#Facebook Tech Support

[galaxywarp]

Ooh, one thing you could also offer is free/discounted tech support for people! My local library has a thing that's sort of like a class mixed with a drop-in event, it's intended for elderly people who maybe need a bit of help learning about tech and I feel like that would be fulfilling for you. My dad also did a lot of work for people who needed their tech fixed on the cheap, I feel like that has You vibes also.

No actually that sounds so perfect??? Something I super excelled at in my work was being able to “translate” technical concepts to non technical people. My grandpa will only speak to me about his computer cuz im the only one who can help him do stuff in a way that doesn’t make him want to throw the whole desktop out the window

[lightgaswaterelectricityrent]

as we approach the three year anniversary of my boss dying 100% unexpectedly and thereby completely derailing the course of my life I would like to share some screenshots from the time that tbh are kind of hilarious to me now

[thunderlina]

In the wake of the TikTok ban and revival as a mouthpiece for fascist propaganda, as well as the downfall of Twitter and Facebook/Facebook-owned platforms to the same evils, I think now is a better time than ever to say LEARN HTML!!! FREE YOURSELVES FROM THE SHACKLES OF MAJOR SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS AND EMBRACE THE INDIE WEB!!!

You can host a website on Neocities for free as long as it's under 1GB (which is a LOT more than it sounds like let me tell you) but if that's not enough you can get 50GB of space (and a variety of other perks) for only $5 a month.

And if you can't/don't want to pay for the extra space, sites like File Garden and Catbox let you host files for free that you can easily link into NeoCities pages (I do this to host videos on mine!) (It also lets you share files NeoCities wouldn't let you upload for free anyways, this is how I upload the .zip files for my 3DS themes on my site.)

Don't know how to write HTML/CSS? No problem. W3schools is an invaluable resource with free lessons on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and a whole slew of other programming languages, both for web development and otherwise.

Want a more traditional social media experience? SpaceHey is a platform that mimics the experience of 2000s MySpace

Struggling to find independent web pages that cater to your interests via major search engines? I've got you covered. Marginalia and Wiby are search engines that specifically prioritize non-commercial content. Marginalia also has filters that let you search for more specific categories of website, like wikis, blogs, academia, forums, and vintage sites.

Maybe you wanna log off the modern internet landscape altogether and step back into the pre-social media web altogether, well, Protoweb lets you do just that. It's a proxy service for older browsers (or really just any browser that supports HTTP, but that's mostly old browsers now anyways) that lets you visit restored snapshots of vintage websites.

Protoweb has a lot of Geocities content archived, but if you're interested in that you can find even more old Geocities sites over on the Geocities Gallery

And really this is just general tip-of-the-iceberg stuff. If you dig a little deeper you can find loads more interesting stuff out there. The internet doesn't have to be a miserable place full of nothing but doomposting and targeted ads. The first step to making it less miserable is for YOU, yes YOU, to quit spending all your time on it looking at the handful of miserable websites big tech wants you to spend all your time on.

[filosofablogger]

Just A Coupl'a Snippets

A couple of days ago, Facebook notified me that they had ‘removed’ my post titled A Second Gilded Age? Only For The 1%.  They claimed that … “It looks like you tried to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way.” “This goes against our Community Standards on spam.” The post was one in which I shared Robert Reich’s editorial on how those with great wealth are corrupting this…

[phantomrose96]

If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.

(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)

Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.

Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.

Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and

But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.

So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.

But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.

But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.

So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.

You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.

The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.

Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.

Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.

You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.

Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.

Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.

Never mind that last part.

And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.

Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."

To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.

It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.

So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:

Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.

[ellipsus-writes]

(Read on our blog)

Beginning in 1933, the Nazis burned books to erase the ideas they feared—works of literature, politics, philosophy, criticism; works by Jewish and leftist authors, and research from the Institute for Sexual Science, which documented and affirmed queer and trans identities.

(Nazis collect "anti-German" books to be destroyed at a Berlin book-burning on May 10, 1933 (Source)

Stories tell truths.

These weren’t just books; they were lifelines.

Writing by, for, and about marginalized people isn’t just about representation, but survival. Writing has always been an incredibly powerful tool—perhaps the most resilient form of resistance, as fascism seeks to disconnect people from knowledge, empathy, history, and finally each other. Empathy is one of the most valuable resources we have, and in the darkest times writers armed with nothing but words have exposed injustice, changed culture, and kept their communities connected.

(A Nazi student and a member of the SA raid the Institute for Sexual Science's library in Berlin, May 6, 1933. Source)

Less than two weeks after the US presidential inauguration, the nightmare of Project 2025 is starting to unfold. What these proposals will mean for creative freedom and freedom of expression is uncertain, but the intent is clear. A chilling effect on subjects that writers engage with every day—queer narratives, racial justice, and critiques of power—is already manifest. The places where these works are published and shared may soon face increased pressure, censorship, and legal jeopardy.

And with speed-run fascism comes a rising tide of misinformation and hostility. The tech giants that facilitate writing, sharing, publishing, and communication—Google, Microsoft, Amazon, the-hellscape-formerly-known-as-Twitter, Facebook, TikTok—have folded like paper in a light breeze. OpenAI, embroiled in lawsuits for training its models on stolen works, is now positioned as the AI of choice for the administration, bolstered by a $500 billion investment. And privacy-focused companies are showing a newfound willingness to align with a polarizing administration, chilling news for writers who rely on digital privacy to protect their work and sources; even their personal safety.

Where does that leave writers?

Writing communities have always been a creative refuge, but they’re more than that now—they are a means of continuity. The information landscape is shifting rapidly, so staying informed on legal and political developments will be essential for protecting creative freedom and pushing back against censorship wherever possible. Direct your energy to the communities that need it, stay connected, check in on each other—and keep backup spaces in case platforms become unsafe.

We can’t stress this enough—support tools and platforms that prioritize creative freedom. The systems we rely on are being rewritten in real time, and the future of writing spaces depends on what we build now. We at Ellipsus will continue working to provide space for our community—one that protects and facilitates creative expression, not undermines it.

Above all—keep writing.

Keep imagining, keep documenting, keep sharing—keep connecting. Suppression thrives on silence, but words have survived every attempt at erasure.

- The Ellipsus team

[fairuzfan]

The idea that there's a position for "public policy for israel" in a tech company is so out there but this is a common occurance for israel related things.

[moonlightcycle571]

Captain Marvel not understanding anything about technology yet somehow being a technopath

I think it should be established that Billy Batson knows nothing about technology. He was stuck in the time bubble for over 50 years, and even then (before during and after), he’s a street kid. Man’s still on radio and old vehicles.

Every time she leaned something slightly techie, he gets flabbergasted. Mispronounces the name of so many machines and has no idea what’s the differences between an IPod and an IPhone. He understands even less why Sam’s song is beefing with an apple???

Having said that, Captain Marvel can be terrifyingly proficient in tech at random times, and the reasoning behind it is so dumb that any tech-savie person in the vicinity are either banging their heads or foaming in jealousy.

Electrics use electricity. Cap is technically Living Lightning. And magical. All Cap needs to do is think about something for it to appear in the nearest screens.

Batman: the access to the security are heavily locked and would take to much time to enter from the outside

Marvel: I got it! *camera footage appear on the screen*

Batman: hn?

*or*

Oracle: I need to bypass multiple firewalls. The coding is so complex, but if you give me ten minutes-

Marvel: oh it’s cool *waves his hand*

Oracle: …

Oracle: did you crack the code by waving your hand…

Marvel: yeah I just swishes off the weird blocks

Oracle, inwardly: THAT SHOULD BE MEEEE

Oracle, outwardly: *noticeably restrained* cool 🙂

*Or*

Marvel: Hey Vic, do you want to get milkshakes?

Cyborg: I can’t, the father box is acting up. I’ve been glitching all day.

Marvel: oh let me help

Cyborg: you can’t just-

Marvel: *slaps Victors shoulder* there!

Cyborg: … how???

Marvel: I asked nicely! 😁

Cyborg: I’m going to die now

Bonus:

Somewhere in a dark unused part of the watchtower, many capes gathered.

Barbara Gordon: Today we will welcome a new member to our support group. Introduce yourself, tell us why you’re here and will can start the meeting.

Roy Harper: Hi, I’m Arsenal, and today Captain Marvel broke my grenade launcher. He then felt bad and made me a pocket rocket launcher. Meaning it’s a rocket launcher but when I press a button, it turns into a small box for me to carry around. I asked him why make a rocket launcher and not a grenade launcher, and he asked me what’s the difference.

*echoes of ‘oooh’ and ‘welcome to the club’*

Tim Drake: I taught him on how to set a Facebook account and helped him set his profile. I go out to get an energy drink. I come back and he’s hacking conversations of the mafia, giving me info on the trafficking ring I’ve been tracking for a month.

*sympathising nods from everyone*

Jaime Reyes: Last Thursday, my scarab got scratched and was having trouble repairing itself. Marvel came in and put a bandaid on it. The worse part is… it actually worked.

*cue groans through out the room*

[subjectsix]

KIP'S BIG POST OF THINGS TO MAKE THE INTERNET & TECHNOLOGY SUCK A LITTLE LESS

Post last updated November 23, 2024. Will continue to update!

Here are my favorite things to use to navigate technology my own way:

A refurbished iPod loaded with Rockbox OS (Rockbox is free, iPods range in price. I linked the site I got mine from. Note that iPods get finicky about syncing and the kind of cord it has— it may still charge but might not recognize the device to sync. Getting an original Apple cord sometimes helps). Rockbox has ports for other MP3 players as well.

This Windows debloater program (there are viable alternatives out there, this one works for me). It has a powershell script that give you a little UI and buttons to press, which I appreciate, as I'm still a bit shy with tech.

Firefox with the following extensions: - Consent-O-Matic (set your responses to ALL privacy/cookie pop-ups in the extension, and it will answer all pop-ups for you. I can see reasons to not use it, but I appreciate it) - Facebook Container ("contains" Meta on Facebook and Instagram pages to keep it from tracking you or getting third party cookies, since Meta is fairly egregious about it) - Redirect Amp to HTML (AMP is designed for mobile phones, this forces pages to go to their HTML version) - A WebP/AVIF image converter - uBlock Origin and uBlacklist, with the AI blacklist loaded in to kill any generative AI results from appearing in search engines or anywhere.

Handbrake for ripping DVDs— I haven’t used this in awhile as I haven’t been making video edits. I used this back when I had a Mac OS

VLC Media Player (ol’ reliable)

Unsplash & Pexels for free-to-use images

A password manager (these often are paid. I use Dashlane. There are many options, feel free to search around and ask for recs!). There is a lot that goes into cybersecurity— find the option you feel is best for you.

Things I suggest:

Understanding Royalty Free and the Creative Commons licenses

Familiarity with boolean operators for searching

Investing in a backup drive and external drive

A few good USBs, including one that has a backup of your OS on it

Adapter cables

Avoiding Fandom “wikias” (as in the brand “Fandom”) and supporting other, fan-run or supported wikis. Consider contributing if its something you find yourself passionate or joyful about.

Finding Forums for the things you like, or creating your own*

Create an email specifically for ads/shopping— use it to receive all promotional emails to keep your inbox clean. Upkeep it.

Stop putting so much of your personal information online— be willing to separate your personal online identity from your “online identity”. You don’t owe people your name, location, pronouns, diagnoses, or any of that. It’s your choice, but be discerning in what you give and why. I recommend avoiding providing your phone number to sites as much as possible.

Be intentional

Ask questions

Talk to people

Remember that you can lurk all you want

Things that are fun to check out:

BBSes-- here's a portal to access them.

Neocities

*Forums-- find some to join, or maybe host your own? The system I was most familiar with was vbulletin.

MMM.page

Things that have worked well for me but might work for you, YMMV:

Limit your app usage time on your smartphone if you’re prone to going back to them— this is a tangible way to “practice mindfulness”, a term I find frustratingly vague ansjdbdj

Things I’m looking into:

The “Pi Hole”— a raspberry pi set up to block all ads on a specific internet connection

VPNs-- this is one that was recommended to me.

How to use computers (I mean it): Resources on how to understand your machine and what you’re doing, even if your skill and knowledge level is currently 0:

This section I'll come back an add to. I know that messing with computers can be intimidating, especially if you feel out of your depth. HTML and regedits and especially things like dualbooting or linux feel impossible. So I want to put things here that explain exactly how the internet and your computer functions, and how you can learn and work with that. Yippee!

[probablyasocialecologist]

Watch out for a wave of Zionist disinformation and propaganda:

A billionaire real estate tycoon in the United States is rallying support for a high-dollar media crusade to boost Israel’s image and demonise the Hamas armed group amid global pro-Palestinian solidarity protests. The media campaign — called Facts for Peace — is seeking million-dollar donations from dozens of the world’s biggest names in media, finance and technology, according to an email seen by news website Semafor. More than 50 individuals are being courted, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Dell CEO Michael Dell and financier Michael Milken. They have a combined net worth of around $500bn, Semafor said. Some of the individuals, such as investor Bill Ackman, have publicly threatened to blacklist pro-Palestine students who are critical of Israel. On October 10, Ackman wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that he and other business executives wanted Ivy League universities to disclose the names of students who are part of organisations that signed open letters criticising Israeli policies in Gaza.

[...]

Facts For Peace, the media campaign launched by Sternlicht, aims to win back public favour for Israel, posting videos on its social media pages blaming Hamas for the plight of Palestinians and denying claims of Israeli rights violations. The most recent video posted on its Facebook page argues that “Israel is not an apartheid state”. This contradicts findings from Palestinian, Israeli and international rights experts, including from the United Nations, that Israel is practising apartheid through its “deeply discriminatory dual legal and political system” in the occupied territories.

[reminiscingtonight]

Tech Support

Alexia Putellas & Putellas!Reader (Jana Fernández x Putellas!Reader)

Word Count: 1.2k

[WOSO Masterlist]

“So I am… supposed to click this?”

Alexia’s hand is swatted away at record speed before she can make contact with the screen.

“No, this one.”

Who would’ve thought. Captain of the country. Legend of your club. The La Reina may be feared by players worldwide, but even she could be beaten by something as simple as a new phone.

The two of you have been at this for a couple hours now.

When your sister first slid the box across the table at you, your eyes nearly bulged out of your head. You didn’t even have time to thank Alexia before she crushed your dreams right then and there. What you first thought was a present for you turned out to be a resigned plea for help.

As the resident tech genius you were high in demand. Last week it was setting up your mami’s tablet. Yesterday it was fixing Olga’s laptop. And today it seems to be Alexia’s turn.

Though now that you think about it, “genius” may be a stretch. It’s not until the third time you stop yourself from throwing Alexia’s phone at her that she lets it slip that Alba was actually her first call for help. It’s no surprise to hear that your middle sister was quick to refuse, given that the last time she helped Alexia set up a phone resulted in heated words and staunch refusal to speak to one another for two weeks.

Given that she’s your club captain the loss in communication is something you can’t risk, but you’ve always thought of yourself as gifted when it comes to technology. If you could teach your mami how to use facebook without spamming her personal page with posts about you and your sisters, surely helping Alexia transfer her data and set up a new phone would not be too hard of a challenge.

Oh how you’re wrong.

Though you’re only eight years younger than Alexia, she still manages to struggle as if she’s well into her nineties.

Ask if she’s backed up her data? Might as well have told her to recite the first fifteen digits of pi.

Ask if she’s taken note of the apps she needs to redownload? Might as well have asked if she knew the secret to happiness.

Tell her to grant certain apps permissions to her phone? Might as well have told her you were transferring to Real Madrid.

Ask her to re-sign back into her multitude of accounts? Might as well have asked her to transfer to Real Madrid.

If you had known just how teeth pulling this would be, you would have left Olga to deal with Alexia herself.

Despite your clear and well-informed instructions of what to click where, which settings to enable or disable, Alexia kept bulldozing through your words, thinking she knew better.

Spoiler, she did not.

Jana’s already been by to give you some words of encouragement, but after the fifth time you quietly asked if she could make up an excuse to drag you out, she hunkered down on a nearby couch with Olga. The two of them, traitors at heart, are having a blast watching some trashy reality tv show while you struggle away with Alexia.

At this point you’re one more question away from factory resetting Alexia’s new phone, but a promise from Olga to buy you lunch and a burning desire to prove to Alba that you’re a better teacher than she is leaves you clinging to the last piece of sanity you have.

After what seems like an eternity, Alexia finally sits back from where she’s been hunched over your shoulder, poking and prodding at her phone.

“I still don’t understand why I have to set up a passcode when I could just use my fingerprint to unlock everything.”

The only word capable of describing Alexia at this moment in time is brooding. Arms crossed, face drawn in a frown, your thirty-year-old sister is brooding over your insistence at setting a passcode.

You sigh, pinching the bridge of your nose. “What if you’re at training and you need Mapi to pull up something from your phone while your hands are busy?”

Alexia huffs, smile on her face as she thinks she’s got you. “Simple, I would never trust Maria with my phone!”

“Ale!” you groan. “That’s not the point.”

She’s not wrong. The last person to mistakenly trust the blonde haired woman with their unlocked phone received the device back with fifteen added stories to their instagram account. Though that was on the tamer side of what the defender was capable of, no one’s really let her borrow their phone since.

You catch Jana’s twinkling eyes over the back of the couch as she shares a giggle with Olga.

“Okay, what if I get hurt on the pitch and you’re too busy consoling me? I’m sure Jana would appreciate being able to use your phone to call mami to let her know I’ve been hurt.”

Alexia rolls her eyes. “First, Jana already has mami’s phone number. Pretty sure she likes your girlfriend more than the both of us.”

The number of times Eli has called you just to ask if Jana would be coming over for a family dinner would be insulting if you weren’t smitten with the idea of your girlfriend having fit right into your own family. Though the two of you haven’t officially been together long, years of friendship meant Eli was more than delighted when she found out the two of you were together. It also meant she was quick to catch Jana up on any and all family events she was hosting.

“Also, that’s not a problem because mami never misses one of our games so she’d already be there!”

It’s almost as if Olga can see the steam coming out of your ears. She’s quick to walk over, rubbing you back apologetically before throwing an arm around Alexia’s shoulder.

“Would you please set one for me, amor? Sometimes I misplace my phone and yours is closer.”

It’s maddening the way Alexia instantly starts nodding like a lovesick puppy. She plucks the phone right out of your hands, swiping until she can get to the right screen.

From over Alexia’s shoulder Olga gives you a wink.

With her girlfriend wrapped tightly around her, you take your cue to exit.

Jana opens her arms wide and you enter willingly. The older girl chuckles when you instantly bury your face against her stomach, arms tightening around her legs.

“I wanna go home,” you grumble, ignoring the way you can feel the vibrations of Jana’s laughter.

“Don’t you wanna stay for lunch?”

As much as you loathe the hours wasted on Alexia, the promise of free sushi did sound pretty good. All you have in your fridge is some leftover pasta from the night before, and you’re never one to pass up free food.

“Hermanita, what’s this I’m seeing about unlocking my phone with my face?”

You stiffen.

On second thought, leftovers didn’t sound too bad.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (Mar 13) in SAN FRANCISCO with ROBIN SLOAN, then Toronto, NYC, Anaheim, and more!

Another characteristically brilliant Kashmir Hill story for The New York Times reveals another characteristically terrible fact about modern life: your car secretly records fine-grained telemetry about your driving and sells it to data-brokers, who sell it to insurers, who use it as a pretext to gouge you on premiums:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html

Almost every car manufacturer does this: Hyundai, Nissan, Ford, Chrysler, etc etc:

https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2020/09/09/ford-state-farm-ford-metromile-honda-verisk-among-insurer-oem-telematics-connections/

This is true whether you own or lease the car, and it's separate from the "black box" your insurer might have offered to you in exchange for a discount on your premiums. In other words, even if you say no to the insurer's carrot – a surveillance-based discount – they've got a stick in reserve: buying your nonconsensually harvested data on the open market.

I've always hated that saying, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," the reason being that it posits decent treatment as a customer reward program, like the little ramekin warm nuts first class passengers get before takeoff. Companies don't treat you well when you pay them. Companies treat you well when they fear the consequences of treating you badly.

Take Apple. The company offers Ios users a one-tap opt-out from commercial surveillance, and more than 96% of users opted out. Presumably, the other 4% were either confused or on Facebook's payroll. Apple – and its army of cultists – insist that this proves that our world's woes can be traced to cheapskate "consumers" who expected to get something for nothing by using advertising-supported products.

But here's the kicker: right after Apple blocked all its rivals from spying on its customers, it began secretly spying on those customers! Apple has a rival surveillance ad network, and even if you opt out of commercial surveillance on your Iphone, Apple still secretly spies on you and uses the data to target you for ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product – provided the company can get away with treating you as the product. Apple can absolutely get away with treating you as the product, because it lacks the historical constraints that prevented Apple – and other companies – from treating you as the product.

As I described in my McLuhan lecture on enshittification, tech firms can be constrained by four forces:

I. Competition

II. Regulation

III. Self-help

IV. Labor

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

When companies have real competitors – when a sector is composed of dozens or hundreds of roughly evenly matched firms – they have to worry that a maltreated customer might move to a rival. 40 years of antitrust neglect means that corporations were able to buy their way to dominance with predatory mergers and pricing, producing today's inbred, Habsburg capitalism. Apple and Google are a mobile duopoly, Google is a search monopoly, etc. It's not just tech! Every sector looks like this:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Eliminating competition doesn't just deprive customers of alternatives, it also empowers corporations. Liberated from "wasteful competition," companies in concentrated industries can extract massive profits. Think of how both Apple and Google have "competitively" arrived at the same 30% app tax on app sales and transactions, a rate that's more than 1,000% higher than the transaction fees extracted by the (bloated, price-gouging) credit-card sector:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/07/curatorial-vig/#app-tax

But cartels' power goes beyond the size of their warchest. The real source of a cartel's power is the ease with which a small number of companies can arrive at – and stick to – a common lobbying position. That's where "regulatory capture" comes in: the mobile duopoly has an easier time of capturing its regulators because two companies have an easy time agreeing on how to spend their app-tax billions:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Apple – and Google, and Facebook, and your car company – can violate your privacy because they aren't constrained regulation, just as Uber can violate its drivers' labor rights and Amazon can violate your consumer rights. The tech cartels have captured their regulators and convinced them that the law doesn't apply if it's being broken via an app:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes

In other words, Apple can spy on you because it's allowed to spy on you. America's last consumer privacy law was passed in 1988, and it bans video-store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history. Congress has taken no action on consumer privacy since the Reagan years:

https://www.eff.org/tags/video-privacy-protection-act

But tech has some special enshittification-resistant characteristics. The most important of these is interoperability: the fact that computers are universal digital machines that can run any program. HP can design a printer that rejects third-party ink and charge $10,000/gallon for its own colored water, but someone else can write a program that lets you jailbreak your printer so that it accepts any ink cartridge:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Tech companies that contemplated enshittifying their products always had to watch over their shoulders for a rival that might offer a disenshittification tool and use that as a wedge between the company and its customers. If you make your website's ads 20% more obnoxious in anticipation of a 2% increase in gross margins, you have to consider the possibility that 40% of your users will google "how do I block ads?" Because the revenue from a user who blocks ads doesn't stay at 100% of the current levels – it drops to zero, forever (no user ever googles "how do I stop blocking ads?").

The majority of web users are running an ad-blocker:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

Web operators made them an offer ("free website in exchange for unlimited surveillance and unfettered intrusions") and they made a counteroffer ("how about 'nah'?"):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Here's the thing: reverse-engineering an app – or any other IP-encumbered technology – is a legal minefield. Just decompiling an app exposes you to felony prosecution: a five year sentence and a $500k fine for violating Section 1201 of the DMCA. But it's not just the DMCA – modern products are surrounded with high-tech tripwires that allow companies to invoke IP law to prevent competitors from augmenting, recongifuring or adapting their products. When a business says it has "IP," it means that it has arranged its legal affairs to allow it to invoke the power of the state to control its customers, critics and competitors:

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

An "app" is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to add an ad-blocker to it. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model" and it's everywhere. When companies don't have to worry about users deploying self-help measures to disenshittify their products, they are freed from the constraint that prevents them indulging the impulse to shift value from their customers to themselves.

Apple owes its existence to interoperability – its ability to clone Microsoft Office's file formats for Pages, Numbers and Keynote, which saved the company in the early 2000s – and ever since, it has devoted its existence to making sure no one ever does to Apple what Apple did to Microsoft:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

Regulatory capture cuts both ways: it's not just about powerful corporations being free to flout the law, it's also about their ability to enlist the law to punish competitors that might constrain their plans for exploiting their workers, customers, suppliers or other stakeholders.

The final historical constraint on tech companies was their own workers. Tech has very low union-density, but that's in part because individual tech workers enjoyed so much bargaining power due to their scarcity. This is why their bosses pampered them with whimsical campuses filled with gourmet cafeterias, fancy gyms and free massages: it allowed tech companies to convince tech workers to work like government mules by flattering them that they were partners on a mission to bring the world to its digital future:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

For tech bosses, this gambit worked well, but failed badly. On the one hand, they were able to get otherwise powerful workers to consent to being "extremely hardcore" by invoking Fobazi Ettarh's spirit of "vocational awe":

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

On the other hand, when you motivate your workers by appealing to their sense of mission, the downside is that they feel a sense of mission. That means that when you demand that a tech worker enshittifies something they missed their mother's funeral to deliver, they will experience a profound sense of moral injury and refuse, and that worker's bargaining power means that they can make it stick.

Or at least, it did. In this era of mass tech layoffs, when Google can fire 12,000 workers after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, tech workers are learning that the answer to "I won't do this and you can't make me" is "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out" (AKA "sharpen your blades boys"):

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elon-musk-texts-discovery-twitter/

With competition, regulation, self-help and labor cleared away, tech firms – and firms that have wrapped their products around the pluripotently malleable core of digital tech, including automotive makers – are no longer constrained from enshittifying their products.

And that's why your car manufacturer has chosen to spy on you and sell your private information to data-brokers and anyone else who wants it. Not because you didn't pay for the product, so you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

Cars are enshittified. The dozens of chips that auto makers have shoveled into their car design are only incidentally related to delivering a better product. The primary use for those chips is autoenshittification – access to legal strictures ("IP") that allows them to block modifications and repairs that would interfere with the unfettered abuse of their own customers:

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

The fact that it's a felony to reverse-engineer and modify a car's software opens the floodgates to all kinds of shitty scams. Remember when Bay Staters were voting on a ballot measure to impose right-to-repair obligations on automakers in Massachusetts? The only reason they needed to have the law intervene to make right-to-repair viable is that Big Car has figured out that if it encrypts its diagnostic messages, it can felonize third-party diagnosis of a car, because decrypting the messages violates the DMCA:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/drm-cars-will-drive-consumers-crazy

Big Car figured out that VIN locking – DRM for engine components and subassemblies – can felonize the production and the installation of third-party spare parts:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

The fact that you can't legally modify your car means that automakers can go back to their pre-2008 ways, when they transformed themselves into unregulated banks that incidentally manufactured the cars they sold subprime loans for. Subprime auto loans – over $1t worth! – absolutely relies on the fact that borrowers' cars can be remotely controlled by lenders. Miss a payment and your car's stereo turns itself on and blares threatening messages at top volume, which you can't turn off. Break the lease agreement that says you won't drive your car over the county line and it will immobilize itself. Try to change any of this software and you'll commit a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA:

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

Tesla, naturally, has the most advanced anti-features. Long before BMW tried to rent you your seat-heater and Mercedes tried to sell you a monthly subscription to your accelerator pedal, Teslas were demon-haunted nightmare cars. Miss a Tesla payment and the car will immobilize itself and lock you out until the repo man arrives, then it will blare its horn and back itself out of its parking spot. If you "buy" the right to fully charge your car's battery or use the features it came with, you don't own them – they're repossessed when your car changes hands, meaning you get less money on the used market because your car's next owner has to buy these features all over again:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

And all this DRM allows your car maker to install spyware that you're not allowed to remove. They really tipped their hand on this when the R2R ballot measure was steaming towards an 80% victory, with wall-to-wall scare ads that revealed that your car collects so much information about you that allowing third parties to access it could lead to your murder (no, really!):

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

That's why your car spies on you. Because it can. Because the company that made it lacks constraint, be it market-based, legal, technological or its own workforce's ethics.

One common critique of my enshittification hypothesis is that this is "kind of sensible and normal" because "there’s something off in the consumer mindset that we’ve come to believe that the internet should provide us with amazing products, which bring us joy and happiness and we spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return":

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-have-great-conversations/

What this criticism misses is that this isn't the companies bargaining to shift some value from us to them. Enshittification happens when a company can seize all that value, without having to bargain, exploiting law and technology and market power over buyers and sellers to unilaterally alter the way the products and services we rely on work.

A company that doesn't have to fear competitors, regulators, jailbreaking or workers' refusal to enshittify its products doesn't have to bargain, it can take. It's the first lesson they teach you in the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Your car spying on you isn't down to your belief that your carmaker "should provide you with amazing products, which brings your joy and happiness you spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return." It's not because you didn't pay for the product, so now you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

The consequences of this spying go much further than mere insurance premium hikes, too. Car telemetry sits at the top of the funnel that the unbelievably sleazy data broker industry uses to collect and sell our data. These are the same companies that sell the fact that you visited an abortion clinic to marketers, bounty hunters, advertisers, or vengeful family members pretending to be one of those:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus

Decades of pro-monopoly policy led to widespread regulatory capture. Corporate cartels use the monopoly profits they extract from us to pay for regulatory inaction, allowing them to extract more profits.

But when it comes to privacy, that period of unchecked corporate power might be coming to an end. The lack of privacy regulation is at the root of so many problems that a pro-privacy movement has an unstoppable constituency working in its favor.

At EFF, we call this "privacy first." Whether you're worried about grifters targeting vulnerable people with conspiracy theories, or teens being targeted with media that harms their mental health, or Americans being spied on by foreign governments, or cops using commercial surveillance data to round up protesters, or your car selling your data to insurance companies, passing that long-overdue privacy legislation would turn off the taps for the data powering all these harms:

https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms

Traditional economics fails because it thinks about markets without thinking about power. Monopolies lead to more than market power: they produce regulatory capture, power over workers, and state capture, which felonizes competition through IP law. The story that our problems stem from the fact that we just don't spend enough money, or buy the wrong products, only makes sense if you willfully ignore the power that corporations exert over our lives. It's nice to think that you can shop your way out of a monopoly, because that's a lot easier than voting your way out of a monopoly, but no matter how many times you vote with your wallet, the cartels that control the market will always win:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

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

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

[etherealfilmstar]

– thunderbolts* headcanons; pt 2 i am not romantically shipping anyone btw !

part 1 - general part 3 - cleaning

theme; social media ════════════════════════════════════════════

JOHN WALKER

advocates that instagram reels is better than tiktok. will trash on you for being on tiktok. but he's also a reddit user. he tries to defend himself saying that he's the 'normal one' when he's really not. he loves those AITA stuff tho. his favorite thing to watch? idk why but i can see him as a dude who loves commentary channels. also he's a twitter/x keyboard warrior. he crashes out at memes making fun of him. probably blocked bucky's number.

════════════════════════════════════════════

BUCKY BARNES

only uses youtube because it's the only thing he can navigate. he tried to get onto twitter/x but gave up because of the UI (me too bucky, me too). he's that parent that gets upset at your screentime. he constantly tells the others that they're online too much. he doesn't like youtube shorts much but he likes long documentaries. the others, including valentina, want to get rid of the cable tv but he wants to keep it 😭 don't get me wrong he's not completely grandpa, he knows how to use messaging apps like whatsapp. he has an instagram account just because yelena told him to make one, but he doesn't use or check it much. he still prefers sending emails.

═══════════════════════════════════

ALEXEI SHOSTAKOV

he loves memes. also will spam the whatsapp group chat with tiktoks. i feel like he'd be interested in conspiracy theories. sometimes he sends the others memes against them yet still laughs heartily at them. he doesn't take them that seriously. he also yells at his device if it's lagging or if the wifi is bugging. he watches those clickbait celebrity or online drama channels LOL. he has facebook too. but he loves sending yelena those wholesome posts like "my daughter is the light of my world" with floral backgrounds fshkdfhsfm

════════════════════════════════════════════

AVA STARR

TUMBLR. SHE'S ON TUMBLR. you cannot change my mind. also ao3 is her guilty pleasure. she is def on twitter/x and has a john walker hate account. literally messages walker: "i hate you 98" "i hate you 99" "i hate you 98" "oh no i messed up." "i hate you 1" she calls people on twitter/x morons and idiots. i feel like she'd looove watching legitimate drama channels. enjoys looking at shopping online. and is defff a chill pinterest girl. she's also the girl that helps with all the tech issues. is also a discord mod and does nitro giveaways. constantly calls people out for using ai and mocks them. "oh poor baby 🥺🥺 do you need the robot to make you pictures? 🥺🥺 yeah? 🥺🥺" (og tweet from @/peterokii)

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BOB REYNOLDS

definitely watching baking and cooking videos. the one least on his device aside from bucky. he also likes watching puppy videos and shares them with yelena. he avoids blocking people as much as possible. is the guy in the comments who says 'guys pls dont argue.' defends himself against hate posts. trying to learn the online terminology ("why do people call me a pookie?") he also loves looking at art and stuff. he uses tiktok and instagram. he has trouble telling the difference between real and AI but when he does realize it's AI he reports it. he's not a complete softy though, he will call people out for posting disgusting things. also the guy who has 'dms open if u need to vent' in his bio. has a pinterest account where he posts those like 'everything will be okay' positivity posts with pictures of flowers or animals. definitely wants to use the internet to help people because he knows not everyone has a shoulder to lean on :) he also sometimes forgets to reply to people and leaves them on read unintentionally

════════════════════════════════════════════

YELENA BELOVA

definitely a tiktok girly!!! she ADORES animal videos. also will spam the others' DMs with reels or tiktoks or memes. often times supports Ava, liking and retweeting/reblogging/reposting her stuff. is the person on pinterest that always puts in the comments the original poster if there aren't any credits. she definitely watches minecraft videos. bought walker a pair of cat ear headphones ("now you're a true redditor"). is the one in charge of hosting movie nights. she is obsessed with actor and broadway drama. always checking movie reviews. watches those 'lazy meal' videos. finds speed paints mesmerizing. she also listens to those like slime asmr videos. she likes to argue with people in twitter/x. always makes sure bob is staying safe on the internet (gotta take care of her little brother) but if he doesn't wanna share she doesn't push.

[good-old-gossip]

Fuck Meta!!!! Boycott Meta!!!!

Israel and Meta are working hand in hand to silence any online criticism of Tel Aviv while stifling support for Palestine.

A report by Drop Site News has uncovered the firm chokehold the Israeli government has on the tech giant in an attempt to control the narrative of its onslaught on Palestine’s Gaza.

Since October 7, 2023, Meta has acted on 94% of the Israeli government’s takedown requests for Instagram and Facebook posts, with all the requests featuring identical wording, regardless of the content.

Israel issues more takedown requests than any other country, focusing not on social media posts created by its own citizens, as is typical of a government, but instead overwhelmingly targeting content generated by Arab and Muslim users worldwide.

While Meta typically uses human moderators to review takedown requests made by governments and organisations, it has bent the rules for Israel by removing posts through AI.

An internal review of pro-Palestine content that was removed found no violations of Meta’s policies.

For years, social media users have accused Meta of actively censoring pro-Palestinian voices, often deleting accounts simply for highlighting Israel’s genocidal acts.

Also, FUCK SHERYL SANDBERG for SPREADING HAMAS MASS RAPE HOAX and for COVERING UP SEXUAL ASSAULT on employees by her then BOYFRIEND

[starrieangel]

🩵 Post Crash Rescued! Curly Headcanons 🩵

Headcanons for a recovered Curly, and just babbling about what his life might be like ♡

Random Headcanons for my favorite character 🩵 I seriously think abt him a lot and what his life might be like, so this is the culmination of all of my Curly daydreams ~

He's way better at technology now. Like before he acted like a dad who could barely use facebook, but after learning how to use a computer using just his eye movements, you could say he's reasonably tech savvy. 

He has a speech impediment. I imagine he couldn't talk on the tulpar because of some sort of paralysis or maybe nerve damage, but with some speech therapy and physical therapy, he learns to speak again. He's still not great at it though, his voice is very soft, so mostly uses his aac device so others can understand him. 

His shorter leg gives him more pain than his longer one. He has to use a cane sometimes for that side. (My reasoning is because the shorter leg is the one Jimmy hacked away oops, he's a worse surgeon than Anya I guess)

He's not all that insecure about his appearance, all things considered. Yes it's weird to look in the mirror and see someone totally different, but he just tries to keep good humor about it and stay positive (laugh to keep from crying at times). I'm sure he does mourn his good looks, but most of all he misses his hair. He doesn't think he looks ugly though, and he doesn't talk down to himself for his looks, because he wasn't all that vain to begin with. 

That being said, he does actually get pretty upset when people stare at him in public. He doesn't say anything, but you can sense he gets a bit quieter when he notices it. It's worse when it's kids, or (his absolute nightmare) a kid crying or making a comment about his appearance, saying he looks scary. That always makes him feel bad. :( 

He carries candy in his pockets. Not for himself, but to give to kids, because he doesn't want them to think he's scary. He actually really appreciates when a kid approaches him and just asks him a question instead of crying or running away. He'll crouch down and let them look at his prosthetic up close, or explain to them how his aac device works. ♡

Even though he hates the negative attention he might get, he still normally doesn't wear sunglasses or a mask to hide his face. He doesn't want to feel like he has to hide, just wants to be a normal guy, which he is..! But he still tries to frequent the same places, to get less attention. For example, the baristas at his favorite coffee shop all recognize him, and the baggers at the grocery store. It makes him feel like a regular joe again. :)

He has an emotional support cat in his apartment ♡ If this is after the Tulpar, then it's for the trauma of losing his crew at the hands of his best friend, etc. If it's an earth au, then it's just to cope with the trauma of being in some sort of accident and having to start a new life, and the hardships of relearning to walk and take care of himself again. 

He was already a cozy guy, but now he's even cozier. Loves warm drinks, sitting with his cat, fireplaces, books. He loves books. He kind of liked reading before, especially historical fiction, but he always liked his other hobbies more. Now that it's harder to do his more active hobbies, he utilizes that time to read all of the books he's always wanted to read. I imagine if he worked, he would work at a bookstore :) (Manager of course, he is the Captain, afterall!) ♡

[hms-no-fun]

you were on cohost? i guess too late now, how was it for you?

cohost had its fair share of problems and i could often find the community there a bit too tumblr-core fingerwaggy if you know what i mean. but the site's dead now so it's kind of a moot point. what i find myself reflecting on most these days are the positives.

first, no numbers. i think their no numbers policy was probably a bit over-aggressive, but it quelled some of the rat race popularity contest aspect of social media that often makes it so tedious. i liked their tag tracking system, their robust content warning options, and the absence of infinite scroll. what i miss most about cohost is that their text editor supported CSS, which led to people programming elaborate text effects and puzzles and games in-site that harkened back to the days of flash animations. there was something in this combination of elements that drew out a rebellious creativity in users.

cohost came at a time when social media was across the board feeling terrible (and it's only gotten worse hahaha), particularly as someone who makes shit that relies on you clicking links that take you away from the website or app. algorithms hate this and punish it. users also just seem kind of lazy and disinterested in using the internet so much as letting the internet happen to them passively. but when a post of mine went viral on cohost, people engaged with it. it wasn't just likes and shares, it was comments and additions. it felt like a place that (at its best) encouraged actual conversation and the development of new ideas among like-minded peers. when my posts did well and i included a donation link, people gave me money. it felt genuinely like a website that COULD support professional blog work in a way that was more customizable even than substack yet still RSS friendly, and the Following tab which let you easily see posts of specific users was a REVELATION, like a mini RSS reader within the website itself.

but the enterprise was unsustainable for various reasons (not all of them outside the dev crew's control) and the haters got what they wanted. now our big social media alternative is bluesky, a website that dares to ask the question "what if there was another twitter?" the answer is that it fucking sucks. i hate microblogs so much dude, why on EARTH are we still acting like these disambiguited 300-character-limit posts are the most preferable means of social communication online??? why would you set out to make a better twitter and then deliberately choose to replicate literally every aspect of the user experience that encouraged low-information high-drama conflict fabrication? WHY WOULD YOU MAKE A VERSION OF TWITTER WHERE YOU CAN EASILY LOOK UP THE ACCOUNT OF EVERYONE WHO HAS YOU BLOCKED AND IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE A FEATURE NOT A BUG???????? i just don't get it. i don't even get the optimism of the early adopters. i've seen people decry the post-election decay of the platform like "of course the cishets come in to ruin a community that was defined by trans & queer people" i'm sorry HELLO???????? from literally day zero bluesky was aiming to be a hands-off centrist IPO-friendly tech startup, there was never anything structurally embedded within the platform itself to keep this kind of decay from happening, you just happened to be on there when there were dramatically fewer users most of whom were curious tech enthusiasts. seriously, how have we not learned this lesson yet? you can't define a digital culture by the vibes of random user behavior! unless you have LAWS and GUIDELINES whereby you fucking BAN people for being shitheads, unless you enforce an actual code of conduct and punish bigoted speech and design a system that encourages constructive conversation, you are always always ALWAYS going to wind up at unhinged facebook boomer slop!

the death of cohost and the utterly predictable decay of bluesky are a big part of the reason why i've been posting so much more on tumblr. this is like the last bastion of anything even remotely resembling the old web, with its support of longposts and tagging and how easy it is to find random hobbyists doing cool shit you never knew existed before. like, yeah, you have to search that shit out and tailor your feed to not drive you crazy, but that's what i like about it!!! i am an adult with agency who understands that life is complicated and as such i expect to have to put some work into making my experience with a website positive! but in the hellworld of the iphone everything is walled garden apps for aggregating content where the content and its creators are structurally established as infinitely replaceable and uniquely worthless punching bags to be used and cast aside. everyone's given up on moderation and real jobs don't exist anymore especially if you happen to work in the "creative economy" IE are a writer or critic or artist or hobbyist of literally any kind. we've given up on expecting anything from the rich moneyboys who own and profit immensely off of the platforms whose value we literally create!!! especially now with the rise of "AI" grifters, whose work has ratcheted good old fashioned casual sexism and racism and homophobia up to levels not seen in such mainstream spaces since the early 2000s.

i like tumblr because i don't have to use a third party app to get & answer asks at length, and because it is a visual artist friendly platform where i won't be looked at funny for reblogging furry postmodernism or transgender homestuck OCs. it is a site that utterly lacks respectability and that's what makes it even remotely usuable. unfortunately it also sucks! partly it sucks because this place was ground zero for the rise of puritanical feminist-passing conservatism in leftist spaces, so it's like a hyperbolic time chamber for brain-melting life or death discourse about the most inconsequential bullshit you could ever imagine. but it also sucks because it's owned by a profit-motivated moneyboy who has consistently encouraged a culture of virulent transphobia and frequently bans trans women who call this out. so like, yeah, this place is cool compared to everywhere else, but it is exactly like everywhere else in that is also on a ticking clock to its own inevitable demise. the owners of this website will destroy everything that makes it interesting and will EAGERLY delete the nearly twenty years (!!!!!!) of posts it's accumulated the instant it will profit them to do so. this will be immensely unpopular and everyone will agree it's a tragedy and it won't matter. the culture and content of a social media platform is epiphenomenal to its rote economic valuation. i mean, obviously it isn't, zero of these massive tech companies would be what they are if so many people weren't so eager to give their time and labor away for free (and yes, writing a dumb dick joke on tumblr IS a form of labor in the same way that doing a captcha is labor, just because it's a miniscule contribution in an economy of scale doesn't mean you didn't contribute!), but once a tech company reaches a certain threshold its valuation ceases to be tethered to anything that actually exists in reality.

all of which is why i remember cohost with a heavy heart. yeah, it was imperfect. it was also independently owned, made with the explicit goal of creating a form of social media that actually tries not to give you a lifelong anxiety disorder so it can sell you homeopathic anti-anxiety sawdust suppositories. for the brief window of time when it was extant, i was genuinely hopeful for the future of being a creative on the internet. part of why i spend so much time on godfeels, a fucking homestuck fanfiction with no hope of turning a profit or establishing mainstream legitimacy, is that my readers actually ENGAGE with the material. what brought me back to using this website consistently was precisely the glut of godfeels-related questions i got, and the exciting conversations that resulted from my answers. meanwhile i put so many hours into my videos and even when they do well numerically, i barely see any actual engagement with the material. and that is a deliberate design choice on the part of youtube! that is the platform functioning as intended!! it sucks!!!

what the memory of cohost has instilled in me is a neverending distaste for the lazy unambitious also-rans that define the modern internet. i remember the possibility space of the early web and long for the expressiveness that even the most minor of utilities offered. we sacrificed that freedom for a convenience which was always the pretense for eventually charging us rent. i am thinking a lot these days about what a publicly funded government administrated social media utility would look like. what federal open source standards could look in an environment where the kinds of activities a digital ecosystem can encourage are strictly regulated against exploitation, bigotry, scams, and literal gambling. what if there was a unionized federal workforce devoted to the administration of internet moderation, which every website above a certain user threshold must legally take advantage of? i like to imagine a world where youtube isn't just nationalized but balkanized, where you have nested networks of youtubes administrated for different purposes by different agencies and organizations that operate on different paradigms of privacy and algorithmic interaction. imagine that your state, county, and/or city has its own branch of youtube meant to specifically highlight local work, while also remaining connected to a broader national network (oops i just reinvented federation lmao). imagine a world where server capacity is a publicly owned utility apportioned according to need and developed in collaboration with the communities of their construction rather than as a deliberate exploitation of them. our horizons for these kinds of things are just so, so small, our ability to imagine completely captured by capitalist realism, our willingness to demand services from our government simply obliterated by decades of cynical pro-austerity propaganda. i imagine proposing some of this stuff and people reacting like "well that's unrealistic" "that'll never happen" "they'd just use it for evil" and i am just SO! FUCKING! TIRED!!!!

like wow you're soooooo cool for being effectively two steps left of reagan, i bet you think prison abolition and free public housing are an impossible pipedream too huh? and exactly what has that attitude gotten you? what've you gained by being such a down to earth realist whose demands are limited by the scope of what seems immediately possible? has anything gotten better? have any of the things you thought were good stayed good? is your career more stable, your political position more safe, your desire to live and thrive greatly expanded? or do you spend every day in a cascading panopticon of stress and collapse, overwhelmed to the point of paralysis by the sheer magnitude of what it's cost us to abandon the future? you HAVE to dream. you HAVE to make unrealistic demands. the fucking conservatives have been making unrealistic demands forever and look, they're getting everything they want even though EVERYONE hates them for it! please i'm begging you to see and understand that what's feasible, what's reasonable, what's realistic, are literally irrelevant. these things only feel impossible because we choose to believe The Adults (and if you're younger than like 45, trust me, to the ruling class you are a child) whose bank accounts reflect just how profitable it is to convince us that they're impossible. all those billions of dollars these fuckers have didn't come from nowhere, it was stolen from all of us. there is no reason that money can't and shouldn't be seized and recirculated back into the economy, no reason it can't be used to fund a society that is actually social, where technological development is driven not by what's most likely to drive up profits next quarter but by what people need from technology in their daily lives.

uh so yeah basically that's my opinion of cohost lmao