#Platform Capitalism

[probablyasocialecologist]

Take the planetary computer to its logical end under platform capitalism: every inch of the earth is mapped and monitored. Carbon flows are predicted. A red flag fire warning for a forest in Australia triggers an automatic sell-off of carbon futures; someone’s bank account is crushed while they sleep. Now imagine the same platform is tracking species. Now do people. A fluctuation in the weather forecasts migrants: send more boats to Lampedusa.

All this is simultaneously hyperbolic and a logical extension of current trends. Maybe take it into what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism—nature’s behavioral surplus fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what it will do, which are traded in behavioral futures markets.

Automated machine processes not only know our behavior but also shape our behavior at scale. With this reorientation from knowledge to power, it is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us.

This births a new species of power Zuboff calls “instrumentarianism”—shaping human behavior toward others’ ends. Now instead of human beings, do birds. Now do fish. Now do trees. If all this data is blackboxed, unknowable, and used to make a profit for a mega platform, that’s a horrific future—though if it was going to come to pass, you’d think it would have more hype than it does today.

Holly Jean Buck, Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero is Not Enough

[lil-tachyon]

Shitposts I made because my engagement is way down on twitter and insta recently. Funnily enough though tumblr's been going stronger than ever. Go figure!

[tietensgo]

Thoughts on the Karl Jacobs thread

Market share may be good for the company, but it’s not necessarily good for you, the customer. I think Karl could do better in being aware of these types of nuances in the future.

On Apr 4 Karl replied to the Twitch Support Twitter account with some thoughts about their announcement that they were going to implement sponsored streams on Twitch.

Karl, in a four-tweet reply thread, stressed that he was “wildly unimpressed” and called the implementation a “malicious and manipulative bandaid solution”,  arguing that Twitch should not implement sponsored streams, and should instead focus on growth and market share over profitability. This seemed odd to me, that Karl would suggest that a company as large as Twitch was misstepping by trying to do something so egregious as turn a profit. But it appeared I was in the minority, going by the overwhelmingly favorable replies and quote tweets.

So I made this post. Just to present another way of thinking about this issue :)

Is growth and market share a good thing for a company to hold? Sure, for the company. In fact, increasingly the attitude of startup companies is to ignore profits for longer and longer time periods so they can get exactly that- the lion’s share of a market/user base (think Amazon, Uber). However, we have to remember two things:

There is a real cost (money, and people) to doing business this way

The monetary debt that is racked up has to come due at /some/ point, and users often pay the price

1: The cost of growth - regular companies without large pockets are unable to compete with growth companies, going out of business and leaving all the power in the hands of a few giant corporations

Amazon notoriously operated at razor thin (to nonexistent) profit margins for years. They /purposefully/ sold their merchandise for less than it was worth, operating at a loss specifically so they could put competitors out of business. Diapers.com, Zappos, nearly Barnes & Noble, likely several others that were too small to be mentioned - competitors gone, absorbed, or maimed. Uber purposefully used introductory pricing, lowering their fees to make their inroads into the market, cannibalizing Yellow Cab. All for the sake of growth. Amazon kept its edge by copying real products from real hard working people and making rip-off versions so that they don’t have to do any development work and instead can capitalize on the success of anyone that comes along.

THIS is how growth works - get big, and get big fast, and eff the poor guy who is in the way, even if their product is /better/. (Even if their product is priced the way it is so they can afford to pay their employees!!)

And if this seems too abstract (companies compete all the time, so what?), it’s real to you - the more growth tactics put competitors out of business, the more power the few companies left will hold. And they don’t always use it well.

Have you ever tried to get a hold of Instagram or YouTube if someone falsely flags your post/video? The recommended method (known by large creators as well, even though they have representatives to help them get around it) is not to go through the company’s appeal process, it’s to go to Twitter and AT the company! Ticketmaster, which holds 70% of the ticket market, implements service fees on top of the ticket price (some which go to the venue, some which they take as profit) - and these can be pricey, but if you want to see major acts, you’re stuck!

Market share may be good for the company, but it’s not necessarily good for you. The more power a single corporation has, the less they have to pay attention to any individual customer’s needs, so you’re sol if you have issues with how they treat you - they have a million more users waiting to replace you.

2: Growth companies rack up costs that have to be paid back, and these costs are often passed on to the customer

Growth companies lose money on their products through introductory pricing, (and paying employees and buying server space and and and) but they can’t stay making no profits forever for (at least) two reasons:

a - unfavorable business conditions and

b - competitors with bigger pockets.

A - Not too long ago, a virus no one saw coming impacted the entire world, closing 700,000 businesses in the US alone. These businesses went under because they had no money. It might be ‘annoying’ that Twitch is introducing sponsored streams, but these streams bring in money to help keep the doors open in case any unforeseen events happen in the future. It’s good for Twitch to be profitable, it’s like having a savings account of funds to dip into in bad weather times.

B - Growth companies have to fight /other/ growth companies. Netflix was happy putting Blockbuster out of business... until it met Disney+ and Amazon Prime and HBO Max and and and. Twitch was happy without sponsored streams... until Kick and YouTube decided to push for streaming. These growth companies are fine making no money as long as they’re the biggest fish - they can always milk their users for money later. But the moment they find a competitor who can steal their users and put them out of business, suddenly the scramble is on for cash.

Where does the cash to keep the doors open come from? In some way, shape or form, the user generally has to pay for it. Either they do what Uber did and bring prices back up once they want to turn a profit or they do what Netflix is doing and introduce an ad-based tier/no password sharing, or they do what YouTube did and introduce ads or what Twitch is doing and kill the 70/30 split for their favorites and introduce sponsored streams - eventually all of these companies have to stop eating loses and make a plan for profitability, and that price hike or decline in the user experience will always come after (sometimes years after) they have lured in enough users with introductory rates that no one can meaningfully complain.

So what do we do? And what does this mean for what Karl tweeted?

I think we need to slow the roll with the growth tactic stuff. Profitability is not a bad word (see: Apple). It (generally) means you have a good product/service/idea and it’s selling well. What is ‘malicious and manipulative’ might actually be the way growth companies do business, putting competitors out of commission through unfair pricing. Having to turn a profit might actually force them to /compete/ in the marketplace instead of undermine it.

I think Karl is coming from a good place in trying to speak up for the users and creators of the site, who might get annoyed at having to sit through a sponsored stream or annoyed at having to do them. And that’s fair! We need that kind of advocacy, goodness knows Twitch has issues (low discoverability on the platform, for example). He talks about wanting to keep Twitch from ‘exploiting its creators’ and stop ‘massive layoffs’. That’s great! (You know what might stop massive layoffs? Profits)  But the way to do it is not, in my opinion, to subscribe to flawed business methodologies that result in the consolidation of power in the hands of a few corporations at the expense of users.

Instead.

I think what Karl could focus on is advocating that the creators and those who work at Twitch should see a larger percentage of the profits that the company makes. It might be easier to do a sponsored stream or sit through one when you know Twitch is handing over 70% of the revenue to the creator, or that Twitch is using the revenue to support well paid employees and not lay them off in hard times! I think Twitch could consider including creators in the decision making process of the platform whose influence they help to build. Honestly, I actually think Twitch should even look into whether its business model fundamentally is sound when it can be so easily replicated or poached (*ahem* Kick/YouTube *ahem* Ludwig). These are all tough questions that need to be asked.

But it’ll take time to figure them out. And I think it would be nice if Twitch gets a little bit of our support and patience in addition to our skepticism as they try to figure it out.

[1-800-dreamgirl]

this is what everyone has been saying!! no one is looking at celebrities for political statements, but they should and must use their platform to amplify the voices of those who need and most importantly be against this genocide!!

[fundgruber]

Gefälschte Zulassungen und Kennzeichen, Sozialversicherungsbetrug: Die Diskussion um Uber, Freenow, Bolt und Co, große Plattformen, die angetreten sind, das Taxigewerbe aufzumischen, dreht sich am Montag im Innenausschuss des Abgeordnetenhaus um die kriminellen Teile des Gewerbes. »Das ist ein Sumpf, den wir da entdeckt haben«, sagt etwa Britta Behrendt (CDU), Staatssekretärin für Klimaschutz und Umwelt. Ein Befund, in dem sich sowohl Regierung als auch Opposition einig sind. Laut Antje Kapek, Sprecherin für Verkehrspolitik der Grünen, handelt es sich »nicht nur um ein bisschen Urkundenbetrug«, sondern um organisiertes Verbrechen. Kirsten Dreher, Direktorin des Landesamts für Bürger und Ordnungsangelegenheiten (Labo), das für die Zulassung von Mietwagenunternehmen zuständig ist, berichtete davon, dass 1661 Fahrzeuge aus dem Verkehr genommen worden seien. »Die Bestandsüberprüfungen haben ihre Wirkung gezeigt«, sagt sie dazu. Insgesamt seien 29,99 Prozent der Fahrzeuge ohne Konzession tätig gewesen, so Staatssekretärin Behrendt. 94 Strafverfahren und 83 Ordnungswidrigskeitsverfahren wurden eingeleitet.

[onawhimsicot]

i know not many people would want to read a 10,000 word article about the minecraft end poem and how the author, Julian Gough, was never fairly compensated for his work and has made it public domain.

But it's a very well-written and heartfelt read, and he makes it very clear that none of this is a cash-grab and despite the fact that he is essentially a starving artist in this capitalist society, he only mentions his financial struggles despite Minecraft's huge huge success at the bottom of this article and not in the tweets so as to not dilute his message.

Anyway, I just think it'd be cool if those who are able to could support him in some way whether it be subscribing to his substack or donating to his paypal (that's linked in the article, you can ctrl + F to find it easier), that's all.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This is your brain on fraud apologetics

In 1998, two Stanford students published a paper in Computer Networks entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

https://research.google/pubs/pub334/

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/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The co-authors were Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, and the “large-scale hypertextual web search-engine” they were describing was their new project, which they called “Google.” They were 100% correct — prescient, even!

On Wednesday night, a friend came over to watch some TV with us. We ordered out. We got scammed. We searched for a great local Thai place we like called Kiin and clicked a sponsored link for a Wix site called “Kiinthaila.com.” We should have clicked the third link down (kiinthaiburbank.com).

We got scammed. The Wix site was a lookalike for Kiin Thai, which marked up their prices by 15% and relayed the order to our local, mom-and-pop, one-branch restaurant. The restaurant knew it, too — they called us and told us they were canceling the order, and said we could still come get our food, but we’d have to call Amex to reverse the charge.

As it turned out, the scammers double-billed us for our order. I called Amex, who advised us to call back in a couple days when the charge posted to cancel it — in other words, they were treating it as a regular customer dispute, and not a systemic, widespread fraud (there’s no way this scammer is just doing this for one restaurant).

In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor hassle, but boy, it’s haunting to watch the quarter-century old prophecy of Brin and Page coming true. Search Google for carpenters, plumbers, gas-stations, locksmiths, concert tickets, entry visas, jobs at the US Post Office or (not making this up) tech support for Google products, and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it’s several of the top ads.

This kind of “intermediation” business is actually revered in business-schools. As Douglas Rushkoff has written, the modern business wisdom reveres “going meta” — not doing anything useful, but rather, creating a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who want to pay for those things, and squatting there, collecting rent:

https://rushkoff.medium.com/going-meta-d42c6a09225e

It’s the ultimate passive income/rise and grind side-hustle: It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to discover a whole festering nest of creeps on Tiktok talking about how they pay Mechanical Turks to produce these lookalike sites at scale.

This mindset is so pervasive that people running companies with billions in revenue and massive hoards of venture capital run exactly the same scam. During lockdown, companies like Doordash, Grubhub and Uber Eats stood up predatory lookalike websites for local restaurants, without their consent, and played monster-in-the-middle, tricking diners into ordering through them:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-are-beautiful/#man-in-the-middle

These delivery app companies were playing a classic enshittification game: first they directed surpluses to customers to lock them in (heavily discounting food), then they directed surplus to restaurants (preferential search results, free delivery, low commissions) — then, having locked in both consumers and producers, they harvested the surplus for themselves.

Today, delivery apps charge massive premiums to both eaters and restaurants, load up every order with junk fees, and clone the most successful restaurants out of ghost kitchens — shipping containers in parking lots crammed with low-waged workers cranking out orders for 15 different fake “virtual restaurants”:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/01/autophagic-buckeyes/#subsidized-autophagia

Delivery apps speedran the enshittification cycle, but Google took a slower path to get there. The company has locked in billions of users (e.g. by paying billions to be the default search on Safari and Firefox and using legal bullying to block third party Android device-makers from pre-installing browsers other than Chrome). For years, it’s been leveraging our lock-in to prey on small businesses, getting them to set up Google Business Profiles.

These profiles are supposed to help Google distinguish between real sellers and scammers. But Kiin Thai has a Google Business Profile, and searching for “kiin thai burbank” brings up a “Knowledge Panel” with the correct website address — on a page that is headed with a link to a scam website for the same business. Google, in other words, has everything it needs to flag lookalike sites and confirm them with their registered owners. It would cost Google money to do this — engineer-time to build and maintain the system, content moderator time to manually check flagged listings, and lost ad-revenue from scammers — but letting the scams flourish makes Google money, at the expense of Google users and Google business customers.

Now, Google has an answer for this: they tell merchants who are being impersonated by ad-buying scammers that all they need to do is outbid them for the top ad-spot. This is a common approach — Amazon has a $31b/year “ad business” that’s mostly its own platform sellers bidding against each other to show you fake results for your query. The first five screens of Amazon search results are 50% ads:

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

This is “going meta,” so naturally, Meta is doing it too: Facebook and Instagram have announced a $12/month “verification” badge that will let you report impersonation and tweak the algorithm to make it more likely that the posts you make are shown to the people who explicitly asked to see them:

https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/2/21/23609375/meta-verified-twitter-blue-checkmark-badge-instagram-facebook

The corollary of this, of course, is that if you don’t pay, they won’t police your impersonators, and they won’t show your posts to the people who asked to see them. This is pure enshittification — the surplus from users and business customers is harvested for the benefit of the platform owners:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

The idea that merchants should master the platforms as a means of keeping us safe from their impersonators is a hollow joke. For one thing, the rules change all the time, as the platforms endlessly twiddle the knobs that determine what gets shown to whom:

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

And they refuse to tell anyone what the rules are, because if they told you what the rules were, you’d be able to bypass them. Content moderation is the only infosec domain where “security through obscurity” doesn’t get laughed out of the room:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

Worse: the one thing the platforms do hunt down and exterminate with extreme prejudice is anything that users or business-customers use to twiddle back — add-ons and plugins and jailbreaks that override their poor choices with better ones:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

As I was submitting complaints about the fake Kiin scam-site (and Amex’s handling of my fraud call) to the FTC, the California Attorney General, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and Wix, I wrote a little Twitter thread about what a gross scam this is:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1628948906657878016

The thread got more than two million reads and got picked up by Hacker News and other sites. While most of the responses evinced solidarity and frustration and recounted similar incidents in other domains, a significant plurality of the replies were scam apologetics — messages from people who wanted to explain why this wasn’t a problem after all.

The most common of these was victim-blaming: “you should have used an adblocker” or “never click the sponsored link.” Of course, I do use an ad-blocker — but this order was placed with a mobile browser, after an absentminded query into the Google search-box permanently placed on the home screen, which opens results in Chrome (where I don’t have an ad-blocker, so I can see material behind an ad-blocker-blocker), not Firefox (which does have an ad-blocker).

Now, I also have a PiHole on my home LAN, which blocks most ads even in a default browser — but earlier this day, I’d been on a public wifi network that was erroneously blocking a website (the always excellent superpunch.net) so I’d turned my wifi off, which meant the connection came over my phone’s 5G connection, bypassing the PiHole:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/28/shut-yer-pi-hole/

“Don’t click a sponsored link” — well, the irony here is that if you habitually use a browser with an ad-blocker, and you backstop it with a PiHole, you never see sponsored links, so it’s easy to miss the tiny “Sponsored” notification beside the search result. That goes double if you’re relaxing with a dinner guest on the sofa and ordering dinner while chatting.

There’s a name for this kind of security failure: the Swiss Cheese Model. We all have multiple defenses (in my case: foreknowledge of Google’s ad-scam problem, an ad-blocker in my browser, LAN-wide ad sinkholing). We also have multiple vulnerabilities (in my case: forgetting I was on 5G, being distracted by conversation, using a mobile device with a permanent insecure search bar on the homescreen, and being so accustomed to ad-blocked results that I got out of the habit of checking whether a result was an ad).

If you think you aren’t vulnerable to scams, you’re wrong — and your confidence in your invulnerability actually increases your risk. This isn’t the first time I’ve been scammed, and it won’t be the last — and every time, it’s been a Swiss Cheese failure, where all the holes in all my defenses lined up for a brief instant and left me vulnerable:

https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/

Other apologetics: “just call the restaurant rather than using its website.” Look, I know the people who say this don’t think I have a time-machine I can use to travel back to the 1980s and retrieve a Yellow Pages, but it’s hard not to snark at them, just the same. Scammers don’t just set up fake websites for your local businesses — they staff them with fake call-centers, too. The same search that takes you to a fake website will also take you to a fake phone number.

Finally, there’s “What do you expect Google to do? They can’t possibly detect this kind of scam.” But they can. Indeed, they are better situated to discover these scams than anyone else, because they have their business profiles, with verified contact information for the merchants being impersonated. When they get an ad that seems to be for the same business but to a different website, they could interrupt the ad process to confirm it with their verified contact info.

Instead, they choose to avoid the expense, and pocket the ad revenue. If a company promises to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” I think we have the right to demand these kinds of basic countermeasures:

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/

The same goes for Amex: when a merchant is scamming customers, they shouldn’t treat complaints as “chargebacks” — they should treat them as reports of a crime in progress. Amex has the bird’s eye view of their transaction flow and when a customer reports a scam, they can backtrack it to see if the same scammer is doing this with other merchants — but the credit card companies make money by not chasing down fraud:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/mastercard-visa-fraud

Wix also has platform-scale analytics that they could use to detect and interdict this kind of fraud — when a scammer creates a hundred lookalike websites for restaurants and uses Wix’s merchant services to process payments for them, that could trigger human review — but it didn’t.

Where do all of these apologetics come from? Why are people so eager to leap to the defense of scammers and their adtech and fintech enablers? Why is there such an impulse to victim-blame?

I think it’s fear: in their hearts, people — especially techies — know that they, too, are vulnerable to these ripoffs, but they don’t want to admit it. They want to convince themselves that the person who got scammed made an easily avoidable mistake, and that they themselves will never make a similar mistake.

This is doubly true for readerships on tech-heavy forums like Twitter or (especially) Hacker News. These readers know just how many vulnerabilities there are — how many holes are in their Swiss cheese — and they are also overexposed to rise-and-grind/passive income rhetoric.

This produces a powerful cognitive dissonance: “If all the ‘entrepreneurs’ I worship are just laying traps for the unwary, and if I am sometimes unwary, then I’m cheering on the authors of my future enduring misery.” The only way to resolve this dissonance — short of re-evaluating your view of platform capitalism or questioning your own immunity to scams — is to blame the victim.

The median Hacker News reader has to somehow resolve the tension between “just install an adblocker” and “Chrome’s extension sandbox is a dumpster fire and it’s basically impossible to know whether any add-on you install can steal every keystroke and all your other data”:

https://mattfrisbie.substack.com/p/spy-chrome-extension

In my Twitter thread, I called this “the worst of all possible timelines.” Everything we do is mediated by gigantic, surveillant monopolists that spy on us comprehensively from asshole to appetite — but none of them, not a 20th century payment giant nor a 21st century search giant — can bestir itself to use that data to keep us safe from scams.

Next Thu (Mar 2) I'll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who's-who of European and US trustbusters. It's livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free:

https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration

On Fri (Mar 3), I'll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival:

https://elevate.at/diskurs/programm/event/e23doctorow/

[Image ID: A modified version of Hieronymus Bosch's painting 'The Conjurer,' which depicts a scam artist playing a shell-game for a group of gawking rubes. The image has been modified so that the scam artist's table has a Google logo and the pea he is triumphantly holding aloft bears the 'Sponsored' wordmark that appears alongside Google search results.]

[soapdispensersalesman]

Spotify don't be a terrible service challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)

[nando161mando]

Idiocracy the movie plays out in the RNC

[gynoidgearhead]

moderation wage labor is inhumane and this is one functional reason social media is a fundamentally insolvent concept

[probablyasocialecologist]

To paraphrase the words of the historian E. P. Thompson, this world will not rise like the sun at an appointed time; it will have to be made.

Phil Jones, Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism

[dailyanarchistposts]

Transphobia is hate speech.

We do not use the phrase ‘hate speech’ lightly. When we describe something as ‘hate speech’ we are talking about speech qualitatively different from mere bigotry, prejudice or ignorance. Hate speech is a weapon, wielded against the marginalised. Hate speech serves, constructs or reinforces systems of oppression that operate upon its targets. Hate speech is characterised by an attempt to dehumanise and delegitimise the very existence of its target, and in this sense it is ultimately eliminationist. By dehumanising its targets, hate speech encourages and supports further violence, marginalisation and oppression.

At its core, transphobia denies the legitimacy and reality of sex and gender diverse peoples’ experience of gender. It is worth highlighting the extreme consequence of this denial. Trans people face extremely high levels of homelessness, poverty, physical and sexual violence, and social ostracism. Other systems of oppression, such as sexism and racism, deny the humanity, intelligence and worth of their targets. Transphobic attacks, in denying the reality of trans peoples’ experience of gender, in effect deny that trans people even exist.

Transphobia is advanced in our midst by those claiming to be radical feminists. Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists portray trans people as gender ‘imposters’ and argue that they undermine feminist organising. This is often accompanied by the intentional misgendering and involuntary outing of individual trans people. Through their actions and ideas, Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists promote discrimination, bullying and create the ideological basis for the further oppression of an already marginalised group of people

While these ideas are often put forward under the guise of feminism, they are no part of a genuinely libertatory feminist or anarchist movement. Those advocating transphobia must be confronted and rejected in the same manner we should confront and reject racists, homophobes and misogynists. We must deny those advocating hate speech any legitimacy in our midst.

Anarchist Affinity calls on all other anarchist groups and individuals to join us in rejecting transphobia by refusing to provide a platform to any person or group advancing transphobic hate speech, and by refusing to share a platform with persons perpetuating transphobia.

[alpaca-clouds]

Solarpunk Game Ideas: (Action) Platformers & Metroidvanias

Let me talk about my absolute favorite genre of games. I love action platformers and especially I love Metroidvanias, that most of the time come along in the form of action platformers. (No, this is not the blog to discuss on whether or not a metroidvania needs to be a platformer or not.)

My own Solarpunk dream game would be a metroidvania, to be sure, though I sadly am just not capable of developing it on my own. (If you wanna help: just contact me - I would love to get a small team together for it.)

But let's go over this.

The Issue

The main issue with action platformers/metroidvanias in terms of Solarpunk is, that again, a lot of people struggle with thinking of conflicts for Solarpunk - especially conflicts that would create some sort of violence. Because action platformers almost necessarily need some sort of violence. After all it is usually about shooting or stabbing or at least jumping onto enemies of some sort.

So, how do we do that? Well, I have three ideas to offer. Mind you, my own little idea for the game I would want to make is not among those. :P

Idea #1: The Rogue AI

So, a simple idea that would work rather well in any sort of futuristic Solarpunk setting is simply a rogue AI. Imagine this: We have the Solarpunk utopia. But to archive this, we had at some point needed AI. Be it to fix the planet, or be it for certain work, or maybe AI had been used in bringing down the former capitalist system. Or heck, maybe the former capitalist system was run by an AI, that by now has been shut down.

Either way: The AI goes rogue, and it turns against humans. Maybe not worldwide (we are still on the entire action platformer thing, where usually the area is a smaller area like a big building or maybe a village/town), but maybe it starts up in a building complex or a city where the AI is kept. Something like that.

But it will start to control all sorts of robots, that then attack the humans. Maybe there are also some humansthat get possessed by the AI in some way.

And the main character is trying to get to the mainframe to shut down the AI once and for all. So the enemies fought are robots and maybe controlled humans. Simple.

Idea #2: Nature's Revenge

Another basic idea that can well work with Solarpunk ideas is one that works more on the basis of fantasy. Once more the reminder: Solarpunk can have fantasy themes. Nothing about the genre says that it has to be pure non-fantastic fantasy, and I will still argue that solarpunk does not even need to be scifi.

But to keep with the scifi optics we can still go for a futuristic world for this one. Again: We have set up the Solarpunk future, we try to fix nature, but we are not quite there yet. Because fixing nature after all the destruction is not that easy. And as nature starts to regenerate, something in it awakes. Some sort of nature spirits. And they are angry about everything humanity has done to nature. They do not care that humanity is trying to correct for this. Think something along the lines of Princess Mononoke or Nausicaä.

The protagonist is someone who is trying to protect the humans in the place where the spirits showed up. And they are forced to fight the spirit. This could also be an interesting basis for maybe being allowed to find way to then dispatch bosses non-lethally and find a solution to the conflict that does not involve destroying the spirits. Some creativity would be cool! Especially given platformers rarely offer alternatives to violence.

Idea #3: Capitalism vs Solarpunk

For the last idea, let's please remember that Solarpunk does not need to be set in a world where utopia was fully reached. In this idea we will either have a world where some parts of the world life under Solarpunk - or even the full world. But here is the thing: Just like some people want the monarchies back and wish back slavery and shit, even in this Solarpunk world there are some people who believe that they were better of under Capitalism. Because usually people idealize the past and believe they would have been among the top 5% in any other time - rather than among the exploited class. And those people try for a coup.

Maybe with guns, or - we are scifi after all - with some sort of robots or mechas. But either way, they try to grab control over some important city or piece of infrastructure. And the protagonist is of course forced to find a way to fight against them and prevent the takeover in some way.

Those are just some little ideas with how to deal with the setting and the genre. And maybe... Well, maybe I was able to inspire someone!

And if you are interested in creative Solarpunk endeavors, I would love to invite you into the Solarpunk Creatives community! :)

[kitteecassee]

i’m gonna make myself get dressed up and walk over to the bar that’s right near me,

anyone wanna buy the cat a drink? payment info on my website here meow

i refuse to allow myself to continue wallowing in my sad i reFUSE so we’re gonna a fake it until my smile becomes genuine again 😤👏🏾

OUTSIDE WORLD HERE I GO

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

According to “Mass Animal Deaths Heat up Fight To Permanently Halt SeaWorld Operations” by Inside the Magic, bird conservation organizations are literally begging SeaWorld to stop their fireworks shows because of how many native birds they’re killing. But go ahead keep acting like their rescue operations justify all the harm/trauma they caused to the wild cetaceans they captured and the wildlife they continue to put in harm’s way in the name of human entertainment. Using ur large platform to assuage ppl’s guilt about spending their money at seaworld *directly* perpetuates this harm. I don’t know how you call yourself a proponent of animal welfare and then support this mega corporation that puts profits above all else

Hi there it seems like you think that I support corporate SeaWorld and all the decisions it makes. I am against a lot of things that SeaWorld does.

This includes: setting off fireworks, building roller coasters instead of updating animal habitats and the cruel layoffs that they inflicted on their employees during COVID.

I agree with the letter put forward, San Diego Audubon did a great job documenting the very real impacts of fireworks on seabirds. Firework events like the 4th of July and New Years Eve are extremely stressful for all animals - as detailed in the letter there were also illegal fireworks along with the firework shows in the City of San Diego and SeaWorld.

SeaWorld stopping their fireworks shows in favour of something potentially less impactful like a drone show would be a great start, but fireworks shows - legal or illegal, would continue regardless. Whether that would reduce the impact or not remains to be seen, but I think SeaWorld should stop their firework shows.

The problem is, it is a corporate company that wants to give people want they want so they buy tickets. Guests like fireworks. People expect fireworks on the 4th of July, NYE ect. I personally think we need to evolve as a society and move away from fireworks in general but that’s not a popular opinion.

Now, to your point about impact on wild whale populations, there is certainly not enough data to conclude that populations were unable to recover from the captures.

You can see with this graph that the Southern Residents were able to recover their numbers after the capture periods, but unfortunately populations continued to decline due to other factors. This includes anthropogenic causes like boat traffic and decreasing food supply with increasing dam building and more efficient fishing methods to take more Chinook Salmon from the orcas. And ongoing effects of bioaccumulation of toxins like PCBs and DDTs.

Some scientists argue that the population decrease from capture resulted in less competition and increased survival rate. Others say that the impacts are still being felt today. There’s not exactly a consensus on it because it’s hard to measure the effects.

While I disagree with corporate SeaWorld and a lot of decisions they make, I will continue to support the work of SeaWorld’s team of marine mammal specialists and veterinarians. And support accredited facilities that are able to create positive welfare states for their animals, even if the conditions aren’t perfect. I have no issue with animals entertaining people as long as the animals have agency and choice and show positive welfare states.

Whether you like it or not SeaWorld just have more money and resources than most other facilities simply due to their ability to appeal to a wide demographic (including people who like fireworks) - that sells tickets. And yeah a portion of that goes to CEO salaries and stakeholders (not nearly enough goes to the workers). But having that luxury of that much money means getting high end diagnostic equipment, paying for medications, antibiotics, scans, developing new technologies to assist in rehab and rescue work, pay staff to work in shifts for standing in the stranding pool to hold up a baby dolphin.

That’s why they’re usually in the front lines of rescue work, often collaborating with other rescues. Because their resources are invaluable to the rescue and rehabilitation of marine animals.

These resources are also giving scientists the ability to collect baseline data and compare to wild populations - and develop technologies and test these with animals in human care before using it in field work.

I disagree with a black and white approach to animal welfare and find it to be detrimental in the long term. Welfare is an evolving state that is always in flux and depends on a variety of factors.

SeaWorld’s fireworks contributed to seabird deaths - but not acknowledging that even if SeaWorld stopped their fireworks, there would continue to be fireworks on the 4th of July that would continue to cause bird deaths isn’t helpful to protecting seabirds.

SeaWorld have rescued, rehabbed and released or provided a permanent home for over 40,000 animals. It was funded by the same company that also put on fireworks shows. The two facts can exist side by side. A company can cause harm while also creating positive change.

The reality of capitalism is that to rescue animals you need to have the resources to do so. People visit SeaWorld to ride roller coasters and ignore the animals (which I can never understand) - yet it is the ability to appeal to a wide demographic that makes money and that money is what can be used for incredibly important conservation and rescue projects.

However, I would still say all of that wouldn’t matter if the welfare of the animals in their care was extremely poor. Which, based on their ability to achieve multiple levels of high standard accreditation like AZA and other signs of positive welfare in basic observation , doesn’t seem to be the case.

I encourage anyone to try to take a more nuanced approach to animal welfare and never just accept something at face value. And if you don’t like SeaWorld, that’s okay! There’s a lot of ethical discussions to be had. But I can only convey the experience and knowledge that I have in both research, hands on practical cetacean welfare experience and general experience and understanding of how marine mammal facilities operate.

[theknucklehead]

They just announced a remake of Yooka-Layle.

Now I would say it's unnecessary to remake something that's only 7 years old, but I'm fine since I did enjoy this game and it's the closest we've gotten to a remake or proper sequel to Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie.