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mostlysignssomeportents · 11 months ago

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“Disenshittify or Die”

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I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).

Last weekend, I traveled to Las Vegas for Defcon 32, where I had the immense privilege of giving a solo talk on Track 1, entitled "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification":

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861

This was a followup to last year's talk, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification," a talk that kicked off a lot of international interest in my analysis of platform decay ("enshittification"):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

The Defcon organizers have earned a restful week or two, and that means that the video of my talk hasn't yet been posted to Defcon's Youtube channel, so in the meantime, I thought I'd post a lightly edited version of my speech crib. If you're headed to Burning Man, you can hear me reprise this talk at Palenque Norte (7&E); I'm kicking off their lecture series on Tuesday, Aug 27 at 1PM.

What the fuck happened to the old, good internet?

I mean, sure, our bosses were a little surveillance-happy, and they were usually up for sharing their data with the NSA, and whenever there was a tossup between user security and growth, it was always YOLO time.

But Google Search used to work. Facebook used to show you posts from people you followed. Uber used to be cheaper than a taxi and pay the driver more than a cabbie made. Amazon used to sell products, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands. Apple used to defend your privacy, rather than spying on you with your no-modifications-allowed Iphone.

There was a time when you searching for an album on Spotify would get you that album – not a playlist of insipid AI-generated covers with the same name and art.

Microsoft used to sell you software – sure, it was buggy – but now they just let you access apps in the cloud, so they can watch how you use those apps and strip the features you use the most out of the basic tier and turn them into an upcharge.

What – and I cannot stress this enough – the fuck happened?!

I’m talking about enshittification.

Here’s what enshittification looks like from the outside: First, you see a company that’s being good to its end users. Google puts the best search results at the top; Facebook shows you a feed of posts from people and groups you followl; Uber charges small dollars for a cab; Amazon subsidizes goods and returns and shipping and puts the best match for your product search at the top of the page.

That’s stage one, being good to end users. But there’s another part of this stage, call it stage 1a). That’s figuring out how to lock in those users.

There’s so many ways to lock in users.

If you’re Facebook, the users do it for you. You joined Facebook because there were people there you wanted to hang out with, and other people joined Facebook to hang out with you.

That’s the old “network effects” in action, and with network effects come “the collective action problem." Because you love your friends, but goddamn are they a pain in the ass! You all agree that FB sucks, sure, but can you all agree on when it’s time to leave?

No way.

Can you agree on where to go next?

Hell no.

You’re there because that’s where the support group for your rare disease hangs out, and your bestie is there because that’s where they talk with the people in the country they moved away from, then there’s that friend who coordinates their kid’s little league car pools on FB, and the best dungeon master you know isn’t gonna leave FB because that’s where her customers are.

So you’re stuck, because even though FB use comes at a high cost – your privacy, your dignity and your sanity – that’s still less than the switching cost you’d have to bear if you left: namely, all those friends who have taken you hostage, and whom you are holding hostage

Now, sometimes companies lock you in with money, like Amazon getting you to prepay for a year’s shipping with Prime, or to buy your Audible books on a monthly subscription, which virtually guarantees that every shopping search will start on Amazon, after all, you’ve already paid for it.

Sometimes, they lock you in with DRM, like HP selling you a printer with four ink cartridges filled with fluid that retails for more than $10,000/gallon, and using DRM to stop you from refilling any of those ink carts or using a third-party cartridge. So when one cart runs dry, you have to refill it or throw away your investment in the remaining three cartridges and the printer itself.

Sometimes, it’s a grab bag:

You can’t run your Ios apps without Apple hardware;

you can’t run your Apple music, books and movies on anything except an Ios app;

your iPhone uses parts pairing – DRM handshakes between replacement parts and the main system – so you can’t use third-party parts to fix it; and

every OEM iPhone part has a microscopic Apple logo engraved on it, so Apple can demand that the US Customs and Border Service seize any shipment of refurb Iphone parts as trademark violations.

Think Different, amirite?

Getting you locked in completes phase one of the enshittification cycle and signals the start of phase two: making things worse for you to make things better for business customers.

For example, a platform might poison its search results, like Google selling more and more of its results pages to ads that are identified with lighter and lighter tinier and tinier type.

Or Amazon selling off search results and calling it an “ad” business. They make $38b/year on this scam. The first result for your search is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The first row is 25% more expensive than the best match. On average, the best match for your search is likely to be found seventeen places down on the results page.

Other platforms sell off your feed, like Facebook, which started off showing you the things you asked to see, but now the quantum of content from the people you follow has dwindled to a homeopathic residue, leaving a void that Facebook fills with things that people pay to show you: boosted posts from publishers you haven’t subscribed to, and, of course, ads.

Now at this point you might be thinking ‘sure, if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.'

Bullshit!

Bull.

Shit.

The people who buy those Google ads? They pay more every year for worse ad-targeting and more ad-fraud

Those publishers paying to nonconsensually cram their content into your Facebook feed? They have to do that because FB suppresses their ability to reach the people who actually subscribed to them

The Amazon sellers with the best match for your query have to outbid everyone else just to show up on the first page of results. It costs so much to sell on Amazon that between 45-51% of every dollar an independent seller brings in has to be kicked up to Don Bezos and the Amazon crime family. Those sellers don’t have the kind of margins that let them pay 51% They have to raise prices in order to avoid losing money on every sale.

"But wait!" I hear you say!

[Come on, say it!]

"But wait! Things on Amazon aren’t more expensive that things at Target, or Walmart, or at a mom and pop store, or direct from the manufacturer.

"How can sellers be raising prices on Amazon if the price at Amazon is the same as at is everywhere else?"

[Any guesses?!]

That’s right, they charge more everywhere. They have to. Amazon binds its sellers to a policy called “most favored nation status,” which says they can’t charge more on Amazon than they charge elsewhere, including direct from their own factory store.

So every seller that wants to sell on Amazon has to raise their prices everywhere else.

Now, these sellers are Amazon’s best customers. They’re paying for the product, and they’re still getting screwed.

Paying for the product doesn’t fill your vapid boss’s shriveled heart with so much joy that he decides to stop trying to think of ways to fuck you over.

Look at Apple. Remember when Apple offered every Ios user a one-click opt out for app-based surveillance? And 96% of users clicked that box?

(The other four percent were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees.)

That cost Facebook at least ten billion dollars per year in lost surveillance revenue?

I mean, you love to see it.

But did you know that at the same time Apple started spying on Ios users in the same way that Facebook had been, for surveillance data to use to target users for its competing advertising product?

Your Iphone isn’t an ad-supported gimme. You paid a thousand fucking dollars for that distraction rectangle in your pocket, and you’re still the product. What’s more, Apple has rigged Ios so that you can’t mod the OS to block its spying.

If you’re not not paying for the product, you’re the product, and if you are paying for the product, you’re still the product.

Just ask the farmers who are expected to swap parts into their own busted half-million dollar, mission-critical tractors, but can’t actually use those parts until a technician charges them $200 to drive out to the farm and type a parts pairing unlock code into their console.

John Deere’s not giving away tractors. Give John Deere a half mil for a tractor and you will be the product.

Please, my brothers and sisters in Christ. Please! Stop saying ‘if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.’

OK, OK, so that’s phase two of enshittification.

Phase one: be good to users while locking them in.

Phase two: screw the users a little to you can good to business customers while locking them in.

Phase three: screw everybody and take all the value for yourself. Leave behind the absolute bare minimum of utility so that everyone stays locked into your pile of shit.

Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.

That’s what enshittification looks like from the outside, but what’s going on inside the company? What is the pathological mechanism? What sci-fi entropy ray converts the excellent and useful service into a pile of shit?

That mechanism is called twiddling. Twiddling is when someone alters the back end of a service to change how its business operates, changing prices, costs, search ranking, recommendation criteria and other foundational aspects of the system.

Digital platforms are a twiddler’s utopia. A grocer would need an army of teenagers with pricing guns on rollerblades to reprice everything in the building when someone arrives who’s extra hungry.

Whereas the McDonald’s Investments portfolio company Plexure advertises that it can use surveillance data to predict when an app user has just gotten paid so the seller can tack an extra couple bucks onto the price of their breakfast sandwich.

And of course, as the prophet William Gibson warned us, ‘cyberspace is everting.' With digital shelf tags, grocers can change prices whenever they feel like, like the grocers in Norway, whose e-ink shelf tags change the prices 2,000 times per day.

Every Uber driver is offered a different wage for every job. If a driver has been picky lately, the job pays more. But if the driver has been desperate enough to grab every ride the app offers, the pay goes down, and down, and down.

The law professor Veena Dubal calls this ‘algorithmic wage discrimination.' It’s a prime example of twiddling.

Every youtuber knows what it’s like to be twiddled. You work for weeks or months, spend thousands of dollars to make a video, then the algorithm decides that no one – not your own subscribers, not searchers who type in the exact name of your video – will see it.

Why? Who knows? The algorithm’s rules are not public.

Because content moderation is the last redoubt of security through obscurit: they can’t tell you what the como algorithm is downranking because then you’d cheat.

Youtube is the kind of shitty boss who docks every paycheck for all the rules you’ve broken, but won’t tell you what those rules were, lest you figure out how to break those rules next time without your boss catching you.

Twiddling can also work in some users’ favor, of course. Sometimes platforms twiddle to make things better for end users or business customers.

For example, Emily Baker-White from Forbes revealed the existence of a back-end feature that Tiktok’s management can access they call the “heating tool.”

When a manager applies the heating toll to a performer’s account, that performer’s videos are thrust into the feeds of millions of users, without regard to whether the recommendation algorithm predicts they will enjoy that video.

Why would they do this? Well, here’s an analogy from my boyhood I used to go to this traveling fair that would come to Toronto at the end of every summer, the Canadian National Exhibition. If you’ve been to a fair like the Ex, you know that you can always spot some guy lugging around a comedically huge teddy bear.

Nominally, you win that teddy bear by throwing five balls in a peach-basket, but to a first approximation, no one has ever gotten five balls to stay in that peach-basket.

That guy “won” the teddy bear when a carny on the midway singled him out and said, "fella, I like your face. Tell you what I’m gonna do: You get just one ball in the basket and I’ll give you this keychain, and if you amass two keychains, I’ll let you trade them in for one of these galactic-scale teddy-bears."

That’s how the guy got his teddy bear, which he now has to drag up and down the midway for the rest of the day.

Why the hell did that carny give away the teddy bear? Because it turns the guy into a walking billboard for the midway games. If that dopey-looking Judas Goat can get five balls into a peach basket, then so can you.

Except you can’t.

Tiktok’s heating tool is a way to give away tactical giant teddy bears. When someone in the TikTok brain trust decides they need more sports bros on the platform, they pick one bro out at random and make him king for the day, heating the shit out of his account.

That guy gets a bazillion views and he starts running around on all the sports bro forums trumpeting his success: *I am the Louis Pasteur of sports bro influencers!"

The other sports bros pile in and start retooling to make content that conforms to the idiosyncratic Tiktok format. When they fail to get giant teddy bears of their own, they assume that it’s because they’re doing Tiktok wrong, because they don’t know about the heating tool.

But then comes the day when the TikTok Star Chamber decides they need to lure in more astrologers, so they take the heat off that one lucky sports bro, and start heating up some lucky astrologer.

Giant teddy bears are all over the place: those Uber drivers who were boasting to the NYT ten years ago about earning $50/hour? The Substackers who were rolling in dough? Joe Rogan and his hundred million dollar Spotify payout? Those people are all the proud owners of giant teddy bears, and they’re a steal.

Because every dollar they get from the platform turns into five dollars worth of free labor from suckers who think they just internetting wrong.

Giant teddy bears are just one way of twiddling. Platforms can play games with every part of their business logic, in highly automated ways, that allows them to quickly and efficiently siphon value from end users to business customers and back again, hiding the pea in a shell game conducted at machine speeds, until they’ve got everyone so turned around that they take all the value for themselves.

That’s the how: How the platforms do the trick where they are good to users, then lock users in, then maltreat users to be good to business customers, then lock in those business customers, then take all the value for themselves.

So now we know what is happening, and how it is happening, all that’s left is why it’s happening.

Now, on the one hand, the why is pretty obvious. The less value that end-users and business customers capture, the more value there is left to divide up among the shareholders and the executives.

That’s why, but it doesn’t tell you why now. Companies could have done this shit at any time in the past 20 years, but they didn’t. Or at least, the successful ones didn’t. The ones that turned themselves into piles of shit got treated like piles of shit. We avoided them and they died.

Remember Myspace? Yahoo Search? Livejournal? Sure, they’re still serving some kind of AI slop or programmatic ad junk if you hit those domains, but they’re gone.

And there’s the clue: It used to be that if you enshittified your product, bad things happened to your company. Now, there are no consequences for enshittification, so everyone’s doing it.

Let’s break that down: What stops a company from enshittifying?

There are four forces that discipline tech companies. The first one is, obviously, competition.

If your customers find it easy to leave, then you have to worry about them leaving

Many factors can contribute to how hard or easy it is to depart a platform, like the network effects that Facebook has going for it. But the most important factor is whether there is anywhere to go.

Back in 2012, Facebook bought Insta for a billion dollars. That may seem like chump-change in these days of eleven-digit Big Tech acquisitions, but that was a big sum in those innocent days, and it was an especially big sum to pay for Insta. The company only had 13 employees, and a mere 25 million registered users.

But what mattered to Zuckerberg wasn’t how many users Insta had, it was where those users came from.

[Does anyone know where those Insta users came from?]

That’s right, they left Facebook and joined Insta. They were sick of FB, even though they liked the people there, they hated creepy Zuck, they hated the platform, so they left and they didn’t come back.

So Zuck spent a cool billion to recapture them, A fact he put in writing in a midnight email to CFO David Ebersman, explaining that he was paying over the odds for Insta because his users hated him, and loved Insta. So even if they quit Facebook (the platform), they would still be captured Facebook (the company).

Now, on paper, Zuck’s Instagram acquisition is illegal, but normally, that would be hard to stop, because you’d have to prove that he bought Insta with the intention of curtailing competition.

But in this case, Zuck tripped over his own dick: he put it in writing.

But Obama’s DoJ and FTC just let that one slide, following the pro-monopoly policies of Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and setting an example that Trump would follow, greenlighting gigamergers like the catastrophic, incestuous Warner-Discovery marriage.

Indeed, for 40 years, starting with Carter, and accelerating through Reagan, the US has encouraged monopoly formation, as an official policy, on the grounds that monopolies are “efficient.”

If everyone is using Google Search, that’s something we should celebrate. It means they’ve got the very best search and wouldn’t it be perverse to spend public funds to punish them for making the best product?

But as we all know, Google didn’t maintain search dominance by being best. They did it by paying bribes. More than 20 billion per year to Apple alone to be the default Ios search, plus billions more to Samsung, Mozilla, and anyone else making a product or service with a search-box on it, ensuring that you never stumble on a search engine that’s better than theirs.

Which, in turn, ensured that no one smart invested big in rival search engines, even if they were visibly, obviously superior. Why bother making something better if Google’s buying up all the market oxygen before it can kindle your product to life?

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon – they’re not “making things” companies, they’re “buying things” companies, taking advantage of official tolerance for anticompetitive acquisitions, predatory pricing, market distorting exclusivity deals and other acts specifically prohibited by existing antitrust law.

Their goal is to become too big to fail, because that makes them too big to jail, and that means they can be too big to care.

Which is why Google Search is a pile of shit and everything on Amazon is dropshipped garbage that instantly disintegrates in a cloud of offgassed volatile organic compounds when you open the box.

Once companies no longer fear losing your business to a competitor, it’s much easier for them to treat you badly, because what’re you gonna do?

Remember Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator in those old SNL sketches? “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”

Competition is the first force that serves to discipline companies and the enshittificatory impulses of their leadership, and we just stopped enforcing competition law.

It takes a special kind of smooth-brained asshole – that is, an establishment economist – to insist that the collapse of every industry from eyeglasses to vitamin C into a cartel of five or fewer companies has nothing to do with policies that officially encouraged monopolization.

It’s like we used to put down rat poison and we didn’t have a rat problem. Then these dickheads convinced us that rats were good for us and we stopped putting down rat poison, and now rats are gnawing our faces off and they’re all running around saying, "Who’s to say where all these rats came from? Maybe it was that we stopped putting down poison, but maybe it’s just the Time of the Rats. The Great Forces of History bearing down on this moment to multiply rats beyond all measure!"

Antitrust didn’t slip down that staircase and fall spine-first on that stiletto: they stabbed it in the back and then they pushed it.

And when they killed antitrust, they also killed regulation, the second force that disciplines companies. Regulation is possible, but only when the regulator is more powerful than the regulated entities. When a company is bigger than the government, it gets damned hard to credibly threaten to punish that company, no matter what its sins.

That’s what protected IBM for all those years when it had its boot on the throat of the American tech sector. Do you know, the DOJ fought to break up IBM in the courts from 1970-1982, and that every year, for 12 consecutive years, IBM spent more on lawyers to fight the USG than the DOJ Antitrust Division spent on all the lawyers fighting every antitrust case in the entire USA?

IBM outspent Uncle Sam for 12 years. People called it “Antitrust’s Vietnam.” All that money paid off, because by 1982, the president was Ronald Reagan, a man whose official policy was that monopolies were “efficient." So he dropped the case, and Big Blue wriggled off the hook.

It’s hard to regulate a monopolist, and it’s hard to regulate a cartel. When a sector is composed of hundreds of competing companies, they compete. They genuinely fight with one another, trying to poach each others’ customers and workers. They are at each others’ throats.

It’s hard enough for a couple hundred executives to agree on anything. But when they’re legitimately competing with one another, really obsessing about how to eat each others’ lunches, they can’t agree on anything.

The instant one of them goes to their regulator with some bullshit story, about how it’s impossible to have a decent search engine without fine-grained commercial surveillance; or how it’s impossible to have a secure and easy to use mobile device without a total veto over which software can run on it; or how it’s impossible to administer an ISP’s network unless you can slow down connections to servers whose owners aren’t paying bribes for “premium carriage"; there’s some *other company saying, “That’s bullshit”

“We’ve managed it! Here’s our server logs, our quarterly financials and our customer testimonials to prove it.”

100 companies are a rabble, they're a mob. They can’t agree on a lobbying position. They’re too busy eating each others’ lunch to agree on how to cater a meeting to discuss it.

But let those hundred companies merge to monopoly, absorb one another in an incestuous orgy, turn into five giant companies, so inbred they’ve got a corporate Habsburg jaw, and they become a cartel.

It’s easy for a cartel to agree on what bullshit they’re all going to feed their regulator, and to mobilize some of the excess billions they’ve reaped through consolidation, which freed them from “wasteful competition," sp they can capture their regulators completely.

You know, Congress used to pass federal consumer privacy laws? Not anymore.

The last time Congress managed to pass a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988: The Video Privacy Protection Act. That’s a law that bans video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you take home. In other words, it regulates three things that have effectively ceased to exist.

The threat of having your video rental history out there in the public eye was not the last or most urgent threat the American public faced, and yet, Congress is deadlocked on passing a privacy law.

Tech companies’ regulatory capture involves a risible and transparent gambit, that is so stupid, it’s an insult to all the good hardworking risible transparent ruses out there.

Namely, they claim that when they violate your consumer, privacy or labor rights, It’s not a crime, because they do it with an app.

Algorithmic wage discrimination isn’t illegal wage theft: we do it with an app.

Spying on you from asshole to appetite isn’t a privacy violation: we do it with an app.

And Amazon’s scam search tool that tricks you into paying 29% more than the best match for your query? Not a ripoff. We do it with an app.

Once we killed competition – stopped putting down rat poison – we got cartels – the rats ate our faces. And the cartels captured their regulators – the rats bought out the poison factory and shut it down.

So companies aren’t constrained by competition or regulation.

But you know what? This is tech, and tech is different.IIt’s different because it’s flexible. Because our computers are Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines. That means that any enshittificatory alteration to a program can be disenshittified with another program.

Every time HP jacks up the price of ink , they invite a competitor to market a refill kit or a compatible cartridge.

When Tesla installs code that says you have to pay an extra monthly fee to use your whole battery, they invite a modder to start selling a kit to jailbreak that battery and charge it all the way up.

Lemme take you through a little example of how that works: Imagine this is a product design meeting for our company’s website, and the guy leading the meeting says “Dudes, you know how our KPI is topline ad-revenue? Well, I’ve calculated that if we make the ads just 20% more invasive and obnoxious, we’ll boost ad rev by 2%”

This is a good pitch. Hit that KPI and everyone gets a fat bonus. We can all take our families on a luxury ski vacation in Switzerland.

But here’s the thing: someone’s gonna stick their arm up – someone who doesn’t give a shit about user well-being, and that person is gonna say, “I love how you think, Elon. But has it occurred to you that if we make the ads 20% more obnoxious, then 40% of our users will go to a search engine and type 'How do I block ads?'"

I mean, what a nightmare! Because once a user does that, the revenue from that user doesn’t rise to 102%. It doesn’t stay at 100% It falls to zero, forever.

[Any guesses why?]

Because no user ever went back to the search engine and typed, 'How do I start seeing ads again?'

Once the user jailbreaks their phone or discovers third party ink, or develops a relationship with an independent Tesla mechanic who’ll unlock all the DLC in their car, that user is gone, forever.

Interoperability – that latent property bequeathed to us courtesy of Herrs Turing and Von Neumann and their infinitely flexible, universal machines – that is a serious check on enshittification.

The fact that Congress hasn’t passed a privacy law since 1988 Is countered, at least in part, by the fact that the majority of web users are now running ad-blockers, which are also tracker-blockers.

But no one’s ever installed a tracker-blocker for an app. Because reverse engineering an app puts in you jeopardy of criminal and civil prosecution under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with penalties of a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

And violating its terms of service puts you in jeopardy under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which is the law that Ronald Reagan signed in a panic after watching Wargames (seriously!).

Helping other users violate the terms of service can get you hit with a lawsuit for tortious interference with contract. And then there’s trademark, copyright and patent.

All that nonsense we call “IP,” but which Jay Freeman of Cydia calls “Felony Contempt of Business Model."

So if we’re still at that product planning meeting and now it’s time to talk about our app, the guy leading the meeting says, “OK, so we’ll make the ads in the app 20% more obnoxious to pull a 2% increase in topline ad rev?”

And that person who objected to making the website 20% worse? Their hand goes back up. Only this time they say “Why don’t we make the ads 100% more invasive and get a 10% increase in ad rev?"

Because it doesn't matter if a user goes to a search engine and types, “How do I block ads in an app." The answer is: you can't. So YOLO, enshittify away.

“IP” is just a euphemism for “any law that lets me reach outside my company’s walls to exert coercive control over my critics, competitors and customers,” and “app” is just a euphemism for “A web page skinned with the right IP so that protecting your privacy while you use it is a felony.”

Interop used to keep companies from enshittifying. If a company made its client suck, someone would roll out an alternative client, if they ripped a feature out and wanted to sell it back to you as a monthly subscription, someone would make a compatible plugin that restored it for a one-time fee, or for free.

To help people flee Myspace, FB gave them bots that you’d load with your login credentials. It would scrape your waiting Myspace messages and put ‘em in your FB inbox, and login to Myspace and paste your replies into your Myspace outbox. So you didn’t have to choose between the people you loved on Myspace, and Facebook, which launched with a promise never to spy on you. Remember that?!

Thanks to the metastasis of IP, all that is off the table today. Apple owes its very existence to iWork Suite, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote are file-compatible with Microsoft’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But make an IOS runtime that’ll play back the files you bought from Apple’s stores on other platforms, and they’ll nuke you til you glow.

FB wouldn’t have had a hope of breaking Myspace’s grip on social media without that scrape, but scrape FB today in support of an alternative client and their lawyers will bomb you til the rubble bounces.

Google scraped every website in the world to create its search index. Try and scrape Google and they’ll have your head on a pike.

When they did it, it was progress. When you do it to them, that’s piracy. Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

Because this handful of companies has so thoroughly captured their regulators, they can wield the power of the state against you when you try to break their grip on power, even as their own flagrant violations of our rights go unpunished. Because they do them with an app.

Tech lost its fear of competitin it neutralized the threat from regulators, and then put them in harness to attack new startups that might do unto them as they did unto the companies that came before them.

But even so, there was a force that kept our bosses in check That force was us. Tech workers.

Tech workers have historically been in short supply, which gave us power, and our bosses knew it.

To get us to work crazy hours, they came up with a trick. They appealed to our love of technology, and told us that we were heroes of a digital revolution, who would “organize the world’s information and make it useful,” who would “bring the world closer together.”

They brought in expert set-dressers to turn our workplaces into whimsical campuses with free laundry, gourmet cafeterias, massages, and kombucha, and a surgeon on hand to freeze our eggs so that we could work through our fertile years.

They convinced us that we were being pampered, rather than being worked like government mules.

This trick has a name. Fobazi Ettarh, the librarian-theorist, calls it “vocational awe, and Elon Musk calls it being “extremely hardcore.”

This worked very well. Boy did we put in some long-ass hours!

But for our bosses, this trick failed badly. Because if you miss your mother’s funeral and to hit a deadline, and then your boss orders you to enshittify that product, you are gonna experience a profound moral injury, which you are absolutely gonna make your boss share.

Because what are they gonna do? Fire you? They can’t hire someone else to do your job, and you can get a job that’s even better at the shop across the street.

So workers held the line when competition, regulation and interop failed.

But eventually, supply caught up with demand. Tech laid off 260,000 of us last year, and another 100,000 in the first half of this year.

You can’t tell your bosses to go fuck themselves, because they’ll fire your ass and give your job to someone who’ll be only too happy to enshittify that product you built.

That’s why this is all happening right now. Our bosses aren’t different. They didn’t catch a mind-virus that turned them into greedy assholes who don’t care about our users’ wellbeing or the quality of our products.

As far as our bosses have always been concerned, the point of the business was to charge the most, and deliver the least, while sharing as little as possible with suppliers, workers, users and customers. They’re not running charities.

Since day one, our bosses have shown up for work and yanked as hard as they can on the big ENSHITTIFICATION lever behind their desks, only that lever didn’t move much. It was all gummed up by competition, regulation, interop and workers.

As those sources of friction melted away, the enshittification lever started moving very freely.

Which sucks, I know. But think about this for a sec: our bosses, despite being wildly imperfect vessels capable of rationalizing endless greed and cheating, nevertheless oversaw a series of actually great products and services.

Not because they used to be better people, but because they used to be subjected to discipline.

So it follows that if we want to end the enshittocene, dismantle the enshitternet, and build a new, good internet that our bosses can’t wreck, we need to make sure that these constraints are durably installed on that internet, wound around its very roots and nerves. And we have to stand guard over it so that it can’t be dismantled again.

A new, good internet is one that has the positive aspects of the old, good internet: an ethic of technological self-determination, where users of technology (and hackers, tinkerers, startups and others serving as their proxies) can reconfigure and mod the technology they use, so that it does what they need it to do, and so that it can’t be used against them.

But the new, good internet will fix the defects of the old, good internet, the part that made it hard to use for anyone who wasn’t us. And hell yeah we can do that. Tech bosses swear that it’s impossible, that you can’t have a conversation friend without sharing it with Zuck; or search the web without letting Google scrape you down to the viscera; or have a phone that works reliably without giving Apple a veto over the software you install.

They claim that it’s a nonsense to even ponder this kind of thing. It’s like making water that’s not wet. But that’s bullshit. We can have nice things. We can build for the people we love, and give them a place that’s worth of their time and attention.

To do that, we have to install constraints.

The first constraint, remember, is competition. We’re living through a epochal shift in competition policy. After 40 years with antitrust enforcement in an induced coma, a wave of antitrust vigor has swept through governments all over the world. Regulators are stepping in to ban monopolistic practices, open up walled gardens, block anticompetitive mergers, and even unwind corrupt mergers that were undertaken on false pretenses.

Normally this is the place in the speech where I’d list out all the amazing things that have happened over the past four years. The enforcement actions that blocked companies from becoming too big to care, and that scared companies away from even trying.

Like Wiz, which just noped out of the largest acquisition offer in history, turning down Google’s $23b cashout, and deciding to, you know, just be a fucking business that makes money by producing a product that people want and selling it at a competitive price.

Normally, I’d be listing out FTC rulemakings that banned noncompetes nationwid. Or the new merger guidelines the FTC and DOJ cooked up, which – among other things – establish that the agencies should be considering whether a merger will negatively impact privacy.

I had a whole section of this stuff in my notes, a real victory lap, but I deleted it all this week.

[Can anyone guess why?]

That’s right! This week, Judge Amit Mehta, ruling for the DC Circuit of these United States of America, In the docket 20-3010 a case known as United States v. Google LLC, found that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," and ordered Google and the DOJ to propose a schedule for a remedy, like breaking the company up.

So yeah, that was pretty fucking epic.

Now, this antitrust stuff is pretty esoteric, and I won’t gatekeep you or shame you if you wanna keep a little distance on this subject. Nearly everyone is an antitrust normie, and that's OK. But if you’re a normie, you’re probably only catching little bits and pieces of the narrative, and let me tell you, the monopolists know it and they are flooding the zone.

The Wall Street Journal has published over 100 editorials condemning FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying she’s an ineffectual do-nothing, wasting public funds chasing doomed, quixotic adventures against poor, innocent businesses accomplishing nothing

[Does anyone out there know who owns the Wall Street Journal?]

That’s right, it’s Rupert Murdoch. Do you really think Rupert Murdoch pays his editorial board to write one hundred editorials about someone who’s not getting anything done?

The reality is that in the USA, in the UK, in the EU, in Australia, in Canada, in Japan, in South Korea, even in China, we are seeing more antitrust action over the past four years than over the preceding forty years.

Remember, competition law is actually pretty robust. The problem isn’t the law, It’s the enforcement priorities. Reagan put antitrust in mothballs 40 years ago, but that elegant weapon from a more civilized age is now back in the hands of people who know how to use it, and they’re swinging for the fences.

Next up: regulation.

As the seemingly inescapable power of the tech giants is revealed for the sham it always was, governments and regulators are finally gonna kill the “one weird trick” of violating the law, and saying “It doesn’t count, we did it with an app.”

Like in the EU, they’re rolling out the Digital Markets Act this year. That’s a law requiring dominant platforms to stand up APIs so that third parties can offer interoperable services.

So a co-op, a nonprofit, a hobbyist, a startup, or a local government agency wil eventuallyl be able to offer, say, a social media server that can interconnect with one of the dominant social media silos, and users who switch to that new platform will be able to continue to exchange messages with the users they follow and groups they belong to, so the switching costs will fall to damned near zero.

That’s a very cool rule, but what’s even cooler is how it’s gonna be enforced. Previous EU tech rules were “regulations” as in the GDPR – the General Data Privacy Regulation. EU regs need to be “transposed” into laws in each of the 27 EU member states, so they become national laws that get enforced by national courts.

For Big Tech, that means all previous tech regulations are enforced in Ireland, because Ireland is a tax haven, and all the tech companies fly Irish flags of convenience.

Here’s the thing: every tax haven is also a crime haven. After all, if Google can pretend it’s Irish this week, it can pretend to be Cypriot, or Maltese, or Luxembougeious next week. So Ireland has to keep these footloose criminal enterprises happy, or they’ll up sticks and go somewhere else.

This is why the GDPR is such a goddamned joke in practice. Big tech wipes its ass with the GDPR, and the only way to punish them starts with Ireland’s privacy commissioner, who barely bothers to get out of bed. This is an agency that spends most of its time watching cartoons on TV in its pajamas and eating breakfast cereal. So all of the big GDPR cases go to Ireland and they die there.

This is hardly a secret. The European Commission knows it’s going on. So with the DMA, the Commission has changed things up: The DMA is an “Act,” not a “Regulation.” Meaning it gets enforced in the EU’s federal courts, bypassing the national courts in crime-havens like Ireland.

In other words, the “we violate privacy law, but we do it with an app” gambit that worked on Ireland’s toothless privacy watchdog is now a dead letter, because EU federal judges have no reason to swallow that obvious bullshit.

Here in the US, the dam is breaking on federal consumer privacy law – at last!

Remember, our last privacy law was passed in 1988 to protect the sanctity of VHS rental history. It's been a minute.

And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden? Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google? Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics? Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms? Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

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 pretty big coalition for that kind of privacy law! Which is why we have seen a procession of imperfect (but steadily improving) privacy laws working their way through Congress.

If you sign up for EFF’s mailing list at eff.org we’ll send you an email when these come up, so you can call your Congressjerk or Senator and talk to them about it. Or better yet, make an appointment to drop by their offices when they’re in their districts, and explain to them that you’re not just a registered voter from their district, you’re the kind of elite tech person who goes to Defcon, and then explain the bill to them. That stuff makes a difference.

What about self-help? How are we doing on making interoperability legal again, so hackers can just fix shit without waiting for Congress or a federal agency to act?

All the action here these day is in the state Right to Repair fight. We’re getting state R2R bills, like the one that passed this year in Oregon that bans parts pairing, where DRM is used to keep a device from using a new part until it gets an authorized technician’s unlock code.

These bills are pushed by a fantastic group of organizations called the Repair Coalition, at Repair.org, and they’ll email you when one of these laws is going through your statehouse, so you can meet with your state reps and explain to the JV squad the same thing you told your federal reps.

Repair.org’s prime mover is Ifixit, who are genuine heroes of the repair revolution, and Ifixit’s founder, Kyle Wiens, is here at the con. When you see him, you can shake his hand and tell him thanks, and that’ll be even better if you tell him that you’ve signed up to get alerts at repair.org!

Now, on to the final way that we reverse enhittification and build that new, good internet: you, the tech labor force.

For years, your bosses tricked you into thinking you were founders in waiting, temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who were only momentarily drawing a salary.

You certainly weren’t workers. Your power came from your intrinsic virtue, not like those lazy slobs in unions who have to get their power through that kumbaya solidarity nonsense.

It was a trick. You were scammed. The power you had came from scarcity, and so when the scarcity ended, when the industry started ringing up six-figure annual layoffs, your power went away with it.

The only durable source of power for tech workers is as workers, in a union.

Think about Amazon. Warehouse workers have to piss in bottles and have the highest rate of on-the-job maimings of any competing business. Whereas Amazon coders get to show up for work with facial piercings, green mohawks, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don’t understand. They can piss whenever they want!

That’s not because Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy loves you guys. It’s because they’re scared you’ll quit and they don’t know how to replace you.

Time for the second obligatory William Gibson quote: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” You know who’s living in the future?. Those Amazon blue-collar workers. They are the bleeding edge.

Drivers whose eyeballs are monitored by AI cameras that do digital phrenology on their faces to figure out whether to dock their pay, warehouse workers whose bodies are ruined in just months.

As tech bosses beef up that reserve army of unemployed, skilled tech workers, then those tech workers – you all – will arrive at the same future as them.

Look, I know that you’ve spent your careers explaining in words so small your boss could understand them that you refuse to enshittify the company’s products, and I thank you for your service.

But if you want to go on fighting for the user, you need power that’s more durable than scarcity. You need a union. Wanna learn how? Check out the Tech Workers Coalition and Tech Solidarity, and get organized.

Enshittification didn’t arise because our bosses changed. They were always that guy.

They were always yankin’ on that enshittification lever in the C-suite.

What changed was the environment, everything that kept that switch from moving.

And that’s good news, in a bankshot way, because it means we can make good services out of imperfect people. As a wildly imperfect person myself, I find this heartening.

The new good internet is in our grasp: an internet that has the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the greased-skids simplicity of Web 2.0 that let all our normie friends get in on the fun.

Tech bosses want you to think that good UX and enshittification can’t ever be separated. That’s such a self-serving proposition you can spot it from orbit. We know it, 'cause we built the old good internet, and we’ve been fighting a rear-guard action to preserve it for the past two decades.

It’s time to stop playing defense. It's time to go on the offensive. To restore competition, regulation, interop and tech worker power so that we can create the new, good internet we’ll need to fight fascism, the climate emergency, and genocide.

To build a digital nervous system for a 21st century in which our children can thrive and prosper.

Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

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

Image: https://twitter.com/igama/status/1822347578094043435/ (cropped)

@[email protected] (cropped)

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/112963252835869648

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.pt

#pluralistic #defcon #defcon 32 #hackers #enshittification #speeches #transcripts #disenshittify or die #Youtube

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beatingtheouijaboardallegations · 1 year ago

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forever tired of our voices being turned into commodity.

forever tired of thorough medaocrity in the AAC business. how that is rewarded. How it fails us as users. how not robust and only robust by small small amount communication systems always chosen by speech therapists and funded by insurance.

forever tired of profit over people.

forever tired of how companies collect data on every word we’ve ever said and sell to people.

forever tired of paying to communicate. of how uninsured disabled people just don’t get a voice many of the time. or have to rely on how AAC is brought into classrooms — which usually is managed to do in every possible wrong way.

forever tired of the branding and rebranding of how we communicate. Of this being amazing revealation over and over that nonspeakers are “in there” and should be able to say things. of how every single time this revelation comes with pre condition of leaving the rest behind, who can’t spell or type their way out of the cage of ableist oppression. or are not given chance & resources to. Of the branding being seen as revolution so many times and of these companies & practitioners making money off this “revolution.” of immersion weeks and CRP trainings that are thousands of dollars and wildly overpriced letterboards, and of that one nightmare Facebook group g-d damm it. How this all is put in language of communication freedom. 26 letters is infinite possibilities they say - but only for the richest of families and disabled people. The rest of us will have to live with fewer possibilities.

forever tired of engineer dads of AAC users who think they can revolutionize whole field of AAC with new terrible designed apps that you can’t say anything with them. of minimally useful AI features that invade every AAC app to cash in on the new moment and not as tool that if used ethically could actually help us, but as way of fixing our grammar our language our cultural syntax we built up to sound “proper” to sound normal. for a machine, a large language model to model a small language for us, turn our inhuman voices human enough.

forever tired of how that brand and marketing is never for us, never for the people who actually use it to communicate. it is always for everyone around us, our parents and teachers paras and SLPs and BCBAs and practitioners and doctors and everyone except the person who ends up stuck stuck with a bad organized bad implemented bad taught profit motivated way to talk. of it being called behavior problems low ability incompetence noncompliance when we don’t use these systems.

you all need to do better. We need to democritize our communication, put it in our own hands. (My friend & communication partner who was in Occupy Wall Street suggested phrase “Occupy AAC” and think that is perfect.) And not talking about badly made non-robust open source apps either. Yes a robust system needs money and recources to make it well. One person or community alone cannot turn a robotic voice into a human one. But our human voice should not be in hands of companies at all.

(this is about the Tobii Dynavox subscription thing. But also exploitive and capitalism practices and just lazy practices in AAC world overall. Both in high tech “ mainstream “ AAC and methods that are like ones I use in sense that are both super stigmatized and also super branded and marketed, Like RPM and S2C and spellers method. )

#I am not a product #you do not have to make a “spellers IPA beer ‘ about it I promise #communication liberation does not have a logo #AAC #capitalism #disability #nonspeaking #dd stuff #ouija talks #ouija rants

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trulyradicalactivist · 6 months ago

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Now that many of you are on the same page with me about the fight for radqueer liberation and freedom from oppression, it’s time for us to channel our strengths into meaningful action. To make a difference, we must educate, invigorate, and advocate. These three pillars, I've found, are the foundation of effective activism. In my time of being an activist, these are the things I use the most to gather community. For all of you, I'm gonna take this time to break them down and explore how all of us can contribute. If everyone really is with me on this, we can turn the tide faster than ever before.

Everything is under the cut. I tried to change my writing style a little from last time (a lot of people thought it was AI generated, so I studied some other speeches to try and write more "human", I hope it worked.)

Educate.

Are you good at making posters? Writing essays, articles, or conducting research? Do you enjoy learning and sharing what you discover? Maybe you’re great at debates. If so, education can be where you shine. Education is essential for dismantling stereotypes and misinformation about our community.

There are many ways to educate, some small, and some more direct. Firstly, start conversations with fellow community members. Run polls, collect data, and organize your findings. Then you can store that information, maybe in a folder, a Google Doc, or even in your notes app. Use it to write essays explaining specific topics or write articles debunking misinformation. Share your work with the world, not just our community, but to those who believe the stereotypes you are writing against.

Now, if education isn’t your strength, make sure you amplify the work of others. Share accurate information, send educational resources to those who might be misinformed, and help shift perceptions. Knowledge is one of the most powerful tools we have, let’s all wield it wisely and responsibly.

Invigorate.

Do you love drawing, writing fanfiction, or making memes? Maybe you enjoy putting together jewelry, like Kandi bracelets, making people laugh, or inspiring people through any form of creativity? If so, you can invigorate the community.

Let’s bring life and joy to the radqueer community. Yes, we face a lot of challenges, and that is exhausting, but we can and should create spaces full of excitement and connection. You could start a cooking blog and help your community learn a skill they might need, open an Etsy store to sell stickers or patches, you could design stim toys if you really know how to! Do anything that fosters creativity and belonging. Build spaces for us, by us, and let's make our movement one with vibrancy and culture!

Advocate.

Advocacy is something everyone can do. It’s about amplifying voices, yours and ours as a community. Share your experiences, whether it’s through writing, social media, or art. Speak openly about how your identity shapes your life.

Advocacy is also about challenging stigma. If you have dysphoria, talk about it. If you don’t, explain your identity and what it means to you. Are you a paraphile? Share your journey with pride, if you feel comfortable, and help others understand how your identity connects to your identity as a whole. Advocacy is about being unapologetically visible. Make them see you. You exist and they have no say in that.

These three actions (educating, invigorating, and advocating) are the building blocks of rebellion. And that’s exactly what we’re doing: rebelling against oppression and ignorance.

Let’s take charge together. Let’s fight for the acceptance and freedom we deserve. We are strong, we are resilient, and we are capable of creating change. I believe in all of you, and I love you all. Let’s do this, together, here and now.

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mariacallous · 4 months ago

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The Trump administration’s Federal Trade Commission has removed four years’ worth of business guidance blogs as of Tuesday morning, including important consumer protection information related to artificial intelligence and the agency’s landmark privacy lawsuits under former chair Lina Khan against companies like Amazon and Microsoft. More than 300 blogs were removed.

On the FTC’s website, the page hosting all of the agency’s business-related blogs and guidance no longer includes any information published during former president Joe Biden’s administration, current and former FTC employees, who spoke under anonymity for fear of retaliation, tell WIRED. These blogs contained advice from the FTC on how big tech companies could avoid violating consumer protection laws.

One now deleted blog, titled “Hey, Alexa! What are you doing with my data?” explains how, according to two FTC complaints, Amazon and its Ring security camera products allegedly leveraged sensitive consumer data to train the ecommerce giant’s algorithms. (Amazon disagreed with the FTC’s claims.) It also provided guidance for companies operating similar products and services. Another post titled “$20 million FTC settlement addresses Microsoft Xbox illegal collection of kids’ data: A game changer for COPPA compliance” instructs tech companies on how to abide by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by using the 2023 Microsoft settlement as an example. The settlement followed allegations by the FTC that Microsoft obtained data from children using Xbox systems without the consent of their parents or guardians.

“In terms of the message to industry on what our compliance expectations were, which is in some ways the most important part of enforcement action, they are trying to just erase those from history,” a source familiar tells WIRED.

Another removed FTC blog titled “The Luring Test: AI and the engineering of consumer trust” outlines how businesses could avoid creating chatbots that violate the FTC Act’s rules against unfair or deceptive products. This blog won an award in 2023 for “excellent descriptions of artificial intelligence.”

The Trump administration has received broad support from the tech industry. Big tech companies like Amazon and Meta, as well as tech entrepreneurs like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, all donated to Trump’s inauguration fund. Other Silicon Valley leaders, like Elon Musk and David Sacks, are officially advising the administration. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employs technologists sourced from Musk’s tech companies. And already, federal agencies like the General Services Administration have started to roll out AI products like GSAi, a general-purpose government chatbot.

The FTC did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED.

Removing blogs raises serious compliance concerns under the Federal Records Act and the Open Government Data Act, one former FTC official tells WIRED. During the Biden administration, FTC leadership would place “warning” labels above previous administrations’ public decisions it no longer agreed with, the source said, fearing that removal would violate the law.

Since President Donald Trump designated Andrew Ferguson to replace Khan as FTC chair in January, the Republican regulator has vowed to leverage his authority to go after big tech companies. Unlike Khan, however, Ferguson’s criticisms center around the Republican party’s long-standing allegations that social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, censor conservative speech online. Before being selected as chair, Ferguson told Trump that his vision for the agency also included rolling back Biden-era regulations on artificial intelligence and tougher merger standards, The New York Times reported in December.

In an interview with CNBC last week, Ferguson argued that content moderation could equate to an antitrust violation. “If companies are degrading their product quality by kicking people off because they hold particular views, that could be an indication that there's a competition problem,” he said.

Sources speaking with WIRED on Tuesday claimed that tech companies are the only groups who benefit from the removal of these blogs.

“They are talking a big game on censorship. But at the end of the day, the thing that really hits these companies’ bottom line is what data they can collect, how they can use that data, whether they can train their AI models on that data, and if this administration is planning to take the foot off the gas there while stepping up its work on censorship,” the source familiar alleges. “I think that's a change big tech would be very happy with.”

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horizontwinflames · 2 years ago

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Horizon AU: Twin Flames - Isaac (Zero Dawn Act) final concept/design.

*texts' transcriptions under the cut after the images*

REPOST, EDIT/USE OR FEED MY ART TO AI ISN'T ALLOWED

Read about Aloy, Beta and Elisabet in this AU [here]

omg... I thought I would never finish this... BUT YAY! Here it is finally! Isaac's final design and concepts!

This AU has an ongoing fanfic! You can read on Ao3: [LINK]

Text transcription:

First image:

Isaac - Roughly 3.2m/10.4' -Unknown age (probably just a few months).

Isaac is an original machine character in this alternative universe.

Isaac is the loyal machine companion of the Sobeck family, serving as both a traveling and battle mount. The sisters unintentionally created him while trying to figure out a way to increase the machine override time. The process they applied in the -back then- simple Watcher rebooted their AI and programming back to its essential functions and disconnected them from their original master, HEPHAESTUS. Once he received his name from Beta, the three family members became his new masters, which he unthinkingly obey to.

Due to his blank AI, Isaac is developing his own sentience and personality by absorbing his masters’ traits and behaviors and learning their morals and concepts. He also downloaded all of the sisters’ Focuses’ data to have some initial communication and works as a backup, so he only knows what they know.

He can speak with anyone with a Focus through its text-to-speech function by sending text messages to them - thus, people who don’t have a Focus only hear his Watcher noises. He can still communicate with other machines normally, so he also works as an information gatherer to help in missions and studies.

Second image:

Once a simple Watcher, now a super advanced mount and best friend of the Sobeck family.

Isaac's customizable body can adapt him to travel in any terrain, even underwater. He's able to reach high speeds at a low energy and heating cost - he's also lighter than it seems. His sleek, almost snake-ish, body shape makes maneuvering more dynamic for his rider.

His propulsors give him the ability to do long leaps and high jumps, helping the sisters get to places they wouldn't be able to reach by themselves. But a repetitive use of said skills in a short timespan can drain his energy and overheat him quickly.

Like his owners, he's not adept at using one single type of weapon. Isaac's tail ranged weapons and armor can be changed to better adapt to the situation. However, he hasn't developed efficient battle techniques yet, as he's still learning with the Sobecks. Note that his Sawtooth's sabers aren't intended to be used to fight but to climb and carry objects.

Melee Tail Weapons: Thunderjaw's tail, Stalker's tail blade, Stormbird's tail (also used to swim), Frostclaw's front paws.

Ranged Weapons: Thunderjaw's Disk Launcher, Ravager's Cannon, Scorcher's Mine Launcher, Bellowback's Snout.

Armors: Nora (stealth), Carja (speed), Oseran (tank), Banuk (damage), Old World (mixed).

Isaac is a mount adapted for two people: One is the rider, and the other is the cannoneer. He syncs with them through their Focuses, so his responses to their commands are more instantaneous. The rider directs Isaac where to go and when and how to use the tail weapon. Meanwhile, the cannoneer controls the ranged weapons and propulsors.

Only those who have a Focus can see his holographic face. The images shown are a collection of emojis the sisters found in Old World Ruins (which they update when they find more). His three "horns" also can move solemnly to make him more expressive.

Being composed of many different machine parts makes Isaac the first machine chimera to exist - still keeping the base shape of a Watcher, but huge. He was customized by the Sobecks little by little through the Cauldrons they visited on their first journey.

He can still stretch his neck like a Watcher can normally do.

His eye received enhancements to better aid the Sobecks in their daily life and journeys - such as infrared, thermic, and ultrasound visions.

He also has in his head a sound device to play audio files, such as music from the Old World, and a holoprojector.

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calmwaterstarot · 2 years ago

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What can we expect from 2024 dear!?? 😌

2024 has a lot going on; there are so many astrological transits happening that have a huge impact on all of us.

January 1, 2024: Mercury went direct after being in retrograde for several weeks. This means communication gets better, legal documents can be signed without issues, and anything related to speech is cleared up.

January 20 - September 1, 2024: Pluto enters Aquarius. This is going to be a wild ride. The last time Pluto was in Aquarius was around the late 1700's, and during that time, the world underwent MASSIVE change. Both the American and French Revolutions occurred, coups happened with governments, royalty was dethroned, battles and wars were fought, the first wave of feminism began, etc. There's so much more than this. You should see the list. I'll include it here--start around 1777 and go through 1798. Pluto represents death, rebirth, and transformation, while Aquarius represents humanity and technology. When you pair these two, you're looking at major transformation socially, politically, economically, and technologically. There's a brief retrograde into Capricorn for one last time during our lifetime, and then Pluto will return to Aquarius for another 20 years. It's interesting to note that the rise and fall of empires throughout history is around 250 years. The cycle for Pluto is 245 years. Coincidence? I think not.

February 16, 2024: A stellium in Aquarius. A stellium occurs when three or more planets are in the same house/sign in an astrological chart. This Aquarius stellium will feature Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Pluto. The last time this occurred was in February, 1962, and was commonly referred to as the "Age of Aquarius." This time period brought about major changes in the fields of technology, science, and aerospace. I'm afraid that during this time, though, there will be a strong focus on AI and its advancement. Pay attention to headlines regarding an upgrade in technology.

March 25, 2024: Lunar eclipse in Libra. Major historical events typically coincide with lunar eclipses, and since this one will be in Libra, I foresee society wishing for balance, harmony, peace, and justice. I believe this will be a time that humanity will call for us to take a deeper look at how we can end strife and get along with each other. Be ready for major calls for wars and upheaval to end (even though it's happening now, this will be on a much larger scale with this eclipse).

April 8, 2024: Solar eclipse in Aries. On the flip side of the lunar eclipse, we have the solar eclipse in Aries. This will be a time where we start anew and are ready to charge down a new path. Mars' energy represents war, destruction, violence, revenge, but also strength. This particular eclipse is warning us about war and destruction on a collective level because it'll be conjunct the North Node (the direction we're all going). I believe we're headed into a total collapse and rebirth when we add in the Pluto in Aquarius energy, but it's something that needs to happen for us to evolve as a civilization.

May 25, 2024: Jupiter in Gemini, which is actually in detriment. This means the energy is weaker in this sign for the planet. Expect changes in telecommunications (voice, data, and video) and social media, since Gemini is ruled by Mercury, the planet of communication.

June 2, 2024: Neptune is anaretic. Anaretic means that a planet has entered the 29th degree, which holds a sense of finality because this planet has transited all 30 degrees (starting at 0). It's ready to move on and cut ties. What does this mean for Neptune? Well, the planet of illusions will lift its veil and a lot of what we've held onto in our beliefs will die out. Some people will still try to hold on (sunk-cost fallacy) because they're stubborn, but the majority of people will release, mourn, and deal with the fallout that's going to be super messy. Imagine the feeling of being betrayed by someone you love. That's what Neptune lifting it's veil is going to feel like for most. Again, collectively, we NEED this energy for healing and spiritual growth.

July 21, 2024: Full Moon in Capricorn. Most of the time, nothing major happens on full moons, but this one is interesting because it falls on an anaretic degree, just like Neptune. Capricorn represents structure, discipline, rigidity, and order (its ruler is Saturn), so we're going to see some upheaval in regards to these issues. The old way of doing things will no longer serve the same purpose. This is the equivalent of saying, "Out with the old, in with the new."

August 5, 2024 – August 28, 2024: Mercury Retrograde in Virgo and Leo. With Mercury rx in Virgo, this might be a time where you lose or misplace documents, feel irritated, have constant miscommunication, or face scrutiny from the general public. Remember to write down important deadlines and keep everything organized so you don't lose anything. With Mercury rx in Leo, I'm fully expecting some celebrity scandals during this time. Otherwise, it'll be a time of thinking about trying something new or wanting to get out and do something fun.

September 17, 2024: Lunar Eclipse in Pisces. This will happen in the 25th degree (an Aries degree), so anyone with heavy Pisces placements will have creative breakthroughs during this time. We'll see a rise in great music, art, poetry and literature, as well as film and visual arts. This time period might feel very dreamy and whimsical on the art scene.

October 2, 2024: Solar Eclipse in Libra. We had the lunar eclipse in Libra in March, so now, the solar eclipse will bring justice and balance. Anyone with Libra placements in early degrees will feel the need to purge what's not working. Even though most Librans are peaceful, this will be a time of upheaval. Expect people to help the oppressed even more (seeking justice) in a world that needs to be more fair and balanced (Libra energy).

November 19, 2024: Pluto goes direct in Aquarius for twenty years, until March 8, 2043. Buckle up! It's going to be a bumpy-but-necessary ride.

November 25, 2024 – December 15, 2024: Mercury Retrograde in Sagittarius. We all know what happens during Mercury rx, but what happens when it's in Sagittarius? Sagittarius represents higher education and learning, all things foreign and travel-related, religion, and spirituality. Expect religious or spiritual leaders, as well as educational leaders at universities, to have private documents leaked, misinformation stemming from foreign countries and media, as well as travel issues (delays, being rerouted, lots of crowds, etc.). This will not be a good time to travel.

December 6, 2024 – February 24, 2025: Mars Retrograde in Cancer and Leo. This is going to be...interesting. Mars hates being in Cancer; it's in detriment. Why? Cancer represents empathy and compassion, while Mars represents a more masculine energy that strives towards war, violence, and destruction. Cancer wants to provide a resolution to all of the conflict occurring, while Mars isn't having it. Expect masculine energies, especially men, to be more irritated and aggressive during this time. This duo can bring about discussion regarding balancing masculine and feminine energy, which we all have. Because Cancer is represented by the Moon, or the "mother" in astrology, expect some discussions about fertility and reproduction, birth rates (especially the low birth rates of some countries), marriage (or lack thereof), and any social dynamics with males and females. These discussions will carry over into 2025.

2024 is going to be a year that'll go down in history, that's for sure. One silver lining in all of this is that Venus does NOT retrograde this year, so we might see or hear about fewer breakups, and we might see or hear about more people entering into relationships and staying together.

#astrology #2024 astrology #2024 transits #mercury retrograde #pluto in aquarius #jupiter in gemini #anaretic neptune #full moon in capricorn #lunar eclipse in pisces #solar eclipse in libra #lunar eclipse in libra #solar eclipse in aries #aquarius stellium #mars retrograde

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effervescent-experience · 6 months ago

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On the TikTok Ban

Hello, everyone. This is not my usual content. However, as a leftist and someone who has been on the app for a while, I feel that I should address the potential TikTok ban on January 19th and why it doesn’t sit right with me at all.

I believe that the ban is bad. This is somewhat of a polarizing statement, but I genuinely think that banning TikTok would be unconstitutional because it would undermine American users’ First Amendment rights by preventing freedom of speech and expression. The ban would eliminate a significant facet of popular culture, limit how people can make money to provide for themselves and their families, and prevent citizens from accessing a major news source (I’m not saying you should get all of your news from TikTok, but it does help to bring surface level awareness about issues so people can go out and learn more about them). Doing this on speculation is wrong and will significantly prevent communication and the exchange of information that has become vital in society.

Speculation and National Security Threats:

The concern about TikTok comes from its owner, ByteDance, headquartered in Beijing and is therefore legally obligated to “turn over data to Chinese authorities on request.” This would mean that sensitive information about American users could be directly accessed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which could lead to the spread of deliberate misinformation and more sophisticated foreign monitoring of online activity (Espada and Popli par. 3-5).

To this, I would respond that there is already extreme amounts of misinformation on TikTok within U.S. borders - sensationalist content without actual evidence is an issue. Especially around elections, natural disasters, or events that may trigger an emotional response, there seems to be an uptick in misinformation and disinformation, as people create false news and others repeat what they see because they believe it to be true. Recently, we have seen this with the fires in California and all of the AI videos. This aligns with my point because any foreign misinformation, political propaganda, or sensationalist content would likely be more extreme than but still comparable to the lies already spread on the app for the sake of garnering more views. I cannot deny that political propaganda is dangerous, nor can I deny that the idea of being monitored is extremely frightening, but skeptics and well-informed audiences will do the work to fact-check such content.

The Spread of Information:

Because I am not an influencer, my biggest personal gripe with banning TikTok is that it would prevent easy and immediate access to all types of information. Like the internet, TikTok is an incredibly vast information collection about nearly every topic. Look up anything, and you will quickly find infodumps, tutorials, and a large crowd of people who can answer your questions. I was working on an embroidery project yesterday and needed to know how to do a particular stitch. Within thirty seconds, I had my answer and could return to work, saving much more time than if I had gone to Google or this website to ask the same question.

It’s much more serious than arts and crafts questions, however. On TikTok, people can better understand important events that people in their “real lives” are not offering explanations for. At least for me, this allows for a much more complete account of the event from numerous perspectives, many of which are likely different than my own. Instead of knowing about the event but only understanding how it impacts me, I can form my opinion with reliable firsthand accounts from others and consider how it impacts everyone, not just myself. As a global community, this is invaluable; understanding each other prevents stigma and the pushing of only one narrative. Banning TikTok would eliminate this, leading to a much less knowledgeable audience and self-centered takes on world events.

Influencers and Creative Spaces:

This is also an extremely concerning facet of the potential TikTok ban for me. Although I am not an influencer, I understand that thousands of people make their living from TikTok and have no other form of income. I support this fully and think it’s great that people can live comfortably by doing what they love. This is why it’s exceptionally alarming to me to think that if TikTok is banned, these people will be wholly cut off from their careers. Digitally or not, that is not fair to do to someone, though society does not care about that. Twitter user (I am not calling it X because fuck Elon Musk) Spirituali_tea wrote, “So who’s gonna tell the Biden administration that some of us have built our literal careers on TikTok, and if it gets banned, we will actually have nothing?”.

TikTok also serves as a source of income for displaced families, people rebuilding after natural disasters, medical bills, and everyday necessities. For those who say that these creators should “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and get a “real job,” some people simply cannot because they are disabled, homeless, or otherwise displaced or marginalized. It is unfair that we should be so limited in a society so diverse. People rely on this app; if it is taken away, they will be left with nothing. I’ll repeat it: that’s just not right.

Additionally, people in creative spaces use the app to promote themselves, bring awareness to their content, and make money. Without it, small businesses and creators will likely get less exposure, meaning some people can no longer do what they love. Artists will likely lose the fanbases they’ve built and a source of income. TikToker la.fumettisa shared a video with the caption, “heartbroken over the imminent TikTok ban, loss of community and income for my small business,” and Tiktoker dollrust0 wrote, “I know it’s just a TikTok ban, but it’s hard not to be sentimental about losing what has essentially been my digital diary for years. I felt seen.” TikTok is an essential platform for artists, creative types, and people who, like dollrust0, want to feel seen.

As someone who loves to write and make things but has chosen not to do it professionally, I find this fucked up to the highest degree. Society encourages art yet takes every opportunity to limit it when done professionally. How will artists bring attention to what they do? How many beautiful, amazingly talented people will we miss out on if the ban goes through? I love engaging with people on TikTok, and as a small creator on other platforms, the thought of losing everyone I have met or interacted with makes me unbelievably sad.

The Potential Power Struggle and Precedent:

Because the legislation around the bill dictates that the app can stay un-banned if it is bought by someone else within a year, there is a potential that someone who has bought other platforms or shown interest in it could buy TikTok, allowing them to control the flow of information in the United States and narrative pushed out to the masses regarding political events, natural disasters, and controversial topics. Like misinformation, there is extreme danger in only one narrative being told. It prevents the varied perspectives I mentioned earlier and allows the people in charge to guide the opinions of American TikTok users (170 million people, by the way) to garner support for their ideals. This is where a ban such as this becomes dangerous and sets a precedent for censorship in that it allows the government to interfere with the speech and writing created by the people.

In a conversation with NBC News, “cyber-diplomat” Chris Painter, who has worked with the Obama administration, says, “If the U.S. was certainly trying to shut down a social media platform or something because they didn’t like what was being said on it, absolutely our moral authority would disappear…it sends the message that this is acceptable…obviously that deserves an outcry (Collier par. 14-16).” The proposed ban directly infringes on the American right to freedom of speech and the press, whether the Supreme Court rules it to be this way or not. If the ban goes through, we will see this again, potentially sooner than we would like. If it can be bought, it is under threat.

Conclusion:

Again, I must assert that the looming ban on TikTok is terrible for various reasons. I am wholeheartedly against it for the threat it poses to Free Speech and its similarities to authoritarian control tactics seen with fascist governments. TikTok is about more than dancing or brain rot. It is vital to spreading information and interconnection between people worldwide, bringing people together around common interests. People use it to make their lives easier and, in some cases, possible. For the government to make such an issue of one app based on speculation when the threat of large-scale war is immense, California is burning, climate change is worsening, gun violence is rampant, and people are dying because they don’t have the basic resources they need to live is, quite frankly, extremely scary.

It is incredibly disheartening to think that our leaders care more about a “silly dancing app” (TikTok user not_tgg) than all of the loss and devastation in the world. Writing does not seem nearly enough to compensate for what is at risk, but we must be aware of what is happening. I’ll leave you with a quote from whistleblower Edward Snowden: “Your rights matter because you never know when you’re going to need them.”

References:

Collier, Kevin. "A TikTok Ban Could Embolden Authoritarian Censorship, Experts Warn." NBC News, 17 Mar. 2024. NBC News, www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-ban-embolden-authoritarian-censorship-experts-warn-rcna143476. Accessed 12 Jan. 2025.

Espada, Mariah, and Nik Popli. "Why the U.S. and Other Countries Want to Ban or Restrict TikTok." TIME. TIME, time.com/6263851/why-us-wants-to-ban-tiktok/. Accessed 12 Jan. 2025.

I have fact-checked all of the information in here to the best of my abilities and would never deliberately spread misinformation, but please correct me if I missed or should add anything. Feel free to reply, but please be polite, even if we share different opinions.

#leftist #tiktok #tiktok ban #government #politics #ao3 writer #opinion #my commentary #luigi mangione #free luigi #deny defend depose #text post #art #i hate rich people

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miracu10us · 18 days ago

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Interest Check!

We are looking for people with different skills to help with the Miraculous 10 Year Anniversary Fanzine.

We are seeking people who are interested in submitting fan-related content for our zine, such as:

Writing

Fanfiction

Poetry

Personal stories

Literary analyses

Critical analyses

Opinion pieces

Artworks

Fanart (digital or traditional)

Comics (1 page)

Physical

Images of you in cosplay

Photos of anything you've created with a Miraculous theme, including customised dolls, recipes, crochet or cross-stitch patterns!

It’s not just creatives! We also need help with:

Fact checking

Data entry

If you would like to submit anything to the zine, please complete the expression of interest form. Please see this post for the relevant submission dates.

Complete this form by 15 July

Have a question? Send an ask or a private message on Tumblr and we'll get in touch with you!

Further details on what's allowed are under the cut.

About the Miracu10us fanzine

This is first and foremost a digital zine, which means there is no inherent length constraint beyond what our time as editors permits.

That being said, while we will make every effort to include your submission, we reserve the right not to include things we find not in the spirit of this zine.

Rules

We want to keep this a safe space for all members of the fandom.

Please note that these are only guidelines.

We have zero tolerance to hate speech, bullying or threats.

LGQBTI+ community is welcome.

Please note that while we support all ships, not just the Lovesquare, we do not allow adult/child relationships or incest.

What we accept

In order for the project to be manageable, we may only take a limited number of submissions per person. In other words, please do not spam us.

We do not accept AI-generated work in any form.

Please make sure your submissions meet the following guidelines.

Writing

We do not accept character salt or bashing

All submissions should be SFW

Fanfiction

Eligibility: you must be a registered user on Ao3, as we will be adding your fic to the collection.

Please note that we will only include the title and summary (accompanied by a small number of tags) in the digital zine, with a link to the fic.

Must be less than 5,000 words.

Poetry and Personal Stories

No more than 2,000 words

Critical or Literary Analyses

No more than 5,000 words

When discussing NSFW fanworks, please make sure you do not use explicit terms.

Unsure what to submit? We have a list of prompts on Ao3 you can use as inspiration. We'll send a link to this when it's ready!

Artworks

Fanart

Digital art - resolution must be set at 300 dpi. For size references, A4 / 2480x3508px + some additional margin for a full-page art. Smaller sizes are also accepted, as long as the resolution is 300 dpi

Your artwork may be a sketch, portrait, line art, or fully rendered - it does not need to have a background

Traditional Media - please send a high-quality digital scan or photograph in good lighting

Comics

In addition to the requirements above, comics have a limit of 1 page

The maximum size is an A4 page in portrait mode

Physical

All of these must be related to Miraculous in some way, including recipes

All photos must be good quality (at least 1280 x 720 pixels, in good lighting)

Cosplayers

Good resolution image of yourself in costume, in good lighting

No images of children

Custom Dolls

The doll must be made by you

Good resolution image of the doll, in good lighting

Recipes

Please make sure you own the copyright (e.g. this is your recipe) and it's not copied from another source

Crochet / Cross-stitch / Sewing

Please make sure you own the copyright to the pattern (i.e. this is your design)

Please supply the pattern as a high-quality image file

Please send a good quality photo of your finished cross-stitch so people can know what it's supposed to look like!

If you have any further questions, feel free to reach out to the Miracu10us team on Tumblr.

#call for entries #miracu10us #10 years of Miraculous #miraculous fandom #miraculous ladybug

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globosetechnologysolution · 1 year ago

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Text-to-speech datasets form the cornerstone of AI-powered speech synthesis applications, facilitating natural and smooth communication between humans and machines. At Globose Technology Solutions, we recognize the transformative power of TTS technology and are committed to delivering cutting-edge solutions that harness the full potential of these datasets. By understanding the importance, features, and applications of TTS datasets, we pave the way to a future where seamless speech synthesis enriches lives and drives innovation across industries.

#text to speech dataset #NLP #Data Collection #Data Collection in Machine Learning #data collection company #datasets #technology #dataset #globose technology solutions #ai

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thesilliestrovingalive · 8 months ago

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Updated: June 22, 2025

Reworked Character #14: Doctor Amadeus

POTENTIAL TRIGGER WARNING: Viewer discretion is advised due to references to death, crime, unethical experiments, self-harm, and SA.

Real name: Ghyslaine Laëtitia Comtois (she legally changed her name to Manfrida Amadeus)

Alias: Angel in Carnage

Nicknames: Ghys and Hakase

Occupation: Governing scientist and founder of the Amadeus Syndicate

Special skills: Proficiency in AI development and the manufacturing of advanced machines, knowledge of biology, chemistry, and ancient technologies, technological prowess, performing surgeries, and blackmailing

Goddess abilities: She can influence mental states, inducing insanity and sensory overload through manipulating self-perception by creating distortions of bodily transformation and vivid visions of personal and loved ones' demise. With a single, hyper-detailed thought, she can materialise advanced weapons and complex mechanical contraptions. Her superhuman strength rivals that of two established armies combined. She's extremely durable against bullets, tank blasts, knives, rockets, and fire. She can summon bolts of blue lightning to strike her enemies, causing deadly paralysis and severely damaging their organs. She possesses ergokinesis, luminokinesis, nihilokinesis, pyrokinesis, geokinesis, and aerokinesis.

She can interact, communicate, and manipulate technology through electrical pulse sensing, physical contact, and sheer mental force. Her teleportation capabilities allow her to instantly transport herself to any location on Earth, while also enabling her to transport others within a specific radius of 50-90 ft (1524-2743.2 cm) from her position. She possesses telepathic abilities that enable her to communicate silently with sentient beings capable of speech without any hindrance. Additionally, she can exert total control over the minds of others, transforming them into unwitting instruments, by releasing spores from microscopic orifices on her neck. These spores, once inhaled, infect the brain's motor control, cognitive processing, and communication centres, granting her dominion over their thoughts and actions.

She can conjure an impenetrable barrier, comprising three layers: an illusion-causing smoke screen that disorients foes, parasitic vines that infect and transform victims into twisted mutants, and a core of solid adamant. This self-sustaining shield continually regenerates until she chooses to dissipate it. She has hyper-cognitive processing, allowing her to execute multiple calculations and thought processes simultaneously. Due to her superior photographic memory, she can retain and recall every thought, emotion, encounter, and experience with perfect clarity. Despite her incredible durability, a collective effort from powerful espers can inflict minute, albeit negligible, physical harm. However, full-blooded deities possess the capacity to effortlessly overwhelm and defeat her.

It's unknown if she possesses any other abilities upon achieving apotheosis, but everyone believes that she has yet to develop all of her godly powers.

Hobbies: Spending time delving into scientific research on the forces of the universe, collecting fossils, rare plant specimens, and books on a variety of intellectual topics, developing weapons for the Amadeus Syndicate and their alliances, taking care of White Baby, and pseudoscientific theorising

Likes: The satisfaction she feels after successfully conducting an experiment, challenging the limits of the mortal body and the moral boundaries of scientific research, laughing in the face of incompetence, classical and industrial music, and genetic engineering

Dislikes: The constraints of mortal physiology and current scientific understanding, having to kill trusted allies and employees to keep her secrets safe, running low on smoking essentials and sweet treats to snack on, losing valuable research data, and bright sunlight

Favourite food: Croque monsieur, beschuit with hagelslag, and homemade sweet snacks

Favourite drink: Pinot gris

Sexuality: Sex-indifferent, heteroflexible sapiosexual

Gender: Demigirl

Age: 54 (in 2022), 60 (in 2028), 62 (in 2030), 64 (in 2032), 66 (in 2034), 73 (in 2041), 75 (in 2043), 76 (in 2044), and 79 (in 2047)

Blood type: O-

Weight: 153 lbs. (69 kg)

Human design: She’s a 5’ 11” (180.34 cm) French ectomorph with a slender yet athletic build, sloping shoulders, small breasts, a well-defined waist, and curvaceous hips. She has limestone skin and heterochromatic eyes with visible bags underneath them: her right eye, a glass prosthetic replacement, is a light amber, while her left eye is grey-green with brown flecks. Ghyslaine has a few moles: one on the left side of her chin; one near the corner of her right eye; two above her right breast; one on the back of her left hand; and three slightly below her left knee. She has a silvery-pink birthmark on her left shoulder, almost shaped like a waning moon with five protruding spikes. Her waist-length raspberry red hair has messy, voluminous curls streaked with silver-grey, often pulled back into a low ponytail.

Thanks to experimental anti-aging drugs, she looks remarkably youthful, with her face showing subtle signs of aging limited to bunny lines, crow's feet, and faint tear troughs. Her right thigh features a tattoo of a statue of Prudentia made from griotte marble, depicted with a glass serpent wrapped around her neck. She cradles a Gallic rooster in her right arm, while her left arm holds a bouquet of red and blue poppies with a small purple mirror nestled at its centre. In contrast, her left hand and forearm are heavily scarred, evidence of severe burns and self-inflicted lacerations. Her upper right arm shows multiple injection sites, evidence of her experimentation with various substances. A healed scar on the centre of her forehead marks the site of her self-performed trepanation using a dental drill.

She wears a white lab coat, a silver ring with a red pearl on her right index finger, and a gold-plated monocle over her left eye. Her right lab coat pocket held a variety of items: a pack of cigarettes, her sweet snack of the day, Argentine blue neoprene gloves, a well-worn leather lilac journal full of scribbled notes, diagrams, and radical scientific hypotheses, and five experimental serum vials (mutant, zombie, mummy, simian creature, and mantid monster). Ghylaine’s left lab coat pocket contains the following: a box of cigars, a versatile multitool that's made of pliers, wire cutters, a screwdriver, and a knife, and a red crystal from Sol Dae Rokker that radiates a yellow glow when exposed to sunlight.

She wears a square-shaped silvery watch on her right wrist with a timepiece that boasts a gilt-brass dial, adorned with amethyst-coloured hands and white numbers from 1 to 12, interspersed with five delicate etchings. Additional features include a secondary display bar indicating AM/PM, while a reddish-black strap is securely fastened with a silver snap-on buckle.

Ghyslaine wears circular nazar charm earrings, outlined in gold, suspended from medium-sized silver hoop rings. She wears a right-side drop leg holster for a Colt Anaconda with a 6-inch barrel, accompanied by a greenish-black waist pack secured at the back of her belt that holds .44 Remington Magnum cartridges for the revolver. On the front left side of her belt, she has a secured holder for the same stun gun that Nadia wields. She wears teal trousers secured by a sage green belt with a silver buckle, paired with red-laced Prussian blue dress boots.

She wears a long-sleeved teal shirt with eight golden buttons running down the front and two breast pockets. The shirt features a turned collar that frames a velvet fern green cravat, patterned with horizontal goldenrod stripes and cardinal red triangles. It’s adorned with a 2x6 white-and-red chequered patch of 12 squares (six above, six below) above the left breast pocket. Her breast pockets carry a metallic red-green lighter, a black ink pen, and three highlighters in yellow, green, and pink. Underneath her dress shirt, she wears an E-Armour bulletproof vest, emblazoned with the insignia of the Amadeus Syndicate.

Goddess design: She’s a 13’ 6” (411.48 cm) nude entity with a flat chest, incredibly smooth malachite-hued skin, elfin ears, three pointed tongues, and two rows of carnivorous gold teeth. She retains her original hairstyle, now lengthened to reach down to her ankles, woven with streaks of dark brown, and adorned with red and blue poppies. Her face features six silver-outlined eyes with cardinal red slit pupils: the left three eyes in a dull amber and the right three in light cyan. Her chest bears the same Black Sun symbol on the palm of her greenish-black glove, placed directly in the centre. Her back is heavily scarred from severe burns, brutal cuts, and hacked-away flesh, revealing bronze-hued muscles. She has an identical tail to Schwarz Metzelei from Metal Slug Attack, but the tip is always open and it features a notable colour variation: the red accents are replaced with teal and the grey is substituted with a shimmering goldenrod hue.

She has horns similar to those of Drache Goldenes from Metal Slug Attack, but they appear to be made from a material resembling griotte marble. She possesses the lower half of Awakened Blume Metzelei from Metal Slug Attack, combined with the birthmark of her original self. Emerging from her upper back, she has two large bat wings with an amethyst-hued membrane, Prussian blue-colored forearms, wrists, thumbs, and fingers, and a reddish-black claw protrudes from each thumb. She has a partially exposed sapphire ribcage, revealing a rhythmic, tide-like pulse that synchronises with each heartbeat.

She has six arms protruding from her lower back and two more where her malformed kidneys are supposedly located. Each hand has pointed, clawless fingers and a Greek letter in the middle of their palm: for the lower torso arms, her right has β (beta) and her left has Ω (omega); for the first lower back arms, her right has ζ (zeta) and her left has Δ (delta); for the second pair, her right has λ (lambda) and her left has ξ (xi); and for the third pair, her right has φ (phi) and her left has Ψ (psi).

Character summary: She’s a composed and wise leader, boasting a genius-level intellect, who derives great satisfaction from pioneering new discoveries and pushing the boundaries of human potential, scientific innovation, and ethical standards. Driven by her insatiable curiosity, Ghyslaine fearlessly conducts self-experiments and utilises human and animal subjects in her controlled, scientific research. While she's a visionary thinker with grand ambitions and an obsessive attention to detail, she tempers her perfectionism with pragmatic decision-making when circumstances dictate it. She's a sadist with a strong aversion to willful ignorance, disregard for knowledge, experimental setbacks, and opposition that thwarts her plans.

She presents herself as polite, open-minded, and willingly generous, but beneath that facade is a ruthless manipulator, driven by arrogance and stubbornness to get her way, no matter the cost. She consistently prioritises her own self-interest, forming alliances and collaborating with others only when it advances her own agenda. To achieve her objectives, she employs manipulative tactics, such as exploiting others' vulnerabilities and showering them with insincere praise. She tends to delegate manual tasks to others whenever possible, but is willing to get involved and take charge when circumstances require it.

She's not particularly fond of the idea of immediate results because it primarily revolves around showcasing opulence and wealth, which she believes is less effective than long-term investment. She often feels uncertain about evacuation, fearing it would significantly set back her plans if she is forced to leave. However, she isn't above hesitantly accepting the need to flee when the situation becomes too dire to handle, much to her frustration. She's consistently displeased when incompetence disrupts her plans and damages her weapons and machines, yet she frequently displays a sense of intrigued admiration for the persistence and strength of her enemies. She's often amused by those who confront her about her heinous actions, carelessly brushing off their concerns, though she occasionally reveals a hint of fury. She also becomes maliciously amused when she's able to exploit the weaknesses of her enemies and break them down easily.

She's a cunning, calculating, and intuitive strategist, consistently outmaneuvering her competitors and adversaries while staying ahead of everyone by meticulously preparing for a wide range of situations. She’s a highly analytical and emotionally detached megalomaniac, adept at keeping secrets through her tight-lipped nature, strategic evasion, and expert use of vagueness and deflection. She's an optimistic nihilist who revels in her vast wealth, technological prowess, and recognition as the world's most brilliant scientist. Ghyslaine is a hypervigilant and seductive individual who believes in a collective consciousness and exhibits traits of psychopathy, including an uncaring temperament, boldness, and a strong desire for social dominance. She prioritises satisfying her scientific curiosity and rigorous work ethic over others' needs, and has no qualms about deliberately harming people to advance her own ambitions. She has zero tolerance for betrayal and is particularly sensitive to skepticism about her intellectual abilities. She finds it infuriating when others suggest she might be senile or ignorant, or question the validity of her ambitious plans.

She's surprisingly cynical and misanthropic towards humanity, viewing them as worthless, filthy parasites who don't appreciate knowledge or the beauty of reality. She believes that people are more inclined to prioritise basic survival, gratuitous violence, sexual gratification, the glorification of disturbing topics, and self-destruction over everything else. She's a staunch believer in the existence of unseen, authentic deities beyond mainstream human religions and mythologies, such as Sol Dae Rokker and the Avatar of Evil. In Ghyslaine’s view, the God revered in Western religions is a malevolent impostor, and she holds that a genuinely benevolent deity worthy of the name—transcending human understanding—lies beyond the cosmos. Her vision for the New World involves achieving apotheosis, triggering the Alator, merging with the Avatar of Evil, and ultimately becoming the omnipotent goddess of a rebooted timeline.

She treats White Baby as if it were her actual child, considering it her best AI masterpiece, rivaling that of MS-Alice. She has purposefully programmed White Baby to be partially sentient to make their mother-child relationship feel more tangible. Despite White Baby's inability to speak and reliance on code and text messages for communication, she has a deep understanding of the emotions displayed by the virus and the actions it performs. In turn, White Baby regards her as a mother deserving of love and is incredibly obedient to her commands, even during a rogue state. White Baby is programmed to never harm Ghyslaine and do everything possible to keep her safe and ensure her goals remain intact. She frequently expresses concern for White Baby's well-being, understanding that if it were to gain full independence, it could destroy everything in its and her allies' path to world domination. Although she never designed White Baby to destroy humanity, she knows that the virus has that potential and believes that the strong must control the weak.

Ghyslaine maintains a positive relationship with General Morden, admiring his charisma, leadership, use of manipulation tactics, and commitment to his soldiers' well-being. She strongly supports his efforts to combat government and military corruption, believing it will bring about positive change and overcome entrenched systemic injustices. In exchange for the Rebel Army's assistance in securing resources and protecting Amadeus Syndicate assets—including mines, worksites, weapon and medical facilities, underground laboratories, and the Amadeus Mainframe Base—she offers to aid the his army��s technological advancement and provide essential supplies, such as medical equipment and financial resources. Their dynamic is underscored by strong sexual tension, fueled by Ghyslaine’s alluring nature and strategic flirtation, which she employs to maintain a facade of innocence and avoid arousing suspicion.

She’s also on good terms with Rootmars, deeply respecting her mission to safeguard Earth's valuable resources. This alignment stems from her conviction that humans are wasteful and fail to utilise natural resources to their full potential. Additionally, she holds Martians and Invaders in high esteem, acknowledging their technological superiority over humanity. She finds Ptolemaios to be a captivating figure, intrigued by rumours suggesting he may be the first esper in all of human history, predating even Hyakutaro. Ghyslaine holds him in high esteem, respecting his vast experience, unwavering faith in the authentic deities, unrelenting dedication to the Ptolemaic Army's advancement, and calculating mindset.

She deeply appreciates Oghma's loyalty and willingness to support her as he demonstrates a clear understanding of her ambitions and genuine respect for her intellectual pursuits. She enjoys sharing a few drinks with him, engaging in lively gossip, and playfully teasing him about his serious yet slyly confident demeanour and his flustered reactions to her well-meaning compliments. Among everyone, she treats Oghma as a true friend rather than just a professional acquaintance or close ally. She never resorts to being rough, demanding, and mercilessly threatening with him. Instead, she subtly manipulates him in ways he doesn't notice, ensuring he remains obedient and appropriately occupied by offering him satisfying pay, fulfilling jobs, decent vacation time, and an adequate degree of freedom.

She previously shared a cordial connection with Marco, largely due to her admiration for his exceptional intellect and vast expertise in computer science, which surpassed that of most Regular Army soldiers. Despite severing their relationship after exploiting his vulnerability, she remains drawn to Marco's physical beauty, stoic demeanour, and impressive intellectual prowess. She finds Clark's melancholic nature exhausting, while Nadia's playful antics, sporadic laziness, and love of shopping sprees are thoroughly irritating and disruptive. To her, Nadia represents a profound disappointment—a willfully defiant and uncooperative individual who has failed to live up to expectations as the intended successor to the Amadeus Syndicate.

Backstory: Ghyslaine Laëtitia Comtois was born on October 5, 1968 in Annecy, France. She comes from a family with a notorious history of clandestine partnerships with corrupt government agencies, inhumane wildlife experimentation, and the development of devastating bioweapons and malicious computer viruses. Two of her most prominent ancestors, Duke Koudou and Parker Eugene von Wittenberg, have particularly troubling legacies.

Marmaduke Koudou was infamous for brokering shady business deals that advanced the political interests and technological capabilities of his government allies and his own company, which specialised in military technology and biochemistry research. Following his death from septic shock, his company was dismantled. In collaboration with renowned biologists, Duke Koudou conducted extensive research on the Elder Centipede, which he referred to as the "Sea Worm”. His studies revealed that this semi-aquatic creature, possessing biomechanical properties and sclerotized scales, has existed since antiquity, dating back to the Hadean Eon. Notably, his research identified the Elder Centipede as an antediluvian arthropod due to the presence of unknown microorganisms attached to it. Marmaduke proposed exploiting the Elder Centipede's unique characteristics—its ability to automatically attack moving objects and inject lethal microorganisms in the form of purple acid—as a potential bioweapon for outer space applications.

Parker Eugene von Wittenberg was a notorious hacker who worked secretly with government agencies across Southern Europe and North America, crafting malicious computer viruses for use against enemies during times of war. His most infamous creation was the highly classified "First Baby" virus, designed to infiltrate and extract sensitive data from adversary systems. Outside of cyber exploits, his research was deeply problematic, focusing on eugenic experiments that sought to control and manipulate wildlife populations, while also studying their social behaviours. He used his cybersecurity firm as a front to conceal his illicit experiments, but his life was cut short when an unknown assailant spiked his glass of cider with a lethal dose of tramadol. The assassination not only claimed his life but also marked the loss of the First Baby computer virus, which vanished without a trace, never to resurface again. Rumours suggest that the First Baby virus was either acquired by the Earth Federation or destroyed by the unknown assassin.

She grew up in a middle-class family. Her biological father left her mother, Jacqueline Comtois, 4 months before she was born for reasons unknown. 2 months after giving birth to Ghyslaine, a sole survivor of triplets whose siblings were stillborn, Jacqueline married Yoshihiko. Yoshihiko was the president of a Japanese video game development company. As part of his role, he travelled the world promoting the company's games, always carrying AES cartridges, a catalogue of new products, and a set of memory cards in his briefcase. However, he had a tendency to get distracted, and his briefcase often went missing. Invariably, he would blame the person he was with at the time. On every birthday, her parents would take her to visit a local museum featuring regional artifacts, including Alpine furniture and religious art, as well as a natural history exhibit.

At just 6-years-old, she demonstrated exceptional intellectual prowess by articulately outlining Sigmund Freud's psychosexual theory and reciting the entire periodic table with flawless accuracy. However, by age 7, having discovered her family's troubled legacy of unethical research and shady business dealings, she resolved to forge a different path. Ghyslaine’s insatiable curiosity drove her to explore diverse interests: science, medicine, computer science, occultism, mythology, religion, philosophy, politics, and human and animal psychology and sociology. With these passions in mind, she aspired to become a psychologist, humanistic philosopher, and biomedical scientist, determined to make a positive impact.

In 1976, a conflict erupted across Western, Northern, and Southern Europe as multiple countries engaged in battles over territory and political differences. The conflict erupted from a skirmish during a joint military and archaeological expedition on Ultima Thule, commonly known as Scrap Island, between Austria and Portugal. The dispute centred on two key issues: the exploitation of Ultima Thule’s resources and the fate of the ancient deity believed to be buried on the island, pending its discovery. The situation escalated into full-scale war with the involvement of France, Luxembourg, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Greece, and Montenegro.

Two rival alliances emerged, each with distinct objectives: the Vanguard and the Luminary. The Vanguard, consisting of France, the United Kingdom, and Austria, formed an alliance to harness Scrap Island's resources for military advancements and construction materials. Their primary goal was to excavate the deity, seeking insights into ancient history and the divine realm, while also aiming to advance military technology to enhance combat effectiveness. They received significant support from the Regular Army and the Germi family, who shared their vision of using Scrap Island to answer some of life's biggest questions and promote global peace. The Luminary alliance comprised of Luxembourg, Denmark, Greece, Portugal, and Montenegro, uniting to ethically use the island's resources for medical breakthroughs and jewelry production. Their ultimate aim was to excavate the deity to develop biological agents for warfare and medical use. The Gutenschiff family provided limited support to this coalition, aligning with its goals but refraining from full commitment.

To mobilise support, each country leveraged patriotism and nationalism, appealing to the sense of duty and loyalty among its citizens. The ultimate objective was to assemble a formidable army and emerge victorious on behalf of their aligned faction. However, not all citizens were driven by ideological conviction; some joined the fight solely out of concern for the safety of their loved ones, coerced by fear of the consequences of inaction. The conflict would become etched in history as the Thule Expeditionary Conquest and would culminate in 1988 with the signing of a landmark peace treaty among all involved nations and the Earth Federation, aimed at preventing similar events from occurring in the future.It was agreed that the resources of Ultima Thule could be used for the betterment of civilization; however, extreme exploitation and the use of these resources for nefarious purposes would be punishable by severe legal fines and imprisonment.

At age 9, Ghyslaine's life took a drastic turn when her family was tragically killed in an airstrike during a battle in France. Annecy found itself at the crossroads of a multifaceted struggle as France, Austria, and the wealthy, superstitious, and battle-hardened Germi family clashed with Portugal, Montenegro, and the bloodthirsty and fearsome Gutenschiff clan. She was initially consumed by deep fear as the war brought chaos to the streets. Crime ran rampant as opportunistic individuals exploited the conflict for personal gain. Mass hysteria gripped the city as many people either hid in fear or panicked and acted out of desperation.

With no one else to turn to, she was forced to rely on herself for survival. She gradually became acquainted with the harsh realities of the streets, navigating the underworld of petty crime and vulnerable individuals fighting to get by. As time passed, she became more skilled at manipulating others to get what she needed. She used her words to exploit their vulnerabilities and influence their actions. Ghyslaine also developed expertise in shoplifting and pickpocketing, and sold illicit goods and bootlegged liquor, often getting these items through theft or chance discovery. She even acquired illegally sold weapons to defend herself when necessary, which she would either methodically discard after committing murder or sell to others for a quick buck, teaching herself how to wield tasers and handguns.

Underneath, she would cultivate a cynical and misanthropic outlook on humanity, veering towards nihilism. Despite this, she remained optimistic, holding out hope for a brighter future. However, the rampant poverty, crime, and violence surrounding her increased her risk of developing psychopathic tendencies.

After being severely burned on her left hand and forearm while fighting off a sexual assailant, she retaliated against her attacker, ultimately killing them. She embarked on a path of vengeance against those who had wronged her, using her knowledge of psychology and chemistry to inflict unhappiness on others. In an attempt to cope with the emotional turmoil of the war and the harm she caused, she briefly resorted to self-harm, which left scars on her left hand and forearm.

At 14, Ghyslaine was among the teenagers from Annecy taken into the Regular Army's orphan program by urban troops. The program relocated her to a residential care home in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, providing refuge from the war and an opportunity to socialize with other children her age. However, she occasionally found herself in brutal fights with the more troubled teenagers and often withdrew socially, uninterested in the lives of her peers and more focused on her own self-reliant isolation and learning. During her time there, she received shelter and education, including English language instruction, which sparked her fascination with foreign languages, particularly Chinese, Spanish, and Afrikaans. However, her stay in the orphan program was short-lived. A wealthy Canadian couple from Victoria, British Columbia, who served in the Regular Army's science branch, discovered her connection to Marmaduke Koudou and Parker Eugene von Wittenberg. They promptly adopted her, eager to raise a child linked to the controversial scientific figures they greatly admired for their boundary-pushing work.

They lavished her with every comfort, introducing her to an opulent lifestyle that she secretly adored. Her adoptive parents, while strict and occasionally dismissive of her emotions, encouraged her to prioritise academic and professional excellence. They rarely disciplined her, convinced that her exceptional intelligence and self-regulation made her inherently responsible and incapable of wrongdoing. Ghyslaine didn't mind, as she was driven to excel and immersed herself in intellectual pursuits, such as political theory and scientific philosophy.

Upon graduating from high school, she received 8 prestigious awards and 6 scholarships in recognition of her outstanding achievements in calculus and STEM fields, biology, chemistry, computer programming and software development, geopolitics and international relations, religious studies, philosophical debates and ethics, and psychological and sociological research. She proceeded to university, driven by her ambition to become a leading scientist. Ghyslaine’s unconventional research and theories sparked controversy, exploring topics such as the potential therapeutic applications of controlled substances, ethical population management strategies, the interconnectedness of human consciousness through shared ancestry, neural electrical pulses, and subconscious processes, and the concept of digital immortality through consciousness uploading and cybernetic bodies.

She would also cultivate an obsessive fascination with pushing the boundaries of science, marked by a penchant for conducting self-experiments. These experiments included learning how to self-sterilise without medical aid, creating and taking anti-aging drugs, removing her own eye to study the ocular microbiome, and exhuming freshly buried corpses to explore ways to make a severed body part function without a host. Ghyslaine also performed self-trepanation, hoping to reduce bodily stress by improving cerebral circulation and alleviating neurosis. Additionally, she injected herself with various psychoactive substances, narcotic analgesics, and central nervous system stimulants to document their potential therapeutic benefits and explore possibilities for legal medications with less addictive side effects.

After graduating from university, she contacted a clever hitman known as Oghma, who possesses Tuatha Dé Danann DNA. She used a large sum of money she had taken from her adoptive father's safe to hire Oghma, with the goal of eliminating her adoptive parents, whom she saw as obstacles to her pursuit of fame and recognition as a scientist. Oghma carried out the assassination, disposing of their bodies and covering up evidence of the crime, making it appear as though they had vanished during an evening walk. She was driven by a malicious desire to secure her inheritance, the substantial sum her adoptive parents had kindly set aside for her. After accessing the funds, she relocated to Britain, where she went on to become a renowned scientist for the British government. Her breakthrough achievement came when she genetically modified active cancer cells into dormant ones, significantly reducing the likelihood of reactivation in children. After Oghma shared information about the ancient lore of the Tuatha Dé Danann and apotheosis, this newfound interest sparked a grand vision for her New World.

Ghyslaine secretly masterminded a human and animal trafficking ring, as well as a theft operation targeting precious British artifacts. By exploiting these illicit resources, Ghyslaine furthered her research by developing simian and mantis serums, collecting DNA and bodily fluid samples, crafting pharmaceuticals from biological materials, designing cybernetic prosthetics, and conducting eugenic experiments. However, British authorities soon uncovered her clandestine activities and issued a warrant for her arrest, forcing Ghyslaine and Oghma to flee. They escaped to the Republic of Bashkortostan, where Ghyslaine assumed a new identity: Manfrida Amadeus. To maintain their empire, they resorted to peddling illicit substances and stolen artifacts, while also sharing sensitive government secrets. Bounty hunters from the British authorities and mercenaries from the Ikari Warriors who pursued her would vanish, leading to a collapse in the pursuit. As fear spread, the remaining hunters and mercenaries backed down, and the bounty on her head was quietly dropped.

After maintaining a low profile for five months, Oghma introduced her to President Marx, who was eager to collaborate with such a talented scientist. This meeting proved pivotal as President Marx successfully persuaded the Chief of the Regular Army to partner with her. Contrary to expectations, the Chief readily agreed. With the Regular Army and President Marx providing substantial funding, she established the Amadeus Syndicate and constructed the Amadeus Mainframe Base in Oceania. In exchange for their support, she agreed to develop cutting-edge weapons and war machines, provide medical services, and conduct scientific and technological experiments. She pioneered numerous innovations, including the development of the E-Armour, Slugnoids, Laser Guns, the Thunder Cloud, the Mobile Satellite, the special suits that high-ranking peacekeeping troops wear, Walking Machines, cyborgs, and a mandatory hospital protocol for uploading human consciousness into cyberspace.

Following a meeting with high-ranking Regular officials at the Joint Military Operations Headquarters to discuss the SV-001 prototype, Protogunner, and esper super soldier program, she crossed paths with Donald Morden. The two forged a cordial bond over dinner at an upscale Genoa restaurant, sharing stories about their lives and future aspirations. Later, while treating Tequila's battle injuries sustained during a skirmish against pirates in Riyadh, she met the seasoned mercenary. Her path would again cross with skilled operatives Gimlet and Red Eye during a visit to the Amadeus Mainframe Base, where they were restocking medical supplies, laser guns, and AR-10 Autorifles.

Impressed by Tequila, Gimlet, and Red Eye's exceptional combat skills and accomplishments, she conceived an idea: transforming them into super soldiers. However, recognizing the untimeliness of such a proposal, she opted to put the notion on hold, biding her time. She decided to befriend them in order to appear friendly and trustworthy. Gimlet welcomed her with open arms, while Red Eye warmed up to her gradually. However, it took a lot more effort to win Tequila over.

In 2010, utilising advanced Martian cloning technology, she created Nadia through a test tube in an underground laboratory owned by the Amadeus Syndicate in Quimper, France. Her goal was twofold: to produce the perfect heir to the Amadeus Syndicate by creating a woman of science and militarism, and to experiment with clone physiology and psychology. To foster an independent sense of identity, she kept Nadia's true status as an imperfect clone a secret, allowing her to believe she was her own person. Additionally, she withheld information about Nadia's family legacy to prevent her from questioning the Amadeus Syndicate's motives or abandoning her research, which was crucial to realising her vision of the New World.

During her time working with the Regular Army and involvement in President Marx's defence contract endeavours, she developed an artificial intelligence capable of simulating the psychological and sociological behaviours of children as they mature. This AI primarily drew upon research conducted on Nadia, utilising data from the Amadeus Syndicate's files, to which it had authorised access to. Initially dubbed Young Deus, a nod to her legally changed name, the AI's language use and responses to commands resembled those of a child, but its programming quickly evolved to mimic the characteristics of a mature adolescent.

Upon learning of her advanced artificial intelligence, the Chief of the Regular Army and President Marx urged her to adapt it for military applications. She subsequently transformed Young Deus into Iron Fortress, reprogramming it to commandeer enemy tanks and utilise them to safeguard Amadeus Syndicate members and registered affiliates, thereby promoting global peace and security.

However, Iron Fortress' flaws became catastrophically apparent during a guerrilla warfare incident in the southern United States. The AI mistakenly identified Regular Army urban troops as hostile forces and attempted to neutralise them, prioritising the protection of perceived innocent civilians who were, in reality, criminal insurgents. Recognizing the devastating potential of Iron Fortress, she swiftly shut it down and sequestered the virus in a secure, isolated compartment within her files. This decision brought relief to the Chief of the Regular Army but dismayed President Marx. Unbeknownst to them, she secretly redeveloped Iron Fortress into the White Baby computer virus. This revamped iteration could bypass the primary military systems of nations worldwide via the internet.

Three months before the Great Morden War, the alliance between the Amadeus Syndicate and the Regular Army shattered. The relationship imploded due to the Amadeus Syndicate's secretive creation of a bioweapon designed to further their plans for global domination, utilising the excavated extraterrestrial entity on Ultima Thule for experimentation. Additionally, Doctor Amadeus was involved in the sexual assault of Marco Rossi to harvest his DNA and semen samples. The Amadeus Syndicate also transformed innocent Regular Army troops into Mutated Soldiers and created terrifying creatures, including the Chowmein-Conga and Enormous Morays, on Pallas Island and in the Oro Sol Ruins. The final blow was the illicit plundering of advanced Tuatha Dé Danann technology from Scrap Island, native villages, and ancient Ajirabian ruins, aided by pirates and the Phantom Strike.

Ptolemaios offered refuge to Doctor Amadeus, Oghma, and their team of scientists and soldiers, fleeing the impending Great Morden War. Furthermore, Ptolemaios deployed his troops to support the Syndicate Infantry, repelling the Regular Army's assault on the Amadeus Mainframe Base, securing a decisive victory. During the war, she seized the opportunity to advance her research on her groundbreaking bioweapon, known as Wysteria. In addition to this, she designed cutting-edge weaponry and fully head-covering gas masks for the Ptolemaic Army. Meanwhile, she chose to keep Ptolemaios company, having observed his loneliness, and used this chance to forge a deeper connection with him. Through their interactions, she discreetly laid the groundwork for a potential future alliance.

Following the Great Morden War, General Morden forged an alliance with her, entrusting her with the bodies of Tequila, Gimlet, and Red Eye. United by a shared vision, they aimed to revolutionise these individuals into super soldiers, resulting in the creation of semi-clones. She integrated their recently updated digital consciousness into a biomechanical brain and nervous system. The experiments she conducted would heavily alter the three individuals: Gimlet and Tequila were imbued with psionic energy, while Red Eye received a Super Devil form and two new abilities. She ensured that they couldn’t recall the circumstances of their death, aware that such memories would pose significant risks to their loyalty and effectiveness within the Rebel Army and Amadeus Syndicate. In the heavily fortified basement of the Amadeus Mainframe Base, she maintained Tequila, Gimlet, and Red Eye in cryogenic stasis, alongside Wysteria, ensuring their secure containment.

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