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oceantornadoo · 3 months ago

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ch13 something borrowed something blue (mafia!price x simon's sister!reader)

tw: allusions to torture. reader has some ptsd. SMUT.

also i did not edit this srry

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“Again.”

Johnny sighs to his right, but Simon ignores it, too concerned with the man in the chair in front of him. “Say it again.” The man in the chair (Richard, 34, nephew of a Price uncle, twice-removed or some bullshit) spits out a glob of blood on the floor before clearing his throat. “The night the weapons were stolen I was at home with my wife. We watched a new episode of one of those trashy American shows, The Bachelor, that dropped that night. I was off-shift. Came in at 6am because of the Mrs. Price emergency.” Simon’s eyebrow twitches under his mask. Three days after getting his sister back and this is what sniffs out the rat? An American show Johnny loves to pirate? He wants to laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Johnny catches his eye and he can’t fault the man for the grin on his face. When Simon turns back to Richard, red in the face, he’s pretty sure the man’s figured it out. “The Bachelor drops Mondays.”

Richard sputters, twitching. “We were catchin’ up from the week before.” Simon shakes his head, glancing at the papers on the table to his left. “You had off every other night that week and only got to it by Sunday? Tellin’ me the wife keeps up with the drop schedule but waited six days?” He walks closer to Richard, gloved hands gripping the man’s jaw tightly. He presses his fingers into the bruise near his mouth, pressing hard until he breaks.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m in debt, man, 50,000 Euros. No one knows so when I lost to the guy at that shithole of a bar and he offered me a job, I couldn’t say no! He said it was just a few documents, wouldn’t hurt anyone…” Stupid, stupid, stupid. Before Simon can grab a tool from the wall, Johnny clears his throat. “Let me, sir. Gaz called. You’re needed at base.” That could only mean one thing. Simon nods, swallowing thickly as he leaves the room to the sound of screams.

It’s a half hour drive back to the Castle, but it feels like eons. Simon changes his gloves and mask with the limo partition up, even swapping his sweatshirt out for your benefit. The smell of blood fades when the fabric is removed, bundled into a trash bag he leaves in the car. When Simon double checks his phone, his hands are shaking. Another oddity of the week, too miniscule to dwell on.

It’s been three days since he last saw you, cuddled up in Price’s arms like an injured stray. For all Simon has tried to protect you from, the insults of childhood and your shared shitty father, it worries him to think you got hurt despite his greatest efforts. There’s no doubt that you’re a strong woman, but he’s not sure what Shepherd did to you and no matter what, there’s only so much a person can take. The guilt that’s been following him since the marriage is heavy like a chain, weighing down his every motion. Did he marry you off too early? Was Price the wrong pick? Thoughts swirl like a snowstorm in his head, only stopping when the car pulls up to the Castle.

It’s the perfect home he would have picked for you, given the chance. Sophisticated wealth, nothing flashy or too pretentious. Gaz mentioned that you redecorated, and he can see parts of you in the artwork, in the new chairs meant for casual conversation instead of just functionality. You’ve turned the base into a home and the guilt creeps up again thinking of how you might have never returned to it.

“Mr. Riley.” The door guards nod at Simon as he walks through. He feels out of place in his hoodie, used to his lax uniform in Manchester. Price styles himself more as a businessman than Simon ever has. He hides the scars with gloves and a mask but he doesn’t delude himself into thinking of himself as a professional. He’s more like the head of a wolf pack, barking and snarling at anyone who gets too close. Nothing like Price and he’s glad for it. You deserve someone who can give you a semblance of a normal life, pretending like he’s going to work at an office instead of meeting illicit weapons dealers on the edge of town.

Gaz is waiting for him in the foyer, immaculate in a deep blue button-up. It’s the first time he’s seen the man shaved, a testament to the bonds that you forged with Price men that were tested in the past week. “Ghost.” Gaz nods, leading him through the Castle. “How is she?” Gaz walks slower than usual, seeming to need more time before bringing Simon upstairs. “She’s…recovering. Been talking with a trauma therapist the Captain trusts.” Simon nods. He can’t imagine what they put you through, why John ordered him to find a new set of clothes when they found you. Everything he learns is a strike against Phil, whenever Simon finds him. John promised him retribution.

“How is she physically? They hurt her?” Gaz stops in front of the stairs, scratching the back of his head awkwardly. “She’s skittish. Can’t approach ‘er from behind, got t’ give ‘er plenty of warnin’. I only saw her last night when she came down for some food, ‘s the first time she’s been out of the room. The Captain’s given me a temporary title while he’s taking care of ‘er.” It’s not temporary. Simon can sense it, leadership senses setting off alarms. Loyalty, initiative, intelligence - Gaz has it all. A fine replacement if he’s ever seen one. Too bad Johnny hates him.

Simon nods, ready to see his sister. Before he can step up the stairs, Gaz clears his throat. “If you can, sir, convince her to drink some water? Last night, all she could do was look at the glass.” Christ. What did they do to you?

When Simon climbs up the stairs, you’re lounging in the sitting room, swathed in clothes too big for you. The couch you’re on is out of place, tugged from its original spot so the back is now against the wall. Tactical. He ensures his steps are loud so you sit up with a smile instead of a shudder. “Si!” You grin and his heart stops at the fact you still have the ability to. They didn’t take everything. “Hey, love. Can I hug ya?” You nod, setting your book down with your arms reaching up. “I missed you.” You murmur as he hugs you. The angle is awkward as he towers over you but he doesn’t particularly care, sitting down next to you while keeping you in his arms.

“How ya doin’, kid?” He asks when you release him. Simon slips off his medical mask into his pocket. On closer look, you’re wearing John’s clothes, the name of some obscure London footie team emboldened on the chest. He can hear the man’s voice come from behind the closed bedroom door, likely on a phone call. “I’m okay. John got me a therapist and she’s really helping. She specializes in kidnapping victims and immediate solutions and…yeah. Isn’t that a bit weird, saying I’ve been kidnapped?” On second look, you don’t look your best. There’s circles on your eyes and faded bruises on your jaw, like someone grabbed it and forced it open. Instead of answering, Simon brushes the soft skin of your neck until he can find your pulse. You don’t jolt like he expected you to, instead curling into the feeling of his familiar touch.

“I knew somethin’ was wrong ‘fore Gaz called. Had this dream of you screamin’ my name, askin’ for my help from somewhere far. When I woke, I just knew. Ready to tear the world apart f’ you, kiddo. You’re still my little sister to protect.” A tear escapes your eye. He brushes it away, then squeezes your cheek like a grandmother would before pulling back. “I’m still lookin’ f’r others who were involved. They’ll get what’s coming for ‘em.” You nod, catching his hand before he pulls back completely. “Thank you for that, Si, but also, I just- just need you here, you know? I think your presence here will do a lot more for me than being an avenging angel.” He gets it, he does, but he didn’t get to kill Shepherd. He was John’s but Phil is Simon’s and no matter what, he will be found. “Think there’s a way f’r us to split it?” It. His time. Your wants, his needs.

You squeeze his hand and nod. “I think so.” You croak out. Simon can sense the need for levity, so he starts telling you about how Johnny almost got himself blown up a few weeks ago when dealing with a Chinese chemical supplier. Simon’s not usually the joker between you two but he channels the infectious energy of his husband, in pursuit of making you laugh. You finally giggle when he mimics the windblown look on Johnny’s face, even putting in the effort to mimic his mohawk with his hands. It’s goofy and reminiscent of your childhood, the ghost of Tommy making a rare appearance in the corner of the room. Your kidnapping has sent Simon off the edge and out of character, desperate to do anything to repair what has been broken.

The bedroom door creaks open and John’s heavy footsteps follow. “Hi, sweetheart.” John approaches the couch head on, kissing your forehead before nodding at Simon. “Simon.” He nods back, not feeling the need to put his mask back on. “John.” “What is this?” Your eyes flick between the two of them, brows furrowed. Simon looks at John, who shrugs. “What’re ya talkin about?” You frown at Simon’s words, crossing your arms in front of your chest. “Since when is there a bromance? What did I miss?” John sighs, dragging a hand down his face. Simon reaches out to ruffle your hairdo, smiling when you screech and bat his hand away. “‘S called mutual respect, sweetheart. Not sure what a bromance is.” You mock John’s sigh, rolling your eyes. “You’ll be wearing friendship bracelets by the end of this year if you keep going on this trajectory.” The men lock eyes with twin glances of horror.

“On that note, you good if I pop in downstairs, sweetheart? Gaz needed help on something.” A look of understanding passes between you two, a look Simon has felt time and time again with his husband. It’s like a punch to the gut in the softest way possible. “All good, I’ll be here with Simon.” John nods, kissing your forehead before taking a few steps back towards the staircase. Before he can leave, Simon clears his throat. “John, you have any condos or safehouses in the area you aren’t usin’?” John’s eyes flicker with a different kind of understanding. “Enough space for two, I gather?” Simon nods, ignoring how you’re kicking his shin. “For a month or two, at least.” You kick him harder and he shoves your foot away in a playful push. “I’ll see what I can do.” John responds, nodding before heading down the stairs.

“You’re stayin’?” When he turns to look at you, your lip is quivering. He sighs in faux exhaustion before tugging your legs on top of his. “‘Course I’m stayin’. Can’t let my baby sister fight alone.” You shyly wipe your eyes before meeting his own. “What about the business in Manchester?” He shrugs, acting like he didn’t spend hours on the phone with his best men last night. “It’s what I’ve got men for. Plus, you can show me ‘round.” Instead of squealing or jumping him, you give him a small smile. It feels older and mellow, something he hates. “Thanks, Si.” He squeezes your foot. He wants to bring up the water drinking, but you seem a little fragile right now. He’s got time now, something he won’t miscount. “‘S what I’m here for. Now tell me the rest ‘f y’r redecoratin’ plans. That entryway could use some work.” You grin and he’s reminded of the toothy five-year old, playing hide and seek in the Riley house of horrors. A survivor, through and through.

Every day passes faster than the last. You find out your therapist, Marie, is actually Dr. Marie Laswell, Kate’s wife. She promises you that despite their marriage, everything you share is confidential and stays between you. It’s hard work, recounting everything that happened in your daily meetings. John is there, kissing your forehead and cuddling you after nightmares, like the perfect gentleman. As the adrenaline drains and you find yourself living again, you crave more than that.

You want to go back to your last fight. You know it could be self-sabotage, but in the confines of the Castle, it’s like nothing can harm you. John only has guards you know working. Terrance stops by once or twice, telling you he got promoted. Simon visits whenever he can. Your reunion with Johnny is heartfelt and strong. Gaz feels like a son now, protective and firm about your security. All of these facts coalesce into a suit of armor, knowing that as long as you don’t leave the building, you are safe.

Marie tells you it’s not the healthiest mindset. You remind her progress is progress. She sighs in a way that reminds you of her wife.

The one-month anniversary of your kidnapping creeps up on you, haunting the corners of your mind. There’s an ache deep in your heart to return to normal, no matter what he said about finding a new one. You want so badly to change without looking over your shoulder. On rainy days, there’s a phantom ache in the side of your arm that Phil sunk a syringe into. He’s still in the wind, a fact that agitates Simon more and more. Small wins happen too. There are days you don’t need John at home, content with phone calls throughout the day and a long dinner at night. You’ve gone on two (2!) walks by yourself, passing through the park across from the Castle as guards trail behind you and at the corners of the park. You’ve progressed to Gatorade and flavored carbonated water but still jump at unknown touches. Except, of course, John’s.

Every night runs like clockwork. You shower, John standing outside the door like a protective hound. Then you slip on a robe and let him in, brushing your teeth and finishing your routine together. He leaves to ‘check something’ and always returns with a new non-water liquid he wants you to try, like a new Gatorade or flavor of tea. In the time he’s gone, you change. You’ve graduated from speed-changing to taking your time, rubbing lotion on your body before slipping on pajamas. When John comes back, you cuddle and talk, and then lights out.

The same damn routine. Every. Night. You feel like a nun.

The anniversary passes without little fanfare. John takes the day off, unusual but part of the new normal. Gaz is left in charge again, a fact he’s getting more used to. When you wake in the morning, something else new happens.

Morning light warms your eyelids. John’s arm is a comfortable weight around your waist, his forearm hair rubbing the patch of your stomach exposed by your raised shirt. Something pulses low in your belly. When he turns to pull you closer into him, your stomach flutters. His face tucked into your neck, the weight of him searing as his body is half-slung over yours. It’s a welcome change from how you usually find yourself on top of him, like he’s pinning you to reality. A body scan reveals wetness between your thighs and a keenness between your lips.

When you cant your hips slightly, chasing that fluttering feeling, his cock twitches in his sweats where it’s against the outside of your thigh. You tilt them higher, fighting against the weight of him, and smile when his cock twitches again. “Go t’sleep.” He groans, rough and sleepy into your ear. Instead of listening, you push your thigh outwards to the heavy weight of him.

“Watch what y’r doin’, pet.” Pet is new. Unlocking a new nickname sends a thrill down your spine. You ignore the connotations behind it. “John…” You whisper, injecting an extra breath of air into your speech. He pulls his head up, hair mussed and eyes blurry. He’s beautiful.

He props himself up on his forearm, giving your own arm freedom to move. You do so, sliding it from his neck to his torso, snaking down to follow his happy trail. “What d’ya think y’r doin’?” You run your fingers through his trimmed body hair, only dipping slightly into the elastic of his boxers. “I want to feel you.” You blink at him with wide eyes. He pulls his core backwards, letting your hand drop on the mattress. “Y’r not ready.” You frown, scooting back into your pillows so you can properly meet his eyes. “I think I get to decide that, John.” He closes his eyes, sighing. “I was readin’ an article and-” You huff, pulling back further until you’re sitting on the opposite side of the bed.

“This is the problem we have, John. You trust external sources more than me.” If he was a weaker man, he’d look whiplashed. Unfortunately, you got a husband prepared for anything, a man who can argue at the drop of a hat. “I’m jus’ sayin’, sweetheart, maybe we wait. I don’t want t’ hurt ya.” You scoff, pulling your knees to your chest. “Can you trust when I say you won’t hurt me? That I can handle myself and know my limits?” He’s silent for a second too long.

You launch yourself out of the bed, heading for the bathroom. He’s faster than you, weak from weeks of lethargy, beating you to the punch to stand in front of the door instead of tugging you back into him. “Stop.” You place a hand on his chest, intent to push him away, but all he does is cover it with his own. “Can you jus’ wait for a second?” That’s when you take a second look at your husband. How he’s panting like he’s out of breath, even if you know he goes for runs every day. His pupils are blown and feral, a predator in the wild. You stand for a bit, letting your palm track how his breaths go in and out of his chest.

“Deep breaths for me, baby.” How nostalgic it feels, the roles reversed as this time it’s you talking him off a ledge. His breathing calms after a minute, eyes going tame as he squeezes the life out of your hand. When he’s calmed, he speaks. “The last time you ran from me after an argument, you were taken from me.” Your heart breaks a little at the weakness he lets you see. Your hand slides up into his beard, brushing over the rough strands as you look in his eyes. “I wasn’t running, John. I just needed some space.” He shakes his head in disagreement. “Ya don’t know what it felt like, seein’ you step into tha’ car an’ gettin’ a call hours later that you were gone.” You nod, biting your lip.

“You’re right, John. I don’t know. And you don’t know how my brain works. You don’t know how harsh grips trigger me but yours never have.” Understanding brews in his eyes, cloudy like a cup of coffee. He pulls you in closer by the waist, lining you up until your pelvises meet. “I get it, sweetheart. I trust you.” You exhale a breath at his words.

“I didn’t take ya on tha’ trip months ago because I was meetin’ a new supplier an’ I didn’t trust him. You know firsthand now how dangerous my world is. I know you’ve lived this life, but London is more cutthroat than Manchester could ever be. ‘M not sorry f’r smotherin’ ya, because at least y’r safe. ‘S my number one concern in this world.” It’s terrible, how you don’t care that he’s admitted that he smothers you. How all you care about is how he knew what you were referencing, even if it was from months ago.

“How do I know you want me for me?” Another concern of yours from your fight before the kidnapping. He shrugs, giving you a wry smile. “Guess you’ll have to trust me.”

You drag him into the bathroom, jumping onto the counter and pulling him between your legs. You practically maul his face, kissing him with unrestrained want. His admission flipped a switch in you, a longing that’s been asleep for a while. It wakes up when he pulls you closer to his pelvis, your clothed cunt rubbing against the outline of his cock. You’re still wet from earlier, your folds sticking to airy fabric.

“Didn’t want it like this.” He breathes behind your ear. John sucks a soft patch of skin there, licking at the sweat from your sleep before trailing down your neck. “Wanted t’ eat ya out f’r an hour ‘fore even pullin’ my cock out.” You run a hand down his rigid back muscles, pulling at the fabric until he lets you tug it off. John laves his tongue at your neck, alternating between sucking and nipping at your sensitive skin. His hands grip your hard, thumbs inching closer and closer to your core. You’re wearing shorts without underwear, a perfect combination that he soon discovers. “What else?” You moan, leaning your head back until it hits the mirror behind you. It’s perfect, knowing there’s nothing but a wall behind your back. It calms the worried part of your brain, letting you fully focus on the moment.

“Then I’d let ya suck my cock, get it nice an’ warm in tha’ mouth of yours. Let you rub y’r cunt against me.” You whine at the image, nails digging into his back as he continues making out with your neck. Finally, he tugs your sleep shirt off, trailing downwards to suck at your tits. He squeezes one while sucking the other, pulling hard enough to make it hurt. There’s no part of him you can reach, the angle of it awkward and wrong. The solution is to trail your free hand up your thigh, passing his hands to push the fabric of your shorts aside and thumb at your clit. “Wha’s this, hm?” He murmurs, switching to your other tit. “Wanna be ready f’ you, John.” The wetness seeping from your cunt makes it easy to slip a finger in, stretching yourself in preparation for your husband. He’s letting you set the rhythm in a way he usually doesn’t, and you love him for it, something you don’t think too hard about.

“Let me?” He asks and you nod immediately. He replaces your hand with his own, sliding two thick fingers into your hole. You clench immediately at the intrusion, more out of tension than fear. John stops, glancing up at you from where he’s leaning down. “Need me to stop?” You shake your head, moving your hips forward so his fingers slide in deeper. “It’s just been a while.” John is still stopped, searching your face for something. “I trust you, John. I need you to say it back or this won’t work.” His eyes don’t leave your face, nodding slowly. “I trust you with my life, baby. An’ I trust ya with yours. You gonna let me stretch you out?” Instead of answering, you start to grind slowly, fucking yourself on his fingers. His gaze drops down, watching your cunt squeeze him tight.

“How’d I get so lucky, hm? Perfect wife, dropped right into my lap.” John makes you work for it, angling his thumb so your clit hits it with every grind. It’s the most work your body has done in months and you love it, love the burn in your muscles as you command them to work. “This is goin’ t’ be a lot shorter than I wanted it t’ be, pet. Can’t focus when y’r mewlin’ f’r my cock like this.” You whine at his words. John pulls his fingers out, a string of slick trailing after them. He rubs them against your chest, pointed nipples scraping against your own wetness. The friction makes you delirious and needy in his arms. “John, I need you.” He hums, that same hand pushing down his sweats to reveal his cock, thick and heavy in his hand. He gives it a pump and you watch him spread your slick around it, mixing with his precum to make it even smoother.

“Last chance, baby.” John lines his cock up with your cunt. He rubs it up and down, catching on your clit every other time. “Shut the fuck up and fuck me, John.” His name on your lips is punctuated with a gasp as he pushes into you. You let out a string of curses at the intrusion. No matter how many times John has given you his fingers, the blunt width of his cock is so much more. It’s been over a year since you’ve fucked someone, and it’s never been like this. It’s never been dark blue eyes filled with trust and care, flicking down every so often to watch his cock go in and out. It’s never been dangling over the precipice of an orgasm so fast, the speed of it hitting you like a lightning strike. He fucks you through it, his hand on the back of your neck, forcing you to look down at where you’re joined. You watch your tits and stomach bounce at his movements and you watch as he hungers for it.

John’s a talker. This you’ve known, but it’s never been like this.

“Look at you, taking my cock so well. Fuckin’ made f’r it.”

“Y’r cunny’s so tight, baby. This all for me?”“So desperate for it, pet.”

“Such a good girl for daddy. C’mon, say it.”

It makes you clench and mewl and claw at his back. He tries to kiss you but all you can do is let your mouth fall open and pant against him. Your first orgasm left you weak-willed, eager to follow his instructions. You nod your assent to every word, sweat dripping into your eyes. The second orgasm builds slow in your core. It burns with every thrust, every brush of your clit that John’s thumb makes. You lean your head back so it hits the mirror, suddenly realizing that your actions echo each other in the mirror behind John.

Your mouth is open. Sweat makes your skin glisten. You settle your weight on your hands and arch your back, a glimpse of your tits visible in the glass. It means you look almost whorish but it doesn’t matter because it’s for your husband, whose muscled back ripples with every thrust. That’s the image that sends you over the edge, whining John’s name as you fall off the edge.

“Where, baby?” John meets your eyes with a burning question. You look down at the creamy ring around his cock, the slight of it sending another hazy spark to your core. “Inside.” This time John’s the one cursing, dropping his forehead to your collarbone as he watches himself come inside his wife. Finally, with his soft cock still inside you, John slows to a stuttering stop.

“Oh fuck.” John looks up at your panicked words with a matching expression. “Somethin’ hurt?” Your mouth opens, then closes. “What? No. I just remembered I stopped taking my birth control because of what happened. I haven’t been on it in over a month. And Plan-B’s really mess up my cycle.” John laughs. Your husband laughs, with his forehead on your collarbone and his cock inside you, pushing his cum in further. “This is not funny, John!” He shakes his head before meeting your eyes. “I got a vasectomy.” You blink. “What do you mean, you got a vasectomy?” He drags a hand down his face. Instead of answering, John eases out of the tight hold of your cunt. He fishes for a washcloth somewhere near, running warm water over it before swiping at your inner thighs. “When we had tha’ conversation about Gaz. Didn’t want it to happen after tha’ an’ not be prepared.” You squint in confusion. “I timed it with your period.” You bark out a laugh of disbelief.

“You’re fucking crazy.” He looks up at you with worry etched into his face, like he’s done something wrong. All you do is smile and pull him in, kissing his nose like he’s adorable. “I hate you.” You say, laughing. “You love me.” He murmurs against your skin. You don’t refute it, shutting him up with a kiss.

Phil watches and waits.

Her husband keeps leaving her alone. Phil’s camera screens flicker, shots of her through windows and from the park. The brother is closing in but it doesn’t matter, not when he’s so close to completing his mission. He must watch and wait.

one. chapter. left.

i barely edited this so if you see any mistakes no you didn't

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months ago

Text

With Great Power Came No Responsibility

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in NYC TONIGHT (26 Feb) with JOHN HODGMAN and at PENN STATE TOMORROW (Feb 27). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

Last night, I traveled to Toronto to deliver the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto's Innis College:

The lecture was called "With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It." It's the latest major speech in my series of talks on the subject, which started with last year's McLuhan Lecture in Berlin:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

And continued with a summer Defcon keynote:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

This speech specifically addresses the unique opportunities for disenshittification created by Trump's rapid unscheduled midair disassembly of the international free trade system. The US used trade deals to force nearly every country in the world to adopt the IP laws that make enshittification possible, and maybe even inevitable. As Trump burns these trade deals to the ground, the rest of the world has an unprecedented opportunity to retaliate against American bullying by getting rid of these laws and producing the tools, devices and services that can protect every tech user (including Americans) from being ripped off by US Big Tech companies.

I'm so grateful for the chance to give this talk. I was hosted for the day by the Centre for Culture and Technology, which was founded by Marshall McLuhan, and is housed in the coach house he used for his office. The talk itself took place in Innis College, named for Harold Innis, who is definitely the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan. What's more, I was mentored by Innis's daughter, Anne Innis Dagg, a radical, brilliant feminist biologist who pretty much invented the field of giraffology:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

But with all respect due to Anne and her dad, Ursula Franklin is the thinking person's Harold Innis. A brilliant scientist, activist and communicator who dedicated her life to the idea that the most important fact about a technology wasn't what it did, but who it did it for and who it did it to. Getting to work out of McLuhan's office to present a talk in Innis's theater that was named after Franklin? Swoon!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin

Here's the text of the talk, lightly edited:

I know tonight’s talk is supposed to be about decaying tech platforms, but I want to start by talking about nurses.

A January 2025 report from Groundwork Collective documents how increasingly nurses in the USA are hired through gig apps – "Uber for nurses” – so nurses never know from one day to the next whether they're going to work, or how much they'll get paid.

There's something high-tech going on here with those nurses' wages. These nursing apps – a cartel of three companies, Shiftkey, Shiftmed and Carerev – can play all kinds of games with labor pricing.

Before Shiftkey offers a nurse a shift, it purchases that worker's credit history from a data-broker. Specifically, it pays to find out how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and whether it is overdue.

The more desperate the nurse's financial straits are, the lower the wage on offer. Because the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come and do the gruntwork of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying.

Now, there are lots of things going on here, and they're all terrible. What's more, they are emblematic of “enshittification,” the word I coined to describe the decay of online platforms.

When I first started writing about this, I focused on the external symptology of enshittification, a three stage process:

First, the platform is good to its end users, while finding a way to lock them in.

Like Google, which minimized ads and maximized spending on engineering for search results, even as they bought their way to dominance, bribing every service or product with a search box to make it a Google search box.

So no matter what browser you used, what mobile OS you used, what carrier you had, you would always be searching on Google by default. This got so batshit that by the early 2020s, Google was spending enough money to buy a whole-ass Twitter, every year or two, just to make sure that no one ever tried a search engine that wasn't Google.

That's stage one: be good to end users, lock in end users.

Stage two is when the platform starts to abuse end users to tempt in and enrich business customers. For Google, that’s advertisers and web publishers. An ever-larger fraction of a Google results page is given over to ads, which are marked with ever-subtler, ever smaller, ever grayer labels. Google uses its commercial surveillance data to target ads to us.

So that's stage two: things get worse for end users and get better for business customers.

But those business customers also get locked into the platform, dependent on those customers. Once businesses are getting as little as 10% of their revenue from Google, leaving Google becomes an existential risk. We talk a lot about Google's "monopoly" power, which is derived from its dominance as a seller. But Google is also a monopsony, a powerful buyer.

So now you have Google acting as a monopolist to its users (stage one), and a monoposonist for its business customers (stage two) and here comes stage three: where Google claws back all the value in the platform, save a homeopathic residue calculated to keep end users locked in, and business customers locked to those end users.

Google becomes enshittified.

In 2019, Google had a turning point. Search had grown as much as it possibly could. More than 90% of us used Google for search, and we searched for everything. Any thought or idle question that crossed our minds, we typed into Google.

How could Google grow? There were no more users left to switch to Google. We weren't going to search for more things. What could Google do?

Well, thanks to internal memos published during last year's monopoly trial against Google, we know what they did. They made search worse. They reduced the system's accuracy it so you had to search twice or more to get to the answer, thus doubling the number of queries, and doubling the number of ads.

Meanwhile, Google entered into a secret, illegal collusive arrangement with Facebook, codenamed Jedi Blue, to rig the ad market, fixing prices so advertisers paid more and publishers got less.

And that's how we get to the enshittified Google of today, where every query serves back a blob of AI slop, over five paid results tagged with the word AD in 8-point, 10% grey on white type, which is, in turn, over ten spammy links from SEO shovelware sites filled with more AI slop.

And yet, we still keep using Google, because we're locked into it. That's enshittification, from the outside. A company that's good to end users, while locking them in. Then it makes things worse for end users, to make things better for business customers, while locking them in. Then it takes all the value for itself and turns into a giant pile of shit.

Enshittification, a tragedy in three acts.

I started off focused on the outward signs of enshittification, but I think it's time we start thinking about what's going in inside the companies to make enshittification possible.

What is the technical mechanism for enshittification? I call it twiddling. Digital businesses have infinite flexibility, bequeathed to them by the marvellously flexible digital computers they run on. That means that firms can twiddle the knobs that control the fundamental aspects of their business. Every time you interact with a firm, everything is different: prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations.

Which takes me back to our nurses. This scam, where you look up the nurse's debt load and titer down the wage you offer based on it in realtime? That's twiddling. It's something you can only do with a computer. The bosses who are doing this aren't more evil than bosses of yore, they just have better tools.

Note that these aren't even tech bosses. These are health-care bosses, who happen to have tech.

Digitalization – weaving networked computers through a firm or a sector – enables this kind of twiddling that allows firms to shift value around, from end users to business customers, from business customers back to end users, and eventually, inevitably, to themselves.

And digitalization is coming to every sector – like nursing. Which means enshittification is coming to every sector – like nursing.

The legal scholar Veena Dubal coined a term to describe the twiddling that suppresses the wages of debt-burdened nurses. It's called "Algorithmic Wage Discrimination," and it follows the gig economy.

The gig economy is a major locus of enshittification, and it’s the largest tear in the membrane separating the virtual world from the real world. Gig work, where your shitty boss is a shitty app, and you aren't even allowed to call yourself an employee.

Uber invented this trick. Drivers who are picky about the jobs the app puts in front of them start to get higher wage offers. But if they yield to temptation and take some of those higher-waged option, then the wage starts to go down again, in random intervals, by small increments, designed to be below the threshold for human perception. Not so much boiling the frog as poaching it, until the Uber driver has gone into debt to buy a new car, and given up the side hustles that let them be picky about the rides they accepted. Then their wage goes down, and down, and down.

Twiddling is a crude trick done quickly. Any task that's simple but time consuming is a prime candidate for automation, and this kind of wage-theft would be unbearably tedious, labor-intensive and expensive to perform manually. No 19th century warehouse full of guys with green eyeshades slaving over ledgers could do this. You need digitalization.

Twiddling nurses' hourly wages is a perfect example of the role digitization pays in enshittification. Because this kind of thing isn't just bad for nurses – it's bad for patients, too. Do we really think that paying nurses based on how desperate they are, at a rate calculated to increase that desperation, and thus decrease the wage they are likely to work for, is going to result in nurses delivering the best care?

Do you want to your catheter inserted by a nurse on food stamps, who drove an Uber until midnight the night before, and skipped breakfast this morning in order to make rent?

This is why it’s so foolish to say "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." “If you’re not paying for the product” ascribes a mystical power to advertising-driven services: the power to bypass our critical faculties by surveilling us, and data-mining the resulting dossiers to locate our mental bind-spots, and weaponize them to get us to buy anything an advertiser is selling.

In this formulation, we are complicit in our own exploitation. By choosing to use "free" services, we invite our own exploitation by surveillance capitalists who have perfected a mind-control ray powered by the surveillance data we're voluntarily handing over by choosing ad-driven services.

The moral is that if we only went back to paying for things, instead of unrealistically demanding that everything be free, we would restore capitalism to its functional, non-surveillant state, and companies would start treating us better, because we'd be the customers, not the products.

That's why the surveillance capitalism hypothesis elevates companies like Apple as virtuous alternatives. Because Apple charges us money, rather than attention, it can focus on giving us better service, rather than exploiting us.

There's a superficially plausible logic to this. After all, in 2022, Apple updated its iOS operating system, which runs on iPhones and other mobile devices, introducing a tick box that allowed you to opt out of third-party surveillance, most notably Facebook’s.

96% of Apple customers ticked that box. The other 4% were, presumably drunk, or Facebook employees, or Facebook employees who were drunk. Which makes sense, because if I worked for Facebook, I'd be drunk all the time.

So on the face of it, it seems like Apple isn't treating its customers like "the product." But simultaneously with this privacy measure, Apple was secretly turning on its own surveillance system for iPhone owners, which would spy on them in exactly the way Facebook had, for exactly the same purpose: to target ads to you based on the places you'd been, the things you'd searched for, the communications you'd had, the links you'd clicked.

Apple didn't ask its customers for permission to spy on them. It didn't let opt out of this spying. It didn’t even tell them about it, and when it was caught, Apple lied about it.

It goes without saying that the $1000 Apple distraction rectangle in your pocket is something you paid for. The fact that you've paid for it doesn't stop Apple from treating you as the product. Apple treats its business customers – app vendors – like the product, screwing them out of 30 cents on every dollar they bring in, with mandatory payment processing fees that are 1,000% higher than the already extortionate industry norm.

Apple treats its end users – people who shell out a grand for a phone – like the product, spying on them to help target ads to them.

Apple treats everyone like the product.

This is what's going on with our gig-app nurses: the nurses are the product. The patients are the product. The hospitals are the product. In enshittification, "the product" is anyone who can be productized.

Fair and dignified treatment is not something you get as a customer loyalty perk, in exchange for parting with your money, rather than your attention. How do you get fair and dignified treatment? Well, I'm gonna get to that, but let's stay with our nurses for a while first.

The nurses are the product, and they're being twiddled, because they've been conscripted into the tech industry, via the digitalization of their own industry.

It's tempting to blame digitalization for this. But tech companies were not born enshittified. They spent years – decades – making pleasing products. If you're old enough to remember the launch of Google, you'll recall that, at the outset, Google was magic.

You could Ask Jeeves questions for a million years, you could load up Altavista with ten trillion boolean search operators meant to screen out low-grade results, and never come up with answers as crisp, as useful, as helpful, as the ones you'd get from a few vaguely descriptive words in a Google search-bar.

There's a reason we all switched to Google. Why so many of us bought iPhones. Why we joined our friends on Facebook. All of these services were born digital. They could have enshittified at any time. But they didn't – until they did. And they did it all at once.

If you were a nurse, and every patient that staggered into the ER had the same dreadful symptoms, you'd call the public health department and report a suspected outbreak of a new and dangerous epidemic.

Ursula Franklin held that technology's outcomes were not preordained. They are the result of deliberate choices. I like that very much, it's a very science fictional way of thinking about technology. Good science fiction isn't merely about what the technology does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.

Those social factors are far more important than the mere technical specifications of a gadget. They're the difference between a system that warns you when you're about to drift out of your lane, and a system that tells your insurer that you nearly drifted out of your lane, so they can add $10 to your monthly premium.

They’re the difference between a spell checker that lets you know you've made a typo, and bossware that lets your manager use the number of typos you made this quarter so he can deny your bonus.

They’re the difference between an app that remembers where you parked your car, and an app that uses the location of your car as a criteria for including you in a reverse warrant for the identities of everyone in the vicinity of an anti-government protest.

I believe that enshittification is caused by changes not to technology, but to the policy environment. These are changes to the rules of the game, undertaken in living memory, by named parties, who were warned at the time about the likely outcomes of their actions, who are today very rich and respected, and face no consequences or accountability for their role in ushering in the enshittocene. They venture out into polite society without ever once wondering if someone is sizing them up for a pitchfork.

In other words: I think we created a crimogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society, that have therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making in our firms and states, leading to a vast enshittening of everything.

And I think there's good news there, because if enshittification isn't the result a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones and emerge from the enshittocene, consigning the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, a mere transitional state between the old, good internet, and a new, good internet.

I'm not going to talk about AI today, because oh my god is AI a boring, overhyped subject. But I will use a metaphor about AI, about the limited liability company, which is a kind of immortal, artificial colony organism in which human beings serve as a kind of gut flora. My colleague Charlie Stross calls corporations "slow AI.”

So you've got these slow AIs whose guts are teeming with people, and the AI's imperative, the paperclip it wants to maximize, is profit. To maximize profits, you charge as much as you can, you pay your workers and suppliers as little as you can, you spend as little as possible on safety and quality.

Every dollar you don't spend on suppliers, workers, quality or safety is a dollar that can go to executives and shareholders. So there's a simple model of the corporation that could maximize its profits by charging infinity dollars, while paying nothing to its workers or suppliers, and ignoring quality and safety.

But that corporation wouldn't make any money, for the obvious reasons that none of us would buy what it was selling, and no one would work for it or supply it with goods. These constraints act as disciplining forces that tamp down the AI's impulse to charge infinity and pay nothing.

In tech, we have four of these constraints, anti-enshittificatory sources of discipline that make products and services better, pay workers more, and keep executives’ and shareholders' wealth from growing at the expense of customers, suppliers and labor.

The first of these constraints is markets. All other things being equal, a business that charges more and delivers less will lose customers to firms that are more generous about sharing value with workers, customers and suppliers.

This is the bedrock of capitalist theory, and it's the ideological basis for competition law, what our American cousins call "antitrust law."

The first antitrust law was 1890's Sherman Act, whose sponsor, Senator John Sherman, stumped for it from the senate floor, saying:

If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.

Senator Sherman was reflecting the outrage of the anitmonopolist movement of the day, when proprietors of monopolistic firms assumed the role of dictators, with the power to decide who would work, who would starve, what could be sold, and what it cost.

Lacking competitors, they were too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care. As Lily Tomlin used to put it in her spoof AT&T ads on SNL: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.”

So what happened to the disciplining force of competition? We killed it. Starting 40-some years ago, the Reagaonomic views of the Chicago School economists transformed antitrust. They threw out John Sherman's idea that we need to keep companies competitive to prevent the emergence of "autocrats of trade,"and installed the idea that monopolies are efficient.

In other words, if Google has a 90% search market share, which it does, then we must infer that Google is the best search engine ever, and the best search engine possible. The only reason a better search engine hasn't stepped in is that Google is so skilled, so efficient, that there is no conceivable way to improve upon it.

We can tell that Google is the best because it has a monopoly, and we can tell that the monopoly is good because Google is the best.

So 40 years ago, the US – and its major trading partners – adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly competition policy.

Now, you'll be glad to hear that this isn't what happened to Canada. The US Trade Rep didn't come here and force us to neuter our competition laws. But don't get smug! The reason that didn't happen is that it didn't have to. Because Canada had no competition law to speak of, and never has.

In its entire history, the Competition Bureau has challenged three mergers, and it has halted precisely zero mergers, which is how we've ended up with a country that is beholden to the most mediocre plutocrats imaginable like the Irvings, the Westons, the Stronachs, the McCains and the Rogerses.

The only reason these chinless wonders were able to conquer this country Is that the Americans had been crushing their monopolists before they could conquer the US and move on to us. But 40 years ago, the rest of the world adopted the Chicago School's pro-monopoly "consumer welfare standard,” and we got…monopolies.

Monopolies in pharma, beer, glass bottles, vitamin C, athletic shoes, microchips, cars, mattresses, eyeglasses, and, of course, professional wrestling.

Remember: these are specific policies adopted in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned, and got rich, and never faced consequences. The economists who conceived of these policies are still around today, polishing their fake Nobel prizes, teaching at elite schools, making millions consulting for blue-chip firms.

When we confront them with the wreckage their policies created, they protest their innocence, maintaining – with a straight face – that there's no way to affirmatively connect pro-monopoly policies with the rise of monopolies.

It's like we used to put down rat poison and we didn't have a rat problem. Then these guys made us stop, and now rats are chewing our faces off, and they're making wide innocent eyes, saying, "How can you be sure that our anti-rat-poison policies are connected to global rat conquest? Maybe this is simply the Time of the Rat! Maybe sunspots caused rats to become more fecund than at any time in history! And if they bought the rat poison factories and shut them all down, well, so what of it? Shutting down rat poison factories after you've decided to stop putting down rat poison is an economically rational, Pareto-optimal decision."

Markets don't discipline tech companies because they don't compete with rivals, they buy them. That's a quote, from Mark Zuckerberg: “It is better to buy than to compete.”

Which is why Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram for a billion dollars, even though it only had 12 employees and 25m users. As he wrote in a spectacularly ill-advised middle-of-the-night email to his CFO, he had to buy Instagram, because Facebook users were leaving Facebook for Instagram. By buying Instagram, Zuck ensured that anyone who left Facebook – the platform – would still be a prisoner of Facebook – the company.

Despite the fact that Zuckerberg put this confession in writing, the Obama administration let him go ahead with the merger, because every government, of every political stripe, for 40 years, adopted the posture that monopolies were efficient.

Now, think about our twiddled, immiserated nurses. Hospitals are among the most consolidated sectors in the US. First, we deregulated pharma mergers, and the pharma companies gobbled each other up at the rate of naughts, and they jacked up the price of drugs. So hospitals also merged to monopoly, a defensive maneuver that let a single hospital chain corner the majority of a region or city and say to the pharma companies, "either you make your products cheaper, or you can't sell them to any of our hospitals."

Of course, once this mission was accomplished, the hospitals started screwing the insurers, who staged their own incestuous orgy, buying and merging until most Americans have just three or two insurance options. This let the insurers fight back against the hospitals, but left patients and health care workers defenseless against the consolidated power of hospitals, pharma companies, pharmacy benefit managers, group purchasing organizations, and other health industry cartels, duopolies and monopolies.

Which is why nurses end up signing on to work for hospitals that use these ghastly apps. Remember, there's just three of these apps, replacing dozens of staffing agencies that once competed for nurses' labor.

Meanwhile, on the patient side, competition has never exercised discipline. No one ever shopped around for a cheaper ambulance or a better ER while they were having a heart attack. The price that people are willing to pay to not die is “everything they have.”

So you have this sector that has no business being a commercial enterprise in the first place, losing what little discipline they faced from competition, paving the way for enshittification.

But I said there are four forces that discipline companies. The second one of these forces is regulation, discipline imposed by states.

It’s a mistake to see market discipline and state discipline as two isolated realms. They are intimately connected. Because competition is a necessary condition for effective regulation.

Let me put this in terms that even the most ideological libertarians can understand. Say you think there should be precisely one regulation that governments should enforce: honoring contracts. For the government to serve as referee in that game, it must have the power to compel the players to honor their contracts. Which means that the smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to permit.

So even if you're the kind of Musk-addled libertarian who can no longer open your copy of Atlas Shrugged because the pages are all stuck together, who pines for markets for human kidneys, and demands the right to sell yourself into slavery, you should still want a robust antitrust regime, so that these contracts can be enforced.

When a sector cartelizes, when it collapses into oligarchy, when the internet turns into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four," then it captures its regulators.

After all, a sector with 100 competing companies is a rabble, at each others' throats. They can't agree on anything, especially how they're going to lobby.

While a sector of five companies – or four – or three – or two – or one – is a cartel, a racket, a conspiracy in waiting. A sector that has been boiled down to a mere handful of firms can agree on a common lobbying position.

What's more, they are so insulated from "wasteful competition" that they are aslosh in cash that they can mobilize to make their regulatory preferences into regulations. In other words, they can capture their regulators.

“Regulatory capture" may sound abstract and complicated, so let me put it in concrete terms. In the UK, the antitrust regulator is called the Competition and Markets Authority, run – until recently – by Marcus Bokkerink. The CMA has been one of the world's most effective investigators and regulators of Big Tech fuckery.

Last month, UK PM Keir Starmer fired Bokkerink and replaced him with Doug Gurr, the former head of Amazon UK. Hey, Starmer, the henhouse is on the line, they want their fox back.

But back to our nurses: there are plenty of examples of regulatory capture lurking in that example, but I'm going to pick the most egregious one, the fact that there are data brokers who will sell you information about the credit card debts of random Americans.

This is because the US Congress hasn't passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when Ronald Reagan signed a law called the Video Privacy Protection Act that bans video store clerks from telling newspapers which VHS cassettes you took home. The fact that Congress hasn't updated Americans' privacy protections since Die Hard was in theaters isn't a coincidence or an oversight. It is the expensively purchased inaction of a heavily concentrated – and thus wildly profitable – privacy-invasion industry that has monetized the abuse of human rights at unimaginable scale.

The coalition in favor of keeping privacy law frozen since the season finale of St Elsewhere keeps growing, because there is an unbounded set of way to transform the systematic invasion of our human rights into cash. There's a direct line from this phenomenon to nurses whose paychecks go down when they can't pay their credit-card bills.

So competition is dead, regulation is dead, and companies aren't disciplined by markets or by states.

But there are four forces that discipline firms, contributing to an inhospitable environment for the reproduction of sociopathic. enshittifying monsters.

So let's talk about those other two forces. The first is interoperability, the principle of two or more things working together. Like, you can put anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, anyone's gas in your gas tank, and anyone's lightbulbs in your light-socket. In the non-digital world, interop takes a lot of work, you have to agree on the direction, pitch, diameter, voltage, amperage and wattage for that light socket, or someone's gonna get their hand blown off.

But in the digital world, interop is built in, because there's only one kind of computer we know how to make, the Turing-complete, universal, von Neumann machine, a computing machine capable of executing every valid program.

Which means that for any enshittifying program, there's a counterenshittificatory program waiting to be run. When HP writes a program to ensure that its printers reject third-party ink, someone else can write a program to disable that checking.

For gig workers, antienshittificatory apps can do yeoman duty. For example, Indonesian gig drivers formed co-ops, that commission hackers to write modifications for their dispatch apps. For example, the taxi app won't book a driver to pick someone up at a train station, unless they're right outside, but when the big trains pull in that's a nightmare scene of total, lethal chaos.

So drivers have an app that lets them spoof their GPS, which lets them park up around the corner, but have the app tell their bosses that they're right out front of the station. When a fare arrives, they can zip around and pick them up, without contributing to the stationside mishegas.

In the USA, a company called Para shipped an app to help Doordash drivers get paid more. You see, Doordash drivers make most of their money on tips, and the Doordash driver app hides the tip amount until you accept a job, meaning you don't know whether you're accepting a job that pays $1.50 or $11.50 with tip, until you agree to take it. So Para made an app that extracted the tip amount and showed it to drivers before they clocked on.

But Doordash shut it down, because in America, apps like Para are illegal. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and section 1201 of the DMCA makes is a felony to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work," with penalties of $500k and a 5-year prison sentence for a first offense. So just the act of reverse-engineering an app like the Doordash app is a potential felony, which is why companies are so desperately horny to get you to use their apps rather than their websites.

The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it's a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.

Around the world, we have enacted a thicket of laws, we call “IP laws,” that make it illegal to modify services, products, and devices, so that they serve your interests, rather than the interests of the shareholders.

Like I said, these laws were enacted in living memory, by people who are among us, who were warned about the obvious, eminently foreseeable consequences of their reckless plans, who did it anyway.

Back in 2010, two ministers from Stephen Harper's government decided to copy-paste America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act into Canadian law. They consulted on the proposal to make it illegal to reverse engineer and modify services, products and devices, and they got an earful! 6,138 Canadians sent in negative comments on the consultation. They warned that making it illegal to bypass digital locks would interfere with repair of devices as diverse as tractors, cars, and medical equipment, from ventilators to insulin pumps.

These Canadians warned that laws banning tampering with digital locks would let American tech giants corner digital markets, forcing us to buy our apps and games from American app stores, that could cream off any commission they chose to levy. They warned that these laws were a gift to monopolists who wanted to jack up the price of ink; that these copyright laws, far from serving Canadian artists would lock us to American platforms. Because every time someone in our audience bought a book, a song, a game, a video, that was locked to an American app, it could never be unlocked.

So if we, the creative workers of Canada, tried to migrate to a Canadian store, our audience couldn't come with us. They couldn't move their purchases from the US app to a Canadian one.

6,138 Canadians told them this, while just 54 respondents sided with Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement. Then, James Moore gave a speech, at the International Chamber of Commerce meeting here in Toronto, where he said he would only be listening to the 54 cranks who supported his terrible ideas, on the grounds that the 6,138 people who disagreed with him were "babyish…radical extremists."

So in 2012, we copied America's terrible digital locks law into the Canadian statute book, and now we live in James Moore and Tony Clement's world, where it is illegal to tamper with a digital lock. So if a company puts a digital lock on its product they can do anything behind that lock, and it's a crime to undo it.

For example, if HP puts a digital lock on its printers that verifies that you're not using third party ink cartridges, or refilling an HP cartridge, it's a crime to bypass that lock and use third party ink. Which is how HP has gotten away with ratcheting the price of ink up, and up, and up.

Printer ink is now the most expensive fluid that a civilian can purchase without a special permit. It's colored water that costs $10k/gallon, which means that you print out your grocery lists with liquid that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion.

That's the world we got from Clement and Moore, in living memory, after they were warned, and did it anyway. The world where farmers can't fix their tractors, where independent mechanics can't fix your car, where hospitals during the pandemic lockdowns couldn't service their failing ventilators, where every time a Canadian iPhone user buys an app from a Canadian software author, every dollar they spend takes a round trip through Apple HQ in Cupertino, California and comes back 30 cents lighter.

Let me remind you this is the world where a nurse can't get a counter-app, a plug-in, for the “Uber for nurses” app they have to use to get work, that lets them coordinate with other nurses to refuse shifts until the wages on offer rise to a common level or to block surveillance of their movements and activity.

Interoperability was a major disciplining force on tech firms. After all, if you make the ads on your website sufficiently obnoxious, some fraction of your users will install an ad-blocker, and you will never earn another penny from them. Because no one in the history of ad-blockers has ever uninstalled an ad-blocker. But once it's illegal to make an ad-blocker, there's no reason not to make the ads as disgusting, invasive, obnoxious as you can, to shift all the value from the end user to shareholders and executives.

So we get monopolies and monopolies capture their regulators, and they can ignore the laws they don't like, and prevent laws that might interfere with their predatory conduct – like privacy laws – from being passed. They get new laws passed, laws that let them wield governmental power to prevent other companies from entering the market.

So three of the four forces are neutralized: competition, regulation, and interoperability. That left just one disciplining force holding enshittification at bay: labor.

Tech workers are a strange sort of workforce, because they have historically been very powerful, able to command high wages and respect, but they did it without joining unions. Union density in tech is abysmal, almost undetectable. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. There weren't enough workers to fill the jobs going begging, and tech workers are unfathomnably productive. Even with the sky-high salaries tech workers commanded, every hour of labor they put in generated far more value for their employers.

Faced with a tight labor market, and the ability to turn every hour of tech worker overtime into gold, tech bosses pulled out all the stops to motivate that workforce. They appealed to workers' sense of mission, convinced them they were holy warriors, ushering in a new digital age. Google promised them they would "organize the world's information and make it useful.” Facebook promised them they would “make the world more open and connected."

There's a name for this tactic: the librarian Fobazi Ettarh calls it "vocational awe." That’s where an appeal to a sense of mission and pride is used to motivate workers to work for longer hours and worse pay.

There are all kinds of professions that run on vocational awe: teaching, daycares and eldercare, and, of course, nursing.

Techies are different from those other workers though, because they've historically been incredibly scarce, which meant that while bosses could motivate them to work on projects they believed in, for endless hours, the minute bosses ordered them to enshittify the projects they'd missed their mothers' funerals to ship on deadline these workers would tell their bosses to fuck off.

If their bosses persisted in these demands, the techies would walk off the job, cross the street, and get a better job the same day.

So for many years, tech workers were the fourth and final constraint, holding the line after the constraints of competition, regulation and interop slipped away. But then came the mass tech layoffs. 260,000 in 2023; 150,000 in 2024; tens of thousands this year, with Facebook planning a 5% headcount massacre while doubling its executive bonuses.

Tech workers can't tell their bosses to go fuck themselves anymore, because there's ten other workers waiting to take their jobs.

Now, I promised I wouldn't talk about AI, but I have to break that promise a little, just to point out that the reason tech bosses are so horny for AI Is because they think it'll let them fire tech workers and replace them with pliant chatbots who'll never tell them to fuck off.

So that's where enshittification comes from: multiple changes to the environment. The fourfold collapse of competition, regulation, interoperability and worker power creates an enshittogenic environment, where the greediest, most sociopathic elements in the body corporate thrive at the expense of those elements that act as moderators of their enshittificatory impulses.

We can try to cure these corporations. We can use antitrust law to break them up, fine them, force strictures upon them. But until we fix the environment, other the contagion will spread to other firms.

So let's talk about how we create a hostile environment for enshittifiers, so the population and importance of enshittifying agents in companies dwindles to 1990s levels. We won't get rid of these elements. So long as the profit motive is intact, there will be people whose pursuit of profit is pathological, unmoderated by shame or decency. But we can change the environment so that these don't dominate our lives.

Let's talk about antitrust. After 40 years of antitrust decline, this decade has seen a massive, global resurgence of antitrust vigor, one that comes in both left- and right-wing flavors.

Over the past four years, the Biden administration’s trustbusters at the Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice and Consumer Finance Protection Bureau did more antitrust enforcement than all their predecessors for the past 40 years combined.

There's certainly factions of the Trump administration that are hostile to this agenda but Trump's antitrust enforcers at the DoJ and FTC now say that they'll preserve and enforce Biden's new merger guidelines, which stop companies from buying each other up, and they've already filed suit to block a giant tech merger.

Of course, last summer a judge found Google guilty of monopolization, and now they're facing a breakup, which explains why they've been so generous and friendly to the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, in Canada, our toothless Competition Bureau's got fitted for a set of titanium dentures last June, when Bill C59 passed Parliament, granting sweeping new powers to our antitrust regulator.

It's true that UK PM Keir Starmer just fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-boss of Amazon UK boss.But the thing that makes that so tragic is that the UK CMA had been doing astonishingly great work under various conservative governments.

In the EU, they've passed the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and they're going after Big Tech with both barrels. Other countries around the world – Australia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea and China (yes, China!) – have passed new antitrust laws, and launched major antitrust enforcement actions, often collaborating with each other.

So you have the UK Competition and Markets Authority using its investigatory powers to research and publish a deep market study on Apple's abusive 30% app tax, and then the EU uses that report as a roadmap for fining Apple, and then banning Apple's payments monopoly under new regulations.Then South Korea and Japan trustbusters translate the EU's case and win nearly identical cases in their courts

What about regulatory capture? Well, we're starting to see regulators get smarter about reining in Big Tech. For example, the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act were designed to bypass the national courts of EU member states, especially Ireland, the tax-haven where US tech companies pretend to have their EU headquarters.

The thing about tax havens is that they always turn into crime havens, because if Apple can pretend to be Irish this week, it can pretend to be Maltese or Cypriot or Luxembourgeois next week. So Ireland has to let US Big Tech companies ignore EU privacy laws and other regulations, or it'll lose them to sleazier, more biddable competitor nations.

So from now on, EU tech regulation is getting enforced in the EU's federal courts, not in national courts, treating the captured Irish courts as damage and routing around them.

Canada needs to strengthen its own tech regulation enforcement, unwinding monopolistic mergers from the likes of Bell and Rogers, but most of all, Canada needs to pursue an interoperability agenda.

Last year, Canada passed two very exciting bills: Bill C244, a national Right to Repair law; and Bill C294, an interoperability law. Nominally, both of these laws allow Canadians to fix everything from tractors to insulin pumps, and to modify the software in their devices from games consoles to printers, so they will work with third party app stores, consumables and add-ons.

However, these bills are essentially useless, because these bills don’t permit Canadians to acquire tools to break digital locks. So you can modify your printer to accept third party ink, or interpret a car's diagnostic codes so any mechanic can fix it, but only if there isn't a digital lock stopping you from doing so, because giving someone a tool to break a digital lock remains illegal thanks to the law that James Moore and Tony Clement shoved down the nation's throat in 2012.

And every single printer, smart speaker, car, tractor, appliance, medical implant and hospital medical device has a digital lock that stops you from fixing it, modifying it, or using third party parts, software, or consumables in it.

Which means that these two landmark laws on repair and interop are useless. So why not get rid of the 2012 law that bans breaking digital locks? Because these laws are part of our trade agreement with the USA. This is a law needed to maintain tariff-free access to US markets.

I don’t know if you've heard, but Donald Trump is going to impose a 25%, across-the-board tariff against Canadian exports. Trudeau's response is to impose retaliatory tariffs, which will make every American product that Canadians buy 25% more expensive. This is a very weird way to punish America!

You know what would be better? Abolish the Canadian laws that protect US Big Tech companies from Canadian competition. Make it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak and modify American technology products and services. Don't ask Facebook to pay a link tax to Canadian newspapers, make it legal to jailbreak all of Meta's apps and block all the ads in them, so Mark Zuckerberg doesn't make a dime off of us.

Make it legal for Canadian mechanics to jailbreak your Tesla and unlock every subscription feature, like autopilot and full access to your battery, for one price, forever. So you get more out of your car, and when you sell it, then next owner continues to enjoy those features, meaning they'll pay more for your used car.

That's how you hurt Elon Musk: not by being performatively appalled at his Nazi salutes. That doesn't cost him a dime. He loves the attention. No! Strike at the rent-extracting, insanely high-margin aftermarket subscriptions he relies on for his Swastikar business. Kick that guy right in the dongle!

Let Canadians stand up a Canadian app store for Apple devices, one that charges 3% to process transactions, not 30%. Then, every Canadian news outlet that sells subscriptions through an app, and every Canadian software author, musician and writer who sells through a mobile platform gets a 25% increase in revenues overnight, without signing up a single new customer.

But we can sign up new customers, by selling jailbreaking software and access to Canadian app stores, for every mobile device and games console to everyone in the world, and by pitching every games publisher and app maker on selling in the Canadian app store to customers anywhere without paying a 30% vig to American big tech companies.

We could sell every mechanic in the world a $100/month subscription to a universal diagnostic tool. Every farmer in the world could buy a kit that would let them fix their own John Deere tractors without paying a $200 callout charge for a Deere technician who inspects the repair the farmer is expected to perform.

They'd beat a path to our door. Canada could become a tech export powerhouse, while making everything cheaper for Canadian tech users, while making everything more profitable for anyone who sells media or software in an online store. And – this is the best part – it’s a frontal assault on the largest, most profitable US companies, the companies that are single-handedly keeping the S&P 500 in the black, striking directly at their most profitable lines of business, taking the revenues from those ripoff scams from hundreds of billions to zero, overnight, globally.

We don't have to stop at exporting reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to Americans! We could export the extremely lucrative tools of technological liberation to our American friends, too.

That's how you win a trade-war.

What about workers? Here we have good news and bad news.

The good news is that public approval for unions is at a high mark last seen in the early 1970s, and more workers want to join a union than at any time in generations, and unions themselves are sitting on record-breaking cash reserves they could be using to organize those workers.

But here's the bad news. The unions spent the Biden years, when they had the most favorable regulatory environment since the Carter administration, when public support for unions was at an all-time high, when more workers than ever wanted to join a union, when they had more money than ever to spend on unionizing those workers, doing fuck all. They allocatid mere pittances to union organizing efforts with the result that we finished the Biden years with fewer unionized workers than we started them with.

Then we got Trump, who illegally fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, leaving the NLRB without a quorum and thus unable to act on unfair labor practices or to certify union elections.

This is terrible. But it’s not game over. Trump fired the referees, and he thinks that this means the game has ended. But here's the thing: firing the referee doesn't end the game, it just means we're throwing out the rules. Trump thinks that labor law creates unions, but he's wrong. Unions are why we have labor law. Long before unions were legal, we had unions, who fought goons and ginks and company finks in` pitched battles in the streets.

That illegal solidarity resulted in the passage of labor law, which legalized unions. Labor law is passed because workers build power through solidarity. Law doesn't create that solidarity, it merely gives it a formal basis in law. Strip away that formal basis, and the worker power remains.

Worker power is the answer to vocational awe. After all, it's good for you and your fellow workers to feel a sense of mission about your jobs. If you feel that sense of mission, if you feel the duty to protect your users, your patients, your patrons, your students, a union lets you fulfill that duty.

We saw that in 2023 when Doug Ford promised to destroy the power of Ontario's public workers. Workers across the province rose up, promising a general strike, and Doug Ford folded like one of his cheap suits. Workers kicked the shit out of him, and we'll do it again. Promises made, promises kept.

The unscheduled midair disassembly of American labor law means that workers can have each others' backs again. Tech workers need other workers' help, because tech workers aren't scarce anymore, not after a half-million layoffs. Which means tech bosses aren't afraid of them anymore.

We know how tech bosses treat workers they aren't afraid of. Look at Jeff Bezos: the workers in his warehouses are injured on the job at 3 times the national rate, his delivery drivers have to pee in bottles, and they are monitored by AI cameras that snitch on them if their eyeballs aren't in the proscribed orientation or if their mouth is open too often while they drive, because policy forbids singing along to the radio.

By contrast, Amazon coders get to show up for work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand. They get to pee whenever they want. Jeff Bezos isn't sentimental about tech workers, nor does he harbor a particularized hatred of warehouse workers and delivery drivers. He treats his workers as terribly as he can get away with. That means that the pee bottles are coming for the coders, too.

It's not just Amazon, of course. Take Apple. Tim Cook was elevated to CEO in 2011. Apple's board chose him to succeed founder Steve Jobs because he is the guy who figured out how to shift Apple's production to contract manufacturers in China, without skimping on quality assurance, or suffering leaks of product specifications ahead of the company's legendary showy launches.

Today, Apple's products are made in a gigantic Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou nicknamed "iPhone City.” Indeed, these devices arrive in shipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles in a state of pristine perfection, manufactured to the finest tolerances, and free of any PR leaks.

To achieve this miraculous supply chain, all Tim Cook had to do was to make iPhone City a living hell, a place that is so horrific to work that they had to install suicide nets around the worker dorms to catch the plummeting bodies of workers who were so brutalized by Tim Cook's sweatshop that they attempted to take their own lives.

Tim Cook is also not sentimentally attached to tech workers, nor is he hostile to Chinese assembly line workers. He just treats his workers as badly as he can get away with, and with mass layoffs in the tech sector he can treat his coders much, much worse

How do tech workers get unions? Well, there are tech-specific organizations like Tech Solidarity and the Tech Workers Coalition. But tech workers will only get unions by having solidarity with other workers and receiving solidarity back from them. We all need to support every union. All workers need to have each other's backs.

We are entering a period of omnishambolic polycrisis.The ominous rumble of climate change, authoritarianism, genocide, xenophobia and transphobia has turned into an avalanche. The perpetrators of these crimes against humanity have weaponized the internet, colonizing the 21st century's digital nervous system, using it to attack its host, threatening civilization itself.

The enshitternet was purpose-built for this kind of apocalyptic co-option, organized around giant corporations who will trade a habitable planet and human rights for a three percent tax cut, who default us all into twiddle-friendly algorithmic feed, and block the interoperability that would let us escape their clutches with the backing of powerful governments whom they can call upon to "protect their IP rights."

It didn't have to be this way. The enshitternet was not inevitable. It was the product of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals.

No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets, intoning Tony Clement, James Moore: Thou shalt make it a crime for Canadians to jailbreak their phones. Those guys chose enshittification, throwing away thousands of comments from Canadians who warned them what would come of it.

We don't have to be eternal prisoners of the catastrophic policy blunders of mediocre Tory ministers. As the omnicrisis polyshambles unfolds around us, we have the means, motive and opportunity to craft Canadian policies that bolster our sovereignty, protect our rights, and help us to set every technology user, in every country (including the USA) free.

The Trump presidency is an existential crisis but it also presents opportunities. When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. We once had an old, good internet, whose major defect was that it required too much technical expertise to use, so all our normie friends were excluded from that wondrous playground.

Web 2.0's online services had greased slides that made it easy for anyone to get online, but escaping from those Web 2.0 walled gardens meant was like climbing out of a greased pit. A new, good internet is possible, and necessary. We can build it, with all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0.

A place where we can find each other, coordinate and mobilize to resist and survive climate collapse, fascism, genocide and authoritarianism. We can build that new, good internet, and we must.

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/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#enshittification-eh

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nymphea0 · 9 months ago

Text

Until Death My love

Part 2.

Yandere husband x Wife Reader

Very long story, might be bad grammar or language in this story, so please correct me if theres any bad word or bad grammar. This story will came out with 4 chapter , so stay always love🦋🦋

word count around : 2000 words

Story Part 1 : Until Death My love

Story Part 3 : Until Death My Love

The sound of many vehicles and street lights were the only things that decorated the darkness of the night' You don't know how it could end like this, there are so many moments that you have gone through with Alex, your beloved husband.

It shouldn't be like this, but it happened so fast.

That night as usual, you became an obedient and very good wife waiting for your husband to come home from work, you prepared dinner that you cooked yourself, even though the servants really wanted to help you cook, that night you were very stubborn and made several dishes such as shrimp pasta alfredo, and roast chicken.

You waited as usual in the dining room, like the nights you had gone through before. But that night, Alex came home early in the morning, your husband came home a little later than usual.

You looked at the street with a sad face and remembered what had happened to you before, that day you learned another secret from your husband, alexandrovic Reigent.

You learned that Alex was the leader of the mafia association, the same association, that destroyed the place where you worked as a staff of a famous restaurant. You think that Alex is an ordinary man that you dated during school, you spent your days so happily with Alex, then you graduated from school and continued to college, you and Alex even studied in the same place with different majors.

Then you graduated with mediocre grades, until Alex said he wanted to build a business in the mining sector.

At first you didn't think that Alex's business would be very successful, but you were very happy with the success of Alex's business. Until one day Alex proposed to you to be his wife, right when it was your birthday.

That day you felt like the happiest woman in the world. .

'Date 05 01 19xx'

That was the day Alex went on his business trip as a CEO of a company that handles coal affairs. Like a normal day you prepared your husband's clothes, helped him put on his shirt.

"Alex how long will you be away on business?"

"Love ...I won't be gone for long, just 5 days .... hmmm? Do you miss me already?"

Your husband, Alex, coquettishly pouted at you who was busy tidying up his work needs.

"No, I don't miss you."

In a playful tone you answered Alex who seemed ready to tickle you.

That morning was filled with laughter and happiness flowing in the residence you shared with Alex. .

That afternoon was very boring without Alex, your husband for the next 5 days, at that time you for some reason really wanted to clean the room where Alex worked.

Alex's work room. As usual the servants at home really didn't want you to work, they looked as if they were afraid of something wrong with you.

Until you forced them and they had no other choice but to let you do what you wanted, well who would dare try to stop the wife of the Reigent house?.

Carrying a broom and cleaning equipment, you opened the door to Alex's work room, the room had a luxurious impression as Alex's job as a CEO of a coal company.

A room polished with African black wood, walls that are added with furniture such as classic lamps, lots of bookshelves and a document shelf.

A small pantry table that provides coffee and tea editing tools when Alex wants to drink something.

A polished work desk with additional high-quality marble with additional computers and also some documents scattered on the desk.

In short, this room is very comfortable and has a distinctive Alex smell, a blend of mint and a little musk aroma.

At first you tidy up and clean the desk where Alex works. Until you clean the bookshelf where Alex keeps books containing world history.

You clean the bookshelf carefully, rearranging the books. Each bookshelf is given a little space between 1 bookshelf and another, with the placement of a flower pot and also a classic lamp on the wall as a divider between shelves 1 and the others.

But when you were about to go to another shelf that you were going to clean next, your feet accidentally slipped between the black carpet that was the base of the shelf, with human instinct you held onto anything so that you wouldn't fall or get hurt, expert at holding bookshelves, you actually held onto the handle of a classic lamp that was quite low and you could reach.

With strong pressure you held the lamp, unfortunately when you thought it wouldn't fall, the chandelier was actually pulled down as you were going to fall, and you ended up falling with the wooden lamp that looked bent downwards.

After standing up and getting rid of the pain from the fall, you tried to fix the lamp to its original position.

But before you could even fix the poor lamp, you realized that the bookshelf you had previously cleaned was slightly tilted from the wall and showed a small gap, out of curiosity you tried to pull the bookshelf.

And there you see a small room with an area and size of 2 footsteps, the room is empty with 3 walls covered in black wallpaper and only lit by 1 lamp on the wall, on the floor there is a round carpet the same color as the walls in the room.

You think, what is this narrow room built for?, with slow steps you enter the room, trying to feel the walls but nothing happens. At that time when you think maybe this small room was built to store Alex's useless files.

When you was about to get out of the small room, my feet accidentally tripped over a lump protruding from the black carpet. Get up slowly and stand up, you try to push the carpet out of the room.

At that time, instead of the floor you saw, you saw a wooden door that was attached to the floor. Looking around, you exit the room and walk slowly towards Alex's study door, then with one turn, you lock Alex's study from the inside and walk back into the room.

Making up your mind, you open the wooden door, it's a little hard to open, but finally the door opens and reveals a staircase leading down, you don't see anything, it's very dark down there.

A dark basement!

When you look around the bottom of the stairs, you see a small light switch that is integrated into the wall right on the first step.

With a 'Click' a light shines under the room, holding a broom, you go down the stairs. Every step you take on the stairs creates a very unpleasant sound to hear.

Until the last step, you can clearly see this basement.

This room is very classic but looks luxurious. There are leather sofas lined up around a glass table, there is a bar table and also a billiard table, there is a television with a wide and thin screen and is very luxurious which is displayed facing the leather sofa.

Slowly you look around and realize that there are many shelves for storing wine bottles and other liquor, you always knew that Alex really liked alcohol beyond your expectations, but you didn't know that this room even existed in this house.

The house where you and Alex live, a 3-story house, with a very large front and back yard, equipped with flower gardens and also a small lake that flows behind your house.

During the 2 years of your marriage with Alex, you didn't know that this room existed.

Walking through this basement, you see about 3 gold and black framed picture displayed on the wall, approaching the picture.

The first picture , is a picture of you and Alex who have just finished their wedding, in the picture you are very beautiful and beautiful, sitting smiling happily while holding a bouquet of flowers, while Alex stands behind you while holding your left shoulder, Alex is wearing a black shirt combined with a collar decoration and also a gold hanger on his jacket pocket which is united with roses.

Under the picture is your name and Alex's name and the date you got married.

Picture of alex and his family wearing all black suits, you don't know much about alex's family.

But when you married alex, only his mother and father came, you don't know why his other family didn't come, alex only told you that his other family was anti-social, and after that you didn't ask much.

On the wedding day, his father and mother didn't talk to you, but you only got a soft smile from his mother and a cold stare from his father.

In the picture there are so many people you don't know, they all sit in rows on the benches, but there's something strange, there are several women sitting on their knees below among several men you don't know. Then you see alex and his mother and father sitting in the right row that doesn't blend with the middle row, there you can see alex with an unfriendly and expressionless face, a facial expression that you didn't even know alex could make.

Under the frame, there is a bold text that contains.

'ARCEINT REIGENT FAMILY'

You don't think much and just guess that Arceint is Alex's extended family name.

Then, the last frame is a picture of Alex and his parents, and 4 people you don't know, they each sit on a bench, while the 4 people you don't know, 2 of them are men and they sit on a bench, but the other 2 are women, and they kneel beside the seats of the 2 men.

Blinking slowly, under the frame contains the name Alexandrovic Reigent Arceint, followed by Alex's father, Rovalnov Reigent Arceint, then Alex's mother, Ilvanna Rosye.

And the names of the 2 men whose names you are not sure which one is correct are Xirent Reigent Arceint, then the other one is William Reigent Arceint.

You can only guess that maybe these 2 people are Alex's older or younger siblings. Since dating and getting married, Alex has been very secretive about his family.

Looking at the other names there are 2 other names written there, you guess it is the name of 2 women who are sitting on their knees side by side.

The names there are written as, Lilya Ergevan, and also Belleriya Woods.

You think that why their names seem so beautiful and elegant?

Looking around the room again, you think to continue cleaning up Alex's work room that was delayed and only conclude that this basement room could be a room where Alex relaxes when he misses his family.

Just as you are about to step on a step, your eyes accidentally catch a corner of the room that is quite dark, and there is a white door in the corner.

People used to say, curiosity can be your death, so be careful.

*Source image : Pinterest

Please dont steal my work, or use without my permissions , Always be good people Dear. Much love , Neva🦋🦋.

@snowflakes666

#yandere x reader #yandere #yandere x darling #yandere oc #yandere male #obsessed #possesive #nevaerah

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