#incentives dont matter

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Uncle Sam paid to develop a cancer drug and now one guy will get to charge whatever he wants for it

Today (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. Tomorrow (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

The argument for pharma patents: making new medicines is expensive, and medicines are how we save ourselves from cancer and other diseases. Therefore, we will award government-backed monopolies – patents – to pharma companies so they will have an incentive to invest their shareholders' capital in research.

There's plenty wrong with this argument. For one thing, pharma companies use their monopoly winnings to sell drugs, not invent drugs. For every dollar pharma spends on research, it spends three dollars on marketing:

https://www.bu.edu/sph/files/2015/05/Pharmaceutical-Marketing-and-Research-Spending-APHA-21-Oct-01.pdf

And that "R&D" isn't what you're thinking of, either. Most R&D spending goes to "evergreening" – coming up with minor variations on existing drugs in a bid to extend those patents for years or decades:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3680578/

Evergreening got a lot of attention recently when John Green rained down righteous fire upon Johnson & Johnson for their sneaky tricks to prevent poor people from accessing affordable TB meds, prompting this excellent explainer from the Arm and A Leg Podcast:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/john-green-part-1/

Another thing those monopoly profits are useful for: "pay for delay," where pharma companies bribe generic manufacturers not to make cheap versions of drugs whose patents have expired. Sure, it's illegal, but that doesn't stop 'em:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforcement/pay-delay

But it's their money, right? If they want to spend it on bribes or evergreening or marketing, at least some of that money is going into drugs that'll keep you and the people you love from enduring unimaginable pain or dying slowly and hard. Surely that warrants a patent.

Let's say it does. But what about when a pharma company gets a patent on a life-saving drug that the public paid to develop, test and refine? Publicly funded work is presumptively in the public domain, from NASA R&D to the photos that park rangers shoot of our national parks. The public pays to produce this work, so it should belong to the public, right?

That was the deal – until Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. Under Bayh-Dole, government-funded inventions are given away – to for-profit corporations, who get to charge us whatever they want to access the things we paid to make. The basis for this is a racist hoax called "The Tragedy Of the Commons," written by the eugenicist white supremacist Garrett Hardin and published by Science in 1968:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

Hardin invented an imaginary history in which "commons" – things owned and shared by a community – are inevitably overrun by selfish assholes, a fact that prompts nice people to also overrun these commons, so as to get some value out of them before they are gobbled up by people who read Garrett Hardin essays.

Hardin asserted this as a historical fact, but he cited no instances in which it happened. But when the Nobel-winning Elinor Ostrom actually went and looked at how commons are managed, she found that they are robust and stable over long time periods, and are a supremely efficient way of managing resources:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

The reason Hardin invented an imaginary history of tragic commons was to justify enclosure: moving things that the public owned and used freely into private ownership. Or, to put it more bluntly, Hardin invented a pseudoscientific justification for giving away parks, roads and schools to rich people and letting them charge us to use them.

To arrive at this fantasy, Hardin deployed one of the most important analytical tools of modern economics: introspection. As Ely Devons put it: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Hardin's hoax swept from the fringes to the center and became received wisdom – so much so that by 1980, Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole were able to pass a law that gave away publicly funded medicine to private firms, because otherwise these inventions would be "overgrazed" by greedy people, denying the public access to livesaving drugs.

On September 21, the NIH quietly published an announcement of one of these pharmaceutical transfers, buried in a list of 31 patent assignments in the Federal Register:

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2023-20487.pdf

The transfer in question is a patent for using T-cell receptors (TCRs) to treat solid tumors from HPV, one of the only patents for treating solid tumors with TCRs. The beneficiary of this transfer is Scarlet TCR, a Delaware company with no website or SEC filings and ownership shrouded in mystery:

https://www.bizapedia.com/de/scarlet-tcr-inc.html

One person who pays attention to this sort of thing is James Love, co-founder of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit that has worked for decades for access to medicines. Love sleuthed out at least one person behind Scarlet TCR: Christian Hinrichs, a researcher at Rutgers who used to work at the NIH's National Cancer Institute:

https://www.nih.gov/research-training/lasker-clinical-research-scholars/tenured-former-scholars

Love presumes Hinrichs is the owner of Scarlet TCR, but neither the NIH nor Scarlet TCR nor Hinrichs will confirm it. Hinrichs was one of the publicly-funded researchers who worked on the new TCR therapy, for which he received a salary.

This new drug was paid for out of the public purse. The basic R&D – salaries for Hinrichs and his collaborators, as well as funding for their facilities – came out of NIH grants. So did the funding for the initial Phase I trial, and the ongoing large Phase II trial.

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, the proposed patent transfer will make Hinrichs a very wealthy man (Love calls it "generational wealth"):

https://prospect.org/health/2023-10-18-nih-how-to-become-billionaire-program/

This wealth will come by charging us – the public – to access a drug that we paid to produce. The public took all the risks to develop this drug, and Hinrichs stands to become a billionaire by reaping the rewards – rewards that will come by extracting fortunes from terrified people who don't want to die from tumors that are eating them alive.

The transfer of this patent is indefensible. The government isn't even waiting until the Phase II trials are complete to hand over our commonly owned science.

But there's still time. The NIH is about to get a new director, Monica Bertagnolli – Hinrichs's former boss – who will need to go before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for confirmation. Love is hoping that the confirmation hearing will present an opportunity to question Bertagnolli about the transfer – specifically, why the drug isn't being nonexclusively licensed to lots of drug companies who will have to compete to sell the cheapest possible version.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/19/solid-tumors/#t-cell-receptors

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[ingleaisle]

Nevermind the fact that there's options outside of The System at all, it's completely baffling that people look at someone (correctly) pointing out that democratic presidence can and have contributed to persecutionary wars up to and including outright genocide and IMMEDIATELY jump to "so you want us to vote republican??? Huh????" Like there's NO other option than Democrat or Republican

[masonsystem]

i hope those kgpr illustration cards from sidu's most recent exhibition in uhhhhhh 2019(?) dont become lost media, but i fear that tht is it's destiny........

[master-gatherer]

I am what is best described as a "tomboy" and y'all are out here making me defend girlie shit

Fuck all yall

[txttletale]

i feel like there’s a false equivalency happening here? im not totally in support of censoring all the Bad Media to keep our child’s minds Pure, but i think there is a difference between something Glamorizing murder, because, well, most teens don’t have the capability to murder people, so even if they come away from american psycho thinking it would be super cool to be a serial killer theres enough incentives in the world to stop them from doing that.

but if you have a text that romanticizes abuse, in a way that a teen doesn’t even pick up that the relationship is unhealthy or abusive and just reads it as a romance, it can shape someone’s view on what’s acceptable in relationships, and a teen can end up yelling at their partner for not loving them enough since they won’t cancel their plans to hang out with them on a whim because they’ve internalized that true romance isolates you from everyone else and if you truly love someone then you will sacrifice anything for them, if that makes any sense

i dont think its the responsibliy of fanfiction (or for that matter regular fiction) to model healthy behaviours for young people above the age of like 6. this kind of didactic edifying view of fiction just produces christian rock. media exists within an actual material society and if someone reads toxic destiel fanfiction or wuthering heights or the great gatsby and decides its awesome to behave abusively to people then yknow perhaps the fault is within a larger culture including the countless adults who they are culturally expected to be relying on as role models innit.

also teenagers in relationships will do dumb shit and hurt each other because some stuff about hwo to have a healthy relationship you have to learn by having relationships. teens being clingy and toxic to each other is not the fault of Problematic Fanfiction and it's deeply silly and unserious to think it is. literally go campaign to bring back the comiocs code authroity if you feel this way and stop sending me anons about it

[riizeblr]

tutor! sungchan OHHHHHH hed be so angry when you dont get easy and simple stuff

-🧸

rating: 18+. mdni.

content: incel mindset, implied noncon

sungchan's leg shakes under the table, jaw tense, hands formed into tight fists around his pen. his face is taut, his eyes stern and brimming with irritation, his mouth pursed together as he sighs through his nose. even just looking at you makes sungchan's blood bubble in his veins. the look of confusion contorting your features as you stare at the paper sungchan had set in front of you ten minutes ago.

it was only a review. three simple problems sungchan had spent no more than five minutes coming up. they were as simple as they could get. sungchan scribbled them onto a wrinkled piece of notebook paper before you arrived and he isn't entirely sure why he bothered. it seemed like nothing ever stuck in that empty head of yours. and sungchan hates it.

he truly just doesn't get it.

why do you even bother? sungchan supposes you're pretty enough to never have to raise a finger if you so desired. but instead, here you are. simply wasting your time and his until sungchan just can't take it anymore and he snaps.

he has yelled at you plenty of times, belittled you, clutched your skin in hurtful manners until you looked up at him with watering eyes, and a stupid look that only made sungchan want to laugh in your face. every single time you look at him like he is the one in the wrong. like he has no reason to make your jaw ache between his fingers to get you to finally look at him and pay attention. but what else is sungchan to do? you don't bat an eye when he breathes out a gentle reminder, or even a stern demand.

sometimes sungchan tells himself that you like the way he treats you. there is no other reason for you to continue to show up in his study room every week, looking like you had spent too much time getting dolled up for a grueling tutoring session that would only end with your makeup smeared and your hair mussed.

perhaps you like the way he takes control of you. when he forces you to glue your eyes to your textbooks and listen to the venomous hisses in your ear as he reiterates the same useless material.

sungchan thinks you would learn more if he brushed his fingers along your filthy cunt, giving you some incentive to eagerly listen to him. that seems to be the reason why women like you do anything at all. women made to sit pretty at home live to have their supple skin caressed and tight cunts stretched and filled with seed. he supposes he wouldn't mind providing that for you until it finally clicked in your brain that the touch of long fingers and the full feeling in your pussy is all that will ever matter.

but sungchan just knows you would be a blubbering mess about it. he can already see you trickling eyes, and hear the whimpered pleas. but sungchan can also see the drool slipping from the corners of your lips, and hear the lewd squelch between your bodies that tells another story.

but as you squirm in his hold, accusatory gaze directed at his face, he knows he has no choice.

[dapper-lil-arts]

Contextualizing whats going on with my blog atm

Ok so i'll explain a bit of the phenomenon of whatsup with my art. So first off, my twitter is dead. The algorythim has found me and blocked me, so i dont get more followers anymore, theres no room for growth, (and as we love to say in capitalism, endless growth is the only way) so since its a dead website, i don't have any incentive to draw things that would originaly help me grow there. which wasnt smth i would usualy do, ive always been more of an original content artist. Either way, this means i barely focus on posting there, and with good reason! it doesnt matter; i get a few commissions there, and thats it. And make no mistake, comms are my livelyhood, i pay my bills and groceries with them, so having fewer does suck. But the website is dead for me, so I have no incentive to post daily like i usualy would. (and you think imma post my poetry on twitter? no fucking way lmao) Meanwhile, here on tumblr, i had never grown or gone viral, i have got a couple thousand followers, thats it, if you think im famous i take that as a compliment, but trust me, im not exactly thriving, lmao. Theres never been a particular trend to follow to be famous on tumblr, and if there was, nah. idc. This is still my primarly posting website anyways. but here's the thing. There is nothin i can do to improve the situation and get more comms or famous or whatever. So if there's nothing i can do... Then i can do Whatever i want. This year is a blank page for me, and i've decided: I'm going to do whatever i want with my art. Jack of all trades. No more regrets, no more fears, no more hesitation. Poetry, fanfiction, erotic art, Personal ocs, titty ocs, fanart of MLP (like now), comics, memes, YTPs, maybe even video essays, whatever the hell i want. If nothing matters than all we do matters! I'm following my whims now. it's time for hedonism and hedonism only! Looking forward to see how yall get weirded out by all i do this year :3 Bye bye!

[thenyanguardparty]

so i prommy im showing up in good faith, i saw it cuz i follow you but like, re: moral stances, iget what people mean when they say x marxist stance is not a moral one or y critique is not moralistic, but that dont mean that morals are absent right? like i can say that quality of life in a place is getting worse because of xyz reasons without moralistic reasoning, but then i would go ”and thats bad” then thats a moral stance, right? im assuming youre working off a different definition of ’morality’ bc that would make the most sense, so what would that definition be? like idk how even the most scientific marxism would be able to abstain from any moral stances because then it wouldnt be political

fundamentally Marxist analysis is made from a scientific perspective, where we look at the world as it actually is regardless of morality; we recognize that morality is a human creation that is ontologically dependent on material forces rather than preceding them; we don't see it as useful to look for Good and Bad People, for whose Fault something is on a moral sense, etc. it doesn't matter whether the capitalist's heart is full of sin or misguided righteousness, it doesn't matter how virtuous we can claim ourselves to be as individuals, etc. the material world is the basis, ideas and morality develop out of it. in the political stage we do make a value judgement in saying we support the resolution of the contradictions of capitalism through advancing the interests of the proletariat. this is not an Objective Morality though, we must understand even ourselves and our motivations as being determined by material forces. morality has a place in marxism in the form of proletarian morality as long as we understand that the reason the proletarian has this set of ethics is because it advances their interest as a class rather than being a feature of the fabric of reality. we support marxist politics not through free will and a virtuous soul but because we have internalized a proletarian morality that develops as the superstructure of material phenomena. just like bourgeois morality exists fundamentally as a tool of capitalism, proletarian morality forms as a justifying ideology for the interests of the proletariat as a class. morality is a social technology for facilitating social cohesion and advancing the interests of the ruling class beyond purely selfish and coercive incentives

[yonpote]

Honestly so relieved with the charity they picked. As an adult I spent a lot of time trying to not seek out validation for my political/social opinions from celebrities but I am so glad they're doing this. I don't mind him being apolitical online but it's nice to see he's doing this because it's important

yeah i think phil has always been good about this even tho sure hes not as vocal about his politics as dan can be. i was talking to some friends and i misremembered phil posting a black square on ig during the BLM protests for george floyd (which if u dont remember was just the absolute laziest form of performative activism) but they quickly corrected me that he actually posted a graphic that said Black lives matter and had a handful of resources in support of the movement and didnt tag it was blacksquare or anything like that and imo very clearly wasnt doing that for clout

i'll be real i was growing a little frustrated hearing about people who were really begging them to speak up about this, and i can understand feeling disappointed when your favs dont speak up about something important but ultimately sometimes thats a thing you just have to let go. and like this point is moot now because they are speaking up and supporting the pcrf and everything! i remember when people hounded dan for tweeting about a ceasefire? as in pro-palestine ppl getting angry with the way he worded his tweet? and like. idk i get it sometimes dan doesnt perfectly phrase things but like WE KNOW he has his heart in the right place so like what's the point in getting upset about the particulars of his choice of words.in general internet culture is so much about semantics and wording things rather than about actions and intent and impact on the world.

and its also very much a parasocial thing to where like, i think for ME bc ive figured out a healthier way to interact with my favs. i know how to separate them from me as a person so like, dnp's actions and statements don't say anything about me as a person or any of their fans. and i mean that's been proven with like, on twitter theres like all these fanartists doing incentives for ppl to donate for fanart and thats like so cool and like didnt need to be sanctioned by dnp or anything it was just something a bunch of people decided together ykwim?

[drdemonprince]

Probably goes without saying but I feel like your latest insta post on invoking ableism to promote hyper-individualism (which is so on the money while remaining succinct, kudos) is a clear illustration of what can happen when someone experiences oppression along only one axis. I'm sure there are exceptions but the kind of discourse you describe feels like such a phenomenon among white, middle-class disabled people, specifically.

The truth is, anyone can leverage a focus on individual identity and personal success in order to dilute a broader fight for collective liberation.

This phenomenon is sometimes called "white feminism," yes, and I certainly think white, middle-class people have a vested interested in promoting it more than anybody else. but it's something that, particularly in the social media age (which converts every conversation into a matter of personal branding), a person of any constellation of identities can leverage a narrative of personal oppression to make themselves wealthy and trusted as an authority figure.

I am reminded of the countless people who enriched themselves by self-marketing as a racial equity scholar on Instagram circa 2020...including many people who had absolutely zero expertise in the subject. Or the people who, because they were sexual assault survivors, began marketing themselves as equipped to run accountability sessions for accused people, or to run consent seminars, again when they had no relevant experience on the topic or any connection to existing organizations or movements working to address such issues. they were just using their personal positionality for their own gain. (And lots of Autistic people do this now with neurodiversity seminars etc).

This book goes into it so, so well

and relatedly:

(Koa is very clear in her book that many women of color are also white feminists -- under capitalism, a lot of people are interested in advancing their own careers rather than fighting for economic justice and structural improvements for oppressed groups. and as the behavior of many trans mascs and enbies show, you dont need to be a woman to be a white feminist either).

So, to respond to your comment, I think ultimately the problem is one of people lacking class consciousness or any kind of firm understanding of how power is built and change is created, according to leftist theories. It's also a phenomenon of some people, particularly ones who already have a little economic power, wanting to enrich themselves further rather than taking any steps toward justice, which would probably cause them to lose money. It's not a phenomenon of which identities a person inhabits. However, it is certainly true that privileged groups have even less incentive to ever learn about these things or care about them!

[calebwittebane]

yknow, some questionable meta aside, i still vastly prefer morrowind having divayth fyr be present in it as a powerful respected rich ex-politician and entrepreneur and scholar, who also is a rotten person horrifically abusing his daughters and his patients and keeping them prisoner on the isolated island he calls home, and no one questions him and people blindly look up to him from afar, and the isolationist If Youre Powerful You Can Do What You Want politics of house telvanni further protect him, and his educated well-spoken gently eccentric persona further discourages people (including the player) from questioning him, and his own daughters isolated and manipulated as they are dont even know what to think about their own situation (and its awkward for them to even try to explain it), and because of his access to unique resources and information at some point in the main quest you have NO choice but to work with him if you want to survive/progress, and you have to confront all of that ugliness and decide what you want to do with it, if you even choose to notice it. the game doesnt punish you for not caring! why would it? has that not been the reality long before you ever got there? you can just get what you want from him and walk away, or you may remain angry and frustrated at your helplessness, because you know that you don't stand a chance against him and his magic he spent centuries and endless resources to hone, and there is no one with any incentive or authority to confront him. you may stay rightfully furious that this situation will not change just as it hasnt changed in so long, just as so many sickening things about the status quo on vvardenfell are way beyond your power as an individual to change. OR, if you're powerful enough--or if you come back later, having trained for this moment--you can simply take matters into your own hands, knowing this is the only way for the man to face any consequences, and get rid of the fucker once and for all. because he is, for all his pride and might, Possible To Kill. and you get cool armor out of it. so then how is it rare just kill him etc. do you see how compelling a narrative this is? both the maddening helplessness at the injustice you witness--a recurring thing in the game--and the catharsis of killing fyr? Do You Understand.

i vastly prefer all of the above to just retconning the whole thing, either ignoring it or clumsily trying to rewrite fyr into this quirky but totally harmless old man for the sake of Hey Remember This Guy. i understand not everyone likes the tone of morrowind and id be a complete fool to say it doesnt fall into a ton of pitfalls regarding many subjects and themes it tackles, but if thats the case, i really think eso was lame as hell for bringing back divayth fyr and stripping him of all that context. was it worth it? is the addition of divayth fyr to eso really that good? was the shallow "oh omg this guy was in morrowind" aspect worth it? i dont think so. and that fathers day joke was foul and we all know it

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Don’t Be Evil

Tonight (November 22), I'll be joined by Vass Bednar at the Toronto Metro Reference Library for a talk about my new novel, The Lost Cause, a preapocalyptic tale of hope in the climate emergency.

My latest Locus Magazine column is "Don't Be Evil," a consideration of the forces that led to the Great Enshittening, the dizzying, rapid transformation of formerly useful services went from indispensable to unusable to actively harmful:

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/

While some services have fallen harder and/or faster, they're all falling. When a whole cohort of services all turn sour in the same way, at the same time, it's obvious that something is happening systemically.

After all, these companies are still being led by the same people. The leaders who presided over a period in which these companies made good and useful services are also presiding over these services' decay. What factors are leading to a pandemic of rapid-onset enshittification?

Recall that enshittification is a three-stage process: first surpluses are allocated to users until they are locked in. Then they are withdrawn and given to business-customers until they are locked in. Then all the value is harvested for the company's shareholders, leaving just enough residual value in the service to keep both end-users and business-customers glued to the platform.

We can think of each step in that enshittification process as the outcome of an argument. At some product planning meeting, one person will propose doing something to materially worsen the service to the company's advantage, and at the expense of end-users or business-customers.

Think of Youtube's decay. Over the past year, Google has:

Dramatically increased the cost of ad-free Youtube subscriptions;

Dramatically increased the number of ads shown to non-subscribers;

Dramatically decreased the amount of money paid to Youtube creators;

Added aggressive anti-adblock;

Then, this week, Google started adding a five-second blanking interval for non-Chrome users who have adblockers installed:

https://www.404media.co/youtube-says-new-5-second-video-load-delay-is-supposed-to-punish-ad-blockers-not-firefox-users/

These all smack of Jenga blocks that different product managers are removing in pursuit of their "key performance indicators" (KPIs):

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

We can think of each of these steps as the outcome of an argument. Someone proposes a Youtube subscription price-hike, and other internal stakeholders object. These objections fall into two categories:

We shouldn't do this because it will make the product worse; and/or

We shouldn't do this because it will reduce the company's earnings.

Lots of googlers sincerely care about product quality. People like doing a good job, and they take pride in making good things. Many have sacrificed something that mattered in the service of making the product better. It's bad enough to miss your kid's school play so you can meet a work deadline – but imagine making that sacrifice and then having the excellent work you put in deliberately degraded.

I have been around Google's orbit since its early days, going to the odd company Christmas party in the early 2000s and giving talks at Google offices in cities all over the world. I've known hundreds of skilled googlers who passionately cared about making the best products they could.

For most of Google's history, those googlers won the argument. But they didn't do so merely by appealing to their colleagues' professional pride in a job well-done. For most of Google's history, the winning argument was a combination of "doing this bad thing would make me sad," and "doing this bad thing will make Google poorer."

Companies are disciplined by three forces:

Competition (the fear of losing business to a rival);

Regulation (the fear of legal penalties that would exceed the expected profits from a given course of action);

Self-help (the fear that customers or users will change their behavior, say, by installing an ad-blocker).

The ability of googlers to win enshittification arguments by appealing to the company's bottom line was a function of one or more of these three disciplining factors. The weakening of each of these factors is the reason that every tech company is sliding into enshittification at once.

For example, when Google contemplates raising the price of a Youtube subscription, the dissent might say, "Well, this will reduce viewership and might shift viewers to rivals like Tiktok" (competition). But the price-hiking side can counter, "No, because we have a giant archive, we control 90% of searches, we are embedded in the workflow of vloggers and other creators who automatically stream and archive to Youtube, and Youtube comes pre-installed on every Android device." Even if the company leaks a few viewers to Tiktok, it will still make more money in aggregate. Prices go up.

When Google contemplates increasing the number of ads shown to nonsubscribers, the dissent might say, "This will incentivize more users to install ad-blockers, and then we'll see no ad-revenue from them." The pro-ad side can counter, "No, because most Youtube viewing is in-app, and reverse-engineering the Youtube app to add an ad-blocker is a felony under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As to non-app viewers: we control the majority of browser installations and have Chrome progressively less hospitable to ad-blocking."

When Google contemplates adding anti-adblock to its web viewers, the dissent might say, "Processing users' data in order to ad-block them will violate Europe's GDPR." The anti-adblock side can counter, "But we maintain the fiction that our EU corporate headquarters is in the corporate crime-haven of Ireland, where the privacy regulator systematically underenforces the GDPR. We can expect a very long tenure of anti-adblock before we are investigated, and we might win the investigation. Even if we are punished, the expected fine is less than the additional ad-revenue we stand to make."

When Google contemplates stealing performers' wages through opaque reshufflings of its revenue-sharing system, the dissent might say, "Our best performers have options, they can go to Twitch or Tiktok." To which the pro-wage-theft side can counter, "But they have no way of taking their viewers with them. There's no way for them to offer their viewers on Youtube a tool that alerts them whenever they post a new video to a rival platform. Their archives are on Youtube, and if they move them to another platform, there's no way redirect users searching for those videos to their new homes. What's more, any attempt to unilaterally extract their users' contact info, or redirect searchers or create a multiplatform client, violates some mix of our terms of service, our rights under DMCA 1201, etc."

It's not just Google. For every giant platform, the threats of competition, regulation and self-help have been in steady decline for years, as acquisitions, underenforcement of privacy/labor/consumer law, and an increase in IP protection for incumbents have all mounted:

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

When internal factions at tech companies argue about whether to make their services worse, there's a heavy weight tilting the scales towards enshittification. The lack of competition, an increase in switching costs for users and business-customers, and broad powers to prevent users from modifying the service for themselves all mean that even when a product gets worse, profits can still go up.

This is the culprit: monopoly, and its handmaiden, regulatory capture. That's why today's antimonopoly movement – and the cases against all the tech giants – are so important. The old, good internet was built by flawed tech companies whose internal ranks included the same amoral enshittifiers who are gobbling up the platforms' seed corn today. The thing that stood in their way before wasn't merely the moral character of colleagues who shrank away from these cynical maneuvers: it was the economic penalties that befell those who enshittified too rashly.

Incentives matter. Money talks and bullshit walks. Enshittification isn't due to the moral failings of individuals in tech companies. It's possible to have a good internet run by flawed people. But to get that new, good internet, we have to support technologists of good will and character by terrorizing their venal and cynical colleagues by hitting them where they live: in their paychecks.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/22/who-wins-the-argument/#corporations-are-people-my-friend

[viktoriakomova]

i feel like a big thing (to be clear im not saying this is inherently Bad or a morally rotten approach to gymnastics, in fact i think this is quite #relatable lol) with simone is that """easy""" gymnastics [for her] really bores her.

one thing i respect the most about her, looking at her career and development over the last decade, is that she continues to push herself even when theres really nobody chasing her. its not like bars where there are 3-4 top girlies at any given time and theyre all pushing each other to upgrade and clean up execution etc. simone stands alone and she has stood alone for practically her entire senior career. the only competitors who have realistically come close to catching up with her, when both of them do AA and hit, are iordache in 2014 and andrade in 2021-23. other than that, she has essentially been competing only against the standard she has set for herself, which is a bar that has moved up every time.

because of her energy and her enthusiasm watching her teammates, everyone says she was made for NCAA. i really dont agree, now that we've had years to mull it over. i think college gymnastics would have bored her rather quickly. elite gymnastics has the double incentive of letting her push the envelope and being mathematically rewarded for it. even somewhere famously performance-oriented and nationally competitive like UCLA where she was originally committed, she still would've had that structural ceiling/cap keeping her well below the stratum of what she can comfortably do. it is clear that pushing the bounds of what is considered "possible" in womens artistic gymnastics, and doing it well for that matter, is what is driving her onward and upward.

[i-am-dulaman]

Okay wait now this is truly a hot take that will probably ruin my reputation as a communist and a socialist but.

I wouldn't mind if netflix and other streaming sites started showing ads

Wait I swear im going somewhere with this.

Now I'm totally against the extent to which advertising has absolutely ruined the online space, especially how much it has driven the commodification of data collection so i would NOT like to see that level of advertisement on streaming sites (i know that once you open the gates to a little advertising you get it all, but.. thats kinda a different problem).

What i wouldnt mind seeing is something equivalent to what we see on TV or in movie theatres before a film, or basically youtube. And the reason for this is that the subscription business model does not translate well into tv/film production.

The reason netflix makes so many different tv shows and then cancels them after 1 season is because they dont care about increasing viewership numbers, they only care about subscription numbers. And they've done the calculations that a new tv show brings in more subscribers than cancelling that same show loses them.

Season 2 and beyond of a tv show doesnt earn them nearly as much money as season 1, but they cost the same amount to make, and it just gets worse with each season, pretty much no matter how popular that show is with very few exceptions (stranger things). Theres a reason we dont get 10 season long tv shows anymore.

Ads would allow them to earn money from someone long after season 1 of the show they subscribed to watch, for as long as they kept making a show worth watching.

It would also allow them to make money from repeat viewings, which takes up a lot of their bandwidth, further incentivising making actual good content rather than something eye catchy to draw in new subscribers.

Its also honestly not that unreasonable when you compare them to actual tv. Streaming sites are cheaper than cable, available on demand, allows infinite repeat viewing, and is currently ad free. Compared to cable thats a pretty good deal and im a little shocked they didnt start advertising years ago. And if it lets them produce cable quality shows without an incentive to cancel them straight away, then I wouldn't mind ads.

That's all im saying really. As long as the ads actually translate to higher quality and importantly more reliable tv show production, i wouldn't mind a youtube-level of advertisements.

Now that is all being said from within our current reality of a capitalist society. i am still in favour of burning it all down 🙏

[marabarl-and-marlbara]

yo, mara i really like your "i dont want to be friends" response to the "can we be…." asks i always picture a cool girl that makes other girls go "カッコイイ(￣ω￣)" when you say this, its so awesome in its honesty+raw

hi anonymous;

honestly: i hate saying that, and things like that; there:s an important ideal underneath my personal feelings, there, that makes it feel important to say, in-kind;

in-part of bacterial will i need be shut-off from people and establishing relationships (i still fail here, and make plenty of excuses here to have them, though: still can:t perfectly adhere to ideals);

in-part because it seems more painful if i don:t be the deranged-moron in the conversation willing to be upfront about unsaid things; as i don:t think most of the people who express liking me, or wanting to have closeness with me, or converse with me, actually like me whatsoever and in-stead craftsome persona or paragraph that appeals to "the idea of what i:d like" & engaging with it seems like (for me) leading them on to some connection i don:t want to provide, and slightly more isolating than if i:d just been ignored completely (put misanthropically: "another conversation that is nothing but empties"); further: there:s grossness in seeming like i:d deny the aforementioned issues and try to connect despite that, as a manipulation where i:d be rewarded from playing-along and furthering-along like treating a persons feelings as part of a business model to create a Strong Fan with great impressions of having interacted me; instead: i just act like a deranged deadbeat moron who follows some programming (like a harmful bug) to say "I will not be your friend; I will not give you advice; etcetera";

i wanted to consider making a group discord for people who support me on substack, both because 1) i want to provide some community to supporters because i do (sincerely) value them, 2) i want to reinforce the connection there from substack and not let it wither in the way being aloof-deranged-deadbeat-moron isolate causes connection to wither, 3) i want to spread the faith where i can and need people warm to me to inherit or adopt those beliefs -- again, being isolate hurts this; the Shadow of all these things is the hidden [4th] cause of bacterial will that suggests caring whatsoever about the prior three is being drawn in-to the connective mist and light of server and the invisible things within that light: of course, becoming enraptured in connection and relationship and be drawn-in deep with rewards and love and good-feeling and incentive; and the [4th] issue staunches (poorly) the desire and opening up to community can:t be, and won:t be; adhere without thinking to programming and the bacterial will will flourish inside a hermetically-sealed type of faith; and it all sets unwell inside me; and i feel a longing i have to ignore, and a sense of dedication allthesame like blindness being passed on-to me by a hand of Lord God as-though it were Acts as-though i were of the goat separated from herd as-though it were St Michael (is that right?);

sermon notes from today, take care, anonymous; bad number of paragraphs in this message but it aligns with the subject matter.

[castielsprostate]

Why are you acting like the Netherlands haven't just won

hi anon, you chose the wrong person to say this to. please don't fucking come at me with this kind of fucking bullshit. if you didn't read my blog info, which i dont except the average pvv supporter to do (no offense), then you'd know the way i identify! woagh! and you'd ALSO know that i actually don't feel very welcome or safe anymore and that im terrified of the people around me because of the person they voted for. the netherlands did not win, they didn't win anything fucking at all if they're regressing on human rights and electing one of the biggest bigots there are. you say "nederland weer op 1" but you know who funds PVV right? you know he gets his money from russia and isreal, right? you know that he does not care about you, right? and that the regular citizen is nothing to him, right? and you know that after he comes for those from an immigrant background, he will come for the LGBT community. he will come for the disabled. he will come for women's rights. he will come for the rights of everyone except white, rich, old men. he doesn't care about the working class, and he sure as all fuck can't make true on his promises. most of the things he wants goes against our constitution, how fucked up is it that people still voted for that?

he wants to cut off immigration, including those that come here for work. he wants to then increase the size of our healthcare and our healthcare workers. quick question, who is going to work in our healthcare? we are already on a shortage, who's going to pick up what's yet to come?

he wants to build more homes, but who's actually going to build those? like, physically, who is going to put those houses together because, guess what! there's no one to do the fucking work. no one works in ANY of these professions anymore, no one WANTS to work in them either. so he would need to get funding to make schooling free for these professions, or create incentives. but where do we get that money? where would you get a billion to make med school (rough term, not really what the term is here) free for only one year? ah, i hear you say, just pull the funding from ukraine and the developing countries. well, 1.) we can't, we're legally obligated to keep paying, and if he somehow does find a way to stop the funding then 2.) we will be hit with fines from both the EU and the NATO, and maybe even the UN. and guess who will pay that, anon? it will be the working class, since he doesn't want to make companies pay more tax, so it will be you and me that pay for this.

and all that isn't even the massive impact he will have on our climate, and don't try the fucking "netherlands is only a small country, it doesn't matter what we do because the us china and russia and india womp womp" because no matter how small the step is, small steps are worth it, too.

and, may i also remind you, anon <3 dat geert wilders in zijn zielige, donkere kut hartje altijd een VVD'er zal zijn. hij is een waardeloze, racistische, homofobische, ellendige, koude oude man en dat is NIET en zal NOOIT zijn wat nederland nodig heeft.

and finally, geert wilders is NOT what the majority of the netherlands wants, it's what 23% of voters want. every other voter did NOT vote for this buffoon, and you're gonna be in those booths again in 6 to 9 months because of the incompetence of the coming kabinet because geert wilders will destroy it.

en, als laatste. stem links bij de volgende verkiezing. stem GL/PVDA of stem volt, stem op de groene partijen die WEL de begroting doorrekenen, die ons WEL uit deze crisis kunnen krijgen en die WEL om ons geven. denk niet aan de toekomst van alleen morgen, denk ook aan de toekomst van over 10, 20, 30, 40, 50! jaar. want op de manier waarop het nu gaat, is er niet meer dan 50 jaar. en dat ene jaar 0% belasting op boodschappen (wat hij trouwens ook niet kan waarmaken, de belastingdienst heeft jaren nodig voor zoiets te kunnen invoeren lmao. misschien heb je het in 2030! en daarna schiet het weer om hoog <3), is niet waard de gruwelijke dood van jou, je kinderen, en iedereen om je heen.

-all the love, sjonnie, a half turk, queer faggot