Yes, I know you’re all using MySpace. But MySpace is owned by a billionaire who spies on you with every hour that God sends. Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world.

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

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

It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. So Facebook’s end users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then Facebook exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers and publishers.

To the advertisers, Facebook said: Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? Well, we do. And we will sell you access to that data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it.

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

Users, advertisers, publishers — everyone was locked in. Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders.

For the users, that meant dialling down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers. For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen. For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt. And then Facebook started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting full text feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetisation.

When any of these groups squawked, Facebook just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learnt in the Darth Vader MBA:

“I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”

Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders. (This continued last week, when the company announced a quarterly dividend of 50 cents per share and that it would increase share buybacks by $50bn. The stock jumped.)

But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service, but I can’t bring myself to quit,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit?” is razor-thin.

All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then Facebook discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword. If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go. That’s terminal enshittification.

This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech euphemistically calls “pivoting”. Which is how we get pivots such as: In the future, all internet users will be transformed into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world called the “metaverse”.

That’s the procession of enshittification. But that doesn’t tell you why everything is enshittifying right now and, without those details, we can’t know what to do about it. What is it about this moment that led to the Great Enshittening? Was it the end of the zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP)? Was it a change in leadership at the tech giants?

Is Mercury in retrograde?

Nope.

The period of free Fed money certainly led to tech companies having a lot of surplus to toss around. But Facebook started enshittifying long before ZIRP ended, so did Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Some of the tech giants got new leaders. But Google’s enshittification got worse when the founders came back to oversee the company’s AI panic — excuse me, AI pivot. And it can’t be Mercury in retrograde, because I’m a Cancer, and as everyone knows, Cancers don’t believe in astrology.

When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that’s a sign that the environment has changed, and that’s what happened to tech. Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a digital world, someone else might well say, “Yes, but if we do that, 20 per cent of our users will install ad blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, for ever.” This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory manoeuvre will prompt their users to google, “How do I disenshittify this?”

And, finally, workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn’t mean that tech workers don’t have labour power. The historical “talent shortage” of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another, better job.

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

That’s why mottoes such as Google’s “Don’t be evil” and Facebook’s “Make the world more open and connected” mattered; they instilled a sense of mission in workers. It’s what the American academic Fobazi Ettarh calls “vocational awe” or Elon Musk calls being “extremely hardcore”.

Tech workers had lots of bargaining power, but they didn’t flex it when their bosses demanded that they sacrifice their health, their families, their sleep to meet arbitrary deadlines. So long as their bosses transformed their workplaces into whimsical “campuses”, with gyms, gourmet cafeterias, laundry service, massages and egg-freezing, workers could tell themselves that they were being pampered, rather than being made to work like government mules.

For bosses, there’s a downside to motivating your workers with appeals to a sense of mission. Namely, your workers will feel a sense of mission. So when you ask them to enshittify the products they ruined their health to ship, workers will experience a sense of profound moral injury, respond with outrage and threaten to quit. Thus tech workers themselves were the final bulwark against enshittification.

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

One by one, each of these constraints was eroded, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittocene.

It started with competition. From the Gilded Age until the Reagan years, the purpose of competition law was to promote competition between companies. US antitrust law treated corporate power as dangerous and sought to blunt it. European antitrust laws were modelled on US ones, imported by the architects of the Marshall Plan. But starting in the 1980s, with the rise of neoliberalism, competition authorities all over the world adopted a doctrine called “consumer welfare”, which essentially held that monopolies were evidence of quality. If everyone was shopping at the same store and buying the same product, that meant that was the best store, selling the best product — not that anyone was cheating.

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

Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with “predatory pricing” that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold. When Diapers.com refused Amazon’s acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100mn on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until Diapers.com went bust, and Amazon bought them for pennies on the dollar.

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

Today’s giants are not constrained by competition. They don’t care. They don’t have to. They’re Google.

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

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

But when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel. Five companies, or four, or three, or two or just one company can easily converge on a single message for their regulators, and without “wasteful competition” eroding their profits, they have plenty of cash to spread around.

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

Now, there are plenty of things we don’t want improved through competition, like privacy invasions. After the EU passed its landmark privacy law, the GDPR, there was a mass-extinction event for small EU ad-tech companies. These companies disappeared en masse and that’s a good thing. They were even more invasive and reckless than US-based Big Tech companies. We don’t want to produce increasing efficiency in violating our human rights.

But: Google and Facebook have been unscathed by European privacy law. That’s not because they don’t violate the GDPR. It’s because they pretend they are headquartered in Ireland, one of the EU’s most notorious corporate crime havens. And Ireland competes with the EU’s other crime havens — Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and, sometimes, the Netherlands — to see which country can offer the most hospitable environment.

The Irish Data Protection Commission rules on very few cases, and more than two-thirds of its rulings are overturned by the EU courts, even though Ireland is the nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent. So Google and Facebook get to act as though they are immune to privacy law, because they violate the law with an app.

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

More than half of all web users are blocking ads. But the web is an open platform, developed in the age when tech was hundreds of companies at each other’s throats, unable to capture their regulators. Today, the web is being devoured by apps, and apps are ripe for enshittification. Regulatory capture isn’t just the ability to flout regulation, it’s also the ability to co-opt regulation, to wield regulation against your adversaries.

Today’s tech giants got big by exploiting self-help measures. When Facebook was telling MySpace users they needed to escape Murdoch’s crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, “Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here.” It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your MySpace username and password, and it would login to MySpace and pretend to be you, scraping everything waiting in your inbox and copying it to your Facebook inbox.

When Microsoft was choking off Apple’s market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac in the 1990s — so that offices were throwing away their designers’ Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator — Steve Jobs didn’t beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office. He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could read and write Microsoft’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.

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

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

Try to make an alternative client for Facebook and they’ll say you violated US laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and EU laws like Article 6 of the EU Copyright Directive. Try to make an Android program that can run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple’s media stores and they’d bomb you until the rubble bounced. Try to scrape all of Google and they’ll nuke you until you glow.

Tech’s regulatory capture is mind-boggling. Take that law I mentioned earlier, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Bill Clinton signed it in 1998, and the EU imported it as Article 6 of the EUCD in 2001. It is a blanket prohibition on removing any kind of encryption that restricts access to a copyrighted work — things such as ripping DVDs or jailbreaking a phone — with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offence. This law has been so broadened that it can be used to imprison creators for granting access to their own creations. Here’s how that works: In 2008, Amazon bought Audible, an audiobook platform. Today, Audible is a monopolist with more than 90 per cent of the audiobook market. Audible requires that all creators on its platform sell with Amazon’s “digital rights management”, which locks it to Amazon’s apps.

So say I write a book, then I read it into a mic, then I pay a director and an engineer thousands of dollars to turn that into an audiobook, and sell it to you on the monopoly platform, Audible, that controls more than 90 per cent of the market. If I later decide to leave Amazon and want to let you come with me to a rival platform, I am out of luck. If I supply you with a tool to remove Amazon’s encryption from my audiobook, so you can play it in another app, I commit a felony, punishable by a five-year sentence and a half-million-dollar fine, for a first offence.

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

Think of our ad blockers again. Fifty per cent of web users are running ad blockers. Zero per cent of app users are running ad blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that’s a felony. (Jay Freeman, the American businessman and engineer, calls this “felony contempt of business-model”.)

So when someone in a boardroom says, “Let’s make our ads 20 per cent more obnoxious and get a 2 per cent revenue increase,” no one objects that this might prompt users to google, “How do I block ads?” After all, the answer is, you can’t. Indeed, it’s more likely that someone in that boardroom will say, “Let’s make our ads 100 per cent more obnoxious and get a 10 per cent revenue increase.” (This is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website.)

There’s no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn’t install a counter-app that co-ordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold. No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete or, in other words, “IP law”.

IP isn’t just short for intellectual property. It’s a euphemism for “a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers”. And “app” is just a euphemism for “a web page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to mod it, to protect the labour, consumer and privacy rights of its user”.

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

What about that fourth constraint: workers? For decades, tech workers’ bargaining power and vocational awe put a ceiling on enshittification. Even after the tech sector shrank to a handful of giants. Even after they captured their regulators. Even after “felony contempt of business model” and extinguished self-help for tech users. Tech was still constrained by their workers’ sense of moral injury in the face of the imperative to enshittify.

Remember when tech workers dreamt of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over? That dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake start-up, get “acqui-hired” by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion. Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.

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

Workers are no longer a check on their bosses’ worst impulses. Today, the response to “I refuse to make this product worse” is “turn in your badge and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out”.

I get that this is all a little depressing. OK, really depressing. But hear me out! We’ve identified the disease. We’ve identified its underlying mechanism. Now we can get to work on a cure.

There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labour. To reverse enshittification and guard against its re-emergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these.

On competition, it’s actually looking pretty good. The EU, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and China are all doing more on competition than they have in two generations. They’re blocking mergers, unwinding existing ones, taking action on predatory pricing and other sleazy tactics. Remember, in the US and Europe, we already have the laws to do this; we just stopped enforcing them.

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

Now, the enshittifiers aren’t taking this lying down. Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has run more than 80 pieces trashing Khan, insisting that she’s an ineffectual ideologue who can’t get anything done. Sure, that’s why you ran 80 editorials about her. Because she can’t get anything done.

Reagan and Thatcher put antitrust law in a coma in the 1980s. But it’s awake, it’s back and it’s pissed off.

What about regulation? How will we get tech companies to stop doing that one weird trick of adding “with an app” to escape enforcement?

Well, here in the EU, they’re starting to figure it out. Recently, the main body of the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act went into effect, and they let people who get screwed by tech companies go straight to the European courts, bypassing the toothless watchdogs in places like Ireland.

In the US, they might finally get a digital privacy law. You probably have no idea how backwards US privacy law is. The last time the US Congress enacted a broadly applicable privacy law was in 1988. The Video Privacy Protection Act makes it a crime for video-store clerks to leak your video-rental history. It was passed after a rightwing judge who was up for the Supreme Court had his rentals published in a DC newspaper. The rentals weren’t even all that embarrassing.

Sure, that judge, Robert Bork, wasn’t confirmed for the Supreme Court, but that was because he was a virulent loudmouth who served as Nixon’s solicitor-general. Still, Congress got the idea that their own video records might be next, freaked out and passed the VPPA. That was the last time Americans got a big, national privacy law. And the thing is, there are a lot of people who are angry about it. Worried that Facebook turned Grampy into a QAnon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing Gen Z into quoting Osama bin Laden?

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

Or that red state attorneys-general are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics?

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

Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

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

What about self-help? That’s a lot farther away, alas. The EU’s DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You’ll be able to use WhatsApp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind. But if you want to reverse-engineer one of those Big Tech products and mod it to work for you, not them, the EU’s got nothing for you. This is an area ripe for improvement. My big hope here is that Stein’s Law will take hold: anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop.

Finally, there’s labour. Here in Europe, there’s much higher union density than in the US, which American tech barons are learning the hard way. There is nothing more satisfying in the daily news than the recent salvo by Nordic unions against that Tesla guy. But even in the US, there’s a massive surge in tech unions. Tech workers have realised they’re not founders-in-waiting. In Seattle, Amazon’s tech workers walked out in sympathy with Amazon’s warehouse workers, because they’re all workers.

We’re seeing bold, muscular, global action on competition, regulation and labour, with self-help bringing up the rear. It’s not a moment too soon, because the bad news is enshittification is coming to every industry. If it’s got a networked computer in it, the people who made it can run the Darth Vader MBA playbook on it, changing the rules from moment to moment, violating your rights and then saying: “It’s OK, we did it with an app.”

From Mercedes effectively renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dish soap, enshittification is metastasising into every corner of our lives. Software doesn’t eat the world, it just enshittifies it.

There’s a bright side to all this: if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification. Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive. It’s unstoppable.

The cynics among you might be sceptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn’t “enshittification” the same as “capitalism”? Well, no.

I’m not going to cape for capitalism. I’m hardly a true believer in markets as the most efficient allocators of resources and arbiters of policy. But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and woolly internet, a space where people with disfavoured views could find each other, offer mutual aid and organise. The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crap gadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand names and cryptocurrency scams.

The internet isn’t more important than the climate emergency, gender justice, racial justice, genocide or inequality. But the internet is the terrain we’ll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it’s joined.

We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device. We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to co-ordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, save our planet and our species.

Martin Luther King said: “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.” And it may be true that the law can’t force corporations to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation. But it can make them fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity — even if they don’t think you deserve it.

---

Cory Doctorow is a special adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a visiting professor of computer science at the Open University. His next book ‘The Bezzle’, published by Head of Zeus, is out this month. This piece is adapted from his Marshall McLuhan Lecture, delivered at the Embassy of Canada in Berlin last month

[klanced]

katie your lawyer au tags have me on my knees I never thought guys in suits doing stuff would seem interesting but wow…wow. your mind

Thank u Anon this AU is incredibly indulgent for me.......... ok time 4 more world-building.

I think @heynhay's original idea of Keith & Lance working together at the same firm is best. For both plot reasons but also for my own morale LOL

So everyone works at a fairly large private firm that splits its practice and has some of its associates doing profit-driven law (i.e. corporate or finance) which subsidizes the public interest/service work that the other associates do.

The firm is like "Altea & Daibazaal LLP" or something. Yes I am implying that the firm was started by Alfor and Zarkon. Yes I am implying that Allura and Lotor are nepo babies.

I know I originally said that Keith and Lance were law school rivals but I've changed my mind... (RIP to the law school rivalry dynamics

Instead I'm making it so that Keith and Lance are the same age but Lance has been practicing longer because he went straight into law school after college. Whereas Keith started working after college and got like a Master's degree in Social Work or something before deciding on law school at 26. (I just think Keith is the kind of person who goes to law school later in life.)

Okay onto the specific Klance dynamics... Keith and Lance are both pushing 30 and are also literally lawyers so they are professional and serious about their work... But there is wiggle room for them to still be rivals :p

Lance and Keith are both junior associates at the firm. Lance has seniority because he's been at the firm longer but he's still a year or so away from formally becoming a senior associate.

Lance really, REALLY wants to make partner and he sees Keith as his biggest threat/rival because Keith is Shiro's little brother, and Shiro recently made partner at the firm, so Lance thinks Keith might be a nepo hire. Also some of the senior associates recently left the firm so now Lance is stuck showing Keith the ropes and he's lowkey super bitter about it.

Basically TLDR Lance starts off Not Liking Keith at all for various real or imagined reasons and begins a work rivalry with him. Keith doesn't actually GAF about making partner because he's only planning on working at the firm for a few years to help pay off his student loans, but Lance doesn't know that. However, Keith is a naturally very competitive person, and he also likes having Lance's attention, so Keith immediately goes all in on the rivalry.

Lance, internally: "This Fucking Guy."

Keith, internally: "I am so good at flirting."

The first few months are rough between them. However both are also incredibly productive in their work.

The romcom part of the AU kicks in once the two of them have to start working together on a huge high stakes civil case and they're both like wow.... *twirls hair* he's so competent.............. <3

Anyway misc. things:

TBH I have no idea what kind of law Keith and Lance might private practice... I'm also really torn on what Shiro, Allura, and Hunk would practice hdjsksdhedf

Pidge is hired on a fellowship for either environmental law or data security/privacy law.

Coran does employment law.

Keith went into law school planning on going into public interest/not-for-profit legal aid and swore he would never, ever do corporate law but then he saw his student loans and was like. Hm. Okay maybe some Biglaw is okay. And that's how he ended up at the firm.

Keith:

[j4m3s-b4k3r]

the rude roommate

There’s a presence following us everywhere. Insinuating itself into our lives, as we enjoy movies, TV shows and music. This rude roommate not only lives with us, but follows us to school, to work and everywhere else that we go, constantly blathering to wear us down. Posing as an indulgent pal, it offers tasty treats, with “go on, you’re worth it!” encouragements. Then, morphing into the concerned friend, it chides us “you’re getting some love handles there, buddy!” and pushes snake oil for that too. Yes, I’m talking about the shifting personas of ADVERTISING. 

You don’t truly notice the ever-present & manipulative jibber jabber of advertising till it’s not a part of your life. It’s like cigarette smoking in this. I was raised by on-again-off-again smokers, and for many years worked in offices permeated by ever present cigarette smoke. Soaking in it everywhere for my entire life, it was only upon moving to California (where it’d just been banned) that I truly became aware of smoking. After living smoke-free, I couldn’t believe the stench when visiting places that still allowed it in communal spaces. My own hair & clothes reeked of it, even though I didn’t smoke myself. Bleurgh!

Likewise, after soaking in advertising my entire life, I’ve only recently lived in a (relatively) ad-free bubble, enjoying media streaming services at home for the last few years. We just watched a movie in a cinema for the first time since 2019. Tickets were almost 20 dollars each for comfortable reserved seating in a beautiful theatre. Then we had to endure 30 minutes of constant advertising blather before the film. Not movie trailers mind you, but ads for clothes, soft drinks and so on. After living ad-free, this was excruciating, and eye-opening. Absence had not made my heart grow fonder. Quite the opposite.

The deal used to be that we tolerated the buzz of ads - like blowflies at a picnic - in exchange for free movies & music (on radio & TV). Nowadays, I pay extra for the ad-free option with entertainment media. Which is a blackmail shakedown - “Pay us, or you have to watch another incontinence commercial” - but at least I understand the terms of that arrangement. I don’t understand (or accept) any deal where I pay AND get ads too (which is why I didn’t have cable TV for very long). If theatres want us to come back en masse after the stay-at-home-years of covid, then making the experience special is key. For me, paying premium prices to watch Madison Avenue Punch & Judy shows is an absolute no no. 

Advertising is RUDE. The constant interruptions are simply annoying, but the purpose of the messages is insidious. In our real lives we are wary of people who constantly broadcast their own PR, because they’re trying to manipulate our perceptions of them. We must be on extra high alert for those who tell us what we are, because they’re trying to manipulate our own perceptions of ourselves.These are the goals of advertising’s trillion dollar industry. It is a nonstop psyop, fanning our hopes and inflaming our insecurities for profit.

“The spectacle of advertising creates images of false beauty so suave and so impossible to attain that you will hurt inside and never even know where the hurt comes from.” - Robert Montgomery

Ever since humans first gathered around fires and hearths, we’ve related to each other via stories. Stories are ‘lies’, in that many of them are 100% made up, but we know that and sharing them is fun. Besides, there may actually be a truth within the story. A parable. However, the human love of stories makes us vulnerable to manipulation by stories too. This is well known on Madison Avenue. Advertising subverts the parable, where the parable’s ‘moral’ has been substituted with a plug for Brand-X. 

It used to be that everyone was served the exact same ads at the same time, but we now live in the era of micro-targeted advertising. After sneakily looking through our private data, the rude roommate can now identify & hammer on each of our specific ‘problem areas’. Despite my attempts at internet ad-blocking, the rude roommate has a fairly accurate demographic profile of me, and websites I visit now display ads of male middle aged losers, worried about their dicks, bald spots, love handles & baggy eyes. The rude roommate has custom-curated these parables just for moi. If advertising was indeed your roommate, an actual person, they’d be the worst person you know. A passive aggressive, gaslighting master manipulator, and the last person you’d want constantly whispering in your ear. 

“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. — They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.” - Banksy

 “Narrative” has become a buzz word, and Hollywood folk (including story artists) now give story seminars to big companies. Wall Street, Langley, & Silicon Valley understand the appeal of storytelling, and Washington & Whitehall both use Spin Doctors to “get ahead of the story" and "control the narrative". The NSA & CIA know a little about narrative manipulation too, and even they are wary of internet advertising propaganda, and use ad-blocking software. Takes one to know one, right? Speaking of that, my own growing allergy to advertising is surely punishment for years of participation in the mass hypnosis. Yes, at one time I enabled the rude roommate, by animating parables that enticed kids to eat sugar bombs for breakfast..

Mea culpa!

Given that advertising so often subverts artforms, artists have been known to return the favour.  B.U.G.A.U.P. was a collective of Sydney graffiti artists active in the 1970s/80s who specifically targeted advertising, very active when I lived in that city. Their special brandalism defaced advertising billboards to subvert the intended message of the ad, revealing the hidden truth of the unhealthy product itself. These wittily-defaced billboards on commuter routes in Sydney were talking points at office coffee pots & tea urns each morning.

Their movement spread to other cities in Australia and even to other countries (I often wondered whether Banksy knew about them) and B.U.G.A.U.P. activism ultimately led to a ban on cigarette advertising in Australia in 1994. Advertising’s corrupted parables RE-made into truth telling parables again. Utterly brilliant.

PS: Full BANKSY QUOTE on advertising (as illustrated by Gavin Aung Than).

From www.James-Baker.com

[hospitalitiltd]

From Dishes to Data: How Hospitality Jobs in London Now Require Digital Skills

A few years ago, if you worked in a restaurant or hotel, you mostly needed to smile, serve and stay on your feet. But today, things have changed. In 2025, Hospitality jobs in London are not just about carrying plates or setting tables. Now, you also need to be comfortable with technology.

Yes, you heard that right.

Whether you’re working in a café, fine-dining restaurant, or hotel, digital tools are becoming a big part of the job. If you want to stay ahead in the hospitality industry, knowing how to use basic digital tools is a must.

Why Tech Matters in Hospitality Jobs

Technology has become a daily part of many hospitality roles. Here’s how:

1. Digital Menus and Contactless Ordering

Many restaurants in London now use QR-code menus. Guests scan the code, order on their phones and pay digitally. Staff should know how to explain this to customers, help with any confusion and update the menu when needed.

2. Modern Payment Systems

Gone are the days of handling cash. Restaurants now use smart POS (Point-of-Sale) systems like Square, EPOS Now, or Lightspeed. These systems help staff split bills, apply discounts and process refunds—all with a few taps.

3. Apps for Scheduling and Bookings

Managers use apps to plan shifts. Customers use apps to make bookings. Staff should know how to manage reservations, check schedules and communicate through team apps.

New Kinds of Hospitality Roles Are Coming Up

Technology has also created new job roles in the hospitality space. Some of these include:

Digital Guest Assistant – Helps guests with app check-ins and tech-based services.

Delivery & Online Menu Manager – Handles menus on apps like Uber Eats or Deliveroo.

Customer Experience Analyst – Looks at online reviews and customer feedback to improve service.

These roles weren’t common a few years ago. Now, many restaurants and hotels in London want people who understand both service and software.

What This Means for Job Seekers

If you’re applying for restaurant jobs in London, it’s a good idea to add your tech skills to your resume. Even basic ones!

Can you use Google Sheets? Have you worked with a POS machine? Do you know how to take bookings using an app?

Mentioning these can help you stand out.

How Hospitaliti Can Help You

If you’re looking for hospitality jobs in London, Hospitaliti is the platform for you. It connects you with restaurants and hotels that need skilled people—people who understand both customer service and digital tools.

The platform also highlights what kind of tech knowledge each job needs. This way, you know exactly what you’re applying for. No surprises.

Tips to Build Your Digital Skills

Want to get better with tech before applying? Here’s how:

Learn a POS System: Watch short videos on YouTube. Try a free demo version if available.

Use Scheduling Apps: Try apps like Google Calendar or Planday to get familiar.

Practice on Delivery Apps: Explore how online food platforms work. It helps you understand how orders are placed and managed.

Be Curious: Don’t be afraid to ask questions during training or try new tools on the job.

Even small efforts can help you land better jobs and grow faster in your career.

In last, if you want to do well in restaurant jobs in London, being comfortable with digital tools is a big plus. With platforms like Hospitaliti, finding the right tech-friendly job is easier than ever. So, get ready—because the future of hospitality is both hands-on and high-tech.

FAQs

Q1: Do I need to be a tech expert for hospitality jobs in London? No. Basic knowledge of common tools is enough. Being open to learning helps the most.

Q2: What digital tools are used in restaurant jobs in London? POS systems, digital menus, payment apps and booking platforms are common.

Q3: How can Hospitaliti help me find tech-friendly hospitality jobs? Hospitaliti shows roles that match your skills, including digital tools required.

Q4: Are digital skills important for future roles in hospitality? Yes. Knowing how to use tech can help you grow faster and earn better roles.

[transcuratorsblog]

How to Write Blog Intros That Hook Within 3 Seconds

You have just three seconds — or less — to grab a reader’s attention. That’s it. In a world where people scroll fast and bounce even faster, your blog introduction is your make-or-break moment.

You could have the best insights, stunning visuals, or a brilliant CTA at the end, but if your intro doesn’t hook readers immediately, they’ll never see it. This applies to blog posts just as much as it does to pay per click services — attention is the currency, and you must earn it fast.

Here’s how to craft powerful blog intros that stop the scroll, pull readers in, and make them want to keep going.

1. Start with a Problem They’re Desperate to Solve

One of the fastest ways to capture attention is by tapping directly into your reader’s pain point.

✅ Example:

"Still struggling to get blog traffic despite posting every week? You’re not alone — and here’s how to fix it."

This intro works because it:

Immediately identifies a relatable frustration

Promises a solution

Makes the reader feel understood

If your reader thinks, “That’s exactly what I’m dealing with,” — you’ve already won the click.

2. Ask a Compelling Question (And Promise to Answer It)

Questions spark curiosity and get readers thinking.

✅ Example:

"What if your blog intro could double your engagement — without writing a single extra paragraph?"

Now they want to know how. But make sure the question is specific and relevant. Generic questions like “Do you want to improve your blog?” fall flat.

Bonus: This tactic works especially well when writing for readers who also use pay per click services, where every second counts and intent must be clear.

3. Use a Bold, Unusual Statement

Saying something unexpected grabs attention.

✅ Example:

"Most blog intros are a waste of space. Yours might be too — unless you do this."

This works because it challenges the reader, making them pause and reevaluate. A bold stance sparks curiosity and sets a confident tone.

4. Share a Surprising Statistic or Fact

Hard numbers stop readers in their tracks — especially if they contradict assumptions or show urgency.

✅ Example:

"According to Nielsen, users typically leave a page within 10–20 seconds. But the first 3 seconds decide if they’ll even stay that long."

Startling stats lend authority to your content and make your post feel worth reading. Just ensure the data is relevant and recent.

5. Tell a One-Line Story

Mini-stories in the first two sentences can build immediate emotional connection.

✅ Example:

"Last year, a 2-minute intro rewrite turned a dead blog into a 300K-views-per-month machine. Here’s what changed."

Stories humanize your content. If readers feel a hint of drama, stakes, or transformation — they’ll follow along.

6. Set the Scene and Tease the Payoff

This is a classic copywriting method: build tension and hint at a benefit.

✅ Example:

"You’ve written the perfect blog. Great structure. Great visuals. But somehow… readers bounce. What’s missing? Probably the intro."

The intro sets the scene and teases what’s broken without revealing the full answer. Curiosity keeps the reader scrolling.

7. Keep It Short and Scannable

Long, dense introductions kill momentum. Your hook should be:

Under 100 words

Formatted with line breaks

Free of jargon or fluff

✅ Bad:

“In today’s fast-paced digital environment, creating compelling blog content is a key component of any modern marketing strategy, and crafting intros is one of the most important…”

✅ Better:

"Your intro isn’t just a welcome. It’s a test. Fail it, and your reader’s gone."

Short. Punchy. Clear.

Bonus Tips for Writing High-Converting Blog Intros

Write the intro last. You’ll write a sharper hook after the post is finished.

Mirror the search intent. Readers should feel, “Yes, this is what I came for.”

Use power words. Words like “revealed,” “secret,” “mistake,” “essential” boost engagement.

Match tone to topic. Formal intros for B2B, casual for lifestyle, urgent for finance or health.

Conclusion: Intros Are the New Headlines

Blog introductions have become just as important as titles — sometimes more. They decide whether the reader gives you a chance or closes the tab.

Whether you’re writing SEO content, case studies, or landing pages for pay per click services, your intro needs to hook, hold, and guide. Think of it as your content’s elevator pitch — you’ve only got a few seconds to prove it's worth reading.

Craft it with intent, test different angles, and always revise until it feels irresistible. Because if the intro fails, nothing else in the blog gets a chance to shine.

[apontejohell1]

We Buy Houses Laredo – Fast, Fair, and Hassle-Free Offers

Are you in a hurry to sell your house in Laredo, TX? Foreclosure is pending, divorce might be underway, or an inherited property is awaiting a title deed; one just might be tired to go through the stressful and time-taking process of listing it on the market. Then definitely, this is the right place for you! Here, at We Buy Houses Laredo, we help homeowners just like you who need to sell their houses in a hurry, pay a reasonable price, cash in hand, with as little hassle as possible.

Why Homeowners in Laredo Choose Us

Selling a home conventionally-folding in needing an agent there, necessary staging, opportunities for open houses, and sellers waiting-the total procedure can take months! And that is time some homeowners in Laredo simply cannot afford to lose. That's the whole link with us.

If you work with us, you have no agents, fees, or repairs. We buy Laredo houses as-is, implying that you don't have to spend one more dollar on fixing broken appliances, repainting walls, or cleaning up. The condition of your house is not important for us-we want it whether it is in excellent shape or has to go through huge fixes.

The Simple 3-Step Process

Selling your house with us is easy and transparent. Here's how it works:

1. Contact Us

On our website, you can fill out a quick form or call us up. Tell us about your property and your situation. It will only take a few minutes to get started.

2. Get a Fair Cash Offer

After inspection of the property, we shall make a no-obligation cash offer. Using local market data, the condition of the house, and your own timeline will form a fair and honest cash offer.

3. Close When You’re Ready

The closing date is up to you should you accept our offer. A quick closing could be done in 7 days; however, you may ask for some additional time if needed. We use a reputable local title company so that everything is legal, clear, and efficient.

No Commissions, No Hidden Fees

Commission fees or closing costs are not charged like in conventional sales. Thus, that is more money for you to keep. Many Laredo homeowners are likewise shocked about how much they save just by avoiding agent commissions, repair costs, and months of holding expenses like mortgage payments, insurance, and utilities.

We Buy Houses Laredo – For Any Reason

Life happens, and we understand that every homeowner’s situation is different. We buy houses in Laredo from people who are dealing with a wide variety of circumstances, including:

Foreclosure or pre-foreclosure

Divorce or separation

Job relocation or downsizing

Inherited unwanted property

Rental properties with bad tenants

Vacant or damaged homes

Behind on payments or taxes

Major repairs needed but no funds to fix them

No matter what your situation is, we’re here to help. Our goal is to make the selling process stress-free so you can move forward with peace of mind.

Local Experts Who Care

We’re not some national company without a face. We are local professionals, living and working here in Laredo. We know the local market, the values of this neighborhood, and what kind of problems homeowners in this area are dealing with. So we go out of our way to provide personal service to our clients, in respect, honesty, and care.

Real Testimonials from Laredo Sellers

“I had to get my house sold in a hurry because of a job move, and they did it under two weeks. No pressure, no hard sell, just an honest and efficient service!” —Maria G., Laredo, TX

“I inherited my parents’ home and couldn’t keep up with the upkeep. Selling through We Buy Houses Laredo saved me a ton of time and energy.” – Luis R., Laredo, TX

Ready to Sell? Let’s Talk.

If you say, "I need to sell my house fast," we can be of service to you. We purchase homes that residents of Laredo no longer want, require, or can pay for. The process is very simple, fair, and without pressure for you to say yes.

Don’t waste more time with showings, repairs, or waiting for offers that fall through. Reach out today and find out how easy it can be to sell your house quickly in Laredo. Stay tuned for our next blog, where we dive even deeper into Pflugerville Homeowners: We Buy Houses for Cash. You won’t want to miss it!

[justbookin]

India’s Fastest Bus Ticket Booking App – Try It Now!

Traveling by bus is one of the most affordable and convenient options in India, especially for short to mid-distance journeys. Whether you’re planning a quick weekend trip or a longer intercity journey, having a reliable app to book your bus tickets can save time, reduce stress, and keep your plans organized. That’s where Justbookinn comes in — your new go-to app for simple and fast bus ticket booking app.

Why Use a Bus Ticket Booking App?

Booking bus tickets online has quickly replaced the traditional method of standing in long queues or depending on travel agents. A mobile app gives you access to all available options in one place. You can compare prices, view seat availability, check bus timings, and book in just a few taps.

Convenience at Your Fingertips No matter where you are — home, office, or on the go — Justbookinn allows you to book your bus tickets instantly. With 24/7 availability, you can plan your trip whenever it’s convenient for you.

Multiple Payment Options The app supports all major payment methods including UPI, debit/credit cards, and popular wallets. You’ll also get instant confirmation, so there’s no guesswork involved.

Key Features of the Justbookinn App

Justbookinn is designed with simplicity and usability in mind. Here’s what makes it stand out:

Wide Network Coverage Whether you’re traveling within a state or across the country, Justbookinn connects you with thousands of bus operators offering routes across India.

Live Bus Tracking Once you’ve booked your seat, you can track the bus location in real-time. This helps you plan better, especially when coordinating with pickups or family.

Easy Seat Selection With an interactive seat map, you can choose your preferred seat — window, aisle, or sleeper — based on real-time availability.

Reschedule or Cancel with Ease Plans change, and Justbookinn understands that. You can reschedule or cancel bookings directly through the app with minimal hassle.

What Sets Justbookinn Apart?

It’s not just about booking a bus ticket. It’s about creating a smoother travel experience. Here’s why Justbookinn is different:

Simple Interface The app has a clutter-free layout that’s easy for anyone to use — even if you’re not tech-savvy.

Reliable Customer Support Got a question or need help? Justbookinn offers chat and phone support to assist you quickly, even during late hours.

Transparent Pricing There are no hidden charges. You’ll always know what you’re paying for, right down to the taxes.

More Than Just Buses — Future Travel Plans

While the app currently focuses on bus travel, the team behind Justbookinn is working toward expanding services to include flight ticket booking, online flight booking, and other travel-related features.

How to Get Started with Justbookinn

Getting started is quick and simple: Step 1: Download the App Available on both Android and iOS, the Justbookinn app can be downloaded from the Google Play Store or Apple App Store.

Step 2: Sign Up or Log In Use your phone number or email to register. It only takes a minute.

Step 3: Search for Buses Enter your departure city, destination, and travel date to browse available options.

Step 4: Choose & Book Pick your seat, select your bus, and proceed to payment. That’s it!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. Can I book tickets for someone else using Justbookinn? Yes, you can book a ticket for any traveler. Just make sure to enter their correct name and contact number during the booking.

2. What if I miss my bus? Missing your bus is treated as a no-show, and refunds are typically not available. However, some operators may offer partial refunds or flexible rebooking. Check the cancellation policy before booking.

3. Is it safe to pay online on Justbookinn? Yes, all transactions are encrypted and processed through secure gateways. Justbookinn uses industry-standard practices for data safety.

4. Will the app offer flight ticket booking in the future? Yes, the development team is actively working on adding flight ticket booking, online flight booking, and flight booking options to the app.

5. Can I get a refund if I cancel my ticket? Yes, refunds are available based on the cancellation policy of the specific bus operator. You’ll see the details before finalizing your booking.

Final Thoughts

Whether you’re a student, working professional, or a frequent traveler, Justbookinn makes bus ticket booking quick, easy, and dependable. And with plans to add flight ticket booking options soon, it’s a smart choice for travelers looking to manage all their trips in one app.

Try it now and take the hassle out of your next bus journey.

[anthony-brandify]

What Is Over The Top Marketing? [Complete Guide for 2025]

Over The Top (OTT) Marketing is quickly becoming the most powerful tool in modern advertising. As more viewers ditch traditional cable in favor of streaming services like Hulu, Max, and Roku, brands now have a smarter, more targeted way to get in front of their audience. But what exactly is OTT marketing, and why is it such a big deal in 2025?

Definition: What Is OTT Marketing?

"Over The Top" refers to any content delivered via the internet rather than traditional broadcast, cable, or satellite TV. OTT marketing involves placing video ads within that content — think commercials you see before or during a Hulu show, or on a Roku channel.

Unlike traditional TV ads, OTT allows for precise targeting based on location, demographics, income level, behaviors, devices, and more.

Why It Works in 2025

Streaming dominance: Nearly 9 out of 10 households now stream TV instead of cable.

Precise targeting: OTT uses data to reach only the right viewers.

More affordable: With CPMs starting at $6, OTT is accessible for local businesses.

No wasted spend: You don't pay to show ads to the wrong people or zip codes.

OTT vs. CTV: What’s the Difference?

These two terms are often used interchangeably, but they aren’t the same:

OTT = The content streamed online (Hulu, Tubi, Freevee, etc.)

CTV = The device it’s streamed on (Roku, Apple TV, Smart TVs)

At Over The Top Marketing, we specialize in both. You get access to premium content and control over which devices your ads run on.

Who Should Use OTT Advertising?

OTT works for almost every industry. We’ve built winning campaigns for:

Restaurants & Franchises

Retail & E-Commerce Brands

Law Firms & Political Campaigns

Healthcare & Cosmetic Clinics

Real Estate & Home Services

How Much Does OTT Advertising Cost?

Our pricing starts at just $6 per CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions). That means if you have a $1,000 budget, you can expect around 166,667 impressions.

And with no long-term contracts, you're never locked into spend that doesn’t deliver.

What Makes Over The Top Marketing Different?

Low CPM rates (starting at $6)

Real targeting: Age, income, device, location, behaviors

Self-serve pricing, expert-managed delivery

Full reporting & transparent metrics

No long-term contracts. Ever.

Getting Started: What to Do Next

If you're ready to place your brand directly on TVs, mobile devices, and streaming services your audience actually uses, we're here to help.

Visit OverTheTop.co to get your free targeting plan — no strings attached.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Can small businesses afford OTT advertising? A: Absolutely. With low minimums and CPMs starting at $6, OTT is no longer just for big brands.

Q: Can I target specific zip codes or neighborhoods? A: Yes! We use geofencing and data to pinpoint exact locations, even competitor storefronts.

Q: Will I know if it worked? A: Our reporting includes impressions, views, clicks, and offline visit attribution if applicable.

Want to dominate screens in 2025? Get started now at OverTheTop.co.

[chris-brandify]

What Is Over The Top Marketing? [Complete Guide for 2025]

Over The Top (OTT) Marketing is quickly becoming the most powerful tool in modern advertising. As more viewers ditch traditional cable in favor of streaming services like Hulu, Max, and Roku, brands now have a smarter, more targeted way to get in front of their audience. But what exactly is OTT marketing, and why is it such a big deal in 2025?

Definition: What Is OTT Marketing?

"Over The Top" refers to any content delivered via the internet rather than traditional broadcast, cable, or satellite TV. OTT marketing involves placing video ads within that content — think commercials you see before or during a Hulu show, or on a Roku channel.

Unlike traditional TV ads, OTT allows for precise targeting based on location, demographics, income level, behaviors, devices, and more.

Why It Works in 2025

Streaming dominance: Nearly 9 out of 10 households now stream TV instead of cable.

Precise targeting: OTT uses data to reach only the right viewers.

More affordable: With CPMs starting at $6, OTT is accessible for local businesses.

No wasted spend: You don't pay to show ads to the wrong people or zip codes.

OTT vs. CTV: What’s the Difference?

These two terms are often used interchangeably, but they aren’t the same:

OTT = The content streamed online (Hulu, Tubi, Freevee, etc.)

CTV = The device it’s streamed on (Roku, Apple TV, Smart TVs)

At Over The Top Marketing, we specialize in both. You get access to premium content and control over which devices your ads run on.

Who Should Use OTT Advertising?

OTT works for almost every industry. We’ve built winning campaigns for:

Restaurants & Franchises

Retail & E-Commerce Brands

Law Firms & Political Campaigns

Healthcare & Cosmetic Clinics

Real Estate & Home Services

How Much Does OTT Advertising Cost?

Our pricing starts at just $6 per CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions). That means if you have a $1,000 budget, you can expect around 166,667 impressions.

And with no long-term contracts, you're never locked into spend that doesn’t deliver.

What Makes Over The Top Marketing Different?

Low CPM rates (starting at $6)

Real targeting: Age, income, device, location, behaviors

Self-serve pricing, expert-managed delivery

Full reporting & transparent metrics

No long-term contracts. Ever.

Getting Started: What to Do Next

If you're ready to place your brand directly on TVs, mobile devices, and streaming services your audience actually uses, we're here to help.

Visit OverTheTop.co to get your free targeting plan — no strings attached.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Can small businesses afford OTT advertising? A: Absolutely. With low minimums and CPMs starting at $6, OTT is no longer just for big brands.

Q: Can I target specific zip codes or neighborhoods? A: Yes! We use geofencing and data to pinpoint exact locations, even competitor storefronts.

Q: Will I know if it worked? A: Our reporting includes impressions, views, clicks, and offline visit attribution if applicable.

Want to dominate screens in 2025? Get started now at OverTheTop.co.