#brian merchant

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Gig apps trap reverse centaurs in Skinner boxes

Enshittification is the process by which digital platforms devour themselves: first they dangle goodies in front of end users. Once users are locked in, the goodies are taken away and dangled before business customers who supply goods to the users. Once those business customers are stuck on the platform, the goodies are clawed away and showered on the platform’s shareholders:

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

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/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Enshittification isn’t just another way of saying “fraud” or “price gouging” or “wage theft.” Enshittification is intrinsically digital, because moving all those goodies around requires the flexibility that only comes with a digital businesses. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can’t rapidly change the price of eggs at Whole Foods without an army of kids with pricing guns on roller-skates. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can change the price of eggs on Amazon Fresh just by twiddling a knob on the service’s back-end.

Twiddling is the key to enshittification: rapidly adjusting prices, conditions and offers. As with any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Tech monopolists aren’t smarter than the Gilded Age sociopaths who monopolized rail or coal — they use the same tricks as those monsters of history, but they do them faster and with computers:

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

If Rockefeller wanted to crush a freight company, he couldn’t just click a mouse and lay down a pipeline that ran on the same route, and then click another mouse to make it go away when he was done. When Bezos wants to bankrupt Diapers.com — a company that refused to sell itself to Amazon — he just moved a slider so that diapers on Amazon were being sold below cost. Amazon lost $100m over three months, diapers.com went bankrupt, and every investor learned that competing with Amazon was a losing bet:

https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-bezos-went-thermonuclear-on-diapers-com.html

That’s the power of twiddling — but twiddling cuts both ways. The same flexibility that digital businesses enjoy is hypothetically available to workers and users. The airlines pioneered twiddling ticket prices, and that naturally gave rise to countertwiddling, in the form of comparison shopping sites that scraped the airlines’ sites to predict when tickets would be cheapest:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin

The airlines — like all abusive businesses — refused to tolerate this. They were allowed to touch their knobs as much as they wanted — indeed, they couldn’t stop touching those knobs — but when we tried to twiddle back, that was “felony contempt of business model,” and the airlines sued:

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/30/airline-sues-man-for-founding-a-cheap-flights-website.html

And sued:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/business/southwest-airlines-lawsuit-prices.html

Platforms don’t just hate it when end-users twiddle back — if anything they are even more aggressive when their business-users dare to twiddle. Take Para, an app that Doordash drivers used to get a peek at the wages offered for jobs before they accepted them — something that Doordash hid from its workers. Doordash ruthlessly attacked Para, saying that by letting drivers know how much they’d earn before they did the work, Para was violating the law:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition

Which law? Well, take your pick. The modern meaning of “IP” is “any law that lets me use the law to control my competitors, competition or customers.” Platforms use a mix of anticircumvention law, patent, copyright, contract, cybersecurity and other legal systems to weave together a thicket of rules that allow them to shut down rivals for their Felony Contempt of Business Model:

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

Enshittification relies on unlimited twiddling (by platforms), and a general prohibition on countertwiddling (by platform users). Enshittification is a form of fishing, in which bait is dangled before different groups of users and then nimbly withdrawn when they lunge for it. Twiddling puts the suppleness into the enshittifier’s fishing-rod, and a ban on countertwiddling weighs down platform users so they’re always a bit too slow to catch the bait.

Nowhere do we see twiddling’s impact more than in the “gig economy,” where workers are misclassified as independent contractors and put to work for an app that scripts their every move to the finest degree. When an app is your boss, you work for an employer who docks your pay for violating rules that you aren’t allowed to know — and where your attempts to learn those rules are constantly frustrated by the endless back-end twiddling that changes the rules faster than you can learn them.

As with every question of technology, the issue isn’t twiddling per se — it’s who does the twiddling and who gets twiddled. A worker armed with digital tools can play gig work employers off each other and force them to bid up the price of their labor; they can form co-ops with other workers that auto-refuse jobs that don’t pay enough, and use digital tools to organize to shift power from bosses to workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

Take “reverse centaurs.” In AI research, a “centaur” is a human assisted by a machine that does more than either could do on their own. For example, a chess master and a chess program can play a better game together than either could play separately. A reverse centaur is a machine assisted by a human, where the machine is in charge and the human is a meat-puppet.

Think of Amazon warehouse workers wearing haptic location-aware wristbands that buzz at them continuously dictating where their hands must be; or Amazon drivers whose eye-movements are continuously tracked in order to penalize drivers who look in the “wrong” direction:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur

The difference between a centaur and a reverse centaur is the difference between a machine that makes your life better and a machine that makes your life worse so that your boss gets richer. Reverse centaurism is the 21st Century’s answer to Taylorism, the pseudoscience that saw white-coated “experts” subject workers to humiliating choreography down to the smallest movement of your fingertip:

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

While reverse centaurism was born in warehouses and other company-owned facilities, gig work let it make the leap into workers’ homes and cars. The 21st century has seen a return to the cottage industry — a form of production that once saw workers labor far from their bosses and thus beyond their control — but shriven of the autonomy and dignity that working from home once afforded:

https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk-463e2730ef0d

The rise and rise of bossware — which allows for remote surveillance of workers in their homes and cars — has turned “work from home” into “live at work.” Reverse centaurs can now be chickenized — a term from labor economics that describes how poultry farmers, who sell their birds to one of three vast poultry processors who have divided up the country like the Pope dividing up the “New World,” are uniquely exploited:

https://onezero.medium.com/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs-b2e8d5cda826

A chickenized reverse centaur has it rough: they must pay for the machines they use to make money for their bosses, they must obey the orders of the app that controls their work, and they are denied any of the protections that a traditional worker might enjoy, even as they are prohibited from deploying digital self-help measures that let them twiddle back to bargain for a better wage.

All of this sets the stage for a phenomenon called algorithmic wage discrimination, in which two workers doing the same job under the same conditions will see radically different payouts for that work. These payouts are continuously tweaked in the background by an algorithm that tries to predict the minimum sum a worker will accept to remain available without payment, to ensure sufficient workers to pick up jobs as they arise.

This phenomenon — and proposed policy and labor solutions to it — is expertly analyzed in “On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination,” a superb paper by UC Law San Franciscos Veena Dubal:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

Dubal uses empirical data and enthnographic accounts from Uber drivers and other gig workers to explain how endless, self-directed twiddling allows gig companies pay workers less and pay themselves more. As @brianmerchant@mastodon.social explains in his LA Times article on Dubal’s research, the goal of the payment algorithm is to guess how often a given driver needs to receive fair compensation in order to keep them driving when the payments are unfair:

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-04-11/algorithmic-wage-discrimination

The algorithm combines nonconsensual dossiers compiled on individual drivers with population-scale data to seek an equilibrium between keeping drivers waiting, unpaid, for a job; and how much a driver needs to be paid for an individual job, in order to keep that driver from clocking out and doing something else. @ Here’s how that works. Sergio Avedian, a writer for The Rideshare Guy, ran an experiment with two brothers who both drove for Uber; one drove a Tesla and drove intermittently, the other brother rented a hybrid sedan and drove frequently. Sitting side-by-side with the brothers, Avedian showed how the brother with the Tesla was offered more for every trip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UADTiL3S67I

Uber wants to lure intermittent drivers into becoming frequent drivers. Uber doesn’t pay for an oversupply of drivers, because it only pays drivers when they have a passenger in the car. Having drivers on call — but idle — is a way for Uber to shift the cost of maintaining a capacity cushion to its workers.

What’s more, what Uber charges customers is not based on how much it pays its workers. As Uber’s head of product explained: Uber uses “machine-learning techniques to estimate how much groups of customers are willing to shell out for a ride. Uber calculates riders’ propensity for paying a higher price for a particular route at a certain time of day. For instance, someone traveling from a wealthy neighborhood to another tony spot might be asked to pay more than another person heading to a poorer part of town, even if demand, traffic and distance are the same.”

https://qz.com/990131/uber-is-practicing-price-discrimination-economists-say-that-might-not-be-a-bad-thing/

Uber has historically described its business a pure supply-and-demand matching system, where a rush of demand for rides triggers surge pricing, which lures out drivers, which takes care of the demand. That’s not how it works today, and it’s unclear if it ever worked that way. Today, a driver who consults the rider version of the Uber app before accepting a job — to compare how much the rider is paying to how much they stand to earn — is booted off the app and denied further journeys.

Surging, instead, has become just another way to twiddle drivers. One of Dubal’s subjects, Derrick, describes how Uber uses fake surges to lure drivers to airports: “You go to the airport, once the lot get kind of full, then the surge go away.” Other drivers describe how they use groupchats to call out fake surges: “I’m in the Marina. It’s dead. Fake surge.”

That’s pure twiddling. Twiddling turns gamification into gamblification, where your labor buys you a spin on a roulette wheel in a rigged casino. As a driver called Melissa, who had doubled down on her availability to earn a $100 bonus awarded for clocking a certain number of rides, told Dubal, “When you get close to the bonus, the rides start trickling in more slowly…. And it makes sense. It’s really the type of shit that they can do when it’s okay to have a surplus labor force that is just sitting there that they don’t have to pay for.”

Wherever you find reverse-centaurs, you get this kind of gamblification, where the rules are twiddled continuously to make sure that the house always wins. As a contract driver Amazon reverse centaur told Lauren Gurley for Motherboard, “Amazon uses these cameras allegedly to make sure they have a safer driving workforce, but they’re actually using them not to pay delivery companies”:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88npjv/amazons-ai-cameras-are-punishing-drivers-for-mistakes-they-didnt-make

Algorithmic wage discrimination is the robot overlord of our nightmares: its job is to relentlessly quest for vulnerabilities and exploit them. Drivers divide themselves into “ants” (drivers who take every job) and “pickers” (drivers who cherry-pick high-paying jobs). The algorithm’s job is ensuring that pickers get the plum assignments, not the ants, in the hopes of converting those pickers to app-dependent ants.

In my work on enshittification, I call this the “giant teddy bear” gambit. At every county fair, you’ll always spot some poor jerk carrying around a giant teddy-bear they “won” on the midway. But they didn’t win it — not by getting three balls in the peach-basket. Rather, the carny running the rigged game either chose not to operate the “scissor” that kicks balls out of the basket. Or, if the game is “honest” (that is, merely impossible to win, rather than gimmicked), the operator will make a too-good-to-refuse offer: “Get one ball in and I’ll give you this keychain. Win two keychains and I’ll let you trade them for this giant teddy bear.”

Carnies aren’t in the business of giving away giant teddy bears — rather, the gambit is an investment. Giving a mark a giant teddy bear to carry around the midway all day acts as a convincer, luring other marks to try to land three balls in the basket and win their own teddy bear.

In the same way, platforms like Uber distribute giant teddy bears to pickers, as a way of keeping the ants scurrying from job to job, and as a way of convincing the pickers to give up whatever work allows them to discriminate among Uber’s offers and hold out for the plum deals, whereupon then can be transmogrified into ants themselves.

Dubal describes the experience of Adil, a Syrian refugee who drives for Uber in the Bay Area. His colleagues are pickers, and showed him screenshots of how much they earned. Determined to get a share of that money, Adil became a model ant, driving two hours to San Francisco, driving three days straight, napping in his car, spending only one day per week with his family. The algorithm noticed that Adil needed the work, so it paid him less.

Adil responded the way the system predicted he would, by driving even more: “My friends they make it, so I keep going, maybe I can figure it out. It’s unsecure, and I don’t know how people they do it. I don’t know how I am doing it, but I have to. I mean, I don’t find another option. In a minute, if I find something else, oh man, I will be out immediately. I am a very patient person, that’s why I can continue.”

Another driver, Diego, told Dubal about how the winners of the giant teddy bears fell into the trap of thinking that they were “good at the app”: “Any time there’s some big shot getting high pay outs, they always shame everyone else and say you don’t know how to use the app. I think there’s secret PR campaigns going on that gives targeted payouts to select workers, and they just think it’s all them.”

That’s the power of twiddling: by hoarding all the flexibility offered by digital tools, the management at platforms can become centaurs, able to string along thousands of workers, while the workers are reverse-centaurs, puppeteered by the apps.

As the example of Adil shows, the algorithm doesn’t need to be very sophisticated in order to figure out which workers it can underpay. The system automates the kind of racial and gender discrimination that is formally illegal, but which is masked by the smokescreen of digitization. An employer who systematically paid women less than men, or Black people less than white people, would be liable to criminal and civil sanctions. But if an algorithm simply notices that people who have fewer job prospects drive more and will thus accept lower wages, that’s just “optimization,” not racism or sexism.

This is the key to understanding the AI hype bubble: when ghouls from multinational banks predict 13 trillion dollar markets for “AI,” what they mean is that digital tools will speed up the twiddling and other wage-suppression techniques to transfer $13T in value from workers and consumers to shareholders.

The American business lobby is relentlessly focused on the goal of reducing wages. That’s the force behind “free trade,” “right to work,” and other codewords for “paying workers less,” including “gig work.” Tech workers long saw themselves as above this fray, immune to labor exploitation because they worked for a noble profession that took care of its own.

But the epidemic of mass tech-worker layoffs, following on the heels of massive stock buybacks, has demonstrated that tech bosses are just like any other boss: willing to pay as little as they can get away with, and no more. Tech bosses are so comfortable with their market dominance and the lock-in of their customers that they are happy to turn out hundreds of thousands of skilled workers, convinced that the twiddling systems they’ve built are the kinds of self-licking ice-cream cones that are so simple even a manager can use them — no morlocks required.

The tech worker layoffs are best understood as an all-out war on tech worker morale, because that morale is the source of tech workers’ confidence and thus their demands for a larger share of the value generated by their labor. The current tech layoff template is very different from previous tech layoffs: today’s layoffs are taking place over a period of months, long after they are announced, and laid off tech worker is likely to be offered a months of paid post-layoff work, rather than severance. This means that tech workplaces are now haunted by the walking dead, workers who have been laid off but need to come into the office for months, even as the threat of layoffs looms over the heads of the workers who remain. As an old friend, recently laid off from Microsoft after decades of service, wrote to me, this is “a new arrow in the quiver of bringing tech workers to heel and ensuring that we’re properly thankful for the jobs we have (had?).”

Dubal is interested in more than analysis, she’s interested in action. She looks at the tactics already deployed by gig workers, who have not taken all this abuse lying down. Workers in the UK and EU organized through Worker Info Exchange and the App Drivers and Couriers Union have used the GDPR (the EU’s privacy law) to demand “algorithmic transparency,” as well as access to their data. In California, drivers hope to use similar provisions in the CCPA (a state privacy law) to do the same.

These efforts have borne fruit. When Cornell economists, led by Louis Hyman, published research (paid for by Uber) claiming that Uber drivers earned an average of $23/hour, it was data from these efforts that revealed the true average Uber driver’s wage was $9.74. Subsequent research in California found that Uber drivers’ wage fell to $6.22/hour after the passage of Prop 22, a worker misclassification law that gig companies spent $225m to pass, only to have the law struck down because of a careless drafting error:

https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2021-08-23/proposition-22-lyft-uber-decision-essential-california

But Dubal is skeptical that data-coops and transparency will achieve transformative change and build real worker power. Knowing how the algorithm works is useful, but it doesn’t mean you can do anything about it, not least because the platform owners can keep touching their knobs, twiddling the payout schedule on their rigged slot-machines.

Data co-ops start from the proposition that “data extraction is an inevitable form of labor for which workers should be remunerated.” It makes on-the-job surveillance acceptable, provided that workers are compensated for the spying. But co-ops aren’t unions, and they don’t have the power to bargain for a fair price for that data, and coops themselves lack the vast resources — “to store, clean, and understand” — data.

Co-ops are also badly situated to understand the true value of the data that is extracted from their members: “Workers cannot know whether the data collected will, at the population level, violate the civil rights of others or amplifies their own social oppression.”

Instead, Dubal wants an outright, nonwaivable prohibition on algorithmic wage discrimination. Just make it illegal. If firms cannot use gambling mechanisms to control worker behavior through variable pay systems, they will have to find ways to maintain flexible workforces while paying their workforce predictable wages under an employment model. If a firm cannot manage wages through digitally-determined variable pay systems, then the firm is less likely to employ algorithmic management.”

In other words, rather than using market mechanisms too constrain platform twiddling, Dubal just wants to make certain kinds of twiddling illegal. This is a growing trend in legal scholarship. For example, the economist Ramsi Woodcock has proposed a ban on surge pricing as a per se violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act:

https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-105-issue-4/the-efficient-queue-and-the-case-against-dynamic-pricing

Similarly, Dubal proposes that algorithmic wage discrimination violates another antitrust law: the Robinson-Patman Act, which “bans sellers from charging competing buyers different prices for the same commodity. Robinson-Patman enforcement was effectively halted under Reagan, kicking off a host of pathologies, like the rise of Walmart:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

I really liked Dubal’s legal reasoning and argument, and to it I would add a call to reinvigorate countertwiddling: reforming laws that get in the way of workers who want to reverse-engineer, spoof, and control the apps that currently control them. Adversarial interoperability (AKA competitive compatibility or comcom) is key tool for building worker power in an era of digital Taylorism:

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

To see how that works, look to other jursidictions where workers have leapfrogged their European and American cousins, such as Indonesia, where gig workers and toolsmiths collaborate to make a whole suite of “tuyul apps,” which let them override the apps that gig companies expect them to use.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

For example, ride-hailing companies won’t assign a train-station pickup to a driver unless they’re circling the station — which is incredibly dangerous during the congested moments after a train arrives. A tuyul app lets a driver park nearby and then spoof their phone’s GPS fix to the ridehailing company so that they appear to be right out front of the station.

In an ideal world, those workers would have a union, and be able to dictate the app’s functionality to their bosses. But workers shouldn’t have to wait for an ideal world: they don’t just need jam tomorrow — they need jam today. Tuyul apps, and apps like Para, which allow workers to extract more money under better working conditions, are a prelude to unionization and employer regulation, not a substitute for it.

Employers will not give workers one iota more power than they have to. Just look at the asymmetry between the regulation of union employees versus union busters. Under US law, employees of a union need to account for every single hour they work, every mile they drive, every location they visit, in public filings. Meanwhile, the union-busting industry — far larger and richer than unions — operate under a cloak of total secrecy, Workers aren’t even told which union busters their employers have hired — let alone get an accounting of how those union busters spend money, or how many of them are working undercover, pretending to be workers in order to sabotage the union.

Twiddling will only get an employer so far. Twiddling — like all “AI” — is based on analyzing the past to predict the future. The heuristics an algorithm creates to lure workers into their cars can’t account for rapid changes in the wider world, which is why companies who relied on “AI” scheduling apps (for example, to prevent their employees from logging enough hours to be entitled to benefits) were caught flatfooted by the Great Resignation.

Workers suddenly found themselves with bargaining power thanks to the departure of millions of workers — a mix of early retirees and workers who were killed or permanently disabled by covid — and they used that shortage to demand a larger share of the fruits of their labor. The outraged howls of the capital class at this development were telling: these companies are operated by the kinds of “capitalists” that MLK once identified, who want “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.”

https://twitter.com/KaseyKlimes/status/821836823022354432/

There's only 5 days left in the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon's Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they're DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: Stephen Drake (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Analog_Test_Array_modular_synth_by_sduck409.jpg

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

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

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

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Louis (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chestnut_horse_head,_all_excited.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A complex mandala of knobs from a modular synth. In the foreground, limned in a blue electric halo, is a man in a hi-viz vest with the head of a horse. The horse's eyes have been replaced with the sinister red eyes of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'"]

[thoughtportal]

Brian Merchant on the Luddites and their view on technology and work.

[parsleysagerosemarytimemachine]

Good narrative history; does a lot to draw parallels with contemporary fights against exploitative technology, as does a good job of making it engaging and quick reading.

[bookcoversonly]

Title: Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn | Author: Brian Merchant / Claire L. Evans | Publisher: FSG (2022)

[pablolf]

OpenAI knows this. It’s almost certainly betting its longer-term future on more partnerships like the one with Microsoft and enterprise deals serving large companies. That means convincing more corporations that if they want to survive the coming AI-led mass upheaval, they’d better climb aboard.

Enterprise deals have always been where automation technology has thrived — sure, a handful of consumers might be interested in streamlining their daily routine or automating tasks here and there, but the core sales target for productivity software or automated kiosks or robotics is management.

And a big driver in motivating companies to buy into automation technology is and always has been fear. The historian of technology David Noble demonstrated in his studies of industrial automation that the wave of workplace and factory floor automation that swept the 1970s and ‘80s was largely spurred by managers submitting to a highly pervasive phenomenon that today we recognize as FOMO. If companies believe a labor-saving technology is so powerful or efficient that their competitors are sure to adopt it, they don’t want to miss out — regardless of the ultimate utility.

The great promise of OpenAI’s suite of AI services is, at root, that companies and individuals will save on labor costs — they can generate the ad copy, art, slide deck presentations, email marketing and data entry processes fast and cheap.

Afraid of AI? The startups selling it want you to be

[shakespearenews]

The topic of theater and its relative openness led to discussion of problematic plays, like Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice.”

“Should it be banned?” asked Greenblatt.

“God, no,” responded Kushner. Acknowledging that Shakespeare “accepted many received ideas about Jewishness,” and noting that “it was written at a time when there were no Jews in England,” Kushner went on to describe the humanity that the playwright grants the Jewish character of Shylock, despite the use of stereotypes: “’Hath not a Jew eyes?’” he quoted. “That transcends prejudice.”

Art, he continued, should not be condemned for being “unsafe.” “It’s so rare that you encounter a work of art that it makes you feel unsafe,” he said. “In the rare moments that you do, you should treasure it.”

Recalling monumental performances by Fiona Shaw as Euripides’ murderous “Medea” and Brian Cox in the title role of Shakespeare’s disturbing “Titus Andronicus,” he described relishing the experience. “You watched a human being pushed to a point,” he said of Cox. Afterward, “the houselights came up and everyone just sat there. Nobody moved. It was the opposite of safe.”

This electrifying — and sometimes discomfiting — experience is “the deal that you make when you go into the theater, the deal that you make when you go to bed and you dream,” he said. “Medea is not really going to come off the stage and kill you.”

[britneyshakespeare]

i have to be honest. i would simply not have agreed to a loan if the condition for not repaying by the specified date were a pound of my flesh. i must tell the truth in that i would have avoided all of that entirely.

[nonesuchrecords]

Natalie Merchant was on The Sound of Success to talk with host Nic Harcourt about her life and musical career, including her new album, Keep Your Courage, and the tour for it she resumes next week on the US West Coast. She shares what Brian Eno and Roxy Music meant to her in her youth (on 8-track!), the impact of David Byrne’s early music videos, her musical guilty pleasure, and much more. You can hear their conversation here.

[screen1ne]

Kick Out The Jams: The Story Of XFM Documentary Out Now

Watch the trailer for Kick Out THe Jams: The Story Of XFM Feat. @rickygervais @StephenMerchant @BlurOfficial & more. #XFM #KickOutTheJams

Titled after the first-ever song to play on their airwaves, Kick Out the Jams follows the development of XFM from its rebellious pirate radio roots in the early 90’s, through to its official FM radio launch in 1997 as a major platform for launching alternative talent into the mainstream. The doc deep-dives into the struggles and influence of the station which gave rise to the likes of Ricky…

[just-some-guy-joust]

Just Some Guy Joust - Contestants List

Note: This is NOT the order of the brackets. Like with the last tournament, the order of the brackets will be a surprise. This list was randomized from the brackets I set up and does not represent who each character will be up against. The only thing you know for sure which side of the bracket they're on. When the polls go up, they'll be posted in order based on the list here, NOT based on where their brackets actually are!

Round 1 of Side A is over! Round 1 of Side B is CURRENTLY UP!

(Full list of characters in text format is under the cut)

Side A

Sasha James (The Magnus Archives)

Reigen Arataka (Mob Psycho 100) - died round 1

Joy (Underworld Office/Charlie in Underworld) - died round 1

Junpei (Zero Escape)

Horse (Centaurworld)

Phone Guy (FNAF) - died round 1

Gordon Freeman (HLVRAI)

Joshua Gillespie (The Magnus Archives) - died round 1

Namari (Dungeon Meshi)

Shez (Fire Emblem: Three Hopes) - died round 1

Henry Stickmin (Henry Stickmin)

Stanley (The Stanley Parable)

Whole (Chonny Jash's Charming Chaos Compendium) - died round 1

Larry (Pokemon)

Luke Carder (Inscryption) - died round 1

Leorio Paladiknight (Hunter x Hunter) - died round 1

Barry the Quokka (The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog)

Tommy (HLVRAI) - died round 1

Ulala Serizawa (Persona 2: Eternal Punishment) - died round 1

April O'Neil (TMNT - All versions)

Tsuzuru Minagi (Act! Addict! Actors!) - died round 1

Matt (Woe.Begone)

Gilear Faeth (Fantasy High - Dimension 20)

Apollo Justice (Ace Attorney)

Emmet Brickowski (The LEGO Movie) - died round 1

Stahl (Fire Emblem: Awakening)

Doug Eiffel (Wolf 359) - died round 1

Jack Townsend (Tales from the Gas Station) - died round 1

Frisk (Undertale) - died round 1

Brian Pasternack (Yuppie Psycho)

Trevor Hills (American Arcadia)

Barry Bluejeans (The Adventure Zone: Balance) - died round 1

Side B

Carol Kohl (Carol and The End of The World)

Jaehee Kang (Mystic Messenger) - died round 1

Paul Matthews (The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals)

Emma Perkins (The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals) - died round 1

Su Moting (God Troubles Me) - died round 1

Satou Hiroshi (Disastrous Life of Saiki K.)

Chilchuck Tims (Dungeon Meshi) - died round 1

Michelle Nguyen (Welcome to Night Vale)

Tad Strange (Gravity Falls)

Colin Robinson (What We Do in the Shadows) - died round 1

The Bard (Wandersong)

Usopp (One Piece) - died round 1

Nick Carraway (The Great Gatsby)

Link (Ocarina of Time) - died round 1

Kazooie (In a Manor of Speaking) - died round 1

Connecticut Clark (FlorkofCows)

Samwise Gamgee (Lord of the Rings)

Hitomi Shizuki (Madoka Magica)

Junpei Iori (Persona 3)

Han Solo (Star Wars) - died round 1

Tomoya Mashiro (Ensemble Stars!) - died round 1

Peter Sqloint (Just Roll With It: Apotheosis)

Cabbage Merchant (Avatar: The Last Airbender)

Marta Cabrera (Knives Out) - died round 1

Greg Universe (Steven Universe)

Yuuki Mishima (Persona 5) - died round 1

Gingerbrave (Cookie Run) - died round 1

Arthur Dent (Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy) - died round 1

Elsen (OFF)

Mob (Mob Psycho 100)

Tadano Hitohito (Komi Can't Communicate) - died round 1

Rung (Transformers - IDW Continuity) - died round 1

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Brian Merchant’s “Blood In the Machine”

Tomorrow (September 27), I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine. On October 2, I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab.

In Blood In the Machine, Brian Merchant delivers the definitive history of the Luddites, and the clearest analysis of the automator's playbook, where "entrepreneurs'" lawless extraction from workers is called "innovation" and "inevitable":

https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/brian-merchant/blood-in-the-machine/9780316487740/

History is written by the winners, and so you probably think of the Luddites as brainless, terrified, thick-fingered vandals who smashed machines and burned factories because they didn't understand them. Today, "Luddite" is a slur that means "technophobe" – but that's neither fair, nor accurate.

Luddism has been steadily creeping into pro-labor technological criticism, as workers and technology critics reclaim the term and its history, which is a rich and powerful tale of greed versus solidarity, slavery versus freedom.

The true tale of the Luddites starts with workers demanding that the laws be upheld. When factory owners began to buy automation systems for textile production, they did so in violation of laws that required collaboration with existing craft guilds – laws designed to ensure that automation was phased in gradually, with accommodations for displaced workers. These laws also protected the public, with the guilds evaluating the quality of cloth produced on the machine, acting as a proxy for buyers who might otherwise be tricked into buying inferior goods.

Factory owners flouted these laws. Though the machines made cloth that was less durable and of inferior weave, they sold it to consumers as though it were as good as the guild-made textiles. Factory owners made quiet deals with orphanages to send them very young children who were enslaved to work in their factories, where they were routinely maimed and killed by the new machines. Children who balked at the long hours or attempted escape were viciously beaten (the memoir of one former child slave became a bestseller and inspired Oliver Twist).

The craft guilds begged Parliament to act. They sent delegations, wrote petitions, even got Members of Parliament to draft legislation ordering enforcement of existing laws. Instead, Parliament passed laws criminalizing labor organizing.

The stakes were high. Economic malaise and war had driven up the price of life's essentials. Workers displaced by illegal machines faced starvation – as did their children. Communities were shattered. Workers who had apprenticed for years found themselves graduating into a market that had no jobs for them.

This is the context in which the Luddite uprisings began. Secret cells of workers, working with discipline and tight organization, warned factory owners to uphold the law. They sent letters and posted handbills in which they styled themselves as the army of "King Ludd" or "General Ludd" – Ned Ludd being a mythical figure who had fought back against an abusive boss.

When factory owners ignored these warnings, the Luddites smashed their machines, breaking into factories or intercepting machines en route from the blacksmith shops where they'd been created. They won key victories, with many factory owners backing off from automation plans, but the owners were deep-pocketed and determined.

The ruling Tories had no sympathy for the workers and no interest in upholding the law or punishing the factory owners for violating it. Instead, they dispatched troops to the factory towns, escalating the use of force until England's industrial centers were occupied by literal armies of soldiers. Soldiers who balked at turning their guns on Luddites were publicly flogged to death.

I got very interested in the Luddites in late 2021, when it became clear that everything I thought I knew about the Luddites was wrong. The Luddites weren't anti-technology – rather, they were doing the same thing a science fiction writer does: asking not just what a new technology does, but also who it does it for and who it does it to:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

Unsurprisingly, ever since I started publishing on this subject, I've run into people who have no sympathy for the Luddite cause and who slide into my replies to replicate the 19th Century automation debate. One such person accused the Luddites of using "state violence" to suppress progress.

You couldn't ask for a more perfect example of how the history of the Luddites has been forgotten and replaced with a deliberately misleading account. The "state violence" of the Luddite uprising was entirely on one side. Parliament, under the lackadaisical leadership of "Mad King George," imposed the death penalty on the Luddites. It wasn't just machine-breaking that became a capital crime – "oath taking" (swearing loyalty to the Luddites) also carried the death penalties.

As the Luddites fought on against increasingly well-armed factory owners (one owner bought a cannon to use on workers who threatened his machines), they were subjected to spectacular acts of true state violence. Occupying soldiers rounded up Luddites and suspected Luddites and staged public mass executions, hanging them by the dozen, creating scores widows and fatherless children.

The sf writer Steven Brust says that the test to tell whether someone is on the right or the left is simple: ask whether property rights are more important than human rights. If the person says "property rights are human rights," they are on the right.

The state response to the Luddites crisply illustrates this distinction. The Luddites wanted an orderly and lawful transition to automation, one that brought workers along and created shared prosperity and quality goods. The craft guilds took pride in their products, and saw themselves as guardians of their industry. They were accustomed to enjoying a high degree of bargaining power and autonomy, working from small craft workshops in their homes, which allowed them to set their own work pace, eat with their families, and enjoy modest amounts of leisure.

The factory owners' cause wasn't just increased production – it was increased power. They wanted a workforce that would dance to their tune, work longer hours for less pay. They wanted unilateral control over which products they made and what corners they cut in making those products. They wanted to enrich themselves, even if that meant that thousands starved and their factory floors ran red with the blood of dismembered children.

The Luddites destroyed machines. The factory owners killed Luddites, shooting them at the factory gates, or rounding them up for mass executions. Parliament deputized owners to act as extensions of law enforcement, allowing them to drag suspected Luddites to their own private cells for questioning.

The Luddites viewed property rights as just one instrument for achieving human rights – freedom from hunger and cold – and when property rights conflicted with human rights, they didn't hesitate to smash the machines. For them, human rights trumped property rights.

Their bosses – and their bosses' modern defenders – saw the demands to uphold the laws on automation as demands to bring "state violence" to bear on the wholly private matter of how a rich man should organize his business. On the other hand, literal killing – both on the factory floor and at the gallows – was not "state violence" but rather, a defense of the most important of all the human rights: the rights of property owners.

19th century textile factories were the original Big Tech, and the rhetoric of the factory owners echoes down the ages. When tech barons like Peter Thiel say that "freedom is incompatible with democracy," he means that letting people who work for a living vote will eventually lead to limitations on people who own things for a living, like him.

Then, as now, resistance to Big Tech enjoyed widespread support. The Luddites couldn't have organized in their thousands if their neighbors didn't have their backs. Shelley and Byron wrote widely reproduced paeans to worker uprisings (Byron also defended the Luddites in the House of Lords). The Brontes wrote Luddite novels. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was a Luddite novel, in which the monster was a sensitive, intelligent creature who merely demanded a say in the technology that created him.

The erasure of the true history of the Luddites was a deliberate act. Despite the popular and elite support the Luddites enjoyed, the owners and their allies in Parliament were able to crush the uprising, using mass murder and imprisonment to force workers to accept immiseration.

The entire supply chain of the textile revolution was soaked in blood. Merchant devotes multiple chapters to the lives of African slaves in America who produced the cotton that the machines in England wove into cloth. Then – as now – automation served to obscure the violence latent in production of finished goods.

But, as Merchant writes, the Luddites didn't lose outright. Historians who study the uprisings record that the places where the Luddites fought most fiercely were the places where automation came most slowly and workers enjoyed the longest shared prosperity.

The motto of Magpie Killjoy's seminal Steampunk Magazine was: "Love the machine, hate the factory." The workers of the Luddite uprising were skilled technologists themselves.

They performed highly technical tasks to produce extremely high-quality goods. They served in craft workshops and controlled their own time.

The factory increased production, but at the cost of autonomy. Factories and their progeny, like assembly lines, made it possible to make more goods (even goods that eventually rose the quality of the craft goods they replaced), but at the cost of human autonomy. Taylorism and other efficiency cults ended up scripting the motions of workers down to the fingertips, and workers were and are subject to increasing surveillance and discipline from their bosses if they deviate. Take too many pee breaks at the Amazon warehouse and you will be marked down for "time off-task."

Steampunk is a dream of craft production at factory scale: in steampunk fantasies, the worker is a solitary genius who can produce high-tech finished goods in their own laboratory. Steampunk has no "dark, satanic mills," no blood in the factory. It's no coincidence that steampunk gained popularity at the same time as the maker movement, in which individual workers use form digital communities. Makers networked together to provide advice and support in craft projects that turn out the kind of technologically sophisticated goods that we associate with vast, heavily-capitalized assembly lines.

But workers are losing autonomy, not gaining it. The steampunk dream is of a world where we get the benefits of factory production with the life of a craft producer. The gig economy has delivered its opposite: craft workers – Uber drivers, casualized doctors and dog-walkers – who are as surveilled and controlled as factory workers.

Gig workers are dispatched by apps, their faces closely studied by cameras for unauthorized eye-movements, their pay changed from moment to moment by an algorithm that docks them for any infraction. They are "reverse centaurs": workers fused to machines where the machine provides the intelligence and the human does its bidding:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur

Craft workers in home workshops are told that they're their own bosses, but in reality they are constantly monitored by bossware that watches out of their computers' cameras and listens through its mic. They have to pay for the privilege of working for their bosses, and pay to quit. If their children make so much as a peep, they can lose their jobs. They don't work from home – they live at work:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/paperback-writer/#toothless

Merchant is a master storyteller and a dedicated researcher. The story he weaves in Blood In the Machine is as gripping as any Propublica deep-dive into the miserable working conditions of today's gig economy. Drawing on primary sources and scholarship, Blood is a kind of Nomadland for Luddites.

Today, Merchant is the technology critic for the LA Times. The final chapters of Blood brings the Luddites into the present day, finding parallels in the labor organizing of the Amazon warehouse workers led by Chris Smalls. The liberal reformers who offered patronizing support to the Luddites – but didn't imagine that they could be masters of their own destiny – are echoed in the rhetoric of Andrew Yang.

And of course, the factory owners' rhetoric is easily transposed to the modern tech baron. Then, as now, we're told that all automation is "progress," that regulatory evasion (Uber's unlicensed taxis, Airbnb's unlicensed hotel rooms, Ring's unregulated surveillance, Tesla's unregulated autopilot) is "innovation." Most of all, we're told that every one of these innovations must exist, that there is no way to stop it, because technology is an autonomous force that is independent of human agency. "There is no alternative" – the rallying cry of Margaret Thatcher – has become our inevitablist catechism.

Squeezing the workers' wages conditions and weakening workers' bargaining power isn't "innovation." It's an old, old story, as old as the factory owners who replaced skilled workers with terrified orphans, sending out for more when a child fell into a machine. Then, as now, this was called "job creation."

Then, as now, there was no way to progress as a worker: no matter how skilled and diligent an Uber driver is, they can't buy their medallion and truly become their own boss, getting a say in their working conditions. They certainly can't hope to rise from a blue-collar job on the streets to a white-collar job in the Uber offices.

Then, as now, a worker was hired by the day, not by the year, and might find themselves with no work the next day, depending on the whim of a factory owner or an algorithm.

As Merchant writes: robots aren't coming for your job; bosses are. The dream of a "dark factory," a "fully automated" Tesla production line, is the dream of a boss who doesn't have to answer to workers, who can press a button and manifest their will, without negotiating with mere workers. The point isn't just to reduce the wage-bill for a finished good – it's to reduce the "friction" of having to care about others and take their needs into account.

Luddites are not – and have never been – anti-technology. Rather, they are pro-human, and see production as a means to an end: broadly shared prosperity. The automation project says it's about replacing humans with machines, but over and over again – in machine learning, in "contactless" delivery, in on-demand workforces – the goal is to turn humans into machines.

There is blood in the machine, Merchant tells us, whether its humans being torn apart by a machine, or humans being transformed into machines.

Brian and I are having a joint book-launch tomorrow night (Sept 27) at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-internet-con-by-cory-doctorow-blood-in-the-machine-by-brian-merchant-tickets-696349940417

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/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen

[thoughtportal]

Paris Marx is joined by Brian Merchant and Claire Evans to discuss their new science fiction anthology, how it uses the genre to critically interrogate the technologies being rolled out around us, and how it pushes back on the desire of tech billionaires to use science fiction to get the public to buy into their corporate futures.

                 Guests                     

Brian Merchant is a tech journalist and author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone. Claire L. Evans is the author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet and singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT. They are the cofounders of Terraform at VICE's Motherboard and the co-editors of Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn.  Follow Brian on Twitter at @bcmerchant and follow Claire at @TheUniverse.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Today, the label luddite is an epithet for someone afraid of technology and the change it can bring. Merchant’s book makes clear that Luddites did not fear automation in the sense of being afraid of the machines or longing for an idyllic past. On the contrary, as Merchant points out, clothworkers were often themselves intimately engaged in improving the technology they used. Some of them proposed paying for job retraining by taxing factory owners who implemented the automating machines, earning the workers the title of “some of the earliest policy futurists,” according to Merchant. These efforts—to use official channels at the local and parliamentary levels—failed, however. With their futures rapidly foreclosing, the clothworkers invoked the fictional Ned Ludd (alternatively, Ludlam), an apprentice stocking-frame knitter in the late 1700s who, the story went, responded to his master whipping him by destroying the machine. Inspired by his act of sabotage against a cruel employer, the Luddites campaigned to halt the spread of the “obnoxious machines.” Soon factory owners found threatening letters signed by Captain Ludd or General Ludd or King Ludd. The letters also allude to another hero of working people from Nottingham, Robin Hood. Merchant argues that the mutability of Ned Ludd served as an organizing symbol akin to a playful but potent meme.

[...]

The Luddites used the tools at their disposal and did so through collective action. Merchant details the day-to-day organizing efforts of the movement’s leaders. We are ushered into a clandestine world of codes and oaths, of backroom meetings and nighttime training. The scheming makes for entertaining reading. But beneath the private planning and public sabotage lurks a more lasting lesson: movements to dismantle automation’s physical infrastructure often depend on building relational infrastructure. Tight-knit communities are extraordinarily important here: they buffered the Luddites from harm and fostered creative thinking rather than merely alienation among adherents and their allies. Increasingly finding themselves wrung out by those in power, these communities coalesced around shared causes that overlooked intragroup differences. This opened space for women, Merchant tells us, to claim the nom de guerre Lady Ludd and charge into markets to demand fair food prices from shop owners and food suppliers. It worked. The “auto-reductions,” as they were called, demonstrate the power of people working together to force change. Similarly, resistance to automation can be creative and provide openings to bring myriad others into the tent.

[utilitycaster]

Well now im curious, what are your top 10 etiquette violations

I'm not actually sure there are 10 tbh in that these are relatively broad - you could split them up more finely if you wanted but they cover a wide range of behavior. Also this is...a bit stream of consciousness. I do stand by 1 as the absolute Golden Rule of D&D in that it's really just so Me Me Me (more so than main character syndrome) that it's inexcusable, but like...rules 2- 6 are kind of all in the same nebulous position in my mind as are rules 7-10. 2-6 are "really bad, have a talk and be prepared to kick this person out if they don't shape up and honestly I would probably not want to hang out with them irl much if they don't shape up" and 7-10 are "maybe don't invite them to game nights but they could be okay otherwise."

Deliberately going against the general vibe of the table. This is the broadest but also obviously worst trait. If everyone else is here to play a serious playthrough of Curse of Strahd and they're all vampire hunters and whatnot and you're playing a clown in a hawaiian shirt named Jeff you are not funny; you are an asshole. I think that person who made the post of like "I'm playing D&D with my dad's friends and they're all fighters with tragic backstory and I'm a neon firbolg who resurrects our enemies and runs therapy sessions" should be beaten with hammers. Like, be unique, but if everyone else is going for a lighthearted vibe it's not time to bust out your darkest PC and vice versa. (This also goes deeper, like, if your table has decided PC death in-game is okay, you can request a change, but if you've never spoken up about this and then your character dies and you pitch a fit, that's on you.)

"Um actually my rich family solves this" and similar circumventing of obstacles in a way that cuts off all story avenues. It's fine to offer your services to help - sometimes the party will want it! But the worst player I've played with (who still did not violate Item 1) did this and short-circuited like 75% of the plot by being like "well my wealthy merchant family can probably smooth this over" and I wanted to, well, beat them with hammers. Brian Murphy of Naddpod calls this "showing up and trying not to play D&D" and he's right.

Closely related to/overlapping with item 2 but Main Character Syndrome. If you're a wizard and there's a nonurgent trial of strength? that is for the barbarian. If they ask for help, go for it, but don't just do everything. Share the table. Self-explanatory but man do some people not get it. I'm also grouping this with "my character wouldn't help" behaviors. Like to be clear, forgoing your turn as a roleplay thing is fine, but another Naddpod D&D Court regular topic is like "the player for whatever reason would not join combat bc their character wouldn't, and we nearly had a tpk because the encounter assumed our fucking cleric would be there".

Actually violating player agency. Closely relating to 2-3. Conflict is great and good. I think it's fine to lie, cheat, and steal from your party members if your table agrees on that. There are spells or abilities that lead to possession which is also valid if your table has talked through that. But you do not get to otherwise like, force another player character to do your bidding (unless your table has, again, decided this is okay). You cannot persuasion check other PCs into going against their desires unless that's a very specific conversation you've had out of character as a table. Even in game, like, the DC on persuasion checks can be arbitrarily high - even impossible - if someone would simply never do it.

Noncombat/non-violent D&D. There are other TTRPGs that are not heavily based on war games with character classes that aren't like 90% battle abilities and you should check those out. Anyone who plays noncombat/nonviolent D&D and is proud of it is dumb as the bag of hammers I'm beating the people of items 1 and 2 for and I don't respect them. I guess this isn't so much an etiquette violation in that if your entire table wants this you can all be terrible together, but it is kind of a dick move, especially since I both love D&D and find the anti-D&D crowd to largely be the most sour grapes-ass losers of all time, but also believe passionately that there are many things D&D does not achieve well because it is in fact a specific game with specific objectives. You should, if you want to play a game that is all social encounters and skill checks and no fighting, play the many indie games that would love your patronage and suit you admirably, not the most neutered, milquetoast, unsalted margarine version of D&D. I genuinely believe that people playing murderhobos or hardcore metagamers are VASTLY preferable.

Not making a good faith effort to know the rules. You do not have to be good at D&D. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting for not knowing every rule of D&D. You only have to let the soft animal of your body have at least read the rules of your character's class, subclass, and race, and show up prepared, instead of being like "tee hee I listened to 5 episodes of TAZ Balance and am going to twirl my hair at the DM and hope they help little old me." The DM is BUSY and has SHIT TO DO. Read the fucking manual. It's okay to be wrong! It's not okay to be clueless on purpose.

Rules for Thee and Not For Me. Mostly a DM thing, and to be clear, the DM does have special rules bc they are the special one and this is obviously not about that. There are also rules that apply to NPCs/stat blocks and not PCs, and those are inherent to the balance of the game and are fine because NPCs have different abilities. But if, for example, you are requiring an athletics check of PCs to climb up on a ledge and don't permit acrobatics, your rogue NPC villain can't do acrobatics either unless they have some specific pre-written ability.

Metagaming pt 1: excessive metagaming: Part 2 will reveal the "excessive" but like. If you know trolls regenerate because you've been playing D&D for years but you are a level 4 INT 8 sorcerer in-game? you do not know trolls regenerate.

Metagaming pt 2: refusal to engage with the fact that this is a game: Sometimes you get the reverse, when people are like "well my character wouldn't realize that this magic item was important to your character" despite the other person RP-ing everything or "would I notice you were knocked out directly in front of me? It's a pitched battle!" Like. don't cheat but come on bro. This is, ultimately, a game. I will once again bring up Naddpod both because D&D Court exists AND they will do rule of funny shit (as Murph once pointed out, if you want to say you go to Ruby Tuesday's as a joke, great, if you try to use it mechanically, no, which is a healthy attitude towards immersion) AND Murph understands the concept of kayfabe.

Really extensive indecision that doesn't involve the whole party. This is mostly me but like. it's not fun, and I am impatient. If you're not an actual play livestream, you should take a break and in fact talk out of game and resume because god this drags. If everyone's on board obviously go for it but if it's one person's choice...babe the spotlight is on you, sing your solo or leave.

Basically: remember you are at a table with other people and you are telling a collaborative story in a system that is combat-heavy. I'm not bothered by (for example) someone stealing another character's item so long as they understand that this may lead to consequences for them! If you can dish it out but you're prepared to take it and your table trusts each other? Great! The problem is when people try to win against the other players, ask for special treatment they do not grant others, waste everyone's time unnecessarily, or skip to the end of the story; that's against the fundamental nature of the game. It's inconsiderate AND it misses the point.

[azspot]

The Luddites were not, contrary to popular belief, idiots who broke machines because they didn’t understand them. They were cloth workers who once led comfortable lives, working at home or in small shops, on their own terms and schedules, with freedom and dignity. When entrepreneurs tried to move their jobs into factories by using power looms and wide frames that did similar work faster, more cheaply and much more shoddily, the Luddites protested. These workers first sought compromise, dialogue and a democratic way to integrate new tech into their communities — to share in the gains. They were ignored. So they rebelled.

Brian Merchant

[cairavende]

Worm Arc 12 thoughts:

Brian needs to watch the Barbie movie holy shit! (I understand the story takes place in 2011 and the movie doesn't exist there)

Just like, fuck get off Taylor's back. She is playing it too safe but also being too aggressive. Moving too fast but also not being aggressive enough! AHHHHHHHH!

Seriously, nearly every time Brian showed up in this arc I was yelling at him. Dude. Just back off.

Skitter fucking just, killing thousands of rats in a few minutes is absolutely terrifying. God I love her.

Hookwolf is a dick. I can't believe everyone else went along with him and gave the Travelers and the Undersiders shitty choices like that. I mean that's not true, I can believe it I'm just mad.

I legit forgot Imp existed until Tattletale mentioned leaving her at the meeting as a spy. I love how the way her power works combined with the writing style means she just disappears for the readers as well.

Loved seeing more of the Travelers and more Noelle. Excited to learn more about her (I don't have great feelings about her long term situation though).

Jack is such a fucking POSER oh my god!

He just. He thinks he's so cool. But he's not. Fucking "this is not an exit" reference and shit.

He is Tobey Maguire Spider-Man from Spider-Man 3. Just thinks he is the coolest shit. Everyone just has to accept it cause he got fancy knife powers.

Tattletale just fucking full confidence fucking with the Nine while standing right in front of them. She clearly knew it was high risk but she took it and she got results, spoiling Jacks plan with Cheri and shit.

That said, AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! MY BABY SOMEBODY HELP MY BABY! AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!! (Ok she's not like, my baby, that's Taylor. But she's still my baby.)

LOOK AT MY FUCKING DAUGHTER! FUCKING LOOK AT HER! HOW MANY PEOPLE DID SHE SAVE FROM SHATTERBIRD? HUNDREDS? THOUSANDS? SHE IS AMAZING!

She fucking needs therapy though. Saves more people than anyone else could have and is mad because she didn't do enough. God damn Taylor love yourself!

Danny is fine. Besides, he had warning so any injures are basically his fault. Git gud Danny. (Ok look that's a little unfair, but he messed up pretty bad with raising my daughter so I'm allowed to be a little unfair to him I think.)

And look at my daughter again! She goes and organizes people to help the wounded. Takes charge. Gets a cool butch lady that might never show up again to help. I hope she does show up again though.

AND THEN FUCKING MANNEQUIN! AAAAHHHHHH!!!!!

After he showed up I said "I don't know how the fuck she's gonna do it, but my daughter is gonna kick your ass". And then like a few paragraphs later I read "I have no idea how the fuck I’m going to do it but I’m going to make you regret that." This made me both happy - fun to say something and have Taylor say almost the same thing - and worried - cause when I said I didn't know how she was going to do it I kinda hoped she had a plan.

But then she fucking does it! She kicks his ass. She steals his arm. SHE RIPS HIS HEAD OFF! GOD DAMN! THAT'S MY FUCKING KID!

I do think she should hire the buff burly guy who helped her rip Mannequin's head off. He clearly has motivation and would be loyal. And maybe I want to see him more. For reasons.

But anyway she fucking wrecks Mannequin, makes him look like he lost a fight with a paint store. Just fucking clowned on him. She is so good.

Then the next day Brian comes in and fully focuses on how stupid it was to fight Mannequin, not really praising that she won or asking if she needs medical help. God damn bud!

But I loved how a fuck ton of people were like "Oh shit she beat Mannequin! I want to work for her." She's going to be so fucking famous soon.

Interlude 1 - Jack is a poser again. Sucks to be the Merchants, can't say I'll miss them. Jack trying to sound all clever with his carrot and sticks thing, but most of what he lists for the other Nine is really obvious. And he misses some stuff as well. Poser. I could lead the Nine better than him (not that I would lead the Nine, just that if I did I would be better than Jack).

Interlude 2 - God damn this is a doozy. Shit ton of Cauldron lore. Battery backstory. Assault backstory. I made a "now kith" joke when they fought for the very first time cause I didn't realize who they were yet. It was supposed to be a joke. I did not want them to end up together. They should not be together. Legend should not have allowed Assault to be on Battery's team. He was a bit of a dick for that. So much Cauldron lore though. I can't put it all here.