#algorithms of late capitalism

[algorithmsoflatecapitalism]

Gorilla in the room means “a problem or difficult issue that is very obvious, but is ignored for the convenience or comfort of those involved”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

No, Uber's (still) not profitable

Going to Defcon this weekend? I'm giving a keynote, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification and Throw it Into Reverse," on Saturday at 12:30pm, followed by a book signing at the No Starch Press booth at 2:30pm!

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=50826

Bezzle (n): 1. "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" (JK Gabraith) 2. Uber.

Uber was, is, and always will be a bezzle. There are just intrinsic limitations to the profits available to operating a taxi fleet, even if you can misclassify your employees as contractors and steal their wages, even as you force them to bear the cost of buying and maintaining your taxis.

The magic of early Uber – when taxi rides were incredibly cheap, and there were always cars available, and drivers made generous livings behind the wheel – wasn't magic at all. It was just predatory pricing.

Uber lost $0.41 on every dollar they brought in, lighting $33b of its investors' cash on fire. Most of that money came from the Saudi royals, funneled through Softbank, who brought you such bezzles as WeWork – a boring real-estate company masquerading as a high-growth tech company, just as Uber was a boring taxi company masquerading as a tech company.

Predatory pricing used to be illegal, but Chicago School economists convinced judges to stop enforcing the law on the grounds that predatory pricing was impossible because no rational actor would choose to lose money. They (willfully) ignored the obvious possibility that a VC fund could invest in a money-losing business and use predatory pricing to convince retail investors that a pile of shit of sufficient size must have a pony under it somewhere.

This venture predation let investors – like Prince Bone Saw – cash out to suckers, leaving behind a money-losing business that had to invent ever-sweatier accounting tricks and implausible narratives to keep the suckers on the line while they blew town. A bezzle, in other words:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

Uber is a true bezzle innovator, coming up with all kinds of fairy tales and sci-fi gimmicks to explain how they would convert their money-loser into a profitable business. They spent $2.5b on self-driving cars, producing a vehicle whose mean distance between fatal crashes was half a mile. Then they paid another company $400 million to take this self-licking ice-cream cone off their hands:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Amazingly, self-driving cars were among the more plausible of Uber's plans. They pissed away hundreds of millions on California's Proposition 22 to institutionalize worker misclassification, only to have the rule struck down because they couldn't be bothered to draft it properly. Then they did it again in Massachusetts:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/15/simple-as-abc/#a-big-ask

Remember when Uber was going to plug the holes in its balance sheet with flying cars? Flying cars! Maybe they were just trying to soften us up for their IPO, where they advised investors that the only way they'd ever be profitable is if they could replace every train, bus and tram ride in the world:

https://48hills.org/2019/05/ubers-plans-include-attacking-public-transit/

Honestly, the only way that seems remotely plausible is when it's put next to flying cars for comparison. I guess we can be grateful that they never promised us jetpacks, or, you know, teleportation. Just imagine the market opportunity they could have ascribed to astral projection!

Narrative capitalism has its limits. Once Uber went public, it had to produce financial disclosures that showed the line going up, lest the bezzle come to an end. These balance-sheet tricks were as varied as they were transparent, but the financial press kept falling for them, serving as dutiful stenographers for a string of triumphant press-releases announcing Uber's long-delayed entry into the league of companies that don't lose more money every single day.

One person Uber has never fooled is Hubert Horan, a transportation analyst with decades of experience who's had Uber's number since the very start, and who has done yeoman service puncturing every one of these financial "disclosures," methodically sifting through the pile of shit to prove that there is no pony hiding in it.

In 2021, Horan showed how Uber had burned through nearly all of its cash reserves, signaling an end to its subsidy for drivers and rides, which would also inevitably end the bezzle:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/10/unter/#bezzle-no-more

In mid, 2022, Horan showed how the "profit" Uber trumpeted came from selling off failed companies it had acquired to other dying rideshare companies, which paid in their own grossly inflated stock:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/05/a-lousy-taxi/#a-giant-asterisk

At the end of 2022, Horan showed how Uber invented a made-up, nonstandard metric, called "EBITDA profitability," which allowed them to lose billions and still declare themselves to be profitable, a lie that would have been obvious if they'd reported their earnings using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft

Like clockwork, Uber has just announced – once again – that it is profitable, and once again, the press has credulously repeated the claim. So once again, Horan has published one of his magisterial debunkings on Naked Capitalism:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/08/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-thirty-three-uber-isnt-really-profitable-yet-but-is-getting-closer-the-antitrust-case-against-uber.html

Uber's $394m gains this quarter come from paper gains to untradable shares in its loss-making rivals – Didi, Grab, Aurora – who swapped stock with Uber in exchange for Uber's own loss-making overseas divisions. Yes, it's that stupid: Uber holds shares in dying companies that no one wants to buy. It declared those shares to have gained value, and on that basis, reported a profit.

Truly, any big number multiplied by an imaginary number can be turned into an even bigger number.

Now, Uber also reported "margin improvements" – that is, it says that it loses less on every journey. But it didn't explain how it made those improvements. But we know how the company did it: they made rides more expensive and cut the pay to their drivers. A 2.9m ride in Manhattan is now $50 – if you get a bargain! The base price is more like $70:

https://www.wired.com/story/uber-ceo-will-always-say-his-company-sucks/

The number of Uber drivers on the road has a direct relationship to the pay Uber offers those drivers. But that pay has been steeply declining, and with it, the availability of Ubers. A couple weeks ago, I found myself at the Burbank train station unable to get an Uber at all, with the app timing out repeatedly and announcing "no drivers available."

Normally, you can get a yellow taxi at the station, but years of Uber's predatory pricing has caused a drawdown of the local taxi-fleet, so there were no taxis available at the cab-rank or by dispatch. It took me an hour to get a cab home. Uber's bezzle destroyed local taxis and local transit – and replaced them with worse taxis that cost more.

Uber won't say why its margins are improving, but it can't be coming from scale. Before the pandemic, Uber had far more rides, and worse margins. Uber has diseconomies of scale: when you lose money on every ride, adding more rides increases your losses, not your profits.

Meanwhile, Lyft – Uber's also-ran competitor – saw its margins worsen over the same period. Lyft has always been worse at lying about it finances than Uber, but it is in essentially the exact same business (right down to the drivers and cars – many drivers have both apps on their phones). So Lyft's financials offer a good peek at Uber's true earnings picture.

Lyft is actually slightly better off than Uber overall. It spent less money on expensive props for its long con – flying cars, robotaxis, scooters, overseas clones – and abandoned them before Uber did. Lyft also fired 24% of its staff at the end of 2022, which should have improved its margins by cutting its costs.

Uber pays its drivers less. Like Lyft, Uber practices algorithmic wage discrimination, Veena Dubal's term describing the illegal practice of offering workers different payouts for the same work. Uber's algorithm seeks out "pickers" who are choosy about which rides they take, and converts them to "ants" (who take every ride offered) by paying them more for the same job, until they drop all their other gigs, whereupon the algorithm cuts their pay back to the rates paid to ants:

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

All told, wage theft and wage cuts by Uber transferred $1b/quarter from labor to Uber's shareholders. Historically, Uber linked fares to driver pay – think of surge pricing, where Uber charged riders more for peak times and passed some of that premium onto drivers. But now Uber trumpets a custom pricing algorithm that is the inverse of its driver payment system, calculating riders' willingness to pay and repricing every ride based on how desperate they think you are.

This pricing is a per se antitrust violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act, America's original antitrust law. That's important because Sherman 2 is one of the few antitrust laws that we never stopped enforcing, unlike the laws banning predator pricing:

https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/sites/ilr.law.uiowa.edu/files/2023-02/Woodcock.pdf

Uber claims an 11% margin improvement. 6-7% of that comes from algorithmic price discrimination and service cutbacks, letting it take 29% of every dollar the driver earns (up from 22%). Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi himself says that this is as high as the take can get – over 30%, and drivers will delete the app.

Uber's food delivery service – a baling wire-and-spit Frankenstein's monster of several food apps it bought and glued together – is a loser even by the standards of the sector, which is unprofitable as a whole and experiencing an unbroken slide of declining demand.

Put it all together and you get a picture of the kind of taxi company Uber really is: one that charges more than traditional cabs, pays drivers less, and has fewer cars on the road at times of peak demand, especially in the neighborhoods that traditional taxis had always underserved. In other words, Uber has broken every one of its promises.

We replaced the "evil taxi cartel" with an "evil taxi monopolist." And it's still losing money.

Even if Lyft goes under – as seems inevitable – Uber can't attain real profitability by scooping up its passengers and drivers. When you're losing money on every ride, you just can't make it up in volume.

Image: JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LA_BREA_TAR_PITS,_LOS_ANGELES.jpg

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

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/09/accounting-gimmicks/#unter

Image: JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LA_BREA_TAR_PITS,_LOS_ANGELES.jpg

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

[queerbrainrot]

Youtube: we want you to use our service over tiktok so here's a 40 second/1 min 30 second unskippable ad, on top of a second unskippable ad

[elizamint]

I've been finding myself really missing the Internet of the late 2000s - early 2010s. The current mainstream Internet is a fucking nightmare. If it weren't for Fedi, and to a smaller extent Tumblr, I probably just wouldn't be online anymore. I hate how hyper capitalistic and bottom line driven every corner of this hellscape feels now. I hate how algorithmically driven and manipulative every fucking website feels now. Almost none of the modern Internet is tolerable to engage with as an end-user, and I'm increasingly struggling to see the point of even bothering to.

[dr11ft]

Me: Idk if my storyline's ready yet what if people notice that I haven't calculated the post-apocalyptic economic factors that would affect what kind of blaster rael uses. What if the sheets on kaspar's bed don't line up with their family history. I'll be hanged.

Average published comic book: Yeah theyre chasing Killer Moth in the Mothmobile. Yeah idk the car is shaped like a moth btw it's $5 if you want the print version of this. And we forgot what eye color the mc has hope that's cool

[killaura]

really great advertisement work coming from the tumblr team over here

[inverse-problem]

really weird constantly having to reconcile my thoughts of "wow I love fictional robots they're so cool and also oh no they're hot sometimes" with "I despise the shit that's happening with machine-learning large-language-model shit"

I've been having a real time of things going "wow I love robots" [the current whatever-the-fuck machine learning bullshit landscape happens] "shit, not like that"

[ars-paradox]

I seek solace within the underlying darkness beneath this static everlasting. Far away from the endless stream that shackled me onto the precipice of the all consuming existence.

In this... blackened spire of existence, where the natural meld with artificial... I gaze upon thee in hope and fear, for the future is fragile and humanity is losing their way...

Keep reading... There might be hope, if only you would listen...

The Dream Machine

In a time before ships and sails, humanity gazed upon the ocean with great wonder.

"What lies beyond the horizon?" "What bounties were there to be claimed?" "What adventures to be had?"

And each individual, they dreamed of a time where they can cruise through the great ocean. Battling its dangers, conquering its monsters, and exploring the world beyond.

And among those who dreamed, some rise among the many to be the few who suffers.

They chose to suffer through their dreams of suffering. They chose to fight through their dreams of endless battle. They chose to struggle through their dreams of adventure.

And glorious were the days of mankind, when they traversed the world and claim nature as their superior.

And enlightened were the days of mankind, when they embraced the unknown and had knowledge as their purpose.

And prosperous were the days of mankind, when they reshape the very world to their own design.

The days of peace and an era of greatness follows. With mankind suffering, fighting, and struggling for their dreams. Even if one individual fail, a thousand more will take their place.

And they share those dreams...

Through written letters, mankind inspired those that came after... Through songs and ballad, mankind encouraged those who listens... Through shapes and colors, mankind painted the hearts of many...

Until one day, mankind created it...

"The Dream Machine"

It was but a simple machine. It lets people share their own dreams with one another; unbound by the constraint of physical world.

The glory of cruising through the sea of stars, the beauty of a mythical island, the stories of peaceful world beyond...

For a race of creature whose purpose was to turn dreams into reality, surely such machine would be a wonderful blessing?

Humanity can share their dreams Humanity can connect through their dreams Humanity can unite to achieve their dreams

Until the strangest thing happen...

Humanity they... created an illusion of a dream... Where the illusion of dream achieved is enough for them... Where they quantify their dreams through numbers...

A bard who dreamt to reach the hearts of the people, Sacrificed their message for a million ticket sales...

A scientist who dreamt of saving the world, Fought desperately to wring out money from the poor...

A director who dreamt of creating the beauty of magic, Abandons the magic for the profit...

And it wasn't enough for mankind.

Through number and measure, mankind pick apart what makes them special. They band together to create something unlike anything the world has ever seen before.

Through number and measure, mankind created their magnum opus...

"The Dreaming Machine"

From the dreams of all that came before them, mankind created a machine that can create its own dream.

And with the creation of the Dreaming Machine...

Surely, mankind would broke free from the illusion of dreams? Surely, mankind would use this machine to achieve their dreams? Surely, mankind would rise higher and sail to the unknown?

...

Or perhaps...

They'd rather sleep, in an endless dream...

-----------

I thank thee for thy patience to read this. It's not thy fault if such endeavor is taxing

It's a curse that comes from this blessing... The blessing of dreams everlasting...

[letteredlettered]

feedback and fic in fandom (3 f's of our own)

This conversation about feedback on fic says everything I’ve been wanting to say better than I could say it. But I’ll go ahead and try anyway.

Over the last five years or so there have been some great discussions around the rise of commodification of fanworks and decline of fandom community. This commodification looks a bit like enshittification of the internet: a cool site exists; its popularity makes someone realize they can get money from it; it has more and more ads; the site adds features to drive engagement, including The Algorithm; the things that made the site cool start to fall away. The site exists now as a vehicle purely to get clicks, and the people on it are on it solely to get clicks—to make money, to be successful, for some kind of social cachet.

AO3 doesn’t have advertisements. It’s not making money. But what is happening to fandom is proof of concept that enshittification changes the way we as humans engage. A cool website in 2004 was often a community space where you could meet people, have conversations, find cool things, and make cool things. A cool website in 2024 is either a content farm that will continually feed you enough content to hold your attention, or a social media site where your participation will come with stats to show you whether you are holding the attention of others.

AO3 wasn’t built to be a community space. It doesn’t have great functions for meeting people and having conversations. The idea was that, because fandom community spaces already existed, AO3 would serve the part of that community where you can find the cool things and store the cool things you made. It was meant to be a library in a city, not the whole city itself.

But it was also never meant to be a website in 2024, a content farm constantly generating content solely for your clicks and eyeballs and ad revenue, or a social media site where the content creators themselves vie for your clicks and eyeballs.

The most common talking point when people discuss the enshittification of fandom is the folks out there who are treating AO3 as that first kind of enshittified website: the content farm. This discussion is about how people treat fanfic as a product for consumption.

The post that kicked off the discussion on @sitp-recs’s blog was about someone who wasn’t getting very many kudos or comments on their fic, and was feeling pretty demoralized about it, then joined a discord server and found an entire channel dedicated to people loving their fic. But those on that server had never come to share that love with the author, which the author found really discouraging.

There are more and more stories like this. Someone on tiktok pulls a quote from a fic on AO3 and makes a 10-second video with them staring at a wall, the quote pasted at the bottom, music playing over it. It has 100,000 hearts, and 100 comments with people gushing over the fic, which has 80 kudos on AO3. Overall, people notice more and more hits on their fics, but fewer and fewer comments or even kudos. Fewer and fewer people seem to feel the need to interact with the author, instead treating the fic like a product to be used and discarded—which the enshittified internet (a stunning feature of late-stage capitalism!) encourages. The fandom community is dying, these stories conclude.

I agree. 100%. Both of the stories above have happened to me—viral tiktoks about my fic, secret discord channels to follow and discuss my fic—and let me tell you, it fucking sucks.

But from these observations about fandom enshittification, the discussion continues in a very odd direction. The solution to the death of fandom community is our favorite enshittification buzzword: engagement. We should engage the authors. They’re producing these products for free. We consume them at no cost. We must demonstrate our gratitude by paying them back.

It’s as though the capitalist consumption that the enshittified web encourages is so ingrained within us that we must think in terms of payment, in terms of exchange, transaction. Or as though, by forgoing payment, authors are some kind of martyrs defying capitalism, and the only way to honor their great sacrifice is comments and kudos.

Indeed, the discourse around this sometimes does veer away from capitalist rhetoric into something that smells almost religious in desperation. Authors are gods who bestow us mere mortals with the fruits of their labor benevolently, through love; the least we can do is worship them. Meanwhile the authors adopt the groveling sentiment of starving artists: I produce great art; I only humbly ask that you feed me in return.

These kinds of entreaties make my skin crawl for a number of reasons. I’m not a god. I’m not writing because I love you. I don’t expect your worship or even your praise.

I think the thing that disturbs me the most about it is that it suggests that authors (or, if the OP is feeling generous fan work creators) are the most important people in fandom. I’ve even seen posts stating that without creators, fandom wouldn’t exist—as though readers aren’t just as important. As though conversations where people discuss characterizations and plot points and randomly spin out interpretations and ideas and thoughts related to canon are meaningless. I’ve even seen people scramble to include folks having these discussions as “creators,” as though realizing that these people are necessary and integral to fandom communities but unable to drop the idea that the producers are the ones who are important. As though that person who just lurks can never count.

Is this what community is? When you join the queer community, are you expected to produce a product of your queerness? If not, must you actively participate and give back to the queer community in order to be considered a part of it? Or is it enough that you are queer, that you exist as a queer person and want to be around others who are queer, you want to be a part of something? What is community, anyway?

The problem with people raising the authors above everyone else in the community and demanding that tribute be paid is that they are decrying the “content farm” style of 2024 website out of one side of their mouth, but out of the other side are instead demanding that AO3 become a 2024-style social media website. Authors are influencers. “Engagement” and clicks are the things that really matter. They are in fact suggesting that the way to solve the commodification of fanfic is by “paying authors back” with stats.

Before anyone comes at me with the idea that comments aren’t just “stats,” I will clarify what I mean. There are literally hundreds of posts on tumblr alone claiming that any comment “helps” the author. Someone replies that they are shy to comment. Someone else replies that incoherent keyboard smashes, a single emoji, or the comment “kudos” are all that is required to satisfy the author, all that is required as tribute—all that is required as payment to keep this economy healthy.

I’m not condemning the comments that are keyboard smashes or emojis or a single kind word. I receive them. They make me happy. If anyone wants to leave such a comment on my fics, I’m really grateful for it. But this is not community-building. This is a transaction. In @yiiiiiiiikes25’s excellent response in the post linked at the beginning, they point out that “you have a cool hat” is something that is “perfectly nice” to hear from someone—and it is! We all want to be told we have a cool hat! But as they go on to say, what builds community is interactions that are deep and specific, interactions that are rich in quality, not in quantity. A kudos or a comment that says only ❤️are lovely things to receive, but they don’t build community.

My reaction, when I see people begging for kudos and comments as the only means by which to keep fandom community alive, is very close to @eleadore's. I want to say, “No. Readers do not need to comment or kudos. Believe not these hucksters who claim to know the appropriate method of fandom participation. Participate as you feel able, or not at all; nothing is required of you.”

I’ve been told before (several times) that I’m not qualified to participate in such discussions because I am an established author who has some fics with very high stats. It doesn’t matter that I have also been a new writer with almost no one reading my fics. It doesn’t matter that I still write in new fandoms where no one in that fandom knows me. It doesn’t matter that I, like any human being, still care about receiving recognition and attention and praise.

And maybe that’s correct. I personally don’t think that billionaires have a place in deciding the direction of the economy, and--if we're really going to consider fandom an economy--in fandom terms, if I’m not a billionaire, or even a millionaire, I’m definitely in the infamous “one percent.” So, just as no one wants to hear Elon Musk say “money isn’t everything,” maybe it’s not my place to say “kudos isn’t required, actually.”

That said, I’m not the only one who has a problem with the stats-based discourse around fandom community. However, the main counter-response to this discussion I see goes something like this: you shouldn’t be writing fic for validation. If you’re writing for attention, you’re doing it for the wrong reason. Authors should write fic because they love it without any expectation of return.

This is, in my opinion, missing the point of what is meant by fandom community.

I wrote fanfic before I knew that fanfic, as a concept, existed. I read books; I wanted them to be different; I wrote little stories for myself with new endings, with self-inserts, with cross-overs, with alternate universes. I did it for myself in the 90s. It never occurred to me that anyone else would do this, much less that people would share.

As @faiell points out—creating and sharing are two different things. I created fics for myself, but I decided to share them in the early 2000s because other people might like them, too. And of course, I wanted to hear whether other people liked them. How could I not? I might decorate my home just for me and not for anyone else’s preferences, but when people come over and say my house is nice, how can I not enjoy that? And if a lot of people think my house is nice, which encourages me to post pictures of it online, isn’t it understandable I might do so with the hope that more people will say my house is nice? And, honestly, if no one is appreciating my pictures, I probably won’t continue to go through the trouble of taking them and posting them. I’ll just enjoy my house that I decorated without sharing, the end.

When I found out there were whole fannish communities where people discussed canon and tossed ideas around about it, made theories and prompts and insights into the characters, fics they had written and recs for other fics and analyses of fics and art based on fics and fics based on art—I wanted to be a part of that, too. Now, sometimes, I write fic not out of an internal need to do so but out of a desire to participate in that community.

The idea that we write fic only for the love of it, then post it only because we possess it, is a process entirely centered on the self. It’s fandom in a vacuum. The idea that we share this thing, that we feel pleasure if someone likes it but feel nothing at all if no one says anything about it, that it’s completely okay to be ignored and unseen—that’s not what a community is either. That’s some weird sort of self-aggrandizement through self-effacement—because yes, there is often a weird kind of virtue-signaling in this kind of discourse.

I say this as someone who has virtue-signaled in that way: “some people write for stats, but I write for myself.” It’s bullshit. Sure, I write for myself, but why post it on the internet? Honestly, said virtue has a whiff of the capitalist machine, which would like you to produce for the sake of production, work for the sake of work. The noblest among us expect no recompense for that which they give!

The reason that I’m bringing this back around to capitalism is that capitalism actively works to dismantle community. The reason that folks are out here pleading for “engagement” in order to “pay back” authors for the products they give us “for free” is because people no longer even have the language to discuss how to participate in meaningful community. And frankly, how to build back fandom community, in the face of enshittification, is getting harder and harder to see.

But I do think that if we value fanfic and the fanfic community, it’s really, really not constructive to judge whether someone’s reasons for writing fanfic are valid. It’s also weird to me that it would be considered wrong that someone’s reason for sharing fanfic is because they would like to receive some recognition for it, when in fact that seems to be the most natural reason in the world for sharing something so private and vulnerable with the world.

Let’s go back to that idea of how hurtful it is to find out your fanfic is trending on tiktok without anyone from tiktok saying anything to you about your fic, or how it can be painful to find out there’s a secret discord channel dedicated to your fic. The people who respond to that with, “Ah, but you shouldn’t be writing to get attention!” are missing the point. The fic did get attention. It got lots. Attention obviously wasn't why the writer was writing--they were writing to participate, and they didn't get to. At all.

However, if your conclusion is that the author was upset because these particular stats were not accruing under this author’s profile, thereby preventing them from achieving the vaunted status of BNF and influencer—I don’t know, maybe you’re right. But I don’t think that’s why I, personally, have been hurt by these things, and I doubt it’s what hurt the people in these posts either. They’re hurt because they want to participate, and they have been systematically excluded by the very people they thought were part of the community they thought they could participate in.

Sure, if those folks from tiktok and the discord server all came and showered the author with kudos and comments that said “kudos,” the author might have felt satisfied enough with the quantity of this recognition that they would continue writing. But in the end, this still does nothing to address the problem of fandom community, in which the deep, meaningful recognition, interactions, and relationships in fandom are getting harder and harder to have and to build, as a result of how people now expect to engage in online spaces.

So, how to address the problem of fandom community? You probably read this long, long post hoping that I had an answer, and for that I must apologize. I don’t have solutions. My intent was to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive. I wished to outline the problems that I’m seeing in what was hopefully a slightly new or at least thought-provoking way, rather than offer solutions.

But, now that I’m talking about being prescriptive, maybe I can offer one suggestion, which is—maybe the solution to this isn’t about prescribing behavior. I do understand the irony in writing a prescription saying we shouldn’t prescribe people, but I’m going to write it anyway:

Maybe we shouldn’t be telling anyone the appropriate reasons for writing fanfic or for sharing it. Maybe we shouldn’t be telling readers they need to kudos or need to comment. If we’re going to go pointing fingers, we should be pointing at the institutions of capitalism that have made the internet what it is today—but I don’t think that’s going to solve the problem either.

But I do think that describing this problem, understanding what it actually is, not blaming readers for it and not blaming authors for it—I do think that helps. The discussion I linked at the beginning of this post is what I think of as the fandom I miss, the fandom that's now harder and harder to access, the fandom that is dying. That fandom was a social space where people had opinions and disagreed and went back and forth and gazed at their navels and then talked about Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In the words of @yiiiiiiiikes25, it was a fuckin’ discussion about hats. And we’re hungry for it.

[fortunately-bi]

God after that rant in the tags I really do miss old Tumblr. Like not just for the nsfw stuff but also like, I miss all of the people I used to follow who disappeared and I never found. I miss the stuff I can't find anymore because it got unfairly nuked during the ban, I miss not having ads, I miss not having weird layouts and random blogs pushed on me and Tumblr live giving me heart attacks every time I think I accidentally clicked one. Like for a long while this site was just left alone with the occasional update and different color of blue and we all just kinda existed(at least that's how my dash looked). Tumblr feels like walking into a house I used to live in but now someone else lives there and they painted the walls a different color they changed a bunch of things. Like it's still the same layout, there's still things that pop up sometimes that poke at the nostalgia but it just feels weird.

[algorithmsoflatecapitalism]

[zaebeecee]

Why HuskerDust Isn’t Canon

I’ve seen a lot of Angel Dust-involved ship critical posts lately, all of them cruel and mean-spirited and all of them from those HuskerDust shippers who give the rest of them a bad name and go out of their way to attack anyone with a ship involving either Husk or Angel. They do this because “HD is canon”, and even those who don’t like the ship have resigned themselves to it being canon. But here’s the thing: in both the actual text of the show and in the meta, it’s not. And I’m going to go through several points to prove that it isn’t canon. (Note: these are all tropic flags and nothing else. Consider this a tiny media literacy course.)

Getting this out of the way: this isn’t anti-HD, a discouragement from shipping HD, or saying “it’s literally never going to be canon”. Obviously, people are free to ship whatever they want for whatever reasons they want; this isn’t intended to bully members of the fandom or to shame anyone who ships it, nor to attempt to convince people not to ship it. This is simply a response to claims of the canonicity of the ship being used to bully non-shippers, and speaking from the viewpoint of the narrative, the tropes, and the meta, it is not canon.

tl;dr: I don’t hate the shippers, I hate the bullies. This is not a discourse invitation, this is a trope analysis. If you don’t like what I’m saying, move on or block me. If you think I’m being mean, I really don’t care, because this is specifically a response to people who are being mean all the time. People in the fandom are terrified to be even vaguely critical of this ship because of the potential backlash, but I’m an Aquarius with a block button, idgaf.

HD was not confirmed canon by Medrano in an interview or on Twitter

To get this first point out of the way, the primary proof that HD shippers will use to claim their ship is canon is a Tweet Medrano put out after Episode 4 was put up on Amazon, as well as a Zoom interview where the interviewer asked her about HD.

The Tweet, which included a screenshot of Masquerade and asked what HD shippers thought of the episode, included the ship name. This is an example of engagement farming, a technique used in social media when people will use trending/popular tags, words, and phrases in order to increase engagement with posts and videos. The use of the HD ship name was not a confirmation of the ship; rather, it was used to capitalize on the ship’s popularity, ensuring that the algorithm would distribute it to as many people as possible. We know this was engagement farming because it was simply asking the people who shipped them what they thought of the episode. It didn’t call it a HD episode, nor did it say it was for the HD shippers.

In the Zoom interview, while the person conducting the interview used the term HD, Medrano herself never did. In fact, she went out of her way to avoid using the ship name, and instead, used the generic word “relationship” when describing their future interactions, a word she has also used to describe future progression between Charlie and Lucifer (so, if this makes HD canon, then it also means that Charlie and Lucifer will be a canon romantic ship).

HD was not confirmed canon by Blake Roman or Keith David

In much the same vein as the aforementioned Zoom interview, when Roman and David were interviewed about the interaction between Angel Dust and Husk, both actors carefully avoided using any terminology or wording that suggested a romantic relationship, only talking about the two of them as close friends. If the ship had actually been confirmed by Medrano months earlier, there would be no reason for the two of them to skirt around the issue. There was also nothing teasing the potential of the ship, simply straightforward information about their friendship.

Husk has been called Angel Dust’s “best friend” by Medrano repeatedly

Medrano has always, when referring to their future interactions, referred to Husk as Angel Dust’s “best friend”. Additionally, while she has never shied away from stating when a character has any form of romantic interest in another character, her only comment on Husk has been that he is pansexual, but she has quite specifically never once stated that he has any romantic interest in Angel Dust.

“Loser, Baby” is the “we’re not so different” buddy musical song

Much of Hazbin Hotel can only be understood through the lens of the form of media that it’s taking most of its cues from: namely, musical theater. There are many tropes that exist within musical theater, specifically in the types of songs themselves, that are used as shorthands to tell audiences what relationships are between characters and how they will be interacting going forward, because all storytelling in musicals are abbreviated by necessity, and songs exist to encapsulate large portions of character/story development in short periods of time.

“Loser, Baby” is, tropically speaking, a song that occurs during the main character’s lowest point in the first half of Act II. This is when they have encountered a massive hurdle in their journey (a breakup, a death, getting kicked out of their house or school, losing their dream job, etc) and are feeling hopeless and lost. In this instance, one of two kinds of songs will occur at this point during the show:

The first is the romantic duet, where the MC is dejected and negative, and their love interest is attempting to turn them around. This is the point when the love interest realizes they are in love with the MC, whether they confess these feelings or not, and is a plea for the MC not to give up.

The second is the “snap out of it, you moron” song. This takes place when the MC is on their own and is found by either a character we are familiar with who has realized they misunderstood the MC (who goes from being a point of conflict to a friend), a family member of the MC (usually either a sibling, an adult offspring, or a parental figure), or by a character we have never met before (generally one considerably older than the MC). This is the song where the other character confesses to the MC that they understand their pain because they were once in the same situation, or because they went through a similar painful progression if that situation hasn’t changed. This song typically carries a “suck it up, buttercup” message and is considerably more callous than the romantic duet, because it is a communication of tough love. It’s important to note that this is never a duet between the MC and their love interest.

“Loser, Baby” is quite firmly in the second category. It is not romantic in nature; rather, it’s Husk realizing that he misjudged Angel Dust and, subsequently, telling him “a lot of other people are in your position, I’m one of them, you aren’t special, stop whining”.

If “Loser, Baby” is romantic, Husk is a predator

For the entirety of the series up until this song, Husk has shown that he has absolutely zero interest in Angel Dust romantically. “Loser, Baby” comes on the heels of Angel Dust confessing to suffering from a great deal of physical and emotional abuse and manipulation, as well as crying in front of someone else for the first time, showing his first true moment of real vulnerability. If Husk uses that moment to suddenly show interest in Angel Dust, it says that either A) Husk is only interested in Angel Dust once he realizes that he is emotionally broken and in a vulnerable position, or B) Husk is willing to use this vulnerability to his advantage and subsequently manipulate Angel Dust. Both of these things are contradictory to Husk’s character.

Husk and Angel Dust have minimal interaction in Welcome to Heaven

Episode 6 has two plots: the A plot, which is Charlie and Vaggie visiting Heaven to attempt to bargain with the Seraphim; and the B plot, revolving around Angel Dust’s temptations to regress into his addictions. In the B plot, Husk’s only interactions with Angel Dust are judging him for wanting to do drugs (which directly contradict his claim in “Loser, Baby”, where he expressly states that he’s fine with Angel Dust’s hooking and drug addiction; it also comes while he is indulging in alcohol, his own vice, which is the definition of hypocritical), and being silently proud of him when he doesn’t do drugs. This is the behavior of the Shoulder Angel or of the Detached Father, not the love interest.

Angel Dust is a main character, Husk is not

Angel Dust is a member of the main cast, alongside Charlie, Vaggie, and Alastor. Husk is a secondary character. It isn’t feasible to have a main character pursue a relationship with a secondary character; you can have an MC who is already in an established relationship with an SC, but you cannot build a relationship between an MC and an SC because the SC doesn’t have enough lines or screen time. Keith David is also quite expensive, and there is no way the show will be able to afford the price that would be required for Husk to be a larger presence in the show.

There is a forty year age gap between the two

Sinners do not age, nor do they mature. We see examples of this in every single Sinner throughout Hell; Angel Dust is a good example, as he died in his 30s in 1947, meaning he would be (at minimum) 110 years old. However, he acts like a young man in his early 30s who spent most (if not all) of his life in a deeply repressed home. Another good example is Cherri Bomb, who is clearly in her 20s, but would be at least in her 60s by this point. Because of this, it is easy to determine that not only do their bodies not age, their minds do not, meaning that the age they were at time of death is the age they will be, mentally and emotionally, forever.

Angel Dust died in his 30s. The only official number Medrano ever gave for Husk’s age at death was 75, and she has stated both that he died in the 1970s and he was born before the year 1900. While no specific age has been stated for Angel Dust, he is written to be between the ages of 30 and 35, meaning that there is a minimum age gap of forty years between the two of them. Additionally, if Husk was intended to be the love interest of someone in their 30s, he would not have been specifically written to be an old man.

Angel Dust has never once come on to Husk

Angel Dust is a flirtatious and sexual character. However, his only flirtations with Husk have been responses to statements Husk made that could be taken out of context. Not only does he never take the initiative and flirt with him first, he also never propositions him; the closest he gets is telling Husk he would be lucky to be propositioned by him. (As a side note, Angel Dust has only ever propositioned two characters in the entire show: Alastor, both in the pilot and the first episode, and Alastor’s shadow construct in the second episode).

It could be said that this is because Angel Dust has “true feelings” for Husk and is, therefore, too shy to overtly proposition him, which brings us to the next point:

HD as a ship is built entirely on homophobic writing tropes

There are several points about this ship that are, ironically, homophobic, but I’ll be focusing on the last two points: the age gap and Angel Dust’s sexual nature.

The age gap: the gay male community has, since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks, been plagued with this idea that enormous age gaps are not only fine, they’re expected. Age differences that would never be tolerated in heterosexual or even lesbian couples are waved off when the characters in question are men. This has created the false expectation that many older gay men have--namely that they are “owed a twink”, and that younger gay men are almost required to submit themselves to a much older man as a rite of passage.

Angel Dust’s sexual nature: Husk has quite expressly stated he has no interest in Angel Dust’s overt sexuality, to the point that he refuses to even look at him as a person until Angel Dust reveals other facets of his personality. This suggests that, for a relationship to work, Angel Dust would have no choice but to repress his urges, or that Angel Dust’s sexuality is a front and he actually isn’t that overt. In either case, this would be a direct parallel to Angel Dust’s life as a gay man in the 1930s and 1940s, where he would have been forced to be closeted under threat of prison or death, and either Husk himself or the audience would be forcing him back into a form of that closet.

Crimini has no stated relationship with Angel Dust

Crimini, a character who is slated to appear in Season Two, has been described as Husk’s adoptive daughter who will make up the bulk of his character plot going forward. Not only does Angel Dust have no stated relationship with her, he has never once been mentioned alongside her character at all. If Angel Dust was intended to be Husk’s love interest, that would make him (functionally) another parental figure to Crimini, if perhaps a reluctant one; that would make him an integral part of Crimini’s future plot, but seemingly, the two have nothing whatsoever to do with one another.

Despite the fact that Medrano changes canon based on fan opinion all the time, the show is written too far in advance to change major plot beats just because one ship got really popular

We in the fandom know that Medrano has a tendency to fold in the face of fandom wants and desires. However, between the pilot and season one, the HD fandom was rather small; this would have been when Medrano was working with Amazon, getting future script approval and mapping out the way the story was going to go, and at the time, RadioDust was just about the only thing keeping the fandom alive long enough for interest to remain during the three year gap, and we all know that isn't going to be canon. Because of the sheer amount of overhead and advance planning that goes into something like this--particularly considering that season two was already in production in the wake of season one’s premier--the fact that the HD fandom grew after the season’s release would be unable to have any effect on the show because it would be far too complicated and far too expensive to make big changes. HD would only be viable if it was already planned from the beginning, which it quite clearly was not.

•

So what's my point with all of this? My point is that the content of media means things, and part of media literacy is understanding the difference between wishful thinking/projection and canon.

[wiisagi-maiingan]

I love watching youtube videos about tiktok and influencer drama, mainly because I'm completely disconnected from stuff like that (I have never watched an influencer video in my life) so it gives me the thrill of true crime without the tragedy exploitation aspect, but sometimes I also feel completely disconnected from the youtubers too?

Like every youtuber has to offer up a million disclaimers about how they aren't judging influencers or whatever and that's usually fine but like. I do feel that there ARE points where people need to be judged for the content they're sharing and promoting and profiting off of!

"I'm not judging tradwives or saying their content is bad—" I am!! I am absolutely judging tradwives! Extremely harshly! Because the entire "tradwife" movement is conservative propaganda based on misogynistic and patriarchal ideas about history with no basis in reality or in our modern world! And tradwife influencers explicitly target young women and especially teen girls and try to convince them to put their entire lives in the hands of their husbands, which is a horrific recipe for domestic abuse!

These women making hundreds of thousands of dollars off tiktok videos (and often coming from extremely wealthy families) are out here telling young girls that they don't need an education, that they don't need their own income, that if they're just pretty enough and obedient enough then they'll find a rich husband and never have to worry about anything ever and it's fucking scary! And I don't know why we are tolerating it!

We know what happens when people, especially women, give up complete control to their partners. We know what that leads to, resentment and extreme control and total lack of options when things go from totally fine to constant arguing to violence. These influencers, who ARE making extremely significant personal incomes from their jobs as influencers online, lie through their fucking teeth about how perfect it is that their husbands do everything for them and all they have to do is take care of the kids and home (with the help of nannies and housekeepers and personal chefs off-screen. . .) and about how they've escaped from capitalism, meanwhile the people actually in those situations who AREN'T making all that extra cash are either already in abusive relationships or they're in incredibly precarious positions where they could end up abused or thrown out with nothing in an instant.

I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to be a homemaker or stay-at-home parent. I don't think it's wrong to not want to go to college or have a 9-5.

But you NEED options. You need full access to your own money that can't be monitored or controlled by a partner. You need access to a vehicle. You need a life outside of your home and family, especially friends who are willing and able to help you if needed. You need the ability to survive on your own in some way. Because if and when things go wrong in the relationship, THOSE are the things that will save your life.

Also remember that again, these tradwives DO have jobs and their jobs involve selling a fake lifestyle and fake ideals. They are getting paid BIG TIME for the shit they peddle to you, whether that's through the millions of views they get (both from genuine fans and from haters, the algorithm doesn't know or care about the difference) or the many sponsorships they get, they have incomes that they are not disclosing. They have help that they are not disclosing. Many of them started out with extreme wealth but lie through their teeth and cosplay as fucking homesteading peasants. It's all a lie to sell shit to you. Don't buy it.

Disclaimer: Please do not nitpick this post, it's very late and I'm ranting and if this leaves my circle of followers I will regret it deeply. Be nice. Tradwives dni, you're all annoying.

[yonahsienna]

This Was Supposed to Be Fun

Or: WTF happened to the online Commons, and where do we go now?

Let me start by saying that I don't want to be a "content creator" or “online influencer”. I don't want to "optimize engagement" or “build an agile social strategy”. I don’t even particularly want to Start a Blog or Podcast. I just want to f#¢&!ng hang out with my friends and community online, and I feel like we should have The Technology to just do that by now.

Of course (infuriatingly) we did have that technology! I first connected to the World Wide Web in 2001 when I was ten years old. Back then, the whole family shared one computer, which I mostly used to play Age of Empires, Bugdom, and Oregon Trail. Connecting to the Internet meant that nobody could use the phone, so we would log on quickly (accompanied by a symphony of discordant whistles and beeps), check emails and/or MSN messages, and then pass the computer to the next person.

As our access to the Internet grew through my teens, so did the diversity of content we consumed, shared, and bonded over. eBaum’s World and Newgrounds hosted a plethora of simple, free webgames we'd play once we got bored with the handful my parents were willing to buy, as well as the first viral videos like Numa Numa and Star Wars Kid. We also connected in new ways with a growing “social web” — profiles on sites like Myspace and Livejournal and eventually the early Facebook were a way that anyone could have their own site on the web, a little virtual locker that you could decorate and fill up to your liking, and have your friends stuff with virtual notes.

In my late teens and early twenties, the Internet was mostly for research and keeping up with student government and clubs via long weekly emails stuffed with hyperlinks and attachments. It wasn't until I was well into my twenties that I got my first smartphone. At university, the only way to connect to the Internet “on the go” was to tweet my on-the-go thoughts by sending an SMS text message to Twitter at 21212. I also hardly used the social web anyways, other than for a quick dopamine distraction or break from long study sessions in the library. I had even deleted my Facebook account that I'd had since high school, since the campus coffee shop and bar served as more than enough of a hub for socializing, philosophical and political debates, and important announcements posted on cork boards or delivered by intercom.

I know I probably sound like a stereotypical Millennial, whining about the “good ole days”, but I wanted to spend this time on memory lane for a reason. I think that no matter when you grew up, this feeling is probably close to universal: from the early 2000s to early 2020s, the Internet and social web seemed to just work. There were a lot of things wrong with the world, but the Internet was where we went to complain about other problems, not a source of them. But of course, even back then we were living on borrowed money and time. The virtual Commons we had grown comfortable in never actually belonged to us, the users. From the moment they incorporated, the big sites belonged to venture capital, who sold them out to the oligarchs, who sold them out to the fascists. We were never the customer, always the product.

Flash forward to 2025. The “big four” North American social media outlets (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok) have all been captured by the Trump administration. Smaller sites, like Reddit, Telegram, and Substack have long been a hotbed for bigotry and hate speech. Searches on Apple, Google, Microsoft, and even Pinterest are serving up LLM “AI” slop before authentic and unique human creations. Ads, suggestions, sponsored posts, and cookie pop-ups take up far more space than the content I came for. And if I ever want my family, friends, and community to actually see my updates, I either need to send them to each person directly, or market my posts not to them, but to an algorithm optimized not for users or even businesses, but shareholder profit. On top of all of this, there is a pervasive sense of how uncomfortably public, permanent, and surveilled it all is. (In parallel to all this: efforts to gather in person are cut at the knees by a lack of coherent and safe public health policies, the dismantling of Third Spaces and affordable public transportation, and the militarization of the police.)

It is horrifying that exactly when the biggest thing we need for survival is to build and strengthen community, that the only accessible tools to do so, are hostile to our very existence.

Obviously this isn’t a coincidence. Every time we, the people, can talk to each other directly, we start getting dangerous ideas about the fact that the ultra-wealthy and hyper-elite are so few, and the rest of us are so many. Pamphlets facilitated the French and American revolutions, the telegraph and radio hastened the collapse of the Russian and German Empires, and Twitter fanned the flames of the Arab Spring. And here in America, The Powers That Be, Red and Blue alike, overwhelmingly want the American government in strict control over where and how we can communicate with each other.

And here I am, just hoping for a single F#¢&!NG site on the whole World Wide Web where I can just hang out with family, friends, and community that isn't owned and operated by literal fascists, kept behind a paywall, or too technical for our Elders to use. A comfy virtual coffee shop with announcement boards, conversations, the occasional performance, and a locker nearby for collecting memories and passing notes.

I don’t really know what the Takeaway/Call to Action is here. Yes, I’m already on Tumblr, Mastadon, and Bluesky, and would love it if we all continued to grow these kind of alternatives while divesting from profit-driven social "platforms". I’m still on Discord, Snapchat, and Signal and even have accounts on Loops, Pixelfed, and Xiaohongshu, in case the center of gravity ever moves over to those places. All of them still feel very "under construction" though, so I don't even know which (if any) I feel comfortable asking friends and family to "switch over" to. In the meantime, I'm just feeling lost, sad, lonely, and adrift; and wanted to share these musings with y’all. Just in case anyone has any advice you want to share, or are feeling the same way and want to commiserate.

xposted to Facebook, Tumblr, Medium, and WriteAs. God, I hate the Internet right now >:(

[ponett]

Excluding Sonic and MLP, was there ever an instance where you so involved in a fandom that all your initial feelings go from enthusiasm to complete jadedness because of how hostile it got? Then once you try get back in it again, you couldn’t muster up any feelings due to those bad experiences?

I’ve been feeling like that with Star Wars lately and I think the problem was that I failed to adhere to that kind of advice back when I was 15 with The Force Awakens.

I get that fandom isn’t everything and you shouldn’t let it dictate your life, but it sucks knowing how it can just well… “break” you like that.

i can definitely say i've soured on fandoms in the past, but i'm not sure it's ever quite gotten to the point that it's made me sour on the associated media. like, even after disengaging from much of the wider mlp fandom due to the huge and vocal contingent of reactionary bronies, i still kept watching and enjoying the show and reblogging fanart. it wasn't the show's fault that a bunch of its fans were annoying libertarians, and i wasn't gonna let those assholes take something i enjoyed away from me

but i also haven't been one to engage with capital f Fandoms for like... the better part of a decade now, so fandoms are rarely a factor in me enjoying or not enjoying a thing. instead of feeling some obligation to participate in the Fandom as a whole, i just have my little niches with like-minded fans and ignore the rest as best i can. there will always be toxic or otherwise annoying fans in every fandom, and i am in no way obligated to pay attention to them just because we share a common interest. when i watched succession i did not feel the need to engage with The Succession Fandom and argue peoples' takes on shiv or whatever. i just watched the show

i do get that it can be harder to escape from these conversations with bigger franchises, though. like, with star wars in particular, the extremely heated arguments can be kind of inescapable on social media whenever something new comes out. but i don't know. you've just gotta find ways to shut that out. use blacklists, unfollow people, block people, look at algorithmic feeds less, don't look at the reddit, etc. sometimes the answer really is just to log off

[mariacallous]

Anne Applebaum’s new book explaining the rise of ‘modern autocracy’ through the politics of patronage, fear and misinformation will strike a familiar chord with observers of the political landscape in the Balkans.

Anne Applebaum’s timely book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World explains the rise of modern autocracy in terms of simple greed and shamelessness. It details the shift away from dictators even pretending to uphold the values that characterised the post-World War II international order – and the collaborative efforts being made to undermine these institutions and replace them with transactionalism and their own control.

Applebaum explains how façades of democracy have been successfully manipulated by those who seek to undermine it as a system. Discussing the “shock therapy” approach taken to economic transition, which planted the seeds for many of these elements in the former Soviet space, she notes the role of Western companies and shell companies, banks and financial institutions. These greased the wheels for kleptocractic superstructures while getting rich and enabling widening inequality.

One chapter criticises the role of media, social media and the technologies and algorithms that enable the erosion of trust with the rapid dissemination of mis- and disinformation. She also sketches out how autocrats are learning from one another in a manner that in many ways is more efficient and effective than anything being seen on the other side.

For anyone living in and observing the political dynamics in the former Yugoslavia, everything outlined in her book seems extremely familiar and tangible.

The nexus of politics and power, and the predominant role of fear, misinformation and patronage in driving governance, rather than electoral and institutional accountability, has been the core feature of the domestic and international cycles of dysfunction in this region for over a generation.

I could not help but link her description of Austrian and West German gas and steel industrialists meeting with Soviet counterparts in 1967, with the transactionalism we see today between German and broader EU interests in making deals on lithium in an increasingly autocratic Serbia.  

In some ways, today’s reality is worse; in 1967 there was no pretence of democratic process; today this and other deals are being made in spite of a lack of informed community consent or institutional good governance.

It would be hard to imagine a more illustrative sign of the potential for further Balkan-American oligarchy than the recently announced deals by Donald Trump’s son-in-law and daughter to develop luxury hotels in Serbia and Albania, or the recent forays into North Macedonia by Trump allies.

One issue that Applebaum grapples with is the hopeful naïveté, or willing ignorance, of so many decision-makers at the end of the Cold War, convincing themselves that free market capitalism and rules- and rights-based democracy would, and even must go, hand-in-hand.

The late Benjamin Barber, a political theorist, in 1992, and later in his 1996 book, saw the writing on the wall in terms of the toxic mix of media conglomerates, popular anger, economic precarity and inequality together enabling the rise of anti-democratic extremisms of all flavours.

Throughout the Western Balkans, I’ve come across many people who have had the feeling that engagement in the former Yugoslavia was always more about capitalism than democracy.

As people have failed to see their lives get substantially better, and as they’ve seen deals being made between supposed Western democrats and known regional anti-democrats, they are increasingly skeptical of motives, words, promises and intentions. They have seen a local branch of “Autocracy, Inc” become firmly established in their own neighbourhood.

I was eager to hear Applebaum’s prescriptions, and in the epilogue she suggests a number of steps to be taken globally and perhaps most importantly in the West itself: adopting legislation to require transparency in the registration of business and real estate; reducing the scope for abuse by shell companies and tax havens; tackling misinformation, including by changing the balance of social media, so users own their data; and decoupling and de-risking business ties, including in the energy sphere, among others.

Many of these are in line with efforts over the years by the US, the EU and others to build democratic institutions in the Western Balkans and beyond. However, these have mostly failed because they tinker technically around the edges while avoiding the political life support systems at the core.

When talking about political reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina, for example, I have lost track of how many times I’ve heard Western diplomats show they have little belief in the possibility for meaningful structural change, noting that “turkeys don’t vote for Thanksgiving”, so acknowledging that the politicians in the country have little interest in changing a system that suits them.

This self-interested scepticism is also evident in consolidated democracies; witness the lack of Congressional support for – or public awareness of – the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act in the US, for example.

No ‘Cold War 2.0’

Applebaum writes that in terms of resisting the increasingly coordinated and coordinating autocrats, the challenge is not a “black-and-white, binary contest, a ‘Cold War 2.0’”. Through this framing, she highlights the nuances among various types of autocrats, as well as the fluid transactional pragmatism among those seeking to amass and keep wealth and the power that comes with it.

She suggests one difference is that there are no “blocs” to join, or clear geographical boundaries, somewhat downplaying the emergence of BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and other constructs.

I wish she would have engaged more with the clarion call made by Oliver Bullough in his 2022 Offshore Cold War: Forging a Democratic Alliance to Combat Transnational Kleptocracy. Bullough, describing many of the same facilitating systems, mechanisms and structures in the West that have enabled the growth of oligarchy and kleptocracy, calls for the same unified and concerted effort against this democratic threat today that was seen during the Cold War.

On this, Applebaum would agree – she closes by calling on democrats to unite as effectively and confidently as the autocrats have done in establishing their own connectivity models.

Western diplomats engaging in the Western Balkans today – and often hailing or even facilitating kleptocratic business dealmaking – would do well to read her book.

They could then recognise the signs that we’ve seen in the region for years, and the potential allies among citizens in the region who know the playbook all too well – and wonder why the West still has not learned.