ephemeralculture

[ephemeralculture]

Find Invisible Unicode Characters aka “AI Watermarks”

https://clemensjarnach.github.io/02-articles/2025-04-24-article.html

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Fifty per cent of web users are running ad blockers. Zero per cent of app users are running ad blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that’s a felony. (Jay Freeman, the American businessman and engineer, calls this “felony contempt of business-model”.) So when someone in a boardroom says, “Let’s make our ads 20 per cent more obnoxious and get a 2 per cent revenue increase,” no one objects that this might prompt users to google, “How do I block ads?” After all, the answer is, you can’t. Indeed, it’s more likely that someone in that boardroom will say, “Let’s make our ads 100 per cent more obnoxious and get a 10 per cent revenue increase.” (This is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website.) There’s no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn’t install a counter-app that co-ordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold. No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete or, in other words, “IP law”. IP isn’t just short for intellectual property. It’s a euphemism for “a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers”. And “app” is just a euphemism for “a web page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to mod it, to protect the labour, consumer and privacy rights of its user”.

[ephemeralculture]

International Digital Ephemera Project (IDEP) | UCLA Library

The International Digital Ephemera Project is an initiative to digitize, preserve and provide broad public access to print, images, multimedia, and social networking resources produced worldwide.

[ephemeralculture]

Digital materials that appear online during or in response to an historic event can provide important perspectives on that occurrence. Yet these sources, which include social media messages, news (whether multimedia or text) and other web sites, often disappear quickly, whether due to neglect, commercial appropriation, or active censorship*. The format and scale of such ephemeral web resources also tend to require specialized software tools and approaches to collect, preserve, and understand them.

[ephemeralculture]

HERE IS HOW platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification...

[ephemeralculture]