So we're all pissed at the new update as we should be and I've been seeing many people proposing blackouts, which is amazing! But all the dates are different and people might get confused at what's happening when, so I just want to organize every blackout (at least that I saw) in one place.
So far I saw six people with dates.
The earliest one, organized by @yourlocalfandomfriendo begins on March 18th and will last 48 hours.
This overlaps with a second proposed blackout by @veejiez for March 19th.
There is also one on the 20th proposed by @daysleftofsecondterm and another one on the same day from 6AM UTC to 6AM UTC on the 21st by @everythingwsnormalhere.
These three days are all very soon so not everyone may see them in time to participate, but if you are able to participate for any or all of these days, I highly encourage you do. Otherwise there are two more blackouts coming up:
The next one after these will be on March 24th as organized by @aroacesafeplaceforall who suggested doing 12 hours.
And the last one, which I personally have a lot of hope for as it's a major day for activity on Tumblr and a blackout then could be especially impactful: April 1st, as proposed by @darkwood-sleddog
There is also a discord set up by @yourlocalfandomfriendo and @aroacesafeplaceforall for anyone interested in joining in!
SO OVERALL, it may sound like a lot, but no one expects everyone to participate to every date here. But PLEASE try to participate in at least one or two of these, even if you feel it may not do much.
Typical strikes, the ones we hear about all the time, win by withholding their labour for consistent periods of time; that's the power people have at work because that's what's exploited.
For blackout strikes, we need to withhold our attention; the resource we own which is exploited through the selling of both advertisements and data.
My comparison of blackout strikes with regular strikes will be for a whole other post, but for the time being, just know that
withholding our attention is our digital bargaining weapon
Tumblr literally lost 63% of its monthly traffic from 2024 to 2025; they are not in a position to play around with those of us still here.
So PLEASE try participating. We cannot let every decent online space get enshittified with no care or consideration for the communities using those spaces.
And where labour strikers risk losing incomes and jobs, all blackout strikers risk is... gaining some of their attention back for a little bit.
The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve.
Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.
If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.
Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.
This is just the beginning. More changes are coming as we keep building this out – stay tuned!
It’s very clear that you all have strong feelings about Tumblr and about this change. We hear you. The passion people have for how Tumblr works is one of the things that makes this place special.
As this rolls out over the next few days and you explore it, we’ll keep reading your replies and reblogs, so please keep sharing your questions, concerns, and ideas.
Your creativity has always been the heart of Tumblr, whether you’re the original poster or adding something brilliant in the reblogs, and nothing about this change is meant to limit that.
If you’d like to talk directly beyond the comments, leave a reply and we’ll follow up with as many of you as we can. We want to work with you to make Tumblr better.
Okay I’m currently furious that migraines are often so blindly easy to treat and I had to find this out myself at the age of 26 when I’ve been to a neurologist since I was 11 lol so I’m about to teach you two neat and fast little tricks to deal with pain!
The first is the sternocleidomastoid muscle, or the SCM muscle.
This big red section is responsible for pain around the eye, cheekbone, and jaw, as well as some temple pain. Literally all you have to do is angle your head down a little, angle it away from the side that hurts, and then you can gently pinch and rub that muscle. I find it best to start at the bottom and travel upwards. The relief is so immediate! You can increase pressure as you feel comfortable doing so.
Here is a short and easy video showing this in action
The second is a fast and easy stretch that soothes your vagus nerve, which is the nerve responsible for calming you down. The vagus nerve, for those unfamiliar, is stimulated by deep breathing such as yawning, sighing, singing, or taking a deep breath to calm your anger in a tense situation.
You can stretch this out by sitting up as straight as possible (this does not have to be perfect to work) and interlacing your fingers. Put your hands on the back of your head with your thumbs going down the sides of your neck and, while keeping your face forward, look all the way to one side with just your eyes. Hold that until you feel the urge to breathe deeply or yawn, or until you can tell there’s a change. Then do the same thing on the other side. When you put your arms down, you should clearly be able to turn your head farther in both directions. If the first session doesn’t get rid of your migraine, rest and repeat as many times as necessary. I even get a little fancy with it and roll my eyes up and down along the outer edge sometimes to stretch as much as I can.
If you need a visual here’s a good video on it. I know some of the language they use seems questionable but this is real and simple science and should not be discarded because it’s been adopted by the trendy wellness crowd!
I seriously cannot believe I didn’t hear a word of this from any doctor in my life. Additionally, if you get frequent recurring migraines, you may want to see a dietician. Migraines can be caused by foods containing histamines, lectin, etc. and can also be caused by high blood pressure in specific situations such as exercise, stress, and even sex.
If any of this information helps you I’d love to hear it btw! It’s so so fast and easy to do. Good luck!
This is something my magic physio man also taught me. It helps if your migraines are triggered by muscle tension. Not so much if you have other root causes like OP mentioned above.
My kid gets migraines because of weather changes, sleep deprivation, and very occasionally food causes. And when shit’s wrecked and he wakes up in the middle of the night with a migraine (any pain that wakes you up like that is 🚩 btw), it’s because his brain doesn’t all the way fit in his skull.
These stretches will not help with kiddo’s migraines. My mom gets cluster migraines and oxygen helps with those.
But! If you get headaches that are more back of your head, above your ears kind of headache, let me give you one more magic trick to teach a friend because it’s really hard to do to yourself:
It’s called a sub occipital release, and here’s a video of how to do that:
This is one of the top 5 things I can do in the office to fix a headache, and once you’re good at it or made a friend get good at it, everyone benefits from the skill!
I don't speak for all autistics. Yes, there are times I say "The autistic community..." or "Some autistics..." but honestly, I can't really speak for anyone but myself. Being autistic myself, it does give me a better view into autism, but not the thoughts and minds of every autistic person.
I'm coming to COLORADO! Catch me in DENVER on Thu (Jan 22) at The Tattered Cover, and in COLORADO SPRINGS this weekend (Jan 23–25) where I'm the Guest of Honor at COSine. Then I'll be in OTTAWA on Jan 28 at Perfect Books and in TORONTO with Tim Wu on Jan 30.
Google is spending a lot on AI, but what's not clear is how Google will make a lot from AI. Or, you know, even break even. Given, you know, that businesses are seeing zero return from AI:
But maybe they've figured it out. In a recent edition of his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller pulls on several of the strings that Google's top execs have dangled recently:
The first string: Google's going to spy on you a lot more, for the same reason Microsoft is spying on all of its users: because they want to supply their AI "agents" with your personal data:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ANECpNdt-4
Google's announced that it's going to feed its AI your Gmail messages, as well as the whole deep surveillance dossier the company has assembled based on your use of all the company's products: Youtube, Maps, Photos, and, of course, Search:
Apple already charges Google more than $20b/year not to enter the search market; now they're going to be charging Google billions not to stay out of the AI market, too. Meanwhile, Google will get to spy on Apple customers, just like they spy on their own users. Anyone who says that Apple is ideologically committed to your privacy because they're real capitalists is a sucker (or a cultist):
But the big revelation is how Google is going to make money with AI: they're going to sell AI-based "personalized pricing" to "partners," including "Walmart, Visa, Mastercard, Shopify, Gap, Kroger, Macy’s, Stripe, Home Depot, Lowe's, American Express, etc":
Personalized pricing, of course, is the polite euphemism for surveillance pricing, which is when a company spies on you in order to figure out how much they can get away with charging you (or how little they can get away with paying you):
It's a weird form of cod-Marxism, whose tenet is "From each according to their desperation; to each according to their vulnerability." Surveillance pricing advocates say that this is "efficient" because they can use surveillance data to offer you discounts, too – like, say you rock up to an airline ticket counter 45 minutes before takeoff and they can use surveillance data to know that you won't take their last empty seat for $200, but you would fly in it for $100, you could get that seat for cheap.
This is, of course, nonsense. Airlines don't sell off cheap seats like bakeries discounting their day-olds – they jack up the price of a last-minute journey to farcical heights.
Google also claims that it will only use its surveillance pricing facility to offer discounts, and not to extract premiums. As Stoller points out, there's a well-developed playbook for making premiums look like discounts, which is easy to see in the health industry. As Stoller says, the list price for an MRI is $8,000, but your insurer gets a $6000 "discount" and actually pays $1970, sticking you with a $30 co-pay. The $8000 is a fake number, and so is the $6000 – the only real price is the $30 you're paying.
The whole economy is filled with versions of this transparent ruse, from "department stores who routinely mark everything as 80% off" to pharmacy benefit managers:
Google, meanwhile, is touting its new "universal commerce protocol" (UCP), a way for AI "agents" to retrieve prices and product descriptions and make purchases:
Right now, a major hurdle to "agentic AI" is the complexity of navigating websites designed for humans. AI agents just aren't very reliable when it comes to figuring out which product is which, choosing the correct options, and putting it in a shopping cart, and then paying for it.
Some of that is merely because websites have inconsistent "semantics" – literally things like the "buy" button being called something other than "buy button" in the HTML code. But there's a far more profound problem with agentic shopping, which is that companies deliberately obfuscate their prices.
This is how junk fees work, and why they're so destructive. Say you're a hotel providing your rate-card to an online travel website. You know that travelers are going to search for hotels by city and amenities, and then sort the resulting list by price. If you hide your final price – by surprising the user with a bunch of junk fees at checkout, or, better yet, after they arrive and put their credit-card down at reception – you are going to be at the top of that list. Your hotel will seem like the cheapest, best option.
But of course, it's not. From Ticketmaster to car rentals, hotels to discount airlines, rental apartments to cellular plans, the real price is withheld until the very last instant, whereupon it shoots up to levels that are absolutely uncompetitive. But because these companies are able to engage in deceptive advertising, they look cheaper.
And of course, crooked offers drive out honest ones. The honest hotel that provides a true rate card, reflecting the all-in price, ends up at the bottom of the price-sorted list, rents no rooms, and goes out of business (or pivots to lying about its prices, too).
Online sellers do not want to expose their true prices to comparison shopping services. They benefit from lying to those services. For decades, technologists have dreamed of building a "semantic web" in which everyone exposes true and accurate machine-readable manifests of their content to facilitate indexing, search and data-mining:
This has failed. It's failed because lying is often more profitable than telling the truth, and because lying to computers is easier than lying to people, and because once a market is dominated by liars, everyone has to lie, or be pushed out of the market.
Of course, it would be really cool if everyone diligently marked up everything they put into the public sphere with accurate metadata. But there are lots of really cool things you could do if you could get everyone else to change how they do things and arrange their affairs to your convenience. Imagine how great it would be if you could just get everyone to board an airplane from back to front, or to stand right and walk left on escalators, or to put on headphones when using their phones in public.
Wanting it badly is not enough. People have lots of reasons for doing things in suboptimal ways. Often the reason is that it's suboptimal for you, but just peachy for them.
Google says that it's going to get every website in the world to expose accurate rate cards to its chatbots to facilitate agentic AI. Google is also incapable of preventing "search engine optimization" companies from tricking it into showing bullshit at the top of the results for common queries:
Google somehow thinks that the companies that spend millions of dollars trying to trick its crawler won't also spend millions of dollars trying to trick its chatbot – and they're providing the internet with a tool to inject lies straight into the chatbot's input hopper.
But UCP isn't just a way for companies to tell Google what their prices are. As Stoller points out, UCP will also sell merchants the ability to have Gemini set prices on their products, using Google's surveillance data, through "dynamic pricing" (another euphemism for "surveillance pricing").
This decade has seen the rise and rise of price "clearinghouses" – companies that offer price "consulting" to direct competitors in a market. Nominally, this is just a case of two competitors shopping with the same supplier – like Procter and Gamble and Unilever buying their high-fructose corn-syrup from the same company.
But it's actually far more sinister. "Clearinghouses" like Realpage – a company that "advises" landlords on rental rates – allow all the major competitors in a market to collude to raise prices in lockstep. A Realpage landlord that ignores the service's "advice" and gives a tenant a break on the rent will be excluded from Realpage's service. The rental markets that Realpage dominates have seen major increases in rental rates:
Google's "direct pricing" offering will allow all comers to have Google set their prices for them, based on Google's surveillance data. That includes direct competitors. As Stoller points out, both Nike and Reebok are Google advertisers. If they let Google price their sneakers, Google can raise prices across the market in lockstep.
Despite how much everyone hates this garbage, neoclassical economists and their apologists in the legal profession continue to insist that surveillance pricing is "efficient." Stoller points to a law review article called "Antitrust After the Coming Wave," written by antitrust law prof and Google lawyer Daniel Crane:
Crane argues that AI will kill antitrust law because AI favors monopolies, and argues "that we should forget about promoting competition or costs, and instead enact a new Soviet-style regime, one in which the government would merely direct a monopolist’s 'AI to maximize social welfare and allocate the surplus created among different stakeholders of the firm.'"
This is a planned economy, but it's one in which the planning is done by monopolists who are – somehow, implausibly – so biddable that governments can delegate the power to decide what we can buy and sell, what we can afford and who can afford it, and rein them in if they get it wrong.
In 1890, Senator John Sherman was stumping for the Sherman Act, America's first antitrust law. On the Senate floor, he declared:
If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.
Google thinks that it has finally found a profitable use for AI. It thinks that it will be the first company to make money on AI, by harnessing that AI to a market-rigging, price-gouging monopoly that turns Google's software into Sherman's "autocrat of trade."
It's funny when you think of all those "AI safety" bros who claimed that AI's greatest danger was that it would become sentient and devour us. It turns out that the real "AI safety" risk is that AI will automate price gouging at scale, allowing Google to crown itself a "King over the necessaries of life":
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:
hey. if someone tries to smear you on the internet for something asinine, what you need to do is block every single person engaging with the post and remind yourself that absolutely under no circumstances are you obligated to draft a PR response defending some out-of-context screenshot or kink fanfiction or thing you said when you were 15 or whatever put your blood in the water. you are not a public figure or a brand. you do not have to respond to something if you know in your heart it is bullshit.
this is actually HILARIOUS because both domestic rabbits and domestic cats practice dominance-related social grooming but for wildly different reasons.
if you're a rabbit, the boss rabbit is the one who gets groomed by its subordinate rabbits.
but if you're a cat... the boss cat is the one that grooms the other cats.
BOTH these idiots are going "aw yeah, it's good to be on top >:) "
origamiaround
romaincrisis
blakekathryn
ellievsbear
annaxmalina
turnnoffyourmind
