#commoditization

[brumeraven]

🦋: Tombstone Keys || dolls, commoditization, abandonment, conformity, mutilation, transformations, violence, gods?, angels?, curious to know if anyone gets the title since it's fairly obscure and opaque

It's funny, isn't it? What is and isn't fashionable. Changes with the weather sometimes, others times things stick like glue.

There aren't many dolls left anymore. Not much use for them since the gig economy took over.

The doll aesthetic, though?

So hot right now.

Can't go a minute in a sleepy village without seeing a girl with porcelain mask or clockwork gloves or something else "dollcore."

Sometimes a literal doll core, showing oh-so-coyly from a provocatively low neckline, elegant crystal facets nestled in between so much garish flesh.

I grimaced as just such a number went mincing by, sundress all embroidered with primroses, hair coiffed and topped with a canted, raffish arrangement neither quite fascinator nor derby hat. All that kept it from being chintzy was the price tag with more zeros than class.

It might have been a convincing display, if not for her airs.

While a doll might once have been bedecked so by its owner, any would have done all it could to avoid notice, even in such an getup. Certainly, none would have walked with so much...heaving and jiggling of flesh.

I brushed the thoughts away as I followed the girl down the street. There is, of course, no accounting for taste, and yet that saying is so rarely afforded to the more daring of us, those who actually broke norms.

Like it or not, dolls were "in." Or at least their aesthetic was.

Only problem is they weren't made anymore. Hadn't been for decades. On the other hand, given the number produced, it was easy to find old stock to break down for parts.

First, it was just the broken and worthless, of course, but then, well, fashion demands nothing but the best.

Flesh might decay, but dolls never did.

The thought brought with it bitter awareness of the once-taught skin that now sagged and slumped tiredly about my face.

Dolls just...went on existing, no matter what changed, untouched by the passing of the years.

Buyers started scouting estate sales and secondhand stores, desperate to find anywhere a well-maintained family heirloom might have been carelessly tossed out, hungry for the payday such a find could bring, like so many vultures...no, vultures ate carrion; these were predators.

Then, of course, the market caught on, as it always does, and deals became rare as the pickings became slim. There's only so long you can drain an irreplaceable resource before prices skyrocket.

The cheap knock-offs from overseas were simply no match for the real, vintage item.

This girl, well, she clearly had the means to afford it. The parts she wore were pristine, or had been before they'd been scalped. My fingers clenched, not as smoothly as they once had, true, but still with a force than belied their gnarled form.

It was revolting. Sacrilegious. Dolls had been marvels of engineering, masterpieces of ingenuity. Beautiful, yes, but not for porcelain shells and glittering cores. Beautiful because they were a thing made for a purpose, made to last, effective and graceful no matter the task.

The beauty lay in how they'd been made with such care by human hands, the ineffable meeting of the mundane and the sacred.

No, not the mundane...for dolls were not mortal, purposeless things, cursed with free-will and the capacity for sin. Dolls were created, yes, but divine.

Dolls were as angels, wheeled, mechanical things of inerrant purpose and inscrutable construction.

Angels on whom God had turned His back.

Angels now cast from heaven for the sin of having shining wings that pleased the eye, no matter they'd once been used to fly.

She turned to face me, eye vacant, smile vacuous, devoid of everything but life.

I shut my eyes, trying to forgive her sins. It had been her hunger that destroyed, if not her hands.

I didn't fear death as she did. Nonexistence was simply that. This fate, though, how much worse?

That a thing once given purpose might be hacked apart and used as but aesthetic trappings?

I could think of no worse fate.

A pity I couldn't inflict it on her. She'd been made for no reason but a grunting, sweaty collision of flesh, some tepid spurts of what passed for passion.

If anything, well, I'd done her a favor.

The thought amused me as I made the switch, peeled the near-putrid skin off my frame and replaced it with her face and hands.

Some creators found meaning in their creations, whether they wanted to or not.

~🦋

[hollowsart]

1:30am and my mind started thinking about live-action crytpid crawler and I won't lie, this idea slaps:

…If there was ever a live-action Acedia movie, it would have to start off in a similar sense to how I imagine a comic for Acedia would start. where you're seeing the world, getting introduced to the various characters that may show up later, seeing them and hearing their names right from the get-go.

So like.. you'd follow one character to another and follow the camera around NY. from the city to the beach, to a movie set, to a corporate lobby, all the way eventually to following a female electrician as she enters the Connors' rehabilitation and research lab, walking past a sign that reads "Free Tours [dates and times]"

the electrician announces her name as Max Dillon as she greets Curt & Martha who introduce themselves and one of the two helps to redirect and show Max where she is needed.

Finally, the one remaining Connors starts the tour--

And the camera lands on Acedia at the back, and that's where the movie fully starts.

--

as you follow the camera around the city to the various locations, you get glimpses of the rogues. Most of which before their incidents that happen, a subtle announcement of their name as the camera lingers just a moment on each one, just enough for the audience to put two and two together if the character isn't recognizable.

Alex standing talk above move people in line for a hot dog near the beach, waiting for her order. Her name is called and she turns to get it.

Wilhelmina sitting on her lifeguard watchtower chair along the beach, kids are building sandcastles around it, someone calls her 'Miss Baker' or something..

Quentin standing and checking the smoke machines and other effects. Gets his named called and back/shoulder tapped by another crewman to hurry it up and bring some things to another part of the set. 'yeah yeah yeah I got it' he says over the bustling workers as he shuts of the machine, picking it up and leaving out of view

The Oscorp Lobby entrance where you see Adrian and Otto speaking, Adrian is having to leave for business but will be back soon enough, Otto is nervous as always, Adrian reassures him before finally exchanging goodbyes and Otto heads in with a good luck wish from Adrian for Otto is meeting with Norman again.

Perhaps you get a shot of the dock and see Sai (@bunny) with their crew.. The only hint here of who Sai is supposed to be being a throwaway line, a joke about what they could find during their next dive. "I've heard there's a spaceship down there--" "If aliens existed, do you think they'd be aquatic? It would explain why they haven't appeared on land!" "Aquatic? They'd have to be like some kind of goo to live down where we're headed!" (the last line being said by Sai)

[egopathic]

maybe it’s not that punk to create 1,000 micro “punk” categories that separate you further from the person next to you and have nothing to do with like. actual punk music or movements. idk.

[girderednerve]

in honor of tumblr's impending data sale to midjourney (go turn off third-party sharing if you haven't), consider glancing through this article that explains a little bit about what tumblr probably means by "discouraging AI crawlers." the article goes into it more, but here's a summary:

crawlers are little programs which bounce around between linked pages, copying what they find to a server for temporary storage. they're how google and other search engines find content to show you in search results and how companies building large language models "scrape" the internet.

if website owners don't want some crawler or other to look at their content, basically what they do is put a simply formatted text file, robots.txt, in their website directory, which lists the web crawlers that they don't want on their site or which pages they want crawlers to avoid. not all websites have one, but many do. you can see tumblr's right here; it lists some major AI crawlers and bans them from the site entirely, and exempts some other content from being indexed by major crawlers, like google.

the thing here to note is that robots.txt documents represent a request that is generally respected. they aren't strictly enforceable—it's not like a firewall—they're just a longstanding norm of the internet. but there's been an explosion of startups in AI, so there are a lot of companies with crawlers, and it may become increasingly difficult for websites to keep up with the crawlers in circulation. different crawlers are treated differently, so each new crawler needs to be listed separately in these documents. openAI only announced the name of its crawler and the associated IP address so websites could block it after building a large, and currently very valuable, training dataset. it's also very possible that some of these new companies will operate unscrupulously and ignore requests in robots.txt files. in some sense, there are very few practical options for larger websites to avoid being included in AI training datasets.

that's the environment that automattic is responding to with the deal with midjourney. i don't think we need to take this move as deliberately hostile towards users (automattic is hostile in other ways!); instead, it's taking advantage of a current market moment to try to monetize tumblr. reddit did much the same in preparation for its IPO. you might wonder why AI companies that can scrape data from the internet would pay for that data; well, the legal standing of AI is an undecided, very murky issue, with multiple open cases, including a high-profile one brought by the new york times. AI companies may hope that if they purchase the right to use data from websites (which have the ability to change the terms of service their users are bound by at any moment), that they will be protected from potential future copyright fallout.

[yakult-kettle]

girl help I'm being flanderized by the algorithm

[aadityawealth]

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[thefangirlme]

Don't gotta (traditionally/indiependently) publish everything you write. Sometimes that ultra specific story you write every night before bed should be reserved for you and you only.

[ardl]

ai art dick source rly xposin the petite bourgiosieness of the avg artist

[brumeraven]

🪫: The Chains That Bind || angels, burnout, commoditization, dehumanization, exhaustion, I know that SCRAM is probably a backronym but it's so stupid I love it

"So, uhh..."

Shit, only three days. Knew I shouldn't have picked four in the pool... At least I didn't go with "Never," like Gloria from HR. Bitch should know better; they always, always ask. Might be a day, might be a week, but they always bring it up.

"You ever, uh, think about what exactly we're doing here?"

There it was. The million dollar question. Suppose that number should be revised well-upwards, honestly, power prices being what they were these days, but I couldn't be arsed to keep up with the current budget...

"Like, with that thing in there, ya know?" He gestured vaguely past the consoles before us towards the observation slit, as if there could be any doubt what he meant. Wasn't anything else to talk about around here, least of all the drab beige plastic that comprised every surface.

"Notice you haven't taken a peek yet, rookie. Superstitious much?" I kept my voice light, despite the lance of hot rage that pierced my breast. Close to a decade of experience meant I'd had practice enough at controlling Extrinsics.

"No! Just, I mean..." With a sigh, he stood and leaned forward to look, pressing forward with a near-reverent hesitance. I'd have to keep an eye on that. That spoke of assumptions, and assumptions lead to sloppy work.

I didn't need to look. Already knew what he was staring at.

And if I hadn't, well, it was painted on his face, plain as daylight. 4 solid inches of recycled cathedral glass lessened the intensity to something just-shy of blinding, but compared to the anemic fluorescence of the control room, he might as well have been staring at the sun.

"....hm." It was a disappointed sort of non-committal noise.

"Not what you expected?" Of course it wasn't, not on this side of the shielding. Anyone too sensitive would never have been allowed this close.

"It's...bright?" Disappointment, and the desire for confirmation.

"It's a toroidal cloud of plasma. What the hell did you expect?" Part of the ritual, this was. Debase, demean, lessen. Pinion its wings with the materialistic, the rational, the objective, the familiar.

I knew what he meant, but that part...that part was buried just out sight.

If a few hundred tons of concrete, ten of graphite, and a cell of industrial diamond could be called "just out of sight." Only been down there once; creeped me out when my clothes changed color. Tiny changes, but you never knew what tiny change in your genes would become cancer.

"Yeah, I, uh, can see. I guess I expected-"

"Arms, legs, wings? Some white robes? Maybe a harp or trumpet?" The first bit was true, at least sometimes. Music was a bad idea though. "It's not a person. It's a machine. A thing that was made to do a job. A car, not a yoked horse."

"Aren't you ...afraid though?"

"Afraid? Hell yes I am." That much was no lie. "I'm afraid my coffee is gonna become decaf in between sips, or my bra won't match my shirt, or some other Slip is gonna fuck up my perfectly good day answering your stupid questions." Easy, steady...

Woof. That was a pained look if I'd ever seen one. Fine, he needed more reassurance than that... "Look, of course I worry. Even without hypocertainty effects, there are ten thousand things that could go wrong here. And our job is to make sure they don't, okay?"

"Okay...but-"

"Look, keep your eyes on the gauges and the protocols in mind. Long as shit's all green, s'all good, yeah? Been here 11 years; most of the time when the alarms go off, it's just brumeraven buildup. We wet vent it out through the filters and someone gets a flat tire or something."

He nodded, if not with much conviction. "What's, uh, what's the worst that could happen?"

Fuck, where in the hell did they even find this guy?

Fine, if he wanted it... "Worst case, the Void coefficient inverts and goes positive. We end up with a criticality incursion, have to cut the outflows and you..." I leaned over to prod his arm for emphasis. "...you get to take ice cream and stuffed animals downstairs for it."

Well, that got a nervous giggle and a minute of silence. Probably for the best he thought it a joke for the moment. I waited, then, waited for the question he still hadn't asked, the one I knew was coming.

"But what...what if it breaks loose? What if it gets out?"

Bingo. It wouldn't. It couldn't. "It won't. It can't. Besides, that's my job." I tapped the badge clipped to my shirt, right on the crisp, serifed capital letters: SCRMNT. Safety Containment Responsibility Manager/Neutralization Technician. Corporate did love their acronyms...

"I mean, sure, no offense, but what exactly are you gonna do against that thing in there, if it breaks the control bonds?"

Ahhh, and there it was, the root of the misunderstanding. He still thought this was a prison of concrete and rebar, copper and steel.

"You don't understand. All this concrete and shit? That's all just shielding for our benefit. And for the power converters and all that. It's free to leave; not like we could stop it. But if she goes, whole power grid goes down."

It. Fuck.

"I don't understand. Why...?"

"Please, with all the hospitals and homes and hotels that depend on us?"

"..."

"You want to know how you keep an angel bound?"

The question hung in the air as I felt the hairs on my arm prick, and a fleeting sense of sorrow not my own slunk into my heart.

He nodded, waiting.

I smiled slowly.

"Responsibilities."

~🪫

[irretrievable-narrator]

The audacity of this webbed site to advertise "Monopoly Go" to me.

1. Advertisers and those who concoct them in their black laboratories should hunted down and biblically sorted.

2. Monopoly sucks so much it's hard to even describe - the epitome of a random number generator game. The decisions one makes, even in its original, intended form, are so hamstrung as to be nonexistent. I could fend one human against three dice rolling bingo machines and the human would win about 1 in 4 times.

3. How is it possible that the most anti-capitalist board game on the planet not made by a 24-year-old from a Seattle commune has become synonymous with multimedia advertisement? I can go out and buy Star Wars monopoly, Pokémon monopoly, Monopoly Monopoly, there's a monopoly where you're allowed to cheat, there's one where you can spend $300 dollars for bespoke monopoly, and in a cruel twist of irony, there's even socialist monopoly. The game isn't even good! Who the fuck is playing this much monopoly?

4. I wanna touch back on 1. again, fuck advertisers. If you make corporate advertisements for a living it's on SIGHT.

5. I will bite you like a dog or other lesser beast

6. Monopoly as a game should not exist. If Hasbro goes under I will dance on the grave of brightly colored money and shitty tin hats.

[iamonlyhereforthefreefood]

Thinking about how grunge fashion when it started was literally just struggling musicians living paycheck to paycheck buying clothes that were warm and cheap it wasn’t a fashion statement it was practical. But then when Nirvana and Pearl Jam and other grunge bands started getting big then everyone wanted to dress like their favorite rockstars and it started becoming a trend to the point where Marc Jacobs made a grunge inspired line, which like... “grunge” and “designer” just do not go together.

[bdarfler]

"Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements." If you've ever heard this phrase, this is where it comes from. If you haven't it explains a lot about why companies invest heavily in OSS.

[stone-stars]

Full thread from Sam on the SAG strike and Dropout!

[ID: A thread from Sam on twitter, as follows: "A thread about the strike and Dropout production: 👇✊. I stand in complete and utter solidarity with our striking performers. I myself am SAG-AFTRA, as are others on our executive team, having come from the world of working actors. I am nothing but sympathetic to their cause and outraged by the mafia-like behavior of the major streamers and AMPTP. It is harder than ever to make a living in this industry, and that goes even for the lucky few of us who get to work on meaningful projects.

In the meanwhile… 🤑 Uber-rich CEOs and shareholders are cashing in like never before 💸 Major streamers are gambling millions on dubious projects and business models 🍾 Hollywood is hiding profits and playing the victim while drinking champagne aboard their superyachts

Dropout production is right now on hold. Because we aren't associated with the AMPTP, it's possible we may be able to reach an interim agreement with SAG that allows us to continue to produce content during the strike.

But we'll only do that, obviously, if we get the blessing of the union and the buy-in of our performers. If not, we have enough content in the can to last us a little past the end of the year.

I pride myself in that Dropout has always paid above SAG minimums. As the years go on and the company is healthier, we will strive to do even better, and then even better still. Without the talent of our performers, we are zilch. Zero. Nothing."

Attached is an instagram post from an actor reading: "The Netflix show in question is shorter than a traditional half hour. But @ collegehumor and @ dropouttv paid me MORE than that for one of their scripted series. Dropout was a brand new online platform at the time and they still managed to pay their actors more than NETFLIX for scripted short form content."

Thread continues: "Public companies don't do this for the very simple reason that they feel more indebted to their executives and shareholders than they do their workforce. It's why corporations are so often exploitative. Our industry, because our jobs are so desirable, is especially vulnerable to exploitation. Hollywood takes advantage of that by making us feel generally commoditized, cheap, and replaceable …which is ironic given just how personal our work so often is. That's why unions - and the power of collective bargaining - is so important: because public companies often won't pay their workforce any more than they're forced to.

As for me, I intend to honor my union's position that I not promote SAG productions as a performer -- even if they are produced by me. That means that I won't personally be promoting any of our shows for the time being.

Attached is a screenshot of Sam on Discord responding to the question "given the strike… what picket line chant will you be rockin'?" with "i'm a talent / CEO! me says me has got to go!"

Thread continues: "This year, instead of running a FYC campaign for Game Changer, we donated $10k to the Entertainment Community Fund in solidarity with the WGA. Today, in solidarity with SAG-AFTRA, I'm personally matching that donation with another $10,000. If you have any disposable income, I encourage you to donate as well: https://entertainmentcommunity.org. And as soon as I test negative for COVID, I'll see you on the picket line. ✊"]

[youzicha]

I wonder if one reason the AI boom is so strong right now is that it's something that you can invest in. The selling point is the scaling laws: if you spend X billion dollars you can buy Y million GPUs and move one step further right on the graph. The promise of those curves is that progress is only limited by money.

This is quite different from other booms. When VR was hot 10 year ago, I believe the limiting factor was getting smart people who could build the software and hardware. You can start by acquiring Oculus Rift and hiring John Carmack, but if you still have some capital left, where do you put it? Zuckerberg supposedly spent 100 billion dollars and was literally unable to build anything with it.

Cryptocurrency is even more extreme. New growth mostly comes from new ideas, which are generated by... like, individual smart researchers. People were able to launch new blockchains out of their living rooms, the whole thing was not capital-constrained at all. (There are some commoditized parts like proof-of-work miners, but those are not where the fantastic profits and growth rates were.)

And even the old-fashioned ad-empires like Google and Facebook, or the dot-com companies circa 2000, were still mostly constrained by availability of software developers. The company spending was dominated by payroll, and the bidding wars led to those ridiculous tech salaries in San Fransisco. This is not helpful for capitalists: you can't easily use money to produce more programmers.

Paul Graham-like tech VCs always talk about "scaling", but this might be the first tech industry that you can scale up mechanically...

[batterymaster01]

The Astutocentaurini & Death Part 2: Utility Vessels

As discussed before, the Astutocentaurini believe in the idea of two deaths: death of the self (the head) and death of the vessel (the body). But how are headless citizens dealt with while still alive? Following self-death, the vessel of an Athyrmatherian has the potential to live for a long time under controlled conditions, anywhere from a year to nearly a century, depending on the creature's species and age. The feudal societies of the world have thus converged on a similar solution: At some point in their adult life, a person will usually be required to sign a will in which they can either decline or agree to posthumously donate their vessels to society. These repurposed vessels are known as "utility vessels."

A utility vessel can be considered an archaic sort of biotechnology, an organic automaton that can be sold and used for various purposes. When awaiting ownership or rental by an employer, they are typically housed and maintained in storage facilities called "body shops," eerily reminiscent of auto shops in their presentation and purpose. They can even be modified surgically and "mechanically" to certain degrees if permitted by a will, although more extensive cases of body modification can be rather controversial. Despite this apparent commoditization, utility vessels are treated with an odd yet palpable sense of respect and reverence, which is culturally analogous to our respect for the dead. Indeed, the very shops they are sold by tend to be subsidiaries of the same funeral homes that house their deceased selves, and employers are legally obligated to return dead vessels so they can be buried in the same graves. With each use, utility vessels are paid in money for their services, and some laws and regulations advise against any particular uses that may be deemed indignant to the former persons. It is also common for utility vessels to be dressed in lavish and beautiful garbs or intricately carved bioplastic shells that match their cultural backgrounds. The centerpiece of these decorations is a custom-carved "persona," a fake head that, in addition to functioning as a feeding tube, serves as a symbolic reminder of the person the vessel used to be attached to.

Under native legal definitions, utility vessels are usually classified into three types based on their composition and functionality. Type "A" utility vessels consist of the thoracic, upper, and lower abdominal zooids, with the thoracic zooid housing a ganglion that makes them autonomous enough to perform specific tasks in response to certain stimuli. This allows them to haul or carry loads similar to pack animals, with the behaviors being conditioned through rhythmic ground vibrations and rewards of liquid food. Type "B" utility vessels consist of only the upper and lower abdominal zooids, and they lack autonomy outside metabolic regulation and basic righting and balancing. Due to this, they have to be pulled or pushed manually like living carts, and they are mostly used to carry lighter loads or to act as portable bases for more stationary equipment. Type "C" utility vessels are essentially any singular zooid that is separated from a composite, and they are typically relegated to use as a surgery stock for organ transplants, zooid replacements, and sometimes to "construct" more complete utility vessels.

[pancakeke]

is there a name for this process?

A post is made criticizing a poll that refered to non-english movies as "foreign language" because English is a second language to a significant number of people on tumblr.

This post gets very popular.

Because many people have read the post, a number of people are inspired to begin commenting on other posts that present US American views as universal truths. The purpose is to point out how that behavior alienates people who are not US American and ideally promote more inclusivity.

The above talking point becomes popular, almost as though it is a new meme, and people look for excuses to share it so they can be part of the trend.

People become more focused on being part of the trend than utilizing the talking point for its intended purpose. Due to this they erroneously call out posts as US-centric for containing details of personal experiences despite that there were never implications that those details were universal standards.

People misusing the original talking point begin to outnumber those who use it correctly. Due to this, it becomes commonplace for anyone using the talking point correctly to be dismissed as though they are part of the majority who do not.

Those who understand the talking point and use it correctly drop it altogether because it no longer promotes useful discussion.

I saw a post with this screenshot and it got me thinking about how this sort of plays out in small bubbles. I have not read anything about how society or popular culture skews the meanings of things so I'm talking as a dumb guy here but I want to say the source of this is FOMO and the commoditization of actions in online spaces. like diluting purpose and meaning via bandwagoning.

I was about to say I wanted a word or phrase to use for this process so it can be more easily discussed, but I guess if it was named that name would probably go through this process itself and become worthless to use lol