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mostlysignssomeportents · 10 months ago

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“Disenshittify or Die”

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the fuck happened to the old, good internet?

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

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

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

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

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

I’m talking about enshittification.

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

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

There’s so many ways to lock in users.

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

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

No way.

Can you agree on where to go next?

Hell no.

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

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

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

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

Sometimes, it’s a grab bag:

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

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

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

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

Think Different, amirite?

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

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

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

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

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

Bullshit!

Bull.

Shit.

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

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

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

"But wait!" I hear you say!

[Come on, say it!]

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

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

[Any guesses?!]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I mean, you love to see it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except you can’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So companies aren’t constrained by competition or regulation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Any guesses why?]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To do that, we have to install constraints.

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

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

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

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

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

[Can anyone guess why?]

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

So yeah, that was pretty fucking epic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next up: regulation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@[email protected] (cropped)

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

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

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

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covid-safer-hotties · 8 months ago

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Also preserved in our archive

Y'all know I'm not one to save celebrity news without reason: There's some excellent analysis done in this article about air quality and airborne disease.

Macbeth: cancelled due to “illness” The eagerly anticipated production of Macbeth, starring David Tennant in the title role at the Harold Pinter Theatre, has cancelled four consecutive performances this week due to “illness within the company.” The latest cancellation, announced just two hours before curtain, left audience members disappointed, including those who had traveled internationally and rearranged work schedules.

Among affected ticket holders, some expressed frustration on social media about the late notice and lack of clarity. Twitter user @clairebobcat voiced a common sentiment:

"Ticket holders were notified at 5:45 this eve. Really short notice considering illness has been ongoing since Friday. All best wishes to the cast—illness can’t be helped, but very shoddy treatment of ticket holders. Travel money & Annual leave wasted."

The ongoing cancellations reflect broader challenges facing the theatre industry in the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

The arts still in crisis due to Covid A survey by Theatre Washington reported that while 58% of Washington, D.C. theatre patrons once attended performances six or more times per year, only 31% have done so since reopening. Almost half of patrons surveyed now attend just three times or fewer, and nearly 68% cited fear of Covid-19 exposure as a primary reason for staying away.

The UK is facing unprecedented rates of long-term illness due to long Covid, a condition marked by symptoms including post-exertional malaise, cognitive impairment, and cardiopulmonary dysfunction.

Public health data shows that over two million people in the UK are affected by long COVID, with more than 10% of Covid cases resulting in prolonged symptoms.

High-profile performers, including Alyssa Milano and Matt McGorry, have spoken publicly about their struggles with long Covid, shedding light on the profound and lasting impact of the illness.

Protect the Heart of the Arts In response to these issues, Protect the Heart of the Arts, an advocacy organisation for members of the performance community with long COVID or who are clinically vulnerable, has offered to donate a HEPA air purification system to the Harold Pinter Theatre, which is staging Macbeth.

Glenda from the group told the Canary:

"It’s unsustainable, unethical, and we can’t afford to accept it as occupational: our employers, unions, regulatory bodies and politicians have to address the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic head-on.

Beyond key vectors (hospitals, schools, prisons), creatives are uniquely vulnerable, especially within live formats, alongside venue staff and audiences; not to mention all within said categories who’ve been marginalised, nor the walk-back of digital programming."

The organisation argues that improved air quality could help reduce health risks for cast, crew, and audiences, potentially preventing further cancellations.

Covid isn’t over – as Macbeth inadvertently shows “We may not know the exact illness affecting the Macbeth cast, but we do know that Covid is a serious vascular disease requiring extended recovery times,” noted Charles Waltz, founder of Protect the Heart of the Arts:

"Reinfections weaken immunity to other pathogens, so without measures like air purification and adequate recovery time, we risk ongoing illness cycles that could impact health and stability across the industry. Clean air and flexible recovery policies are essential to protect the performance community’s long-term health."

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thefreakandthehair · 2 years ago

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@eddiemonth prompt, oct 10th: College | Loser Denial - Heyrocco | Determined a/n: steddie, college au, really just fluffy getting together. un-betaed because I’m challenging myself to write these in under an hour. read on ao3 | link to masterpost on ao3

They say that the most basic human need is to feel a sense of belonging, to feel welcomed. Eddie’s yet to find that acceptance at Ivy Tech Community College in Fort Wayne, about 25 miles southeast of his hometown. He’d hoped that getting away from Hawkins and joining a program for automotive technology would give him a good shot at meeting some like-minded people but so far, it’s been nothing short of a bust.

Not only is he yet to touch a car because he’s had to focus on meaningless general education classes first, he’s made one friend. One single friend in the form of a lab partner, and he’s not actually sure if they’re even friends so much as they are two people forced into talking on a regular basis. But Eddie counts it, because it’s all he’s got for now.

Without his high school reputation and the safety of a familiar environment, college is an ominous beast with sharp teeth. Each day feels like stepping into a pasture with no shepherd, but he’s determined not to fail. Three attempts at graduating high school is enough failure for a lifetime. So yes, he counts his lab partner.

Besides, if they aren’t really friends yet, Eddie would like to be. Steve’s a good dude— not quite his normal type in company, sure, but he’s studying to become a nurse, he’s smart in a quick-witted non-traditional sort of way, and Eddie can’t imagine anyone being on the receiving end of that smile and not going a little wobbly in the knees.

Alright, so maybe Eddie wants a little more than friendship but he’s only greedy when the end goal seems possible. And determined as Eddie may be, he can’t imagine that he’s Steve type. Some days are harder than others though, like the days when they’re crammed next to each other in the library at tiny tables, or the days when they hang back in the lab to work through their latest experiment.

Today though? Today is downright painful.

Today, he’s in Steve’s fucking apartment. Steve’s tiny, off-campus apartment that he shares with someone named Robin who Eddie can only assume is his girlfriend. There are pictures of the two of them all over the place, distracting Eddie from the lab report they’re supposed to be working on. Words jump off the page in front of him as he sits cross legged on the floor with his back against the couch Steve’s sitting on. It doesn’t help that Steve’s sitting so close, his foot occasionally grazing Eddie’s side, his thigh close enough for Eddie to rest his head against.

Twice now, Steve’s leaned down over Eddie’s shoulders to get a closer look at the data chart, turning to face him close enough that their noses nearly touch. Eddie’s just about stopped breathing both times because his hair tickles Eddie’s ear and he smells so good.

Molecular weight. Boiling point. Propanol.

He tries his damndest to focus on his section, opting to take on the procedures and data analysis while Steve works on the lengthy conclusion section, but he just—

He can’t. Maybe he can’t be friends with Steve after all. Not when he’s sitting in his apartment, surrounded by happy pictures of Steve with his girlfriend, feeling his disappointment grow stronger and stronger. Through his haze, he barely recognizes Steve asking him a question.

“Hello? Eddie? Earth to Eddie Munson?” Steve nudges him gently in the shoulder with his knee. “We have to rank the order that the pure substances traveled through the column from fastest to slowest, and you’ve got the data.”

Eddie shakes his head, trying his best to hide his disappointment that Steve can’t be a friend because of his own stupid crush and that Steve can’t be more because well, he’s clearly spoken for and why wouldn’t he be? Who wouldn’t just fall ass over ankles for Steve?

Apparently, he already has.

“Uh, hey man, you good? Seriously, you’re kinda freaking me out.” Steve drops his papers on the coffee table and slides off the couch to kneel in front of Eddie. He reaches out and gently tips his chin up, probably checking for some kind of medical issue.

Stupid nursing program, Eddie thinks. But he just looks up, lets himself be guided by Steve soft, practiced hand and makes eye contact. Hazel, he thinks. I’ve never been close enough to notice that.

But he still hasn’t spoken and can see that Steve is truly starting to panic so he swallows and finds his tongue again.

“I’m fine, I’m good, promise. Just uh, just lost in thought. That’s a thing that I do a lot, you’ve seen my notebooks,” he tries to laugh it off but Steve doesn’t drop his hand. He simply slides it to the side, resting carefully on Eddie’s cheek. Eddie’s sure that Steve can feel it growing warmer beneath his touch.

“What about?” Steve asks, inquisitive. Eddie must be going insane because he swears he sees Steve’s eyes flicker between his gaze and his lips.

Eddie smiles, mostly fake but there’s something about Steve’s touch that does give him a reason to.

“Didn’t know you had a girlfriend, that’s all. Got a little lost looking at all the pictures, she seems awesome.”

Not that he’s thought too deeply about how Steve would react, but hysterical laughter wouldn’t have been one of them if he had. But that’s what he sees: Steve falling to the side, his face turning red, his hand slipping from Eddie’s cheek to his chest, and his elbow leaning on the coffee table as his entire body shakes with laughter.

What the fuck is going on here? Eddie wonders.

“That’s—” Steve tries to speak but takes several tries to get audible words out. “God, she knew that was gonna happen, I owe Robin $20.”

Eddie sits, stuck in place, his eyes wide and brows knitted tightly above his nose. “Robin? What was gonna happen? $20?”

“Oh my God, Eddie, I’m— no. Robin is the girl in these pictures, and she’s my best friend. She bet me $20 that the pictures were gonna throw you off and I thought I’d been obvious enough by now that you wouldn’t go down that route. But no, we’re definitely not dating. I’m uh, I’m not exactly her type.” Steve grins and slowly sits back upright, this time cross-legged to mirror Eddie’s position, their knees touching this time.

“How the fuck could you not be someone’s type?” Eddie lets slip, his mouth moving faster than his brain. No surprise there.

Before he can take it back, Steve just quirks one eyebrow up. “Well, unless I wake tomorrow a woman… not gonna happen. Did you miss that picture?”

Eddie follows Steve’s finger that’s pointing to the largest picture hung on the wall, one of them at a Pride event. Robin sits on Steve’s shoulders, wearing a flag of varying shades of reds, oranges, and purples like a cape around her neck. Steve’s smiling from ear to ear, otherwise dressed as he does every day save for the pink, purple, and blue stripes painted on his cheek.

It’s the largest picture in the room, and somehow, Eddie’s missed it completely.

“So yeah, not really her type. Is that why you’ve been so quiet? And completely ignoring all of my attempts to make a move?”

“A move? On what?” Eddie asks, incredulous.

Steve shrugs and leans forward, resting his palms on Eddie’s knees. “You, dumbass. Why else would we study here instead of the library?”

“Gonna level with you here, I didn’t even think about it. I figured you were just tired of me almost getting us kicked out for being too loud or something! That was not obvious, Steve.” Eddie’s heart pounds in his chest, hope clawing its way through a graveyard of isolation.

Steve just huffs a small laugh through his nose and bites his lower lip. “Let me be clearer, then. I like you. And maybe we can see if we’ve got as much chemistry as propanol and… whatever the fuck else was on that list, I don’t remember.”

It’s Eddie’s turn to laugh, wild and free as he throws his head back against the couch. When he looks back at Steve, his laughter lulls to a soft smile. “Jesus Christ, that was so bad and I can’t believe it’s about to work on me.”

“Yeah?” Steve grins, leaning closer, almost closing the distance.

Eddie nods, breathless. “Yeah.”

Terrible chemistry puns and pick up lines aside, kissing Steve does feel like a chemical reaction, one that deserves its own lab report.

His lips are soft, a little chapped to match Eddie’s, but he moves with intention and care, two things Eddie isn’t familiar with. He’s kissed before but not like this, not like his partner is trying to pour affection into him with every movement. Over time, he’ll grow to learn that that’s just how Steve is, all-in on everything he finds worth his time and energy.

Their lab report goes forgotten in favor of learning more about one another until Robin comes home hours later, thankfully after they’ve washed up and settled in on the couch in a much less precarious position.

“Aw, man,” she bemoans, dropping her bag next to the door with a loud thud. “I really thought the pictures were gonna cockblock you.”

Eddie elbows Steve in the side. “Pay up, Stevie. Be a man of your word. I don’t date men with poor integrity.”

“You two are gonna be the worse fucking tag team, goddamn it,” he mutters under his breath as he lifts his hips up to fish around for his wallet, tossing a $20 on the coffee table. “I don’t think it should count because it was fine once I explained!”

Robin grins, walking over to the couch and grabbing the bill off the table before making herself comfortable in the free corner next to Eddie.

“Eddie, I’ve heard a lot about you and I think we’re gonna be really good friends.”

He finds himself sandwiched between Steve and Robin for the rest of the night, comfortable and welcomed, as though he’s belonged there the whole time. The evening doesn’t end with Eddie making a friend out of Steve, but how can he complain when he finds so much more?

#steddie #steddie fic #steddie fanfic #steddie fanfiction #eddie month #eddie munson x steve harrington #steve harrington #eddie munson #stranger things #stranger things fic #stranger things fanfic #stranger things fanfiction #st fic #myblurbs #this nearly got very out of hand but holding myself to that hour is proving very effective #eddie month prompts

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mariacallous · 2 months ago

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A United States Customs and Border Protection request for information this week revealed the agency’s plans to find vendors that can supply face recognition technology for capturing data on everyone entering the US in a vehicle like a car or van, not just the people sitting in the front seat. And a CBP spokesperson later told WIRED that the agency also has plans to expand its real-time face recognition capabilities at the border to detect people exiting the US as well—a focus that may be tied to the Trump administration’s push to get undocumented people to “self-deport” and leave the US.

WIRED also shed light this week on a recent CBP memo that rescinded a number of internal policies designed to protect vulnerable people—including pregnant women, infants, the elderly, and people with serious medical conditions—while in the agency’s custody. Signed by acting commissioner Pete Flores, the order eliminates four Biden-era policies.

Meanwhile, as the ripple effects of “SignalGate” continue, the communication app TeleMessage suspended “all services” pending an investigation after former US national security adviser Mike Waltz inadvertently called attention to the app, which subsequently suffered data breaches in recent days. Analysis of TeleMessage Signal’s source code this week appeared to show that the app sends users’ message logs in plaintext, undermining the security and privacy guarantees the service promised. After data stolen in one of the TeleMessage hacks indicated that CBP agents might be users of the app, CBP confirmed its use to WIRED, saying that the agency has “disabled TeleMessage as a precautionary measure.”

A WIRED investigation found that US director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reused a weak password for years on multiple accounts. And researchers warn that an open source tool known as “easyjson” could be an exposure for the US government and US companies, because it has ties to the Russian social network VK, whose CEO has been sanctioned.

And there's more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

ICE’s Deportation Airline Hack Reveals Man “Disappeared” to El Salvador

Hackers this week revealed they had breached GlobalX, one of the airlines that has come to be known as “ICE Air” thanks to its use by the Trump administration to deport hundreds of migrants. The data they leaked from the airline includes detailed flight manifests for those deportation flights—including, in at least one case, the travel records of a man whose own family had considered him “disappeared” by immigration authorities and whose whereabouts the US government had refused to divulge.

On Monday, reporters at 404 Media said that hackers had provided them with a trove of data taken from GlobalX after breaching the company’s network and defacing its website. “Anonymous has decided to enforce the Judge's order since you and your sycophant staff ignore lawful orders that go against your fascist plans,” a message the hackers posted to the site read. That stolen data, it turns out, included detailed passenger lists for GlobalX’s deportation flights—including the flight to El Salvador of Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a Venezuelan man whose whereabouts had become a mystery to even his own family as they sought answers from the US government. US authorities had previously declined to tell his family or reporters where he had been sent—only that he had been deported—and his name was even excluded from a list of deportees leaked to CBS News. (The Department of Homeland Security later stated in a post to X that Prada was in El Salvador—but only after a New York Times story about his disappearance.)

The fact that his name was, in fact, included all along on a GlobalX flight manifest highlights just how opaque the Trump administration’s deportation process remains. According to immigrant advocates who spoke with 404 Media, it even raises questions about whether the government itself had deportation records as comprehensive as the airline whose planes it chartered. “There are so many levels at which this concerns me. One is they clearly did not take enough care in this to even make sure they had the right lists of who they were removing, and who they were not sending to a prison that is a black hole in El Salvador,” Michelle Brané, executive director of immigrant rights group Together and Free, told 404 Media. “They weren't even keeping accurate records of who they were sending there.”

The Computer of a DOGE Staffer With Sensitive Access Reportedly Infected With Malware

Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency has raised alarms not just due to its often reckless cuts to federal programs, but also the agency’s habit of giving young, inexperienced staffers with questionable vetting access to highly sensitive systems. Now security researcher Micah Lee has found that Kyle Schutt, a DOGE staffer who reportedly accessed the financial system of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, appears to have had infostealer malware on one of his computers. Lee discovered that four dumps of user data stolen by that kind of password-stealing malware included Schutt’s passwords and usernames. It’s far from clear when Schutt’s credentials were stolen, for what machine, or whether the malware would have posed any threat to any government agency’s systems, but the incident nonetheless highlights the potential risks posed by DOGE staffers’ unprecedented access.

Grok AI Will “Undress” Women in Public on X

Elon Musk has long marketed his AI tool Grok as a more freewheeling, less restricted alternative to other large language models and AI image generators. Now X users are testing the limits of Grok’s few safeguards by replying to images of women on the platform and asking Grok to “undress” them. While the tool doesn’t allow the generation of nude images, 404 Media and Bellingcat have found that it repeatedly responded to users’ “undress” prompts with pictures of women in lingerie or bikinis, posted publicly to the site. In one case, Grok apologized to a woman who complained about the practice, but the feature has yet to be disabled.

A Hacked School Software Company Paid a Ransom—but Schools Are Still Being Extorted

This week in don’t-trust-ransomware-gangs news: Schools in North Carolina and Canada warned that they’ve received extortion threats from hackers who had obtained students’ personal information. The likely source of that sensitive data? A ransomware breach last December of PowerSchool, one of the world’s biggest education software firms, according to NBC News. PowerSchool paid a ransom at the time, but the data stolen from the company nonetheless appears to be the same info now being used in the current extortion attempts. “We sincerely regret these developments—it pains us that our customers are being threatened and re-victimized by bad actors,” PowerSchool told NBC News in a statement. “As is always the case with these situations, there was a risk that the bad actors would not delete the data they stole, despite assurances and evidence that were provided to us.”

A Notorious Deepfake Porn Site Shuts Down After Its Creator Is Outed

Since its creation in 2018, MrDeepFakes.com grew into perhaps the world’s most infamous repository of nonconsensual pornography created with AI mimicry tools. Now it’s offline after the site’s creator was identified as a Canadian pharmacist in an investigation by CBC, Bellingcat, and the Danish news outlets Politiken and Tjekdet. The site’s pseudonymous administrator, who went by DPFKS on its forums and created at least 150 of its porn videos himself, left a trail of clues in email addresses and passwords found on breached sites that eventually led to the Yelp and Airbnb accounts of Ontario pharmacist David Do. After reporters approached Do with evidence that he was DPFKS, MrDeepFakes.com went offline. “A critical service provider has terminated service permanently. Data loss has made it impossible to continue operation,” reads a message on its homepage. “We will not be relaunching.”

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thoughtlessarse · 11 days ago

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President Trump and his former star advisor, Elon Musk, have accelerated the deployment of a vast technological infrastructure that monitors the lives of millions of people. The system is focusing on immigrants — for now Massive unauthorized scanning of social media. Analysis of biometric, income, health, and Social Security data. Interception of telephone communications. Geolocation via mobile devices. Tracking of car journeys using license plate readers. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, the U.S. government has been using these and other tools based on artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor and persecute thousands of people without judicial authorization — mostly immigrants, foreigners passing through, or students. In the last four months, Trump and his former star advisor, the tech tycoon Elon Musk, have, along with the private sector, accelerated the deployment of a massive techno-surveillance state. And for the first time in history, Washington is boasting about it rather than denying its existence. “Surveillance in the U.S. didn’t begin with Trump, nor will it end when he leaves the White House. The foundations for the current state of techno-surveillance were laid over decades, with bipartisan support for policies that normalized invasive practices in law enforcement, the military, and border control,” says the Bahraini civil rights activist Esra’a Al Shafei, who has been studying this issue for years, in a conversation with EL PAÍS. “This system is fueled by large budgets allocated to intelligence agencies, as well as private providers, all under the pretext of national security and crime prevention.” Companies like Palantir, Anduril, and GEO Group are providing Washington with digital tools to build this entire surveillance infrastructure. Trump continues to add layers to this system. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed in April that it is using a tool called Babel X to collect social media information about travelers who may be subject to increased surveillance, according to the agency itself. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), for its part, has acknowledged using another program, SocialNet, which aggregates data from more than 200 sources, including Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and dating apps.

#us #us polirtics #trump regime #mass surveillance

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bangkoksolicitor · 2 months ago

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Immigration Services in Thailand

1.1 Statutory Foundations

Immigration Act B.E. 2522 (1979): Primary legislation

Ministerial Regulations: 47 implementing regulations (updated 2023)

Royal Decrees: Special provisions for investment/retirement

1.2 Organizational Structure

Immigration Bureau: Under Royal Thai Police

Headquarters (Chaeng Wattana, Bangkok)

76 Provincial Offices

32 Border Checkpoints

Specialized Units:

Visa Division (Section 1)

Extension Division (Section 2)

Investigation Division (Section 3)

2. Core Visa Categories and Processing

2.2 Special Visa Programs

SMART Visa: 4-year stay for experts/investors

LTR Visa: 10-year privilege visa

Elite Visa: 5-20 year membership program

3. Application Procedures

3.1 Document Authentication

Notarization Requirements:

Home country documents

Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs legalization

Translation Standards:

Certified translators

Embassy verification

4. Digital Transformation Initiatives

4.1 Online Systems

e-Extension: Pilot program for 12 visa types

90-Day Reporting: Online portal and mobile app

TM30 Automation: Hotel API integration

4.2 Biometric Implementation

Facial Recognition: At 6 major airports

Fingerprint Database: 10-print system since 2018

Iris Scanning: Testing at Suvarnabhumi

5. Compliance and Enforcement

5.1 Monitoring Systems

Overstay Tracking: Real-time alerts after 7 days

Visa Run Detection: Algorithmic pattern analysis

Work Permit Integration: MOE-Immigration data sharing

6. Provincial Variations

6.2 Special Economic Zones

Eastern Economic Corridor: Fast-track processing

Border Provinces: Cross-border worker programs

7. Specialized Services

7.1 Corporate Immigration

BOI Fast Track: 7-day work permit processing

Regional HQ Packages: Multiple-entry privileges

Startup Visa: DEPA-endorsed companies

7.2 Family Reunification

Dependent Visas: Spouse/children under 20

Parent Visas: Financial guarantee requirements

Thai National Sponsorship: Income thresholds

8. Emerging Trends (2024 Update)

8.1 Policy Developments

Digital Nomad Visa: Expected Q4 2024

Airport Automated Clearance: Expansion to 8 more nationalities

Visa Fee Restructuring: Proposed 15-20% increase

8.2 Technological Advancements

Blockchain Verification: For document authentication

AI-Assisted Processing: Risk assessment algorithms

Mobile Biometrics: Pilot for frequent travelers

9. Strategic Considerations

9.1 Application Optimization

Document Preparation:

6-month bank statement continuity

Property lease registration

Timing Strategies:

Avoid holiday periods

Pre-submission checks

9.2 Compliance Management

Record Keeping:

Entry/exit stamps

TM30 receipts

Advisory Services:

Licensed lawyers vs agents

BOI-certified consultants

#thailand #immigration #immigrationlawyers #visa #visainthailand #immigrationinthailand #immigrationlawyersinthailand #thai #thaivisa #immigrationservices

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whencyclopedia · 1 year ago

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Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

"Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories" is a sweeping and jarring work of how opium became an insidious capitalistic tool to generate wealth for the British Empire and other Western powers at the expense of an epidemic of addiction in China and the impoverishment of millions of farmers in India. The legacy of this “criminal enterprise,” as the author puts it, left lasting influences that reverberate across cultures and societies even today.

Written in engaging language, Smoke and Ashes is a scholarly follow-up to the author’s famous Ibis trilogy, a collection of fiction that uses the opium trade as its backdrop. In Smoke and Ashes, the author draws on his years-long research into opium supplemented by his family history, personal travels, cross-cultural experience, and expertise in works of historical verisimilitude. Composed over 18 chapters, the author delves into a diverse set of primary and secondary data, including Chinese sources. He also brings a multidimensional angle to the study by highlighting the opium trade's legacy in diverse areas such as art, architecture, horticulture, printmaking, and calligraphy. 23 pictorial illustrations serve as powerful eyewitness accounts to the discourse.

This book should interest students and scholars seeking historical analysis based on facts on the ground instead of colonial narratives. Readers will also find answers to how opium continues to play an outsize role in modern-day conflicts, addictions, corporate behavior, and globalism.

Amitav Ghosh’s research convincingly points out that while opium had always been used for recreational purposes across cultures, it was the Western powers such as the British, Portuguese, the Spaniards, and the Dutch that discovered its significant potential as a trading vehicle. Ghosh adds that colonial rulers, especially the British, often rationalized their actions by arguing that the Asian population was naturally predisposed to narcotics. However, it was British India that bested others in virtually monopolizing the market for the highly addictive Indian opium in China. Used as a currency to redress the East India Company (EIC)’s trade deficit with China, the opium trade by the 1890s generated about five million sterling a year for Britain. Meanwhile, as many as 40 million Chinese became addicted to opium.

Eastern India became the epicenter of British opium production. Workers in opium factories in Patna and Benares toiled under severe conditions, often earning less than the cost of production while their British managers lived in luxury. Ghosh asserts that opium farming permanently impoverished a region that was an economic powerhouse before the British arrived. Ghosh’s work echoes developmental economists such as Jonathan Lehne, who has documented opium-growing communities' lower literacy and economic progress compared to their neighbors.

Ghosh states that after Britain, “the country that benefited most from the opium trade” with China, was the United States. American traders skirted the British opium monopoly by sourcing from Turkey and Malwa in Western India. By 1818, American traders were smuggling about one-third of all the opium consumed in China. Many powerful families like the Astors, Coolidges, Forbes, Irvings, and Roosevelts built their fortunes from the opium trade. Much of this opium money, Ghosh shows, also financed banking, railroads, and Ivy League institutions. While Ghosh mentions that many of these families developed a huge collection of Chinese art, he could have also discussed that some of their holdings were most probably part of millions of Chinese cultural icons plundered by colonialists.

Ghosh ends the book by discussing how the EIC's predatory behaviors have been replicated by modern corporations, like Purdue Pharma, that are responsible for the opium-derived OxyContin addiction. He adds that fossil fuel companies such as BP have also reaped enormous profits at the expense of consumer health or environmental damage.

Perhaps one omission in this book is that the author does not hold Indian opium traders from Malwa, such as the Marwaris, Parsis, and Jews, under the same ethical scrutiny as he does to the British and the Americans. While various other works have covered the British Empire's involvement in the opium trade, most readers would find Ghosh's narrative of American involvement to be eye-opening. Likewise, his linkage of present-day eastern India's economic backwardness to opium is both revealing and insightful.

Winner of India's highest literary award Jnanpith and nominated author for the Man Booker Prize, Amitav Ghosh's works concern colonialism, identity, migration, environmentalism, and climate change. In this book, he provides an invaluable lesson for political and business leaders that abdication of ethics and social responsibility have lasting consequences impacting us all.

#History #EastIndiaCompany #BritishIndia #Dutch

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mayhemstories · 3 months ago

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Prototype: Love - Chapter 5 "Count - 2.2"

check it out on ao3 here! // find chapter index here!

You'd think all of these large-scale, world-changing, revolution-related android cases would make the small ones stop coming in. Like all side characters would just behave out of respect for the ongoing main plot. You'd be wrong. part two: Already loved you on Tuesday //

words: 2,986 / chapters: 5/? / rating: mature

-- ☆ -- ☆ -- ☆ --

TUESDAY, 9th of November, 12:04 AM

The second you stepped foot into the apartment you felt the data pad in your bag explode with messages again. You turned around at Connor, who was right behind you, and who gave you a quick smile before turning his gaze down towards the apartment. His LED circled yellow as his eyes flickered across the rooms, taking in information.

You pretended not to hear the messages, choosing to ignore Connor’s automated analysis and investigate on your own instead.

The apartment was airy and well decorated. It wasn’t big by any means, a living room, a bedroom and a study - only bigger than your own home by one room. The carpet in the entryway showed signs of wear and the side table had a leg that was reinforced with duct tape. A faint food smell wafted through the air. The apartment was clearly well loved.

There were pictures on the walls to the left and right, showing the couple who lived here through the years.

“Oliver and Louise Blaird.”, Connor told you. “Ages 34 and 36. He works as a teacher for elementary school kids, she used to work as a representative for an insurance company, but got laid off several months ago. They both have a clean record. No pets, one car. He has family in Texas, she is from Belgium. They moved to Detroit together in 2026.”

You looked at the pictures. They showed the couple in all sorts of situations throughout the last ten years. There was one of them smiling in front of the Washington Monument in DC in what must’ve been the late to mid-twenties - they looked almost ten years younger compared to some of the more recent photographs. There were pictures of them at a sunny beach and pictures of them hiking in mountains, but also some more candid shots that were clearly taken right here in the couple’s home. One of them cozied up on a couch with a Christmas Tree behind them and a few of them smiling, surrounded by what must be family and friends.

The apartment was recently deep-cleaned and the shelves showed little gadgets that the couple must’ve picked up on their travels over the years, as well as a few well taken care of houseplants.

Art hung on the walls where pictures didn’t - nothing egregiously expensive, more like a labour of love, picked up on various flea markets over the years.

They seemed like a normal couple in an average Detroit apartment.

It made the red and blue splatters of blood on the kitchen floor even more harrowing in contrast.

You had arrived after the first responders, who were trying to calm down a crying woman on the couch. She was holding on to her husband’s left arm while his right arm was being tended to by paramedics.

“Hey, I’m a Detective with Detroit Police”, you introduced yourself. “These are my colleagues, Lieutenant Anderson and Connor. We’d like to have a look around and ask you a few questions, if that’s okay with you?”

The woman sobbed and nodded, using her free hand to wipe her tears away.

Her entire demeanour changed when her glance fell on Connor.

“An android? Why did you bring an android to our house?” Her voice trembled and her body drew back, like she was terrified of him.

“My name is Connor. I’m the android sent by CyberLife.”, he said, lowering his shoulders and displaying a small smile to seem less intimidating. It could be interpreted as nice - or as manipulative, depending who you asked. “I investigate cases of deviancy in androids. I understand that your recent experiences with androids have left you shaken and suspicious, but I assure you that I mean you no harm.”

The woman was still visibly tense, her lip shaking as she looked back and forth between the three strangers in her living room.

“Come on, Connor”, Hank said. “Let’s leave the detective to do their job and take a look around the kitchen.”

After a wordless exchange between the two men Connor nodded towards the couple curtly and turned around to walk to the kitchen.

You turned back to the woman, careful not to upset her further. You shouldn’t have worried - the second Connor left the room she relaxed, the tension leaving her shoulders. However, she still seemed shaken - her eyes were red from crying and her voice was hoarse when she said “Thank you for coming so quickly, Detective. My husband and I were so scared…”

Another sob broke from her lips and her husband carefully raised his free hand to her shoulder to comfort her.

“We’ve never experienced anything like this before,” he explained. “We didn’t know what to do or how to react.”

You eased onto the couch next to them and tried a calming smile. “Why don’t we take it from the top? Mr. and Mrs. Blaird, correct? Why don’t you tell me in your own words what happened?”

“Please, call me Oliver.”, the man said. “We don’t really know what happened. One moment it was smiling and warming up our lunch like everything was okay, and the next it tensed up and started blabbering about needing to leave.”

You retrieved the data pad from your bag and turned it on to take notes.

RK800 / 313 248 317 - 51 → WITNESS INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT DETECTIVE#81538. “Why don’t you tell me in your own words what happened?”

RK800 / 313 248 317 - 51 → WITNESS STATEMENT TRANSCRIPT OLIVER BLAIRD. “Please, call me Oliver.”

RK800 / 313 248 317 - 51 → WITNESS STATEMENT TRANSCRIPT OLIVER BLAIRD. “We don’t really know what happened.”

RK800 / 313 248 317 - 51 → WITNESS STATEMENT TRANSCRIPT OLIVER BLAIRD. “One moment it was smiling and warming up our lunch like everything was okay, and the next it tensed up and started blabbering about needing to leave.”

You looked over to the kitchen where Connor was currently analysing a broken bowl of soup that lay on the floor, successfully acting fully absorbed by the task at hand.

Like he wasn’t fully eavesdropping on your conversation.

Or ‘processing multiple complex tasks simultaneously’ as he’d probably call it.

Whatever. Less work for you.

You slid the data pad back into your bag, focusing on the conversation instead.

“By ‘it’ you mean the android, right? Can you tell me more about it?” you asked.

Oliver nodded. “We just bought it two days ago to help with the housework a little, you know? Louise wanted to focus on finding a new job, and we wanted to make it as easy as possible.”

Suddenly, he winced and the paramedic treating his arm quickly apologised. “I’m sorry, this might hurt a little. You’re almost done.”

“We would never have bought it after everything that went down yesterday.”, Louise explained, wiping tears from her face. “Everything you hear in the news sounds so scary, but we had already purchased it at that point and we didn’t want to bring it back in case nothing was wrong.”

Her voice was trembling again. You pulled a pack of tissues from your bag and handed it to her with a facial expression that you hoped looked comforting.

“Did the android seem fine to you when you purchased it? No issues with behaviour or weird glitches?”, you asked.

“Well, it was second hand,” Oliver replied. “You never know with second hand devices, but when we picked it up yesterday morning we were assured that it had been fully reset and wiped and was good as new.”

“And it was!”, his wife confirmed. “It smiled and cleaned and cooked happily all day yesterday and all morning today until suddenly it froze when warming up our lunch. Then it just went crazy!”

You tried to process what she said. This didn’t entirely add up with the previous cases of deviancy - there were often patterns of repeated abuse or strong emotional shock that led to androids deviating from their code. A quasi-brand new model deviating after just less than 48 hours of being active? That was unheard of.

“And you didn’t notice anything weird about it before?”, you asked.

Louise shook her head then paused thoughtfully.

“Well… now that you mention it…” she said. “It did freeze like that before. Twice actually. I took it grocery shopping yesterday, so I can have somebody to carry the bags? It froze right in front of the ice cream aisle, like it was buffering. Then again on the way home, while we were walking past a playground.”

Bingo. That wasn’t normal android behaviour.

“Can you tell me more about that?”, you asked.

“Why? Do you think that’s important, Officer?” she asked inquisitively.

Detective, you corrected her silently, but didn’t bother saying it out loud.

“Maybe.”, you replied. “I need to know more about it.”

“Well, it kind of scrunched up its face like this”, she demonstrated. “Like it was trying to remember something but it couldn’t. Then it just unfroze and moved on like nothing happened. When I asked about that, it didn’t know what I was talking about. I figured it was just an old model and it was a bit slow sometimes.”

“Okay”, you nodded, theories slowly forming in your head. “And when that happened again today, it went crazy after unfreezing, you said? Can you explain what you mean by that?“

Louise nodded slowly and glanced at her husband for help. Oliver was busy watching the paramedic finish up his bandages.

“It unfroze and looked around in shock”, she began to explain. “I don’t know how to describe the look in its eyes other than panicked. Like it was looking for someone who it worried was dead.”

“Tell them about the rambling, darling”, her husband interceded.

“I’m getting to it”, she replied. “Then it started saying the craziest things. It was looking for somebody, and that we needed to help it. That it needed to leave and that somebody was in danger. What was that name it mentioned?”

“Lucas”, Oliver said. “It said it was looking for Lucas. Kept saying that name over and over again. Always ‘Lucas. I need to get to Lucas.’”

The paramedic who had been treating Oliver’s arm got up and took a step back. “You’re good to go, Mr. Blaird”, she said to him. “All patched up. Most of the damage was very superficial, but it’ll still take a couple weeks to heal.” She offered a smile to the Blairds and a wave to you, then left.

“I mean, that’s crazy right?” Louise said to you, getting back to the topic. “We don’t even know a Lucas so I don’t know where it could’ve gotten that name from!”

“What happened then?”, you asked. “How did you get that injury?”

“It tried to leave”, Oliver explained. “So I grabbed it by the arm. That was fine, right? I mean it’s still my android! It took the soup bowl it was still holding in its other hand and smashed it against my arm at full force. The bowl smashed on impact.”

He gestured towards his right side, which was indeed covered in what looked like Minestrone mixed with blood - both red and blue.

“I think it cut its own hand, too.” he added. “That’s where the blue blood came from.”

“And I suppose it ran away after that?” you concluded.

Louise nodded. “We weren't paying close attention to it after it attacked, you’ll understand”, she said. “But I heard the door close with a bang. That’s when we called the police.”

You thanked them for their help and promised to get back to them if the case progressed.

Then you got up and walked over to Connor, who was still in the kitchen.

“The witnesses’ story lines up with the evidence in the kitchen.” he said, getting up to look at you.

“You were listening in?” you asked with a laugh, careful to be quiet enough so the couple couldn’t hear you.

“Yes,” he said matter-of-factly. “You already knew this. You realised it when you looked at the data pad during the witness interview.”

You just raised an eyebrow.

“Is everything alright, Detective?”, he asked.

“Yeah”, you replied. “I’m just not… used to working with someone who pays such close attention.”

He tilted his head, his LED flickering yellow at your statement. “I have noticed a similar sentiment from Lieutenant Anderson. I must admit, I struggle to understand it. Can you explain to me what exactly bothers you about my attentiveness?”

“I’m not exactly bothered, it’s just…”, you attempted to explain, interrupted by Hank who walked into the kitchen with a stack of papers. He threw them on the counter, and you saw a bill from a store called Android Zone as well as an order confirmation and a payment confirmation.

“Date says the couple bought an LM100 at the Android Zone second-hand store two days ago and picked him up yesterday morning,” he said. “I assume that’s our suspect?”

“That fits with the couple’s description of events,” you confirmed.

“It also fits my analysis of the blue blood on the ground as belonging to an LM100.”, Connor added. “As well as the size and shape of an android necessary to injure Mr. Blaird in this specific way.”

“Oh god, Connor, don’t tell me you licked the crime scene again!” Hank groaned and you looked at Connor disgusted and fascinated at the same time.

He licks evidence to analyse it? It made sense to fit him with sensors that allow him to analyse evidence on-scene but you couldn’t help your stomach from turning at the particular placement.

“I have explained to you before that I am simply performing an analysis, Lieutenant.” Connor said, his voice laced with hints of annoyance. “I am not human and cannot contract disease through my oral cavity. I am also equipped with a self-cleaning feature that allows me to sanitise between analyses. I am entirely hygienic.”

“Good job, Connor, now I’ve lost my appetite”, Hank retorted. “If you say ‘oral cavity’ again, I might lose it for the entire week!”

“I will not repeat myself then. We wouldn’t want you to starve, Lieutenant.”

“Stop bickering, boys”, you interrupted, unsure if they were actually fighting, or if this was their weird way of being affectionate. Neither of them seemed hostile with each other, but they weren’t exactly helping progress the case either way. “Let’s focus on work for now, okay?”

“Agreed.”, Connor took a step towards the counter and looked at the papers Hank had thrown there, suddenly standing very close to you. Had it been anyone else, you probably would’ve found it uncomfortable and taken a step back. With him, you strangely didn’t mind.

“The LM100 does not come with a GPS module.” Connor said thoughtfully. “Injured and unable to get its bearings, it might not have gone very far.”

“Counterpoint: It was clearly looking for someone.”, you argued. “It probably would’ve run very far trying to find whoever it is it was looking for.”

“What did I miss?”, Hank asked. “How did your witness interview go?”

“You can read it all in the case file,” you replied. “But the short version is that the android was completely fine all day, until it suddenly panicked, said it was looking for someone named ‘Lucas’, attacked Mr. Blaird and ran away.”

“You put the whole thing in the case file?”, Hank asked, ignoring your explanation entirely. “Damn kid, way to be an overachiever.”

You laughed. “As much as I would love to take credit, no, I didn’t. Connor transcribed the conversation while pretending to inspect the kitchen.”

“I wasn’t pretending, Detective.” Connor told you. “I was transcribing the conversation while inspecting the kitchen. I am capable of processing multiple complex tasks simultaneously.”

You tried hard not to grin. Really hard. You failed.

What was it that you had expected him to call eavesdropping earlier?

“Should’ve guessed that you’re the overachiever, Connor.”, the Lieutenant said. “Do you also have a clever idea for how to find our runaway?”

Connor’s LED circled yellow. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it again and looked back and forth between Hank and you, like he was wondering if he was the butt of some joke that he didn’t understand.

You had never seen him think this hard before.

“I do, actually.” he said eventually, straightening up again and regaining a more neutral facial expression. “The cuts the android sustained were not major, but they were not trivial either. It would have continued to bleed for quite some time. If it did not go far, then that trace of thirium might lead us to it.”

“And if it did run far, then we’ll at least know the vague direction”, you concluded.

“Correct.”, Connor agreed. “Although my thorough analysis of the android’s presumed mental and physical state indicates that it did not get far, in the event that you are correct in assuming it ran away, Detective, we will at least know the vague direction.”

“I like my odds.” you smiled confidently.

“You currently have an eleven percent chance of being correct,” Connor said.

“I… still like my odds.” you said, less confidently this time. “Eleven percent is still more than ten percent.”

“Oh, what the hell”, Hank said. “Are you two done? Let’s get out of here.”

He left the room, and you followed, Connor right behind you.

“Eleven percent is more than ten percent, is a terrible way to go about gambling, Detective.”, you heard Connor say on your way out of the apartment, just quietly enough so Hank couldn’t hear him.

“All I hear is that you’re willing to bet.”, you whispered back.

“I am an android and as such I am not permitted to gamble. Were I permitted to gamble, I would almost certainly have an unfair advantage given my extensive preconstructive abilities and my state-of-the-art statistical evaluation features.”

“You’re on.”

-- ☆ -- ☆ -- ☆ --

author's note: ♡

previous chapter // next chapter ->

#dbh connor #fan fiction #may wrote #connor rk800 x reader #detroit become human #prototype love #pl

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