Sometimes my little cat will approach me all "what if there was a little cat now" and it's always an excellent idea I love when there's a little cat
Show & Tell
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
hello vonnie
Sweet Seals For You, Always

⁂

pixel skylines
Cosmic Funnies
i don't do bad sauce passes

#extradirty
RMH
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

JVL
almost home

blake kathryn
ojovivo
cherry valley forever
noise dept.
$LAYYYTER
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
seen from United States
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@bluecrystalrainingdaggers
Sometimes my little cat will approach me all "what if there was a little cat now" and it's always an excellent idea I love when there's a little cat
Someone's here.
LOVE IN THE CLOUDS (2025) dir. Peng Xue Jun & Zhi Zhu
a treatise on pangs
i’m currently putting together a rec list for someone who requested pangy tim fics, and i kept adding side notes to explain/break down the pangs and eventually decided to just put all that to a separate post. so! for anyone who might at all be interested, this is my extremely informal, not-at-all academic essay about what pangs are to me, what i tend to seek out as a reader, and what works for me when i’m trying to craft them in my own writing.
“pang” is a phrase that has become a regular part of my vocab for the last…ten years, now, wow. it’s not always easy for me to explain, but it has helped me articulate this specific thing i enjoy and actively seek out in media: i like characters who are pangy. i like plots and tropes that deliver pangs. i want to feel the physical chest-aching, stomach-dropping sensation that comes from a specific kind of misunderstanding + hurt/comfort setup, and if something doesn’t deliver that for me, that’s fine! i will go fill in the blanks in my own head as i fall asleep for days on end. no big. i think about this an average amount probably.
like haha it’s just a hobby for me i swear—
anyway. obviously this is the ideal bait to lure me into a box trap. so what exactly am i talking about? how do they function in a story? and what actually makes a pang a pang?
"doesnt israel have a right to exist too??" well its an apartheid ethnostate so no
"what about the people dont the PEOPLE have a right to exist??" yes! they do! however, they do not have a right to an apartheid ethnostate
"what about the holocaust survivors in israel dont they-" yes they have a right to exist too, however surviving one genocide does not give you the right to commit another, nor does it give you the right to an apartheid ethnostate
classification of fractures (source: merck manual)
A bit of help for writers using this as a reference!
NOT ALL OF THESE ARE ALWAYS APPLICABLE. Fractures are about energy passing through a brittle medium, so please be aware that not all fractures can happen from all circumstances. Some, like spiral fractures, are also fucking tragic.
Transverse fractures. These are quite common, though not as common as oblique fractures, and are due to a long bone like a humerus or tibia being impacted by a small, single point somewhere along their length. This is a relatively low-energy fracture, meaning it doesn’t happen in high-force, high-impact, high-speed collisions. This is a common break during a low-speed car accidents and when falling off a wall from a low height, for example.
Oblique fractures. Same as the above, but the impact angle can come from more than just head-on. These are more common than transverse breaks because the bones generally break more easily down a grain angle.
Spiral fractures. These are also called “twist fractures” or “torsion fractures”. They occur when a limb, especially the leg, gets violently twisted past the point where the bone essentially starts to splinter away from itself, resulting in a spiralling crack that runs around the length of the bone and then snaps it in half. They’re only caused by twisting, and as a result they are quite rare. I’ve also highlighted them in red because I want people to know: please don’t use these in your fiction unless you’re trying to convey a point, because one of the most common ways in which they happen is child abuse. Spiral fractures are rare in older adults, who have large limbs and rigid bones and don’t regularly get exposed to violent torsion. However, in children, they’re a common child abuse fracture because they CAN be exposed to those kind of forces. If you see a spiral fracture on a child’s X-ray, dollars to doughnuts that kid is being abused and you need to call DOCS. Please do not use this in writing unless you’re specifically trying to indicate something.
Comminuted fractures. These are a HIGH-ENERGY fracture: you get this when something SLAMS into you at high speed. They are common in high-speed car accidents, and they result from the bones having too much energy to be distributed from a single break so it instead cracks down multiple grain lines, even transverse ones. These DO NOT occur in low-speed collisions and they’re a bugger for us to fix. Every single time you see one, you know this person was in a big-ass impact, e.g. falling off a house roof or something.
Segmental fractures. These are a high-energy fracture with a particularly poor healing rate. Your bones have a blood supply, just like everything else important in your body (looking at you, cartilage you avascular FUCK). However, that blood needs to come from above or below, and a segmental fracture is bad because you COMPLETELY ISOLATE one section of the bone from blood. This kind of fracture is at a very high risk of necrosis, infection, and horrible consequences without immediate treatment. These breaks are a surgical emergency. You get segmental fractures usually from something wide hitting a long bone straight on at high speed: a wide sledgehammer strike from the side directly into a lone bone, for example, could easily cause a segmental break. They’re unusual but they can and do happen in car accidents.
Avulsion fractures. These are the bodybuilder fracture, caused when a muscle that’s too strong for the bone it’s attached to pulls so hard that it rips a piece of bone off the end. They’re common in people with connective tissue disorders: osteogenesis imperfecta and Marfan’s have a _particularly_ high rate of them, as do some kinds (not really hypermobile) of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (mostly the more serious types that affect stuff like cardiac valves as well). They’re actually really common in childhood sports injuries, too, and are a LOW-ENERGY fracture type. The most common childhood one is an ACL avulsion, where the anterior cruciate ligament rips a chunk of bone off the back of someone’s tibia. They often need surgery if it’s big.
Impacted fractures. Caused when a force slams into a bone hard from ALONG its axis, or ACROSS the axis at the TIP of a bone. These are common in children because children are idiots who do lots of weird and wonderful shit like “how high can I jump off the monkey bars?” and other such childhood games, but they also happen a lot in older people and in athletes. An impacted fracture in the spine is a serious danger and indicates osteoporosis. I don’t know so much about how else you’d get these but car accidents can ALSO cause these (are you seeing a pattern, guys???)
Torus fractures. These are almost always a childhood fracture, and almost always seen in the bones of the arm. They’re caused by a bone that’s incompletely cracked around the rim of the bone, causing it to “bulge” outwards like a torus (ring). These usually happen when a child is running, especially during sport, and trips onto an outstretched arm. These injuries are called FOOSHes, or Falls Onto OutStretched Hand, and are so common we give them a special name. They heal quite well but require a cast I believe. Not sure, never seen a real one. Not common.
Greenstick fractures. Virtually exclusively a fracture of young children, because their bones are springy and bend easily. These are an incomplete fracture caused by BENDING a bone that’s got a lot of collagen still in it (i.e. not old) and it snaps only along the outside edge of the bend, away from the force. These are always a low-energy break and you will never see these in a healthy adult. Even older children like adolescents rarely get these.
Needless to say, I am HORRIFIED.
‘All that you need to know about boars can be summed up in the fact that if you wish to hunt them, you must have a specially made boar spear. This spear has a crosspiece on it to prevent the boar from charging the length of the spear, driving it all the way through his own body, to savage the human holding the other end.’
-Boar and Apples, T. Kingfisher
fuck OFF
Note that pigs are also HUGE. So, yes, they ARE slightly larger pigs.
So I grew up in the city and have never seen a pig in real life and I just googled it and WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS
I thought they were like labrador sized, like, fat labradors, not mini-cows.
every time I see this post there are more people discovering how fuck off huge pigs actually are and I love it I thought this was a thing everyone knew but clearly not and I’m laughing
This is me with our Tamworth boar, a heritage breed closer to their wild cousins than the Yorkshire above. I am a fully grown, average sized human. He was a gentle sweetie who, sadly, is no longer with us. His name was Mr. Big.
FUCK OFF
Forever laffin’ at people who don’t understand how enormous, terrifying, and tenacious wild boar are.
They’re like if bears had knives protruding from their closed mouths and Didn’t Know When To Quit. Their survival instincts when they’re wounded aren’t “run away and minimize injury” it’s “take the thing that hurt you down with you” They also make sounds like someone crossed a pig with an alligator.
Their head and neck alone can be like the size of an entire human torso.
Also forever laffin’ at people who think pigs are tiny, ‘cause we designed those things can get in the neighbourhood of a thousand pounds in ideal circumstances.
It’s like when people assume Tuna must be small because they’ve only ever experienced them in hockey puck form.
Like seriously why the fuck y'all think everyone FREAKED THE HELL OUT when Dorothy fell into the pig pen in Wizard of Oz? It’s because pigs are HUGE and weigh a shitton and would crush her in an instant.
also dont they eat like, basically anything?
YUP. Pigs will eat people, if given the chance. They dgaf.
That’s why boar hunters use a team of very tenacious dogs to hold the boar so they can be speared without fucking you up. The dogs wear body armour.
I’ve heard stories of people shooting boars, and if it didn’t kill them, it just pissed them off.
how the hell did we ever domesticate these things?
…“how the hell did we ever domesticate these things?”
Very carefully, I would imagine.
WIld boar babies are rather cute, like living humbugs…
…but the adults and their ferocity have been associated with warriors for thousands of years, from Mycenaean Greece (a helmet made from sections of boar tusk)…
…through Celtic Europe (reconstructed carnyx war-horns and standards)…
…Ancient Rome (the crest of Legion 20 “Valeria Victrix”). A couple more legions also used a boar as their crest - I wonder did they squabble over which was the “right” one the way a couple of Swiss cantons had a little war over whose bear was best…?
…then Anglo-Saxon and pre-Viking helmet crests…
…right up to the late Middle Ages (here the white boar badge of Richard Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III of England)…
…and the blue boar badge of the Earl of Oxford, more usually represented by the De Vere arms, quarterly gules and or, in the first a molet argent.
After Richard was defeated at Bosworth in 1485, there was a run on blue paint as inn-signs were changed to reflect new loyalties since Oxford was on the winning side…
And pigs will definitely eat people.
It gets mentioned in the movie “Snatch”, the book/movie “Hannibal” and the webcomic “Lackadaisy Cats”, among numerous other fictional sources, and IRL it’s suspected to be the reason why numerous missing persons have stayed missing.
More here (another comment to this same OP) and here (slightly different).
Here’s some boar-hunting armour for dogs, ancient…
…and modern…
…and the modern one looks very like a simple style of ancient…
So when Odysseus’s old nurse recognizes him by the scar he got from the boar-tusk slash that almost killed him… now you get the resonance.
This post…it just really went places on me.
i feel like we didn’t spend long enough on the tuna
Can everyone who reads this PLEASE reblog it?!?!? Libraries literally saved my life as a child!
Being abused at home, bullied at school and lost in the world, the library and all the books I could escape to the most amazing worlds, kept me alive!
I would walk to the library, and spend all day, from 10 am to 9 pm reading there!! I got special awards for how many books I read, I wrote little blurbs on why i loved the books (probably why I love to BETA and do ARCs)
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE Just hit the green arrows and the reblog!!!
As a 50 year old woman, the library offers me so much. Digital art pads to borrow, 3D printing, book clubs that are face to face (yeah, the introvert likes face to face because a moderator will stomp on anyone getting snarky)
New books in LARGE PRINT! I’m visually challenged and as much as I love my kindle, The feel of a real book in my hands will always be a beloved feeling!
Our library also has quarterly books sales of almost free books!! For 5$USD we get in a day early and can buy as many as we want. Anyone else has to wait and there is a limit for the first 2 days.
Also many, many libraries have inter library loan(it may be called something different). This means if they don’t have the item you want, they can get it for you. This may include photocopy/pdf of articles. This can also include along with books and DVDs, microfilm/fiche which is also a huge resource. Check around for libraries that are listed as depositories if you want to look at government documents.
Remember that many colleges and universities have open stacks for the public. You will likely have to pay a membership fee but you will get to stuff.
I love the library ☺
The library was one of my favorite places to go as a kid and I still live to go and just. Sit and read. Or do homework. The university I’m at has a massive 8-story one I love to just wonder around in~ Great places
Libraries are amazing places, we need to protect them to ensure their continued existence.
I used to wander about the fiction section in my local library, and choose books with the most interesting titles - I discovered two amazing authors that way
If you feel disconnected from your local community & want to find ways to get involved, seriously consider spending some time at the library. Go to some events! Organize a reading group!
Support your libraries!
Read banned books!
People who don’t learn can be more easily controlled and told what to think!
BDSM gets a bad rep as like a violent (male) dom pushing the boundaries of a reluctant (female) sub but in my experience it's a lot of subs with wildly elaborate fantasies screaming shit like "PUT MY ASS IN THE CHILI" while a new dom is like "Okay I think, we are reaching yellow for me,"
Sub: Okay so before we begin how familiar are you with the ancien régime? It's not super important but it does help contextualize this. Essentially I'd like for you to be a ravenous, semi-cannibalistic Antoine Barnave-esque figure
Dom, holding a pen and notebook: Yeah okay
sub: can you drug me and perform fucked up surgeries on my unconscious body without telling what you did
dom:
King Arthur Baking Company is coming under fire for holding a competition exclusively for people of color-owned businesses and brands.
According to the company’s website, “Baking Pitchfest 2024” offers a product edition geared toward baking brands founded and owned by people of color across the U.S., and a bakery edition, which focuses on people of color-owned bakeries in the Northeast and Washington state. “Half mentorship, half competition, Baking Pitchfest is an accelerator program designed to foster greater inclusivity and creativity in the baking world by providing equitable opportunities for People of Color entrepreneurs,” the website states, adding that winners will receive financial support, mentorship, and exposure. But the initiative has generated outrage amongst conservatives online, who have blasted the competition eligibility rules as discriminatory against white people.
One X user critical of King Arthur Baking’s contest posted an email she received from the company in response to her complaining. “Helping build joyful, equitable communities that celebrate diversity is an important part of who we are as a company,” the email states, later adding: “We love baking with anyone and everyone. Our simple expectation is that everyone show respect for one another.”
Time to buy more King Arthur Flour!
if i remember correctly, kung arthur has information on their website about navigating baking with brain fog and chronic fatigue, so if you wanna support them but are disabled like myself they have the resources to help you
edit: i did remember correctly (surprisingly)! here's the link
The King Arthur Flour website is AMAZING and has never steered me wrong. Most of what I know about baking bread comes from there. Also iirc they're an employee owned company? Also also their burger bun recipes absolutely slaps
They used to be on twitter and really seemed to walk the walk consistently. I know companies can never be perfect, but my interactions with this one has been consistently positive.
If memory serves @copperbadge is a fan of King Arthur and makes his pizza with it often.
Oh, exclusively. I don't buy other flour if I can get King Arthur, to the point I've ordered it off their website when the local stores weren't keeping it in stock. I wish they sold it in bulk, because I generally buy ten pounds at a time anyway.
It actually surprised me how much the quality of my baking and pasta doughs improved when I started using King Arthur. It's more expensive than most other brands so it was only in the last few years that I felt comfortable dropping that much cash on flour, but using the right kind and quality of flour really improved my cooking.
Even more than that though, I use King Arthur recipes. When you see photos of my pizzas, it's their Crispy Cheesy Pan Pizza dough recipe I'm using, with a 50/50 mix of their bread and pizza flour. It's reached the point where if I want to cook something that involves flour, I check King Arthur first -- for example their cheesecake recipe was a really good, really basic recipe for my first try at cheesecake in a while.
If you have access to a local mill, like Barton Springs Mill in Texas, it's good to at least give it a spin, to support a local business and buy good grain. But King Arthur is the national equivalent of a Local Mill and while pricey it's not unreasonable, so yeah I'm a big fan.
If you think a recipe can't change your life, you have not had the King Arthur Baking Company perfectly pillowy cinnamon rolls
Paired with classic bold cinnamon flavor and rich vanilla icing, the result is truly the ultimate cinnamon rolls. Make this cinnamon roll re
Part 2
#idk either of the original songs so this is great
I’m sorry you WHAT
found the inverse o.O
(and it's, like, Homoerotic homoerotic)
Both of these absolutely slap!!!
so back when i was teaching, one of the things i learned to look for were the "mood makers", as i liked to call them, of the classes. there were always 2 or 3 per class, and it was easy to find them in the first few days. you got those kids on your side, and it was a ripple effect with the rest of the students - they would all follow. so winning those kids over was huge when it came to how the year would play out. and from time to time, whenever the class was sort of faltering - middle of winter, of a big project, burn-out high - i would lean back in on those mood makers again to turn things around.
one particular class, when we had a big multi-month group project happening, were just... really struggling with getting their shit together lol. they were supposed to be practicing their presentations (english speaking class) and they were doing pretty much anything but, and their presentations were supposed to start the next class day. they were also PANICKING as i started giving out some feedback - which was NOT GREAT - as they were running through the lines they were supposed to be remembering. after realizing all of them needed so much extra work, i decided we needed to have a turn-around, so i invited one of the mood makers up to the front. i held out a cup to him, with two papers inside.
"one of them," i said, "says tuesday, and if you draw that, presentations go as planned. but one of them says thursday, and if you choose that one, everyone gets extra time to practice."
everyone was like OH SHIT. OKAY. THIS IS IT. and this mood maker, he was a big personality (they usually are) so i knew he'd really ham this up, and he did. we made a huge deal, with drum-rolls and everything, of him picking one out of the cup. he opened it up the paper and announced THURSDAY to a round of huge cheers. he was the class hero. everyone had TONS of motivation to work super hard on this gifted extra day, and really put the time in. their presentations were great. morale SOARED.
the plot twist was that both papers said thursday, because they all needed the extra time. my forever teacher advice: find creative ways to make things happen so that you get the buy-in from the class.
chinese high-end business war by 双面笑笑
I want this as a long ass show where every episode's this
LITERALLY WHY IS THIS NOT A SITCOM
This is what a real, qualified OBGYN will tell you about what women feel when they get an abortion
Dr. Willie Parker, who is trained as a gynecologist and OBGYN, is a hero for the pro-choice movement because he’s honest about the undiscussed aspects of getting (or not getting) an abortion. Watch how he gives a consultation.
That last statement about regret is so important, because so many people don’t understand what it is or what causes it. Anti-choicers exploit this by manipulating pregnant people and creating doubt, which only increases the likelihood of regret, no matter what decision the pregnant person makes. You know what is best for you, even if it takes some time to figure it out.
More posts on Dr. Willie Parker
Willie Parker is a HERO among common people!
Dr. Parker is one of the few things I like about Alabama and we are so fortunate to have him here.
awesome
As much as I hate to ruin the joke, the article is really good. Here it is in full!
Cory Doctorow 8 feb 2024
Last year, I coined the term “enshittification” to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers; it really hit the zeitgeist.
The American Dialect Society made it its Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I’m definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).
So what’s enshittification and why did it catch fire? It’s my theory explaining how the internet was colonised by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters and what we can do about it. We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying.
I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the “great forces of history”, and into the material world of specific decisions made by real people; decisions we can reverse and people whose names and pitchfork sizes we can learn.
Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It’s not just a way to say “things are getting worse”, though, of course, it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way. (It’s an English word. We don’t have ein Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free-for-all. Go nuts, meine Kerle.) But in case you want to be more precise, let’s examine how enshittification works. It’s a three-stage process: first, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die.
Let’s do a case study. What could be better than Facebook?
Facebook arose from a website developed to rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that. When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and K-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It effectively told them: Yes, I know you’re all using MySpace. But MySpace is owned by a billionaire who spies on you with every hour that God sends. Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world.
That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end users. Those end users proceeded to lock themselves into Facebook. Facebook, like most tech businesses, had network effects on its side. A product or service enjoys network effects when it improves as more people sign up to use it. You joined Facebook because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there.
But Facebook didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem.
It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. So Facebook’s end users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then Facebook exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers and publishers.
To the advertisers, Facebook said: Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? Well, we do. And we will sell you access to that data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it.
To the publishers, Facebook said: Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? Ha! Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link and we will cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetise as you please. And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too.
Users, advertisers, publishers — everyone was locked in. Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders.
For the users, that meant dialling down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers. For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen. For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt. And then Facebook started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting full text feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetisation.
When any of these groups squawked, Facebook just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learnt in the Darth Vader MBA:
“I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”
Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders. (This continued last week, when the company announced a quarterly dividend of 50 cents per share and that it would increase share buybacks by $50bn. The stock jumped.)
But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service, but I can’t bring myself to quit,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit?” is razor-thin.
All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then Facebook discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword. If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go. That’s terminal enshittification.
This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech euphemistically calls “pivoting”. Which is how we get pivots such as: In the future, all internet users will be transformed into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world called the “metaverse”.
That’s the procession of enshittification. But that doesn’t tell you why everything is enshittifying right now and, without those details, we can’t know what to do about it. What is it about this moment that led to the Great Enshittening? Was it the end of the zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP)? Was it a change in leadership at the tech giants?
Is Mercury in retrograde?
Nope.
The period of free Fed money certainly led to tech companies having a lot of surplus to toss around. But Facebook started enshittifying long before ZIRP ended, so did Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Some of the tech giants got new leaders. But Google’s enshittification got worse when the founders came back to oversee the company’s AI panic — excuse me, AI pivot. And it can’t be Mercury in retrograde, because I’m a Cancer, and as everyone knows, Cancers don’t believe in astrology.
When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that’s a sign that the environment has changed, and that’s what happened to tech. Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.
The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honourable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty.
There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses:
Competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices.
Regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.
These two forces affect all industries, but the next two are far more tech-specific.
Self-help. Computers are extremely flexible and so are the digital products and services we make from them. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing-Complete Von Neumann Machine, a computer that can run every valid program.
That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company’s shareholders. Think of a boardroom table where someone says, “I’ve calculated that making our ads 20 per cent more invasive will net us 2 per cent more revenue per user.”
In a digital world, someone else might well say, “Yes, but if we do that, 20 per cent of our users will install ad blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, for ever.” This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory manoeuvre will prompt their users to google, “How do I disenshittify this?”
And, finally, workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn’t mean that tech workers don’t have labour power. The historical “talent shortage” of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another, better job.
They knew it and their bosses knew it. Ironically, this made tech workers highly exploitable. Tech workers overwhelmingly saw themselves as founders in waiting, entrepreneurs who were temporarily drawing a salary, heroic figures to be.
That’s why mottoes such as Google’s “Don’t be evil” and Facebook’s “Make the world more open and connected” mattered; they instilled a sense of mission in workers. It’s what the American academic Fobazi Ettarh calls “vocational awe” or Elon Musk calls being “extremely hardcore”.
Tech workers had lots of bargaining power, but they didn’t flex it when their bosses demanded that they sacrifice their health, their families, their sleep to meet arbitrary deadlines. So long as their bosses transformed their workplaces into whimsical “campuses”, with gyms, gourmet cafeterias, laundry service, massages and egg-freezing, workers could tell themselves that they were being pampered, rather than being made to work like government mules.
For bosses, there’s a downside to motivating your workers with appeals to a sense of mission. Namely, your workers will feel a sense of mission. So when you ask them to enshittify the products they ruined their health to ship, workers will experience a sense of profound moral injury, respond with outrage and threaten to quit. Thus tech workers themselves were the final bulwark against enshittification.
The pre-enshittification era wasn’t a time of better leadership. The executives weren’t better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power. So what happened?
One by one, each of these constraints was eroded, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittocene.
It started with competition. From the Gilded Age until the Reagan years, the purpose of competition law was to promote competition between companies. US antitrust law treated corporate power as dangerous and sought to blunt it. European antitrust laws were modelled on US ones, imported by the architects of the Marshall Plan. But starting in the 1980s, with the rise of neoliberalism, competition authorities all over the world adopted a doctrine called “consumer welfare”, which essentially held that monopolies were evidence of quality. If everyone was shopping at the same store and buying the same product, that meant that was the best store, selling the best product — not that anyone was cheating.
And so, all over the world, governments stopped enforcing their competition laws. They just ignored them as companies flouted them. Those companies merged with their major competitors, absorbed smaller companies before they could grow to be big threats. They held an orgy of consolidation that produced the most inbred industries imaginable, whole sectors grown so incestuous they developed Habsburg jaws, from eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer.
Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with “predatory pricing” that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold. When Diapers.com refused Amazon’s acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100mn on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until Diapers.com went bust, and Amazon bought them for pennies on the dollar.
Lily Tomlin used to do a character on the TV show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, an AT&T telephone operator who’d do commercials for the Bell system. Each one would end with her saying: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”
Today’s giants are not constrained by competition. They don’t care. They don’t have to. They’re Google.
That’s the first constraint gone, and as it slipped away, the second constraint — regulation — was also doomed.
When an industry consists of hundreds of small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is a mob, a rabble. Hundreds of companies can’t agree on what to tell Parliament or Congress or the Commission. They can’t even agree on how to cater a meeting where they’d discuss the matter.
But when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel. Five companies, or four, or three, or two or just one company can easily converge on a single message for their regulators, and without “wasteful competition” eroding their profits, they have plenty of cash to spread around.
This is why competition matters: it’s not just because competition makes companies work harder and share value with customers and workers; it’s because competition keeps companies from becoming too big to fail, and too big to jail.
Now, there are plenty of things we don’t want improved through competition, like privacy invasions. After the EU passed its landmark privacy law, the GDPR, there was a mass-extinction event for small EU ad-tech companies. These companies disappeared en masse and that’s a good thing. They were even more invasive and reckless than US-based Big Tech companies. We don’t want to produce increasing efficiency in violating our human rights.
But: Google and Facebook have been unscathed by European privacy law. That’s not because they don’t violate the GDPR. It’s because they pretend they are headquartered in Ireland, one of the EU’s most notorious corporate crime havens. And Ireland competes with the EU’s other crime havens — Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and, sometimes, the Netherlands — to see which country can offer the most hospitable environment.
The Irish Data Protection Commission rules on very few cases, and more than two-thirds of its rulings are overturned by the EU courts, even though Ireland is the nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent. So Google and Facebook get to act as though they are immune to privacy law, because they violate the law with an app.
This is where that third constraint, self-help, would surely come in handy. If you don’t want your privacy violated, you don’t need to wait for the Irish privacy regulator to act, you can just install an ad blocker.
More than half of all web users are blocking ads. But the web is an open platform, developed in the age when tech was hundreds of companies at each other’s throats, unable to capture their regulators. Today, the web is being devoured by apps, and apps are ripe for enshittification. Regulatory capture isn’t just the ability to flout regulation, it’s also the ability to co-opt regulation, to wield regulation against your adversaries.
Today’s tech giants got big by exploiting self-help measures. When Facebook was telling MySpace users they needed to escape Murdoch’s crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, “Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here.” It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your MySpace username and password, and it would login to MySpace and pretend to be you, scraping everything waiting in your inbox and copying it to your Facebook inbox.
When Microsoft was choking off Apple’s market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac in the 1990s — so that offices were throwing away their designers’ Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator — Steve Jobs didn’t beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office. He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could read and write Microsoft’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.
When Google entered the market, it sent its crawler to every web server on earth, where it presented itself as a web-user: “Hi! Hello! Do you have any web pages? Thanks! How about some more? How about more?”
But every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, that was progress. If you try to do it to them, that’s piracy.
Try to make an alternative client for Facebook and they’ll say you violated US laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and EU laws like Article 6 of the EU Copyright Directive. Try to make an Android program that can run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple’s media stores and they’d bomb you until the rubble bounced. Try to scrape all of Google and they’ll nuke you until you glow.
Tech’s regulatory capture is mind-boggling. Take that law I mentioned earlier, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Bill Clinton signed it in 1998, and the EU imported it as Article 6 of the EUCD in 2001. It is a blanket prohibition on removing any kind of encryption that restricts access to a copyrighted work — things such as ripping DVDs or jailbreaking a phone — with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offence. This law has been so broadened that it can be used to imprison creators for granting access to their own creations. Here’s how that works: In 2008, Amazon bought Audible, an audiobook platform. Today, Audible is a monopolist with more than 90 per cent of the audiobook market. Audible requires that all creators on its platform sell with Amazon’s “digital rights management”, which locks it to Amazon’s apps.
So say I write a book, then I read it into a mic, then I pay a director and an engineer thousands of dollars to turn that into an audiobook, and sell it to you on the monopoly platform, Audible, that controls more than 90 per cent of the market. If I later decide to leave Amazon and want to let you come with me to a rival platform, I am out of luck. If I supply you with a tool to remove Amazon’s encryption from my audiobook, so you can play it in another app, I commit a felony, punishable by a five-year sentence and a half-million-dollar fine, for a first offence.
That’s a stiffer penalty than you would face if you simply pirated the audiobook from a torrent site. But it’s also harsher than the punishment you’d get for shoplifting the audiobook on CD from a truck stop. It’s harsher than the sentence you’d get for hijacking the truck that delivered the CD.
Think of our ad blockers again. Fifty per cent of web users are running ad blockers. Zero per cent of app users are running ad blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that’s a felony. (Jay Freeman, the American businessman and engineer, calls this “felony contempt of business-model”.)
So when someone in a boardroom says, “Let’s make our ads 20 per cent more obnoxious and get a 2 per cent revenue increase,” no one objects that this might prompt users to google, “How do I block ads?” After all, the answer is, you can’t. Indeed, it’s more likely that someone in that boardroom will say, “Let’s make our ads 100 per cent more obnoxious and get a 10 per cent revenue increase.” (This is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website.)
There’s no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn’t install a counter-app that co-ordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold. No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete or, in other words, “IP law”.
IP isn’t just short for intellectual property. It’s a euphemism for “a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers”. And “app” is just a euphemism for “a web page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to mod it, to protect the labour, consumer and privacy rights of its user”.
We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.
What about that fourth constraint: workers? For decades, tech workers’ bargaining power and vocational awe put a ceiling on enshittification. Even after the tech sector shrank to a handful of giants. Even after they captured their regulators. Even after “felony contempt of business model” and extinguished self-help for tech users. Tech was still constrained by their workers’ sense of moral injury in the face of the imperative to enshittify.
Remember when tech workers dreamt of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over? That dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake start-up, get “acqui-hired” by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion. Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.
And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire you, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired last year, eight months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.
Workers are no longer a check on their bosses’ worst impulses. Today, the response to “I refuse to make this product worse” is “turn in your badge and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out”.
I get that this is all a little depressing. OK, really depressing. But hear me out! We’ve identified the disease. We’ve identified its underlying mechanism. Now we can get to work on a cure.
There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labour. To reverse enshittification and guard against its re-emergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these.
On competition, it’s actually looking pretty good. The EU, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and China are all doing more on competition than they have in two generations. They’re blocking mergers, unwinding existing ones, taking action on predatory pricing and other sleazy tactics. Remember, in the US and Europe, we already have the laws to do this; we just stopped enforcing them.
I’ve been fighting these fights with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 22 years now, and I’ve never seen a more hopeful moment for sound, informed tech policy.
Now, the enshittifiers aren’t taking this lying down. Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has run more than 80 pieces trashing Khan, insisting that she’s an ineffectual ideologue who can’t get anything done. Sure, that’s why you ran 80 editorials about her. Because she can’t get anything done.
Reagan and Thatcher put antitrust law in a coma in the 1980s. But it’s awake, it’s back and it’s pissed off.
What about regulation? How will we get tech companies to stop doing that one weird trick of adding “with an app” to escape enforcement?
Well, here in the EU, they’re starting to figure it out. Recently, the main body of the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act went into effect, and they let people who get screwed by tech companies go straight to the European courts, bypassing the toothless watchdogs in places like Ireland.
In the US, they might finally get a digital privacy law. You probably have no idea how backwards US privacy law is. The last time the US Congress enacted a broadly applicable privacy law was in 1988. The Video Privacy Protection Act makes it a crime for video-store clerks to leak your video-rental history. It was passed after a rightwing judge who was up for the Supreme Court had his rentals published in a DC newspaper. The rentals weren’t even all that embarrassing.
Sure, that judge, Robert Bork, wasn’t confirmed for the Supreme Court, but that was because he was a virulent loudmouth who served as Nixon’s solicitor-general. Still, Congress got the idea that their own video records might be next, freaked out and passed the VPPA. That was the last time Americans got a big, national privacy law. And the thing is, there are a lot of people who are angry about it. Worried that Facebook turned Grampy into a QAnon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing Gen Z into quoting Osama bin Laden?
Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google?
Or that red state attorneys-general are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics?
Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms?
Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?
Having a federal privacy law with a private right of action — which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy — would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems. There’s a big coalition for that kind of privacy law.
What about self-help? That’s a lot farther away, alas. The EU’s DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You’ll be able to use WhatsApp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind. But if you want to reverse-engineer one of those Big Tech products and mod it to work for you, not them, the EU’s got nothing for you. This is an area ripe for improvement. My big hope here is that Stein’s Law will take hold: anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop.
Finally, there’s labour. Here in Europe, there’s much higher union density than in the US, which American tech barons are learning the hard way. There is nothing more satisfying in the daily news than the recent salvo by Nordic unions against that Tesla guy. But even in the US, there’s a massive surge in tech unions. Tech workers have realised they’re not founders-in-waiting. In Seattle, Amazon’s tech workers walked out in sympathy with Amazon’s warehouse workers, because they’re all workers.
We’re seeing bold, muscular, global action on competition, regulation and labour, with self-help bringing up the rear. It’s not a moment too soon, because the bad news is enshittification is coming to every industry. If it’s got a networked computer in it, the people who made it can run the Darth Vader MBA playbook on it, changing the rules from moment to moment, violating your rights and then saying: “It’s OK, we did it with an app.”
From Mercedes effectively renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dish soap, enshittification is metastasising into every corner of our lives. Software doesn’t eat the world, it just enshittifies it.
There’s a bright side to all this: if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification. Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive. It’s unstoppable.
The cynics among you might be sceptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn’t “enshittification” the same as “capitalism”? Well, no.
I’m not going to cape for capitalism. I’m hardly a true believer in markets as the most efficient allocators of resources and arbiters of policy. But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and woolly internet, a space where people with disfavoured views could find each other, offer mutual aid and organise. The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crap gadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand names and cryptocurrency scams.
The internet isn’t more important than the climate emergency, gender justice, racial justice, genocide or inequality. But the internet is the terrain we’ll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it’s joined.
We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device. We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to co-ordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, save our planet and our species.
Martin Luther King said: “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.” And it may be true that the law can’t force corporations to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation. But it can make them fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity — even if they don’t think you deserve it.
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Cory Doctorow is a special adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a visiting professor of computer science at the Open University. His next book ‘The Bezzle’, published by Head of Zeus, is out this month. This piece is adapted from his Marshall McLuhan Lecture, delivered at the Embassy of Canada in Berlin last month
I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the “great forces of history”, and into the material world of specific decisions made by real people; decisions we can reverse and people whose names and pitchfork sizes we can learn.
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