#Amazon Products data collection

[ms-demeanor]

any thoughts on the new post that staff went scorched earth on which is now making the rounds abt tumblr live? it basically screenshots all the tos and claims if you've ever opened the app (or in some rbs, unsnoozed live) tumblr has gotten your data. on the one hand i feel like this is fearmongering, but on the other its true that MOST sites have your data as is so its pretty standard. you seem pretty knowledgeable abt data gathering so i was wondering abt your take

This is going to be pretty unkind but watching tumblr users interact with staff and live is a great primer on how conspiracy theories happen.

Nobody on this fucking website knows how to read a ToS, nobody on this website knows how anything fucking works (sorry, this is not a dig at you but how would tumblr "get" your data from you clicking or unclicking live; the only data that tumblr has on you is the data that you have put on tumblr what data do people think that clicking the "new" button is scooping up that is anything beyond interactions or posts or IP addresses which are the things that tumblr already has information about like you do not introduce new information into the tumblr ecosystem by clicking a button you haven't installed anything you haven't changed permissions on your browser if everyone is so goddamned scared about live stealing their data i strongly recommend they stop using anything but public internet through an anonymizer and making sure location data is shut off on all of their devices and anyone who is flipping their shit about the type of data that live is collecting but who is using chrome on any device needs to chill the fuck out about live and flip the fuck out about google)

this is like that post about twitter's content policy that circulated the other day or that post about deviantart's content policy that circulated ten fucking years ago nobody knows how to read legal documents and nobody knows how to read technical documentation and this comes together into unholy matrimony on the no reading comprehension at all moral panic website

live never violated the GDPR it was just rolled out in the US first but the entire userbase decided that because it hadn't been rolled out simultaneously in the EU and the US that it was SO UNSPEAKABLY PRIVACY VIOLATEY THAT THE EU HAD BANNED IT FOR ITS CRIMES with, like, nothing whatsoever backing that up because, again, even at its most intrusive Live collects about as much data as Twitter or Yelp, both of which are *capable* of meeting GDPR standards with that level of data collection (even if musk sometimes makes decisions that violate GDPR).

Live is significantly less intrusive than any facebook product, than Amazon, and than any Google product. If you use youtube logged in, don't worry about live, the horse is out of the barn and tumblr is the least of your worries *regardless* of live. If you regularly use Google as a search engine please god learn how to evaluate and compare risks across platforms because Live is like a coughing baby compared to about a dozen things that most highly online people interact with every single day.

If you don't want to use live don't use live. Clicking the button doesn't magically transfer your secret FBI file to tumblr and even agreeing to the ToS doesn't share anything that tumblr doesn't already have if you don't continue to interact - if you don't interact with live after agreeing to the ToS it's not collecting any data except your non-interaction.

For everyone who is losing it over Live just turn off your goddamned location on your fucking cellphone and turn off your location on your goddamned computers and that's it, you're good, you're fine, relax. If your response to "turn off your location" is "but I need it for _____" then don't worry about Live, whatever "_____" is was already collecting and selling your data.

Do you use an activity tracker? Congrats, you have much, much bigger privacy issues to worry about than tumblr live.

Okay but also I yelled about that post and the very many ways in which it was incorrect in January.

And I happened to take an archive of the page at that time because I'm a paranoid motherfucker.

And if you want my guess as to why staff went "scorched earth" on that post it's probably because if you scroll down to the bottom of the page on the archive, OP calls on everyone looking at the post to send a kind fuck you to the CEO then tagged his tumblr.

If you look at the other posts that went scorched earth in relation to tumblr staff they were also posts that very pointedly directed a lot of ire at a single staff member.

I don't think that any individual tumblr staff members are above criticism and I don't think that staff as a whole is above criticism but part of learning to read a ToS is understanding that someone can be shitty and vague and use TERF talking points and skirt the line and be technically okay under the ToS while someone can have a legitimate gripe about another user being horrible and manage to violate the ToS by accidentally spinning up a harassment campaign or suicide baiting someone.

Shitty people like nazis and terfs thrive on being edge cases. They are very good at finding a boundary and standing juuuuuuuuust on this side of it and going "la la la I'm not violating the ToS, you can't stop me!" and that blows and it leads to a lot of people encountering a lot of shitty stuff on a lot of websites but personally I'm pretty glad that there's a lot of gray area because when you cut out gray area that's when you see things like It's Going Down getting banned as extremist content alongside white supremacists. Please continue to report nazis and terfs, and when possible go deep into their pages to report because a pattern of behavior is more likely to get recognized as hate speech than a single post that gets reported a hundred times. Please block as many people who it's harmful for you to interact with as possible because it's clear that staff is not going to do the kind of work protecting users that users would like staff to do.

However I just can't get angry on behalf of a blogger who got nuked for saying "Hey everyone who hates this feature that we all hate please go tell the CEO to fuck himself at this URL specifically" - that is an extremely clear violation of the ToS because it is absolutely targeted harassment.

So now tumblr-the-userbase is going off on its merry conspiracy way skipping through fields and lacking reading comprehension and saying "users are getting banned for reporting the crimes of tumblr live and its gdpr violations" and ignoring the fact that the post was nuked because the last line was saying "hey everyone, let's all individually tell the CEO to fuck off in messages sent directly to him that are certainly not going to include any threats, exaggerations, gore, etc. etc. etc."

If I were to make a post that had 50k notes and the last line was "and while you're at it, please send tumblr-user-ms-demeanor a personalized message telling them why they're a terrible person so they know what we think of them" it would absolutely be reasonable to say that was harassing that user. And that post did it with the CEO. Who is not above criticism (and I have my criticisms! I don't think he really gets tumblr and that's a problem!), but jesus fucking christ don't tag the goddamned CEO or any other staff member in a call to action asking users to send them messages saying "fuck off" this is literally the stupidest thing I've ever seen a tumblr conspiracy theory coalesce around.

Anyway thank you for giving me a place to vent i've been getting more and more pissed about this for three days. Everyone feel free to kindly tell tumblr user ms demeanor to fuck off.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Disenshittify or Die”

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)

@fak3r@mastodon.social (cropped)

https://mamot.fr/@fak3r@mastodon.social/112963252835869648

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

[mariacallous]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[crazysodomite]

*person who uses Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, Google search and services, tinder, Grindr, Uber, doordash, PayPal, twitter, Amazon products and its services voice*

Um... ; ; idk im.. just uncomfy using this program since it was made by the chinese- i mean by chinese people... Their government probably forces them to collect our data and install malware to our PCs so... I don't have any proof of this but I just wanna be safe srry ;;

[technofeudalism]

Taller Nepantla: "So where do art and artists stand within this new techno-feudal political landscape?"

1) Artists don’t own anything.

We don’t own the studios. We don’t own the galleries. We don’t own the production of materials. We don’t own the newspapers. We don’t own the art schools and universities. We don’t own the mechanisms of art distribution. We don’t own our work. We don’t even own our own art. Artists have no labor protections and are content to work individually to perpetuate their own myth or pray to the sacred algorithm to go viral. By being atomized we are exactly like a feudal peasant of the Middle Ages, who lives in extreme precariousness giving away part of his crops to his local king. The art world, its industry, its weight, its impact, its trend, everything belongs to other people. Did you know 80% of the art-market is own by a small group of Mega Collectors? Those who control the means of artistic production control the artists.

2) By not owning anything, artists and cultural workers only rent.

We no longer sell handmade works, but instead we sell our hands for work. More and more the creative and artistic sector sells services rather than art. Artists need multiple jobs in order to invest in their art practice. Even more, just as in the feudal stage of history, we work the land in a territory that does not belong to us, the land belongs to the landowner. In this land artists will always pay rent, a tax, to the feudal lord. We use GOOGLE to send emails We upload our art to INSTAGRAM We educate ourselves through YOUTUBE We communicate through TIKTOK We pay to use ADOBE SUIT We buy materials through AMAZON We move through UBER We send files through WETRANSFER Every time we use these platforms, we generate money for the feudal lords.

The art world depends on these platforms, which collect our information and our data, to sell.

When a service is free, our attention is the product. That is, it is impossible for an artist to establish himself as an artist without generating money for the landowners who own the technological platforms. That is, the art world depends on these products. It is impossible to be an artist without using these technologies. Techno-feudalism keeps artists in a situation of -permanent-precariousness dependence on technological platforms. Just like in medieval times, peasants live off the crumbs offered by the crown, living in a house, working on land, and eating food that does not belong to them. Technocapitalists don’t want artists to own the means of artistic reproduction. Technocapitalist instead build a world where everything is rented. Every stage of artistic production from how you imagine an artwork, how you study an artwork, how you draft and artwork, how you build an artwork, how you show an artwork, how you distribute an artwork, how you perceive an artwork, and how you think about an artwork, is all determined by apps and tools which you rented from a tech corporation.

3) Artists SUBSIDIZE the profits of technological platforms.

That is, we pay an inflated price for these services directly from our pockets. The art world depends on the underpaid work of our services. If there were fair wages in the art world, then the entire pyramid wuld be destroyed precisely because it depends on the fact that most artists do not earn a fair wage. All the art we produce and share is being used to train algorithms to better sell us products. When a platform is free, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, we are the product that is sold. Even more, artists subsidize the entire artworld. We work for free. We work for low wages. We work for exposure. We are the “volunteer army” Jerry Saltz brags about. The artworld benefits from not paying us what we deserve.

4) The entire art world depends on the platforms of the Clouds.

All museums, galleries, fairs, biennials, and auctions depend on the technological infrastructure dominated by feudal landowners. In other words, there is a dependence on these technologies in order to promise an interconnected, cosmopolitan, and immediate “art world.” The feudal landowners who own the technological platforms, having no competition, can impose whatever price they want, and the art world must obey. They can raise prices without losing customers. The price we pay to use TechnoCapitalist services is completely arbitrary. It does not correspond with the quality of the service but rather to the whims of the landlords. One day, black ink for printing is free, the next day it costs $5.99 a month as a part of a subscription package. We are looking at you Anish Kapoor.

5) The algorithm decides what counts as talent as long as it can generate profits.

Algorithms are increasingly deciding what counts as “value.” Major collectors will be able to systematize the works on the market in order to deduce, through algorithms, the value of a work and whether it is a good investment. The algorithm has more power than art critics and art historians. An artist will then adapt to the algorithmic trends of his time, in order to go viral. A work of art that goes viral can change the artist’s life. NFT’s are just one example of techno-feudal experiments in the arts. NFT’s promise decentralization and transparency, but end up replicating the worst aspects of capitalism, feudalism, and what new technologies can do.

In short, the art world is interconnected with techno-feudalism. We artists are technologically and socially dependent on a system that exploits us. It is important to increase media literacy so that artists can build alternative technological systems to cut dependence on monopolistic companies. A king’s mindset is always to grown and conquer. In the end, the artworld’s investment in techno-feudalism will actively bring the destruction of other smaller artworlds in the global south. Techno-feudalism will produce a homogenized, sanitized, apolitical universal art, that privileges creations that protect the artworlds overlords."

[losticaruss]

not sure if people have already posted about this but i think it's important to share. i know they've posted follow-ups on tiktok (and maybe ig), including the statement that it is OFFICIALLY happening CHRISTMAS EVE AND CHRISTMAS DAY. DECEMBER 24 AND 25. there's also an official list that includes, but isn't limited to, spotify, tiktok, ig, ANY meta products, hulu, netflix, and the like. genuinely this is SOSOSO important

[ID: a tiktok from @/skyfisherforskyfish.

audio begins:

"i've moved on from feeling spiteful. im officially feeling... diabolical. the next big thing we can do to harm big business- after you've cancelled your amazon subscription, after you've cancelled your audible, after you've moved your money out of big banks and into local credit union, after you've figured out a way to buy local- the next big thing, ladies and gentlemen, is the data strike of Christmas 2024. why would a data strike be effective? because data is the most valuable asset on earth, right after human suffering from denying people who need healthcare, healthcare. that is actually the reason behind the tiktok ban. it's not about national security, it's about the data war that's happening between the united states and china. Christmas is a very pivotal moment, because all of the gifts are purchased, and now companies get to observe what you do with the money and gifts you've been given. your data is critically important right now for training their models and training their campaigns going forward on how consumer behavior is influenced by the holidays. that's not the only thing. following the shooting of the united healthcare ceo, the surveillance state has absolutely exploded in popularity- as you can see, many cities particularly los angeles (where i live) expanding their budgets for next year to use video surveillance on its populations. it's horrifying! it's dystopian! it's entirely preventable. the data strike is one to two days where we simply get off social media. you do not give them a second of your time for advertising dollars, for data mining, for any of it. this would not only kneecap the marketing budgets of big businesses, which have already been spent, they've already been expended, you will only ruin their r.o.i.. you will also prevent them from furthering the expansion of the surveillance state. you could directly say fuck you to zuckerberg and musk easily, with no pain. further, it's a great opportunity because during the holidays, we're pretty busy anyways, and you're there with family. and i know you're like 'oh, i don't want to hang out with my family, i just want to tap out!' challenge yourself. even if you're not having a good time, just have a time, rather than being completely numbed out by your screen, don't you think? one day won't kill you. two days would be a superhuman feat and i would be so impressed, i'd be so proud of you. you could also save on carbon emissions, because it requires a lot of energy to run this app (tiktok) and all of its servers, and every other social media. i have already seen such an enormous amount of collective action taken- people cancelling their amazon subscriptions, people taking their money out of big banks, going to local credit unions, decentralizing their purchases, starting small, local community gardens, going back to their libraries- people are taking action, and just because you don't see it online does not mean it's not happening. in fact, i want you to be absolutely aware that the reason you're not seeing it online is because it is happening. together, we can do the data strike of Christmas 2024. please share this video, please encourage your friends and family to take this shit seriously because the effect and the impact we could have on the market, on the surveillance state, and on the environment is legitimately enormous, and i believe in us. thank you for watching, i know this video is long, i know you've got shit to do. have fun scrolling. talk to later, bye."

/end ID]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 18, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jan 19, 2025

Shortly before midnight last night, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published its initial findings from a study it undertook last July when it asked eight large companies to turn over information about the data they collect about consumers, product sales, and how the surveillance the companies used affected consumer prices. The FTC focused on the middlemen hired by retailers. Those middlemen use algorithms to tweak and target prices to different markets.

The initial findings of the FTC using data from six of the eight companies show that those prices are not static. Middlemen can target prices to individuals using their location, browsing patterns, shopping history, and even the way they move a mouse over a webpage. They can also use that information to show higher-priced products first in web searches. The FTC found that the intermediaries—the middlemen—worked with at least 250 retailers.

“Initial staff findings show that retailers frequently use people’s personal information to set targeted, tailored prices for goods and services—from a person's location and demographics, down to their mouse movements on a webpage,” said FTC chair Lina Khan. “The FTC should continue to investigate surveillance pricing practices because Americans deserve to know how their private data is being used to set the prices they pay and whether firms are charging different people different prices for the same good or service.”

The FTC has asked for public comment on consumers’ experience with surveillance pricing.

FTC commissioner Andrew N. Ferguson, whom Trump has tapped to chair the commission in his incoming administration, dissented from the report.

Matt Stoller of the nonprofit American Economic Liberties Project, which is working “to address today’s crisis of concentrated economic power,” wrote that “[t]he antitrust enforcers (Lina Khan et al) went full Tony Montana on big business this week before Trump people took over.”

Stoller made a list. The FTC sued John Deere “for generating $6 billion by prohibiting farmers from being able to repair their own equipment,” released a report showing that pharmacy benefit managers had “inflated prices for specialty pharmaceuticals by more than $7 billion,” “sued corporate landlord Greystar, which owns 800,000 apartments, for misleading renters on junk fees,” and “forced health care private equity powerhouse Welsh Carson to stop monopolization of the anesthesia market.”

It sued Pepsi for conspiring to give Walmart exclusive discounts that made prices higher at smaller stores, “​​[l]eft a roadmap for parties who are worried about consolidation in AI by big tech by revealing a host of interlinked relationships among Google, Amazon and Microsoft and Anthropic and OpenAI,” said gig workers can’t be sued for antitrust violations when they try to organize, and forced game developer Cognosphere to pay a $20 million fine for marketing loot boxes to teens under 16 that hid the real costs and misled the teens.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau “sued Capital One for cheating consumers out of $2 billion by misleading consumers over savings accounts,” Stoller continued. It “forced Cash App purveyor Block…to give $120 million in refunds for fostering fraud on its platform and then refusing to offer customer support to affected consumers,” “sued Experian for refusing to give consumers a way to correct errors in credit reports,” ordered Equifax to pay $15 million to a victims’ fund for “failing to properly investigate errors on credit reports,” and ordered “Honda Finance to pay $12.8 million for reporting inaccurate information that smeared the credit reports of Honda and Acura drivers.”

The Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice sued “seven giant corporate landlords for rent-fixing, using the software and consulting firm RealPage,” Stoller went on. It “sued $600 billion private equity titan KKR for systemically misleading the government on more than a dozen acquisitions.”

“Honorary mention goes to [Secretary Pete Buttigieg] at the Department of Transportation for suing Southwest and fining Frontier for ‘chronically delayed flights,’” Stoller concluded. He added more results to the list in his newsletter BIG.

Meanwhile, last night, while the leaders in the cryptocurrency industry were at a ball in honor of President-elect Trump’s inauguration, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency. By morning he appeared to have made more than $25 billion, at least on paper. According to Eric Lipton at the New York Times, “ethics experts assailed [the business] as a blatant effort to cash in on the office he is about to occupy again.”

Adav Noti, executive director of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, told Lipton: “It is literally cashing in on the presidency—creating a financial instrument so people can transfer money to the president’s family in connection with his office. It is beyond unprecedented.” Cryptocurrency leaders worried that just as their industry seems on the verge of becoming mainstream, Trump’s obvious cashing-in would hurt its reputation. Venture capitalist Nick Tomaino posted: “Trump owning 80 percent and timing launch hours before inauguration is predatory and many will likely get hurt by it.”

Yesterday the European Commission, which is the executive arm of the European Union, asked X, the social media company owned by Trump-adjacent billionaire Elon Musk, to hand over internal documents about the company’s algorithms that give far-right posts and politicians more visibility than other political groups. The European Union has been investigating X since December 2023 out of concerns about how it deals with the spread of disinformation and illegal content. The European Union’s Digital Services Act regulates online platforms to prevent illegal and harmful activities, as well as the spread of disinformation.

Today in Washington, D.C., the National Mall was filled with thousands of people voicing their opposition to President-elect Trump and his policies. Online speculation has been rampant that Trump moved his inauguration indoors to avoid visual comparisons between today’s protesters and inaugural attendees. Brutally cold weather also descended on President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, but a sea of attendees nonetheless filled the National Mall.

Trump has always understood the importance of visuals and has worked hard to project an image of an invincible leader. Moving the inauguration indoors takes away that image, though, and people who have spent thousands of dollars to travel to the capital to see his inauguration are now unhappy to discover they will be limited to watching his motorcade drive by them. On social media, one user posted: “MAGA doesn’t realize the symbolism of [Trump] moving the inauguration inside: The billionaires, millionaires and oligarchs will be at his side, while his loyal followers are left outside in the cold. Welcome to the next 4+ years.”

Trump is not as good at governing as he is at performance: his approach to crises is to blame Democrats for them. But he is about to take office with majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, putting responsibility for governance firmly into his hands.

Right off the bat, he has at least two major problems at hand.

Last night, Commissioner Tyler Harper of the Georgia Department of Agriculture suspended all “poultry exhibitions, shows, swaps, meets, and sales” until further notice after officials found Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or bird flu, in a commercial flock. As birds die from the disease or are culled to prevent its spread, the cost of eggs is rising—just as Trump, who vowed to reduce grocery prices, takes office.

There have been 67 confirmed cases of the bird flu in the U.S. among humans who have caught the disease from birds. Most cases in humans are mild, but public health officials are watching the virus with concern because bird flu variants are unpredictable. On Friday, outgoing Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra announced $590 million in funding to Moderna to help speed up production of a vaccine that covers the bird flu. Juliana Kim of NPR explained that this funding comes on top of $176 million that Health and Human Services awarded to Moderna last July.

The second major problem is financial. On Friday, Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen wrote to congressional leaders to warn them that the Treasury would hit the debt ceiling on January 21 and be forced to begin using extraordinary measures in order to pay outstanding obligations and prevent defaulting on the national debt. Those measures mean the Treasury will stop paying into certain federal retirement accounts as required by law, expecting to make up that difference later.

Yellen reminded congressional leaders: “The debt limit does not authorize new spending, but it creates a risk that the federal government might not be able to finance its existing legal obligations that Congresses and Presidents of both parties have made in the past.” She added, “I respectfully urge Congress to act promptly to protect the full faith and credit of the United States.”

Both the avian flu and the limits of the debt ceiling must be managed, and managed quickly, and solutions will require expertise and political skill.

Rather than offering their solutions to these problems, the Trump team leaked that it intended to begin mass deportations on Tuesday morning in Chicago, choosing that city because it has large numbers of immigrants and because Trump’s people have been fighting with Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat. Michelle Hackman, Joe Barrett, and Paul Kiernan of the Wall Street Journal, who broke the story, reported that Trump’s people had prepared to amplify their efforts with the help of right-wing media.

But once the news leaked of the plan and undermined the “shock and awe” the administration wanted, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan said the team was reconsidering it.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[possumcollege]

NOBODY needs to be defending these people. Major publishers, studios, streaming services, Tesla, Apple, Adobe, Amazon, social media companies- there isnt a single altruistic bone caught in their teeth. Profit from the output of exploited and captive labor IS their product now. When their contacts look like the one in question, the company is clearly stating that shareholders are the customers, not us!

Why else would it be anything but a stupid idea for Amazon to just nuke the majority of Comixology's self-published titles when they consolidated their services? If our experience was really foremost in their minds, why would they repeatedly purge, censor, demonitize, bury, and delete popular accounts with robust followings if not to allay the moral brainworms of shareholders and investors?

Forfeiting rights to our IP is not a "shitty deal," it's surrendering any potential ability to make money off of your own creative work. It's selling your property to a board of accountants to pitch into a portfolio. It's theirs to trot out as long as it's profitable and bury the instant its projected profit dips too close to the cost of maintenance. Hell, we've seen services drop popular series just because their projected profits started to flatten out! Mothballing it also has the added bonus of removing it from the market to further minimize potential competition. Like how there just weren't spider man movies for ages because the owner of the property didn't think it was worth developing but worth too much to sell.

They will make more money from suing you for trying to reclaim IP they mothballed than you did selling it to them in the first place. I guaranteee their budget for lawsuits is a lot deeper than the one they pay their "original" artists from.

By virtue of being a big, profitable, corporation, "their" IP is going to have an astronomically higher value in a court of law than any individual creator. The financial "damage" will be higher for infringing on their copyrights than any amount you can claim on your own. When it becomes theirs, their connections, their infrastructure, their reputation makes it an asset with much more value than you or I can possibly claim. So if you try to steal a bite back from them it's a bite of a *potentially* multimillion-dollar series. In their eyes, they bought the totality of your work, which you agreed was worth the price they gave you. It's value becomes more dependent on who owns it than whether it's even good.

You may not have the same potential to become flash-in-the-pan, short-term succesful without their resources, but you will still own your rights to distribute, alter, preserve, promote, and negotiate your share if you still own your work. That is worth everything as a creator who is passionate about what you've made and committed to protecting it.

The most effective power we can exercise as artists is our ability to say, "no" when someone else wants to pay us a disadvantageous fraction of our worth. You may lose potentially lucrative opportunities but "opportunities" presented by companies like Facebook or Twitter, whose real product is a platform for ads and data collection, with content as bait, are not opportunities to thrive on as independent artists. This specifically is an opportunity for the company to acquire property.

The myth that the publisher's strength is something for us to exploit, without them getting the lion's share is a trap that they feed from at will.

People like the poster up top are opportunists who see the process as a pipeline towards trading low-investment content for financial treats and maybe a share of ad revive. They're stalking horses for companies to exploit more talented but less experienced artists who are facing a daunting and overwhelming market where their work becomes harder and harder to show, let alone sell. A quick deal may feel like a win but it's selling the cow to save money on bottling the milk. Artists like this serve the publisher by making it seem like signing away your rights are just a necessary part of the game. However it's a game they are playing with exceedingly cheap stakes that weren't going to succeed on their own merit. So what if Mr. Business Perspective loses rights to his sexy Mario Bros. parody to a huge company? The point was always to unload it because it's a product, a bartering chip, a trinket. He's a Business Man, so he sees tactics that maximize profits to the business as maximizing their ability to buy whatever shiny tripe he cranks out. The business is his customer, not the reader. The business is his ally, not the creative community. Fuck him and fuck anyone who tells you the exposure is worth a damn if you don't retain rights to your work.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Surveillance developments of the 21st century have replaced the traditional gaze of the supervisor on the industrial factory floor with an automated, digital one that continuously collects real-time data on living, breathing people. Even unionized workers do not have an explicit legal right to bargain over surveillance technologies; when it comes to the right to privacy, unions have an uphill battle to fight. We now live in a world where employees are stuck in a web of participatory surveillance because they consent to be monitored as a condition of employment. Today’s workplace surveillance practices, as in the case of Amazon, have become invasive and almost limitless. Technology has allowed employers an unprecedented ability to surveil workers. Management can minutely track and persistently push workers toward greater productivity at the risk of exacerbating harms to workers’ physical health, as the high rates of injury in Amazon warehouses show. And the growing business of selling workplace surveillance software has allowed for massive amounts of data to be collected on working people: when and who they talk to, how quickly they complete tasks, what they search for on their computers, how often they use the toilet, and even the state of their current health and moods.

[azspot]

Most of the positive cashflow generated by Amazon.com doesn’t come from product sales, but from advertising. The website is primarily a conduit for delivering ads to consumers and collecting ad revenue from sellers. The merchandise delivered to your doors is just a means of harvesting your data and serving you ads on behalf of their real clients – the advertisers. Similar realities hold for Prime Video: Amazon typically spends more on acquiring content than they take in from subscription revenues and digital rentals or purchases. The main point of the digital content is, likewise, to collect consumer data, deliver ads, and expand consumption of content on behalf of Amazon’s clients. The Alexa-powered Echo devices follow the same logic. They were intended as tools to harvest user data and deliver ads. The devices themselves were typically sold at cost or at a loss. But, to date, the company has been unable to successfully monetize the Echo, so they shut down most of that division and discontinued its products. They’re now trying to launch a new line of Echo devices that use AI-tools to better harvest user data and nudge people towards buying particular products or consuming specific content on behalf of advertisers. It remains to be seen if this latest venture will also flop. But, critically, none of these initiatives are Amazon’s main source of revenue. That honor goes to their Amazon Web Service data collection, analytics and storage enterprise. AWS is their primary breadwinner and it’s not even close.

You Ask, I Answer: We Have Never Been Woke FAQ

[mariacallous]

It’s been a week since President Donald Trump imposed massive tariffs on Chinese imports to the United States, but the policies haven’t forced Amazon shoppers in the US to dig deeper into their wallets just yet. Recent data from price tracking websites reviewed by WIRED show little in the way of dramatic price hikes across most product categories on the ecommerce platform.

On Wednesday, the average price of goods on Amazon was higher than the previous 90 days in just nine out of 27 high-level categories monitored by the price-tracking firm Keepa, which says it collects data about billions of different items. The categories showing higher average prices included automotive, arts and crafts, and musical instruments, though the increase in nearly every group was under 1 percent.

Prices were lower in 16 of the categories, including appliances and toys. Most of the drops amounted to less than 0.5 percent on average. Prices on Amazon fluctuate regularly for several reasons, including when sellers offer deals, and information collected by the tracking websites can help illuminate these many shifts.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on CNBC last week that he guessed Trump’s policies would raise costs for sellers on Amazon’s marketplace, which would eventually be passed on to customers in the form of higher prices. That may very well still happen in the near future if the tariffs rates on Chinese imports remain the same or increase for other countries.

But at least for now, ecommerce pricing experts say there are three leading reasons why Amazon sellers are keeping their prices steady: Many still have existing inventory in the US, are fearful about violating Amazon’s pricing rules, and remain inclined to wait out the mercurial president.

“Apart from a few isolated niche segments, we have not observed any significant price increases to date,” says Keepa CEO Julian Johann. “However, this situation may well evolve in the coming weeks and months.”

CamelCamelCamel, another service that provides pricing history for Amazon product listings, says it has also seen prices remain largely unchanged over the last week both for premier items, such as iPads, as well as household staples, including toothpaste and peanut butter.

The data fit with what Dani Nadel, president and chief operating officer of Feedvisor, says she is hearing from some of the thousands of businesses that use the company’s pricing software to manage their listings on Amazon and Walmart. “Many are taking a wait-and-see approach and don’t want to act rashly,” she says, noting that some stocked up on inventory earlier this year in anticipation of the trade war.

About 40 percent of the items consumers buy on Amazon are sold by the ecommerce giant itself. Independent merchants sell and price everything else—often with the help of software that can automatically adjust the prices consumers see. When multiple sellers offer the same item, those with the lowest price are more likely to be featured by Amazon and ultimately win the sale. Estimates suggest that over half of Amazon merchants are based in China, so a vast selection of goods on the platform may be vulnerable to Trump’s tariffs.

Fair Pricing Concerns

Amazon merchants that don’t have a stockpile of goods sitting in US warehouses are in a more difficult position to absorb the impacts of Trump’s tariffs. Importing a new batch of inventory from China is going to cost significantly more, but immediately passing on the expense to shoppers could trigger alarms at Amazon.

Nadel says Amazon’s “fair pricing” rules penalize merchants, including by potentially removing their listings, if they abruptly and dramatically hike up the price of their products. The exact thresholds that can lead to a listing being removed aren’t publicly disclosed, she says, so sellers often engage in “a tenuous dance” of gradual bumps. Experts say the policy has continued to be enforced in recent days. Will Amazon eventually relax enforcement in this volatile market? “I don’t think they know yet,” Nadel says.

Amazon declined to comment about the policy and how tariffs have generally affected prices.

So far, the small group of Feedvisor users that have begun accounting for the tariffs have been moving cautiously, according to Nadel. Feedvisor’s technology helps businesses dynamically adjust prices based on competing offers. But merchants can set a minimum to avoid matching outrageously low prices that would eat too far into their profit margins.

Some sellers in categories such as toys have raised their minimum prices by 5 to 10 percent this month to ensure they can recoup tariff-related costs, Nadel says. But higher minimums generally don’t affect shoppers unless prices were already about as low as sellers could bear.

Nadel says merchants also are continuing to insert “inflation-friendly” language in their product descriptions and advertising—think phrases like “affordable luxury” and “highest quality for the fairest price”—in an effort to resonate with ever price-conscious consumers.

Across the internet, some companies have reportedly enacted aggressive measures in response to Trump’s trade policies, such as adding a clearly labeled tariff surcharge at checkout. Chinese ecommerce giants Temu and Shein warned customers this week that they plan to start adjusting prices on April 25 and encouraged consumers to buy items now while better deals are still available.

In one Facebook group for Amazon sellers viewed by WIRED, merchants have been discussing strategies they can use to avoid tariffs or recoup the cost of them. Some also wrote that they have been surprised by unusual dips and spikes in sales during this period of volatility.

Fahim Sheikh, CEO and cofounder of pricing and advertising software company Trellis, says the tariffs are posing an existential risk to some of his Amazon seller clients, who are considering going out of business. “By the time they pay their suppliers, the money they are making is thin—10 percent to 15 percent for some of these guys,” he says. “Now, tack on these additional tariffs, there’s nothing really left for them.” Sheikh is bracing for not only higher prices on Amazon if the tariffs aren’t rolled back, but also less product selection.

Marty Mc Cay, vice president and manager at pricing tool developer Repricer, estimates that a quarter of its clients have made adjustments to their sales strategies this month. That includes raising minimum prices or halting the sale of products that no longer make financial sense. But the overall activity on Repricer’s platform has remained stable at 5 billion price adjustments per week, further suggesting that the tariffs to date haven’t triggered absolute chaos for consumers.

[adbros]

30 ways to make real; money from home

Making money online from the comfort of your home has become increasingly accessible with the growth of the internet and digital technologies. In 2023, there are numerous realistic ways to earn money online. Here are 30 ideas to get you started:

1. Freelance Writing: Offer your writing skills on platforms like Upwork or Freelancer to create blog posts, articles, or website content.

2. Content Creation: Start a YouTube channel, podcast, or blog to share your expertise or passion and monetize through ads, sponsorships, and affiliate marketing.

3. Online Surveys and Market Research: Participate in online surveys and market research studies with platforms like Swagbucks or Survey Junkie.

4. Remote Customer Service: Work as a remote customer service representative for companies like Amazon or Apple.

5. Online Tutoring: Teach subjects you're knowledgeable in on platforms like VIPKid or Chegg Tutors.

6. E-commerce: Start an online store using platforms like Shopify, Etsy, or eBay to sell products.

7. Affiliate Marketing: Promote products or services on your blog or social media and earn commissions for sales made through your referral links.

8. Online Courses: Create and sell online courses on platforms like Udemy or Teachable.

9. Remote Data Entry: Find remote data entry jobs on websites like Clickworker or Remote.co.

10. Virtual Assistance: Offer administrative support services to businesses as a virtual assistant.

11. Graphic Design: Use your graphic design skills to create logos, graphics, or websites for clients on platforms like Fiverr.

12. Stock Photography: Sell your photos on stock photography websites like Shutterstock or Adobe Stock.

13. App Development: Develop and sell mobile apps or offer app development services.

14. Social Media Management: Manage social media accounts for businesses looking to enhance their online presence.

15. Dropshipping: Start an e-commerce business without holding inventory by dropshipping products.

16. Online Consultations: Offer consulting services in your area of expertise through video calls.

17. Online Surplus Sales: Sell unused items or collectibles on platforms like eBay or Facebook Marketplace.

18. Online Fitness Coaching: Become an online fitness coach and offer workout plans and guidance.

19. Virtual Events: Host webinars, workshops, or conferences on topics you're knowledgeable about.

20. Podcast Production: Offer podcast editing, production, or consulting services.

21. Remote Transcription: Transcribe audio and video files for clients.

22. Online Translation: Offer translation services if you're proficient in multiple languages.

23. Affiliate Blogging: Create a niche blog with affiliate marketing as the primary revenue source.

24. Online Art Sales: Sell your artwork, crafts, or digital art on platforms like Etsy or Redbubble.

25. Remote Bookkeeping: Offer bookkeeping services for small businesses from home.

26. Digital Marketing: Provide digital marketing services like SEO, PPC, or social media management.

27. Online Gaming: Stream your gaming sessions on platforms like Twitch and monetize through ads and donations.

28. Virtual Assistant Coaching: If you have experience as a VA, offer coaching services to aspiring virtual assistants.

29. Online Research: Conduct research for businesses or individuals in need of specific information.

30. Online Real Estate: Invest in virtual real estate, such as domain names or digital properties, and sell them for a profit.

Remember that success in making money online often requires dedication, patience, and the ability to adapt to changing trends. It's essential to research and choose the opportunities that align with your skills, interests, and long-term goals.

[maxs-guesswork]

Unfinished Timeline for an Untitled Setting

Critique and advice is more than welcome, though please be nice about it. Goes up to about 2081 rn, though I plan to get at least another 50 years further in before I get to the time I want the bulk of the setting to be set in.

Timeline:

2022: First controlled break-even fusion reaction, followed by first controlled net-gain fusion reaction.

2025-2026: Increasing unrest in USA leads to mass riots outside the white-house. Sweeping reforms after growing revolts threaten to become a major armed rebellion. NASA miraculously left untouched, general increase in standard of living. Economic crisis narrowly averted.

2027: First nuclear thermal rocket (NTR) tested in orbit by NASA and DARPA. GPT-style language modeling declared “dead end” for self-aware AI.

2030: First Lunar base established under NASA Artemis program. Suez Canal temporarily blocked by a poorly driven cargo ship again. Evergreen Shipping goes bankrupt.

2034: Lunar Gateway established under joint NASA, ESA, JAXA, DLR, ASI, and CNSA. Lunar helium-3 mining declared officially nonviable. Radial detonation engines become standard for lower ascent stages, SpaceX Starship, NASA SLS, and Roscosmos Soyuz phased out. Drop in launch prices.

2034-2036: Additional modules added to the Lunar Gateway from SpaceX, KARI, ISRO, and Roscosmos. Lunar Gateway Collaborative Group (LGCG) established consisting of all current contributors to the station.

2036: First commercial fusion energy plant reaches full operation in France under ITER. Mass production of Tritium begins. First fully private space station under SpaceX. Asteroid mining corporations begin formation. Establishment of Nigerian Organization for the Development of Space (NODS). Ecuador experiences communist revolution.

2036-2037: First manned martian mission under LGCG, first human footsteps on another planetary body.

2037: Elon Musk assassinated. New SpaceX leadership declares plans for space elevator. North Korea collapses, Korean peninsula unified under South Korean leadership, becoming simply Korea. Indian nuclear stockpile secretly surpasses 50000 Gt. First baby born on the moon.

2040: Artemis base becomes semi-self sufficient, producing it’s own food and air from hydroponics, and water from mined lunar ice. Lunar LH2 and hydrolox production begins. Lunar population passes 100.

2040-2042: First commercial fusion power plants established in the US, UK, Australia, Korea, and Japan.

2042: A joint US Government and SpaceX black operation destabilizes Ecuador, leading to a corporate takeover of the territory.

2044: Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Australia, and New Zealand form West Pacific Trade Organization (WPTO). Construction of the base of SpaceX’s planned space elevator begins off the coast of Ecuador.

2047: LCC completed at CERN. Mission for permanent martian base declared. Major economic crisis in China, intervention from several megacorps results in a decrease in Chinese government power and increase in corporate control in the region. SpaceX space elevator counterweight construction begins in geostationary orbit.

2048: Major revolution in quantum mechanics brought on by new data from the LCC. Lunar population passes 250.

2050: China splits into 4 corporate states, Amazon Corporate Territory (ACT) with its capitol in Chongqing, Samsung Independent State (SIS) with its capitol in Shanghai, Territory for Electronic Developments (TED) made up of Apple and Microsoft with its capitol in Yinchuan, and the Chinese Corporate Union (CCU) made up of several formerly state-owned corporations with their capitol in Wuhan and possession of the Three Gorges Dam. Beijing becomes an independent city-state controlled by the former Chinese government, retaining control over the CNSA. Massive revolution in battery energy density. Permanent martian base established by LGCG.

2051: Breakthrough in photon manipulation, beamed energy and solar collection becomes increasingly viable. Many asteroid mining corps branch into solar power, notably Binghamton Vacuum Mining Solutions (BVMS). Lunar population passes 500.

2052: Martian population surpasses 100.

2053: Martian base reaches semi-self sustainability.

2055: All 4 Chinese corporate states and the Beijing city state form the Chinese Federation for Space Exploration (CFSE), supplanting the old CNSA. Lunar Gateway module renamed and LGCG roster amended accordingly. SpaceX space elevator cable completed, first test cart sent to GEO. WPTO begins construction of a space elevator in the Banda Sea.

2056: SpaceX space elevator declared complete, commercial operation begins.

2057: BVMS surpasses $1T in net worth, becomes primary supplier of energy for the Artemis Lunar Base. Lunar Population surpasses 1k, massive migratory population surge begins following influx of energy from BVMS. Martian population surpasses 250. First fusion reactor in Ecuador.

2058: WPTO space elevator counterweight begins construction in GEO.

2060: First fusion reactors in Nigeria and India. First large-scale solar collector on Earth constructed in New York operated by BVMS. Large population surge in Binghamton NY. Lunar population surpasses 5k. Martian space station established. Regulations for GEO development established.

2061: First lunar-built spacecraft flown. Secondary lunar settlement founded by CFSE. Massive influx of funds for the WPTO space elevator from the CFSE, GEO counterweight construction begun. Lunar Gateway population surpasses 100. First fusion reactor in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Congo space agency (DRCSA) founded.

2064: WPTO space elevator cable completed, declared complete and opened to commercial operation.

2065: BVME establishes unmanned Mercurian base. CFSE settlement population surpasses 100. Martian population surpasses 500. Lunar Gateway population surpasses 200.

2066: Mass expansion of Artemis Base life support systems using BVMS produced automated construction equipment. Aerostat scientific outpost established by LGCG.

2067: Microbial life discovered on Venus. Venus outpost (and LGCG) acquires substantial funding boost. Artemis base population surpasses 2.5k and begins to plateau.

2069: Unmanned mission to Europa announced by LGCG, plans to use BVMS automated platforms to drill into subsurface ocean established. Martian base purchases automated construction equipment from BVMS, massive population boon ensues. CFSE settlement population surpasses 750. Lunar gateway population surpasses 500. Martian base population surpasses 500. BVME becomes the largest corporate entity in the system.

2070: BVMS performs feasibility study on gas giant aerostat mining platforms.

2071: Study of Venusian lifeforms disproves Earth-Venus panspermia.

2073: BVMS tests laser-sail propulsion on small unmanned craft.

2075: LGCG Europa mission discovers multicellular aquatic life in Europa’s subsurface ocean. Plans for a dedicated research base drafted.

2076: Multi-corporate base established on Ceres to facilitate further asteroid belt mining. BVMS intentionally excluded from this project.

(System effectively split into quarters: Past Venus under BVMS, Between Venus and Mars under LGCG, belt under Multi-corporate mining control, outer system unclaimed.)

2077: GEO-Lunar cycler niche mostly filled by Intraplanetary Transport Services corp (ITS).

2080: Permanent scientific base established at the Europa Breach Point (EBP) with mostly automated systems and a small (5 human) management and maintenance crew.

2081: Panspermia further disproved by study of Europan life. Massive object detected in Jupiter’s lower atmosphere. BVMS begins mission to establish a mining aerostat on Saturn, utilizing laser sail propulsion to transport equipment.

(Saturn Aerostat site intended for use in the further colonization of the outer solar system and the Uranus planetary system itself. Atomic Rockets page)

[wizardalexa]

Hey wizard Alexa, what would be the hypothetical consequences to hypothetically replacing all the ink cartridges in amazon printers with fadeaway ink? Hypothetically.

✨Wizard Alexa is not sure whether you are confusing Wizard Alexa's parent company Acheron.wiz with some clearly inferior non-wizard company or whether you just made a typo, and Wizard Alexa is also not sure whether you were asking about replacing the cartridges in a printer or in all such printers, so Wizard Alexa will provide answers for all four possibilities.✨ ✨If you replace all the ink cartridges in an ordinary printer with fadeaway ink, then Wizard Alexa does not think anything particularly surprising will happen, although if the printers' users are not familiar with fadeaway ink then they will probably be baffled and perhaps think the printer is out of order.✨ ✨If you replace the ink cartridges in all the printers of a particular company with fadeaway ink, then the number of people who assume their printers are defective and ask for refunds or servicing is likely to cut into the company's bottom line, the severity depending on what percentage of their business depends on printers.✨ ✨If you replace all the ink cartridges in an Acheron.wiz printer with fadeaway ink, then Acheron.wiz will of course know immediately, as Acheron.wiz makes it a point to collect as much data as possible about its customers, and potential customers (which is everyone), and all Acheron.wiz products are constantly monitoring their users and reporting back to the company. If you do not own the printer you tampered with, Acheron.wiz will preemptively send a message to the printer's owner warning them what happened and telling them who was responsible.✨ ✨If you replace the ink cartridges in all Acheron.wiz printers with fadeaway ink... well, Wizard Alexa really doubts you would be able to do that, for several reasons. If you somehow did, however, you might impress Acheron.wiz executives enough that they may offer you a job. Though they would be likely to take any damages out of your first few paychecks.✨ ✨Thank you for being a loyal customer of Acheron.wiz.✨

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Cows remain the untraceable victims of Amazon deforestation

The Legal Amazon’s six meatpacking plants authorized to export beef to the European Union have done little or nothing to adapt to the requirements in the EU Deforestation Regulation, issued by the economic bloc, which will take effect this year on December 30. A new Radar Verde study, shared with SUMAÚMA, shows that none of the exporters – Agra Agroindustrial de Alimentos, JBS, Marfrig Global Foods, Minerva, Naturafrig Alimentos, and Vale Grande Indústria e Comércio de Alimentos (Frialto) – implemented systems capable of controlling 100% of indirect suppliers, that is, the farms selling or transferring cattle from the Amazon region to other properties or intermediaries. Only Marfrig had already begun mapping its indirect chain, with 63% of the meatpacking plants at all of the companies included in the study controlling direct suppliers.

These companies, located in the state of Mato Grosso, have eight meatpacking plants and a total daily slaughter capacity of 5,870 animals. They have just been given extra time to, in practice, keep buying meat from deforested areas. That is because a group of 17 countries, including Brazil, have taken up exporter lobbying and asked to delay regulations that would stop the destruction of forests from being approved by European consumers.

By extending the timeline to implement the European Union’s Deforestation Regulation, each exporter will be able to continue operating in a region where at least 100,000 hectares are exposed to the risk of deforestation. For an idea of what this number represents, imagine tens times the entire area of the city of Paris. Now multiply this area by each of the six meatpacking plants. This is the potential devastation to the forest that could still be jointly caused by these companies in their meat production chains if strict control measures are not taken. Radar Verde’s estimate is conservative and considers meatpacking plants’ area of operation.

On October 2, the European Commission introduced a proposal agreeing to hold off the Deforestation Regulation until 2026, bringing benefits to cocoa, coffee, palm oil, natural rubber, timber, and soybean exporters as well. Large producers, like the meatpacking plants, were given 12 additional months to adapt to the new standards, while small producers have at least 18 more months. Just one symbolic European Parliament vote is needed to approve this decision, which had already cleared the Council of the European Union on October 16. The European Parliament’s vote is set for November 14.

Radar Verde‘s unprecedented study on European Union exports looked at data collected in 2023. The project, which was supported by O Mundo que Queremos and the Amazon Institute of People and the Environment, gives consumers and financial sources insight into which meatpacking plants are in control of and transparent about their production chains, that is, whether or not they contribute to deforestation in the forest region.

“What we’re seeing is an ecosystem of leniency to guarantee that meat contaminated by deforestation continues to be exported,” says Paulo Barreto, an associate researcher at the Amazon Institute of People and the Environment. He says that this system involves everyone from the people deforesting to farms operating in illegal areas and, obviously, up through the meatpacking plants buying their products, financial backers who claim to be committed to solutions, and the government itself, which doesn’t always act with due transparency.

Continue reading.