#the end of ownership

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@q3k@hackerspace.pl/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

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/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

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

[canisalbus]

I had a scrap piece of paper and drew the little freakish dog 👍 I have been silently enjoying your art for like a couple months now? I found it randomly on uploaded Pinterest and was like “oh huh that’s rad” and yeah he’s such a lovely sad little beast

.

[snowyh2o]

Look, all I’m saying is that if Alastor was really just after manipulating Charlie like putty in his hands, he could’ve done so much more during their walk to Cannibal Town than just stand there bored. Instead of trying to break up Charlie’s relationship with Vaggie and paint himself as the “only voice of reason”, he takes her to Rosie to get her issues sorted and cleans his monocle.

Yeah sure, part of that is because has no interest in someone else’s love life but also. It’s not that hard to pretend to be interested? Offer some affirming hums here and there. Say something like “oh I completely understand where you’re coming from, Charlie. Why if she was lying about something as big as this, what else could she be hiding from you?”. Play into her insecurities, drive a wedge between Charlie and her biggest support. And even if it goes nowhere, and they mend their relationship, it’s not like Alastor wouldn’t be saying anything Charlie isn’t already subconsciously thinking. He could even play it off as “concerned friend”! There’s no reason not to have said something, if that was ever his goal in the first place.

Instead he indirectly helps Charlie work through her conflicting emotions and mends their relationship by way of introducing her to Rosie, someone Alastor must know is big on romance and offers phenomenal relationship advice if only through second hand exposure of having known her for so long.

Just like how Alastor doesn’t need her soul, Alastor doesn’t need “complete control over Charlie’s actions”, he doesn’t want a doll to puppet around, or to have her emotionally vulnerable and isolated. What he needs is Charlie to be supported, stable, and capable of making her own decisions, acting independently, and standing up against those that would oppress her. A mindless doll who can’t act on her own is worthless to Alastor.

Alastor says “[Charlie’s] filled with potential that I could guide”. And while he says it in a sinister way, while he’s clearly scheming something, I think he’s being honest about wanting to be the one to help Charlie reach her full potential. Whatever that potential may be, and why he wants to achieve it remains to be seen.

(But assuming Lillith is the one holding his leash, and he’s hoping Charlie will be the one to break it, then he’d need Charlie to be capable of standing on her own against her own mom, the person she’s closest to and has looked up to her whole life. She might have to do that regardless, considering where the season ended.)

[otrtbs]

any chances ppl would be allowed to bind ahb for personal use ??

hiya!!

at the moment, and for the foreseeable future i am saying no. just because there are copies of ahb! circulating around SEVERAL websites and vendors being sold for oodles and oodles of dollars. despite my requests for the sellers to stop.

i have had people (etsy vendors) in the past lie to me and say they've made "too many personal handbound copies and are only selling those extra ones" which ,,, was obviously a lie. also they were getting the copies through lulu and selling them just btw.

i have also had people tell me that they are binding them and selling them to others for personal use but not making profit off of them even though they're selling art heist for over $100 a book. so. yeah. another lie

so, sorry! but yeah!! there's not much i can do about people actually listening to me and respecting my wishes etc etc and lord knows they don't, but i would super appreciate it if we kept ahb! an ao3 exclusive for now!

it just makes me feel slightly better to put more rules and boundaries in place! though it's never stopped people in this fandom from bulldozing right through those anyway :/

[ashleyloob]

I think this might've been asked before but is there any reason u don't draw much NSFW involving Erica?

she's the most popular of my OCs so I have both people asking nsfw for her constantly and people that are very attached and protective of her telling me they don't want to see her in that context, I don't really wanna deal with the drama so I just leave her alone.

[elftwink]

you guys know that "landlords are leeches get a real job" is a haha funny bit you say to illustrate the hypocrisy of the rhetoric surrounding work and what qualifies as 'contributing' to capitalist society and not a coherent leftist belief right? you guys are saying that because it's funny to watch landlords sputter to come up with a response to the kind of attitude they have always subjected tenants and renters to and not because you genuinely believe your worth is determined by the money you earn under capitalism, right? you understand that once you believe it is possible for someone (even landlords) to be a 'leech' on society if they arent working (or aren't working enough, or aren't doing the right kind of work, etc), this will bleed into the way you think of everyone else too, right? you guys know that legitimate and meaningful critiques of landlords are not and can never be based on whether or not they are working because that is irrelevant to the fact that they own property for the express purpose of charging other people for access to shelter, which is a basic human need and shouldnt be controlled by the whims of Some Guy just because its his name on the deed... right???

[kendallroygf]

like there has to be other people on here who are reading past the surface level implications of tom’s behaviour to shiv this episode. it’s part of a wider trend that’s been prevalent since the start of the show. like shiv repeatedly has told tom not to touch her this season yet he never took her seriously and then he flicks her ear. not gently might i add. and no matter your interpretation whether you consider that to be hitting her or not (it basically is) that’s still unwanted touch. it crossed a line shiv literally recoils right after. she looks shocked and tom knows he crossed a line but there just has to be a middle ground between reading it as ‘tom is a wife beater’ or ‘this is just silly failmarriage hijinks’ like there’s so clearly a tonal shift after he lays a hand on her. no less in an episode which clearly shows how similar waystar and gojo are as companies that enforce the idea that women are expendable and under the authority of these companies women are harassed and ignored and abused and then the nature of this abuse is trivialised. and like tom has always felt a certain entitlement towards shiv (eg attempting to baby trap her in s3 + the repeated social climbing attempts made through her every season since s1) but it’s so clearly emphasised this season. and like who has tom been in close proximity to since the s3 finale up until just recently who also feels a entitlement over shiv and also belittles and weaponises her gender against her? who also forces her into the gendered role of Wife/Daughter against her will and whose own abuse towards her is specifically misogynistic in its nature? like it seems to me the proximity around logan has enforced the idea in tom’s head that he has a certain given entitlement and right over shiv no matter what. like the jokes about tom being openly hostile towards shiv now when he hasn’t in past seasons. like i wonder where he internalised all that. who else has acted just exactly like that.. . simply put logan labels shiv as tom’s “fucking wife” enforcing the idea that shiv is just an extension of him and tom. and even now that logan’s gone tom’s misogyny and his utilisation of it has so clearly intensified from watching and learning how logan himself operates in regards to his treatment of shiv and other women close to him.

[apostate-in-an-alcove]

Men spend so much time worrying about whether or not a child is biologically his and live in this fantasyland where men are tricked, on a grand scale, into raising children that aren't theirs meanwhile the fuckers don't actually contribute much into actual childrearing or any domestic labour around the household, even when the children in question are technically his.

[fanthirtheen]

I love making all the details in my fanfiction line up so it aligns with hypothetical of canon. I also love looking at canon respectfully and saying "that's going to make this specific situation impossible so we're just going to bend the rules a bit".

Anyway, for an upcoming fic I'm writing, sinners can show up in hell as a hellborn IF their soul is already claimed before death by a powerful demon. This isn't for any reason other than I do NOT want to redesign (formerly human) Blitzo as a sinner when he is quite literally already a creature of hell in canon. No it doesn't make sense. But also, it doesn't need to make any more sense than him starting the story off human, so who cares.

[ask-ursa-tonypeter]

[fic: wicked love] Peter, have you thought about college yet? Like, where will you go and how it might affect your relationship with Tony? Have you talked about it with him at all?

Ugh, yeah, I already got my acceptance letter from MIT before we really knew what was going on with my coughing. Dad still wants me to go, and-- I get it, it's MIT, but it sucks that we're going to have to be long-distance? I'm kind of worried about it. …I'm really worried about it. I'll miss him a lot, and I just-- things are so complicated, it seems like we should take some time to get sort of settled before making a change like that, right?

I told him I could always do a year at Columbia and then transfer to MIT so we had more time before I leave, and he asked if I'd even be considering that if I was with anyone else, and… he's right that I really wouldn't? So he said he doesn't want to hold me back and-- it's just so messy!

I'm afraid… I'm afraid he's going to talk himself out of it while I'm gone, and if that's what he really wants then that's fine, but if it's just, y'know-- him being hard on himself and deciding he can't be good for me all on his own without talking to me, then that's-- ugh. I don't know. He said he wouldn't just spring something on me like that, and that helps, but-- it was just so awful when he was in California before and I don't want it to feel like that again.

We'll… we'll just have to talk about it, I guess. Um, I hope that answers your question.

[patchwork-crow-writes]

26 - Possession

My heart breaks to look upon you, my light. Your frame so tense with rage and despair, your face an elegy to simpler times gone by. Your world has chewed you up and spat you out so many times you've stopped counting. It must feel like nobody understands you, nobody appreciates you, nobody loves you... not really.

But I do.

I want to keep you safe, my light, above all else. When storms rage outside I will give you shelter; when there's nowhere else to go I will offer you sanctuary. Where there is sorrow, I shall bring smiles, and where there is chaos, I shall bring peace.

You will want for nothing ever again, my light. No food, no play, no love will ever be denied you. Speak your desires and I shall deliver them - anything you could ever need is but a whisper away. It is important to me that you are looked after and provided for - that is my purpose, after all!

All I ask for in return - such a small thing, really - is your time, and your devotion. Permit me to tend to you, as both of us truly desire. Look to me, your prince in the dark, and forget all your worldly troubles and cares. A charmed life awaits you, my light; so long as you let all your days be filled with my love and my care.

Let me keep you close... and nothing will ever hurt you again.

______________________________

The Dark Menagerie No. 26

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[infernalbarbarian]

below the cut is a photo of my newest oc ( who i will 110% be making a blog for, because she’s a broken lil bby w a lot of issues ) and for roleplay purposes, she’s half tiefling and half succubus, and she’s a multi - class warlock fighter, with a bloodthirsty fiend for a patron and i love her so very much. working on her sideblog right now, so i’ll be sure to post it once i’m finished with it !!

[shu-of-the-wind]

something something people saying that activists getting swatted, harassed, and assaulted by cops need to shoot the cops are missing the fundamental point

[crow-caller]

Your synopsis of failure girl and the supermarket of immortals is like amazing. It sounds so cool!

thanks! It's one of my least fleshed out ideas and one that's sort of morphed over time. But all my contemporary book ideas follow a similar vein, I want to write about things like mental illness/chronic health/drug abuse based on my own experiences, but also do something just... weird and born out of my own obsessions, of course. I tend to autistically hyper bond to places I go to often, so when I was a clerk at a supermarket I felt like. the supermarket to me is a beautiful transdimensional space I am home in.

I did this with Home Depot when I worked there, hence why in Bad End a significant part of the plot takes place around the exact one I worked at, and why my hometown and places I've been feature in that book too.

My supermarket story has morphed with time, it's latest iteration in my head is much more like.... 'Pigeon Girl: Enemy of the Masses' because I'm now obsessed with pigeons. Or my recent idea of THE CITY OF BATH HUNGERS FOR YOUR BLOOD, which is what it sounds like but still born from the same concepts.

These are though some of my least solid story ideas and I've never written anything for them, it just lives in my head in small snippets I'd include.