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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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Autoenshittification

Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car’s digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare — but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it’s a dream they can’t give up on.

Your car is stuffed full of microchips, a fact the world came to appreciate after the pandemic struck and auto production ground to a halt due to chip shortages. Of course, that wasn’t the whole story: when the pandemic started, the automakers panicked and canceled their chip orders, only to immediately regret that decision and place new orders.

But it was too late: semiconductor production had taken a serious body-blow, and when Big Car placed its new chip orders, it went to the back of a long, slow-moving line. It was a catastrophic bungle: microchips are so integral to car production that a car is basically a computer network on wheels that you stick your fragile human body into and pray.

The car manufacturers got so desperate for chips that they started buying up washing machines for the microchips in them, extracting the chips and discarding the washing machines like some absurdo-dystopian cyberpunk walnut-shelling machine:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/desperate-times-companies-buy-washing-machines-just-to-rip-out-the-chips-187033.html

These digital systems are a huge problem for the car companies. They are the underlying cause of a precipitous decline in car quality. From touch-based digital door-locks to networked sensors and cameras, every digital system in your car is a source of endless repair nightmares, costly recalls and cybersecurity vulnerabilities:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/quality-new-vehicles-us-declining-more-tech-use-study-shows-2023-06-22/

What’s more, drivers hate all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps. Digital systems are drivers’ most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers’ products:

https://www.theverge.com/23801545/car-infotainment-customer-satisifaction-survey-jd-power

Even the automakers sorta-kinda admit that this is a problem. Back in 2020 when Massachusetts was having a Right-to-Repair ballot initiative, Big Car ran these unfuckingbelievable scare ads that basically said, “Your car spies on you so comprehensively that giving anyone else access to its systems will let murderers stalk you to your home and kill you:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

But even amid all the complaining about cars getting stuck in the Internet of Shit, there’s still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips. Are car execs just the latest generation of rubes who’ve been suckered by Silicon Valley bullshit and convinced that apps are a magic path to profitability?

Nope. Car execs are sophisticated businesspeople, and they’re surfing capitalism’s latest — and last — hot trend: dismantling capitalism itself.

Now, leftists have been predicting the death of capitalism since The Communist Manifesto, but even Marx and Engels warned us not to get too frisky: capitalism, they wrote, is endlessly creative, constantly reinventing itself, re-emerging from each crisis in a new form that is perfectly adapted to the post-crisis reality:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html

But capitalism has finally run out of gas. In his forthcoming book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis proposes that capitalism has died — but it wasn’t replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279

Under capitalism, capital is the prime mover. The people who own and mobilize capital — the capitalists — organize the economy and take the lion’s share of its returns. But it wasn’t always this way: for hundreds of years, European civilization was dominated by rents, not markets.

A “rent” is income that you get from owning something that other people need to produce value. Think of renting out a house you own: not only do you get paid when someone pays you to live there, you also get the benefit of rising property values, which are the result of the work that all the other homeowners, business owners, and residents do to make the neighborhood more valuable.

The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.

Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The “free market” of Adam Smith wasn’t a market that was free from regulation — it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist’s due:

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Today, we live in a rentier’s paradise. People don’t aspire to create value — they aspire to capture it. In Survival of the Richest, Doug Rushkoff calls this “going meta”: don’t provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Don’t drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don’t found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders. Go meta.

This is your brain on the four-hour-work-week, passive income mind-virus. In Techno Feudalism, Varoufakis deftly describes how the new “Cloud Capital” has created a new generation of rentiers, and how they have become the richest, most powerful people in human history.

Shopping at Amazon is like visiting a bustling city center full of stores — but each of those stores’ owners has to pay the majority of every sale to a feudal landlord, Emperor Jeff Bezos, who also decides which goods they can sell and where they must appear on the shelves. Amazon is full of capitalists, but it is not a capitalist enterprise. It’s a feudal one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is the reason that automakers are willing to enshittify their products so comprehensively: they were one of the first industries to decouple rents from profits. Recall that the reason that Big Car needed billions in bailouts in 2008 is that they’d reinvented themselves as loan-sharks who incidentally made cars, lending money to car-buyers and then “securitizing” the loans so they could be traded in the capital markets.

Even though this strategy brought the car companies to the brink of ruin, it paid off in the long run. The car makers got billions in public money, paid their execs massive bonuses, gave billions to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, smashed their unions, fucked their pensioned workers, and shipped jobs anywhere they could pollute and murder their workforce with impunity.

Car companies are on the forefront of postcapitalism, and they understand that digital is the key to rent-extraction. Remember when BMW announced that it was going to rent you the seatwarmer in your own fucking car?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big-river/#beemers

Not to be outdone, Mercedes announced that they were going to rent you your car’s accelerator pedal, charging an extra $1200/year to unlock a fully functional acceleration curve:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price

This is the urinary tract infection business model: without digitization, all your car’s value flowed in a healthy stream. But once the car-makers add semiconductors, each one of those features comes out in a painful, burning dribble, with every button on that fakakta touchscreen wired directly into your credit-card.

But it’s just for starters. Computers are malleable. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing Complete Von Neumann Machine, which can run every program we know how to write. Once they add networked computers to your car, the Car Lords can endlessly twiddle the knobs on the back end, finding new ways to extract value from you:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

That means that your car can track your every movement, and sell your location data to anyone and everyone, from marketers to bounty-hunters looking to collect fees for tracking down people who travel out of state for abortions to cops to foreign spies:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7enex/tool-shows-if-car-selling-data-privacy4cars-vehicle-privacy-report

Digitization supercharges financialization. It lets car-makers offer subprime auto-loans to desperate, poor people and then killswitch their cars if they miss a payment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s

Subprime lending for cars would be a terrible business without computers, but digitization makes it a great source of feudal rents. Car dealers can originate loans to people with teaser rates that quickly blow up into payments the dealer knows their customer can’t afford. Then they repo the car and sell it to another desperate person, and another, and another:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#looking-for-the-joke-with-a-microscope

Digitization also opens up more exotic options. Some subprime cars have secondary control systems wired into their entertainment system: miss a payment and your car radio flips to full volume and bellows an unstoppable, unmutable stream of threats. Tesla does one better: your car will lock and immobilize itself, then blare its horn and back out of its parking spot when the repo man arrives:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

Digital feudalism hasn’t stopped innovating — it’s just stopped innovating good things. The digital device is an endless source of sadistic novelties, like the cellphones that disable your most-used app the first day you’re late on a payment, then work their way down the other apps you rely on for every day you’re late:

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

Usurers have always relied on this kind of imaginative intimidation. The loan-shark’s arm-breaker knows you’re never going to get off the hook; his goal is in intimidating you into paying his boss first, liquidating your house and your kid’s college fund and your wedding ring before you default and he throws you off a building.

Thanks to the malleability of computerized systems, digital arm-breakers have an endless array of options they can deploy to motivate you into paying them first, no matter what it costs you:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Car-makers are trailblazers in imaginative rent-extraction. Take VIN-locking: this is the practice of adding cheap microchips to engine components that communicate with the car’s overall network. After a new part is installed in your car, your car’s computer does a complex cryptographic handshake with the part that requires an unlock code provided by an authorized technician. If the code isn’t entered, the car refuses to use that part.

VIN-locking has exploded in popularity. It’s in your iPhone, preventing you from using refurb or third-party replacement parts:

https://doctorow.medium.com/apples-cement-overshoes-329856288d13

It’s in fuckin’ ventilators, which was a nightmare during lockdown as hospital techs nursed their precious ventilators along by swapping parts from dead systems into serviceable ones:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3azv9b/why-repair-techs-are-hacking-ventilators-with-diy-dongles-from-poland

And of course, it’s in tractors, along with other forms of remote killswitch. Remember that feelgood story about John Deere bricking the looted Ukrainian tractors whose snitch-chips showed they’d been relocated to Russia?

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

That wasn’t a happy story — it was a cautionary tale. After all, John Deere now controls the majority of the world’s agricultural future, and they’ve boobytrapped those ubiquitous tractors with killswitches that can be activated by anyone who hacks, takes over, or suborns Deere or its dealerships.

Control over repair isn’t limited to gouging customers on parts and service. When a company gets to decide whether your device can be fixed, it can fuck you over in all kinds of ways. Back in 2019, Tim Apple told his shareholders to expect lower revenues because people were opting to fix their phones rather than replace them:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

By usurping your right to decide who fixes your phone, Apple gets to decide whether you can fix it, or whether you must replace it. Problem solved — and not just for Apple, but for car makers, tractor makers, ventilator makers and more. Apple leads on this, even ahead of Big Car, pioneering a “recycling” program that sees trade-in phones shredded so they can’t possibly be diverted from an e-waste dump and mined for parts:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

John Deere isn’t sleeping on this. They’ve come up with a valuable treasure they extract when they win the Right-to-Repair: Deere singles out farmers who complain about its policies and refuses to repair their tractors, stranding them with six-figure, two-ton paperweight:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

The repair wars are just a skirmish in a vast, invisible fight that’s been waged for decades: the War On General-Purpose Computing, where tech companies use the law to make it illegal for you to reconfigure your devices so they serve you, rather than their shareholders:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

The force behind this army is vast and grows larger every day. General purpose computers are antithetical to technofeudalism — all the rents extracted by technofeudalists would go away if others (tinkereres, co-ops, even capitalists!) were allowed to reconfigure our devices so they serve us.

You’ve probably noticed the skirmishes with inkjet printer makers, who can only force you to buy their ink at 20,000% markups if they can stop you from deciding how your printer is configured:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty But we’re also fighting against insulin pump makers, who want to turn people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/10/loopers/#hp-ification

And companies that make powered wheelchairs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/08/chair-ish/#r2r

These companies start with people who have the least agency and social power and wreck their lives, then work their way up the privilege gradient, coming for everyone else. It’s called the “shitty technology adoption curve”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Technofeudalism is the public-private-partnership from hell, emerging from a combination of state and private action. On the one hand, bailing out bankers and big business (rather than workers) after the 2008 crash and the covid lockdown decoupled income from profits. Companies spent billions more than they earned were still wildly profitable, thanks to those public funds.

But there’s also a policy dimension here. Some of those rentiers’ billions were mobilized to both deconstruct antitrust law (allowing bigger and bigger companies and cartels) and to expand “IP” law, turning “IP” into a toolsuite for controlling the conduct of a firm’s competitors, critics and customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP is key to understanding the rise of technofeudalism. The same malleability that allows companies to “twiddle” the knobs on their services and keep us on the hook as they reel us in would hypothetically allow us to countertwiddle, seizing the means of computation:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

The thing that stands between you and an alternative app store, an interoperable social media network that you can escape to while continuing to message the friends you left behind, or a car that anyone can fix or unlock features for is IP, not technology. Under capitalism, that technology would already exist, because capitalists have no loyalty to one another and view each other’s margins as their own opportunities.

But under technofeudalism, control comes from rents (owning things), not profits (selling things). The capitalist who wants to participate in your iPhone’s “ecosystem” has to make apps and submit them to Apple, along with 30% of their lifetime revenues — they don’t get to sell you jailbreaking kit that lets you choose their app store.

Rent-seeking technology has a holy grail: control over “ring zero” — the ability to compel you to configure your computer to a feudalist’s specifications, and to verify that you haven’t altered your computer after it came into your possession:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/ring-minus-one/#drm-political-economy

For more than two decades, various would-be feudal lords and their court sorcerers have been pitching ways of doing this, of varying degrees of outlandishness.

At core, here’s what they envision: inside your computer, they will nest another computer, one that is designed to run a very simple set of programs, none of which can be altered once it leaves the factory. This computer — either a whole separate chip called a “Trusted Platform Module” or a region of your main processor called a secure enclave — can tally observations about your computer: which operating system, modules and programs it’s running.

Then it can cryptographically “sign” these observations, proving that they were made by a secure chip and not by something you could have modified. Then you can send this signed “attestation” to someone else, who can use it to determine how your computer is configured and thus whether to trust it. This is called “remote attestation.”

There are some cool things you can do with remote attestation: for example, two strangers playing a networked video game together can use attestations to make sure neither is running any cheat modules. Or you could require your cloud computing provider to use attestations that they aren’t stealing your data from the server you’re renting. Or if you suspect that your computer has been infected with malware, you can connect to someone else and send them an attestation that they can use to figure out whether you should trust it.

Today, there’s a cool remote attestation technology called “PrivacyPass” that replaces CAPTCHAs by having you prove to your own device that you are a human. When a server wants to make sure you’re a person, it sends a random number to your device, which signs that number along with its promise that it is acting on behalf of a human being, and sends it back. CAPTCHAs are all kinds of bad — bad for accessibility and privacy — and this is really great.

But the billions that have been thrown at remote attestation over the decades is only incidentally about solving CAPTCHAs or verifying your cloud server. The holy grail here is being able to make sure that you’re not running an ad-blocker. It’s being able to remotely verify that you haven’t disabled the bossware your employer requires. It’s the power to block someone from opening an Office365 doc with LibreOffice. It’s your boss’s ability to ensure that you haven’t modified your messaging client to disable disappearing messages before he sends you an auto-destructing memo ordering you to break the law.

And there’s a new remote attestation technology making the rounds: Google’s Web Environment Integrity, which will leverage Google’s dominance over browsers to allow websites to block users who run ad-blockers:

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity

There’s plenty else WEI can do (it would make detecting ad-fraud much easier), but for every legitimate use, there are a hundred ways this could be abused. It’s a technology purpose-built to allow rent extraction by stripping us of our right to technological self-determination.

Releasing a technology like this into a world where companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents is incredibly reckless and shortsighted. You want unauthorized bread? This is how you get Unauthorized Bread:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/amp/

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

[Image ID: The interior of a luxury car. There is a dagger protruding from the steering wheel. The entertainment console has been replaced by the text 'You wouldn't download a car,' in MPAA scare-ad font. Outside of the windscreen looms the Matrix waterfall effect. Visible in the rear- and side-view mirror is the driver: the figure from Munch's 'Scream.' The screen behind the steering-wheel has been replaced by the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.']

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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misfitwashere · 4 months ago

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ROBERT REICH

FEB 7

Friends,

I wanted to make sure you saw this piece by Lina Khan, who until a few days ago was chair of the Federal Trade Commission. IMHO — as someone who was once an official of the FTC — Khan was one of the wisest and most courageous of its leaders. She wrote the following in the February 4 edition of The New York Times.

Stop Worshiping the American Tech Giants

By Lina M. Khan

When Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek shocked Silicon Valley and Wall Street with its powerful new A.I. model, Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley investor, went so far as to describe it as “A.I.’s Sputnik moment.” Presumably, Mr. Andreessen wasn’t calling on the federal government to start a massive new program like NASA, which was our response to the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite launch; he wants the U.S. government to flood private industry with capital, to ensure that America remains technologically and economically dominant.

As an antitrust enforcer, I see a different metaphor. DeepSeek is the canary in the coal mine. It’s warning us that when there isn’t enough competition, our tech industry grows vulnerable to its Chinese rivals, threatening U.S. geopolitical power in the 21st century.

Although it’s unclear precisely how much more efficient DeepSeek’s models are than, say, ChatGPT, its innovations are real and undermine a core argument that America’s dominant technology firms have been pushing — namely, that they are developing the best artificial intelligence technology the world has to offer, and that technological advances can be achieved only with enormous investment — in computing power, energy generation and cutting-edge chips. For years now, these companies have been arguing that the government must protect them from competition to ensure that America stays ahead.

But let’s not forget that America’s tech giants are awash in cash, computing power and data capacity. They are headquartered in the world’s strongest economy and enjoy the advantages conferred by the rule of law and a free enterprise system. And yet, despite all those advantages — as well as a U.S. government ban on the sales of cutting-edge chips and chip-making equipment to Chinese firms — America’s tech giants have seemingly been challenged on the cheap.

It should be no surprise that our big tech firms are at risk of being surpassed in A.I. innovation by foreign competitors. After companies like Google, Apple and Amazon helped transform the American economy in the 2000s, they maintained their dominance primarily through buying out rivals and building anticompetitive moats around their businesses.

Over the last decade, big tech chief executives have seemed more adept at reinventing themselves to suit the politics of the moment — resistance sympathizers, social justice warriors, MAGA enthusiasts — than on pioneering new pathbreaking innovations and breakthrough technologies.

There have been times when Washington has embraced the argument that certain businesses deserve to be treated as national champions and, as such, to become monopolies with the expectation that they will represent America’s national interests. Those times serve as a cautionary tale.

Boeing was one such star — the aircraft manufacturer’s reputation was so sterling that a former White House adviser during the Clinton administration referred to it as a “de facto national champion,” so important that “you can be an out-and-out advocate for it” in government. This superstar status was such that it likely helped Boeing gain the regulatory green light to absorb its remaining U.S. rival McDonnell Douglas. That 1997 merger played a significant role in damaging Boeing’s culture, leaving it plagued with a host of problems, including safety concerns.

On the other hand, the government’s decision to enforce antitrust laws against what is now AT&T Inc., IBM and Microsoft in the 1970s through the 1990s helped create the market conditions that gave rise to Silicon Valley’s dynamism and America’s subsequent technological lead. America’s bipartisan commitment to maintaining open and competitive markets from the 1930s to the 1980s — a commitment that many European countries and Japan did not share — was critical for generating the broad-based economic growth and technological edge that catapulted the United States to the top of the world order.

While monopolies may offer periodic advances, breakthrough innovations have historically come from disruptive outsiders, in part because huge behemoths rarely want to advance technologies that could displace or cannibalize their own businesses. Mired in red tape and bureaucratic inertia, those companies usually aren’t set up to deliver the seismic efficiencies that hungry start-ups can generate.

The recent history of artificial intelligence demonstrates this pattern. Google developed the groundbreaking Transformer architecture that underlies today’s A.I. revolution in 2017, but the technology was largely underutilized until researchers left to join or to found new companies. It took these independent firms, not the tech giant, to realize the technology’s transformative potential.

At the Federal Trade Commission, I argued that in the arena of artificial intelligence, developers should release enough information about their models to allow smaller players and upstarts to bring their ideas to market without being beholden to dominant firms’ pricing or access restrictions. Competition and openness, not centralization, drive innovation.

In the coming weeks and months, U.S. tech giants may renew their calls for the government to grant them special protections that close off markets and lock in their dominance. Indeed, top executives from these firms appear eager to curry favor and cut deals, which could include asking the federal government to pare back sensible efforts to require adequate testing of models before they are released to the public, or to look the other way when a dominant firm seeks to acquire an upstart competitor.

Enforcers and policymakers should be wary. During the first Trump and then the Biden administrations, antitrust enforcers brought major monopolization lawsuits against those same companies — making the case that by unlawfully buying up or excluding their rivals, these companies had undermined innovation and deprived America of the benefits that free and fair competition delivers. Reversing course would be a mistake. The best way for the United States to stay ahead globally is by promoting competition at home.

#robert reich

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knightyoomyoui · 1 year ago

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[SMUT] TWICE Dahyun x Male Reader - "Conquered By An Abomination"

Here's my final one-shot for this year which is another smut fic featuring Dahyun. I want to say that I'm pretty proud and impressed at myself for being able to catch up on the 4th quarter after being too busy during July-October. This fic has got to be one of my experimental and unique works that I decided to try writing, because the concept that you're about to see here was never been done by me before, meaning that this my first-time writing it. Please understand and pardon me if this one turns out to be not suitable to the liking of some, as I feel like this might not be everyone's cup of tea. Enjoy reading and celebrate a Happy New Year with your loved ones, please!

Here's my Ko-fi account where you can drop your donations or ask for a commission. You can check it out on my Tumblr profile too! Buy knightyoomyoui a Coffee. ko-fi.com/knightyoomyoui - Ko-fi ❤️ Where creators get support from fans through donations, memberships, shop sales and more! The original 'Buy Me a Coffee' Page. TRIGGER WARNING: contains R+18 mature content, smut WORD COUNT: 4,500+ TAGS: abduction, aphrodisiac, tentacles, rough sex, monster fucking, gangbang, breast play, deepthroating, ass filling, creampie

On Friday, November 13, astrophysicist Dr. Kim Dahyun and her research team went from Busan to Seoul to visit a location where they were tasked with conducting a comprehensive examination.

Based on radar data from their headquarters, it was seen that around midnight yesterday, an object that seems to be a fragment of an asteroid or comet crashed into the vicinity of Seoul.

Their chief professor and mentor at the research lab gave them the order to report any unusual sightings they came across there before calling the military and defense squad to seize control of the area and place it under lockdown, keeping everyone outside of the sector out.

Dahyun and her group entered the hidden area through their vehicle, bypassing the main road and making their way to the designated site. They made the decision to park close to the danger zone as they were leaving the road so they could more easily reach the astronomical devices inside.

"So what's this anomaly of yours supposed to look like?" One of her intern graduated to SNU, YN LN asked her after arranging all the panels around the van.

"It's almost the same as what we used to find from the sky, but this one was the first to do the unthinkable." Dahyun answered, wiping her eyeglasses. "The record says that it's like a small shooting star that emerged from the sky, but the impact it left when it came contact here almost triggered a mild earthquake."

"So that's why the sent us in." He responded, nodding his head understandably.

Dahyun turns her head around, acknowledging her other assistant who is testing some devices that they will equip on their hands outside. "Uhm, Minyoung excuse me for a sec will you?"

"Yes, Miss Kim?"

"Can you grab for me that gloves beside the first cabinet?" She pointed at the direction. Minyoung saw it and unhesitantly passed it to her. "Thanks."

"Are you guys good now?" She checked on her accomplices. They signalled her with a positive note. "Okay, let's take a look what they have in store for us."

After getting out of the van, they began to swing the tall leaves that were obstructing their view and path on the verdant field. They weren't even gone from their car for that far when they observed something startling.

The three researchers were welcomed with a bald area on the top portion of the field, which was produced by a big crater on the land. The leaves that were impacted by the collision scattered across the hole.

"This looks huge." YN exclaimed with a gasping mouth. "Are you all sure it's just a thin shooting star-like that appeared yesterday?"

"It is. They even presented it to me." Dahyun explained. "The anomalies here would be always associated to the geological condition here. I have a chart that describes everything we have encountered for these past few years and I've never seen anything like this that an unknown object also gave us a hard time dealing with a quake."

"We better get starting now because to be honest, this is getting really unpredictable to the minute and I couldn't understand what's going on as long as we see it ourselves." Minyoung suggested. Dahyun and YN looked at her and they were both convinced. YN planted a huge nail beside the crater and wrapped a rope around it that will serve as their handle when going down to the crater.

As the three of them made it below. They began to look around and observe deeply the surfaces. Minyoung kneels down and poked a stick on a gross material, forming a disgusted expression on her face. "Uhh guys, take a look at this."

Dahyun and YN came towards her. "Does this remind you of something?" Minyoung said as she twirled and flipped it around, almost like she's playing on it.

"Is that an eggshell?" YN asked, furrowing his brows at the black and velvet-colored thin piece swimming at a pool of gooey substance.

"Could be. Just look at the fluids around that probably came from this." Dahyun said, mentioning the slime. They garnered their eyes more at their surroundings, there were even bigger ones that what Minyoung has found and they were also mostly covered with a slime.

"Get away from that, Minyoung-ah. Don't you see how disgusting it is?!" YN scolded his friend. He started to cover his nose too with his shirt. "And do you guys smell that?"

"Yeah, it's bad." Dahyun clenched her face in dislike. "Feels like there's a rotting organ in here."

"Wait, so are we gonna conclude right away that we just discovered a cracked egg?" YN said. He scoffed and rubbed his face. "Am I correct at what I think this might mean?"

"No, YN. We're just getting started here. We are researchers we came here to finish our task and not do it in rush just because we're in an unsettling situation right now." Dahyun protested. "We don't jump into conclusions right away."

"S-sorry, Prof." YN bowed his head. "It's just.. I'm sensing something wrong in here."

"YN, let's just wish it would not happen at all. Okay?"

YN looked at Dahyun's comforting and calm demeanor. He nodded shyly. "Yes, Ms. Kim."

Snapping a few photos of the scene, Dahyun gave Minyoung and YN the order to take everything out of the van that would be necessary for them to make a report and gather any evidence that they would find here. Dahyun borrowed a tracker and used it to glide around the crater's borders while they did so.

The tracker bumped against a tall leaf, and the alarm began to sound loudly. After receiving an alert, Dahyun was perplexed as to what it had discovered. Before she caught anything, she inspected the dirt and leaves in the area.

The leaves did not have sharp, pointed ends. Rather, it appears as though the flower has grown directly onto the leaf, utilizing it as a stem or something unexplainable. Dahyun thought it was rather strange to see a flower extending through the body of the leaves itself.

She stepped back to wipe the dust off her face as the flower burst some sprinkle of nectar on her face as she reached out to touch it. She held her tracker again while she coughed, but she quickly figured out that it was unresponsive.

"There's got to be some power or equipment malfunction" Dahyun hissed on the device as she carried it. "Minyoung! YN! I need a help on-"

Dahyun was about to walk back on the van when suddenly she went out of balance and slipped through the crater. When she was about to get up, she saw the van fleeted upwards to the sky, a hole was formed on the bottom of the vehicle before it splitted in half when it crashed on the ground. Her heart shattered she heard it explode.

She wasn't devastated because of the vehicle, but because of the fact that two of her colleagues were inside that van when it exploded. "NOOOOOOOO!!!!" she shouted at the horrific sight from outside the crater.

Dahyun ran through the ropes and hurriedly climbed but she started getting drowsy and lightheaded, her body losing it sense until it managed to get her out of the grip from the rope, sending her unconscious inside the crater.

Right after she snapped out, the ground she's laying at started to flow like waves.

Dahyun woke up hours later, but not without a clue on her, as her mind was still rebooting from what happened to her earlier. Her eyes opened, and there she witnessed herself sitting in the middle of what it seems to be a cave.

She slowly risen up to her feet, her feet stumbled a bit as she felt a dull ache on her head once again. Rubbing it to ease it off atleast, Dahyun breathed deeply before returning back her attention on her current situation of getting stuck.

She couldn't find any light that would provide her to a clearer vision of everything around her. Nervous and desperate to find a route to escape, Dahyun had no other choice but to walk around and explore for a route way out.

"HELPPP!!! ANYBODY OUT THERE CAN HEAR ME?!" Dahyun pleaded as loud as she can reach on her voice. "MINYOUNG? YN? WHERE ARE-"

She paused as she recalled earlier seeing their van where her two assistants were staying in. Her emotions overtook her, releasing teardrops across her face. She also began to feel guilty, thinking that she should have ordered them to go back inside and fetch all of their equipment on her behalf.

Maybe if it wasn't for her, she wouldn't led both her friends on their own demise. Dahyun sobbed heavily as she repeated calling their names in agony.

She slammed her hand accidentally on some surface. Dahyun probably guessed it a wall where she could support herself while trailing along the cave. She took the opportunity, caressing and patting it.

However, Dahyun noticed something different. It was rough, soft, and quite sticky as she could describe. She tried to smell it, and it brought her to a familiar rotten organ smell she, Minyoung, and YN had depicted earlier.

"Huh? What is this?" Dahyun questioned herself where she is also the only one who could find the answer. With one more pat onto the strange wall, she noticed the entire area start to glow including the one where she is touching.

She roamed her eyes around, and it made her tensed to learn that she does indeed correct on her being stuck inside a cave right now, but rather everything that blocks her from the possibility of escaping is covered with unidentified type of organs.

There was a dark area on the far end just right in front of Dahyun's direction. She could swear that she had a glimpse of something that just moved there and disappeared from the shadows in a few second. "WHO'S T-THERE?!" she shouted as she started having suspicions in her mind.

Taking few steps ahead to check out what it is, a loud roar put her into halt before she was about to scream in terror. She fell on her butt and her breathing goes faster, wondering what kind of a monstrous noise she just heard.

She then saw something emerging from the drak shadows. In her utmost bewilderment and panic, an abomination has appeared in front of her, standing tall with its bulbous, humungeous and very disfigured appeareance.

It's size is like almost half of the space of the cave they're occupying, and Dahyun was in complete disbelief that the fear of YN he was trying to refer a while ago has unfortunately manifested into reality. A beast from the space or in other term made by humans ourselves, called aliens- are real in Dahyun's universe.

"D-don't come closer to me!" Dahyun tensefully said as she starts to crawl away from the monster. It blabbered some unusual noises that almost formed some inaudible words while shaking its head madly, and after that, Dahyun saw something popping out of its body.

Two slimy tentacles just came out from each sides and began crawling through Dahyun to reach each of her ankles and get wrapped. She then felt her body being dragged closer to the monster and Dahyun repeatedly yelled, begging for it to stop while tugging the tentacles with all the force she could apply to yank it off, only to end up with no effect.

As Dahyun was placed almost inches away from the gigantic alien creature, she has finally accepted her fate of being helpless and in danger. Tears filled with nothing but negative emotions streamed out of her eyes before the monster blew out some gas that has a color similar to the nectars that were sprayed on her by an infected plant earlier.

After she smelled it, she soon finds her body growing into a sense of arousal that urges her horny feelings to activate. She tried to endure it but she could swear that her skin were releasing more sweat and her pussy and her nipples are starting to become sensitive.

The tentacles must've found the lustful sensation brewing inside of her, and they took the perfect timing as one of them starts to slid through her pencil skirt and lift it up her tummy before it traces her pussy through the soaked panty. It's partner focused on her clothed breasts, bumping it and feeling its softness as it bounces.

Several more tentacles were released from the creature, but this time with various sizes and colors. Some were lighter or darker, some where thicker or thinner. The thin ones snaked through her sleeve and forcefully spreaded her top, revealing her white strapped bras containing her milky tits.

The rest then helped to remove her skirt, exposing her into half naked with her matching pair of white bra and panties. "NOOO! PLEASE, DON'T DO IT!" Dahyun pleaded until she unexpectedly released a sultry moan when a fast tentacle moves through her cheek and rubs itself on her skin.

All the tentacles starts to wrap around on her meaty thighs and slender arms in order to suspend her in mid-air. Their touch becomes even more satisfying and felt relaxing to Dahyun despite how denial the words coming out of her mouth.

Being half-naked and spreaded in front of the creature's ugly looking face, the tentacle then moved from her cheek to her lips as it continues to rub across Dahyun's pretty face. Her lips starts to pucker and the effects of the strange gas which was probably aphrodisiac as Dahyun guessed, made her more susceptible as it clouded her mind with lust and temptation.

She starts kissing the tentacle before it slid through her mouth, she sucks on it like it was a cock entering on her.

The other tentacles started to become bold also. They tugged and remove her bras and panties, finally making her naked. There's these suction cups- like tentacles went to crept up on her torso to her underboobs, feeling her perky tits bounce on their motions before its lips opened and sucked on her hardened pinky nipples.

Thinner tentacles spreaded her walls, assisting the thicker tubular object crawl and enter her tight pussy. It effectively brought another relieving feeling on Dahyun's aroused body, moaning in rhythm to the tentacle's barging on her constricted hole.

Their movements became faster and rougher, including the suction cups almost biting her nipples then returning to lick on it like there were supposed to have milk leaking out of Dahyun's breasts.

Due to the sudden increase of pace, it also din't allow more time for the tentacles to reach their limit. Despite her little efforts and strength to shake them off their body, Dahyun uncontrollably welcomes their slimy liquid that probably resembles to a man's cum, into her warm throat and womb.

She lets out a poor groan and whimper, sniffling in fear of what it could bring her after when she watched the odd colors and thickness of their cum flowing out of her. She hoped it would not cause her to get pregnant, especially if it would mean that she would breed an abnormal hybrid that sets aparts from what a normal baby should look like.

Desire is what Dahyun could just accept within her, disturbing and letting out the pleasure she has long kept to seek any solutions for it. First load wasn't enough for the tentacles howsoever, as she felt the tentacles changing their hold on her limbs to prepare her for a next position.

Still hanging from the mid-air, Dahyun's body was forced to bend, with her backdoor being the one facing the beast. The tentacles spreaded her legs, causing her cheeks and puffy pussy to open a little.

With her arms around her back, Dahyun endured all the harsh slaps of the thicker tentacles to each of her curvy asscheeks. She lost the count of how many times they played on it, too obsessed on how soft and big enough for it to give comfort on these creatures.

Funtime didn't lasted longer as they went already to the next move. She felt the girthy pair pounding both her asshole and pussy, fucking them simultaneously. Her body went back and forth at their movement.

The suction cups returned to play on her breats, tugging on her nipples and stretching them as farther her endurance could take. Dahyun hissed in a mixture of pain and pleasure only because it aided the abuse her tits were being applied at when she felt something gliding through her entire back.

She turned her head around and witnessed the alien sticking out its wide and long tongue slurping the taste of of the sweat forming across her back view.

The thick tentacles reached their climax, exploding a second amount of load to her love holes. Dahyun huffed at the unmatched energy of these active creatures using her body for pleasure.

As they release from her ass and pussy. She was repositioned again. She was now facing the monster completely before she gulped when she realized what she was about to suffer next.

A huge- like literally- gigantic cock, probably measuring around 14 or 15 inches in size unbeatable to any men's size around the world, is ready to explore Dahyun's innards. Dahyun wiggled her legs, afraid that she might break from being unable to take his girth.

But again, she is outnumbered with numerous tentacles attached to her body, imprisoning her from any attempts of escaping, even though she has no other palns anymore as the aphrodisiacs are still in full effect on her.

Their strength pressed Dahyun's body to the awaiting cock. Due to its massive size it struggled to enter Dahyun's tight little pussy before it succeeded, only for the poor scientist to scream and grit her teeth in a shocking pain while the creature twitched and produced more creepy noises.

Thankfully, it didn't last long as the impressive pleasure began to take over her body when the monster started ramming his cock on her pussy, demolishing her womb inside. She went crazily bouncing on its crotch. Dahyun's eyes are completely white, with her pupils now rolled at the back at the intense pace of fucking she's receiving.

Her mouth began to lustfully agape, with her tongue sticking out as the monster cock continues to push deeper across Dahyun's walls. Her ass starts to create loud claps around the cave as it hits the alien's crotch repeatedly.

The giant cock stuffed into her pussy then pulsated, as it erupted a terrifying amount of dirty white cum almost inflating Dahyun's stomach like she is about to be mistakenly identified as pregnant, before it slowly slid out of her pussy, allowing the rest of the load to explode out of her abused hole.

The tentacles lets go of her body, releasing Dahyun on the ground, which gave her time to rest for a while. She panted heavily and speechless at the rough fucking she just had with the monster alien. She couldn't deny that there might be no other man she would ever met that would match the performance of what this monster has showed to her.

All of the tentacles and the bulbous cock slowly erected again the more the creature stares at Dahyun's messy and sticky nude body lying on the floor. They decided to proceed with the last action, as they focus once again on her nether regions.

Lifting her up, they spreaded her arms and legs again and faced her closer to the creature. The suction cups slowly crawled on her back then cupped her full breasts from behind. Dahyun whined and moaned at the relaxing and tickly feeling it gives. One tentacle went through her tongue, a pair goes back to her pussy and asshole.

There was a twist added again coming from the idea of the monster. Wanting to give every single part of her body that could provide a purpose of satisfaction to this monster's desire, they let go of Dahyun's hands and two tentacles caressed her fingers.

Dahyun sensed their hidden message for doing that and finding out the answer, she formed a fist and gripped the tentacles, stroking them like she would do to a male cock.

All of her body and now functioning properly following the monster's command. Dahyun's mind is full of sex. She has been hypnotized and manipulated too much by the pleasure and sensation that the creature has been passing through her using its ability to fuck her senseless and take her breath away.

The thick tentacles had her overpowered and weak from the way they drill through her holes as deeper as they could get. Dahyun felt her neck bulging as the tentacle gave her a deep throat, her clit being scrubbed by a tentacle with a brush-like end on it to add more pleasure, and the other tentacle wiggling around her ass.

They all began to pull the trigger of increasing the speed while they all moved in unison, their grip on her skin went tighter as they felt this familiar tightness in their system, approaching the climax of their endurance. Dahyun squirted her juices again and spasmed at her own orgasm, resulting to her walls clamping on the tentacles more.

Few more waves, pumps and strokes they gave and finally they executed their final blow, releasing their cum flowing through her throat, ass and pussy simultaneously, as she switches through gags and moans. The two other tentacles enwrapped on her fists splashed their warm sticky liquid on her arms and side of her face.

The rest of the tentacles joined, painting Dahyun's entire body with the rest of the cum flowing and leaking out of its ends. As they finished, the tentacles crawled around Dahyun's skin, giving her body a nice calming massage to ride out their lengthy session of sex and intense orgasms they shared.

Dahyun couldn't opened her eyes wide anymore as she knew she's completely drained now. The creature slowly laid her back on the ground with her body entirely covered with cum. She also weakly spitted and coughed out some from her mouth after unable to swallow all of the load down to her filled tummy.

Now that she can have her rest, Dahyun slowly shuts her eyes as she went unconscious, while the tentacles continue to caress her hair gently and massage her body, especially her addicting round tits, as they wiped away all the stuffs around her pearly skin.

When she woke up again from her long slumber, she found herself lying on a hospital bed with her body now clothed in a hospital gown.

Realizing that she is now in a hospital and two familiar people sleeping with their head resting beside her bed, she concluded that after everything that happened to her, she was now free and safe from that creature she encountered.

She gasped and shuddered as she remembered what it did to her, it awakened her parents and quickly hugged her in response to her fine state. "Oh thank God you're okay.", her mother said.

"How are you feeling, daughter?" Mr. Kim checked up on her. "It's been days you were confined. We were really worried that something worse could happen."

"I-I'm alright… I'm just… still tired." Dahyun said in a weak tone. Her eyes became watery when she remembered Minyoung and YN. "Mom… Dad, we-… we got ambushed. They didn't make it, it's my fault." she said as her lips trembled.

"No, daughter. Don't blame yourself, we know you can't do such bad thing with whole intention. I know you." Mrs. Kim said, rubbing her palms to calm down her poor daughter.

"We heard what happened to you and your team, Dubu. We're sorry." Her father stated in sympathy. "But we couldn't help ourselves to be thankful that we have been given a miracle to have you still here, safe and sound."

"I missed you, Mom… Dad." Dahyun holds her mother's hand and looked them in the eyes tenderly. "I thought I wouldn't make it."

"Oh, by the way. If you may be wondering how did we managed to get you here, it's all thanks to your workmates. They sent a rescue on the location where they found you lying on a grass field with your…. dress torn up covering your body." Her father gulped and lowered his head in regret at the last words. Dahyun just furrowed her brows, couldn't recall that part.

Dahyun saw her mom getting choked up on her emotions. She pressed her hands on her own and stared at her eagerly. "Dubu, answer me with all honesty. Okay?"

Dahyun just listened attentively on what her mom's about to ask. "W-who did this to you?"

Their conversation were interrupted when the door opened. Two men appeared in a room, in which Dahyun speculated that it's a doctor and the other one works in the military.

"Pardon to interrupt, Mr. and Mrs. Kim but this gentleman right here is taking a visit and… to ask for a request for the both of you." The doctor said. He looked at his patient, his face lightened in relief. "Oh, you're Miss Dahyun right? Good thing that you're awake. How are you feeling?"

"Fined, doc." Dahyun replied.

"Is there anything you need from us, sir…?" her mother asked.

"General Knight Yoo of the Seoul Military Army. Greetings to meet you Mr. and Mrs. Kim." the military man introduced himself to the family, performing a salute gesture. "Yes, I actually would like to speak with your daughter."

They all looked at Dahyun who became curious at the acknowledgement. "For what, sir?"

"It's regarding to that research that your team embarked near outside Itaewon." Knight elaborated. Dahyun's eyes widened in astonishment as his words struck those memories of her on that given time to repeat in cycle on her mind, including that one awful experience that she had.

"Your faculty cooperated with us in order to seek help when they lost their line to your team. We went through an investigation at that site and we found something… threatening, and we assume that since you're the only survivor in the incident confirmed yet, we would like you to enlighten us as we interrogate you about what actually happened."

Dahyun pursed her body forward slight from leaning on the bed, her face showed a puzzled expression. "Wait, what do you mean 'yet'?"

General Yoo maintained his intrigued stare at the patient. "Ms. Bae Minyoung's remains were found by the forensic team but your other accomplice, Mr. YN LN is still nowhere to be found but some of his torn out clothing were seen inside a cave. We will give it one week before we rule him as deceased."

Dahyun's switched looks at the four people gathered around her before she lured away her eyes filled with hope for her friend's disappearance from them.

Her traumatic experience of being conquered by an abomination should've brought her instantly to cooperate with the armed forces as they requested for her to stand up as the witness and part of the evidence in this important matter.

But rather, she's conflicted about what she should consider telling to them.

The idea of the alien monster who also amazingly pleasured her beyond the edge, disregarding the actual peculiar possibility behind the monster's odd behavior when she was held captive which failed for Dahyun to intepret; made her think twice on the decision she has to unveil.

#twice dahyun #kim dahyun #twice #twice smut #twice dahyun smut #dahyun smut #twice dahyun x male reader #dahyun x male reader #dahyun x m reader #twice x m reader #twice x male reader #kpop smut #kpop au #kpop oneshot #kpop fanfic #twice au #twice oneshot #twice fanfic

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askagamedev · 4 months ago

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Re: evangelist players vs. engaged players vs. those who fall off - does that not ever fall into the problem of trying to appeal to players who have no interest in sticking around and then alienating the evangelist/engaged players who loved the game for what it was? Too often I see studios try to broaden who their games appeal to, or try to capture the people who were never going to stick around in the first place, and utterly sacrifice their actual evangelists/engaged players and are left with no one who is happy with the end result.

I understand studios/the money behind the studios want to make the most possible money but we are now left with a market of video games where too many of them are all aiming to appeal to as many people as possible and thus appeal to no one. We're left with homogenous slop and for what? So many of these drop and flop, and when so many IPs and studios are forced to cater to this, the dedicated playerbase is left unhappy and alienated and they go elsewhere. Then the investors act shocked and scandalized that the studio didn't meet their "target goals" that were set to completely unrealistic standards.

You're conflating several issues.

First - evangelists are not known for good game design sense or business sense. They're known for their deep faith and love for the object of their beliefs, so much so that it drives them to preach. They tend to speculate based on their own feelings and projecting those values onto the player base at large, rather than gathering data and drawing conclusions from that. Trusting their judgement on decisions in fields they are not skilled in based on their feelings rather than collected data is unwise.

Second - all games are sinking ships. The rate at which they sink depends on a few key elements: the marketing spend to attract new and lapsed players, and a steady stream of new content to keep the new, returning, and current players. But every game is sinking because their players grow and change over time. Some finish school and get jobs, some start families, some quit to play other games, some drift apart from their friend groups and stop playing. Every game's days are numbered. This is why publishers keep pushing new ones - they need to stay afloat, and all of their current breadwinners are all sinking at various rates of decay. This means that publishers are always on the lookout for a new big winner to keep things going.

Third - We know that not all games will be successful. This has always been the case. Some of us are old enough to remember the term "shovelware" as a good example of this. The current lifestyle game status quo is a lot more sustainable than the old days, where a bad launch meant immediate layoffs and studio closures were much more commonplace.

The big takeaway here is that big failures are terrible for everybody involved, but a single big success can sustain a company for a long, long time - much longer than in the old days. Small successes don't earn as much or last as long as big ones, which is why publishers are betting big. As Charlie Munger said, "Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome". The current situation incentivizes long-term lifestyle games, which is why we keep building them.

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#the business of video games

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warningsine · 1 year ago

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Living online means never quite understanding what’s happening to you at a given moment. Why these search results? Why this product recommendation? There is a feeling—often warranted, sometimes conspiracy-minded—that we are constantly manipulated by platforms and websites.

So-called dark patterns, deceptive bits of web design that can trick people into certain choices online, make it harder to unsubscribe from a scammy or unwanted newsletter; they nudge us into purchases. Algorithms optimized for engagement shape what we see on social media and can goad us into participation by showing us things that are likely to provoke strong emotional responses. But although we know that all of this is happening in aggregate, it’s hard to know specifically how large technology companies exert their influence over our lives.

This week, Wired published a story by the former FTC attorney Megan Gray that illustrates the dynamic in a nutshell. The op-ed argued that Google alters user searches to include more lucrative keywords. For example, Google is said to surreptitiously replace a query for “children’s clothing” with “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear” on the back end in order to direct users to lucrative shopping links on the results page. It’s an alarming allegation, and Ned Adriance, a spokesperson for Google, told me that it’s “flat-out false.” Gray, who is also a former vice president of the Google Search competitor DuckDuckGo, had seemingly misinterpreted a chart that was briefly presented during the company’s ongoing U.S. et al v. Google trial, in which the company is defending itself against charges that it violated federal antitrust law. (That chart, according to Adriance, represents a “phrase match” feature that the company uses for its ads product; “Google does not delete queries and replace them with ones that monetize better as the opinion piece suggests, and the organic results you see in Search are not affected by our ads systems,” he said.)

Gray told me, “I stand by my larger point—the Google Search team and Google ad team worked together to secretly boost commercial queries, which triggered more ads and thus revenue. Google isn’t contesting this, as far as I know.” In a statement, Chelsea Russo, another Google spokesperson, reiterated that the company’s products do not work this way and cited testimony from Google VP Jerry Dischler that “the organic team does not take data from the ads team in order to affect its ranking and affect its result.” Wired did not respond to a request for comment. Last night, the publication removed the story from its website, noting that it does not meet Wired’s editorial standards.

It’s hard to know what to make of these competing statements. Gray’s specific facts may be wrong, but the broader concerns about Google’s business—that it makes monetization decisions that could lead the product to feel less useful or enjoyable—form the heart of the government’s case against the company. None of this is easy to untangle in plain English—in fact, that’s the whole point of the trial. For most of us, evidence about Big Tech’s products tends to be anecdotal or fuzzy—more vibes-based than factual. Google may not be altering billions of queries in the manner that the Wired story suggests, but the company is constantly tweaking and ranking what we see, while injecting ads and proprietary widgets into our feed, thereby altering our experience. And so we end up saying that Google Search is less useful now or that shopping on Amazon has gotten worse. These tools are so embedded in our lives that we feel acutely that something is off, even if we can’t put our finger on the technical problem.

That’s changing. In the past month, thanks to a series of antitrust actions on behalf of the federal government, hard evidence of the ways that Silicon Valley’s biggest companies are wielding their influence is trickling out. Google’s trial is under way, and while the tech giant is trying to keep testimony locked down, the past four weeks have helped illustrate—via internal company documents and slide decks like the one cited by Wired—how Google has used its war chest to broker deals and dominate the search market. Perhaps the specifics of Gray’s essay were off, but we have learned, for instance, how company executives considered adjusting Google’s products to lead to more “monetizable queries.” And just last week, the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Amazon alleging anticompetitive practices. (Amazon has called the suit “misguided.”)

Filings related to that suit have delivered a staggering revelation concerning a secretive Amazon algorithm code-named Project Nessie. The particulars of Nessie were heavily redacted in the public complaint, but this week The Wall Street Journal revealed details of the program. According to the unredacted complaint, a copy of which I have also viewed, Nessie—which is no longer in use—monitored industry prices of specific goods to determine whether competitors were algorithmically matching Amazon’s prices. In the event that competitors were, Nessie would exploit this by systematically raising prices on goods across Amazon, encouraging its competitors to follow suit. Amazon, via the algorithm, knew that it would be able to charge more on its own site, because it didn’t have to worry about being undercut elsewhere, thereby making the broader online shopping experience worse for everyone. An Amazon spokesperson told the Journal that the FTC is mischaracterizing the tool, and suggested that Nessie was a way to monitor competitor pricing and keep price-matching algorithms from dropping prices to unsustainable levels (the company did not respond to my request for comment).

In the FTC’s telling, Project Nessie demonstrates the sheer scope of Amazon’s power in online markets. The project arguably amounted to a form of unilateral price fixing, where Amazon essentially goaded its competitors into acting like cartel members without even knowing they’d done so—all while raising prices on consumers. It’s an astonishing form of influence, powered by behind-the-scenes technology.

The government will need to prove whether this type of algorithmic influence is illegal. But even putting legality aside, Project Nessie is a sterling example of the way that Big Tech has supercharged capitalistic tendencies and manipulated markets in unnatural and opaque ways. It demonstrates the muscle that a company can throw around when it has consolidated its position in a given sector. The complaint alleges that Amazon’s reach and logistics capabilities force third-party sellers to offer products on Amazon and for lower prices than other retailers. Once it captured a significant share of the retail market, Amazon was allegedly able to use algorithmic tools such as Nessie to drive prices up for specific products, boosting revenues and manipulating competitors.

Reading about Project Nessie, I was surprised to feel a sense of relief. In recent years, customer-satisfaction ratings have dipped among Amazon shoppers who have cited delivery disruptions, an explosion of third-party sellers, and poor-quality products as reasons for frustration. In my own life and among friends and relatives, there has been a growing feeling that shopping on the platform has become a slog, with fewer deals and far more junk to sift through. Again, these feelings tend to occupy vibe territory: Amazon’s bigness seems stifling or grating in ways that aren’t always easy to explain. But Nessie offers a partial explanation for this frustration, as do revelations about Google’s various product adjustments. We have the sense that we’re being manipulated because, well, we are. It’s a bit like feeling vaguely sick, going to the doctor, and receiving a blood-test result confirming that, yes, the malaise you experienced is actually an iron deficiency. It is the catharsis of, at long last, receiving a diagnosis.

This is the true power of the surge in anti-monopoly litigation. (According to experts in the field, September was “the most extraordinary month they have ever seen in antitrust.”) Whether or not any of these lawsuits results in corporate breakups or lasting change, they are, effectively, an MRI of our sprawling digital economy—a forensic look at what these larger-than-life technology companies are really doing, and how they are exerting their influence and causing damage. It is confirmation that what so many of us have felt—that the platforms dictating our online experiences are behaving unnaturally and manipulatively—is not merely a paranoid delusion, but the effect of an asymmetrical relationship between the giants of scale and us, the users.

In recent years, it’s been harder to love the internet, a miracle of connectivity that feels ever more bloated, stagnant, commercialized, and junkified. We are just now starting to understand the specifics of this transformation—the true influence of Silicon Valley’s vise grip on our lives. It turns out that the slow rot we might feel isn’t just in our heads, after all.

#technology #internet

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hazbinhazbinhazbinreblog · 1 year ago

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Vox doesn't mean to overhear the conversation. He really doesn't. He's just passing by his daughter's bedroom when Charlie says something that makes him pause.

"…I went to go see Angel at the Porn Studios and ran into Valentino."

"What happened?"

"Well, Valentino offered me a job there—"

Vox slams the door open, his screen displaying a mess of static and a pair ominous, glowing red eyes. "Valentino did what."

Charlie jumps and Vaggie reflexively points her spear at him. "Dad! Uh, how much h did you hear?"

Vox takes a step forward. "I heard the part where you said Valentino offered you a job." His tone is deceptively calm. "Charlie, is that all that happened? Please don't lie."

Charlie averts her eyes guiltily and fiddles with the lapels of her blazer. But once Vaggie lays a comforting hand on her, she takes a deep breath and starts, "Well, I went there to find Angel and ran into him. We talked and then…he grabbed my arm and licked it."

Vox tilts his head curiously—a habit he picked up from Alastor. His screen flashes blood-red for a second. "He grabbed you…and licked your arm." He thinks for a moment before coming to a decision. "Alright then, I'll take care of it."

Charlie nervously watches him straighten up and head out of the room, electricity crackling with each step. "Dad, please be careful!"

Vox looks back at her, his screen fading from static to his usual face.

Charlie looks worried and Vaggie looks pensive. Neither of them look particularly excited about his vague statement.

He smiles reassuringly at the two girls. "I'll be fine, honey. Don't worry about it "

He leaves the room after that.

Alastor, he says through the radio waves. Al, there's something important we have to take care of.

What is it? Alastor replies.

Valentino hit on Charlie and offered her a job, Vox says, straight to the point.

Alastor falls silent in the other end for a moment before responding, I'll be there in five minutes. I need to grab a few things.

Vox smirks and sends out a feeling of appreciation through their connection before he turns into electricity and jumps into a nearby wire.

The world around him is filled with color rushing by and information invading his mind. Time simultaneously slows down and speeds up. Each action takes nanoseconds, reducing the time he needs to find what he's searching for.

With the Pride ring's technology in his grasp, Vox sees everything. He peers through every camera, looking for his business partner. If Valentino isn't spotted, Vox moves on.

Valentino is a slippery bastard, but he has some charm and a general aura that attracts demons whether they're aware of it or not. Vox isn't sure why it doesn't affect him, and if it weren't for Vox co-parenting Charlie with Alastor for years, he thinks he might have fallen for the moth's flirtations and propositions eventually.

The thought of that scares him. He knows what Valentino does to Angel Dust.

He and Alastor are trying to find a sponsored way to break the spider demon's contract with him. They're close now. They just need to find the physical contract.

Lost in his rage and thoughts, Vox nearly misses the bright red of Valentino's coat through one of the various screens in the Porn Studios.

He grits his teeth.

"Valentino."

Vox appears on the largest screen, his face back to the mess of pixels and static.

Valentino merely gives him an unimpressed glance. "What?"

"Did you offer the Princess a job?"

Valentino shrugs, walking up to the screen. "Of course I did. Even if she's a spineless little thing she's still royalty. Demons will pay big bucks for that. If it wasn't for her being Lucifer's daughter I might have snatched her up for myself."

Vox goes quiet. All the screens in the building freeze and black out, except for the one Vox is peering through.

Vox retreats into the data stream, and the screen flickers out.

The next moment, that same screen erupts with a surge of power and blasts Valentino point blank with a concentrated bolt of electricity.

Vox rematerializes in mid-air, grabbing onto Valentino's collar and, with the help of his initial momentum, sends him flying through the front of the studio and out onto the street.

Vox is alight with electricity as he steps towards the fallen moth. His voice starts to echo. "The one nonnegotiable term I had for our partnership was that involving the Princess in anything was off limits. I let you do as you pleased for a good portion of our time in the past because the benefits outweighed some of the costs, but you've crossed a line this time, Valentino."

Valentino spit out a mouthful of blood and sneered at him. "What the fuck? You know, I never understood why you put that clause there. Did you want her all for yourself? I don't mind sloppy seconds if that's true."

Vox fires another bolt at Valentino from his face, this one bigger than the last. Bundles of wires snake around him as parts of his screen shift and move to grow. The wires envelop him fully, and melt together as the mass grows before falling away to reveal Vox's full demon form: a large billboard screen held up by large metallic joints simmering with large sparks of electricity. A deep navy blue suit wraps around his figure, and a single hypnotizing eye amidst black static stares accusingly down at the other Overlord.

"I've tolerated your behavior for the past few decades Valentino. I'm at my limit now. Our partnership is over. You are not welcome here. Now get. Out."

FANFICTION ANON IS BACK AND THIS TIME ITS BADASS

The detail to which you describe things amazes me, it builds up just the right amount of angry tension

Post(s) this is referencing: 1, 2

Edit: fanfiction anon has blessed us with a full version on ao3

#ask #fanfiction #dadstaticradio au #staticradio #radiostatic #staticlovetune

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drdemonprince · 1 year ago

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something im kind of connecting the dots to re: your posts about shaming people who don’t wear masks…in ‘20 and ‘21 I spent a lot of time posting shaming instagram stories telling people they needed to mask, and i yelled at family until i was blue in the face bc they weren’t masking, having big weddings, etc. and it really created a rift (obviously) in my relationships. I’ve also spent a lot of time and energy in the past 4 or so years telling people that it’s not possible to be an ally to trans people if they still engage in any media created by jk rowling. Especially given that her anti trans manifesto has been cited in anti trans legislation in the uk, she says that she assumes that anyone who continues to engage with Harry Potter media approves of her transphobia, etc the list goes on. And yet i still see my friends going to the wizarding world of Harry Potter, marathoning the movies with their friends, going to see the new movies in theaters, and so on. Obviously my aggressive shaming posts and conversations (which have alienated a lot of people) aren’t doing jack shit. Your mask shame posts made me realize that it probably wasn’t right of me to do that. But I don’t see how I can stand up for what I believe in and show people that it’s not okay to keep doing this shit AND play nice and not create trouble. Do you have any thoughts?

Thanks for this great question and for sharing your experiences.

I think when we shame, part of it is a grappling with our own powerlessness. It feels terrible to confront that no matter how much we care, and no matter how much we plead, we cannot make another person take action. When people we love or rely on won't hear our pleas and won't take action, it wounds us so deeply, and it makes sense we react in anger or seek to shame them hoping it will make them care. But it isn't effective.

I think one of the first steps is accepting our powerlessness as individuals. We have to stop expecting ourselves to somehow persuade people to change their behavior and views, when all the research indicates that such change is rare, slow, and very hard, and cannot be accomplished on a person who does not already want to be influenced. We have to sit in the humility of not being able to make others care, and take time to grieve how badly it hurts. Our understandable and huge hurt feelings need to be processed. many of us have a powerful need to express our rage and have it witnessed by others who understand.

From there, we have to think very strategically about what kind of collective work we can do that will shift social norms, facilitate the behavior we want to see, and fight for systemic changes that will actually address the root issues.

This may be things like passing out masks at protests. Joining a local mutual aid fund to contribute to the expenses of people who are quarantining. Protesting an event space to make them institute a masking policy. Unionizing with our coworkers to demand paid sick leave. Shoplifting tests and redistributing them to people in need. Terrorizing the business leaders who dragged us all back into the office. Sharing the wastewater data. Asking loved ones about their COVID mitigation decisions in a sincere way. Organizing outdoor events for our communities. Paying for a buddy's vaccine.

There are countless ways for us to be plugged into an active community that is larger than us. The work is humble, and ongoing, and what you do personally will never be enough on its own, and you must accept that in order to believe that it does not have to be. We are in this together.

In short, I think the tough emotional realities of feeling disrespected and not cared for much be addressed by finding community with people who do care and will give us room to voice our outrage. And then we have to work together to create the circumstances that allow real systemic change to germinate.

Right now, people conflate that emotional need to express rage with the political need to take action. And what feels cathartic to do or say is not necessarily what's persuasive. There has to be room for both.

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jcmarchi · 1 year ago

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Stanhope raises £2.3m for AI that teaches machines to 'make human-like decisions' - AI News

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/stanhope-raises-2-3m-for-ai-that-teaches-machines-to-make-human-like-decisions-ai-news/

Stanhope raises £2.3m for AI that teaches machines to 'make human-like decisions' - AI News

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Stanhope AI – a company applying decades of neuroscience research to teach machines how to make human-like decisions in the real world – has raised £2.3m in seed funding led by the UCL Technology Fund.

Creator Fund also participated, along with, MMC Ventures, Moonfire Ventures and Rockmount Capital and leading angel investors.

Stanhope AI was founded as a spinout from University College London, supported by UCL Business, by three of the most eminent names in neuroscience and AI research – CEO Professor Rosalyn Moran (former Deputy Director of King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence), Director Karl Friston, Professor at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology and Technical Advisor Dr Biswa Sengupta (MD of AI and Cloud products at JP Morgan Chase).

By using key neuroscience principles and applying them to AI and mathematics, Stanhope AI is at the forefront of the new generation of AI technology known as ‘agentic’ AI. The team has built algorithms that, like the human brain, are always trying to guess what will happen next; learning from any discrepancies between predicted and actual events to continuously update their “internal models of the world.” Instead of training vast LLMs to make decisions based on seen data, Stanhope agentic AI’s models are in charge of their own learning. They autonomously decode their environments and rebuild and refine their “world models” using real-time data, continuously fed to them via onboard sensors.

The rise of agentic AI

This approach, and Stanhope AI’s technology, are based on the neuroscience principle of Active Inference – the idea that our brains, in order to minimise free energy, are constantly making predictions about incoming sensory data around us. As this data changes, our brains adapt and update our predictions in response to rebuild and refine our world view.

This is very different to the traditional machine learning methods used to train today’s AI systems such as LLMs. Today’s models can only operate within the realms of the training they are given, and can only make best-guess decisions based on the information they have. They can’t learn on the go. They require extreme amounts of processing power and energy to train and run, as well as vast amounts of seen data.

By contrast, Stanhope AI’s Active Inference models are truly autonomous. They can constantly rebuild and refine their predictions. Uncertainty is minimised by default, which removes the risk of hallucinations about what the AI thinks is true, and this moves Stanhope’s unique models towards reasoning and human-like decision-making. What’s more, by drastically reducing the size and energy required to run the models and the machines, Stanhope AI’s models can operate on small devices such as drones and similar.

“The most all-encompassing idea since natural selection”

Stanhope AI’s approach is possible because of its founding team’s extensive research into the neuroscience principles of Active Inference, as well as free energy. Director Indeed Professor Friston, a world-renowned neuroscientist at UCL whose work has been cited twice as many times as Albert Einstein, is the inventor of the Free Energy Theory Principle.

Friston’s principle theory centres on how our brains minimise surprise and uncertainty. It explains that all living things are driven to minimise free energy, and thus the energy needed to predict and perceive the world. Such is its impact, the Free Energy Theory Principle has been described as the “most all-encompassing idea since the theory of natural selection.” Active Inference sits within this theory to explain the process our brains use in order to minimise this energy. This idea infuses Stanhope AI’s work, led by Professor Moran, a specialist in Active Inference and its application through AI; and Dr Biswa Sengupta, whose doctoral research was in dynamical systems, optimisation and energy efficiency from the University of Cambridge.

Real-world application

In the immediate term, the technology is being tested with delivery drones and autonomous machines used by partners including Germany’s Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation and the Royal Navy. In the long term, the technology holds huge promise in the realms of manufacturing, industrial robotics and embodied AI. The investment will be used to further the company’s development of its agentic AI models and the practical application of its research.

Professor Rosalyn Moran, CEO and co-founder of Stanhope AI, said: “Our mission at Stanhope AI is to bridge the gap between neuroscience and artificial intelligence, creating a new generation of AI systems that can think, adapt, and decide like humans. We believe this technology will transform the capabilities of AI and robotics and make them more impactful in real-world scenarios. We trust the math and we’re delighted to have the backing of investors like UCL Technology Fund who deeply understand the science behind this technology and their support will be significant on our journey to revolutionise AI technology.”

David Grimm, partner UCL Technology Fund, said: “AI startups may be some of the hottest investments right now but few have the calibre and deep scientific and technical know-how as the Stanhope AI team. This is emblematic of their unique approach, combining neuroscience insights with advanced AI, which presents a groundbreaking opportunity to advance the field and address some of the most challenging problems in AI today. We can’t wait to see what this team achieves.”

Marina Santilli, sasociate director UCL Business, added “The promise offered by Stanhope AI’s approach to Artificial Intelligence is hugely exciting, providing hope for powerful whilst energy-light models. UCLB is delighted to have been able to support the formation of a company built on the decades of fundamental research at UCL led by Professor Friston, developing the Free Energy Principle.”

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Tags: decision making, development, funding, llm

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