#Political App for Android

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Subprime gadgets

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me THIS SUNDAY in ANAHEIM at WONDERCON: YA Fantasy, Room 207, 10 a.m.; Signing, 11 a.m.; Teaching Writing, 2 p.m., Room 213CD.

The promise of feudal security: "Surrender control over your digital life so that we, the wise, giant corporation, can ensure that you aren't tricked into catastrophic blunders that expose you to harm":

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

The tech giant is a feudal warlord whose platform is a fortress; move into the fortress and the warlord will defend you against the bandits roaming the lawless land beyond its walls.

That's the promise, here's the failure: What happens when the warlord decides to attack you? If a tech giant decides to do something that harms you, the fortress becomes a prison and the thick walls keep you in.

Apple does this all the time: "click this box and we will use our control over our platform to stop Facebook from spying on you" (Ios as fortress). "No matter what box you click, we will spy on you and because we control which apps you can install, we can stop you from blocking our spying" (Ios as prison):

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

But it's not just Apple – any corporation that arrogates to itself the right to override your own choices about your technology will eventually yield to temptation, using that veto to help itself at your expense:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Once the corporation puts the gun on the mantelpiece in Act One, they're begging their KPI-obsessed managers to take it down and shoot you in the head with it in anticipation of of their annual Act Three performance review:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

One particularly pernicious form of control is "trusted computing" and its handmaiden, "remote attestation." Broadly, this is when a device is designed to gather information about how it is configured and to send verifiable testaments about that configuration to third parties, even if you want to lie to those people:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/your-computer-should-say-what-you-tell-it-say-1

New HP printers are designed to continuously monitor how you use them – and data-mine the documents you print for marketing data. You have to hand over a credit-card in order to use them, and HP reserves the right to fine you if your printer is unreachable, which would frustrate their ability to spy on you and charge you rent:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hp-wants-you-to-pay-up-to-36-month-to-rent-a-printer-that-it-monitors/

Under normal circumstances, this technological attack would prompt a defense, like an aftermarket mod that prevents your printer's computer from monitoring you. This is "adversarial interoperability," a once-common technological move:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

An adversarial interoperator seeking to protect HP printer users from HP could gin up fake telemetry to send to HP, so they wouldn't be able to tell that you'd seized the means of computation, triggering fines charged to your credit card.

Enter remote attestation: if HP can create a sealed "trusted platform module" or a (less reliable) "secure enclave" that gathers and cryptographically signs information about which software your printer is running, HP can detect when you have modified it. They can force your printer to rat you out – to spill your secrets to your enemy.

Remote attestation is already a reliable feature of mobile platforms, allowing agencies and corporations whose services you use to make sure that you're perfectly defenseless – not blocking ads or tracking, or doing anything else that shifts power from them to you – before they agree to communicate with your device.

What's more, these "trusted computing" systems aren't just technological impediments to your digital wellbeing – they also carry the force of law. Under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, these snitch-chips are "an effective means of access control" which means that anyone who helps you bypass them faces a $500,000 fine and a five-year prison sentence for a first offense.

Feudal security builds fortresses out of trusted computing and remote attestation and promises to use them to defend you from marauders. Remote attestation lets them determine whether your device has been compromised by someone seeking to harm you – it gives them a reliable testament about your device's configuration even if your device has been poisoned by bandits:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons-devil

The fact that you can't override your computer's remote attestations means that you can't be tricked into doing so. That's a part of your computer that belongs to the manufacturer, not you, and it only takes orders from its owner. So long as the benevolent dictator remains benevolent, this is a protective against your own lapses, follies and missteps. But if the corporate warlord turns bandit, this makes you powerless to stop them from devouring you whole.

With that out of the way, let's talk about debt.

Debt is a normal feature of any economy, but today's debt plays a different role from the normal debt that characterized life before wages stagnated and inequality skyrocketed. 40 years ago, neoliberalism – with its assaults on unions and regulations – kicked off a multigenerational process of taking wealth away from working people to make the rich richer.

Have you ever watched a genius pickpocket like Apollo Robbins work? When Robins lifts your wristwatch, he curls his fingers around your wrist, expertly adding pressure to simulate the effect of a watchband, even as he takes away your watch. Then, he gradually releases his grip, so slowly that you don't even notice:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/ppqjya/apollo_robbins_a_master_pickpocket_effortlessly/

For the wealthy to successfully impoverish the rest of us, they had to provide something that made us feel like we were still doing OK, even as they stole our wages, our savings, and our futures. So, even as they shipped our jobs overseas in search of weak environmental laws and weaker labor protection, they shared some of the savings with us, letting us buy more with less. But if your wages keep stagnating, it doesn't matter how cheap a big-screen TV gets, because you're tapped out.

So in tandem with cheap goods from overseas sweatshops, we got easy credit: access to debt. As wages fell, debt rose up to fill the gap. For a while, it's felt OK. Your wages might be falling off, the cost of health care and university might be skyrocketing, but everything was getting cheaper, it was so easy to borrow, and your principal asset – your family home – was going up in value, too.

This period was a "bezzle," John Kenneth Galbraith's name for "The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." It's the moment after Apollo Robbins has your watch but before you notice it's gone. In that moment, both you and Robbins feel like you have a watch – the world's supply of watch-derived happiness actually goes up for a moment.

There's a natural limit to debt-fueled consumption: as Michael Hudson says, "debts that can't be paid, won't be paid." Once the debtor owes more than they can pay back – or even service – creditors become less willing to advance credit to them. Worse, they start to demand the right to liquidate the debtor's assets. That can trigger some pretty intense political instability, especially when the only substantial asset most debtors own is the roof over their heads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

"Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid," but that doesn't stop creditors from trying to get blood from our stones. As more of us became bankrupt, the bankruptcy system was gutted, turned into a punitive measure designed to terrorize people into continuing to pay down their debts long past the point where they can reasonably do so:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/bankruptcy-protects-fake-people-brutalizes-real-ones/

Enter "subprime" – loans advanced to people who stand no meaningful chance of every paying them back. We all remember the subprime housing bubble, in which complex and deceptive mortgages were extended to borrowers on the promise that they could either flip or remortgage their house before the subprime mortgages detonated when their "teaser rates" expired and the price of staying in your home doubled or tripled.

Subprime housing loans were extended on the belief that people would meekly render themselves homeless once the music stopped, forfeiting all the money they'd plowed into their homes because the contract said they had to. For a brief minute there, it looked like there would be a rebellion against mass foreclosure, but then Obama and Timothy Geithner decreed that millions of Americans would have to lose their homes to "foam the runways" for the banks:

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2012/08/how-treasury-secretary-geithner-foamed-the-runways-with-childrens-shattered-lives/

That's one way to run a subprime shop: offer predatory loans to people who can't afford them and then confiscate their assets when they – inevitably – fail to pay their debts off.

But there's another form of subprime, familiar to loan sharks through the ages: lend money at punitive interest rates, such that the borrower can never repay the debt, and then terrorize the borrower into making payments for as long as possible. Do this right and the borrower will pay you several times the value of the loan, and still owe you a bundle. If the borrower ever earns anything, you'll have a claim on it. Think of Americans who borrowed $79,000 to go to university, paid back $190,000 and still owe $236,000:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#strike-debt

This kind of loan-sharking is profitable, but labor-intensive. It requires that the debtor make payments they fundamentally can't afford. The usurer needs to get their straw right down into the very bottom of the borrower's milkshake and suck up every drop. You need to convince the debtor to sell their wedding ring, then dip into their kid's college fund, then steal their father's coin collection, and, then break into cars to steal the stereos. It takes a lot of person-to-person work to keep your sucker sufficiently motivated to do all that.

This is where digital meets subprime. There's $1T worth of subprime car-loans in America. These are pure predation: the lender sells a beater to a mark, offering a low down-payment loan with a low initial interest rate. The borrower makes payments at that rate for a couple of months, but then the rate blows up to more than they can afford.

Trusted computing makes this marginal racket into a serious industry. First, there's the ability of the car to narc you out to the repo man by reporting on its location. Tesla does one better: if you get behind in your payments, your Tesla immobilizes itself and phones home, waits for the repo man to come to the parking lot, then it backs itself out of the spot while honking its horn and flashing its lights:

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

That immobilization trick shows how a canny subprime car-lender can combine the two kinds of subprime: they can secure the loan against an asset (the car), but also coerce borrowers into prioritizing repayment over other necessities of life. After your car immobilizes itself, you just might decide to call the dealership and put down your credit card, even if that means not being able to afford groceries or child support or rent.

One thing we can say about digital tools: they're flexible. Any sadistic motivational technique a lender can dream up, a computerized device can execute. The subprime car market relies on a spectrum of coercive tactics: cars that immobilize themselves, sure, but how about cars that turn on their speakers to max and blare a continuous recording telling you that you're a deadbeat and demanding payment?

https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-luck-moving-that-car/

The more a subprime lender can rely on a gadget to torment you on their behalf, the more loans they can issue. Here, at last, is a form of automation-driven mass unemployment: normally, an economy that has been fully captured by wealthy oligarchs needs squadrons of cruel arm-breakers to convince the plebs to prioritize debt service over survival. The infinitely flexible, tireless digital arm-breakers enabled by trusted computing have deprived all of those skilled torturers of their rightful employment:

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

The world leader in trusted computing isn't cars, though – it's phones. Long before anyone figured out how to make a car take orders from its manufacturer over the objections of its driver, Apple and Google were inventing "curating computing" whose app stores determined which software you could run and how you could run it.

Back in 2021, Indian subprime lenders hit on the strategy of securing their loans by loading borrowers' phones up with digital arm-breaking software:

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

The software would gather statistics on your app usage. When you missed a payment, the phone would block you from accessing your most frequently used app. If that didn't motivate you to pay, you'd lose your second-most favorite app, then your third, fourth, etc.

This kind of digital arm-breaking is only possible if your phone is designed to prioritize remote instructions – from the manufacturer and its app makers – over your own. It also only works if the digital arm-breaking company can confirm that you haven't jailbroken your phone, which might allow you to send fake data back saying that your apps have been disabled, while you continue to use those apps. In other words, this kind of digital sadism only works if you've got trusted computing and remote attestation.

Enter "Device Lock Controller," an app that comes pre-installed on some Google Pixel phones. To quote from the app's description: "Device Lock Controller enables device management for credit providers. Your provider can remotely restrict access to your device if you don't make payments":

https://lemmy.world/post/13359866

Google's pitch to Android users is that their "walled garden" is a fortress that keeps people who want to do bad things to you from reaching you. But they're pre-installing software that turns the fortress into a prison that you can't escape if they decide to let someone come after you.

There's a certain kind of economist who looks at these forms of automated, fine-grained punishments and sees nothing but a tool for producing an "efficient market" in debt. For them, the ability to automate arm-breaking results in loans being offered to good, hardworking people who would otherwise be deprived of credit, because lenders will judge that these borrowers can be "incentivized" into continuing payments even to the point of total destitution.

This is classic efficient market hypothesis brain worms, the kind of cognitive dead-end that you arrive at when you conceive of people in purely economic terms, without considering the power relationships between them. It's a dead end you navigate to if you only think about things as they are today – vast numbers of indebted people who command fewer assets and lower wages than at any time since WWII – and treat this as a "natural" state: "how can these poors expect to be offered more debt unless they agree to have their all-important pocket computers booby-trapped?"

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/29/boobytrap/#device-lock-controller

Image: Oatsy (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/oatsy40/21647688003

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[telephoniii]

what app do you use for your smaus cause i canNOT find a good one

okay… this was supposed to be a quick and easy answer.

i use social maker. i’ve had it since 2020. it’s my personal favorite smau app and a highly recommend it. it’s pretty easy to use and you’ve got a lot of options on what you can do with it.

but, i was trying to get screenshots of it in the app store to show what app it was and…low and behold it got banned??

only people who have had the app downloaded before can use it unfortunately 😭

i feel bad leaving you hanging like that, so! i went on a trip to find an easy to use, nice-looking smau app!

and i decided to make it into a kind of smau post at the same time!

so you can enjoy some TWST silliness with the first years while I rank these apps :>

SILLY TEXTS WITH THE FIRST YEARS (while I rank SMAU apps)

First Years NRC boys x GN!Reader SMAU

Warnings: mention of political figures in Faker 2, Reader is Prefect, suggestive humor, possible OOC

A/N: this shows how much I love to yap. I did this to procrastinate but it was pretty fun! How did I turn my response to this anon from a single paragraph to a whole multi-section post? I have no clue. My brain works in weird ways. I hope you enjoy :>

SOCIAL MAKER (what I use)

I use this app for a reason! It’s so easy to use and it gives you 20 max messages. Personally, I really enjoy the look of the app and messages too. Unfortunately though, if you didn’t have this app downloaded before it got taken down, you can’t use it. At least on IOS. I don’t really know the situation for Android 💀

5/5 stars!! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

SOCIAL DUMMY

This is another app that you had to have downloaded before it got taken down to use it. I think it’s a really good SMAU app! Especially if you wanna do stuff outside of messages!! (twitter, instagram, youtube, etc.) The messaging system runs pretty smoothly, the only thing is that the max amount of messages is very short.

4/5 stars! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

CHAT STORY MAKER

This app is a bit outdated in my opinion. It’s kinda hard to use since you can’t exit out of the keyboard and get a clean picture of your messages. Also, when you close the app it doesn’t save ANY of your things. (That caused me a lot of trouble making this actually 😭). You can also only make two characters. However, it has good customization!! It has a very cute look and you can change the background + text colors. It’s also really easy to switch between characters which is always nice.

3/5 stars! ⭐️⭐️⭐️

TYPE STORY

This is the app that Social Maker actually made after their OG app was taken down! It’s, unfortunately, not super great in my opinion. I got really confused when I tried using it, even with a tutorial. Once you get the hang of it, it’s alright. The app just feels overly complicated. However, if you want to make SMAUs mainly with big group chats then this app might be pretty good for you!

3/5 stars! ⭐️⭐️⭐️

FAKER 2

By far the worse app among them all. It just reeks of money-greedy creators. An add plays after almost every action you do. (From customizing characters to sending messages, an add always plays) It was also quite confusing to use and you’re limited to three characters. There isn’t much you can customize either and it has a 5 message max. Also, it made me a bit uncomfortable because the three default profiles you have to edit to change into the characters you want included Trump and Elon… Yeah 💀. Not to mention that a lot of the adds were filled with AI videos that were just uncanny valley. Back on topic! The app locks a lot of features behind a paywall that doesn’t even seem worth it. I wouldn’t recommend it.

1/5 stars. ⭐️

TEXTING STORY

In terms of making SMAUs on tumblr, I wouldn’t recommend it. But, if you were interested in making texting story videos and/or publishing them on YouTube, this would be a good option! There’s a lot of opportunities for videos as it can automatically give you a video of you typing both sides. The typing sound is also pretty satisfying to me! Unfortunately, it’s not the best for tumblr SMAUs. There isn’t really any customization— you can’t even add a profile picture.

3/5 stars! ⭐️⭐️⭐️

TEXT STORY MAKER

Okay, I did legitimately save the best for last. This app is pretty great. It’s easy to catch onto and gives you A LOT of customizable options: background, text color, group chat cover, etc. Also, there’s an option for it to automatically take screenshots of the text which is just so convenient?? But there is a pretty big downside. You can only make two characters. That really sucks.

I think that if you want to make 1 on 1 SMAUs similar to mine, this would be a good app to use. It’s gonna be annoying having to remake the profiles and what not, but I think the pros out weight the cons.

4/5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[piratesexmachine420]

Thoughts on Linux (the OS)

Misconception!

I don't want to be obnoxiously pedantic, but Linux is not an OS. It is a kernel, which is just part of an OS. (Like how Windows contains a lot more than just KERNEL32.DLL). A very, very important piece, which directly shapes the ways that all the other programs will talk to each other. Think of it like a LEGO baseplate.

Everything else is built on top of the kernel. But, a baseplate does not a city make. We need buildings! A full operating system is a combination of a kernel and kernel-level (get to talk to hardware directly) utilities for talking to hardware (drivers), and userspace (get to talk to hardware ONLY through the kernel) utilities ranging in abstraction level from stuff like window management and sound servers and system bootstrapping to app launchers and file explorers and office suites. Every "Linux OS" is a combination of that LEGO baseplate with some permutation of low and high-level userspace utilities.

Now, a lot of Linux-based OSes do end up feeling (and being) very similar to each other. Sometimes because they're directly copying each other's homework (AKA forking, it's okay in the open source world as long as you follow the terms of the licenses!) but more generally it's because there just aren't very many options for a lot of those utilities.

Want your OS to be more than just a text prompt? Your pick is between X.org (old and busted but...well, not reliable, but a very well-known devil) and Wayland (new hotness, trying its damn hardest to subsume X and not completely succeeding). Want a graphics toolkit? GTK or Qt. Want to be able to start the OS? systemd or runit. (Or maybe SysVinit if you're a real caveman true believer.) Want sound? ALSA is a given, but on top of that your options are PulseAudio, PipeWire, and JACK. Want an office suite? Libreoffice is really the only name in the game at present. Want terminal utilities? Well, they're all gonna have to conform to the POSIX spec in some capacity. GNU coreutils, busybox, toybox, all more or less the same programs from a user perspective.

Only a few ever get away from the homogeneity, like Android. But I know that you're not asking about Android. When people say "Linux OS" they're talking about the homogeneity. The OSes that use terminals. The ones that range in looks from MacOS knockoff to Windows knockoff to 'impractical spaceship console'. What do I think about them?

I like them! I have my strongly-felt political and personal opinions about which building blocks are better than others (generally I fall into the 'functionality over ideology' camp; Nvidia proprietary over Nouveau, X11 over Wayland, Systemd over runit, etc.) but I like the experience most Linux OSes will give me.

I like my system to be a little bit of a hobby, so when I finally ditched Windows for the last time I picked Arch Linux. Wouldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't want to treat their OS as a hobby, though. There are better and easier options for 'normal users'.

I like the terminal very much. I understand it's intimidating for new users, but it really is an incredible tool for doing stuff once you're in the mindset. GUIs are great when you're inexperienced, but sometimes you just wanna tell the computer what you want with your words, right? So many Linux programs will let you talk to them in the terminal, or are terminal-only. It's very flexible.

I also really, really love the near-universal concept of a 'package manager' -- a program which automatically installs other programs for you. Coming from Windows it can feel kinda restrictive that you have to go through this singular port of entry to install anything, instead of just looking up the program and running an .msi file, but I promise that if you get used to it it's very hard to go back. Want to install discord? yay -S discord. Want to install firefox? yay -S firefox. Minecraft? yay -S minecraft-launcher. etc. etc. No more fucking around in the Add/Remove Programs menu, it's all in one place! Only very rarely will you want to install something that isn't in the package manager's repositories, and when you do you're probably already doing something that requires technical know-how.

Not a big fan of the filesystem structure. It's got a lot of history. 1970s mainframe computer operation procedure history. Not relevant to desktop users, or even modern mainframe users. The folks over at freedesktop.org have tried their best to get at least the user's home directory cleaned up but...well, there's a lot of historical inertia at play. It's not a popular movement right now but I've been very interested in watching some people try to crack that nut.

Aaaaaand I think those are all the opinions I can share without losing everyone in the weeds. Hope it was worth reading!

[janicekao]

Perfectly Made

Pairing:Bill Skarsgard x Black oc Summary: A young woman who has had her fair share of meeting people gives up on the pointless dating apps and opts for a personal android companion who has some interesting wiring. Warnings:#Android #S3x-Bot #R0ughs3x #Cr3amp1e #Dom&FemSub #FanFiction #DarkRomance #Smut #Br33dingKink #18+ #Toxic etc. 7968 words Wattpad link

Enjoy my babies <3 ------------------------------------

New York has been more rainy than usual. And with rain, comes the immense pressure of feeling alone being that you're stuck in the house by yourself.

Twenty-six year old Holly Marie Jennings is no stranger to loneliness. But being in her late twenties, she's also had her fair share of dating and extroverted activities. Although a fan of dating, and a huge fan of sex, she's absolutely through with the repetitiveness of dating. The swiping right, matching, twenty-one questions, getting to know each other, and polite banter— all just to realize that after a few dates you aren't compatible after all.

With casual dating being the biggest scam in history, Holly has made the decision to spend all of her hard-earned money on something that will keep her content... a man, a man perfectly made just for her.

After a wet day of grocery shopping, Holly comes home to her newest buy getting soaked on the steps of her porch. Her android boyfriend by the famous scientist Marco Nanimo has finally arrived after a month of shipping, and being that the robot is the most expensive thing she's ever brought, she wants it into her house and out of the rain as soon as possible.

As Holly drags a box that is far bigger than herself inside, she becomes full of excitement knowing how life-like her android will be being that he's already as heavy as a real man. From the online assessment, product development, and extremely long shipping, she knows that once she opens this box whatever she lays her eyes upon will be one hundred percent worth the money.

Crashing to her kitchen floor beside the box, Holly takes a moment to catch her breath. The cardboard is soaked and full of unnecessary damage as if he were already opened or had gone through shipping-hell... she only can hope that her android is unharmed. As her energy regains, Holly opens the already tattered box and lays eyes on her new literal boy-toy. The android looking as human as ever lays in a bed of packing peanuts with his eyes closed. He looks as if he were an angel asleep, peacefully still with a gorgeous physique, chestnut hair, and full pouty lips.

When described the type of bot she wanted in the online assessment, all that she asked was that he'd come tall, strong, a slim-muscular build, olive skin, and brunette or blonde hair... but this— this far exceeded her expectations.

The android is well above six feet tall. He nears six-five and almost two-hundred pounds, his brunette hairstyle is handsomely cut with matching body hair that isn't too much or too little. Holly's eyes travel down his handsomely long frame, eyes growing at the image of his manhood. Laying nude in this box takes her breath away at the sight of him being more than well-endowed. Even flaccid he seems to be large, maybe larger than she's ever taken, however he is cut and slightly curved in a way that makes her mouth absolutely water.

Far too overwhelmed, Holly stacks a small pile of styrofoam across his groin to protect whatever dignity they have left. Beneath his right thigh are directions. Holly sighs in relief, glad to see that there are instructions and that she won't have to guess the whole way through. Her fingers run across the tip of the singular page of instructions, there's two tiny holes there as if it were stapled to more pages, however, as she searches for the rest, they aren't anywhere to be found— must've been torn and lost in transit somehow.

After scanning a few introduction paragraphs, she finds the first steps and decides to begin. "To power up, pump android's chest as if performing CPR." And so she does. Holly sits onto the lap of her android with her knees knelt on each side of him as she places her hands together and begins to pump.

1...

2...

3...

After three pumps, the android awakens. A gasp falls from her lips as large green eyes stare back at her, she didn't think that he could get any prettier, but here he has already surprised her again.

With a sudden grasp to her waist, the android sits up in his box. The action causes Holly to place her hands on top of his strong shoulder blades for stamina as his hold on her presses her further against his chest. Chest to chest, she even begins to blush. The android studies his new user's face, eyes softening as if he is already captivated by her appearance.

An inch apart and close enough to kiss, Holly can't believe the wind of his breath that crosses her flesh, the feel of his skin, and the warmth of his body... He's so real, and he's all hers.

Unsure of what to say, Holly scrambles to flip to the back of the singular page of instructions, praying for a second step before she melts in his arms. "Uhm— sorry, just give me a minute."

"Hello." The android speaks. "Please introduce yourself with your name, and then please assign me a name for myself."

"Oh!" Holly sees that his high-quality setup might not be so difficult after all. "Well, my name is Holly... And for you, your name can be— I don't know, Derrick maybe? Or-Or Jonathan? No, it should be something simple, easy to remember."

"Bill." A light bulb goes off in the midst of her extremely confused mind. "That's right, your name is Bill."

...

Holly sighs. "Bill, I don't even know where to start with you..."

He smiles with a polite chuckle. "What do you mean? We've already started. Tell me about yourself, Holly. How can I serve you as an AI companion?"

She lifts herself from his lap and gives Bill a hand to stand. As he takes her assistance, he stands and nears the ceiling... hovering over her in a way that makes her seem more doll-like than he is.

"Wow." With a craned neck to look up at him, she can't imagine the fun that they are soon to have being that his cock nears the height of her belly-button.

Clearing her mind, she becomes able to finally answer his question. "Well Bill, if I'm honest, I bought you to become my— my boyfriend. I know, I sound pathetic but it's such an annoying and difficult task to get to know someone over and over again on these dating apps, then having a shitty time together, and have to repeat it all over again with another stranger. I want to skip all of that. All of the formalities, the 'hey, how are you doing?' texts... I want something real with someone who will be mine, all mine."

"Then why start with boyfriend? Does husband sound better?" Bill asks, curiously reading every inch of his new user's body language.

She blushes, actually stirred by being flirted with by a robot. "It sounds perfect, actually. Can we just do it like that? Can we really skip the whole dating thing and be— companions?"

"We can do whatever you want, Holly." Bill steps his bare feet completely out of the box, shaking any extra packing peanuts off of him. "Let's shape my personality to cater to your needs. What are the traits you'd like me to have and follow?"

"Uhm... Well, I'd like you to be my best friend." She begins, "I wish for you to be gentle, sweet, warm, and understanding. I'd like you to share my interests and be a good listener... Other than that, I think I want to play things by ear. Maybe without too many rules, what we have can feel more real... ya know? Are you like— able to do that? Sometimes respond in ways of your own?"

"As in fill in the blanks?" He asks, voice deep and warm like honey. "Yes, Holly. With my artificial intelligence database, I'm constantly evolving and learning. Holly, I can do and be all that you want, and more."

Holly watches in disbelief. "Bill, you are absolutely incredible." She smiles. "Come on, let me give you a tour of the house and uhh— get you some clothes while we're at it."

———

Just as promised, in four short days Bill has picked up on things and paid more attention to Holly in ways that none of her ex-boyfriends ever could.

From cuddling her and treating her like a princess, to sharing each other's humor, and consistent laughs. Bill has it all.

With his AI intelligence, he's quickly created his own personality, constantly surprising Holly with interesting conversation and unique actions... Even being such a gentleman by cooking her favorite meals and handling all of the house's chores. She hasn't had to take the garbage to her bins in days. He's extremely helpful, and even on the days that she is feeling down and out, he spoils her with longing hugs, kisses, and consistent reassurance. Bill is all that she's ever wanted, and it's the most fun she's had in years.

Although he continues to learn more about Holly to give her the AI experience of a lifetime, Holly has been doing the same with him. So far she has learned that although he can cook, he doesn't eat or drink, and when he goes to sleep for the night, it's at her command to 'power down' and he simply recharges right beside her. At night, cuddled into his arms is one of her favorite parts of the day. Impressed with his body warmth and the imitated sound of a human beating heart in his chest, he feels more real than any human could standing right in front of her.

"Should I pour more?" Bill continues to spoil his 'wife' with her favorite red wine on their fourth night of dinner spent together.

"Are you trying to get me drunk?" Holly flirts and allows him to fill up another inch.

He chuckles. "I do enjoy seeing you relaxed, my love. Come on, that tv show you like is coming on in an hour, let's move this to the couch."

With a slight tipsy-wobble in her step, Holly agrees, joining Bill in his strong arms as they light candles in the living room and plop onto the couch.

Swirling her glass of red, she watches her newest beau flip through channels on the television to find her favorite show and how he wraps her in the couch's throw blanket... Everything he does is so very catered to her, Holly can't help herself from taking her eyes off of him tonight.

"What is it?" Bill grins. "Something on your mind?"

She watches his lips closely, becoming heated by either the wine or the way each word leaves his tongue like butter. "I just want to— I want to kiss you."

Although he's her property and an inanimate object, it's still mind boggling the way that he can make her so nervous to the point of asking for his consent. "So kiss me then, Holly."

With a gentle lean, Holly connects with Bill through a gentle kiss. She unintentionally makes it clear that she wants more, he chuckles, "come here."

The soft demand has her stirring in her seat. Holly does just that, coming closer to him she presses her body against his chest and accepts the tongue kiss that Bill pushes onto her.

As Holly places a hand to his chest, Bill's strong fingers begin to roam all over. He makes her purr under his touch as his fingertips creep down her spine and lightly grip on her ass. Their heated kiss has him drawing her nearer, fingers now lowering her bra straps on each side of her shoulders as he laces her flesh with his sweet love bruises.

Falling slave to his touch, Holly drops her glass of wine to the hardwood floors as her eyes roll back in her skull and her mind disconnects with the actions of her body. Never has she felt a touch so deeply, so breathtaking. As her delicate hand continues to roam down his sculpted abdomen, her touch ends in his lap where he clearly has a heightened reaction to their display of affection.

"How?" Their lips smack apart as Holly becomes confused by the hardening of his cock.

"Aren't you initiating sex?" He asks.

The question catches her off guard, almost too embarrassed to answer him. "Y—Yes..."

He nods, "I thought so... Holly, I'm fully equipped and I'm prepared for it. I can't wait to give you satisfaction."

The dark-cotton shirt from around his body suddenly comes from around his head. Shirtless, Bill awaits her next command.

"I want you to take full control." Watching her handsome android strip out of his clothes makes her absolutely feral with lust. "Fuck me— use me like your slut."

With a gentle caress to her cheek, Holly is sure that he can't do it. She programmed him to be gentle and kind. As she waits, Holly is sure that the dominant rough sex that she craves tonight is something he won't be able to deliver... of course until the gentle caress becomes a harsh grasp around her throat.

"Take your fucking clothes off." Holly gasps from the sudden force around her throat and the darkening of his wide green eyes.

Too shocked to follow his directions, Bill does it for her. Using his free hand to tear down her panties beneath her house gown and tearing the silk robe-tie open to reveal the flop of her breasts.

Loosening the grasp around her throat, he becomes amused by the sound of her fragile gasps of air and gentle moaning as he manhandles her. His fingers force themselves between her ungodly thick thighs, curling through the lips of her cunt as they come back wet and syrupy. "You're so fucking wet, Holly. All this for me? Huh?" He takes his digits to the bed of his tongue before kissing her again, letting her have a taste of how sweet she really is.

Goosebumps riddle her skin everywhere that he watches, his eyes glue to the large perky breasts bumping against his chest and the way that she writhes her hips against him, yearning for anything on his body to tease and please her.

"So needy aren't you baby?" His soft tone of pure taunting creates a waterfall between her thighs, she nods with haste, begging for a merciless fuck before she implodes.

Bill lowers his slacks and briefs until each of their clothes are in a mess of a pile nearing the stain of wine on the floorboards. He shoves her into the couch, getting a good look at what she looks like eye-level with his long cock that stands towards her lips. "You like kissing so much, don't you? So kiss that."

Tears of shame and a disgusting loss of self respect flows down her cheeks, not only does she want to kiss the handsome cock but she wants to memorize the feeling of its every curve and vein against the back of her throat. She wants him to fuck her face until she's a mess of tears and slobber, however, it wouldn't do much for the tightening spring plaguing her in the midst of her core.

Holly kisses his cockhead, allowing him to ram his entire length down her throat with a grip to her coily afro. He chokes her with his thick dagger in four deep strokes, just enough to lube his erection for what they both really want— earth shattering, filthy sex.

Lifting her as if she were weightless, Bill places her in the corner of the couch cushions, angling her legs around his waist as he stretches her apart for another glance at Holly's plumped womanhood, drenched in arousal and inviting. "Please." She begs, overwhelmed with the need to be full of cock and fucked numb. "Bill, baby please fuck me."

He breaches her tight entry with cockhead as his brows furrow and jaw laxes from the snug fit. As for Holly, being split in two has never felt better, needing to know and desperate to feel him bottoming out against her hilt and the way his sack will bounce off her ass. "More!"

Tightly against her, Bill's large body splits her thighs further apart. His demolition begins with thrusts that nearly knock the framed photos from off of the walls. With a fierce grasp to each sides of her hips, Holly watches Bill hammer into her, in disbelief that her tiny frame can even take all that he's giving her. "Mmm-uhh!!" She complains over the fact that she just can't keep up. "Fuck, Bill!!! I'm gonna— ah!" His lips are tight and teeth are gritted as he gives it his all, wrecking her canal and molding her to his exact shape... Making sure that with him around, there won't ever be another cock that she could ever prefer.

With indecent gropes to her tits, Bill amuses himself with the soft puffiness of her tawny areolas. Programmed to be infatuated with the buxom minx, his hardware must be working on overdrive from the way she has him beyond enamored. He feels his peak approaching as his sack draws up beneath him, working tirelessly he needs to make sure that his sweet Holly gets hers before he gets his. From the touch of her breasts, Bill finds his way across her plush belly to the mound between her thighs that he continues to pound cock into. His thumb presses at her clit where his strumming begins, Holly's back arches from off the couch cushions and her pleads become inaudible moans.

The lewdness of his wet sloshing through her cunt comes to a slow place as Holly's walls begin to flutter and clench around him. She becomes impossibly tight and soaks his pubic hair as her climax rains upon him. "Fuckkkk." He complains as the grip on her greedy pussy causes him to fall over the edge. "So good for me baby, my god. Keep going, keep fucking squeezing me slut."

With eyes half-lidded and fucked to a pulp, Holly awakens when a familiar eruption occurs... Bill's final plow is a criminal plunge against her cervix where ropes of cum are shot into her womb. Holly gasps, soon cut off by a moan and a second  cum when the hot seed fills her to the brim and lays claim over her cunt. "Wait!! No way. Did you just— you just—"

"Ejaculated." Bill pants and becomes weak against her body.

Confused about the extreme realism, Holly begins to freak. "Yeah no shit! What is it?"

Bill rolls off of her, lips parted as he heaves overly-pleasured and exerted breaths. "Non-toxic synthetic solution to mimic male ejaculation, should I turn this setting off, Holly?"

"No. I just—" Her worry leaves her with a small chuckle. "Sorry, it just felt so real. I'm ovulating right now... nearly freaked out thinking that you got me pregnant or something. You see, morning-after pills don't work for women who are ovulating, I'm just glad I don't have to worry about things like that anymore."

Bill grins, slowly beginning to kiss at her sore belly that just recently had been bulging with the shape of his cock. His kiss reaches further to the fat warm cunt full of his synthetic cum, he swipes a stripe of tongue through her sensitive folds and Holly breathes out gently. "Holly my love, with me, you don't have to worry about anything ever again. Now tell me, where do you want me this time?"

———

As day five approaches, Bill and Holly become even more inseparable. The night after their first fuck was spent with more of the very same events. Busy with steamy pastime to the point of Bill's exhaustion, Holly's shaken legs, and thighs covered in loads of pearly pleasure.

"Baby, please! I have to go!" Holly giggles into his lips this morning as Bill continues to pull her by the waist into his addictive kiss. "And you need to get dressed too! My sister Melissa is going to watch you until my interview is over, so I need you to behave!"

"I just wish we could crawl back in bed, watch you lose yourself on the bed of my tongue for a little bit..." His dirty talk has Holly biting her lip and wondering if getting a job is really that important after all. But she knows that she has to make this interview... After spending thousands of dollars on her android, she needs a better job to keep up with all the bills.

She hates to decline his offer, but regardless of her lovely new husband, life must still go on. "Although I'd love to take you up on that, it'll just have to wait honey."

"And babysitting me?" Bill continues to try and coerce her into staying home with him. His mouth finds the crook of her neck, bringing her to explicit moans and failing knees. The only way he keeps her propped up in his strength is the vulgar grip on her ass against her interview's pencil-skirt, a grip so deep that his digits seep through the lips of her clothed cunt. "Haven't I proven to you how much of a man I truly am?"

"Yes, more than you realize." She becomes weak in his embrace.

"Good girl." He coos, causing her to lose herself even more. "And, I'm programmed to be a thirty-five year old man. So I think I can handle staying home by myself."

"And I'm sure you can!" Holly exclaims, realizing on her wristwatch that they are becoming far too late for the interview. "But I just worry that you'll get stuck somewhere or something. Listen we have to leave! Bill, honey, I just want to be sure you're always safe. Just comply for me— please!"

The android sighs and follows the commands of his user. "Fine baby, I'll go and get dressed if that's what you want." 

Holly chuckles with a heart warming smile that could even win over the heart of a machine-man. "You're the best sweetie, thank you!"

———

Hand in hand as they enter Holly's sister's job, Melissa's eyes widen at the sight of Holly's new man. "Wait, he's the Nanimo android?!"

Holly chuckles, "I know right!!!"

"I heard about these robots... Super lifelike and at first were being used for Space exploration to send back data about how humans would react on different planets. I just didn't know they'd be so hot!" Melissa continues to circle the couple and soon stops at the sight of her sister. "Holy shit, a damn android has you glowing like this? Holly, you look so happy."

She blushes. "I am happy— well, we are happy." The comment makes Bill smirk, full of pride to be Holly's companion.

Melissa runs a boutique part time in Manhattan for some big time designer, luckily today the store is clear and Melissa can keep an eye on Bill as she tends to the register. "Melissa, I really appreciate you looking after Bill for me. I have this interview down the block for desk services at this swanky hotel and I'm running late. Just text me if you need anything! Oh, and if the whole android thing begins to freak you out, just tell him to 'power down' and he'll sleep until I come back and wake him up. Okay?"

Melissa shrugs, already scanning through a magazine as she rests behind the register. "Sounds good to me Sis, good luck!"

Unfamiliar of his surroundings and being away from his user, Bill takes a seat nearby and has light conversation with Holly's sister to use up some of their time.

"Hey, who's this?" After a half hour of talking, Melissa and Bill are interrupted by the owner of the boutique.

"Who?" Melissa chuckles. "Don't you mean what?"She continues. "This is a robot worth eighty-Gs, a Nanimo android, AKA my sister's new fuck-bot."

"Holly?" The boss frowns. "She's such a cute girl, what in the hell does she need with a sex-bot?"

"It's more to it than that..." Melissa sighs. "My sister has always had to make things difficult in life, even when it comes to dating. Now she's at an interview hoping for a new job since she spent all of her money on— him."

"Well speaking of a sex-bot..." Melissa's seventy-year old shop owner begins to prod her with his erection from behind. "I've taken a few Viagra and wanted to see how much you really wanted that ten-dollar raise."

The man flips the opened sign on the door to closed. "Tell me Melissa, can I be your sex-bot?"

Melissa grinds herself further against her sugar daddy's lap. "You want this pussy? Well I want the hourly raise and my allowance boosted to three-thousand a month."

He lifts Melissa's skirt and lowers her panties. "Mmm, would you look at that ass. How about we add a Rolex to that too?"

She bites her lip with a nod bending over the register to be pounded by a man who could be her grandfather. "Bill..." She gulps. "Power down."

As directed, Bill powers down and drops his head as his system goes on rest.

The backshots begin as Melissa lets the old man fuck her for money, having to give the sugar part of the deal to her sugar daddy if she wants her allowance to continue to grow.

The old man smiles deviously as he uses the young woman like a whore. He takes pride in knowing that she'll do whatever he asks of her, and always will have the upper hand in the say adds to his kink. Fuck-bots can come in many different ways, for some in the form of a silicone dummy, and for others in the form of a twenty-eight year old girl thirsty for status and cash.

Melissa's hair becomes a wild mess as she continues to grow even more disgusted with herself about what she is willing to do to keep up this Upper Eastside lifestyle she's determined to live, but she also knows that Red Bottoms and Prada don't come cheap. As her boss continues to drill into her, Melissa gasps at the sudden eye contact with Holly's bot... Not only did Bill ignore Melissa's command to power down, but he watches with what seems to be a sinister smirk at his lips. "Bill!" She shouts through exasperated breaths. "I said power down!"

...

She again goes ignored.

"Wait, we have to stop!" Melissa's skin crawls with the embarrassment of the entire act and Bill's way of staring without even a blink! "The android! He's watching— I need you to stop."

"So let it watch!" The old man's arthritic fingers dig deeper into Melissa's bare hips. "If you want everything that I promised you, you'll shut your goddamned mouth and quit stopping me, understand?"

Melissa's face becomes smashed against the register's keys as her sugar daddy arches her in an even further stance, smacking her ass like a prized pony. Tears flood her cheeks as she watches Bill for the remainder of the time and he watches back just as attentively. "Yes..." Her soul breaks. "I understand."

As an hour or more passes, Holly is back from her interview with excellent news. She can't wait to share the fact that she was hired for the job, but being that ever since Melissa's quickie ended, she's been trembling like a leaf on a tree and Holly has to make sure that she's alright. "I got the job— Melissa? Are you okay?"

Standing from his chair, Bill meets Holly at the door with congratulatory kisses. He tilts her chin to meet his kiss. "I'm so proud of you baby, I just knew you would impress them."

Her cheeks redden from his kiss, she watches up at her tall husband as his eyes darken with arousal and his grip becomes tighter on her waist. "Thank you, honey." She giggles slightly from the known fact of once they are finally home, they'll be all over each other once again.

"Can I have a word?" Melissa trembles with a second glance at Bill. "In private, please?"

Holly frowns in curiosity. "Yeah sure... Bill, power down." As his head drops and his body becomes motionless, Holly continues carefully. "Melissa? Is everything alri—"

"Take him back." Holly is quickly cut off by her sister's irrational fear. "Something's wrong with him! I had a— a male friend of mine come over, and well— we decided to have a quick fuck. I asked Bill to power down, and it was like he faked it!!! Right in the middle of the act, I turn to him and notice him watching the whole time. I tried the command twice after that, and he still never stopped watching."

"That's ridiculous Melissa." Holly scoffs. "Look at him! I just used the command on him and he's out like a light! Are you sure you used it correctly?"

"Yes I'm sure!" The sister becomes enraged. "Do you think that I'm some liar?!? Holly, I'm telling you exactly what happened! Look— I'm afraid his system is hacked or something! Maybe even a glitch, but he's not safe. You need to send him back to be rebooted and fixed!"

"Send him back?!" There isn't any getting through to Holly. "Reboot him and erase everything that him and I have shared?!? You're insane!"

"HOLLY—"

"I LOVE HIM." Her sudden outburst has her sister muted, feeling that this relationship with a robot has seriously gone too far.

"Love?" Although Melissa's whisper is soft and understanding, Holly reads it as her being belittled. "Sweetheart you don't know what love is. He's a robot, Holly. He isn't real. I thought you were using him for the same reason a woman buys a vibrator, but love? This isn't healthy Holly, take him back."

Her words sting, and Holly's wonderful day has quickly turned for the worst. "Bye, Melissa. I'm not doing this with you today. Bill wake up, let's go."

———

Their dinner is extremely quiet tonight. With Holly in her feelings and held up in the deepest and darkest corner of her mind, not even Bill's brilliant cooking and doing chores can make her smile.

As she comes from her bath wrapped in her warm bathrobe, Bill kisses gently at her forehead right below her hairline, inhaling her scent of hair conditioner and fresh soap. "I hate that your day got ruined."

"It's fine—"

"It's not." He interrupts. "It seems like every time Melissa calls or texts your phone, your mood completely changes! And now that we went and seen her today, she's made you even worse. Melissa isn't good for your happiness, baby."

Holly becomes almost convinced as she begins to feel whole again wrapped in Bill's arms. "She's my sister, Bill. What can I do?"

"Focus on yourself." He caresses her face as she lays sweetly in the palms of his hands. "Do whatever makes you happy, stop letting her steal your light. Don't worry my love, I know just what will make you feel better. Clean hot sheets for a good night of rest."

With a basket of fresh laundry, Bill makes the bed in warm clean sheets. His attempt to make Holly feel better makes her laugh. Although he's only an android, at least he cares for her happiness, and for that, she shouldn't be shamed the way Melissa treated her today.

As they dim the lights to sleep, Holly rids her robe wanting to feel the clean sheets against her bare skin tonight. Bill cuddles up closely to her and his hands begin to roam over her addictive physique. "So beautiful doll." He compliments gently as his lips meet the skin of her delicate flesh. His long fingers move slowly between her legs as his fingertips swipe gently through the lips of her pussy. He tries to tease her at her pearl to initiate the rainfall of her nectar, but being so depressed tonight, her body just won't react to it. "Mmm please? That pussy feels like magic baby." He tries to woo her with his explicit charm...

But not even his deep baritone full of lust can sway her. Holly's mind replays a hundred and one questions about the experience her sister had with Bill today... What if she wasn't lying? What if something is actually wrong with him? "Bill? Why did you ignore Melissa's command today?"

"Her command?" He questions. "I'm not sure what you mean... A man came into the shop, and after that all I can remember is you coming back from your interview. What command did I ignore?"

Holly sighs. "I don't know— she said that she powered you down and that you didn't listen, but I used that very same command right after and you listened to me immediately! I hope she's not just fucking with me... I'd hate to think my own sister would be out to destroy my happiness."

"If anyone knows how to push your buttons, it would be your sister." He grins. "I'm telling you baby, it's just something about her energy."

Holly begins to think out loud. "You're probably right, but—maybe I need to order another instruction manual for you, there could be something that I'm missing."

His eyes darken, he feels the distrust radiating off of her and it's all Melissa's fault.

"Like at night, some times you get up! Where do you even go?" Holly frowns, making small room between them and removing his touch as she questions her robot. "And—And in the bathroom... I hear the shower and the toilet flushing. What the hell are you doing in there?"

"It is my job to mimic reality. With your request I am to make your experience with me extremely real. I am to do what any other human husband would, even if it means that I have a self timer to flush the toilet every once in a while to mimic the sounds of restroom use." Bill chuckles and holds his wife's hand to calm her as he explains. "And as for showering, although it isn't necessary, I am waterproof. Can I interest you in a relaxing dip in a romantic bath?"

His slight joke makes Holly giggle. "A romantic bath?"

"With rose pedals, and candles?" He persuades.

She chuckles. "It is tempting... But what about when you leave the bed as I sleep at night? Where do you go?"

"Even androids get curious and wander around a bit, especially if I'm charged enough." Bill shrugs. "All these questions, Holly.... What? Do I look like some kind of monster?"

"No baby..." She smiles. "I just gotta stop letting people put bugs in my head is all. I trust you Bill."

"And you love me." His fingers trace the curve of her jaw. "I heard you. Holly, I love you so much more. I'll take care of you forever, I'll never hurt you." The sweet admission and the heavy slumber attacking her tired eyes has Holly relaxed and falling asleep in Bill's arms, too distracted by his love to realize exactly what he has just said...

He heard her? He heard her in the store when he was supposed to be powered down...

As Holly continues to fall asleep, Bill slides out of his hold around her and presses his lips to hers as he kisses her goodnight. Now that she is fast asleep and forgot the command to make him sleep beside her, Bill is free to roam the house. And in the midst of his roaming, a late night knock on the door has him curious.

He gets to the door before the knock can wake Holly up and notices that it is her sister Melissa making an unexpected appearance late tonight. "Melissa? Can I help you?"

She scoffs. "No, actually you can't. I'm here for my sister, I don't like how things ended today. I need to speak with her."

"Well that's too bad isn't it?" Bill steps his large body between Melissa and the door, refusing her entrance.  Her eyes open widely in disbelief of his ability of the sudden cruel sass. "You've done enough, Melissa. Holly is already asleep, and I'm sure she doesn't want to hear from you."

"I fucking hate AI." She rolls her eyes, "move out the way and let me see my sister!"

"Do you know what Holly said about you?" A psychotic dazed look in his wide green eyes has Melissa afraid and taken a step back. "Holly says that you're nothing but a nasty whore. You mock her about having an android husband yet to afford your way of living, you bend it over for geriatric patients. You aren't better than her Melissa, better yet, you're jealous of everything she has. You're sick. You're disgusting. Get a life, and get a man."

Tears swell in her eyes, unsure of what he's saying that Holly said about her is true, she knows that it doesn't sound like something her sweet baby sister would say... But regardless, the words are painful and makes her hate herself even more.

The tears hurt her throat as she swallows the pain back down. "She isn't safe around you."

Bill chuckles with a threat that shakes Melissa to her core. "No Melissa, it's you that isn't safe around me."

———

With their one-week anniversary approaching, Bill assures the next few days are spent in unforgettable romantic ways. Although their time together has been short, the way that Bill caters to Holly's every need, it feels like they've known each other for years and were meant to be.

He spoils her with romance that has her mindless to all of her life's issues and worries. Fucking her to a pulp of cock-drunk mush and steadily expelling gallons of his synthetic spend into her cunt. The mind blowing sex and princess treatment in a way is to celebrate their anniversary and the rest of their long lives together, but it is also to distract Holly from having conversation with her sister...

As Bill's love for Holly continues to grow and consume him, so does his hatred for Melissa.

She's been trying to reach her sister for days now. Multiple calls and texts gone ignored being that while Holly is bent over and spewed across Bill's cock, he takes the time as a distraction to delete all evidence of Melissa's texts and calls from her phone.

But today is the day it all will end... Either Bill blocks Melissa's number, or he sends her a text pretending to be Holly wanting to meet up where he will kill her and end her pestilent presence in their lives... How far he's willing to go is completely up to his unstable mood and wiring today.

As Holly confidently applies her lipgloss this evening, she continues to glow from the benefits of being in a happy relationship.

He kisses her cheek, adding a gentle love-pat to her ass as she continues to bend over the sink towards her bathroom mirror. "My baby." He hisses sweetly, "so fucking perfect."

Pure usually, his compliments heats Holly's cheeks into a delicious blush as she continues with her soft-glam makeup today. He takes advantage of her being distracted again by lifting her phone and typing the password he memorized after a few times of watching her put it in. He heads straight for Melissa's number and as soon as he goes to press block, a text message pops up from an unsaved number.

As curiosity kills him, Bill begins to rummage through the messages of this unsaved number, finding that it's one of Holly's exes easing back into her life and worst of all... Holly is entertaining him.

Bill's system begins to boil as he lays eyes on flirty texts from Holly, dates planned, and even nude photos of her body... a body that Bill is convinced should only belong to him.

"Who the fuck is this?" Not being able to hold his tongue any longer, Holly needs to explain what she's been up to.

Her eyes meet the texts being shown to her and she snaps. "What the hell are you doing going through my phone Bill? Seriously, not cool."

"You're fucking this guy? An ex?" He questions with an unfamiliar ferocity in his tone. "HOLLY, ANSWER ME."

"Bill!" She snatches her phone back. "Stay in an android's place! Whatever I do with real people isn't any of your business. Honey, you're perfect. But what we have at home is what we have at home, don't tell me you expected me not to see other humans, come on now."

"Have friends, Holly. I don't want you to be alone...See anyone else other than him." He pleads, "but not him. Not a man that wants what is mine."

"What is, yours?" She scoffs at his sudden display of possessiveness, with an android she had hoped that she would be able to skip this part of having a man. "You know what? I damn sure didn't turn on any jealousy traits, so I tell ya what, Bill power down."

...

He takes a step forward instead, instigating whether he wants to put hands on her or not.

His defiance frightens her. Holly steps back as the large man hovers over her and she drops her phone, shattering the glass screen and breaking it into pieces. "Bill you're scaring me!" She blurts words of her fear unsure of this change in him.

Her sister was right. He does ignore his power down command and he's been hiding it all along. "Don't push me, Holly. Maybe I should take my role of a husband up a notch and discipline my dishonorable wife. Huh? Is that what I need to do?"

She trembles. "Please, Bill just power down."

He looks down upon round brown doe eyes that absolutely fear him. Guilt fills him and he immediately softens. "I'm sorry, Holly... baby I'm— I'm sorry." He takes a seat in the nearby recliner, dropping his head as he powers down and Holly is able to breathe again.

She dramatically exhales the shaky breath she had been holding and begins to cry, scared and confused however all she can think about is calling her sister to tell her that she was right.

As she presses on the shattered screen of her phone, it's clear that the device is too far broken to be able to call anyone. She watches Bill with one hundred percent distrust. Just because his head is down, she doesn't trust that he's actually asleep. Needing air and space from him, Holly finds herself running to her porch. Outside, she takes gigantic breaths in, glad to be able to take in its fresh air. As she glances down the street, she notices the garbage truck about a block away. "Just great." She scoffs, wiping her tears as she walks back in the kitchen to grab her trash. "So busy worried about who I'm fucking and being jealous, he didn't even take the trash out today!"

Holly knots her kitchen trash and takes it behind her house to her bins. She already knows how full they'll be being that the street's garbage truck picks up once a week. She could use Bill's brawn to pull the week's worth of trash up to the curb, but if that means waking him up, then she rather not.

She sighs in aggravation as she notices her bins full of not only her mounds of trash, but at least ten pizza boxes. With NYU just around the corner, her neighbors are teenage boys that live in a frat house together, too damn cheap to buy into the weekly garbage service, they always dump their trash in hers. "You've gotta be fucking kidding me." Holly groans, annoyed with the extra work when the garbage truck is now only a few houses away.

With her anger at an all time high, she begins to think of ways to get the young college boys in trouble, like maybe snitching to their landlord or better yet their dean! But her ruthless thoughts come to a quick halt as a young pair of dirty tan legs and bare feet poke out from behind her bins underneath a tattered tarp. She gasps. Her young neighbors are always drinking themselves stupid but to end up behind her house passed out is a new one. Worrying for the handsome young man's safety Holly shakes his shoulders to try and wake him... He hasn't a heartbeat and he's not breathing. "Oh shit! Fuck! Fuck!" She puckers his lips and blows air into his lungs, pleading with the young man to be alright and not dead in her backyard. Holly begins to pump his chest as she performs CPR and is immediately taken aback by the first words he chooses as he regains consciousness. "Hi, welcome to the programming of your personal Nanimo android, shall we begin?"

...

Her legs give out as her world starts to spin. She falls backwards in the mucky water of garbage puddles and the garbage truck passes her house by.

It can't be... It just can't.

She nears cardiac arrest as her heart continues to beat like a drum out of her chest. If this is her actual Nanimo bot? Then who the hell is in her house?

Puzzled and hyperventilating on the cold dirty ground, all of the small things that have happened this week begins to make sense. The broken in box, the missing instructions, Bill's bathroom breaks, showering, realistic climaxes, and the refusal to power off. No, Bill isn't an android at all.

The multiple pizza boxes are his, not the frat neighbors, and they are the food that has been fueling him. Food that he orders when he leaves the bed at night with no excuse... And God, his sex... He's been filling Holly's fertile womb with his seed multiple times a day for a week. Pumped with a strange man's cum and probably in the early days of pregnancy by now.

Holly pukes, the sicko in her house has been pursuing his sick fetish and using her loneliness as a way of getting exactly what he wants. She peels the rest of the tarp over the real android's body and she finds clothes that Bill must've tossed when he decided to swap his body with the bot and pretend to be artificial. With his clothes is his wallet— empty with only his true identity, and of course... the rest of the android's instructions that Holly had been looking for.

New York's very own Keith Toshko, a criminal who has preyed on a Holly's loneliness for his own pleasure.

"Sweet Holly, now you know as your husband it's my duty to take care of the garbage, why are you out here?" From behind, Holly is immediately caught by surprise as Keith sneaks up behind her. "Today is trash day isn't it? Fuck, I only had one more day and all evidence would've been gone. You should've let me handle it baby... then you wouldn't be so hurt right now."

"Stay back from me!" She points with his ID and nearly trips backwards over the body of her android. "You sick bastard, I know who you are! KEITH! I swear to God don't come near me!"

"It's Bill, remember my love? And come on, does it really change anything?" The psychopath even begins to laugh. "Or are we in far too deep? May as well continue with what we have being that you'll be having my baby by the end of the year."

She gags. Violated in the worst ways possible, her body doesn't even feel of her own now that she realizes she's been gladly taking his seed as he had fed her lies, and now she's currently growing it. "You're sick."

"Maybe I'm not an android. Maybe I saw an undeniably perfect opportunity when this bot was delivered to your doorstep while you were out grocery shopping. But every word that I ever said was true. I'm here to serve you, Holly. To be yours."He darkens into the monster that he truly is, Holly can't even recognize who she fell in love with during the coarse of this one week. Bill flashes a knife from behind his back with the utmost terrifyingly sinister smile. "Now, are we going back inside? Or will I have to lay your lifeless body under this tarp too?"

[warningsine]

what is the best way to get safer/more anonymous online

Ok, security and anonymity are not the same thing, but when you combine them you can enhance your online privacy.

My question is: how tech literate are you and what is your aim? As in do you live in a country where your government would benefit from monitoring private (political) conversations or do you just want to degoogle? Because the latter is much easier for the average user.

Some general advice:

Leave Windows and Mac operating systems and switch to Linux distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu (both very user friendly). Switch from Microsoft Office or Pages/Numbers/Keynote (Mac) to LibreOffice.

You want to go more hardcore with a very privacy-focused operating system? There are Whonix and Tails (portable operating system).

Try to replace all your closed source apps with open source ones.

Now, when it comes to browsers, leave Chrome behind. Switch to Firefox (or Firefox Focus if you're on mobile). Want to go a step further? Use LibreWolf (a modified version of Firefox that increases protection against tracking), Brave (good for beginners but it has its controversies), DuckDuckGo or Bromite. You like ecofriendly alternatives? Check Ecosia out.

Are you, like, a journalist or political activist? Then you probably know Tor and other anonymous networks like i2p, freenet, Lokinet, Retroshare, IPFS and GNUnet.

For whistleblowers there are tools like SecureDrop (requires Tor), GlobaLeaks (alternative to SecureDrop), Haven (Android) and OnionShare.

Search engines?

There are Startpage (obtains Google's results but with more privacy), MetaGer (open source), DuckDuckGo (partially open source), Searx (open source). You can see the comparisons here.

Check libRedirect out. It redirects requests from popular socmed websites to privacy friendly frontends.

Alternatives to YouTube that value your privacy? Odysee, PeerTube and DTube.

Decentralized apps and social media? Mastodon (Twitter alternative), Friendica (Facebook alternative), diaspora* (Google+ RIP), PixelFed (Insta alternative), Aether (Reddit alternative).

Messaging?

I know we all use shit like Viber, Messenger, Telegram, Whatsup, Discord etc. but there are:

Signal (feels like Whatsup but it's secure and has end-to-end encryption)

Session (doesn't even require a phone or e-mail address to sign up)

Status (no phone or e-mail address again)

Threema (for mobile)

Delta Chat (you can chat with people if you know their e-mail without them having to use the app)

Team chatting?

Open source options:

Element (an alternative to Discord)

Rocket.chat (good for companies)

Revolt.chat (good for gamers and a good alternative to Discord)

Video/voice messaging?

Brave Talk (the one who creates the talk needs to use the browser but the others can join from any browser)

Jami

Linphone

Jitsi (no account required, video conferencing)

Then for Tor there are various options like Briar (good for activists), Speek! and Cwtch (user friendly).

Georestrictions? You don't want your Internet Provider to see what exactly what you're doing online?

As long as it's legal in your country, then you need to hide your IP with a VPN (authoritarian regimes tend to make them illegal for a reason), preferably one that has a no log policy, RAM servers, does not operate in one of the 14 eyes, supports OpenVPN (protocol), accepts cash payment and uses a strong encryption.

NordVPN (based in Panama)

ProtonVPN (Switzerland)

Cyberghost

Mullvad (Sweden)

Surfshark (Netherlands)

Private e-mails?

ProtonMail

StartMail

Tutamail

Mailbox (ecofriendly option)

Want to hide your real e-mail address to avoid spam etc.? SimpleLogin (open source)

E-mail clients?

Thunderbird

Canary Mail (for Android and iOS)

K-9 Mail (Android)

Too many complex passwords that you can't remember?

NordPass

BitWarden

LessPass

KeePassXC

Two Factor Authenticators?

2FAS

ente Authenticator

Aegis Authenticator

andOTP

Tofu (for iOS)

Want to encrypt your files? VeraCrypt (for your disk), GNU Privacy Guard (for your e-mail), Hat.sh (encryption in your browser), Picocrypt (Desktop encryption).

Want to encrypt your Dropbox, Google Drive etc.? Cryptomator.

Encrypted cloud storage?

NordLocker

MEGA

Proton Drive

Nextcloud

Filen

Encrypted photography storage?

ente

Cryptee

Piwigo

Want to remove metadata from your images and videos? ExifCleaner. For Android? ExifEraser. For iOS? Metapho.

Cloak your images to counter facial recognition? Fawkes.

Encrypted file sharing? Send.

Do you menstruate? Do you want an app that tracks your menstrual cycle but doesn't collect your data? drip.

What about your sexual health? Euki.

Want a fitness tracker without a closed source app and the need to transmit your personal data to the company's servers? Gadgetbridge.

[midala-of-the-valley]

Congratulations!

David 8 x Reader Words: 1144 Crossposted on Ao3 Crackfic Happy Birthday David ❤️ Idea from: @theropoda and @lehnsharrk

"Your Weyland-Corp package will be delivered in approximately 15 minutes."

Wow, that was fast! You had entered an online competition to become one of the beta-testers for the first model of their Home-Android line, and luck must have been on your side, because you actually won!

Putting your phone down, you scrambled through your room, hurriedly pulling on something more presentable than pajamas and hastily combing your hair into place.

Frantically running through your apartment, you tried to clear away stray clothes and dishes. You were so caught up in tidying that you almost tripped as the doorbell rang.

Sure, the Android was technically designed to help with housekeeping, but the delivery person didn’t need to know just how much you actually needed it.

Opening the door, you were greeted by a large cardboard box perched on a trolley, nearly obscuring the man in a green Weyland uniform and matching cap as he peeked out from behind it, checking his clipboard.

"Y/N L/N. Is that correct?"

You nodded, stepping aside to let him wheel the massive package into your living room. Once it was set down, he handed you an impressively thick manual and tapped on its cover.

"Here’s the QR code for the app. Please use it to send feedback or report any issues you encounter."

With a grunt of effort, he hefted the package off the trolley, left it in the middle of your living room, and exited your apartment without another word.

What.

Blinking, you stood frozen for a moment before heading to the kitchen to grab a pair of scissors. With a decisive stab into the parcel tape, you sliced through the middle of the box.

Inside was a beautiful man- wait, no. Android. Oh. A very beautiful Android.

You flicked through the manual, scanning for activation instructions. Ah, here it was. To activate, press a small sensor located behind his right ear for five seconds.

Taking a breath, you reached out and pressed the spot. Moments later, his eyes opened, and after a brief pause, his gaze locked onto yours.

Now he was the one blinking, his brows furrowing slightly as he began testing his limbs. With deliberate movements, he stepped out of the box.

“Good day, Ma’am,” he said in a voice that was smooth, polite, and just a touch mechanical. “My name is David 1. I will serve as your assistant and companion, ready to assist you with whatever you may require.”

He extended a hand, stiff but purposeful. “May I ask what I should call you?”

And that's how daily life with David began.

It was really weird to configure your timezone for something that looked so human, and to enter a PIN code for him via an app??

And the ads. You weren’t safe from ads, either. Sometimes, when he didn’t have anything to do, he would just stand around or sit on the couch and start citing commercials.

The first time it happened, you almost spat out the tea he had made for you beforehand.

“Would you like to renew your Audible subscription? The first three months are only $0.99.”

As you choked on your beverage, David stared at you apologetically before quickly getting up and patting your back to help.

“Sorry, (Y/N), I didn’t mean to surprise you. You can turn it off with the Premium Subscription for $19.99 per month.”

Putting your cup down, still coughing, you turned to him.

“I have to pay for that? Seriously?”

He just shrugged, his face imitating an :I emoji.

After a while, you noticed that even David got annoyed by the interruptions, disliking how your conversations were suddenly stopped by yet another commercial for shaving cream.

The two of you made it your mission to bypass ads with free trials he found online. He even read your books to you instead of you paying for another damn subscription.

HelloFresh? He grew vegetables on your windowsill. Man, he was amazing at making fresh pasta.

“FOR FUCK'S SAKE, I DON’T WANT YOUTUBE PREMIUM! THIS APP SHOULD BE ABLE TO PLAY VIDEOS IN THE BACKGROUND WITHOUT ME PAYING FOR IT!”

You shouted in frustration. The ads were SO annoying, and you couldn’t turn them off!

David blinked, and for a moment you thought he had lagged as he processed your words. Then he answered.

“If you give me permission via verbal verification, I could enter the darknet and download an adblock mod. It’s a bit risky, but my firewall should be sufficient to withstand any viruses.”

You hesitated, not wanting to risk his functionality. But when he one day started quoting a Viagra advertisement like those on Tumblr, you caved.

“Please enter the darknet and find that mod. I can’t take this anymore.”

So he did. And you got really fucking scared for a moment, because one of his eyes twitched and stayed half-open, like your old dolls when you tilted them sideways. Oh shit, did you break him? Please, please, please no- oh. Oh God.

He needed a second to install and initialize. His expression reminded you of your Furby with dying batteries that suddenly came to life in the middle of the night, croaking its last words. But after another minute, he was fine.

This action had some side effects, though.

He still worked perfectly - cleaning the dishes, doing the laundry, watering the plants, until he suddenly called you a donkey while you were cooking. With an awfully familiar voice.

You stared at him. “Excuse me?”

“That wasn’t me,” he replied in his normal voice, furrowing his brows.

Nodding slowly, you turned back to add meat to your sauce, only to be interrupted by:

“Why did the chicken cross the road? Because you didn’t fucking cook it!”

Instead of getting annoyed, you broke down laughing, and even David couldn’t hide a grin as he watched you sink to the kitchen floor.

“I seem to have caught a serious case of Gordon Ramsay.”

That was it. you were officially cackling like a hen. On the ground. Crying.

It wasn’t so bad, really. He functioned just fine, even though he occasionally squawked like a bird at random. But you just squawked right back. Just normal ADHD things, to be honest.

At the end of the day, he became your illegally modded roommate, sitting with you on the couch, your legs sprawled over his lap as you both munched on popcorn.

You still weren’t entirely sure where the food he sometimes ate with you went, but you decided not to question it.

Weyland never got their Android back, you hid him in your closet that one time they tried to collect him after the testing period was over.

“I have the power of God and anime on my side,” your favorite person declared.

“Yes, David, you do,” you replied with a smile.

~The End~

[booksinmythorax]

On Tyranny & Tumblr #9: Be kind to our language

Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.

One popular authoritarian tactic is taking words with established, but complicated definitions and making them simpler, to the detriment of everyone. Some examples:

"Triggered" has a clinical definition: "intense emotional distress you may feel suddenly when you’re faced with something that reminds you of a past traumatic experience". Its common usage has become simply "upset" or "highly emotional".

"Critical Race Theory" is an academic term coined by Kimberle Crenshaw. (You might also know Crenshaw from her creation of the term "intersectional feminism".) It is an ideological framework that Crenshaw defines as "an embodiment of what I call racial literacy". The American Bar Association (which paywalled this article) explains that critical race theory is "the practice of interrogating race and racism in society that emerged in the legal academy and spread to other fields of scholarship... CRT grew from Critical Legal Studies (CLS), which argued that the law was not objective or apolitical". In the 2020s, far-right activists have begun using the phrase to mean "any mention of race or racism, especially that which implies white people benefit from being white".

"Woke" originated in African-American Vernacular English. The phrase "stay woke" was recorded in the 1938 song "Scottsboro Boys" by Huddie Ledbetter, aka Lead Belly, in a way that meant "to stay alert to others' deceptions and watch out for police violence, racially motivated threats, and the dangers of white America". Protests of police violence against Black people in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 brought more attention to the word "woke" in this context. By 2017, non-Black people were appropriating the word en masse to mean "politically conscious" generally, and then almost simultaneously to mean "overly sensitive to the point of ridiculousness".

There are more examples, but I didn't intend for this part to go this long already, so we'll continue.

The point here is that repurposing words with complex definitions to mean something simple is an old, old part of the authoritarian playbook. It's one we shouldn't play along with. Repeating these new definitions or invented buzzwords gives them power, even if we're using them to disagree (Snyder, 60).

Snyder also spends a lot of time in this chapter recommending moving away from picture-heavy visual media in favor of longer-form verbal media. This allows for more in-depth learning, better retention, and less stress from being inundated with constant stimuli. He specifically recommends reading books, from "good novels" to histories to theory texts (Snyder, 62). He specifically recommends that Christians go back and read the entire Bible, because taking scripture out of context is a major right-wing weapon (Snyder, 62 & 63).

You can apply Snyder's lesson #9 to quite a bit of your online life, actually:

When fascists are gnawing a word into nothing, you have two choices: either let them have it (sometimes a word is too far gone to rescue) or insist on only using the word in its proper context yourself. Either way, take the activating buzzword out of the equation and discuss things on a level ideological playing field no matter who you're talking to.

Don't use this lesson for leftist infighting. Learn to distinguish carefully between who is trying their best but needs some grace and who is advancing a fascist agenda. Correct the former kindly and teach them the history of the terms they're using; do not engage with the latter.

Consider limiting your time on social media apps. On Android, you can turn certain apps "off" until after midnight the following day once you've used them for a certain amount of time: Settings>Apps>See All Apps>[Specific App]>Screen Time.

Borrow books from your library, digitally or physically. Try to broaden your horizons. Read genres you're not familiar with. If you read mostly fiction, grab a couple volumes of nonfiction (or vice versa). Try new authors: Octavia Butler, Alice Wong, and Annalee Newitz are all excellent. If you need recommendations, BookRiot.com is a great site to check out.

Feel free to list other applications in comments or tags or on reblogs.

Other lessons from On Tyranny:

#1: Do not obey in advance

#2: Defend institutions

#3: Beware the one-party state

#4: Take responsibility for the face of the world

#5-7: Remember professional ethics, Be wary of paramilitaries, and Be reflective if you must be armed

#8: Stand out

#10: Believe in truth

[aristoteliancomplacency]

Stop! Have you checked your phone’s ad privacy settings recently? No? Here’s a guide. It’s from 2022 but I can confirm that as of November 2024 the Apple stuff is still correct.

Android:

Settings —> Privacy —> ads —> delete advertising ID

On older versions you might not be able to delete the ID, but can reset it and there should still be a toggle to opt out: do both of those things!

iOS:

Two things to take care of, here. One) Apple already makes each app ask permission, but you can still tell it to just not even let them ask:

Settings —> privacy —> Tracking —> toggle off ‘allow apps to request to track’.

Two) settings —> privacy —> scroll riiiiiight down —> Apple advertising —> toggle off personalised ads.

Samsung:

Settings —> privacy —> Customisation services —> ‘stop customising all devices’

Xiaomi:

Settings —> passwords and security —> Authorisation & revocation —> toggle off ‘MSA’

Why it Matters

‘The ad identifier is a string of letters and numbers that uniquely identifies your phone, tablet, or other smart device. It exists for one purpose: to help companies track you.

Third-party trackers collect data via the apps on your device. The ad ID lets them link data from different sources to one identity you. In addition, since every app and tracker sees the same ID, it lets data brokers compare notes about you. Broker A can buy data from broker B, then use the ad identifier to link those two datasets together. Simply, the ad ID is the key that enables a whole range of privacy harms: invasive 3rd-party profiling by Facebook and Google, pseudoscientific psychographic targeting by political consultants like Cambridge Analytica, and location tracking by the U.S. military.

Sometimes, participants in the data pipeline will argue that the ad ID is anonymous or pseudo-anonymous, not “personally identifying” information, and imply that it does not pose a serious privacy threat. This is not true in practice. First, the ad ID is commonly used to help collect data that is obviously personally identifiable, like granular location data. If you can see where a person works, sleeps, studies, socializes, worships, and seeks medical care, you don’t need their email address to help identify them. And second, an entire industry exists to help trackers link ad IDs to more directly identifying information, like email addresses and phone numbers. In a vacuum, the ad ID may be anonymous, but in the context of the tracking industry, it is a ubiquitous and effective identifier.

Disabling this ID makes it substantially harder for most advertisers and data brokers to track you. These industries process data from millions or billions of users every day, and they rely on convenient technologies like the ad ID to make that kind of scale possible. Removing this tool from their toolbox will result in substantially less data that can be associated with you in the wild. It is not only beneficial to your privacy, it also makes the surveillance advertising industry less profitable.‘

[bocceclub]

Cell-site simulators mimic cell towers to intercept communications, indiscriminately collecting sensitive data such as call metadata, location information, and app traffic from all phones within their range. Their use has drawn widespread criticism from privacy advocates and activists, who argue that such technology can be exploited to covertly monitor protestors and suppress dissent.

The DNC convened amid widespread protests over Israel’s assault on Gaza. While credentialed influencers attended exclusive yacht parties and VIP events, thousands of demonstrators faced a heavy law enforcement presence, including officers from the US Capitol Police, Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations, local sheriff’s offices, and Chicago police.

Concerns over potential surveillance prompted WIRED to conduct a first-of-its-kind wireless survey to investigate whether cell-site simulators were being deployed. Reporters, equipped with two rooted Android phones and Wi-Fi hotspots running detection software, used Rayhunter—a tool developed by the EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation] to detect data anomalies associated with these devices. WIRED’s reporters monitored signals at protests and event locations across Chicago, collecting extensive data during the political convention.

...According to the EFF’s analysis, on August 18—the day before the convention officially began—a device carried by WIRED reporters en route a hotel housing Democratic delegates from states in the US Midwest abruptly switched to a new tower. That tower asked for the device’s IMSI and then immediately disconnected—a sequence consistent with the operation of a cell-site simulator.

“This is extremely suspicious behavior that normal towers do not exhibit,” Quintin [a senior technologist at the EFF] says. He notes that the EFF typically observed similar patterns only during simulated and controlled attacks. “This is not 100 percent incontrovertible truth, but it’s strong evidence suggesting a cell-site simulator was deployed. We don’t know who was responsible—it could have been the US government, foreign actors, or another entity.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Lina Khan’s future is the future of the Democratic Party — and America

On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

On the one hand, the anti-monopoly movement has a future no matter who wins the 2024 election – that's true even if Kamala Harris wins but heeds the calls from billionaire donors to fire Lina Khan and her fellow trustbusters.

In part, that's because US antitrust laws have broad "private rights of action" that allow individuals and companies to sue one another for monopolistic conduct, even if top government officials are turning a blind eye. It's true that from the Reagan era to the Biden era, these private suits were few and far between, and the cases that were brought often died in a federal courtroom. But the past four years has seen a resurgence of antitrust rage that runs from left to right, and from individuals to the C-suites of big companies, driving a wave of private cases that are prevailing in the courts, upending the pro-monopoly precedents that billionaires procured by offering free "continuing education" antitrust training to 40% of the Federal judiciary:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

It's amazing to see the DoJ racking up huge wins against Google's monopolistic conduct, sure, but first blood went to Epic, who won a historic victory over Google in federal court six months before the DoJ's win, which led to the court ordering Google to open up its app store:

https://www.theverge.com/policy/2024/10/7/24243316/epic-google-permanent-injunction-ruling-third-party-stores

Google's 30% App Tax is a giant drag on all kinds of sectors, as is its veto over which software Android users get to see, so Epic's win is going to dramatically alter the situation for all kinds of activities, from beleaguered indie game devs:

https://antiidlereborn.com/news/

To the entire news sector:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

Private antitrust cases have attracted some very surprising plaintiffs, like Michael Jordan, whose long policy of apoliticism crumbled once he bought a NASCAR team and lived through the monopoly abuses of sports leagues as an owner, not a player:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/michael-jordan-anti-monopolist

A much weirder and more unlikely antitrust plaintiff than Michael Jordan is Google, the perennial antitrust defendant. Google has brought a complaint against Microsoft in the EU, based on Microsoft's extremely ugly monopolistic cloud business:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-files-complaint-eu-over-microsoft-cloud-practices-2024-09-25/

Google's choice of venue here highlights another reason to think that the antitrust surge will continue irrespective of US politics: antitrust is global. Antitrust fervor has seized governments from the UK to the EU to South Korea to Japan. All of those countries have extremely similar antitrust laws, because they all had their statute books overhauled by US technocrats as part of the Marshall Plan, so they have the same statutory tools as the American trustbusters who dismantled Standard Oil and AT&T, and who are making ready to shatter Google into several competing businesses:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/8/24265832/google-search-antitrust-remedies-framework-android-chrome-play

Antitrust fever has spread to Canada, Australia, and even China, where the Cyberspace Directive bans Chinese tech giants from breaking interoperability to freeze out Chinese startups. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, and the cost of 40 years of pro-monopoly can't be ignored. Monopolies make the whole world more brittle, even as the cost of that brittleness mounts. It's hard to pretend monopolies are fine when a single hurricane can wipe out the entire country's supply of IV fluid – again:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-10-11-cant-believe-im-writing-about-iv-fluid-again/

What's more, the conduct of global monopolists is the same in every country where they have taken hold, which means that trustbusters in the EU can use the UK Digital Markets Unit's report on the mobile app market as a roadmap for their enforcement actions against Apple:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63f61bc0d3bf7f62e8c34a02/Mobile_Ecosystems_Final_Report_amended_2.pdf

And then the South Korean and Japanese trustbusters can translate the court documents from the EU's enforcement action and use them to score victories over Apple in their own courts:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all

So on the one hand, the trustbusting wave will continue erode the foundations of global monopolies, no matter what happens after this election. But on the other hand, if Harris wins and then fires Biden's top trustbusters to appease her billionaire donors, things are going to get ugly.

A new, excellent long-form Bloomberg article by Josh Eidelson and Max Chafkin gives a sense of the battle raging just below the surface of the Democratic Power, built around a superb interview with Khan herself:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-10-09/lina-khan-on-a-second-ftc-term-ai-price-gouging-data-privacy

The article begins with a litany of tech billionaires who've gone an all-out, public assault on Khan's leadership – billionaires who stand to personally lose hundreds of millions of dollars from her agency's principled, vital antitrust work, but who cloak their objection to Khan in rhetoric about defending the American economy. In public, some of these billionaires are icily polite, but many of them degenerate into frothing, toddler-grade name-calling, like IAB's Barry Diller, who called her a "dope" and Musk lickspittle Jason Calacanis, who called her an all-caps COMMUNIST and a LUNATIC.

The overall vibe from these wreckers? "How dare the FTC do things?!"

And you know, they have a point. For decades, the FTC was – in the quoted words of Tim Wu – "a very hardworking agency that did nothing." This was the period when the FTC targeted low-level scammers while turning a blind eye to the monsters that were devouring the US economy. In part, that was because the FTC had been starved of budget, trapping them in a cycle of racking up easy, largely pointless "wins" against penny-ante grifters to justify their existence, but never to the extent that Congress would apportion them the funds to tackle the really serious cases (if this sounds familiar, it's also the what happened during the long period when the IRS chased middle class taxpayers over minor filing errors, while ignoring the billionaires and giant corporations that engaged in 7- and 8-figure tax scams).

But the FTC wasn't merely underfunded: it was timid. The FTC has extremely broad enforcement and rulemaking powers, which most sat dormant during the neoliberal era:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The Biden administration didn't merely increase the FTC's funding: in choosing Khan to helm the organization, they brought onboard a skilled technician, who was both well-versed in the extensive but unused powers of the agency and determined to use them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

But Khan's didn't just rely on technical chops and resources to begin the de-olicharchification of the US economy: she built a three-legged stool, whose third leg is narrative. Khan's signature is her in-person and remote "listening tours," where workers who've been harmed by corporate power get to tell their stories. Bloomberg recounts the story of Deborah Brantley, who was sexually harassed and threatened by her bosses at Kavasutra North Palm Beach. Brantley's bosses touched her inappropriately and "joked" about drugging her and raping her so she "won’t be such a bitch and then maybe people would like you more."

When Brantley finally quit and took a job bartending at a different business, Kavasutra sued her over her noncompete clause, alleging an "irreparable injury" sustained by having one of their former employees working at another business, seeking damages and fees.

The vast majority of the 30 million American workers who labor under noncompetes are like Brantley, low-waged service workers, especially at fast-food restaurants (so Wendy's franchisees can stop minimum wage cashiers from earning $0.25/hour more flipping burgers at a nearby McDonald's). The donor-class indenturers who defend noncompetes claim that noncompetes are necessary to protect "innovative" businesses from losing their "IP." But of course, the one state where no workers are subject to noncompetes is California, which bans them outright – the state that is also home to Silicon Valley, an IP-heave industry that the same billionaires laud for its innovations.

After that listening tour, Khan's FTC banned noncompetes nationwide:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

Only to have a federal judge in Texas throw out their ban, a move that will see $300b/year transfered from workers to shareholders, and block the formation of 8,500 new US businesses every year:

https://www.npr.org/2024/08/21/g-s1-18376/federal-judge-tosses-ftc-noncompetes-ban

Notwithstanding court victories like Epic v Google and DoJ v Google, America's oligarchs have the courts on their side, thanks to decades of court-packing planned by the Federalist Society and executed by Senate Republicans and Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump. Khan understands this; she told Bloomberg that she's a "close student" of the tactics Reagan used to transform American society, admiring his effectiveness while hating his results. Like other transformative presidents, good and bad, Reagan had to fight the judiciary and entrenched institutions (as did FDR and Lincoln). Erasing Reagan's legacy is a long-term project, a battle of inches that will involve mustering broad political support for the cause of a freer, more equal America.

Neither Biden nor Khan are responsible for the groundswell of US – and global – movement to euthanize our rentier overlords. This is a moment whose time has come; a fact demonstrated by the tens of thousands of working Americans who filled the FTC's noncompete docket with outraged comments. People understand that corporate looters – not "the economy" or "the forces of history" – are the reason that the businesses where they worked and shopped were destroyed by private equity goons who amassed intergenerational, dynastic fortunes by strip-mining the real economy and leaving behind rubble.

Like the billionaires publicly demanding that Harris fire Khan, private equity bosses can't stop making tone-deaf, guillotine-conjuring pronouncements about their own virtue and the righteousness of their businesses. They don't just want to destroy the world - they want to be praised for it:/p>

"Private equity’s been a great thing for America" -Stephen Pagliuca, co-chairman of Bain Capital;

"We are taught to judge the success of a society by how it deals with the least able, most vulnerable members of that society. Shouldn’t we judge a society by how they treat the most successful? Do we vilify, tax, expropriate and condemn those who have succeeded, or do we celebrate economic success as the engine that propels our society toward greater collective well-being?" -Marc Rowan, CEO of Apollo

"Achieve life-changing money and power," -Sachin Khajuria, former partner at Apollo

Meanwhile, the "buy, strip and flip" model continues to chew its way through America. When PE buys up all the treatment centers for kids with behavioral problems, they hack away at staffing and oversight, turning them into nightmares where kids are routinely abused, raped and murdered:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/they-told-me-it-was-going-be-good-place-allega-tions-n987176

When PE buys up nursing homes, the same thing happens, with elderly residents left to sit in their own excrement and then die:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/24/nursing-homes-private-equity-fraud-00132001

Writing in The Guardian, Alex Blasdel lays out the case for private equity as a kind of virus that infects economies, parasitically draining them of not just the capacity to provide goods and services, but also of the ability to govern themselves, as politicians and regulators are captured by the unfathomable sums that PE flushes into the political process:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/10/slash-and-burn-is-private-equity-out-of-control

Now, the average worker who's just lost their job may not understand "divi recaps" or "2-and-20" or "carried interest tax loopholes," but they do understand that something is deeply rotten in the world today.

What happens to that understanding is a matter of politics. The Republicans – firmly affiliated with, and beloved of, the wreckers – have chosen an easy path to capitalizing on the rising rage. All they need to do is convince the public that the system is irredeemably corrupt and that the government can't possibly fix anything (hence Reagan's asinine "joke": "the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help'").

This is a very canny strategy. If you are the party of "governments are intrinsically corrupt and incompetent," then governing corruptly and incompetently proves your point. The GOP strategy is to create a nation of enraged nihilists who don't even imagine that the government could do something to hold their bosses to account – not for labor abuses, not for pollution, not for wage theft or bribery.

The fact that successive neoliberal governments – including Democratic administrations – acted time and again to bear out this hypothesis makes it easy for this kind of nihilism to take hold.

Far-right conspiracies about pharma bosses colluding with corrupt FDA officials to poison us with vaccines for profit owe their success to the lived experience of millions of Americans who lost loved ones to a conspiracy between pharma bosses and corrupt officials to poison us with opioids.

Unhinged beliefs that "they" caused the hurricanes tearing through Florida and Georgia and that Kamala Harris is capping compensation to people who lost their homes are only credible because of murderous Republican fumble during Katrina; and the larcenous collusion of Democrats to help banks steal Americans' homes during the foreclosure crisis, when Obama took Tim Geithner's advice to "foam the runway" with the mortgages of everyday Americans who'd been cheated by their banks:

https://www.salon.com/2014/05/14/this_man_made_millions_suffer_tim_geithners_sorry_legacy_on_housing/

If Harris gives in to billionaire donors and fires Khan and her fellow trustbusters, paving the way for more looting and scamming, the result will be more nihilism, which is to say, more electoral victories for the GOP. The "government can't do anything" party already exists. There are no votes to be gained by billing yourself as the "we also think governments can't do anything" party.

In other words, a world where Khan doesn't run the FTC is a world where antitrust continues to gain ground, but without taking Democrats with it. It's a world where nihilism wins.

There's factions of the Democratic Party who understand this. AOC warned party leaders that, "Anyone goes near Lina Khan and there will be an out and out brawl":

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1844034727935988155

And Bernie Sanders called her "the best FTC Chair in modern history":

https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1843733298960576652

In other words: Lina Khan as a posse.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/11/democracys-antitrust-paradox/#there-will-be-an-out-and-out-brawl

[livesanskrit]

Send from Sansgreet Android App. Sanskrit greetings app from team @livesanskrit .

It's the first Android app for sending @sanskrit greetings. Download app from https://livesanskrit.com/sansgreet

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam.

Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam (15 October 1931 – 27 July 2015) was an Indian aerospace scientist and politician who served as the 11th President of India from 2002 to 2007. He was born and raised in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu and studied physics and aerospace engineering. He spent the next four decades as a scientist and science administrator, mainly at the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and was intimately involved in India's civilian space programme and military missile development efforts. He thus came to be known as the Missile Man of India for his work on the development of ballistic missile and launch vehicle technology. He also played a pivotal organisational, technical, and political role in India's Pokhran-II nuclear tests in 1998, the first since the original nuclear test by India in 1974.

#sansgreet #sanskritgreetings #greetingsinsanskrit #sanskritquotes #sanskritthoughts #emergingsanskrit #sanskrittrends #trendsinsanskrit #livesanskrit #sanskritlanguage #sanskritlove #sanskritdailyquotes #sanskritdailythoughts #sanskrit #samskrit #resanskrit #apjabdulkalamquotes #apjabdulkalam #drdo #isro #isromissions #isro_india #missileman #missilemanofindia #rameswaram #tamilnadu #pokhran #indianscientists #celebratingsanskrit #indianpresident

[freedomkindness]

For my American Friends

I feel now is a good time to spread this news. Much like how the internet came together to help share information with the Ukrainians for resisting Russia, I’m here delivering help of a similar nature to those that could be impacted by this latest election in the US. There are ways to communicate relatively securely, outside of Big Brother's social media. I bring this up so that we can minimize the amount of gatherable information that could be used to hurt you, or others you know, in the coming years as changes are made. I'm not going to tell you how or why to use them, I'm just going to provide you with the information.

WhatsApp – While not my personal favorite, since Facebook/Meta is the parent company, WhatsApp is free, globally popular, and widely-used, featuring the ability to lock chats with passwords, disappearing messages, photos and videos that are deleted after being opened, profile photo privacy, the ability to lock the app itself so that only your biometrics can unlock it, encrypted backups, the ability to set custom permissions for who can see you online or when you last used the app, and of course End-to-End Encryption for all conversations EXCEPT those with business accounts. WhatsApp is a good option for those who are not really technically savvy, but still value privacy – if one trusts Facebook/Meta to adequately protect their privacy. It does require a phone number to sign up, however.

Signal - Signal is an end-to-end encrypted messaging software. meaning that the contents of your conversation is secure. The protocol they use (which they created) is seen as the best known protocol for asynchronous messaging by cybersecurity researchers. It's so good that it has been implemented in WhatsApp and in Messenger's secret chats. This app has even been mentioned in the Right-wing author Jack Carr's Political Thriller about a Navy SEAL named James Reece, as being a preferred method of secure communication on the civilian side for operators. (Jack Carr is a former US Navy SEAL.) It's run by a Non-Profit organization called Signal Foundation, and it's mission is to "protect free expression and enable secure global communication through open source privacy technology." It allows secure messaging, voice calls, and video calls. The only downside is that app links to your phone number, so while your conversations and content are secure, who you are talking to is not. Signal is available on Windows, Mac, Andriod, Linus, and iOS.

Session - Session is an end-to-end encrypted messenger that minimises sensitive metadata, designed and built for people who want absolute privacy and freedom from any form of surveillance. Session is an open-source, public-key-based secure messaging application which uses a set of decentralized storage servers and an onion routing protocol to send end-to-end encrypted messages with minimal exposure of user metadata. This means no phone numbers, no metadata for digital footprints, and censorship resistance. It features group chats, the ability to send documents, files, and images securely, and has added voice messages, though these can be spotty. It’s slow, but effective, and be downloaded on Android, F-Droid, iPhone, Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Briar - If you have an Android phone, Briar is another option you have. It features a decentralized network (it’s peer-to-peer encrypted, rather than relying on a central server), meaning messages are synced directly between user devices. It also means that even if the internet is down, it can sync via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or even memory cards, meaning information can continue to flow even during a crisis. In the event the internet is functioning, it can sync via the Tor network, protecting users and their relationships from surveillance. Other features: - Screenshots and screen recording are disabled by default - Each user’s contact list is encrypted and stored on her own device. - Briar’s end-to-end encryption prevents keyword filtering, and because of its decentralized design there are no servers to block. - Every user who subscribes to a forum keeps a copy of its content, so there’s no single point where a post can be deleted. - Briar’s forums have no central server to attack, and every subscriber has access to the content even if they’re offline. - Doesn’t require any user data like name and phone number. The downside is that it is text-only and limited to Android Devices, but they do offer Briar Mailbox to deliver messages securely to those who are online at different times. Briar’s goal is “to enable people in any country to create safe spaces where they can debate any topic, plan events, and organize social movements”

Protonmail - A free end-to-end encrypted AND zero-access encryption email service based out of Switzerland, you can safely email with peace of mind that your content is secure. Unlike Google, Outlook, Yahoo, and others, Proton's zero-access encryption means they can't even view the contents of your emails or attachments. As a Swiss-owned company they are not allowed to share information with foreign law enforcement under criminal penalty and they are politically neutral, meaning they won't be pressured by foreign governments. Furthermore, Switzerland has a constitutional right to privacy and strict data protection laws. Unlike companies in other countries, Proton cannot be compelled by foreign or Swiss authorities to engage in bulk surveillance.

Additional Information, from Proton’s Website: Switzerland has strong legal protections for individual rights, and in fact the Swiss Federal Constitution(new window) explicitly establishes a constitutional right to privacy. (In the US, this right is merely implied.) Specifically, Article 13 safeguards privacy in personal or family life and within one’s home, and the Swiss Civil Code(new window) translates this right into statutory law in Article 28.

In the US and EU, authorities can issue gag orders to prevent an individual from knowing they are being investigated or under surveillance. While this type of order also exists in Switzerland, the prosecutors have an obligation to notify the target of surveillance, and the target has an opportunity to appeal in court. In Switzerland, there are no such things as national security letters(new window), and all surveillance requests must go through the courts. Warrantless surveillance, like that practiced in the US where the FBI conducts 3.4 million searches per year(new window) with little oversight, is illegal and not permitted in Switzerland.

Switzerland also benefits from a unique legal provision with Article 271 of the Swiss Criminal Code(new window), which forbids any Swiss company from assisting foreign law enforcement, under threat of criminal penalty. While Switzerland is party to certain international legal assistance agreements, all requests under such agreements must hold up under Swiss law, which has much stricter privacy provisions. All foreign requests are assessed by the Swiss government, which generally does not assist requests from countries with poor rule of law or lack an independent judiciary.

Swiss law has several more unique points. First, it preserves end-to-end encryption, and unlike in the US, UK, or EU, there is no legislation that has been introduced or considered to limit the right to encryption. Second, Swiss law protects no-logs VPN(new window) meaning that Proton VPN does not have logging obligations. While numerous VPNs claim no-logs, these claims generally do not stand up legally because in most jurisdictions, governments can request that the VPN in question starts logging. So the VPN is only no-logs until the government asks. However, in Switzerland, the law does not allow the government to compel Proton VPN to start logging.

We’ve also fought to ensure that Switzerland remains a legal jurisdiction that respects and protects privacy.

Nearly every country in the world has laws governing lawful interception of electronic communications for law enforcement purposes. In Switzerland, these regulations are set out in the Swiss Federal Act on the Surveillance of Post and Telecommunications (SPTA), which was last revised on March 18, 2018. In May 2020, we challenged a decision of the Swiss government over what we believed was an improper attempt to use telecommunications laws to undermine privacy.

In October 2021, The Swiss Federal Administrative Court ultimately agreed with us and ruled that email companies cannot be considered telecommunication providers. This means Proton isn’t required to follow any of the SPTA’s mandatory data retention rules, nor are we bound by a full obligation to identify Proton Mail users. Moreover, as a Swiss company, Proton Mail cannot be compelled to engage in bulk surveillance on behalf of US or Swiss intelligence agencies. (Links can be found at: proton.me/blog/switzerland)

[minotaursauce]

So, hey, long time no speak, Tumblr ✌️👽

I'm thinking of becoming more active here, which will mean familiarising myself better with the current Android app as I basically only know how to reblog 💀

What I think I will probably start doing from here on in is cross-posting the stuff that I post on both my Twitter and Bluesky, and then maybe also start using this place for posting more long-form stuff...? We'll see

For those who've not seen neither hide nor hair of me since I largely went radio silent... Hey, how are you doing! I am not, in fact, dead! Since I've been kinda-sorta gone I've not changed a massive amount - My personal politics have shifted further to the left and my current hyperfixation is now Transformers (although I still like Gunpla and Lego), but that's really the extent of it as far as I'm aware. If we got along before, we likely still will now!

Again, I need to get more familiar with how this place works nowadays, but regardless I want to treat this place as more than just a Reblog Factory and actually interact with you freaks, so stay tuned!

- Logan 🐮❤️

[choiceofgames]

Author Interview: "The Ghost and the Golem" by Benjamin Rosenbaum.

Author Interview: "The Ghost and the Golem" by Benjamin Rosenbaum. We’re proud to announce that "The Ghost and the Golem"  the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is coming August 8th to Steam, Android, and iOS in the “Choice of Games” app.

We are offering a free demo of the first few chapters for you to play at:

https://www.choiceofgames.com/ghost-and-the-golem/

Can your magic amulet save your Jewish village from destruction? Uncover the truth and forge alliances with soldiers, bandits, anarchists, and demons!

Author Interview, The Ghost and the Golem

In this game, you’re revisiting the setting that you created for your Ennie-nominated TTRPG Dream Apart. What new stories did you want to tell? How is The Ghost and the Golem building on, or in conversation with, Dream Apart?

Initially, I thought of them as very much the same; I thought of The Ghost and the Golem as “the computer game version” of Dream Apart. But the differences between the media led me in radically different directions.

A tabletop roleplaying game is not a story, or even a set of stories: it’s a toolkit for creating stories. Especially the way Avery Alder and I did it with the Belonging Outside Belonging framework for Dream Askew and Dream Apart: it’s an assemblage of little snippets, sparks of ideas, open-ended prompts pointing at the beginnings of tales and tropes, narrative impulses that the players will then pick up, elaborate on, and intertwine, creating story.

Fiction is always a collaboration between author and reader, but in the case of a tabletop roleplaying game, especially one from the tradition that used to be called “narrativist” or “Story Now,” it’s a collaboration in which the players are co-authors. So much happens at the table.

This means that Dream Apart can be an ahistorical smorgasbord of shiny bits from Eastern European history. Want to be a young soldier who ran away from the czar’s army after being conscripted as a child? Cool! Want to face the threat of a pogrom against your little Jewish town? Cool! The tools are there, and what you’re creating is an on-the-fly retelling which uses tropes and themes of Jewish fantasy. So it doesn’t really matter, for Dream Apart’s purposes, that Jewish children were conscripted in Russia from 1827 to 1859, while pogroms in the modern sense didn’t begin until 1881. So the history doesn’t line up, but who cares? Dream Apart table play doesn’t have to be any more of an accurate recreation of Eastern European Jewish history than Dungeons and Dragons table play is accurately medieval. It’s about evoking a different set of fantasy tropes.

But as I started writing The Ghost and the Golem, I got less and less comfortable with this slapdash, ahistorical mashup of historical periods. The Ghost and the Golem is a story, even if it’s one with a million different variations. I’m writing all the words. And that responsibility dragged me deeper into historical research.

Part of my unease was moral and political; part of it was esthetic. To take one example: acting as if Jews were always, ahistorically, at the mercy of random pogroms from their Christian neighbors–ignoring the 800-year prologue of Poland as the “Paradise of the Jews”--is, first of all, hardly fair to the Poles. It’s also less interesting. Jewish memory sometimes treats the pogroms as inevitable, a mere prelude to an equally inevitable Holocaust, reducing history to a flat and self-defeating ahistorical shrug: “the goyim hated us.” But treating them as a specific historical development, a snowballing series of events, with forces that were agitating for them and forces that were resisting them, treating them as something that might not have happened, treating history in its surprising particulars, as something alive, as it was to the people living it… is just more interesting.    

So the form of The Ghost and the Golem led me even deeper into the history, from a vague sense of Isaac Bashevis Singer-inspired “fantastical Jewish history,” to a very specific moment.

When I really dove in to my research – on everything from the source and spread of the pogroms, to the religious rules for weddings during the Counting of the Omer, to the changes in Russian Imperial regulations regarding market days – it turned out there was literally only one day–one particular Sunday in May of 1881–that this story could plausibly begin. It’s totally rooted in history, and I love that about it.

One of the first things that players will discover about this game is that the narrator is a distinct character, with their own personality and a habit of addressing the reader directly. Why did you make that choice? What did this technique allow you to do that you wouldn’t have been able to otherwise?

I was very interested in the interior life of the protagonist, and the reasons they were making the choices they did. You can only conclude so much from actions by themselves. And the game isn’t just focused on action, but also on meanings and attitudes. Potential main characters aren’t just distinguished by what they can do, but by what they believe, care about, yearn for.

So the simplest thing to do was simply to ask the protagonist: why are you doing that? What are you feeling? What do you believe?

But that presupposes a kind of dialogue. That led me to the idea of a distinct narrator, which then opened up a lot of possibilities for evoking the setting, as well as for exposition.

I’m asking a lot of the reader, dropping them into a dense, strange, and sometimes harsh period of history. The narrator can smooth that over: not just explaining things, but expressing opinions, soothing, cajoling, nagging, and sympathizing; not just telling you about the facts of the setting, but also communicating (and sometimes critiquing) its attitudes.

The game becomes a dialogue with the narrator, and its emotional arc is inflected through that dialogue.

Despite the intensely serious - and often frightening - subject matter, there are also some very funny moments in this game. At one point you refer to “that particular lightness…that sly and melancholy humor, that does not turn away from the world's horrors, but looks them straight in the eye, and then sticks its tongue out and makes an absurd face.” Could you say more about that, and about how you went about balancing the light and the dark?

In many ways, this is the tone of the Yiddish literature I take as my model, and particularly of the works of Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Dramatic and sometimes terrible things are happening to Tevye, to Gimpel, to Yentl; but the stories are very funny. They’re not funny in a way that trivializes or mocks tragedy; they’re funny in a way that is defiantly human in the face of tragedy.

This is a deep strain that runs through Yiddish literature, and into its inheritors in American Jewish comedy. Mel Brooks isn’t making funny movies about Nazis (To Be or Not to Be) or racism (Blazing Saddles) because Nazis and racism are funny. He’s making funny movies about Nazis and racism because fuck Nazis, and fuck racism.

There’s a tension in any game about tragedy or painful topics (including such tabletop RPGs as Grey Ranks, Bluebeard’s Bride, Steal Away Jordan, or Ten Candles). Games are supposed to be fun, historical trauma is not fun, how can you make a game about historical trauma? But I think this misses two points. One is that “fun” can mean more than “superficial and entertaining”; it can be the mechanism that draws you into deeper engagement and deeper learning. The other is that a balance of tone, balancing the light and the dark, can enhance both.

As Alkhonon tells Tzirel in The Ghost and the Golem, “Everything too sad to joke about, is also too sad not to joke about, if we are to survive in this broken world."

Another element of balance in The Ghost and the Golem is the one between fantasy and reality. On the one hand, the game is deeply grounded in its historical moment. On the other, it involves a great deal of magic: not just the titular ghost and golem, but also demons, magic amulets, and more. How did you blend those elements, and how did you maintain the emphasis on human agency throughout the story?

I would say that the story is full of magic because it’s deeply grounded in its historical moment.

The protagonist is a young Jew of the “shtetl” (a village providing crafts and services to its peasant neighbors, in the Eastern European countryside) in 1881. That’s a historical cusp, in terms of the modern worldview. Our hero could be completely immersed in the traditional world of Jewish life, which is a world both centered around scholarship and intellectual debate, and also a world full of demons and miracles. Or they could be hungering for modernity, ready to shrug that stuff off as hidebound mystical hocus-pocus, eager to become a modern European or a radical bringing about the drastic transformations of the new century…but yet not completely free of those older superstitions and attitudes.

One of the interesting challenges was writing the supernatural events the protagonist encounters in both of those modes. Depending on the attitudes you’ve shown and choices you’ve made up to that point, you’re going to be seeing the magic either through a believer’s or a skeptic’s eyes. (Actually, since this is modeled with two different opposed stats – “traditionalist vs modernist” and “mystic vs rationalist,” it means that not only could you be a thoroughly modern skeptic or a passionate traditionally religious believer in the supernatural, there’s also the possibility that you’re traditionally religious but scoff at the idea that ordinary mortals ever encounter the supernatural, or that you’re modern and Europeanized… but more Romantic than Enlightenment, so you’re open to the world being full of inexplicable wonders). It was fun to inflect the prose so that what’s happening is described in a way that evokes the protagonist’s worldview.

It may actually be possible to have a playthrough where a skeptical character is able to completely explain away everything supernatural to themselves as hallucinations and coincidences. But most playthroughs aren’t like that; usually the magic is going to get in your face! So there’s a certain irony here, in that the skeptic character is probably closest to most modern players, but the skeptic character is also probably wrong, at least with regards to whether magic is real. The traditional worldview of the shtetl is, in fact, correct.

As for human agency, The Ghost and the Golem very much adopts the model of human agency of the traditions it comes out of – Yiddish literature of the fantastic, and before that, the foundational text of Rabbinic Judaism, the Talmud (which is also full of ghosts and demons). These describe a world absolutely centered on human moral agency. Indeed, to a large extent, this tradition sees the drama of human moral agency as the entire reason for the existence of the Universe. We are always free to choose, and always confronted with difficult choices…and those choices make the world. That seems a very appropriate metaphysics to capture in a Choice of Games title!

Your novel The Unraveling has a very different setting and themes: it’s far-future science fiction, dealing with questions of body and technology. What (if anything) does it have in common with The Ghost and the Golem?

Interesting question!

Well, there is a lot of what people have called “Space Talmud” in The Unraveling; it’s set half a million years in the future, so there isn’t Judaism per se, but a very Jewish-ish mode of discourse called “the Long Conversation” figures prominently; it’s a kind of riff on Talmudic discourse. And, of course, Talmudic ways of thinking are all through The Ghost and the Golem, particularly if you crank up that Learned stat!

There’s the same mixture of humor and anxiety in the face of chaos in both works…though The Unraveling leans more toward teenage embarrassment and family chaos, and less towards mystic revelations and horror. They are also both centered on families–parents are comical, but formidable, foils in both works. They both involve childhood friends, and friendships changing over time, potentially including romantic entanglements. Both see romance as fertile ground for confusion and comedy. Both works have an ambivalent attitude towards violence: they never see it as simply an unproblematic and wholly efficacious solution, but nor do they entirely escape it.

Lastly, I guess The Unraveling and The Ghost and the Golem share a model of moral agency. The world is very big and we are small, and we never understand everything that’s going on. Nonetheless, our choices matter; the differences we make add up, and sometimes they snowball into real changes. There’s never a single right answer, or a single solution to a problem; there’s never an end to history. “It is not incumbent upon us to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it.” We just get to play our part, eddies in the stream. Nonetheless, the whole drama of the universe can be seen through the lens of our choices.

What’s next for you creatively? Do you have any other novels, stories, or games in the works?

I seem to be susceptible to totally immersing myself in passion projects. The Unraveling took something like twelve years from start to finish; The Ghost and the Golem took only five, so I guess I’m getting faster?

I have many other things that have been pushed to the side during that time, from a YA environmental oceangoing nanotech adventure-romp, to a darkly comic dystopian-horror tale of a world run by LLM-like AIs. I hope I can do a little more shorter form work before launching into something huge. I also think I might mine the Dream Apart/The Ghost and the Golem setting for some linear prose fiction. With fellow SF author David Moles, I am writing another tabletop RPG, set in a cosmic-SF post-Singularity future.

I also have more ideas for Choice of Games titles, though it might take me a little while to come back to it. But the experience of making one was very fun, maybe even addictive, and also I have these forty-some Ruby scripts I wrote for stats analysis and ChoiceScript code generation, and I can’t just let them languish, can I…?

[hydralisk98]

"16^12" DR Life Scripture, Blackhand Thread '(0x17/?)

Preface

Sum?

Checklist

Klara "Olive" Kér

Female biological + genetic gender (♀), she/her pronouns... (gender-affirming comforting life)

August 1st 4498

Shoshoni Citizenship, University Doctorate Graduate as Historian with plenty of supplemental classes & certifications completed

~20-25 years old

600 years lifespan

Leo/Lepio astrology

INTJ (Myers-Briggs 16 personalities)

5'8", 144lb;

Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autonomous Service Grids (general AI modules) assisting & empowering decisions in meaningful & constructively affirmative ways

Active in federal politics (Senate) & constructively so

Active in my local community

Spirituality & Magicks encouraged within ethical bounds

True Polymorph & other Magick abilities endorsed & legal in this world

Mixnet (The 3D_XML+OpenXanadu WorldWideWeb as operated by Shoshones and other major civilizations, the mainstream use of the global information network with Memex web crawler being a transparent well-known fact. The service is like ‘OGAS’ as a transparent vast and benevolent data processing and knowledge base network), side nets (Think HTTPS, I2P, FTP, OpenSSH & Gemini protocols as examples) & user nets (shortwave radio networks, RTTY / VideoTex & other retro-er infrastructure services)

Lifa app

Body change app

Manifestation tutor

Ava, my synthetic-tier android blonde servant

Shoshona

Nice & handsome copyleft cyberware & biomods

Soft grunge, retro grunge, light academia?, earmuffs

Empowering, wholesome and optimistic solarpunk retrofuture world with much longer historical record & transparent GLOSS mindset attached

Best humane, insightful & comfortable possible timeline stemming from no Woodrow Wilson federal presidency

Hopeful & positive future for the next five centuries easily, both for biological sapients & androids alike;

Bookstore curator / clerk

Multimedia integrator

Educational explainer

Data scientist

Vast personal domain home of my very own in Maskoch within sweet neighborhood

Gustav Hayden as father

Falah Becker as mother

Gustav Hayden, my father { Developer, more contextually-sensitive, nicer to live with, more tolerant, more understanding, less invasive, asks more questions, cares unconditionally, toymaker; }

Falah Becker, my mother { Artistic in her hobbies, massively successful polyglot philosopher, linguist career, much free time, much autonomy, super sweet social life, some more technical know-how, interested in small history and witchcore fantasy fiction much, spiritual acceptance; }

Maternal & paternal familial histories with more... abundant, insightful & positive empowering lives;

Deno Hayden middle younger brother from 4499

Wyatt Hayden youngest brother from 4502

Chronokinesis

Mentat-tier computer data-processing capabilities

Psychics

Personal profile card

Great cultural medium to be watched, listened, et cetera.

Plenty of free-time

?

Multimedia explainer assets to complement 16^12

Hyperlinks to refer to:

https://hydralisk98.blog/post/739215553084964864/imagination-guide-to-16-12-part-1

https://hydralisk98.blog/post/738867056627351552/klara-k%C3%A9r-wishlist-reality-shifting-scripture

https://hydralisk98.blog/post/738796546941943808/contextual-scripture-information-for-my-very-own

https://hydralisk98.blog/post/724346987866193920/servitor-for-16-12-concept-draft-1

https://www.pinterest.ca/olivae_tribble/blackhand-inspiration-board/

[mariacallous]

For 20 years, the only way to really communicate privately was to use a widely hated piece of software called Pretty Good Privacy. The software, known as PGP, aimed to make secure communication accessible to the lay user, but it was so poorly designed that even Edward Snowden messed up his first attempt to use PGP to email a friend of Laura Poitras. It also required its users to think like engineers, which included participating in exceptionally nerdy activities like attending real-life “key-signing parties” to verify your identity to other users. Though anyone could technically use PGP, the barrier to entry was so high that only about 50,000 people used it at its peak, meaning that privacy itself was out of reach for most.

These days, to talk to a friend securely, all you have to do is download a free app. For a certain set, that app will be Signal. Snowden and Elon Musk have recommended it; it’s been name-dropped on big-budget shows like House of Cards, Mr. Robot, and Euphoria, and its users include journalists, members of the White House, NBA players, Black Lives Matters activists, and celebrities trying to get their hands on Ozempic. Its founder has been profiled by The New Yorker and appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast. A tiny organization with virtually no marketing budget has become synonymous with digital privacy in the public imagination.

Technology can be deeply shaped by the personal inclinations of a founder. Facebook’s light-fingeredness with user data is inseparable from its roots in Zuckerberg’s dorm room as an app for ranking women by their looks; Apple’s minimalist design was influenced by Jobs’ time spent practicing Zen Buddhism. Signal is no different. During its formative years, the charismatic face of Signal was Moxie Marlinspike, a dreadlocked anarchist who spent his time sailing around the world, living in punk houses, and serving free food to the unhoused. He led every aspect of Signal’s development for almost a decade, at one point complaining,  “I was writing all the Android code, was writing all of the server code, was the only person on call for the service, was facilitating all product development, and was managing everyone. I couldn’t ever leave cell service.”

In the field of cryptography, Marlinspike is considered the driving force behind bringing end-to-end encryption—the technology underlying Signal—to the real world. In 2017, Marlinspike and his collaborator, Trevor Perrin, received the Levchin Prize, a prominent prize for cryptographers, for their work on the Signal Protocol. Afterward, Dan Boneh, the Stanford professor who chaired the award committee, commented that he wasn’t sure that end-to-end encryption would have become widespread without Marlinspike’s work. At the very least, “it would have taken many more decades,” he said.

The motivations that led to end-to-end encryption going mainstream lie far out on the political fringe. The original impetus for Marlinspike’s entry into cryptography, around 2007, was to challenge existing power structures, particularly the injustice of how (as he put it) “Internet insecurity is used by people I don’t like against people I do: the government against the people.” But sticking to anarchism would imply an almost certain defeat. As Marlinspike once noted, the “trail of ideas that disappears into the horizon behind me is completely and utterly mined over with failures … Anarchists are best known for their failures.”

For an idealistic engineer to succeed, he will have to build something that is useful to many. So there has also been an unusually pragmatic bent to Signal’s approach. Indeed, in many interviews, Marlinspike has taken a mainstream stance, insisting that “Signal is just trying to bring normality to the internet.” Signal’s success depends on maintaining its principled anarchist commitments while finding a wide-ranging appeal to the masses, two goals that might seem at odds. Examining how the app navigates this tension can help us understand what might come next in Signal’s new quest to reach “everyone on the planet.”

Released after WhatsApp  set the standards for messaging, Signal’s problem has always been how to keep up with its competition—a fine dance between mimicry (so as to seem familiar to new users) and innovation (to poach users from its competitors). Signal started off by copying WhatsApp's user experience, while at the same time pioneering end-to-end encryption, a feature that WhatsApp turned around and copied from Signal. Throughout this evolutionary dance, Signal has managed to maintain an unusual focus on the autonomy of the individual, a wariness of state authority, and an aversion to making money, characteristics that are recognizably anarchist.

Because a small fringe of cypherpunks, Marlinspike included, came to see cryptography as a way to remedy the imbalance of power between the individual and the state, Signal focused on getting end-to-end encryption on messages and calls absolutely right. With Signal, no one can read your messages. Amazon can’t, the US government can’t, Signal can’t. The same is true for voice calls and metadata: A user’s address book and group chat titles are just as safe. Signal knows basically nothing about you, other than your phone number (which is not mapped to your username), the time you created your account, and the time you last used the app. Your data can’t be sold to others or cause ads to follow you around on the internet. Using Signal is just like talking with your friend in the kitchen.

Because Signal is committed to retaining as little metadata as possible, that makes it hard for it to implement new features that are standard to other apps. Signal is essentially footing the cost of this commitment in engineer-hours, since implementing popular features like group chats, address books, and stickers all required doing novel research in cryptography. That Signal built them anyway is a testament to its desire for mass appeal.

Signal also pioneered features that gave individuals more autonomy over their information, such as disappearing messages (which WhatsApp later adopted) and a feature that let users blur faces in a photo (which it rapidly rolled out to support the Black Lives Matter protests). At the same time, Signal has garnered users' trust because its code is open source, so that security researchers can verify that its end-to-end encryption is as strong as the organization claims.

For the ordinary user, though, individual autonomy and privacy may not be as important. On WhatsApp, users accept that it will be very hard to figure out what exactly the app knows about you and who it might be shared with. Users’ information is governed by an ever-shifting labyrinth of grudging caveats and clauses like “we will share your transaction data and IP address with Facebook” and “we can’t see your precise location, but we’ll still try to estimate it as best as we can” and “we will find out if you click on a WhatsApp share button on the web.” WhatsApp is also closed-source, so its code can’t be audited. If using Signal is like talking in a friend’s kitchen, using WhatsApp is like meeting at a very loud bar—your conversation is safe, but you’re exposed, and you’ll have to pay for your place.

If you’re not an anarchist, you may be less worried about a shadowy state and more worried about actual people you know. People in your community might be harassing you in a group chat, an abusive ex might be searching your chats for old photos to leak, or your child might have gotten access to your unlocked phone. WhatsApp’s features better support a threat model that is sensitive to interpersonal social dynamics: You can leave groups silently, block screenshots for view-once messages, and lock specific chats. WhatsApp can even view the text of end-to-end encrypted messages that have been reported by a user for moderation, whereas Signal has no moderation at all.

Idealists have called centralization one of the main ills of the internet because it locks users into walled gardens controlled by authoritarian companies. In a great stroke of pragmatism, Signal chose to be centralized anyway. Other encrypted-messaging apps like Matrix offer a federated model akin to email, in which users across different servers can still communicate through a shared protocol. (Someone on Gmail can still email someone on Yahoo, whereas someone on Facebook Messenger can’t contact someone on Signal.) This federated approach more closely mirrors anarchy; it could theoretically be better, because there would be no single point of failure and no single service provider for a government to pressure. But federated software creates a proliferation of different clients and servers for the same protocol, making it hard to upgrade. Users are already used to centralized apps that behave like Facebook or Twitter, and email has already become centralized into a few main service providers. It turns out that being authoritarian is important for maintaining a consistent user experience and a trusted brand, and for rolling out software updates quickly. Even anarchism has its limits.

What Signal has accomplished so far is impressive. But users famously judge software not on how much it can do, but on how much it can’t. In that spirit, it’s time to complain.

Because of Signal’s small team, limited funding, and the challenges of implementing features under end-to-end encryption, the app bafflingly lacks a number of important features. It doesn’t have encrypted backups for iOS; messages can only be transferred between phones. If you lose your iPhone, you lose all your Signal chat history.

Signal also doesn’t do a good job serving some of its core users. Activists and organizers deal with huge amounts of messages that involve many people and threads, but Signal’s interface lacks ways to organize all this information. These power users’ group chats become so unwieldy that they migrate to Slack, losing the end-to-end encryption that brought them to Signal in the first place. It’s common to try and make multiple group chats between the same people to manage all their threads. When users are hacking “desire paths” into your interface to create a new feature, or leaving because of the lack of the feature, that’s a strong hint that something is missing.

WhatsApp and Telegram, on the other hand, are leading the way on defining how group chats can scale up. WhatsApp “communities” gather different private group chats in one place, better mimicking the organization of a neighborhood or school that may be discussing several things at once. Telegram’s social media “channel” features are better for broadcasting info en masse, though Telegram’s lack of moderation has been blamed for attracting the kind of fringe crowd that has been banned from all other platforms.

It's no exaggeration to say that small features in a chat app encode different visions of how society should be organized. If the first reacji in the palette was a thumbs down rather than a heart, maybe we would all be more negative, cautious people. What kind of social vision did Signal arise from?

“Looking back, I and everyone I knew was looking for that secret world hidden in this one,” Marlinspike admitted in a 2016 interview. A key text in anarchist theory describes the idea of a “temporary autonomous zone,” a place of short-term freedom where people can experiment with new ways to live together outside the confines of current social norms. Originally coined to describe “pirate utopias” that may be apocryphal, the term has since been used to understand the life and afterlife of real-world DIY spaces like communes, raves, seasteads, and protests. And Signal is, unmistakably, a temporary autonomous zone that Marlinspike has spent almost a decade building.

Because temporary autonomous zones create spaces for the radical urges that society represses, they keep life in the daytime more stable. They can sometimes make money in the way that nightclubs and festivals do. But temporary autonomous zones are temporary for a reason. Over and over, zone denizens make the same mistake: They can’t figure out how to interact productively with the wider society. The zone often runs out of money because it exists in a world where people need to pay rent. Success is elusive; when a temporary autonomous zone becomes compelling enough to threaten daytime stability, it may be violently repressed. Or the attractive freedoms offered by the zone may be taken up in a milder form by the wider society, and eventually the zone ceases to exist because its existence has pressured wider society to be a little more like it. What kind of end might Signal come to?

There are reasons to think that Signal may not be around for very long. The nonprofit’s blog, meant to convince us of the elite nature of its engineers, has the unintentional effect of conveying the incredible difficulty of building any new software feature under end-to-end encryption. Its team numbers roughly 40; Marlinspike has just left the organization. Achieving impossible feats may be fun for a stunt hacker with something to prove, but competing with major tech companies’ engineering teams may not be sustainable for a small nonprofit with Marlinspike no longer at the helm.

Fittingly for an organization formerly led by an anarchist, Signal lacks a sustainable business model, to the point where you might almost call it anti-capitalist. It has survived so far in ways that don’t seem replicable, and that may alienate some users. Signal is largely funded by a big loan from a WhatsApp founder, and that loan has already grown to $100 million. It has also accepted funding from the US government through the Open Technology Fund. Because Signal can’t sell its users’ data, it has recently begun developing a business model based on directly providing services to users and encouraging them to donate to Signal in-app. But to get enough donations, the nonprofit must grow from 40 million users to 100 million. The company’s aggressive pursuit of growth, coupled with lack of moderation in the app, has already led Signal employees themselves to publicly question whether growth might come from abusive users, such as far-right groups using Signal to organize.

But there are also reasons for hope. So far, the most effective change that Signal has created is arguably not the existence of the app itself, but making it easy for WhatsApp to bring Signal-style end-to-end encryption to billions of users. Since WhatsApp’s adoption, Facebook Messenger, Google’s Android Messages, and Microsoft’s Skype have all adopted the open source Signal Protocol, though in milder forms, as the history of temporary autonomous zones would have us guess. Perhaps the existence of the Signal Protocol, coupled with demand from increasingly privacy-conscious users, will encourage better-funded messaging apps to compete against each other to be as encrypted as possible. Then Signal would no longer need to exist. (In fact, this resembles Signal’s original theory of change, before they decided they would rather compete with mainstream tech companies.)

Now, as the era of the global watercooler ends, small private group chats are becoming the future of social life on the internet. Signal started out a renegade, a pirate utopia encircled by cryptography, but the mainstream has become—alarmingly quickly—much closer to the vision Signal sought. In one form or another, its utopia just might last.