#Infrastructure Fragility

[collapseofindustrialcivilization]

AI-Driven Cyberattacks, Climate Change, and the Fragility of Modern Civilization

The weaponization of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems stands as one of the most plausible and catastrophic risks facing modern civilization. As AI capabilities accelerate, so too does their potential to destabilize the complex, interdependent systems that sustain our societies—namely, power grids, communication networks, and global supply chains. In a scenario increasingly discussed…

[prettyboykatsuki-moved]

Hii fang, I wanted to ask you if you’ve read or watched Tokyo Revengers, and if you’ve done a character analysis on Mikey? ? I feel like he’s such a complex character and I’m super interested to hear about your thoughts on him. Sorry if you’ve answered this before or haven’t watched it! I just wanted to ask just in case

i have read all of TR and ending aside im a huge fan of the manga

i love mikey!! i think i've written about him once or twice. if i were to read TR in the good year of 2024, i would definitely yanderify the fuck out of that guy LMAOO.

i think he's ultimately just a very damaged character who i'll always defend. he was very clearly unstable for a lot of the series and his general apathy and immorality in other timelines were because of the overarching and inescapable themes of loss in each one. i think the way a lot of people wrote about him at TRs peak was really unsymapthetic djfjsdkksd.

i understand peoples frustration with him i just find him to be a hugely tragic character because he very clearly wants to be because he often contradicts himself . but most importantly he's my handsome and silly little guy

[ontonix]

Complexity Monitoring Device for Local Anomaly Detection in Networks

The blog provides a brief description of a Quantitative Complexity Management-based (QCM) network monitoring device. The QCM technology has been under development by Ontonix since 2005. Numerous applications have been developed which span various sectors of the industry, economics, finance and medicine. In the majority of cases, QCM solutions are used for following…

[gaza-giving-tree]

Video: Hossam Al-Qazzaz has recently given us a glimpse of a day in the life of his family through a video he sent to us, featuring his infant daughter Habiba, son Bashar, and other daughter Diana. Despite their living conditions, Hossam does his best to keep his children's spirits high.

@hanon-qazaz

Story written by @rumiandroses

Imagine being born into a world where the first sounds you hear are explosions, the hum of drones, and the cries of your family fleeing for their lives. This is the reality for Habiba Al-Qazzaz, a precious baby girl who has known nothing but war, displacement, and hunger in her short life. Born in Gaza amidst the ongoing conflict that began on October 7, 2023, Habiba has spent much of her existence so far in uncertainty, hunger, and fear.

This precious little girl is not even a year old, and already, she has suffered through unimaginable hardship.

Her parents, Hossam and Hanan Al-Qazzaz, are doing everything they can to care for Habiba and her three siblings—Bashar (9), Hani (8), and Diana (4). But the relentless devastation of Gaza’s infrastructure has made survival nearly impossible. With no stable income and essential supplies priced beyond reach, the Al-Qazzaz family is fighting a daily battle just to keep their children warm, fed, and safe.

Their GoFundMe campaign has been their only lifeline, allowing them to afford the most basic necessities—food, water, milk for Habiba. Yet despite the thousands of people who have seen and shared their plea, donations have been coming in at a painfully slow pace. Since last year, they have managed to raise only €2,000, an amount tragically short of their €55,000 goal—the sum they had hoped would allow them to evacuate to Egypt with Hossam’s elderly parents and start anew.

Forced to Live on Top of Rubble

Images: (Top) Bashar, Hani, and Diana, still able to smile in spite of the devastation they've been forced to endure. (Bottom) Hossam Al-Qazzaz, as he does his best to clear their destroyed home of debris to make it slightly more suitable for habitation.

As time passed and donations fell short, the family was forced to abandon their dreams of escape. Instead, they now live atop the ruins of their destroyed home, sheltered only by a fragile tent that does little to protect them from the cold, roaming animals, or the ever-present danger of violence. Their reality is bleak, and their options are running out.

On February 8, 2025, Hanan reached out to us with an update on her family's condition:

Image: Hanan's update message to us, informing us of her family's current condition.

The freezing temperatures persist. Her children are crying for warmth in a shelter that provides no protection from the elements.

This is Not a Call for Comfort—It’s a Plea for Survival!

The Al-Qazzaz family is NOT asking for luxuries. They are asking for the bare minimum:

🧤🧣Warmth for their children.

🍞💧 Food and clean water.

🏠🚪A secure shelter.

With further violence looming, the time to act is NOW.

How You Can Help

🔹 Donate to the Al-Qazzaz Family’s GoFundMe to help provide food, warmth, and shelter for Habiba and her family. Every contribution—no matter how small—makes an impact. [DONATE HERE] 🍞💧🍼🧦🧣🧤🏥

🔹 Support the Chuffed Campaign created by our founder, Bethany-Grace, as an additional fundraiser to help the family rebuild their lives. This ensures they don’t have to choose between saving money for the future and feeding their children today. [DONATE HERE] 🌱🏠🛫🕊️

🔹 If you cannot donate, PLEASE share this post. The more people see their story, the greater the chance of reaching someone who can help. EVERY like, share, and repost helps.

The Al-Qazzaz family’s campaign has been vetted by @gazavetters and is #287 on their list of verified campaigns.

A Family of Resilience and Kindness

Hossam Al-Qazzaz is also the cousin of Falestine Asad, another courageous individual struggling to keep her infant child safe in war-torn Gaza. Both Hossam and Falestine are some of the kindest and humblest people you will ever meet. If you can, we encourage you to view and share both of their campaigns, and to donate if possible.

Together, we can help the Al-Qazzaz family find the security, warmth, and stability they so desperately need.

No child should have to suffer like these poor babies have.

Let’s all be part of the reason they make it through another day, and into a brighter, more peaceful future. 🙏🏻🕊️💗

[sayruq]

Oxfam condemns in the strongest terms the killing in Gaza today of four water engineers and workers from the Khuzaa municipality who were working with our strategic partner the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU). The four men were killed on their way to conduct repairs to water infrastructure in Khuzaa, east of Khan Younis. Despite prior coordination with Israeli authorities their clearly-marked vehicle was bombed. Oxfam stands in solidarity with the CMWU, their partners and the families of the victims.  Their deaths deepen the catastrophic humanitarian crisis in Gaza where access to clean water is already severely compromised. Dozens of engineers, civil servants and humanitarian workers have been killed in Israeli airstrikes throughout this war. They were all working on essential services to keep Gaza's fragile infrastructure running. Despite their movements being coordinated with the Israeli authorities by the CMWU and the Palestinian Water Authority, to ensure their safety, they were still targeted.  Attacks on civilian infrastructure and those who maintain it are clear violations of international humanitarian law. Those responsible must be held to account. Such attacks are part of the crime of using starvation as a weapon of war.  

[valtsv]

forgive me if this is utterly incoherent but i'm suddenly thinking about tsv sainthood again and how saints are the living product of violent traumatic assault on the body and subsequent death and rebirth as "something else", elevated to divinity by their sacrifice in theory but seen and treated as subhuman - created for the sole purpose of serving their former fellow man, upholding the infrastructure at the very bottom of the social hierarchy - in practice, and how intrinsic their suffering and death is to that conception. the corpse is, after all, "the utmost of abjection". a corpse is necessarily an object, a thing, a concept, because to acknowledge it as a person is to acknowledge one's own fragile position in the symbolic order, and how easily that is broken down and rendered meaningless. even more so when the symbolic order is as sociopolitically relevant as it is in the silt verses. saints are necessarily subject to abjection in much the same way as the corpse, because to look upon them and allow yourself to understand that they were once a person is to acknowledge that you could just as easily be in their position, and enduring the terror and revulsion in the face of that absence of meaning - that utter void of alienation - for an extended period of time would drive almost anyone blindingly insane with fear and grief. dehumanisation necessitates a sacrifice, necessitates death, necessitates assault upon the body, and this assault upon the body encourages its dehumanisation in an ouroboros of violence.

[psychotrenny]

I think one of Imperialism's most evil strategies is the national scale torture you'll see inflicted on countries that dare to dream of freedom. Like it's not just about overthrowing the anti-imperialist regime itself, but utterly breaking the very social, economic and in turn psychological foundations it's built upon. Prolonged periods of destruction that are as systematic as they are sadistic with the aim of making life unlivable until the government either collapses or gives in, accepting whatever concessions are forced upon them as the nation is remoulded into an dependent and obedient little neocolony.

Sometimes an imperialist power will act directly to achieve this (just take the gratuitous and deliberate destruction of civil infrastructure during the bombings of Yugoslavia and Iraq), but the preferred strategy is to employ local proxies. Groups like RENAMO in Mozambique or the Contras of Nicaragua. Bands of reactionaries, traitors and general desperadoes are gathered up, trained, armed and transported over the border at the expense of the Imperialists and their local collaborators. These armed groups have no interest in build mass support, of representing an alternative way of life. Their only purpose is destruction; killing, torturing, looting, burning whatever they can in order to bring their country to its knees. Frequently targeting important nodes in the networks that sustain the nation and the people's faith in it (bridges, rail depots, factories, hospitals and schools) but ultimately happy to attack whatever they can; every house burned or person tortured contributes to the climate of terror and corrosion of government credibility. Because when they kill these groups don't like to do it cleanly; their attacks generate countless reports immolation, disembowelment, victims hacked to pieces and left to bleed. But when possible they prefer to leave their victims alive and capable of further spreading their terror, inflicting the most vicious sorts of rape and mutilation on a mass scale

It's not just just evil for the sake of evil mind you. The cruelty has a point; human destruction to accompany the physical. Every person killed is someone who can no longer contribute to the development of the nation, while even living yet physically and psychologically broken victim places further strain on their country's increasingly fragile support systems. Meanwhile the terror of these actions spreads the impact beyond their immediate victims. The murder and torture of peasants makes the survivors too scared to go back into their fields, slowly starving the nation as the rural economy grind to a halt. The gruesome deaths of traders and travelers leaves the survivors too terrified to continue their business, shutting down the distributive networks that make national development and often life itself possible. The terror unleashed on foreign professionals can prompt the survivors to flee and discourage newcomers from arriving, depriving the underdeveloped economic and education systems of the skilled workers they need to improve or even function. And every broken body, ever broken mind, is proof of the government's weakness and ineptitude; a humiliating failure to protect their own people that demoralises supporters and empowers dissenters. The motivated sadism of these terrorist attacks is a microcosm of the motivated sadism displayed by their Imperialist backers

But why go to all this trouble? Why not just send in the paratroopers or organise a coup to end those troublesome regimes quickly? Sometimes it's a matter of possibility. As great as they are, the powers of Imperialist nations are not unlimited. All manner of constraints (domestic unrest, international condemnation which advantages dangerous rivals, the simple financial and human costs of such operations) limit what actions are viable or desirable. This is especially significant when the targets are motivated and disciplined anti-imperialists with a base of deep-rooted popular support, the sort of regime that won't go down to a simple commando raid or bribe to the right general. But sometimes, it's not enough to merely cut down a dissenting government; you have to salt the earth and make sure nothing similar ever grows back. I'll finish with the words of an anonymous Jesuit priest, talking about Nicaragua yet in terms widely relevant enough to be published in John Saul's conclusion to A Difficult Road: The Transition to Socialism in Mozambique (1985):

In Chile the Americans made a mistake. They cut off the revolution too abruptly. They killed the revolution but, as we can see from recent developments there, they didn't kill the dream. In Nicaragua, they're trying to kill the dream

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Autoenshittification

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And companies that make powered wheelchairs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[3liza]

we gotta figure out the prescription bottle recycling thing man I get like 12 of them every month and it's an enormous amount of single use plastic that is going directly into landfills and the ocean. there's zero reason for pharmacies not to have empty bottle dropoffs, it's dry storage and easy to clean. one problem is plastic gets micro scratches and dings in it that make it difficult or impossible to sanitize to a medical standard, which would be solved by switching to glass bottles, but then glass causes transport problems with weight and fragility. I've researched this and the only way to recycle prescription bottles in my city is to, on your own, mail them somewhere that will do it for you. I think some of the privatized recycling services will do the same thing but I'm deeply suspicious of those services and suspect most of them are not actually recycling anything. the recycling infrastructure is so bad in the USA and the majority of our plastic recycling is not actually happening, it's just fake garbage sorting that ends up in landfills anyway. we HAVE to go back to using glass for everything, plastic recycling is a dead end.

[mariacallous]

Students and activists from multiple faiths are sounding the alarm over the Trump administration and lawmakers’ efforts to silence dissent on college campuses over issues like Palestinian rights — accusing officials of using allegations of antisemitism as a pretext to crush free speech and exert control over the country’s higher education system.

At a hearing Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee listened to testimony related to the rise in antisemitism in the U.S., particularly after the deadly Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023. With the exception of temporary, fragile ceasefires, Israeli forces have been fighting in Gaza — and destroying infrastructure and killing civilians — ever since.

The U.S. also has seen a rise in Islamophobia since the attack, though Wednesday’s Senate hearing did not include concerns over that issue. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the Republican-controlled committee’s ranking member, stressed that the panel under his leadership had held multiple hearings on hate against all faiths. He added that the mother of Wadee Alfayoumi, the 6-year-old Palestinian American boy murdered by his landlord in Illinois, attended a previous hearing.

“It was clearly a hate crime, and it was based on their religion,” Durbin said. “And the fact that that was part of the hearing did not diminish in any way my strong feelings about antisemitism. It is the same hatred that we’re trying to stamp out today.”

In the spring of 2024, protests erupted on college campuses across the country, with students and faculty of all faiths peacefully demanding that the U.S. government – the Biden administration at the time – stop supporting Israel in its destruction of Gaza and the Palestinian people.

Similar to the students who protested the Vietnam War, participants faced police brutality, far-right agitators, retaliation by their schools and mostly unfounded accusations of being antisemitic. Just Wednesday, Columbia University’s Barnard College expelled a third student for participating in pro-Palestinian activism.

“It is essential we continue working to dismantle real antisemitism while also defending our friends and community members who are falsely accused of antisemitism,” Ellie Baron, a Bryn Mawr College student who is part of this year’s graduating class, said in a statement. “The only [way]forward is through forging greater solidarity with all people who are targeted by fascism and supremacist ideologies, including antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism.”

President Donald Trump has threatened to essentially sanction universities that allow peaceful protests for Palestinian human rights, and he has even called for revoking the visas of foreign students who participate in those protests. At Wednesday’s hearing, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) repeatedly questioned why the government should not enact Trump’s pledge todeport foreign students who commit “an act of violence against a Jewish student.”

“Well, that’s already the law,” civil liberties attorney Jenin Younes posted on X. “So everyone with a brain knows these ‘antisemitism’ related [executive orders] aren’t about prosecuting violent crime or other illegal conduct like harassment and vandalizing property. They’re about suppressing disfavored speech and you’re smart enough to know that this is a grave violation of 1A.”

Despite Trump and his allies’ statements that they care about Jewish safety, the president’s actions have done the opposite. Trump and his billionaire friend Elon Musk are behind the layoffs of at least a dozen government officials from the Education Department’s office of civil rights, which looked into students’ complaints of discrimination — including antisemitism.

The president has a history of objectively antisemitic statements, like saying that any Jewish person who votes for Democrats “hates their religion,” and implying that Jewish Americans have dual loyalty with Israel. On his first day in office this term, Trump issued full pardons to rioters who carried out the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, including white nationalists and others who brought antisemitic symbols to the Capitol.

Musk has also come under fire for giving a Nazi-like salute during an event, openly supporting far-right German politics and saying that society should stop paying so much attention to the Holocaust.

“It is reprehensible that MAGA senators who have aligned themselves with white nationalists and antisemites like Elon Musk are putting on this hearing to crack down on the movement for Palestinian rights and for our civil liberties writ large under the guise of fighting antisemitism,” Jewish progressive group IfNotNow said Wednesday. “We refuse to let our Jewish community be the face of the Trump-Musk administration’s attacks on our rights.”

Protecting education and open dialogue is vital to “the ability of Jewish students to succeed and thrive,” Tufts University student Meirav Solomon testified at the Senate hearing on Wednesday.

Some lawmakers support adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which labels most criticism of the State of Israel as antisemitic. Civil and human rights groups – as well as the definition’s original co-author – have strongly opposed it as “overbroad” and “unconstitutional,” particularly in education spaces.

In November, a federal judge ruled that a state-level executive order threatening funding to Texas colleges and universities who don’t update campus free speech policies to include the IHRA definition of antisemitism likely violates the First Amendment.

“Distorting the meaning of antisemitism and making Jews the face of a campaign to crush free speech is deeply dangerous to Jewish Americans,” Barry Trachtenberg, presidential chair of Jewish history at Wake Forest University, said in a statement, “and all of us who work for collective liberation.”

[ontonix]

Next-gen Monitoring and Protection of Complex, Critical Systems

A New Paradigm in Early Anomaly Detection. Artificial Intuition identifies problems in complex, critical systems and helps solve them. Before they materialise. In real time. Highly complex systems are exposed to a new form of risk: complexity-induced risk. MORE What Does Artificial Intuition Do? Artificial Intuition analyses data from large, complex systems, infrastuctures or processes,…

[papoochu]

Next in the council series is "The Machine", Tomoe Tsurugi! Though for ArtFight, she'll go undercover as Tachibana Nagi!

Now that I have 3 council members up, I think I'll make a pinned masterpost on my blog if you want to see the others! 3 down, 9 more to go!

Background

Tachibana = noble samurai clan name symbolizing honor and legacy, deeply tied to Japan’s warrior history

Nagi = meaning “to mow down” or “to sweep away”; often used to describe the motion of a naginata, a sword, or wind in battle

Born 1967 in Tokyo to a strict traditional family, proud of their samurai lineage

Learned various martial arts and weaponry, but excelled in swordsmanship

Raised on stories of Onna-Musha, Tomoe Gozen, and the codes of bushidō

On her mother’s side, descended from survivors of the Nagasaki atomic bombing (1945)

Childhood During Japan’s Economic Miracle:

Raised amid Japan’s postwar boom, a time of gleaming technology and rising prosperity

While her father, a bureaucrat in the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, embraced modernization, her household remained steeped in samurai values: discipline, tradition, duty

Unbeknownst to them, Nagi had inherited genetic mutations from her hibakusha grandparents, survivors of Nagasaki’s blast

Frequently ill as a child (chronic fatigue, joint pain, unusual sensitivities), she was in and out of hospitals

Medical professionals were evasive, classmates cruel; whispers of “tainted blood” followed her

Early medical trauma and social alienation planted a seed of hatred for human fragility and societal hypocrisy

Early Signs of Blindness (Age 13):

Began experiencing night blindness, trouble reading, and disorientation in dim light

Eventually diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa: a progressive, degenerative eye condition

Her doctors quietly suggested the condition may be linked to her family’s radiation exposure, a lingering curse of Nagasaki

For Nagi, the diagnosis became not just a personal tragedy, but proof that the past can reach forward and rot the present

University Years:

While studying engineering and mathematics at the University of Tokyo, her sight deteriorated rapidly

Already known for her genius and prowess, she was approached by the council, who provided her with the resources to adapt her skills for her failing sight

By 24, she was legally blind

This coincided with the peak of Japan’s Bubble Economy: wealth rising, but so was corruption and moral decay (Recruit Scandal)

Rejected from elite job programs despite top academic performance

Her fury crystallized: flesh is weakness, society is hypocritical, and machines do not discriminate

She vowed to build a future where the flawed human body and corrupt human systems would be rendered obsolete

Founding Tachibana Tech (Age 24–28):

As Japan entered the Lost Decade, Nagi founded Tachibana Tech: a cybernetics and AI firm based on one principle: refining the human form through technology

She personally underwent neural interface surgeries, experimenting on herself to convert her remaining senses into data streams

Her vision did not return, but she received augmented perception - a new kind of sight born of code and signal

No longer “blind,” she became The Machine - detached, calculating, and unbound by human limitations

1995 – Kobe Earthquake & Technological Control:

Great Hanshin Earthquake devastated Kobe, exposed fatal weaknesses in Japan’s infrastructure and disaster readiness

Nagi quietly offered her AI to the state for predictive modeling and emergency logistics, then used the data to expand her surveillance reach

The state was incompetent. The people were panicked. Only machines-maintained order

Solidified her belief: Japan doesn’t need democracy - it needs an operating system

Rise of Tachibana Industries:

With Japan’s population aging and its political system paralyzed, Nagi’s company became indispensable - providing predictive governance tools, infrastructure AI, and covert intelligence services

Privately, she orchestrated digital blackmail campaigns, economic disruptions, and political reshuffling to consolidate influence

2011 – Fukushima Nuclear Disaster:

The Fukushima meltdown reopened national trauma - once again, revealing humanity’s hubris and helplessness

To Nagi, it was the final confirmation:

Nagasaki made her blind

Kobe made her a player

Fukushima made her sovereign

Emotion, tradition, empathy - these were relics

Only through data, order, and engineered governance could civilization survive itself

Present Day (Age 49):

Leads a corporate-state hybrid that quietly shapes policy, surveillance, and commerce across East Asia and beyond

Believes that Japan must return to its warrior roots - but not through swords or blood, through discipline, hierarchy, and machine logic

Her mission: eradicate human fragility; a society where order is no longer maintained by the fallible human hand, but by precision systems

Design Notes/Character Study

Character Inspo for main outfit:

Garuda (Warframe), Shen (Kung Fu Panda)

Note: Garuda is based on Indian mythology, while Shen is based on Chinese - use other references for cultural nuance, as this character is Japanese

Modernized kimono

Red, black, white

Tech inspo:

Neon Genesis Evangelion, PCB, Signalis

Parallels to Gendo Ikari

Evangelion Unit-01

Cultural/historical references

Mu = nothingness

Oni

Onna-bugeisha and Tomoe Gozen

Nagasaki

Seismic patterns on shirts

Rising sun/chrysanthemum seal on obi = authoritarianism/conquest

Wields a naginata

Watched videos of national women's competitions @ 0.25 speed T-T

Has devoted her life to the council

Retinitis pigmentosa does not usually have any physical symptoms

Her eyes are pale red/pink from the tech implants

Glowing for artistic flair

Glasses are blackout glasses (opaque)

Company emblem is a sword

Believes her mother gave her weakness

President Snow: No objections to violence; but always with reason

[kissingraine]

(might become a Starscream x reader, Shockwave x reader thang,,,,) eventual smut! 18+

Midnight City — TFP Soundwave x f!Reader

Draped in fog and soft neon, the Nemesis cruised slowly across the dark skies. Undetected and reeking of Decepticon malevolence as always yet undetected. The small lights that flickered below were as ignorant as ever, inferior lifeforms that were too busy eyeing their tiny glowing boxes to even look up. Soundwave knew without a doubt that they spent twenty four full hours of the week with their heads bent down. No mistaking it's become an issue among them.

Thin servos dancing over the keys as he watches the human settlement breathe, each streetlamp glistening faintly; a city that never sleeps. His sources tell him. Flickers of data, EM fields that pulse—not enough to disrupt the way his processor regulates but just enough to make the probes attached to his chassis writhe in distaste, primitive security networks buzzing with naive confidence. He's been relentlessly tracking down a signal that's made contact with the Earth's atmosphere a little over two nights ago.

It flashes every few irregular intervals, making it hard to pin down where the signal begins before fizzling out again. Like a dying star. Soundwave doesn't stop, can't stop. Not when this might be the only thing that can fix their current dilemma and he's been alone for so long. He's not sure how much time has passed. The ship's command left in his servos as their forces went on separate paths, vowed not to stray from the cause just had more creative 'ideas' on how to effectively mobilize their forces. He stayed on the Nemesis to keep things within control, to keep himself in control. Knows that his cassettes are also worrying about their situation but when they see him so composed, can feel that relief as it washes over him.

That signal, so similar to that relic's nature... but he can't be too sure just yet. Needs to keep probing, combing through the infantile network that the natives possessed.

Lazerbeak suggested to scout, but he turned it down. This organic settlement is a little too crowded for his liking. Can't risk them getting found. Not with their resources limited. He's been rationing their energon preserves too and he's this close to finding another hotspot of undisturbed fuel. Just enough to get them off of this miserable ball of dirt. The others can't be faring too well, can they? His objective was apparent, precise: locate the signal. Which he watched disappear into the city near the sewege systems.

Not exactly pleasant but he isn't Knockout enough to be picky about it. A red dot appears on his screen and his servos are quick to move, tendrils moving in to help. This is the first time Lazerbeak's seen him get remotely excited over something like a red spot on the multi-screens of his control panel. It's faint but emits a similar wavelength to the one Soundwave's filed away in his data banks.

It's in an area just near the organic's underground mode of transportation. Figures. It's more complicated to single out the signal's location especially if it was underground. Soundwave had discovered pretty recently that layers of concrete, reinforced metal buried beneath the earth didn't allow currents of data to run as easily.

And he'd rather not part with the ship to risk getting his processor overwhelmed with human thoughts and volatile emotions. So he does what he's best at. Infiltrate surface network and seeping into it like viscous liquid. It's fascinating how they make it so easy to extract information from them with their fragile digital infrastructure, trembling with aging code—an easy point of access. Doesn't even need to knock when the firewall practically crumbles at his technological prowess.

• Glancing at the clock, it's almost time for you to close the cafe. It had been a hectic day with Ma finally taking over the latter half of your shift so you could lay back and relax on bean bag chairs in the basement. Said basement was a small arcade area where a select few people in your block would come and relax, too. The space just big enough for a small crowd. It was mostly you and your friends who used it, though. One of their siblings, an electronically inclined person as you like to call them, had their computer setup placed in one of the cozy corners.

• It's... beeping, the screen flashing in red with warnings popping up in a dozen windows. That can't be good, can it...?

• Granted you have no clue how to code things and the like. Or just code in general. You've called your friend's sibling's name. Once, twice, but no response and the very undeniable fact that there might be a virus or worse... someone trying to hack into their device was enough to alarm you.

Interference... suddenly. Out of all the humans on this sad excuse for a mudball, there's one tenacious enough to not only interrupt Soundwave's search for data but crudely walk straight into his network with intent. Curious and reckless, his servos stop moving something that Lazerbeak doesn't fail to notice as he and his fellow cassette look at each other. And then he's back into it, he narrows the scan and slices through the city's digital haze to trace the point of origin. Protocol indicating he should move quietly and observe. It's difficult to keep track of, being so close to their manmade tunnels, slipping through his iron grasp and fading into an almost ambient noise.

• You don't know how you're doing this, you don't even know why and for all you know your friend's sibling could have their entire information compromised! But your fingers move as though possessed and you find yourself unable to stop. And now you wonder if it had anything to do with that incident from a week ago. But you definitely know that someone is actively trying to hack the computer, “You're mine now.” You murmur to yourself, responding in plain text and all the amount of taunt you could muster in you.

Before his tracer could lock on, having every bit the intent to scare this human off by revealing their location because that always worked—a spew of numbers and words strung together with an image attached. His tentacles twitch in anticipation, coiling around itself as his head tilts in instinct. And there you are, on his screen forming visuals on who the very human that's dared to intercept him. Bold move, human, he all but manages to swallow the growl building in his chassis. And that gesture... your middle finger's raised. Soundwave might not know what that means but he'll assume that you're insulting him considering the words that appear right after it.

“Come and get me. Coward.”

Next

[gaza-giving-tree]

Imagine being an Information Technology student, your days filled with lectures, coding projects, and dreams of a better future. Then one day, your entire world is upended. You find yourself standing atop the ruins of your home, the bitter wind biting through your clothes as you stare at the devastation stretching endlessly before you. In the blink of an eye, your world has transformed from textbooks and computer screens to survival amid the wreckage of a genocide.

Images: (Top) Mahmoud before the start of the conflict. (Bottom) Mahmoud, standing atop the ruins of his home, destroyed by occupation attacks.

@mahmodjsy8

Story written by @rumiandroses

Before the war, Mahmoud was an Information Technology student at Gaza University, harboring dreams of building a brighter future for his family. Those dreams were shattered when the university was bombed, classes were suspended, and his home in Khan Yunis was reduced to ruins. Now, Mahmoud and his family live in a makeshift tent in a displacement camp, fighting to survive without water, electricity, or access to food.

The winter cold seeps through every threadbare inch of the tent, and the howling wind drowns out the silence left by everything they’ve lost. With his father sick and his brother in need of medical care, Mahmoud shoulders the burden of his family’s survival alone. Every day is a battle against hunger and despair, a struggle to find clean water and enough food to keep his loved ones alive.

Despite the ceasefire, the nightmare continues. The streets of Gaza are lined with hollow buildings and shattered glass, a grim reminder that peace is a fragile but unwavering hope. The infrastructure is decimated, jobs are nonexistent, and the people are left to fend for themselves amid the wreckage. Mahmoud's dreams of finishing his education are now intertwined with a desperate plea for survival—for the chance to escape Gaza, to rebuild their lives, to turn the page on this chapter of endless loss.

Your support can help Mahmoud continue his education outside of Gaza, to rebuild what was destroyed, and to keep his family alive through the darkest winter they’ve ever known.

Please consider making a donation to help Mahmoud's family rebuild, or by sharing his story so his call for help can reach others who can.

You can donate to Mahmoud's GoFundMe campaign [HERE].

Mahmoud’s campaign has been vetted by @gazavetters, and is (#063) on their list of verified campaigns. His campaign has also been vetted by @beesandwatermelons, and is (#190) on their list of verified campaigns

[stsgluver]

NOTHING NEW – gojo satoru

synopsis. gojo coming home at 1:43am (nothing new)

wc. 1.5k

tags. fluff <3333, not proofread bc i’m lazy

“baby? hey, i’m home.” there’s a light brush against your nose as gojo gently knocks his against yours, his voice coaxing you out of your sleep. instinctively, your hands reach out to him and he responds by taking both your wrists in his hands to press light kisses to the palm of your hands. butterflies flutter inside of you from the sheer delicateness that your boyfriend handles you with; the same hands capable of unimaginable destruction cradling you like you’re the most fragile ornament. you almost fall back to sleep from the feather-like touches.

gojo had been sent away on a mission, as he so often is, but for once it was fairly local to your apartment so you’d told him you’d stay up for him (even though he insisted he would rather you slept). however, it seemed that as the number of curses increased and their torment escalated, you were seeing gojo less and less and you missed him. he was the love of your life after all, he was meant to be the centre of your universe, not just another planet orbiting your story.

even for just an additional five minutes of his time, you would always wait for him.

so, even though the clock read 01:43am and you want nothing more than to curl up further into the plush sofa, you force yourself to open your eyes. gojo is inches away from your face, blindfold and uniform still on, but you can still feel his gaze on you. it’s full of love and adoration and appreciation. he’s so used to people leaving him and yet here you are on a night when he knows you’ve got work in the morning.

his lips are quirked up as he takes in your pile of blankets and uneaten snacks you had kitted yourself out with in your (unsuccessful) plan to stay awake by watching movies (you think you made it through at least one but you can’t be entirely sure). 

“hi,” you whisper quietly, shifting your hands from his loose hold to cup his face. despite the fact he’s on the floor on his knees in front of you and you’re now sat upright on the sofa, he still towers above you, and you have to crane your neck up to be able to see all of his face. his pale skin is smooth under your touch and so so cold and you could only imagine the abandoned school or hospital he’d been sent to, shattered windows and a crumbling infrastructure.

“the bed’s more comfy, y’know,” gojo flashes you one of his usual carefree grins. his movements are slower than usual as he brushes a stray strand of hair away from your face and you know he’s just as tired as you are. you don’t voice your concerns – he’d dismiss them anyways (“i’m the strongest” and all that) – but your thumb gently brushes back and forth as your eyes scan every inch of skin visible to you in the dim light, searching for any scratches or wounds. there never is any.

you shake your head with a quiet hum, “not without you.” there’s a falter in his smile and you know that if you could see his eyes right now, you’d see the softness and vulnerability – a side of himself he’ll only ever be with you. there’d be guilt too – guilt that he’s not there enough and that you’re living half the life that you should be.

“i’m here now,” he sighs quietly and presses one single peck to your forehead. the two of you hold still for a moment, noses brushing against one anothers and breaths intermixing as you just bask in the other’s presence. despite the sweat and grime ruining his clothes, gojo still smells of your favourite cologne and sweets. it’s familiar and smells more like home than the apartment ever could when he’s not there.

it’s peaceful, something he rarely gets to experience nowadays. his joints ache from their constant use and lack of sleep so kneeling before you isn’t ideally what he should be doing, but it’s what he needs if it means to be this close to you.

you lift your head up slightly, just enough to be able to brush your lips against his. it only takes a second before he’s kissing you back more firmly, the barely-there-touches not enough. the kiss is slow and sweet and filled with unspoken affirmations of love.

he only pulls away to breathe and god you wish you could see those blue eyes right now. maybe they’d be staring at your lips, or your own eyes or maybe they’d be closed as he indulged himself in the sparks that your kisses left behind.

pressing one more kiss to his lips, nose, then cheek, you nod your head to the hallway, “can we get ready for bed?”

gojo’s blindfold shifts as he furrows his brows. “you can go to bed, i’ll join you in a minute baby.” his large hand pats down your hair, frizzy from sleeping on the sofa’s cushions. “you’re half asleep,” he adds with a slight tease as your head instinctively drops into his touch, eyes fluttering closed.

“if you think i’m leaving you for a second, you’re an idiot gojo satoru,” you blindly swat at his chest in response of such an outrageous offer. how dare he think the two of you can exist in the same apartment and not be less than a feet away from each other? 

gojo chuckles under his breath and took your wrist into his hand, holding it over his heart. “i love you.”

your eyes open and you can’t stop yourself from grinning – like the man before you isn’t your boyfriend of years, like you’re both teenagers again confessing for the first time, “i love you more, toru.” if it were any other night he’d fake offence, starting up a playful argument in which he would emphasise that that was in fact a lie. you’d never be able to comprehend how much he truly loves you. but this isn’t any other night; this is tonight and after three nights without, he thinks he’ll give you this one. 

the first thing you do once you’re both in the bathroom is lift off his blindfold, dropping it into the laundry basket next to the sink. you left the main bathroom light on so you are having to rely on the light from the hallway and the moon that spills in through the window.

gojo winces slightly still at the use of his eyes with no barrier between him and the world. you press what you hope is a comforting kiss to his jawline as you silently continue with your own routine – removing any remnants of make up and plaiting your hair. 

this is usually how it goes: the two of you simple co-existing as gojo finally lets his guard down, his body finally realising the overuse and lack of energy it had been running on. then, once you’ve pat your damp face down with a towel, you help gojo with his minimal skincare routine.

“satoru,” you say once you’ve almost finished rubbing the moisturiser into his porcelain skin.

“yes, gorgeous?” he hums quietly, the ghost of a smile on his face as he looks down at you. 

“i love you.”

he’s giddy when he kisses you again, dipping down so you don’t have to try and reach his height. the kiss only lasts several seconds but it didn’t need to last any longer for you not to feel all the emotions behind it; the ‘i’m sorry i’m not here enough’s; the don’t give up on me’s; the ‘please always be here when i come home’s.  

“never stop.” it’s not a demand from the world’s strongest sorcerer, it’s a plea from your tired and lonely boyfriend. 

several minutes later and the two of you are curled up in your sheets together. your legs are hooked together as you face each other. initially, you had tried telling him quietly about your day, something to take his mind off of whatever horrors he had experienced whilst away, but your quiet voiced melted into whispers, and your whispers into light snores as you slipped easily into an unconscious state.

“night my love,” gojo ghosts his hand over your cheek and body as his eyes take mental screenshots of every inch of you. he wouldn’t sleep tonight. tonight is all about ensuring that you are okay. he’d never openly admit to the overwhelming fear he experiences every time he leaves you alone – you, gojo satoru’s (the strongest sorcerer alive) girlfriend. he is untouchable, however you are everything but.

so tonight he’d stay awake, to hold you and to whisper sweet nothings as you shift in your sleep unbeknownst because, for as long as he is there, you are safe.

a/n. honestly not my fav bit of writing I've ever done but I found it in my drafts and I did like SOME bits so here you go. next thing I post will either be the next part of snapshot or take me back to before :)

[dots3a]

The international world is watching this bridge collapse, causing the temporary closure of a major American port, and I wonder if they're thinking about how fragile American infrastructure is because of so many decades of relentless, unchecked growth that has come at the cost of the initial safety of and future buttressing of aging infrastructure.

The United States government was created by and for human traffickers and it has operated as one would expect a government created by and for human traffickers to operate. There is little consideration of human cost. There is little consideration of human safety. People who have galvanized the populace of the country to demand things like their own safety and fair treatment are literally murdered by this government.

There was nothing around that very important, very high traffic bridge to protect it from collision. If you look at pictures of the collapsed bridge, you'll see electrical poles and towers around it, all of them are surrounded by barriers so that boats can't just careen into them and take them out. There was nothing like that to protect the bridge designed for human beings.

The fragility of this empire is on display, while this empire is supporting a pariah state that is in direct violation of international law.

Wonder what's gonna happen.