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#04/08/2021
sport-captures · 1 year
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aureliebella · 10 months
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baizhuo · 11 months
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#BAIZHUO . ❛ is it really selfish of me to defy the inevitable ? ❜
🐍🌺 . carrd . doc . home .
a private & highly selective HEADCANON based BAIZHU of genshin impact ; written by GHOST ( 27 , they / them ) . activity will always be selectively low . this blog is UNAFFILIATED to the genshin impact community & is crossover FRIENDLY to any mixed media .
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IMPORTANT UPDATES BELOW .
🐍 Leaks & Spoilers
Tag your LEAKS or i will unfollow.
I don't care about content that is already found within the game. I am fine with stuff that is already available to play. I am talking about content that is yet to come. The new update information and patch notes are already on thin ice most of the time and i am not overly fond about it but what I really don't enjoy is rumours about the game. Stuff that isn't really 100 percent confirmed.
if you don't understand this, then to put it simply. do NOT talk about anything that ISN'T found within the game. if its something you can find in the game and it's available then I'm chill about it.
Of course this doesnt include like.... personal HCs and whatnot.
🐍 notifications & tags  
tumblr does not notify me of any @ ’ s . you can @ me if you would like , it pops up on the activity page , i just do not get notified directly / immediately , so i will not see your notif right away . my dash is relatively slow , often , so i read that like the morning paper , but i also am not frequent enough on here to always know .
this also goes for anybody who tags me in things . the tumblr tagging system does not pick up most ( if not all ) posts with my url . i cannot use the tag tracking system . at all . i never have been able . i do not know why either i am sorry !
if you want to notify me of something or bring to my attention something / a reply, please dm me directly ! it is also better if you dm me in discord . if you do not have my discord , then you can use the tumblr dms ( but they are not always great either ) . if push comes to shove , you can then use my inbox as well , i will not mind if you get my attention like that either !
know that the only thing i do see / notice are likes & reblogs of posts that are on my blog . so that is fine . i don’t need notifications for threads as much .
i promise you it is okay i love getting messages . i just tend to hyperfocus A LOT at times while other times i cannot focus at all & i get really distracted with my squirrel brain . it is okay to gently remind me of something or try to get my attention ! i know many people don’t like that , which is why i don’t do it to others , but i 100 % promise you that it is okay .
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🐍 about spoilers
i actually don’t pay attention to genshin spoilers or the videos that come out for them right way . i try to actively avoid them tbh . if it isnt in the game directly , then i don’t really perceive it . if I happen to come across it , then cool , but otherwise ... please refrain from directly telling me / showing spoilers that are NOT in the game . i dont mind if its spoilers that are already IN the game . 
but for upcoming content that isn’t found in the game , please assume that i don’t know wtf is coming into the game , & assume that i don’t actively look for these patch notes , because i really dont . there is a reason why i dont look this stuff up . i am somebody that wants to enjoy the game for what it already has & not what it will have .
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🐍 i do modify my formatting for people on request !
if my formatting for your replies / threads bothers you in any way , shape , or form , please tell me . i promise that i can accommodate you . i format AFTER i write the entire reply anyway . so it will not be a bother for me if you dont want to have that . i have friends who have asked in the past . 
i use small font and edit html for the colour . if any of this bothers you ( be it cause you genuinely cannot read it or you dont like it ) , please let me know & i will modify it for you .
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* you are always more than welcome to send asks if you have any questions *
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jardelkiel · 1 year
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“Brand safety” killed Jezebel
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I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library this Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!
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Progressives: if you want to lose to conservatives, all you need to do is reflexively praise and support everything conservatives turn into a culture-war issue, without considering whether they might be right. Because sometimes…they're right.
Remember early in the Trump presidency, when conservatives all woke up and discovered that America's spy agencies – excuse me, "the intelligence community" – were dirty-tricking psychos who run amok, lawlessly sabotaging democracy? Progressives have been shouting this ever since Hoover's FBI tried to blackmail MLK into killing himself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_letter
But millions of progressives forgot about COINTELPRO, CIA dirty tricks and CIA mass spying when this "intelligence community" temporarily set out to wrong-foot Trump. Remember James Comey votive candles?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/08/30/james-comey-fbi-memo-leaks-trump-inspector-general-report-column/2157705001/
Anthropologists have a name for this phenomenon, in which one side reverses its positions because their sworn enemies have done so. It's called schizmogenesis, and it goes like this: "If they hate it, we love it":
https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/
Schizmogenesis is an equal-opportunity delusion. Within living memory, white evangelicals supported abortion, because their sworn enemies – Catholics – opposed it. Some of those white Boomer women who voted Trump because abortion was literally the only issue they cared about held the opposite position on abortion not so long ago – and completely forgot about it:
https://text.npr.org/734303135
The main purpose of the culture war isn't immiserating marginalized people – that's its effect, but its purpose is to distract low-information turkeys (working people) so they'll vote for Christmas (the ongoing seizure of power by American oligarchs). For the funders of conservative movement politics, the cruelty isn't the point, it's merely the tactic. The point is power:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars
Which brings me to "woke capitalism." Conservative string-pullers have whipped up their base about the threat of companies embracing social causes. They (erroneously) claim that corporations have progressive values, and that big business is thumbing the scales for causes they despise. The purpose here isn't to sow distrust of capitalism per se. Rather, it's to stampede talk-radio-addled supporters into backing the oligarchy's agenda. Remember when culture war leaders told their base to support being gouged on credit-card junk fees "to own the libs?"
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping
That's schizmogenesis working against the conservative rank-and-file, tricking them into taking the side of a cartel of wildly profitable payment processors who are making billions by picking their pockets (credit card fees are up 40% since the covid lockdowns), because (checks notes), Target pays these profiteers a lot to process its payments, and Target sells Pride merch (no, really):
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping
It's easy to point and laugh at conservative dopes when they're tricked into shooting themselves in the balls to own the libs. This is not a hypothetical example:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#musketfuckers
But progressives do it, too, particularly when they embrace monopolies as a force for positive social change. Remember 2019, when people got excited about playing loud pop music at Nazi rallies in the hopes that the monopoly video platforms' copyright filters would make any video from that rally impossible to post?
https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/23/clever-hack-that-will-end-badly-playing-copyrighted-music-during-nazis-rallies-so-they-cant-be-posted-to-youtube/
I warned then that if this tactic worked, it would be used by cops to prevent you from recording them when they're macing you or splitting your skull with a billyclub, and yup, within a couple years, cops were blaring Taylor Swift music in hopes of preventing the public from posting videos of their illegal conduct:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/07/moral-hazard-of-filternets/#dmas
Conservatives are (partially) right about woke capitalism. It is a threat to democracy. Concentrating the power to decide who gets to speak and what they get to say into the hands of five or six corporations, mostly run by mediocre billionaires, is bad for society. The moderation decisions of giant platforms are a form of (commercial) censorship, even these don't violate the First Amendment:
https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/
(The progressive delusion that censorship only occurs when the First Amendment is violated is a wild own-goal, one that excuses, for example, the decision by school book-fair monopolist Scholastic to remove books about queers and Black and brown people from its offerings as a purely private matter without consequences for free speech):
https://www.themarysue.com/scholastic-response-to-authors-and-illustrators-on-diverse-books/
Conservatives are only partially right about woke capitalism, though. Here's what they're wrong about: corporations don't have values. Target isn't selling Pride tees because they support progressive causes, they're selling them because it seems like a good way to increase returns to their shareholders. Individuals – even top executives – at Target might endorse the cause, but the company will only durably support the cause if that endorsement is profitable, which means that when it stops being profitable, the company will stop supporting the cause:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/23/business/target-lgbtq-merchandise/index.html
The idea that corporations have values isn't merely stupid, it's very dangerous. The Hobby Lobby decision – which allows corporations to deny basic health-care expenses for women on the basis that a Bronze Age mystic wouldn't approve of an IUD – rests on the ideological foundation that corporate personhood includes corporate values:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,_Inc.
Citizens United – the idea that corporations should be allowed to funnel unlimited funds to politicians who'll sell out the public good in favor of investor profits – also depends on a form of corporate personhood that includes values:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
There are undeniably instances in which corporate monopoly power benefits progressive causes, but these are side-effects of corporate power's main purpose, namely: taking money and power away from working people and giving it to rich people. That is what monopoly power is for.
Which brings me to ad-tech, "brand safety," and the demise of Jezebel, the 16 year old feminist website whose shuttering was just announced by its latest owner, G/O Media:
https://www.metafilter.com/201349/This-is-the-end-of-Jezebel-and-that-feels-really-really-bad
Jezebel's demise is the direct result of monopoly power. Jezebel writes about current affairs – sex, politics, abortion, and other important issues of great moment and significance. When we talk about journalism as a public good, necessary for a healthy civic life, this is what we mean. But unfortunately for Jezebel – and any other news outlet covering current events – there are vast, invisible forces that exist solely to starve this kind of coverage of advertising revenue.
Writing for the independent news site 404 Media, reporter Emanuel Maiberg and former Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler go deep on the "brand safety" industry, whose mission is to assist corporations in blocking their ads from showing up alongside real news:
https://www.404media.co/advertisers-dont-want-sites-like-jezebel-to-exist/
Maiberg and Koebler explain how industry associations like the World Federation of Marketers' Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) promulgate "frameworks" to help advertisers automatically detect and exclude real news from consideration when their ads are placed:
https://www.peer39.com/blog/garm-standards
This boycott makes use of scammy "AI" technology like "sentiment and emotional analysis" to determine whether an article is suitable for monetization. These parameters are then fed to the ad-tech duopoly's ad auction system, so Google and Meta (who control the vast majority of online advertising) can ensure that real news is starved of cash.
But reality is not brand-safe, and high quality, reputable journalistic outlets are concerned with reality, which means that the "brand safe" outlets that attract the most revenue are garbage websites that haven't yet been blacklisted by the ad-safety cartel, leading to major brands' ads showing up alongside notorious internet gross-out images like "goatse":
https://www.404media.co/sqword-game-dev-sneaks-goatse-onto-a-dozen-sites-that-stole-his-game/
More than a fifth of "brand safe" ad placements end up on "made for advertising" sites, which 404 Media describe as "trash websites that plagiarize content, are literally spam, pay for fake traffic, or are autogenerated websites that serve no other purpose than capturing ad dollars":
https://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/id/rr-2023-06-ana-programmatic-transparency-first-look
Despite all this, many progressives have become cheerleaders for "brand safety," as a countervailing force to the drawdown of trust and safety at online platforms, which led to the re-platforming of Nazis, QAnon conspiratorialists, TERFs, and other overt elements of the reactionary movement's vanguard on Twitter and Facebook. Articles about ads for major brands showing up alongside Nazi content on Twitter are now a staple of progressive reporting, presented as evidence of Elon Musk's lack of business acumen. The message of these stories is "Musk is bad at business because he's allowing Nazis on his platform, which will send advertisers bolting for the exits to avoid brand-safety crises."
This isn't wrong. Musk is a bad businessman (he's a good scam artist, though). Twitter is hemorrhaging advertisers, notwithstanding the desperate (and easily debunked) stats-juking its "CEO," Linda Yaccarino, floats onstage at tech conferences:
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/11/math-problem-for-linda-yaccarino-if-90-of-the-top-advertisers-have-come-back-but-are-only-spending-10-of-what-they-used-to-how-screwed-are-you/
But progressives are out of their minds if they think the primary effect of the brand safety industry is punishing Elon Musk for secretly loving Nazis. The primary effect of brand safety is killing reality-based coverage of the news of the day, and since reality has a well-known anti-conservative bias, anything that works against the reality-based community is ultimately good for oligarchy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
We can't afford to let schizmogenesis stampede us into loving things just because conservative culture warriors have been momentarily tricked into hating them as part of oligarchs' turkeys-voting-for-Christmas project. "Swivel-eyed loons hate it, so it must be good," is a worse-than-useless heuristic for navigating complex issues:
https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/
A much better rule of thumb is "If oligarchs love something, it's probably bad." Almost without exception, things that are good for oligarchs are bad for the rest of us. I mean, this whole shuttering of Jezebel starts with an oligarch imposing his will on millions of other people. Jezebel began life as a Gawker Media site, beloved of millions of readers, destroyed when FBI informant Peter Thiel secretly funded Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against the publisher in a successful bid to put them out of business to retaliate for their unfavorable coverage of Thiel:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/hogan-thiel-gawker-trial/554132/
This, in turn, put Jezebel under the ownership of G/O Media, who are unwilling to pay for a human salesforce that would – for example – sell advertising space on Jezebel to sex-toy companies or pro-abortion groups. G/O has been on a killing spree, shuttering beloved news outlets like Deadspin:
https://deadspin.com/this-is-how-things-work-now-at-g-o-media-1836908201
G/O's top exec, an oligarch named Jim Spanfeller who answers to the private equity looters at Great Hill Partners, is bent on ending reality-based coverage in favor of "letting robots shit out brand safe AI-assisted articles about generic topics":
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/ai-articles-disinformation-future-g-o-media-rcna95944
Three quarters of a century ago, Orwell coined a term to describe this kind of news: duckspeak,
It was not the man’s brain that was speaking it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words but it was not speech in true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness like the quacking of a duck.
When investors and analysts speak of "content" (rather than, say, "journalism"), this is what they mean – a warm slurry of platitudes, purged of any jagged-edged fragments to render it a perfectly suitable carrier for commercial messages targeted based on surveillance data about the "consumer" whose eyeballs are upon it.
This aversion to reality has been present among corporate decisionmakers since the earliest days, but the consolidation of power among large firms – ad-tech firms, online platforms, and "brands" themselves – makes corporate realityphobia much easier to turn into, well, reality, giving advertisers the fine-grained power to put Jezebel and every site like it out of business.
As Koebler and Maiberg's headliine so aptly puts it, "Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist."
The reason to deplore Nazis on Twitter is because they are Nazis, not because their content isn't brand-safe. The short-term wins progressives gain by legitimizing a corporate veto over what we see online are vastly overshadowed by the most important consequence of brand safety: the mass extinction of reality-based reporting. Reality isn't brand safe. If you're in the reality based community, brand safety should be your sworn enemy, even if they help you temporarily get a couple of Nazis kicked off Twitter.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/11/ad-jacency/#brand-safety
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aroundfortwayne · 2 years
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Solid waste rate proposal to be presented to City Council
New Post has been published on https://aroundfortwayne.com/news/2022/08/05/solid-waste-rate-proposal-to-be-presented-to-city-council/
Solid waste rate proposal to be presented to City Council
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Today, the City of Fort Wayne Indiana Administration announced a solid waste rate resolution and ordinance will be introduced to City Council on Tuesday, August 9, 2022.
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toskarinarchive · 27 days
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Toskarin Database
Last updated: 2024-03-19, 23:47+00:00
Current Toskarinlike Count: 31
toskarin-blog - First post (2017-11-14, 08:38)
toskarin - First post (2021-09-08, 21:59)
niraksot - First post (2022-10-25, 23:55)
toskarinfr (original, deleted) - First post (2023-05-26)
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cowgirlcherrie · 8 months
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CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST[masterlist]
skater! ellie x fem! reader
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synopsis: California; while known for its heat, legal marijuana, and hardcore skate culture, is the center of all disasters, especially for a local town skater who falls in love with her ex’s sweetheart roommate. The two teaming up to keep the past in the past and let the skater get the girl of her dreams.
warning: skating references and terminology will be used, lying, shiesty behavior, some parts are in txt and some are in full lengthed chapters, arguing, cursing, drama galoreee, sneaking around, betrayal, fighting, partying, injuries (skate related)
a/n: this is a gift (for 300,400 fllwers) and my first SMAU fic ♡ a TEST to see how I like writing in this format. But heavily inspired by Ang who has a wonderful amount of smau’s on their page @phantombriide ‘crush culture’ being an influence in particular and of course the talented @totheblood who has aamaaazing work on their page as well! ‘the hard way’ so check out their work as well I beg!! This fic short but long will alternate between smau and full length(I’m talking 9k+ words chapters) I really am testing the waters with this so letting me know how you like it or what fits and doesn’t will help me tremendously
Each chapter is paired by a song/ creative piece from Tyler The creator’s discography, his call me if you get lost (2021) album —entire fic based off of skate culture, odd future era
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prologue
chapter 01: WUSYANAME
chapter 02: CORSO
chapter 03: LEMONHEAD
chapter 04: RISE!
chapter 05:RUNITUP
chapter 06: SWEET, I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE
chapter 07: BOYFRIEND, GIRLFRIEND
chapter 08 (FINAL): SORRY NOT SORRY
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taglist
@starologist @destielcore @beforeimdeceased @spacewlf @elliestrwbrry @ellsss @emluvselandabs @mossc0vered @rarestdoll @luvrgalore @zahraaziza @sawaagyapong
© cowgirlcherrie 2023
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sunnebeam · 9 months
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twin flame bruise.
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SERIES.
pairing: jeon jeongguk x reader, jeon jungkook x reader (yes they're different people)
plot: the jeon twins have become nothing more than two strikingly similar looking guys who share a mere home address and a last name. but in their senior year of college, the estranged twins may have found one more thing they share in common – you.
warnings: jeon twins au, possible headache bc the use of jeongguk and jung kook is v confusing (but they're different people here your honor), specific warnings will be emphasized in the actual completed fic (whenever that may be)
masterlist + disclaimers.
note: this is an au i had since amas 2021. haven't finished it yet so please manage ur expectations bc 1. i'm too lazy and unmotivated to finish this, and 2. i have no idea where i'm going with the plot ^^
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JEON JEONGGUK.
nickname: Guk
description: the older twin, the golden son, the responsible one
appearance: styles his hair in a short & clean cut, has eleven piercings (6 on the right earlobe, 3 on the left earlobe, 1 through the right eyebrow, 1 on the lower lip), prefers studs as earrings, has a full sleeve tattoo on his right arm
hobbies: studying (yes he's smart too bc god has favorites), working out, singing (holds nightly karaoke sessions by himself), boxing (does it recreatively, not competitively)
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JEON JUNG KOOK.
nickname: JK
description: the younger twin, the black sheep, the rebellious one
appearance: has his long hair slicked back to complement his undercut, has 6 visible piercings on his earlobes (but rumor has it he has more elsewhere *wink*), prefers hoops or dangling earrings, has a couple of small tattoos on his arm but covers them with long sleeved shirts
hobbies: drawing (prefers old-fashioned sketching over digital), working out, playing guitar (he's self taught!), riding his motorcycle (he wears knee pads & a helmet bc safety is cool)
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INDEX.
PART 01.
PART 02.
PART 03.
PART 04.
PART 05.
PART 06.
PART 07.
PART 08.
EPILOGUE.
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COPYRIGHT 2023. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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calderacitylovers · 9 months
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Zutara SlowBurn FanFiction: Personal Favs, part I
·        I AM STILL HERE by owedbetter Published: 2017-10-09 | 77K words | 7 Chapters
After the Last Agni Kai K heals Z with the help of bloodbending. Very sweet.
 ·        THE SUMMIT by AJLenoire
Chronicles post-war years, as Gaang and other characters gather for annual summits to keep peace and build relationships between the Four Nations. Katara yearns for a bigger purpose than the Avatar’s companion and slowly grows into a shrewd diplomat. Very sweet slow burn ZK story. Has mature scenes.
 ·        CLOTHE ME IN SEASONS, DRESS ME IN SNOW by sadladybug Published: 2015-01-05 | 62K words | 7 Chapters
Follows old Zuko as he reflects on his life and what would have been if he kept Katara closer. Absolutely beautiful, but also a devastatingly heart-breaking story about loss and pain.
 ·        SILENT DECLARATIONS by Megara Pike (Megara_Pike) Published: 2021-01-20 | 2,6K words
A short story based on animation by Hayley Wong. Z finds K asleep in her study and carries her to bed. Very sweet, gentle story.
 ·        COVERED IN YOU by evergreenonthehorizon Published: 2021-04-02 | 55K words | 14 Chapters
Eight years after the war Z convinces K to take on a role of a Southern Water Tribe ambassador in the Caldera city. Both are completely clueless about each other’s feelings. Features political talks, big gestures, and a ball. Very cute, sweet slow-burn story. Has mature scenes.
 ·        TEN STRIDES IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION by evergreenonthehorizon Published: 2021-04-03 | 29K Words | 12 Chapters
A collection of short stories filling in the gaps between some of the events of ATLAS3 and up to the Last Agni Kai. Features accidental cuddling, embracing in the rain, sharing a bed for warmth, post-Ember Island Theater discussions, being discovered, waiting to be kissed, Suki & Katara being good friends, battle plans, Zuko & Sokka getting drunk, slow burn & angst. Very sweet.
 ·        THE SWAY OF THE SUN by TheBlackBriarSparrow Published: Published: 2019-10-14 | 102K Words | 27 Chapters
Two years post-war Gaang reunites in Caldera city for a secret party in honor of the overworked Fire Lord’s birthday. Rebels attack the palace setting a thrilling consequence of events in motion. Adventures, investigations, and fights ensue. Z & K work together and enlist old friends to help find missing people. Beautiful slow-burn story with an exciting plot.
·        A WARM EMBRACE by ewinkie Published: 2020-10-06 | 19K Words | 7 Chapters
An ATLAS3 rewrite from Southern Riders to the Last Agni Kai. Katara and Zuko have to hide in a cave following their encounter with Yon Rha. Comforting turns to cuddling, which turns to waking up on Appa's tail in each other's arms. Katara is shocked at how comfortable she is. Zuko is shocked that Katara doesn't hate him for it. Features sharing a bed, being discovered, slowburn, and lots of teenage silliness.
 ·        FOLLOWING BLUE by Boogum Published: 2018-11-07 | 39K Words | 10 Chapters
ATLA S2 rewrite. After Katara falls from Appa’s saddle during a pursuit, the Blue Spirit becomes her reluctant companion and helps her reunite with her friends. Ba Sing Se scenes are completely rewritten, and Z ends up joining the Gaang much earlier. Thrilling beginning, sweet middle, average ending.
 ·        ANOTHER WORD FOR ALCHEMY by FanPanda13 Published: 2014-08-19 | 108K words | 24 Chapters
Five years post-war Aang summons old friends for a summit and invites them on a trip to investigate mysterious locations where he experiences loss of bending. Features Gaang setting Z & K up, travelling on Appa like in the olden days, lots of sparring, royal courting, magnificent navy ships & war ballons. Thrilling story with fun banter between old friends. Slowburn, mature content.
 ·        CONSUME ME WITH FIRE, FLOOD ME WITH DESIRE by Dacamia Published: 2020-08-14 | 86K words | 24 Chapters
Steamy ATLAS2 and ATLA S3 rewrite. Z & K accidentally meetup on their way to Ba Sing Se and decide to travel together. Features aged-up characters, lots of intimate scenes, staying in a beautiful cave, helping villagers, betrayal in Ba Sing Se, reunion, forgiveness, etc. Explicit mature content.
 ·        ROOTS AND WINGS by zukoscomet Published: 2020-08-14 | 250K words | 25 Chapters
A series of short stories of Z & K as they grow closer, confess their love for one another and start a family.
 ·        THOSE WHO FAVOR FIRE by hiwasseelane Published: 2021-05-02 |29K Words | 13 Chapters
An ATLAS3 rewrite. Sweet, teen-appopriate.
Here’s a link to Part II of my personal favs.
Here’s a link to Wholesome Zutara Short Stories.
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sedicii · 1 month
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« What happens to a dream deferred? » — Charles and the lifelong quest towards fulfilling the boyhood dream of red.
link to part 1
📝 : Charles Leclerc: My First Time In A Music Studio on Youtube, 17/02/2024 | Charles Leclerc in 2018 (via @/FanaticsFerrari on Twitter) | AutoHebdo, 11/09/2018 | @/charles_leclerc on instagram, 27/10/2016 | "Leclerc looks like a gamble by Ferrari - but he’s not", The Guardian, Giles Richards, 12/09/2018 | @/Charles Leclerc on Facebook, 11/09/2018 | la Republica, 4/09/2019 | "It's a dream come true - What racing in red at Monza means to Ferrari's Leclerc", Formula 1, Lawrence Barretto, 7/09/2022 | Corriere del Veneto, Matteo Sorio, 10/09/2019 | Charles Leclerc, Autosprint Awards, Caschi d'Oro 2022 | It Is Daylight, Louise Glück | Charles Leclerc to GQ France, 28/05/2023 | Blinding, Florence + the Machine | Charles to Motorsport IT, 27/04/2023 | @/hammertime magazine on instagram, 31/01/2024 | Charles to Corriere dello Sport, 10/2022 | The Guardian, 23/12/2019 | FP, Alessandro Prada, 27/04/2023 | @/F1HLM on twitter, 30/08/2023 | "Charles Leclerc : Il faudrait changer le process pour arriver à la bonne décision", L’Equipe, Fréderic Ferret, 21/11/2022 | Sportsmanor, Rohit Kumar, 26/09/2023 | "Charles Leclerc Interview: Ferrari Driver On Vettel, 2021 And More", @/Formula1 on Youtube, 1/09/2020 | Delicate, Taylor Swift | Alla Guida, Francesco Domenighin, 27/10/2023 | @/leclercdata on twitter 14/08/2022 | Pole Position, Sportweek, La Gazetta dello Sport, 7/01/2023 | Charles Leclerc to DLui Magazine, 2021 | Charles Leclerc’s contract renewal announcement via @/charles_leclerc on instagram, 25/01/2024 (speech) | @/charles_leclerc on Instagram before the first race, 29/02/2024 I Dream Deferred, Langston Hughes
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helgatisha · 1 year
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All poses | part 2
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Somebody told me | I know
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Male poses 12 | 11 | 10
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Male poses 09 | 08 | 07
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Male poses 06 | 05
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Male poses 04 | 03
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My bad tin can | My tin can
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Valentine’s Day 2021 | Sweety
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Sitting paired poses | Valentine’s Day 2020
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Trio rio
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Trio luxurious
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Note
I’ve been doing my best to find proper descriptions of the pilgrims’ appearances, but my search results are being frustratingly vague, and the novel itself has a habit of giving this information in small, dispersed increments (which I struggle to find)—not to mention one or two costume changes on Monkey’s end.
So, I must ask, do you have any reliable sources for the crew’s physical appearance?
(Sorry if you’ve been asked this before!)
Sun Wukong - https://journeytothewestresearch.com/2018/05/30/what-does-sun-wukong-look-like-an-artist-and-cosplayer-resource/
Zhu Bajie - https://journeytothewestresearch.com/2021/08/08/what-does-zhu-bajie-look-like-a-resource-for-artists-and-cosplayers/
Everyone's height and also Tripitaka's description - https://journeytothewestresearch.com/2023/04/17/how-tall-are-the-main-characters-from-journey-to-the-west/
Sha Wujing's face and early clothing - https://journeytothewestresearch.com/2018/03/24/the-origins-and-evolution-of-sha-wujing/
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hynko · 9 months
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STARRING : multiple haikyuu characters - hinata, kageyama, tsukkishima, kuroo, kenma, lev, oikawa, iwaizumi, kunimi, koganegawa, futakuchi, bokuto, akaashi, konoha, ushijima, tendou, semi, shirabu, goshiki, terushima, sakusa, komori, kita, aran, tsumu & samu, suna
GENRE : drama / rom-com / angst. smau and writing combined
TAGLIST : cmnt if u want 2 b added <3
Status: ongoing & active
TWS: suggestive, minor depictions of violence, possible smut?? comedic but ANGSSSTTTT. implies sensitive topics, which will be indicated on the story tws.
synopsis. y/n is a rising star and a global phenomenon, loved and admired by millions. However, fame comes with a price. As many looked down upon and envied her, wishing for her downfall, y/n’s flourishing career was taken aback as a rival starts a scandal. Shocking many fans, leaving them worried, confused and disappointed. Distressed, she comes back to the one place which made her happy. But soon she discovers there may be more to unravel in her life, secrets that risks people lives, including hers. What lengths will she take to save her career?
au note: been awhile since i’ve written 😭 but this is obv inspired by The Idol. all haikyuu characters belong to furudate.
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ೃ⁀➷ CHAPTER LISTS !
00 : PROFILES
01 : ROLLING STONE
02 : ROLE MODEL
03 : DREAMS, FAIRYTAILS, FANTASIES
04 : THE PRICE OF FAME
05 : EGOMANIAC
06 : MERCEDES
07 : REHAB
08 : ADDICTIONS
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hynko est 2021-2023 do not repost, translate or copy.
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me-and-your-husband · 7 months
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me-and-your-husband's miscellaneous masterlist
* denotes smut!
Marvel
steve rogers
his favourite day* || 2k words I| 01/08/2021
it's your birthday, and steve has something to give you.
over it Il 550 words || 01/16/2021
steve thinks you need better taste in men.
peter parker
-peter parker with a size kink*
Chris Evans + characters
chris evans
-Chris having a library in his house*
andy barber
together ll 1.7k words I| 12/02/2021
you and andy spend your valentine's day together. part of "Happy Hoelentines" valentine's day gift exchange.
I'll be here Il 2k words Il 04/09/2021
jacob barber grew up with you around. when he gets charged with murder, how will your relationship with his family change? will your feelings for andy resurface once laurie is out of the picture?
johnny storm
-waking up with johnny in between your legs*
Attack on Titan
armin arlert
sensitive* |I n/a words Il 04/07/2021
you want armin really bad.
home* I| 5k words I| 04/08/2021
four years after you're presumed dead, you come knocking on the scout's doorstep.
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Gig apps trap reverse centaurs in Skinner boxes
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Enshittification is the process by which digital platforms devour themselves: first they dangle goodies in front of end users. Once users are locked in, the goodies are taken away and dangled before business customers who supply goods to the users. Once those business customers are stuck on the platform, the goodies are clawed away and showered on the platform’s shareholders:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
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/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
Enshittification isn’t just another way of saying “fraud” or “price gouging” or “wage theft.” Enshittification is intrinsically digital, because moving all those goodies around requires the flexibility that only comes with a digital businesses. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can’t rapidly change the price of eggs at Whole Foods without an army of kids with pricing guns on roller-skates. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can change the price of eggs on Amazon Fresh just by twiddling a knob on the service’s back-end.
Twiddling is the key to enshittification: rapidly adjusting prices, conditions and offers. As with any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Tech monopolists aren’t smarter than the Gilded Age sociopaths who monopolized rail or coal — they use the same tricks as those monsters of history, but they do them faster and with computers:
https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6
If Rockefeller wanted to crush a freight company, he couldn’t just click a mouse and lay down a pipeline that ran on the same route, and then click another mouse to make it go away when he was done. When Bezos wants to bankrupt Diapers.com — a company that refused to sell itself to Amazon — he just moved a slider so that diapers on Amazon were being sold below cost. Amazon lost $100m over three months, diapers.com went bankrupt, and every investor learned that competing with Amazon was a losing bet:
https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-bezos-went-thermonuclear-on-diapers-com.html
That’s the power of twiddling — but twiddling cuts both ways. The same flexibility that digital businesses enjoy is hypothetically available to workers and users. The airlines pioneered twiddling ticket prices, and that naturally gave rise to countertwiddling, in the form of comparison shopping sites that scraped the airlines’ sites to predict when tickets would be cheapest:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin
The airlines — like all abusive businesses — refused to tolerate this. They were allowed to touch their knobs as much as they wanted — indeed, they couldn’t stop touching those knobs — but when we tried to twiddle back, that was “felony contempt of business model,” and the airlines sued:
https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/30/airline-sues-man-for-founding-a-cheap-flights-website.html
And sued:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/business/southwest-airlines-lawsuit-prices.html
Platforms don’t just hate it when end-users twiddle back — if anything they are even more aggressive when their business-users dare to twiddle. Take Para, an app that Doordash drivers used to get a peek at the wages offered for jobs before they accepted them — something that Doordash hid from its workers. Doordash ruthlessly attacked Para, saying that by letting drivers know how much they’d earn before they did the work, Para was violating the law:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition
Which law? Well, take your pick. The modern meaning of “IP” is “any law that lets me use the law to control my competitors, competition or customers.” Platforms use a mix of anticircumvention law, patent, copyright, contract, cybersecurity and other legal systems to weave together a thicket of rules that allow them to shut down rivals for their Felony Contempt of Business Model:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
Enshittification relies on unlimited twiddling (by platforms), and a general prohibition on countertwiddling (by platform users). Enshittification is a form of fishing, in which bait is dangled before different groups of users and then nimbly withdrawn when they lunge for it. Twiddling puts the suppleness into the enshittifier’s fishing-rod, and a ban on countertwiddling weighs down platform users so they’re always a bit too slow to catch the bait.
Nowhere do we see twiddling’s impact more than in the “gig economy,” where workers are misclassified as independent contractors and put to work for an app that scripts their every move to the finest degree. When an app is your boss, you work for an employer who docks your pay for violating rules that you aren’t allowed to know — and where your attempts to learn those rules are constantly frustrated by the endless back-end twiddling that changes the rules faster than you can learn them.
As with every question of technology, the issue isn’t twiddling per se — it’s who does the twiddling and who gets twiddled. A worker armed with digital tools can play gig work employers off each other and force them to bid up the price of their labor; they can form co-ops with other workers that auto-refuse jobs that don’t pay enough, and use digital tools to organize to shift power from bosses to workers:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to
Take “reverse centaurs.” In AI research, a “centaur” is a human assisted by a machine that does more than either could do on their own. For example, a chess master and a chess program can play a better game together than either could play separately. A reverse centaur is a machine assisted by a human, where the machine is in charge and the human is a meat-puppet.
Think of Amazon warehouse workers wearing haptic location-aware wristbands that buzz at them continuously dictating where their hands must be; or Amazon drivers whose eye-movements are continuously tracked in order to penalize drivers who look in the “wrong” direction:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur
The difference between a centaur and a reverse centaur is the difference between a machine that makes your life better and a machine that makes your life worse so that your boss gets richer. Reverse centaurism is the 21st Century’s answer to Taylorism, the pseudoscience that saw white-coated “experts” subject workers to humiliating choreography down to the smallest movement of your fingertip:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust
While reverse centaurism was born in warehouses and other company-owned facilities, gig work let it make the leap into workers’ homes and cars. The 21st century has seen a return to the cottage industry — a form of production that once saw workers labor far from their bosses and thus beyond their control — but shriven of the autonomy and dignity that working from home once afforded:
https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk-463e2730ef0d
The rise and rise of bossware — which allows for remote surveillance of workers in their homes and cars — has turned “work from home” into “live at work.” Reverse centaurs can now be chickenized — a term from labor economics that describes how poultry farmers, who sell their birds to one of three vast poultry processors who have divided up the country like the Pope dividing up the “New World,” are uniquely exploited:
https://onezero.medium.com/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs-b2e8d5cda826
A chickenized reverse centaur has it rough: they must pay for the machines they use to make money for their bosses, they must obey the orders of the app that controls their work, and they are denied any of the protections that a traditional worker might enjoy, even as they are prohibited from deploying digital self-help measures that let them twiddle back to bargain for a better wage.
All of this sets the stage for a phenomenon called algorithmic wage discrimination, in which two workers doing the same job under the same conditions will see radically different payouts for that work. These payouts are continuously tweaked in the background by an algorithm that tries to predict the minimum sum a worker will accept to remain available without payment, to ensure sufficient workers to pick up jobs as they arise.
This phenomenon — and proposed policy and labor solutions to it — is expertly analyzed in “On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination,” a superb paper by UC Law San Franciscos Veena Dubal:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080
Dubal uses empirical data and enthnographic accounts from Uber drivers and other gig workers to explain how endless, self-directed twiddling allows gig companies pay workers less and pay themselves more. As @[email protected] explains in his LA Times article on Dubal’s research, the goal of the payment algorithm is to guess how often a given driver needs to receive fair compensation in order to keep them driving when the payments are unfair:
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-04-11/algorithmic-wage-discrimination
The algorithm combines nonconsensual dossiers compiled on individual drivers with population-scale data to seek an equilibrium between keeping drivers waiting, unpaid, for a job; and how much a driver needs to be paid for an individual job, in order to keep that driver from clocking out and doing something else. @ Here’s how that works. Sergio Avedian, a writer for The Rideshare Guy, ran an experiment with two brothers who both drove for Uber; one drove a Tesla and drove intermittently, the other brother rented a hybrid sedan and drove frequently. Sitting side-by-side with the brothers, Avedian showed how the brother with the Tesla was offered more for every trip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UADTiL3S67I
Uber wants to lure intermittent drivers into becoming frequent drivers. Uber doesn’t pay for an oversupply of drivers, because it only pays drivers when they have a passenger in the car. Having drivers on call — but idle — is a way for Uber to shift the cost of maintaining a capacity cushion to its workers.
What’s more, what Uber charges customers is not based on how much it pays its workers. As Uber’s head of product explained: Uber uses “machine-learning techniques to estimate how much groups of customers are willing to shell out for a ride. Uber calculates riders’ propensity for paying a higher price for a particular route at a certain time of day. For instance, someone traveling from a wealthy neighborhood to another tony spot might be asked to pay more than another person heading to a poorer part of town, even if demand, traffic and distance are the same.”
https://qz.com/990131/uber-is-practicing-price-discrimination-economists-say-that-might-not-be-a-bad-thing/
Uber has historically described its business a pure supply-and-demand matching system, where a rush of demand for rides triggers surge pricing, which lures out drivers, which takes care of the demand. That’s not how it works today, and it’s unclear if it ever worked that way. Today, a driver who consults the rider version of the Uber app before accepting a job — to compare how much the rider is paying to how much they stand to earn — is booted off the app and denied further journeys.
Surging, instead, has become just another way to twiddle drivers. One of Dubal’s subjects, Derrick, describes how Uber uses fake surges to lure drivers to airports: “You go to the airport, once the lot get kind of full, then the surge go away.” Other drivers describe how they use groupchats to call out fake surges: “I’m in the Marina. It’s dead. Fake surge.”
That’s pure twiddling. Twiddling turns gamification into gamblification, where your labor buys you a spin on a roulette wheel in a rigged casino. As a driver called Melissa, who had doubled down on her availability to earn a $100 bonus awarded for clocking a certain number of rides, told Dubal, “When you get close to the bonus, the rides start trickling in more slowly…. And it makes sense. It’s really the type of shit that they can do when it’s okay to have a surplus labor force that is just sitting there that they don’t have to pay for.”
Wherever you find reverse-centaurs, you get this kind of gamblification, where the rules are twiddled continuously to make sure that the house always wins. As a contract driver Amazon reverse centaur told Lauren Gurley for Motherboard, “Amazon uses these cameras allegedly to make sure they have a safer driving workforce, but they’re actually using them not to pay delivery companies”:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88npjv/amazons-ai-cameras-are-punishing-drivers-for-mistakes-they-didnt-make
Algorithmic wage discrimination is the robot overlord of our nightmares: its job is to relentlessly quest for vulnerabilities and exploit them. Drivers divide themselves into “ants” (drivers who take every job) and “pickers” (drivers who cherry-pick high-paying jobs). The algorithm’s job is ensuring that pickers get the plum assignments, not the ants, in the hopes of converting those pickers to app-dependent ants.
In my work on enshittification, I call this the “giant teddy bear” gambit. At every county fair, you’ll always spot some poor jerk carrying around a giant teddy-bear they “won” on the midway. But they didn’t win it — not by getting three balls in the peach-basket. Rather, the carny running the rigged game either chose not to operate the “scissor” that kicks balls out of the basket. Or, if the game is “honest” (that is, merely impossible to win, rather than gimmicked), the operator will make a too-good-to-refuse offer: “Get one ball in and I’ll give you this keychain. Win two keychains and I’ll let you trade them for this giant teddy bear.”
Carnies aren’t in the business of giving away giant teddy bears — rather, the gambit is an investment. Giving a mark a giant teddy bear to carry around the midway all day acts as a convincer, luring other marks to try to land three balls in the basket and win their own teddy bear.
In the same way, platforms like Uber distribute giant teddy bears to pickers, as a way of keeping the ants scurrying from job to job, and as a way of convincing the pickers to give up whatever work allows them to discriminate among Uber’s offers and hold out for the plum deals, whereupon then can be transmogrified into ants themselves.
Dubal describes the experience of Adil, a Syrian refugee who drives for Uber in the Bay Area. His colleagues are pickers, and showed him screenshots of how much they earned. Determined to get a share of that money, Adil became a model ant, driving two hours to San Francisco, driving three days straight, napping in his car, spending only one day per week with his family. The algorithm noticed that Adil needed the work, so it paid him less.
Adil responded the way the system predicted he would, by driving even more: “My friends they make it, so I keep going, maybe I can figure it out. It’s unsecure, and I don’t know how people they do it. I don’t know how I am doing it, but I have to. I mean, I don’t find another option. In a minute, if I find something else, oh man, I will be out immediately. I am a very patient person, that’s why I can continue.”
Another driver, Diego, told Dubal about how the winners of the giant teddy bears fell into the trap of thinking that they were “good at the app”: “Any time there’s some big shot getting high pay outs, they always shame everyone else and say you don’t know how to use the app. I think there’s secret PR campaigns going on that gives targeted payouts to select workers, and they just think it’s all them.”
That’s the power of twiddling: by hoarding all the flexibility offered by digital tools, the management at platforms can become centaurs, able to string along thousands of workers, while the workers are reverse-centaurs, puppeteered by the apps.
As the example of Adil shows, the algorithm doesn’t need to be very sophisticated in order to figure out which workers it can underpay. The system automates the kind of racial and gender discrimination that is formally illegal, but which is masked by the smokescreen of digitization. An employer who systematically paid women less than men, or Black people less than white people, would be liable to criminal and civil sanctions. But if an algorithm simply notices that people who have fewer job prospects drive more and will thus accept lower wages, that’s just “optimization,” not racism or sexism.
This is the key to understanding the AI hype bubble: when ghouls from multinational banks predict 13 trillion dollar markets for “AI,” what they mean is that digital tools will speed up the twiddling and other wage-suppression techniques to transfer $13T in value from workers and consumers to shareholders.
The American business lobby is relentlessly focused on the goal of reducing wages. That’s the force behind “free trade,” “right to work,” and other codewords for “paying workers less,” including “gig work.” Tech workers long saw themselves as above this fray, immune to labor exploitation because they worked for a noble profession that took care of its own.
But the epidemic of mass tech-worker layoffs, following on the heels of massive stock buybacks, has demonstrated that tech bosses are just like any other boss: willing to pay as little as they can get away with, and no more. Tech bosses are so comfortable with their market dominance and the lock-in of their customers that they are happy to turn out hundreds of thousands of skilled workers, convinced that the twiddling systems they’ve built are the kinds of self-licking ice-cream cones that are so simple even a manager can use them — no morlocks required.
The tech worker layoffs are best understood as an all-out war on tech worker morale, because that morale is the source of tech workers’ confidence and thus their demands for a larger share of the value generated by their labor. The current tech layoff template is very different from previous tech layoffs: today’s layoffs are taking place over a period of months, long after they are announced, and laid off tech worker is likely to be offered a months of paid post-layoff work, rather than severance. This means that tech workplaces are now haunted by the walking dead, workers who have been laid off but need to come into the office for months, even as the threat of layoffs looms over the heads of the workers who remain. As an old friend, recently laid off from Microsoft after decades of service, wrote to me, this is “a new arrow in the quiver of bringing tech workers to heel and ensuring that we’re properly thankful for the jobs we have (had?).”
Dubal is interested in more than analysis, she’s interested in action. She looks at the tactics already deployed by gig workers, who have not taken all this abuse lying down. Workers in the UK and EU organized through Worker Info Exchange and the App Drivers and Couriers Union have used the GDPR (the EU’s privacy law) to demand “algorithmic transparency,” as well as access to their data. In California, drivers hope to use similar provisions in the CCPA (a state privacy law) to do the same.
These efforts have borne fruit. When Cornell economists, led by Louis Hyman, published research (paid for by Uber) claiming that Uber drivers earned an average of $23/hour, it was data from these efforts that revealed the true average Uber driver’s wage was $9.74. Subsequent research in California found that Uber drivers’ wage fell to $6.22/hour after the passage of Prop 22, a worker misclassification law that gig companies spent $225m to pass, only to have the law struck down because of a careless drafting error:
https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2021-08-23/proposition-22-lyft-uber-decision-essential-california
But Dubal is skeptical that data-coops and transparency will achieve transformative change and build real worker power. Knowing how the algorithm works is useful, but it doesn’t mean you can do anything about it, not least because the platform owners can keep touching their knobs, twiddling the payout schedule on their rigged slot-machines.
Data co-ops start from the proposition that “data extraction is an inevitable form of labor for which workers should be remunerated.” It makes on-the-job surveillance acceptable, provided that workers are compensated for the spying. But co-ops aren’t unions, and they don’t have the power to bargain for a fair price for that data, and coops themselves lack the vast resources — “to store, clean, and understand” — data.
Co-ops are also badly situated to understand the true value of the data that is extracted from their members: “Workers cannot know whether the data collected will, at the population level, violate the civil rights of others or amplifies their own social oppression.”
Instead, Dubal wants an outright, nonwaivable prohibition on algorithmic wage discrimination. Just make it illegal. If firms cannot use gambling mechanisms to control worker behavior through variable pay systems, they will have to find ways to maintain flexible workforces while paying their workforce predictable wages under an employment model. If a firm cannot manage wages through digitally-determined variable pay systems, then the firm is less likely to employ algorithmic management.”
In other words, rather than using market mechanisms too constrain platform twiddling, Dubal just wants to make certain kinds of twiddling illegal. This is a growing trend in legal scholarship. For example, the economist Ramsi Woodcock has proposed a ban on surge pricing as a per se violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act:
https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-105-issue-4/the-efficient-queue-and-the-case-against-dynamic-pricing
Similarly, Dubal proposes that algorithmic wage discrimination violates another antitrust law: the Robinson-Patman Act, which “bans sellers from charging competing buyers different prices for the same commodity. Robinson-Patman enforcement was effectively halted under Reagan, kicking off a host of pathologies, like the rise of Walmart:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes
I really liked Dubal’s legal reasoning and argument, and to it I would add a call to reinvigorate countertwiddling: reforming laws that get in the way of workers who want to reverse-engineer, spoof, and control the apps that currently control them. Adversarial interoperability (AKA competitive compatibility or comcom) is key tool for building worker power in an era of digital Taylorism:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability
To see how that works, look to other jursidictions where workers have leapfrogged their European and American cousins, such as Indonesia, where gig workers and toolsmiths collaborate to make a whole suite of “tuyul apps,” which let them override the apps that gig companies expect them to use.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek
For example, ride-hailing companies won’t assign a train-station pickup to a driver unless they’re circling the station — which is incredibly dangerous during the congested moments after a train arrives. A tuyul app lets a driver park nearby and then spoof their phone’s GPS fix to the ridehailing company so that they appear to be right out front of the station.
In an ideal world, those workers would have a union, and be able to dictate the app’s functionality to their bosses. But workers shouldn’t have to wait for an ideal world: they don’t just need jam tomorrow — they need jam today. Tuyul apps, and apps like Para, which allow workers to extract more money under better working conditions, are a prelude to unionization and employer regulation, not a substitute for it.
Employers will not give workers one iota more power than they have to. Just look at the asymmetry between the regulation of union employees versus union busters. Under US law, employees of a union need to account for every single hour they work, every mile they drive, every location they visit, in public filings. Meanwhile, the union-busting industry — far larger and richer than unions — operate under a cloak of total secrecy, Workers aren’t even told which union busters their employers have hired — let alone get an accounting of how those union busters spend money, or how many of them are working undercover, pretending to be workers in order to sabotage the union.
Twiddling will only get an employer so far. Twiddling — like all “AI” — is based on analyzing the past to predict the future. The heuristics an algorithm creates to lure workers into their cars can’t account for rapid changes in the wider world, which is why companies who relied on “AI” scheduling apps (for example, to prevent their employees from logging enough hours to be entitled to benefits) were caught flatfooted by the Great Resignation.
Workers suddenly found themselves with bargaining power thanks to the departure of millions of workers — a mix of early retirees and workers who were killed or permanently disabled by covid — and they used that shortage to demand a larger share of the fruits of their labor. The outraged howls of the capital class at this development were telling: these companies are operated by the kinds of “capitalists” that MLK once identified, who want “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.”
https://twitter.com/KaseyKlimes/status/821836823022354432/
There's only 5 days left in the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon's Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they're DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.
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