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kasagia · 6 months

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Right hand II

Pairing: Na-Baron Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen x fem!exBeneGesserit! reader Summary: After you miraculously escaped from his arms the other night, you tried to stay away from him as best as you could. You have to put a lot of effort into escaping from the na-baron, who is tirelessly and constantly chasing you, or into avoiding another invitation to his chambers late at night. However, on Arrakis, the situation between you changes drastically... And you're losing control over your life, and it's not because of Feyd. Warning: 18+; violence; blood; Feyd Rautha; death; fight; brutality; smut; Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen's Masterlist ~•♤♤♤•~ Main Masterlist ~•♤♤♤•~ PART I ~•♤♤♤•~ PART III ~•♤♤♤•~

You are standing in front of the window of the ship that is taking you to Arrakis. You nervously play with the edge of the shawl that covers your head. You don't have good memories of that planet. Before you escaped with Feyd, the Bene Gesserit sent several of their young apprentices to… train in the sands of Dune. Including you.

You still remember the screams of some of your companions who went crazy from a lack of water and decided to end their lives. And sometimes at night you dream that the sandworm swallows half of your group, leaving you practically on your own.

Arrakis didn't just kill your friends. It killed any belief in the Bene Gesserit in you, only confirming that you would rather die than be completely subject to them.

And now you're going back there with someone who had full control over your life again. It's funny how history likes to come full circle. And how, despite their repetition, people still fall for tricks and fall into fate's traps, acting in exactly the same way.

A cold hand on your bare shoulder snaps you out of your stupor. You act fully automatically,drawing the dagger attached to your belt and twisting the attacker's arm. You pin him to the wall, placing the blade against his pale neck. You freeze as your eyes meet Feyd's icy blue gaze.

"Good reflex. If you were anyone else, I'd kill you for this, but I'm in a particularly good mood today, so I won't punish you as I would like. What were you thinking about, my little witch, that you didn't hear me sneaking up on you? Or maybe I have finally surpassed the master?" He asks with a mocking smirk, showing off his black teeth. You snort, shaking your head at him.

"Keep dreaming." You say, taking advantage of his amusement. This time, you are not keeping your mouth shut for fear that he will deprive you of your tongue for your boldness towards him. You move away from him, which he takes with clear displeasure, and return to your place by the window.

"If I dream about you, I prefer to dream about something much more pleasant." He wraps his arms around your waist, pulling you into his chest. He slides your shawl off your head with his teeth and nuzzles his nose into your hair, inhaling your scent.

You feel him sigh deeply, leaning against you a little as he relaxes into your scent and closeness. You frown, but let him hold you because you feel calmer having him close to you. Despite everything that had happened in the past two weeks, you still found his presence reassuring. It didn't make any sense to you, but apparently, over the years, you had begun to involuntarily associate him with something akin to a safe shelter. Herkonnen. A psychopathic, bloodthirsty future baron. How ironic…

However, being in his arms helped you come to the conclusion that the demons of the past should remain in the past. And you should focus on the newest one that is now wrapped around you.

You stare at your reflection in the glass, shuddering as his scent surrounds you, mixed with the blood that stains his uniform. You wonder which soldier you will have to find a replacement for this time.

"What were you thinking about?" He whispers that he doesn't loosen his grip on you even for a moment, knowing full well that the moment he does, you'll wriggle out of his arms and find another excuse to leave him.

You checked the condition of engines and fuel 8 times. He started counting after the ship's captain complained to him about your constant presence. He beheaded him without giving him the opportunity to complete his complaint against you. Feyd smiles, remembering the irritated frown on your forehead when you had to clean up his mess. Of course he followed you then. Of course, 'just to make sure that the next captain you appoint will be more competent'.

"It doesn't matter." You sigh, resting your head on his shoulder. He would enjoy your submission and willing closeness if he didn't see that, by doing so, you only wanted to distract him from the main topic. Clever little witch you were…

"It must be important if you stopped paying attention to your surroundings. You are always alert and aware of the things that happen around you. No matter what. I remember how, during one of our escapades, you were the only one who didn't fall into the trap."

"Well, that one was actually obvious." You say it with a mocking smile, remembering how you had to save him and his soldiers.

For the rest of your life, you will never forget how you had to dig Baron Feyd-Rauth Harkonnen out of the mud and save his ass from the Assassins who planned his execution. Of course, he killed any witnesses, leaving only you and him alive. After all, his uncle and brother couldn't find out about it.

He growls in your ear, tightening his grip on you as a warning, when you make him replay that day in his head.

"Don't brag now. I was… busy observing something much more interesting than muddy swamps." He grumbles, burying his face in the crook of your neck. The warm air he exhales makes you shiver.

"Which was?" You ask shakily, placing your hands over his to stop him from roaming them over your body.

"You." His answer is short and simple, as if it were the most obvious thing you should know. He doesn't hide it anymore; he doesn't keep his desire to himself. He wants you. He craves you. He shows it to you so clearly and thoroughly that you laugh at how naive you were to believe that you had only a friendly, platonic relationship. But how could you not believe that he only saw you as a means to an end when he treated everyone else around him like that? Since he treats people like things to play with and break whenever he wants? How could you have predicted that you would become his obsession, a precious jewel in his collection that he would want to protect and have just for himself? "I'm asking for the last time. What were you thinking about, little witch?" He asks, wrapping his hand around your neck and forcing you to look into his eyes.

You have no escape from him now. And you certainly won't tell him that lately you've been thinking more and more often about how to run away from him, or what would happen if you stayed with the Bene Gesserit, or how your life would have looked if you escaped from them on your own. You wonder if it wouldn't have been better to bury yourself in the sands of Arrakis all those years ago with your friends and die there. You are sure that it would be a much more dignified death.

"I... I thought about Arrakis." You decide to respond safely and carefully, so as not to reveal too much to him. You didn't want him to become suspicious of you. Not when you had to handle him carefully, lest you fulfil any of the Bene Gesserit's sick plans and visions.

"So what about this? Are you scared?"

"No. I am not. I'm never afraid. Fear is the mindkiller. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration." You repeat the mantra automatically without thinking much about it.

You flinch as you realise that you are answering quickly with the Bene Gesserit litany of fear, which they've made you learn by heart. A great deal of anger grows within you as you realise how much they have influenced your life, even so many years after you ran away from them.

"You're quite tense. More than when I usually hold you." He points this out, starting to gently stroke your back in an attempt to relax you. You give him an angry look instead, suddenly understanding why he was irritated with you for reading him and his emotions perfectly when he was the one who was flustered and furious.

It was always easier for you than for him to hit sensitive places or to read the other one like an open book. Apparently, you're not the only one who's learned this over the years. He knew you as well as the back of his hand. He just never showed any trace of concern for your well-being.

You had your… tender moments when you allowed yourselves to be vulnerable with each other once or twice, but you both treated them more as minor lapses in maintaining your impenetrable façade of indifference and neutrality. In the end, everyone is on their own. And looking for a friend in him was a completely stupid thing—an act of true naivety and a sign of self-destruction, maybe even masochism.

"Maybe you shouldn't hold me at all, then?" You growl at him furiously, unable to control yourself. He just frowns, more surprised by your behaviour than offended by this blatant act of disrespect. He had rarely seen you so nervous or furious.

Of the two of you, you were the one who was the most calm and composed. You were always able to hide all your emotions behind a mask of indifference. He's fascinated by how you really behave when you don't have a filter on. He often throws you off your balance only to see your cheeks flush with anger; you take out your anger in a fight (just like him); or you bite your lip to avoid saying something back to his taunts.

"Or maybe you should drop your attitude and just let me do it?" He asks, his lips brushing against your earlobe. He doesn't wait for your response; he simply catches the tip of your ear between his teeth. He bites in gently, sucking and caressing your skin with his lips, as if your ear's superior helix were the sweetest delicacy he could enjoy.

"I'm not fighting or trying to escape, am I?" You respond, enduring his treatment with dignity. At the ship's window, you can see a small smile appear on his lips at your words.

He decides to pull away from you, but he is not giving you even the smallest chance to run away from him. He presses you against the cold glass, entering your personal space even more than when he had you close against his chest. You lift your chin, looking at him defiantly as he puts his hands on your hips.

"You are not. But you also don't want to be here in my arms." He replies, cupping your chin with two fingers. He leans closer, making you feel the metallic scent of blood that still lingers on him, probably from his fight with some prisoners on the ship. "And I don't like it at all." He whispers hoarsely into your ear.

"Since when do you care what others want? I don't remember you spoiling your concubines like that." You snap, causing him to laugh mockingly and shaking his head in amusement.

He leans in, making you tense up slightly. You think he's doing it to kiss you, but instead of feeling his lips on yours, you feel his cheek brush against yours, and his lips blow hot air into your ear again as he whispers softly:

"Because they weren't you, Y/N." You shiver at the sound of his dark, hoarse whisper in your ear. You can't say you don't feel the effects of his... seduction. But you promised yourself long ago that you wouldn't be any man's whore, concubine, plaything, or broodmare. And certainly not HIS. No matter how... tempting he could be.

"And what is so special about me? Hm? My body? My appearance? That I can fight well? You would get bored of me. Like you did with all your concubines."

"Did they understand me like you do? Have you ever seen them look at me as anything other than a wild, bloodless beast in the heat?" He answers your angry questions with his, dismissing your attempt to start a verbal fight with him.

His thumb traces the line of your jaw, examining you closely. Looking into his light blue eyes makes you feel uncomfortable. He shouldn't have reacted to you like that. You weren't used to anything he had been doing these past few weeks. You preferred to fight him than... when he showed you so much tenderness, appreciation, and affection.

"Have I ever looked at you differently?" You ask defiantly. He smiles, licking his plump lips. You give in to this provocation, and, without controlling it at all, you move your gaze to his lips. His dark chuckle makes you look back into his eyes.

"Yes. Yes, you did that... you don't even know how often." He hums, his fingertips moving towards your mouth. He caresses your lips with incredible tenderness and delicacy. He presses on them gently, but you squeeze them as tight as you can, preventing him from doing anything he planned.

You react faster than him. You bite his wandering fingers, take advantage of the fact that he is still trying to process what has just happened, and quickly pull away from him. He laughs, shaking his head, looking at you intently as he deliberately crosses the distance between you two. He doesn't have to say anything for you to see how clearly he's mocking you and daring you to continue to defy him.

"We're not even on Arrakis yet, and you're already delusional, my na-Baron? Or maybe the black sun of Giedi Prime made you start seeing a mirage?"

"If you are a mirage or an illusion, then I never want to be sane again, my little witch." You gasp, as he wraps his arms around you tightly, clinging to you completely. He leans in, his nose tracing a line along your temple, inhaling your scent before burying his face in your hair.

He keeps a firm grip on your shoulders. You place your hands on his, trying to loosen his tight grasp somehow, but it only makes him hold you tighter. He tilts his head slightly and brushes his nose against yours.

You shiver, feeling how close he is and how his musky smell, mixed with a hint of metallic blood, surrounds you. He presses himself against you so tightly that there's practically no space left between your bodies. You close your eyes, letting out a small, shaky breath. And just as he's about to press his lips against yours, the metal door to the room slides open with a loud bang.

You jump away from him, grunting as a young recruit enters your field of vision.

“My lord na-Baron. Lady Y/N. We will land in fifteen minutes."

"We would rather notice it ourselves." Feyd growls at him. You see him reach for the hidden dagger. You walk over to him, resting your chest against his back, and grab his hand before he places it on his dagger and throws it at the poor man.

"Thank you, Oliver." You say with a smile. The man swallows in fear at Feyd's furious glare. He bows and leaves the two of you alone.

You step away from Feyd, letting go of his hand. You frown, seeing that he's even more furious than when one of the soldiers entered. You raise your eyebrow questioningly, not understanding why he's practically huffing in anger now.

"What?" You finally ask him, not understanding the reason behind his behaviour.

"Oliver... do you call all of them by their names?" He asks, spitting out the soldier's name in disgust. You sigh, rolling your eyes as you reach for the shawl he had thrown off you and put it back on your head.

"If I know them, then yes, why?"

"You've never called me anything other than my lord and na-baron." He speaks in an almost accusatory tone. It takes a lot of strength in you not to burst out laughing when you realize he's completely serious and not joking right now. You try to come up with some excuse, wondering how to safely answer his question.

"And you always call me your little witch." You answer. Using his name somehow never felt right to you. At first, out of respect for him, maybe even fear. After all, he saved you from the clutches of the Bene Gesserit. Calling him by his name was out of the question. With time, you did it out of habit. And now… now you didn't want to call him by anything else because you knew that it would be a small step on his way to make you his.

"So this is supposed to be our thing?" He asks with a challenging, teasing smile.

"We don't have a thing." You huff, walking towards the exit. He, of course, follows you faithfully. You can feel the excitement radiating from him. He was definitely planning something big to do on Arrakis. Something he didn't tell you. You just hoped that he would be too busy with his brother and securing the spice mine to take care of you at the same time.

"Don't we?"

"You should focus on what you tell your brother. You're finally taking the reins. Rabban won't give them to you that easily. And we need to establish a final plan of action on Arrakis." You say, returning to your matter-of-fact, cool tone. He smiles, nodding.

"Don't worry about that… I'll make him kiss our shoes." You snort, shaking your head in amusement at his words. It might be true, but it's still hard for you to imagine him actually putting this plan into action. As you'll see in a few minutes, he actually intended to do that. "And the plan was decided a long time ago. I told you I wouldn't let us split up. And not because I question your leadership skills or loyalty. You are the only competent and worthy person to lead half of my army. But we, little witch, work together. Always. You don't change something that works perfectly. Get ready. We're landing soon." He leaves you with a quick kiss on your temple.

He walks away from you with a sly smirk, as if he's managed to trick you. You sigh as you watch him walk out of sight, walking with a spring in his step towards his room, probably to grab his things and get his harpies ready to leave.

You look out the ship's window at Arrakis for the last time. You close your eyes, promising yourself that since the Bene Gesserit, Feyd Rautha, Giedi Prime, or the Harkonens hadn't killed you, this damn planet wouldn't do this either. You weren't the same Y/N from 10 years ago. You were more powerful. Your bones won't sink into the sands of this damn dune... you'd even rather become the mother of that Kwisatz Haderach.

You practically jump out of bed with your heart beating fast as you wake up from another nightmare. You sigh shakily, pressing your hand to your mouth, trying to calm your breathing as best as you can as your heart pounds frantically against your chest.

The screams of your companions echo in your ears, and the images of the Fremen pumping the water out of them replay in your head. And that damned sandworm...

“Y/N, look at me.” His cool hands on your bare shoulders and his raspy, commanding tone bring you back to reality.

As soon as you look into Feyd Rautha's blue irises, you stop trembling. You snap out of this strange trance, trying your best to forget about the returning memories that haunted you more often during this week of your stay on Caladan. You suspect that this may have resulted in a rather close relationship with Lady Jessica. You breathe slowly, focusing on his pale skin that looks like snow, illuminated by the moonlight that streams through the window of one of the Caladan's inns.

“Breathe in and out.” He gives you another order. You nod, imitating the pace of his slow breathing as you slowly begin to calm down. "I will kill that witch as soon as I get my hands on her." He growls, brushing your sweaty hair away from your forehead with his hand. You see immense anger in his eyes and the seeds of a plan forming in his head as he thinks of many ways to make that Bene Gesserit pay for your nightmares.

"You can't. She's the prince's mother. Besides, it's not her fault that she recognised me from somewhere. I could have been more careful."

"You covered your face with a mask for an entire week, all the time, even to sleep. What can you call that other than being careful? Besides, the baron knew that these negotiations were doomed to failure anyway. It's not like her suspicions ruined them. I would have decided to leave this damned palace even without it." He assures you, slowly lowering the two of you back onto the mattress. He wraps one arm around you, his tight embrace grounding you in the moment and helping your mind focus entirely on the present rather than the dark memories from your past.

"The Baron will be furious with you. It's all my fault. You should have killed me." You say, focusing your gaze on his daggers, which are strapped to his hip. Feyd follows your gaze and snorts. He grabs your neck, forcing you to lift your head and look into his eyes again.

"And get rid of the only competent right hand I've had in years? I'd rather suffer his punishment for this... small act of disrespect towards the Atreides. And who knows? Maybe he'll even like it? Harkonnen chooses inns over Atreides' palaces. I can always say that I saw rats running freely around my chamber and decided that such conditions are not worthy of a na-Baron and they are an insult to my person that I could not allow them to do." You roll your eyes at him, but you can't help but smirk at him.

Feyd finds himself smiling slightly at the sparkle of amusement in your eyes. He decided he preferred seeing them in your eyes rather than the emptiness and terror that didn't even let you breathe normally. He reveled in the fear of others. But yours brought him more pain than joy. Unpleasant pain.

It was starting to worry him. And maybe he would think about it more if you weren't lying so close to him now, practically in his arms. At his fingertips if he wanted to play with you. But, surprisingly, he didn't. And even if so, he wanted it only if you were as desperate for his touch as he was for yours.

"There are also rats on Giedi Prime. And you have to share a room with me because there's not enough space here for all of us. I'm sure your harpies are furious. You'd probably rather do something else with them, too, than hold me through my nightmares like some scared little child." You tease him, snapping him from his thoughts. He looks at you carefully, admiring the way the beads of sweat on your forehead glisten in the moonlight.

He feels a strange, new desire to make them be caused by him... or rather, by the activity he would subject you to. His gaze returns to your eyes and your lips, and he feels himself harden slightly as his thoughts turn to fantasies about you—something he's been doing a lot more of lately. One of his harpies mentioned something about him moaning your name...

"Maybe you actually deserve this punishment? Such sharp language…" He whispers huskily, tracing the line of your jaw with the pad of his thumb. He watches you carefully, and, as usual, he sees no fear in your eyes. Even when his fingers travel to your neck and then to the fabric of your nightgown, imagine how close he is to touching what you hide from him and everyone else behind your outfits designed to fit you into staying in the shadows and fighting. If he could, he would dress you in the most beautiful silks and jewellery so that he could feast his eyes on the only beautiful view of Giedi Prime. You see a crease form on his forehead as he becomes aware of this strange desire. He removes his hand before he goes too far to come back, and he clears his throat as he focuses his gaze on your eyes again. "What was that? That dream?"

"I... I don't want to talk about it." Feyd feels how you tense up just thinking about your nightmare. If it was anyone else, he wouldn't care. He wouldn't spare a thought or, if he was curious enough, force them to talk. But with you... he just nods and gives you space, turning to lay on his side of the bed.

"Feyd..." His heart beats faster after you use his name for the first time. He turns to your side of the bed so he can fully look at you. He hums, pretending that you're not giving him a heart attack and that he's not replaying the soft, gentle tone with which you said his name in his head. And he wants to hear it again. In many ways. A quiet whisper, a cry, a scream of pleasure as he makes you come... "I... can you..."'

He doesn't wait for you to ask him. And he could. He could make you beg for him to bring you the comfort you need or mock you for being so defenceless and scared, but how can he make you do that when you look at him with those doe eyes? How can he do anything other than pull you into his chest, place his hand on your head, and play with your hair, guiding your face into the crook of his neck as you look at him like no one has ever done before?

He wasn't the type of man you turned to for comfort or solace, and yet here you were, lying next to him, just wanting to feel his safe embrace around you again. He smiles when he feels your breathing and pulse slow as you fall asleep against him, allowing him to be with you in your unconscious state. He could do many things to you. He could slit your throat, stab you in the heart, scalp you of all your beautiful hair, and touch and taste any part of you he wanted. Satisfy himself with you and give yourself to his concubines when he ends using you.

But all he can do, as you sleep so peacefully on his chest, is pull the covers tighter around you and place a gentle kiss on your head. He doesn't remember the last time he felt such peace or the last time he felt wanted—not because of his status or the benefits he could bring to someone, but simply because someone wanted to be close to HIM.

"After all… I guess Caladan isn't that bad, my little witch." He whispers, pressing a kiss on the top of your head.

Feyd liked to think that the moment you first said his name and clung to him after the nightmare for comfort and security (IN HIM) was the moment he fell for you. But the truth was that it was a day later, after his uncle had punished him, inflicting various wounds with a blade on him, that you returned to the Giedi Prime without the expected agreement with Atreides. And, of course, he didn't rat you out. He took the blame. After all, it was his fault. He put your well-being above anything else and ordered to leave Caladan when Lady Jessica became too attentive to you. And he would do it again. He couldn't lose his right hand.

You felt guilty and took care of him. And those few days when you played the role of his nurse were the best ones in his life.

Feyd learned to love pain. Numerous punishments made it impossible for him not to do that. But he loved your gentle touch even more, esepcially when you tried your best to heal him. And he could get a thousand cuts or even more if it was the price of feeling your tender, caring touch on his skin once again.

And lying there with a torn back, looking at your sleeping form next to his bed, ready to meet his every little wish; he promised himself that he would do it. He will feel your hands on his body again. In better, less bloody circumstances. And definitely not with worry staining your beautiful eyes. But desire. Passion. Affection. Maybe even love.

"Uncomfortable, my lord?" You mock him with a little smirk as you both lie on the sand, observing the surroundings.

"Shut up, or I'll put you over my knee." You huff, shaking your head at his words. You know it's the last thing he'll actually do at this point. You use your binoculars to zoom in on a specific sand dune, in the middle of which there should be a Fremen base.

"Someone woke up with his left foot. I thought you'd be more enthusiastic about the upcoming fight." You say, trying to spot any movement, silhouette, or anything that indicates that your informant was right, and this is the place where one of the more important sietches are.

"I am. But it's damn hot here. Besides, sand gets in where it shouldn't." You smile, barely holding back your laughter, as Feyd allows himself to grumble next to you. You squeal in shock as he spanks you. You look away from the dune and give him an offended, shocked look when he chuckles hoarsely at your reaction.

"You're lucky that it's just a desert and that you're not dressed all in black like our soldiers. If this shipment of new equipment, weapons, and uniforms does not arrive this week, I will return to Giedi Prime and slaughter these useless scientists and engineers. Besides, your harpies will probably be more than happy to help you get rid of every little grain of sand from your body."

"Jealous?" He asks as you go back to watching the dunes.

"I wouldn't willingly be around these cannibals even if you paid me." You say, ignoring the fact that he was clearly asking if you were jealous of HIM, not the fact that he has his concubines and you don't. You shiver, feeling his piercing, burning gaze on you.

You're a little annoyed that he's doing practically nothing. Apparently, he too must have felt the effects of spending many weeks in that damn desert, and he had enough. Just like all of you.

"Arrakis brings out your more feisty side… I like it." He takes the binoculars from you and looks in a completely different direction. You snort, trying to see what caught his eye. You frown as you see a sandworm scurrying in the distance. But it wasn't under the sand... "Tell squad six to kill it. Those rats must be moving around again."

"Will you waste the bomb on a sandworm?"

"Only the most important Fremen travel like this. Whoever's on the back of this is not just anyone." You nod. You turn on the communicator and share information with the group, giving them the orders. You feel Feyd's eyes focused on you all the time. You roll your eyes and shift your gaze to his as he continues to stare at you curiously.

"What?"

"You've been here before, right? You may not know the ways of the Fremen, but I can see in your eyes that this planet is no stranger to you."

"The Bene Gesserit prepared us for every circumstance." You answered him deceptively. However, this does not quench his curiosity. And you know that since you're doomed to wait here for a good hour before anything happens, you're doomed to keep him entertained.

"Did they send you to Giedi Prime too?"

"No. But I was often send to Caladan." You say, not realizing how bad a move it was. The wrinkle on his forehead and the gentle tightening of his hand on his blades prove to you what an idiot you are. But you can't keep an eye on the dunes and anticipate his mood swings at the same time. Which he's had quite a lot of since you came to Arrakis. He didn't show it to anyone else, but you could see that the heat was bothering him just as much as it was for all of you.

"Why? Breeding program? Don't tell me you were supposed to be Atreides' pet." He spit out from his mouth the names of the people who were his family's greatest nemeses, as if it were some kind of dead poison. Even though the Atreides were long dead, buried in the sands of Arrakis, he still talked about them with huge hostility.

No. I was supposed to be your pet.

"I don't know." You slide off the sand to get out of sight of your possible opponents. There's no point in observing the area now. You know that your best men and their troops are positioned around you, so you could have left them to make the first attack. For now, you had to defuse a bomb that was about to explode next to you.

"You don't talk about it often. About the Bene Gesserit." He pursues the topic further, following in your footsteps. You both are standing on a small ledge, with your backs pressed against a sandstone. You don't have much space, so you have to rest your arm on his so as not to fall down and crash into the rocks below you.

"I don't want to remember it. I have another life now. Better one." You say, fiddling with your communicator. You issue a surveillance order to the rest of your units and turn it off, waiting for them to notice something. You take the shawl off your head and wipe your sweaty forehead with it.

"I won't let them hurt you again. Or anyone else." You freeze for a moment at his words. All you can do is stare at him in shock as he reaches for your face and grabs your hair. He ties them awkwardly, making sure they don't get in your face. It's a sweet gesture... even too sweet for him. And you wonder how the hell he knows how to tie someone's hair back.

You are about to tie your shawl around your forehead again when Feyd suddenly takes it from you. He wipes the back of your neck and makes sure there isn't a single bead of sweat on your face before he ties your shawl around his wrist.

"Who said they hurt me?" You ask, swallowing. You try to hide the tremble in your voice, but you suddenly become very aware of how close you are to each other. And that you two are completely alone...

"Your eyes and actions tell me more than you can let through your mouth, little witch."

"Shut up, or I'll put you over my knee." You respond with what he told you earlier without thinking much about it.

You gasp in shock as he presses you against the sandstone behind you, guiding the two of you deeper. His dilated pupils, slightly clenched jaw, and rapid breathing confirm how fucked up you are. You've lost your damn guard. Again. And now he will use it to his advantage.

"Oh, my darling little witch… you don't know how much I want you to do this…" He growls in your ear. His nose traces a path from your hair to your neck, inhaling your scent. You shiver as his lips brush against your neck.

"What are you doing?" You moan as he sucks your neck and bites it lightly, leaving a hickey there. He moves his head away from you and looks at the trail he created. He hums lightly, planning where to leave the next one. And another one. And another. And another...

"Shhh... We have a few minutes before they stop bombarding them. Another few before the dust settles and before we enter those rats' canals... let me make sure that my right hand is properly relaxed in the meantime."

As usual, he doesn't give you time to respond. He leans down and captures your lips in a passionate kiss. His chapped lips brush against yours, gently urging you to open your mouth for him. You try to tighten them as best you can, but he somehow manages to bite your lip, which makes him immediately clear the way for his tongue.

You gasp as his hands cup your ass. His fingers dig into your flesh, and you know that if it weren't for the thick tactical suit, it would have left bruises in the shape of his fingers. He picks you up without breaking the kiss and presses you against the stone-sand wall of the small cave.

You moan as his bulge rubs against your clothed core. You dig your fingers into his shoulders, holding yourself up as he peppers your neck with hickeys, grinding against you.

On Giedi Prime, you would struggle with him, trying to break free from his grip. But here, while you've been busy planning, tracking, fighting, and increasing your spice production for the last few weeks, you haven't had any opportunity... to take care of yourself. He wasn't helping either, following you around and acting like a fucking guard dog. And from what you heard from your room next to his in the night, he wasn't denying himself anything. Damn bastard.

What you didn't know was that he was fucking his fist thinking about you all this time because, since the two of you shared a bath, none of his concubines have been able to please him. So he's just as desperate as you are.

You moan as he thrusts into you, especially hard. He also purrs against your neck at the sounds you make. You're well aware that if it didn't take you forever to put your clothes back on, he'd already have you naked beneath him, fucking you wildly and giving you orgasm after orgasm... and you almost want to let him. If only those fucking witches weren't planning on breeding you with him, you would have been riding him wild a long time ago.

At one point, he bites into your neck, making you scream uncontrollably. You blush furiously when he pulls away from your neck with your blood on his full lips and gives you a hungry, lustful look.

"Take off your pants." He orders you. He licks the blood from his lips and leans down to lick the rest from your neck, leaving a few more hickeys on it.

"We… can't… we... battle..." He suddenly stops making any movements, but instead of moving away from you, as you think he will, he grabs you tightly by the throat. He squeezes lightly and leans forward, resting his forehead against yours. He breathes deeply and heavily, nuzzling his nose against yours before opening his eyes to fix his wide pupils on yours.

"Are you defying me?" You shake your head, always being a good soldier. "Good girl. Pants down, or I'll rip them off, and you'll have to walk back to the base without them."

This is a very real threat. And even though you know he would rather kill any man who dares to look at you in this state than expose you to the… lust of the hundreds of men who were on the base, you have no desire to parade around Arrakis with your bare ass. You start to take off your pants, slowly unbuttoning them. He won't even let you take them off of you all the way. As soon as he sees your exposed pussy, he drops to his knees in front of you, holding your hips in a tight grip.

"She blocks me so much when she has a damn spring between her legs… a real desert oasis…" He mumbles, his fingers collecting your wetness. You gasp as he looks you straight in the eye, sucking your juices from his finger. You lick your lips unconsciously, your brain completely stunned by the suddenness of the situation, the lust overwhelming you, the sight of him on his knees for you, as well as the spice in the air.

You don't even protest when he licks the stripe of your pussy and tightens his grip on your hips, pressing his face against your crotch. As he begins to lick and suck on your more sensitive parts, you scratch his scalp with your nails in a vain attempt to grab something. His dark, raspy chuckle against your clit makes you even wetter, as the vibrations and fingers teasing your entrance only fuel your desire.

He eats you like he's really dying of thirst. He brings out in you sounds that you would be ashamed of if you were in a better, saner, more aware state. And you try to maintain the last of your dignity and stifle your moans by placing a hand over your mouth, but he growls in protest and removes your hands so quickly that you have no idea when it happened. He places it on his shoulder, encouraging you to dig your nails into him as he devours you like his life depends on it. Like he would die if he didn't make you cum, lick up every last bit of wetness from between your legs.

At one point, he puts your leg over his shoulder. He's even closer to you (if possible), but you're not really paying attention to what he's doing as long as his mouth and fingers are still working their magic on you. You pull him closer, chasing your sweet release, when suddenly, he pulls away.

You growl in anger, opening your eyes. He's still on his knees in front of you, his face covered in your juices, and he's staring at you hungrily as if his face wasn't buried in your pussy moments ago.

"Say my name." His demand throws you off balance for a moment. You open your mouth to argue with him, to taunt him, but instead you close it quickly, biting your lip as his finger lazily moves in and out of your needy pussy. "Scream my name and I'll let you cum."

You don't want to give in to him like that. You don't want to show any weakness. But his fingers stretch you so wonderfully, hitting your most sensitive spot. You tremble around his fingers, biting your lip until it draws blood, too proud to admit to yourself how weak you were.

You escaped from the Bene Gesserit and from your fate to the only safe place; it's darkest under the lamp. No one in their right mind would willingly hide in the house of the man to whom you were supposed to submit. But it turned out that you were following the path these witches laid out for you anyway. But damn, he made you feel like you'd never felt with any man or woman...

You growl furiously as he removes his fingers again—right when you're finally about to come. He laughs hoarsely, sucking his fingers clean of your wetness.

"You're extending my fun, little witch. You must like it as much as I do." You protest as he dips his fingers inside you again, taking you close the edge again. You grab his neck, trying to pull him towards you, but he just laughs, intensifying the work of his fingers and fending off your feeble attempts to pull his face back to your needy cunt. "You know what you have to do to cum." He reminds you with a cocky smirk, watching your trembling, panting form.

Feyd drinks in the sight of you, so needy and desperate to orgasm. And it's all because of him. Every little moan, the closing of your eyes and the tilt of your head in pleasure, the ragged breathing, the quickening of your heartbeat, the wetness between your legs, the sweet nectar of the gods dripping down your thighs—it was all because of him. His cock hardens as he imagines how you'll react as he pounds into you like an animal in heat, stretching your tight walls for him. How you'll clench around his length and dig your nails into his back to feel him as close to you as possible. Or when you swell beautifully with his heir...

He will have you there. Willingly. He will prepare you as he is now; he will fuck out of you any thought until nothing except the desire for him remains.

"Feyd..." You moan as he unconsciously speeds up the movements of his fingers, thrusting them into you at breakneck speed. He smiles, blowing air at your pussy, making you moan even louder.

"Again." He demands, licking the small trail of your juices that has formed on your thighs. He welcomes the way you wet his hand and your shawl that was wrapped around his wrist. He'll save it for later this night.

"Feyd!" You pull on his head and he obliges. He couldn't be cruel to you in this state.

You come suddenly, quickly, and intensely. Your vision is blurry and unclear, and your blood is rushing through you as you moan loudly, holding on to him with all your might.

The next thing you know, he's holding you tightly by your trembling legs as he lowers you to his lap. You straddle him, hugging him tightly as you breathe slowly, trying to get back to a state of relative using after he fucked the orgasm of your life out of you. You hide your face in his neck, too disappointed in yourself to see the proud smirk on his face. He lazily rubs your back, holding you as you regain your strenght.

"You owe me, little witch. And you know, I always collect my debt." He growls hoarsely in your ear and presses a kiss on your temple. You can smell your scent on him. You blush, embarrassed, as you can feel desire rising in you again. "No response? Not a single malicious comment? Did I make you come so hard that now you are speechless? Are you really just a little mouse in need of my attention under that strong witch façade?"

"I'm not a fucking mouse." You snap at him in anger, finally coming to your senses.

"So that's the first one. Even better for me." He stands up, slowly carrying you from his lap to the ground. He reaches for your pants and helps you put them on. He grabs your hands and pulls you closer to him. You can't stand alone. You can't fucking stand alone. He laughs as he realises it, which irritates you to the point where you can't control yourself anymore.

"Shut up." You use your voice on him before you bite your tongue to stop yourself. Silence falls between you for a moment. You swallow, realising what you've done. You open your mouth to explain yourself, but, as usual, he beats you to it.

"Hmm… interesting. So you have that fire in you…" He tangles his hand in your hair and watches you closely, fascinated by the way you used your voice on him for the first time. "As sweet as I thought. Better than any water… Use that voice on me in a way I don't like, and I will really punish you, little witch. And this time, it will only be pleasant for me. Understood?" You nod your head with clenched teeth. "Good girl. Let's go. I believe they stopped dropping bombs right when you came on my face and fingers." He brags, letting you go when he sees you can stand on your own. You roll your eyes, realising how often he'll brag about it. You draw your blade and follow him, looking forward to hunting for Fremen.

You try to ignore the sand that… got where he was a few seconds ago and where he had it himself too. Damn bastard.

You walk through the corridors of your base. You're covered in blood, but it doesn't bother you much. Maybe a little when you remember that you will have to remove clotted blood from your hair. You sigh, adjusting the scarf around your neck that you took from some fremen to hide the hickeys as you walk to the war room to give new orders to the soldiers.

The Sietch has been completely destroyed by you. You murdered most of the fremen, and those left alive were taken prisoner... or to the camp brothel. You preferred not to go into details.

As you walk through the halls, you hear rustling behind you. You take a few slow steps and turn around, with your hand on your dagger, only to see na-Baron's harpies. You tense up as you watch the three women carefully and distrustfully.

"How can I help you?" You ask them, trying to avoid showing them genuine disgust and hostility. After all, they had somehow kept Feyd away from you… for now.

"The little witch is in trouble…"

"Our master will be very angry with her…"

"Maybe he'll even let us suck her bones when he's done with her…"

They say one by one, tilting their heads as they observe you. You shiver slightly, but you quickly adopt a hostile, intimidating stance, not caring much about what they say. They may have been cannibals, but you were a trained soldier and killer. You would kill them in a heartbeat if they weren't useful to you in some way.

"What do you want, vultures?" You growl at them, expecting them to get scared and return to their master's chamber, waiting for him like faithful dogs.

"The little witch's friend is here…"

"Our master is interrogating her…"

"And he learns very interesting things about the witch."

"When he's done with her, he'll be ours again."

"We will eat her meat and feast, celebrating our victory."

And what really should scare you more is the part about them saying they're going to eat you, but all you can think about is that friend he's interrogating. Another Bene Gesserit? Impossible. You made sure that everyone who came into contact with you either believed you were dead or forgot that you existed. Except for one… No. No, that wasn't possible.

"I have the blood of hundreds of rats on me. Get out of my sight unless you want yours to adorn my armor. And believe me… I will do it with great pleasure. I bet your master would fuck me on your corpse as a reward." You snap at them, still processing what may have been happening in the interrogation room. If your suspicions were true... you didn't even want to think about it. This couldn't be happening. You're paranoid. After so many years of keeping everything a secret... you couldn't lose control that easily.

You pay them no further attention and continue walking, ignoring their hisses and mocking laughter as you change your plans and head to the interrogation room.

You had to run away. As far away from here as possible. But if you do, he will chase after you. And when he finds you, and there is no doubt that he will, he will gut you and throw your remains to his harpies.

So you couldn't escape. You had to face him and try to tame him somehow. But how the hell are you going to explain to him that you ran away from the Bene Gesserit with him because you didn't want to be his concubine? Maybe a few years ago he would have understood it, but now that he has found this strange obsession with you, how could you get out of this situation? He'll cut you up before you even try to say anything.

You pass soldiers standing at the door of the interrogation room. They nod at you, letting you in as you hesitantly walk over to see for yourself if the situation is actually as dire as you think.

You feel the cold metal door on your back as it closes behind you with a bang. You freeze in place, swallowing nervously, as you see the Fremen Reverend Mother handcuffed to a chair. What scares you much more than the fact that it is really a Bene Gesserit is that it's Lady Jessica. Your former trainer in that sick sisterhood.

Feyd is standing right in front of her. His hands are gripped tightly around his daggers, and his gaze is focused on the woman in front of him. He strokes the blade of his dagger with his thumb as he is lost in his thoughts. He behaved as if he were completely oblivious to you, but you know him better than to even think for a while that he didn't notice your entrance. But he doesn't say anything as he continues to stare at her intently.

"She can tell you that herself. Right, Y/N?" Lady Jessica looks at you, raising an eyebrow defiantly. Even captured, she looks proud, as if she were the one who had power over what was happening in the room. "I should thank you. If it weren't for you, Paul would never have taken over the Kwisatz Haderach's way. No matter how hard I tried..."

"Feyd…" You ignore her and walk over to Harkonnen. You place a hand on his shoulder, but he just flinches at your touch, moving away from you. His eyes were fixed on the floor; he wasn't giving you even a single glance.

"I'm not surprised. If they sent me to breed with such a monster, I would also run away... not necessarily into his arms, but I really admire your skillful mind. To come up with such intrigue. No one would ever imagine that a little scared girl would run straight into the lion's mouth to take shelter there. I remember how you cried down my skirt when you found out what your mission was. I never would have imagined that my apprentice would go so far."

"Silence!" You shout at her, using the voice, and surprisingly, you succeed. You don't have time to try to understand what just happened—that you used your voice against a much stronger woman than you, the Reverend Mother. You walk up to Feyd and cup his cheek with your hand, forcing him to look at you.

His gaze is blank. He's wearing his mask, blocking out any emotions that might get through and reveal what he's thinking. He takes your hand and moves it away from his face, pushing you away from him like a bug.

"Would you like to see a monster, concubine of the Atreides? I'll be more than happy to show you one…" Before either of you can react, Feyd swings, creating a long gash across her chest. The woman gasps in shock, placing her hand on her wound, from which blood is now flowing down on the floor.

Before you can take a breath to talk some sense into him, he plunges the blade into her chest. You tremble as you hear the sound of cracked bones under the movement of his dagger and the witch's screams.

You don't do anything. You just stand there, watching as Feyd takes out his anger on her, disembowelling her. The metallic smell of blood hits your nostrils, but even that doesn't cause you to react. All you can do is stand and watch. And wait for your turn.

You feel sick as Lady Jassica's screams remind you of your friends who died on Arrakis. You deny what's happening in front of you as your thoughts return to that fateful day.

You weren't sent to Arrakis to try to survive. No, the plan created by Bene Gesserit was much worse. You were sent there to kill each other. This sick test was intended to eliminate weak individuals, leaving only one Bene Gesserit alive, the one who was the strongest among the young generation of women trained by these mad witches.

You were sent on one ship, thrown into the desert with weapons and one bottle of water, as an act of mercy. There were fifty of you. You killed half of them. Or at least that's what the Reverend Mothers told you after the Sisterhood took you back from there..

You were the only one left alive.

From that day on, you promised yourself that you would never let them control your life or make you go through these tests again. You didn't want to take part in their sick games ever again. You preferred to die rather than become their tool again, a monster that blindly follows their orders.

You never wanted to feel powerless or furiously frustrated again.

And now, standing there and staring blankly as Feyd killed the woman who was your mentor in front of you, you felt as if you were once again that helpless girl who is forced to do as she is told and who has no power over anything that is happening around her.

You flinch as blood reaches your shoes. You look up to see Na-Baron turning towards you. Blood was dripping down his armour as he cleaned his blades on her clothes, which were already soaked in blood.

For a moment, you delude yourself, thinking that it's not what you think. That he didn't actually discover the truth about your past in the Bene Gesserit by accident. That everything will be all right, just how it used to.

But by the look in his icy-blue eyes, you know he knows. He gives you the same angry, bloodthirsty glare that he gives his victims moments before they die. But there's something else there. Pain. Betrayal. Without knowing why, you feel a flood of guilt wash over you, outweighing your fear. But you didn't owe him anything. No loyalty or sincere devotion.

You gasp as he pushes you against the wall and presses the knife to your neck, breathing heavily. You feel it gently pierce your skin, causing blood to leak from the wound and run down your neck. He doesn't move away. He doesn't bend down to lick it off your skin. He presses further and harder, looking straight into your eyes. And you don't know if he's just testing you or if he really wants to kill you.

Suddenly, fucking him wasn't the worst solution to the situation you found yourself in...

Part IIITaglist: (I hope that everyone is here...) @thegabbyh @himesuedi @wo-ming-bai @beebeechaos @mamawiggers1980 @moonsoulk @avidreader73 @heartarianagran @dreamlandcreations @ancientbeing10 @lovereadingfanfic @jeansjoie @workof-a-rr-t @aixicl @ladyredstar1991 @evangelineimagine @hobobobo-fett56 @happyant3 @marsflys @aaaaaamond @kamcrazy123 @k1swass @yum-yahgurt @tyns13 @oh-you-mean-me @menari @tyns13

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 month

Text

“Disenshittify or Die”

youtube

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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poohsources · 6 months

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🐝 * ― 𝑺𝑷𝑰𝑹𝑰𝑻𝑬𝑫 𝑨𝑾𝑨𝒀 𝑺𝑬𝑵𝑻𝑬𝑵𝑪𝑬 𝑺𝑻𝑨𝑹𝑻𝑬𝑹𝑺.

❛ we'll just have to make do. ❜ ❛ come on, it'll be fun. ❜ ❛ wait, where are we going? ❜ ❛ you can't be here. go now! ❜ ❛ it's just a dream, a stupid dream. ❜ ❛ don't be afraid. i'm a friend. ❜ ❛ i can't stand up. what should i do? ❜ ❛ now listen, i'l tell you what to do. if you stay here, they'll find you. i'll distract them while you get away. ❜ ❛ you have no choice if you want to survive here ... and save your parents, too. ❜ ❛ why do i need a weakling like you? ❜ ❛ trembling, aren't you? still, i'm impressed you made it this far. ❜ ❛ what a pain. you're gonna pay for this. ❜ ❛ keep your wits about you. if you need anything, ask me. ❜ ❛ hey, are you okay? don't fall apart on me. ❜ ❛ listen to me. i'll promise i'll save you. ❜ ❛ what did you expect after all that rain? ❜ ❛ i'm gonna get there someday. i'll get out of here for sure. ❜ ❛ i was just coming to wake you up, look! ❜ ❛ what should i do? he'll die! ❜ ❛ what's so funny? wipe off that smile. ❜ ❛ don't do anything stupid until i get down there. ❜ ❛ you see, someone i really care about is badly hurt. i've got to go right now. ❜ ❛ this is our little secret. if you tell anyone ... i'll do the same to you. ❜ ❛ what are you going to do? he needs help. ❜ ❛ becoming a sorcerer's apprentice is dangerous business. ❜ ❛ well, getting there is one thing. getting back's the problem. ❜ ❛ [name], i promise i'll be back. please don't die. ❜ ❛ don't you understand? it's love. ❜ ❛ what took you so long? this is a total disaster! ❜ ❛ what do you want? you can tell me. ❜ ❛ what, you're still alive? ❜ ❛ you still don't see it? she's played a trick on you. ❜ ❛ since when do you talk that way? ❜ ❛ you held this, and nothing happened to you? ❜ ❛ i'd like to help you, but there's nothing i can do. it's one of our rules here. ❜ ❛ but can't you even give me a hint? ❜ ❛ everything that happens stays inside you ... even if you can't remember it. ❜ ❛ see? you have a talent for this. ❜ ❛ [name], i no longer blame you for what you did. but be sure to protect this girl. ❜ ❛ will we meet again somewhere? ❜

#rp meme #rp memes #rp prompts #roleplay meme #sentence startesr #movie sentence starters #movie starters #rph #type: meme

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sugucidal · 1 year

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# HOW TO SEDUCE YOUR NEIGHBOR 101 !!

CHAPTER i. [3k words]

୨୧‬┊pairing: toji fushiguro x fem! reader

୨୧‬┊synopsis: with winter break having rolled around the corner, you’ve decided to spend it with your family back at home. it felt nice being back after 2 years away at university. you just wish your mom had told you that a certain guest was visiting. one that you hadn’t expected to ever have to face again.

୨୧‬┊warnings: fluff! + age gap (reader is 19 and toji is 34) + taboo content (cause what’re u doin tryna get tojis middle aged ass in ur bed smh) + slice of life kind of (??) + suggestiveness + humor + reader is in her winter bimbo era + toji is…toji. + no smut yet sorryy + slight slowburn + everything is legal! no ones going to jail!

୨୧‬┊a/n: first chapter woohooo !!! second chapter will finally be coming out on [redacted] <3

‪MAIN POST | part i. > part ii. > part iii.

Tugging at the sleeves of your jacket further down your hands, you let out an exhale, nerves set ablaze. The typical cool spring air was colder than usual this particular night out, sun having already set and moon shining up into the dark, starry sky.

Fiddling with the hem of your mini skirt, you gazed up, doe eyes glinting heatedly up at the man you've harbored adoration towards.

You were finally gonna confess.

"I want you."

The simple words that held so much weight filled the space between you both.

A sigh in response. Oh no. You already knew what was coming, but you hoped to any deity or god from above that it wouldn't turn out this way.

"Kid, you're way too young for me." The smoke blowing past his lips wafted through the stiff air, his scar pulling at the corner of his mouth in dismay. "If you were older maybe I'd consider it. Wouldn't bet on it though, since you're such a pain in the ass to deal with."

You let his words hang momentarily, trying to come up with a sufficient rebuttal. You knew he was only playing when he said you were a pain to deal with but it still stung your heart to hear it coming from him. But you weren't gonna give up that easily. You've had a crush on this man ever since he moved into the neighborhood years ago!

What started out as innocent puppy love slowly built its way into this desire, stemmed deep at the heart the older you got. You'd watch as he invited women into his home late into the hours of the night, clinging onto him like a leech in a body of lakewater. God, how you wish it was you he'd have brought into his home on those late nights. Lustfully gazing down at you with promises of this being the best you'll ever have, one you'd be thinking back on until the day you die.

He knew exactly just how much you craved for his touch. It wasn't hard to see that he felt the same, you could see it in the way he'd glance in your direction whenever you purposely wore something revealing, hoping to catch his eye. He told you that you shouldn't wear things like that at your age around men, that they were dangerous, intentions impure. As if he wasn't one of those men he was warning you about. But despite it all, he always looked the other way. Kept a boundary of barbed wire up, no way of climbing through. Frankly, it was annoying.

You hate when people play hard to get.

"So...you mean once I'm 18, you'll take up my offer?" If he couldn't get with you because you were 'too young' then surely he'd concede if you were legally an adult...right?

"Not exactly what I said, but sure," Taking one last final drag of his cigar, he stomped it out onto the pavement, sharp eyes gazing at you discerningly one last time before turning the other way.

"Whatever gets you off my case."

That was the last time you spoke with Toji and almost 2 years have gone by since then. The rejection after the confession hurt no doubt, but the avoidance of Toji towards you afterwards, hurt like salt to a fresh wound.

You rarely saw him after that, suddenly out for weeks to months at a time for work. Sometimes he'd come by when he was free and have idle chats with your parents any time they saw him down the neighborhood. Not bothering to spare a polite greeting or glance in your direction whenever you were present. What used to be a strong bond between family friend and their doting daughter, having met him at an early age, quickly turned awkward and tense, distance overtaking whatever there once was.

You regret talking to him that night every single day.

Unfortunately, you couldn't bring back the past and fix your fuck up. On the other hand, the days of being immature and bratty were long gone. Having been replaced by someone more mature and less dense.

Living off pre-packaged noodles and staying up till 6 am finishing up assignments for your university classes due the next hour, does that to a person you suppose.

Now with winter break finally having rolled around the corner, you were able to get that good night's sleep your exhausted ass had been craving for. And the home cooked meals your mother had waiting for you was certainly appreciated as well.

Lugging your bags up the front steps to your parents' quaint home, you took a quick look at the classic 'welcome home' mat under your feet that you were sure still hid a key underneath. Lifting the corner of the mat your suspicions were confirmed.

You'd think they'd realize how unsafe this could be one of these days.

Before you could place the key through the silver lock, you were instead met with the distinct sound of hard, oak wood doors being unlocked and swung open.

"Baby, you're finally home! Get in quickly, come on now." Your mother hastily ushered you in, calling over your father to help carry your bags further inside the warmth of your home. The key you held was quickly dropped on the small table near the entrance, and the door kicked shut. The signature smell of a vanilla sugar cookie candle being burnt filled your nostrils, the rest wafting through the air. Anyone would think your family baked with the way they always seem to choose that particular scent regardless of season or weather. Further glancing around, you watched your family's pet cat prance towards you, its furry face wide eyed and complaining to be held. You swear he acted like a dog sometimes.

Guess some things never change.

You just hoped that would've stayed true for a certain someone.

Before you had any more time to dwell on it, you were taken out of your thoughts by the mention of the name you had barely begun to ponder over.

'Speak of the devil', you sighed.

Walking over to the living area, you followed your father picking up your cat on the way, butting in, "Hm? what was that?"

"You remember Toji right?" Nodding your head, your father continued. "We invited him over for dinner tonight."

You paused in your step. "What? Why?" The confusion in your voice was surely noticed. You couldn't exactly say you were unhappy, hell you felt giddy at just the mention of his name, but you were still hung up on the past and weren't ready to face the man that blew off your poor naive, little heart. If you saw his handsome face in person again that's been embarrassingly haunting your dazed mind whenever you're busy writhing and whining atop your soft, cozy sheets—at that dinner table, you might just take the 2 hour car ride back to campus dorms.

You were just a pussy like that. One that couldn't face the culprit of those lingering feelings that had never ceased to falter throughout the years, dead in the eye.

The two quietly glanced at each other at your sudden change in demeanor, eyebrows raised. Before he could continue your mom piped up first, "What do you mean by 'why'? You haven't seen each other in so long. He misses you and I'm sure you two would like to catch up."

"Misses you" You swear your heart might've actually stopped beating. In what world would Toji Fushiguro have missed their friends young daughter after being told straight to their face that they wanted him to fuck her.

"He..misses me?" It sounded a little unbelievable saying it outloud.

"Mhm, after you left for University he asked about you a couple times, wondering when you'd be back to visit," Turning around to walk into the kitchen to get started on dinner, she smiled over her shoulder at you once more, "You must've really left an impression on him."

Nervously laughing you settled your cat down, watching him stride over to sip some water from his bowl.

"Yeah..quite some impression alright."

- - - - - - - - - - ୨♡୧ - - - - - - - - - -

Okay. Okay it's fine. Yeah you haven't seen him in years but it's fine! He's just coming over for dinner. You'll greet him with a friendly smile, he'll ask how you've been- or shit, maybe he won't. Maybe he'll just ignore you again like he's already done. Toji mentioning to your parents that he misses you was probably just a misunderstanding and he meant to say the weather has been misty- yeah. Totally plausible.

"What the hell am I doing.." Taking a once-over to look yourself in the mirror, you just finished applying the finishing touches to your makeup, wiping off any excess gloss at the corner of your lips with a q-tip for a sharp finish. Was the gloss necessary given the fact that it was going to be smudged off during dinner anyway?

The answer was yes. Yes It was.

Just because you were having a small dinner that was probably gonna be awkward as hell with a man you've been wanting- didn't want to see, shouldn't mean you couldn't at least look cute.

A sudden faint sound of muffled talking took you out your inner monologue. Putting away your array of makeup displayed on the varnished wood countertop of your vanity, you walked over to the door pressing an ear against it trying to discern what was being said.

'Hm sounds like there's someone else down there..' quietly poking a head out into the hallway you just barely made out a deep yet familiar voice before quickly being startled by your mother calling out your name.

"Hon, come down and greet Toji!"

Fuck. "C–Coming!" straightening up, you calmed your blazing nerves, mentally preparing yourself for the onslaught of awkward tension that your parents luckily knew nothing of. Bless their complete oblivion.

Walking out into the hallway and down the stairs your eyes immediately locked onto Tojis, gaze shyly looking away and focusing onto nothing in particular. You were better off staring at something near him than at him directly.

Approaching towards where they stood, you tried your best to look as confident as possible. You're a woman now. Not some doe. At least that's what you feel like telling yourself at this moment, as you pick at your nails. Standing straighter, you stood next to your parents, watching as they finished up their talk.

You haven't had a proper conversation with Toji since, well...that night. Not counting the usual greetings you had exchanged with him in the past when you saw each other after. If you could even call it that. If a glance of bare acknowledgement was considered a greeting, then sure. Yet here you were right in front of him, determined to set things right. You had to confront him, it was the only way you'd be able to heal the wound of the past and maybe, even let go.

But first, you'll have to actually talk to him.

Deciding to finally look up at Toji, you were able to make out his features more clearly. He hadn't changed much since you last saw him, still very much tall, and his ever so brooding presence never waned. His jaw was somehow even more defined than before, and he was still rocking the same haircut as he always did.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it I guess.

Overall, he looked good. Better. The best. As he most likely always will be in your eyes.

And you're so lost in your own thoughts that you don't even notice Toji looking down at you in the corner of his eye, trying to hold back a smirk that's beginning to creep up. Silly you, ogling him so openly in front of your own parents. Not like they bothered to ever notice though.

Hearing the three of them laugh about something pulled you away from your stupor, and your attention was immediately latched onto Toji who was the first to speak.

Hopefully he didn't notice you being a creep.

"It's been a while, huh? You still remember me?" You know he's only teasing by asking if you still "remembered" him. The old you would've sassed him up for asking something silly like that, but you don't know if its a good idea to get ahead of yourself and start pulling on his leg this early on.

So you opt for the safest response.

With a polite smile on your lips, you shrugged your shoulders, "Of course. It hasn't been that long."

Toji stared at you for a moment. Shit. Did he not like that answer..?

Then you felt something warm come into contact with the top of your head; it was Toji's hand. Toji was petting you. Or more like ruffling your hair—same difference.

"You barely changed."

You exhaled a breath you didn't even know you were holding. A moment longer in silence and you don't think you'd be able to hold back the urge to run back up those stairs, slam the door shut behind you, and scream into your pillow.

Why were you so nervous!? You're never nervous when it comes to Toji.

'What's up with me??''

Regardless, you felt yourself being left annoyed at his comment. Disappointed that he probably still saw you as some kid despite not certainly looking or being one at all for that matter.

Too bad you didn't realize he meant it in a different way.

Even if you tried to hide it, Toji could still make out the way you held your hands behind your back, most likely fidgeting with your nails. Seems you've changed, the thought amusing him. The old you he knew would've pounced on him by now, batting your lashes, staring up starry eyed thinking you were being discreet about it.

Nothing gets past him, especially not when you make it so obvious. One thing that hasn't changed though, are the clothes you seemed to purposely wear around him, and him only.

The moment he saw you walk down those stairs, he knew you had him wrapped around your finger all over again. The too short skirt and see-through slip on you adorned leaving almost nothing to the imagination, if not for the cream colored cardigan you wore hiding the slivers of skin, leaving him wanting more of what was underneath.

'What a damn tease..' But Tojis eyes averted by the time your parents noticed your descend towards them. He didn't exactly want them seeing him ogle their daughter so openly.

Before any one of you could say anything more, your mother cut the greetings short. "Great, now that we're all finished reuniting again, let's start eating before the food gets cold."

Walking a little ways behind you, Toji catched the way your hips swayed as you walked. Whether you were doing it intentionally or not, he couldn't say for sure.

But one thing he was sure about, is that you were going to give him one hell of a hard time.

- - - - - - - - - - ୨♡୧ - - - - - - - - - -

The rest of dinner went by quickly. Once you were all seated, your parents and Toji had no problem talking with each other. They were busy discussing something, but your mind was too occupied to actually listen in on what they were saying. Too busy playing around with the food on your plate as your mind ran aimlessly, and foot twitching anxiously.

The night could've been worse. Really, it could've. Sure you haven't made any progress yet, but you'll get there! Overall, nothing particular happened. Except for one thing.

Toji couldn't stop looking at you.

- - - - - - - - - - ୨♡୧ - - - - - - - - - -

Before you knew it, dinner had come to an end. Toji had already taken his leave and bid you all a 'thanks for the meal' and a goodbye. Finally. Now you can slip away to your room, wipe off your makeup, and lay awake in your bed as you regret everything you could've said and done tonight but didn't without anyone noticing–

"Where do you think you're going?" There stood your mom, looking at you expectantly. Were you missing something?

"To my room, why?"

"Didn't you hear at dinner?"

'Was I supposed to hear something at dinner?'

"No, hear what exactly?"

"Tomorrow, you're going out to buy some decorations for a party we're having."

A beat of silence. Your eyebrows were furrowed in confusion as you wondered why the hell you would be having a party.

"Mom… I appreciate that you want to host a welcome back party for me, but there's really no need to." It's sweet that they missed you this much, but you weren't one for parties that were centered around you.

She laughed. "No, no, not a party for you. I know you don't like that kinda stuff,"

Oh. Nevermind then.

"Our annual winter get together. We do it every year with the rest of the neighborhood and we're the ones hosting this time. Have all those cup noodles gotten to your head and you suddenly forgot?" She shook her head in disappointment.

Low blow, mom.

"I didn't forget! I just...didn't know you'd be the ones doing it this year."

"If you were actually paying attention at dinner then you'd have heard."

"Sorry. So, tomorrow you want me to go out and buy decor right? Cool, I'll go after lunch."

Thinking that was the end of that, you began to trudge your way towards the staircase. Already almost at the top when your mother called out to you once more.

"Oh! and Toji's accompanying you."

Yup, definitely going to scream into your pillow tonight.

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