#dark corners | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mostlysignssomeportents · 1 month

Text

Someday, we’ll all take comfort in the internet’s “dark corners”

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me on SUNDAY (Mar 24) with LAURA POITRAS in NYC, then Anaheim, and beyond!

Platforms decay. Tech bosses, unconstrained by competition; regulation; ad blockers and other adversarial interoperability; and their own workers, will inevitably hollow out their platforms, using ultraflexible digital technology to siphon value away from end users and business customers, leaving behind the bare minimum of value to keep all those users locked in:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/23/evacuate-the-platforms/#let-the-platforms-burn

Enshittification is the inevitable result of high switching costs. Tech bosses are keenly attuned to opportunities to lock in their customers and users, because the harder is to leave a platform, the worse the platform can treat you – the more value it can rob you of – without risking your departure.

But platform users are a heterogeneous, lumpy mass. Different groups of users have different switching costs. An adult Facebook user of long tenure has more reasons to stay than a younger user: they have more complex social lives, with nonoverlapping social circles from high school, college, various jobs, affinity groups, and family. They are more likely to have a chronic illness, or to be caring for someone with chronic illness, and to be a member of a social media support group they value highly. They are more likely to be connected to practical communities, like little league carpool rotas.

That's the terrible irony of platform decay: the more value you get from a platform, the more cost that platform can extract, a cost denominated in your wellbeing, enjoyment and dignity.

(At this point, someone will pipe up and say, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." It's nonsense. Dignity, respect and fairness aren't frequent flier program perks that tech companies dribble out to their best customers. Companies will happily treat their paying customers as "products" if they think those customers can't avoid other forms of rent-extraction, such as "attention rents")

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

Now, consider the converse proposition: for younger users, platforms deliver less value. Younger users have less complex social lives on average relative to their parents and grandparents, which means that platforms have fewer ways to sink their hooks into those young users. Further: young users tend to want things that the platforms don't want them to have, right from the first day they sign up. In particular, young users often want to conduct their socializing out of eyesight and earshot of adults, especially parents, teachers, and other authority figures. This means that a typical younger user has both more reasons to leave a platform as well as fewer reasons to stay there.

Younger people have an additional reason to bail on platforms early and often: if your online and offline social circles strongly overlap – if you see the same people at school as you do in your feed, it's much easier to reassemble your (smaller, less complex) social circle on a new platform.

And so: on average, young people like platforms less, hate them more, and have both less to lose and more to gain by leaving one platform for another. Sure, some young people are also burning with youth's neophilia. But even without that neophilia, young people are among the first to go when tech bosses start to ratchet up the enshittification.

Beyond young people, there are others who tend to jump ship early, like sex-workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/21/early-adopters/#sex-tech

Sex-workers' technology changes are only incidentally the result of some novelty-seeking impulse. The real reason to change platforms if you're a sex-worker is that the platforms are either absolutely hostile to sex-workers, or profoundly indifferent to the suffering their policy changes rain down upon them.

The same is broadly true of other disfavored groups, including those with out-of-mainstream political ideologies. Some of these groups hold progressive views, others are out-and-out Nazis, but all of them chafe at the platforms' policies at the best of times, and are far more ready to jump ship when the platforms tighten the noose on all their users.

This is where "dark corners" come in. The worst people on the internet have relocated to its so-called dark corners – privately hosted servers, groupchats, message-boards, etc. Some of these are notorious: Kiwi Farms, 4chan, 8kun, sprawling Telegram groupchats. Others only breach when they are implicated in waves of unthinkably cruel and grotesque crimes:

https://www.wired.com/story/764-com-child-predator-network/

The answer to crimes committed in the internet's dark corners is the same as for crimes committed anywhere: catch the criminals, prosecute the crimes. But a distressing number of well-meaning people observe the nexus between dark corners and the crimes that fester there, and conclude that the problem is with the dark corners, themselves.

These people observe that social media platforms like Facebook, and intermediaries like Cloudflare, DNS providers, and domain registrars constitute a "nexus of control" – chokepoints that trap the online lives of billions of people – and conclude that these gigantic corporations can and should be made "responsible" for their users:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

From there, it's a short leap to conclude that anyone who isn't in a position to be controlled by these too big to jail, too big to fail, relentlessly enshittifying corporations must be pushed into their demesne.

This is a deal with the devil. In the name of preventing small groups of terrible people from gathering in private, beyond the control of the world's insufferable and cruel tech barons, we risk dooming everyone else to being permanently within those unworthy billionaires' thumbs.

This is why people like Mark Zuckerberg are so eager to see an increase in "intermediary liability" rules like Section 230. Zuckerberg's greatest fear isn't having to spend more on moderators or algorithms that suppress controversial subjects:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/instagram-users-outraged-by-app-limiting-political-content-ahead-of-elections/

The thing he fears the most is losing control over his users. That's why he bought Instagram: to recapture the young users who were fleeing his mismanaged, enshittified platform in droves:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

A legal mandate for Zuckerberg to police his users is a legal requirement that he surveil and control those users. It's fundamentally incompatible with the new drive in competition circles to force Zuckerberg and his fellow tech barons to offer gateways that make it easier to escape their grasp, by allowing users to depart Facebook and continue to socialize with the users who stay behind:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

Remember: the more locked-in a platform user is, the harder that platform will squeeze that user, safe in the knowledge that the cost of leaving is higher than the cost of staying and tolerating the platform's abuse.

This is the problem with "feudal security" – the warlord who lures you into his castle fortress with the promise of protection from external threats is, in reality, operating a prison where no one can protect you from him:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#manorialism

Rather than fighting to abolish dark corners because only the worst people on the internet use them today, we should be normalizing dark corners, making it easier for every kind of user to find a cozy nook that is shaded from the baleful glare of Zuck and his fellow, eminently guillotineable tech warlords:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/15/normalize-dark-corners/

Enshittification is relentless. The collapse of the restraints that penalized tech companies who abused their users – competition, regulation, interoperability and their own workers' consciences – has inculcated every tech boss with an incurable enshittification imperative.

Efforts to make the platforms safer for their users can only take us so far. Fundamentally, these vast, centralized systems that vest authority with flawed and mediocre and frail human dictators (who fancy themselves noble, brilliant and infallible) will never be safe for human habitation. Rather than focusing on improving the platforms, we should be evacuating them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/09/let-the-platforms-burn/

Online communities that control their own moderation policies won't always get it right. But there is a whole host of difficult moderation calls that can never be adequately handled by outsiders overseeing vast, sprawling platforms. Distinguishing friendly banter from harassment requires the context that only an insider can hope to possess.

We all deserve dark corners where we stand a chance of finding well-managed communities that can deliver the value that keeps us stuck to our decaying giant platforms. Eventually, the enshittification will chase every user off these platforms – not just kids or sex-workers or political radicals. When that happens, it sure would be nice if everyone could set up in a dark corner of their own.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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/2024/03/23/evacuate-the-platforms/#let-the-platforms-burn

#pluralistic #online harms #interoperability #dma #interop #feudal security #switching costs #dark corners #web theory #darknet #platforms #enshittification #evacuate the platforms #bulletproof hosting #incentives matter #platform decay #shitty technology adoption curve

215 notes · View notes

dark-ethereal-visions · 2 months

Text

Thora Birch is a top-tier horror scream queen!

And I will die on this hill!

#horror #scream queens #thora birch #train #the walking dead #twd #kindred spirits #deadline #dark corners #ghost world #the hole #13 minutes #mayfair witches

8 notes · View notes

kayakovicyoo · 3 days

Text

Dark Corners (2006)

#thora birch #dark corners #00s horror #horror #horror movies

3 notes · View notes

russellejoslin · 3 months

Text

#liminal #dreamcore #weirdcore #liminal spaces #dark aesthetic #oddcore #seedy #creepycore #france #paris #backrooms #dark corners #nightcore #midnights #nightmare time #insomnia #2am thoughts #3am thoughts #tranquility

2 notes · View notes

lascitasdelashoras · 5 months

Text

Bruno Santos - Dark Corner Bestiary, en Behance

#bruno santos #dark corners #bestiario #behance

4 notes · View notes

spookyspaghettisundae · 5 months

Text

Do No Harm

There are a lot of things to like about living alone. Wondering if you were not alone in the house was not among those things.

As so often, I was down in the cellar, doing my laundry. Nothing out of the ordinary in and of itself. The house wasn’t exactly some decrepit old haunted mansion that would give you the willies just by looking at it, but it was also old enough to fuel uneasiness, what with its many dark corners and old wooden floorboards and doors creaking and groaning in the night.

After everybody else had moved out of the place, the whole cellar area had a very different sound and feel to it. More spacious, liminal, and just… colder, overall.

Whatever hadn’t been moved out had wound up in a landfill, leaving a lot of empty shelves and cabinets in the cellar. I didn’t have much to fill it out by myself, so every sound you made down there now had this hollow echo to it.

Especially in the middle of a routine like plunking my laundry into the machine, measuring liquid detergent, and setting things up for a wash cycle, certain sounds stood out. Anything that didn’t fit into the mold of that routine.

I couldn’t really tell at the time, but there was a sound out of place down there. A small scraping noise, just once, not repeating. Easy to mistake with my slippers scraping against the bare concrete of the cellar floor.

It was also really cold that night. My breath condensed in front of me when I exhaled, and I broke my routine to check if all windows in the cellar were shut.

They were.

And I felt something else. A presence lurked behind me.

I knew I wasn’t alone down there.

Click. Click.

I switched on every light to banish the shadows from all dark corners. Click. A hanging bulb swung back and forth, shadows cast from empty shelves engaged each other in a rhythmic, swaying dance.

Nothing. Nothing behind me, nothing at all. I kept telling myself that my mind was playing tricks on me.

Really, this was the exact downside of living alone.

Anyway, nothing came of it. I didn’t spot anything out of the ordinary. I couldn’t shake the feeling of a presence, but I also couldn’t find anything, so it had to have been my imagination, right?

Wrong.

It would be weeks until I learned just how wrong I was.

A week later, there it was again. While I was doing laundry again, no less. I mean, that’s the only reason I went down into the cellar. This time, I felt something while I was ferrying wet laundry from washing machine into the dryer.

There, behind me, a presence. Whenever I turned, and—

Click.

Lights on, I found nothing. Only empty space. Dark corners where only dim light reached, and dust had gathered. If I had been just a bit more paranoid, I would have told myself that I kept hearing a second echo of my movements, always just behind me.

Motions I couldn’t glimpse, always just outside my field of vision, shadows fleeting from the corner of my eye, ever elusive and never truly seen. The kind of thing that makes us tell ourselves that it’s just our nerves, right?

It was cold in the cellar again, so very cold, as if someone had left the windows open and flooded the place with wintry air.

I checked the latches on the windows, and they felt loose—looser than they probably should be feeling to open and shut.

Like they had been in frequent use.

Feeling a bit more spooked at that thought, I slammed the dryer’s lid shut and started its cycle. The machine chugged and rumbled to life. Meanwhile, I searched my entire house, paranoid enough to wonder if I wasn’t actually alone. Exploring every room and switching on every light, I gripped an old baseball bat, ready for the worst.

Still, nothing. I found myself in an empty house with every light on.

I felt silly for the rest of the night. I treated myself to some wine and my favorite show, and that was that.

A few weeks later, it happened again. Just enough time having passed that I forgot about it. Winter’s bite flooded the cellar, as if I had forgotten to close the windows.

Without fail, all of them were shut. And nowhere near as difficult to open and close as they probably should have been.

That weird sensation of a presence nearby… it had almost become part of the routine itself. Me going about my things, peering into dark corners once light bulbs illuminated them—finding nothing, and feeling more ridiculous by the second.

Of course there was nothing. I started switching off every light and gave the washing machine one last passing glance and turned and—

Eyes. In the dark.

Yellow, shiny, glistening eyes, staring right back at me.

Paralyzing me with my own dread, I turned into the deer frozen in the headlights.

From the darkest corner of the cellar, yellow eyes locked onto my own gaze.

A cat, I thought at first, but that was just my mind trying to protect itself from the frightening reality. Because the eyes were too big, and too high up in the corner—high up, against the ceiling, like something hanging there, or rather… something very tall. Several heads taller than me.

Looming, even.

And it was cold, oh so cold. The eyes followed me as I stumbled back up the creaking old stairs, eventually scrambling up the last steps and slamming the door shut, and locking it behind me, and finding my baseball bat again. I, a pathetic heap of terror and white-knuckling that bat, sat on the floor with my back to the kitchen cupboards, and my gaze locked onto the cellar door.

Sometime later, police officers showed up.

They found nothing. I described it as some kind of wild animal having gotten into my cellar. This seemed routine enough for them, in turn. They left me with contact information for animal services. An uneasy feeling remained, and I kept telling myself that my mind had been playing tricks on me.

The yellow eyes must have been my imagination.

There was nothing there. All windows were firmly closed, all doors in and out locked, and the two police officers searched my entire home from top to bottom. They found nothing. And if anything had been downstairs in the cellar, I would have had to have seen it emerge from the door while I waited.

No such thing.

The cops had stayed extremely calm the entire time. Maybe they hadn’t taken me seriously. Who knew how many such reports they clocked in this part of town? Hell, I struggled to take myself seriously.

Yellow eyes of some creature in my basement?

Who was I kidding?

Then it happened it again. Weeks later, again.

The sense of a presence, the cold air, the hollow echo of a sound that didn’t belong. I didn’t even start searching this time. I didn’t dare, I didn’t want to see those yellow eyes again. I just up and got the baseball bat first, and had my phone ready to trigger an emergency call. I only needed to press the button.

The eyes. Yellow eyes. There they were again, staring back at me, from the shadows in the cellar, just before I could switch on a light to expose the body they belonged to.

Stricken with fear, I was frozen solid again.

Only this time, the presence spoke. It spoke to me.

“Please, let me stay here,” it said. A voice like sandpaper on wood. Hissing, hoarse, it sounded like an old woman. “I will do no harm. I just need a place to stay for the winter.”

My paralysis persisted.

Those eyes never blinked. They glistened, with strange intelligence, and I felt like they were probing the very depths of my soul.

And as speechless as I was, the presence didn’t miss a beat.

“I will not bother you at all.”

It stared.

Rather than screaming, or running away, I hyperventilated. Apparently, I possessed neither fight nor flight instincts, being reduced to a shivering, helpless mess.

When I finally regained some command over my senses and body, I fought the temptation to shine light upon the presence, to see what might frame those yellow, unblinking eyes.

“What are you?” was all I mustered to ask, sounding so meek and pathetic that I pitied myself.

Yet a sliver of hope filled me with warmth; hope that this presence found me just as pathetic. That it might spare me. Horrid imagery of claws and fangs and a hulking monster flooded my mind; visions of being torn apart and eaten alive.

The presence did no such thing. It only responded in the same, oddly soothing voice it had spoken in before.

“You would not understand, for it is difficult to explain to your species. And you can think of me as a… dream once I am gone.”

I had so many questions but my lips only flapped without emitting words, like a fish on land.

“What—how did you learn how to speak like… us?”

The yellow eyes narrowed.

“I watched and I listened for a long time. Now I understand everything you say, and can speak the same way in return.”

That only sparked more curiosity, and my imagination kept circling back to blood and gore and horrible deaths, leaving me speechless again. I wanted to know what exactly this presence was, where it came from, what it wanted. I wanted to know why it was hiding in my cellar, out of all places, maybe even if it had a name—

It interrupted my endless train of thoughts with more soft-spoken words.

“I promise to do no harm. I will just stay a little while… longer. Until it is warmer outside.”

Finally eking out another question, I asked, “And you… you just… you’ll stay down here?”

The yellow eyes widened. They reminded me of a cat.

A huge cat, given how high up they loomed. Something big enough to be just on the verge of leaping out from those shadows, and crushing me under its weight, snapping my bones like twigs.

“No. I venture outside sometimes.”

“What… what do you do out there?”

“I explore. I observe.”

My mind exploded with more imagery running wild. I envisioned myself sleeping in my bed with the presence and its yellow eyes looming over me, lurking around my helpless self and—

“I will do better to ensure you do not notice me. And then I will be gone,” said the presence.

Almost as if it had read my mind. As if it could taste my fear.

And to some degree, this strangely made me feel better—like it was negotiating, and genuinely interested in alleviating my fears. For both our sakes.

It needed a place to stay. What was the alternative?

Saying no, and getting torn apart by this mysterious beast behind the yellow eyes?

I swallowed all fear, and pride, and everything else. Happy I hadn’t peed my pants, I nodded, and meekly told the presence it could stay for the winter.

It said nothing at all.

Once more, I stumbled backwards up the stairs, thumping up, and out of my cellar. Those yellow eyes and their unblinking gaze stayed glued onto me all the way up, and I slammed the door shut. Locked it.

I locked every door in the house, checked every corner, and switched on every light. I did not get a second of sleep that night. Every time wood creaked and groaned, I dreaded the yellow-eyed presence was lurking throughout my house, stalking me.

This became my new ritual for the next days, though exhaustion eventually overwhelmed me, and I found some semblance of sleep behind locked doors, curled up in my bed, always hugging onto my baseball bat.

Weeks. They melted away.

I never saw the presence again. The yellow eyes only haunted my dreams. I even started going to a laundromat instead of doing laundry in my own cellar. The door down there stayed locked. Sometimes, I felt the cold wintry air seeping through cracks from downstairs, but I never dared to check.

Some part of me wanted to learn more, know more, understand more, but I was too afraid to descend and find out.

I’m not even sure why I’m telling you about this now. It sounds like I’m crazy, like this was some kind of fever dream. And I don’t blame you if that’s what you take away from this.

I only checked down there again when green blossomed on trees again and I no longer felt a chill coming from the cellar door.

Come spring, I searched the cellar. I found nothing. Not a trace. Just dust and empty shadows.

Still, I expected to see those yellow eyes again. Still, I found nothing for the following months. Eventually, summer came.

It was gone.

No trace of it. If I hadn’t known it had been there, if I didn’t tell myself it had been there, I would question my sanity. But I know what I saw. What I felt.

And then it was gone.

The presence was gone.

Gone for good.

Could you please move in with me? I don’t want to be alone this winter.

2 notes · View notes

euesworld · 2 years

Text

"Caress my innermost heart, the darkest corners of such and I can promise you that I will love you so damn much.."

Put me at ease by loving even my darkness - eUë

32 notes · View notes

lvlupmike · 9 months

Text

GOW.

#exploring #hallway #unknown #god of war #dark corners

2 notes · View notes

ash-and-books · 11 months

Photo

Rating: 4/5

Book Blurb: "A gripping story that is equal parts shocking, unnerving, and thrilling. Goldin takes the ‘true crime’ trope to new and unexpected territory.” —Karin Slaughter, New York Times and #1 international bestselling author of Girl, Forgotten Rachel Krall, the true crime podcaster star of Megan Goldin’s acclaimed The Night Swim, returns to search for a popular influencer who disappears after visiting a suspected serial killer. Terence Bailey is about to be released from prison for breaking and entering, though investigators have long suspected him in the murders of six women. As his release date approaches, Bailey gets a surprise visit from Maddison Logan, a hot, young influencer with a huge social media following. Hours later, Maddison disappears, and police suspect she’s been kidnapped—or worse. Is Maddison’s disappearance connected to her visit to Bailey? And why was she visiting him in the first place? When they hit a wall in the investigation, the FBI reluctantly asks for Rachel Krall’s help in finding the missing influencer. Maddison seems to only exist on social media; she has no family, no friends, and other than in her posts, most people have never seen her. Who is she, really? Using a fake Instagram account, Rachel goes undercover to BuzzCon, a popular influencer conference, where she discovers a world of fierce rivalry that may have turned lethal. When police find the body of a woman with a tattoo of a snake eating its tail—identical to a tattoo Rachel had seen on Bailey’s hand—the FBI must consider a chilling possibility: Bailey has an accomplice on the outside and a dangerous obsession with influencers, including Rachel Krall herself. Suddenly the target of a monster hiding in plain sight, Rachel is forced to confront the very real dangers that lurk in the dark corners of the internet.

Review:

When a true crime podcaster finds herself in the center of a case involving a popular missing influencer who is connected to a suspected serial killer... and the possibility that there is a larger case at hand and that the real killer could still be outside. Rachel Krall is a true crime podcaster who actually helped solve real cases, but then she is suddenly called in by the FBI to help with a case involving Terence Bailey, a man who was put in prison for breaking and entering though he was long suspected of murdering six women.... Terence is about to be let out of prison soon but he got a surprise visit from Maddison Logan, a hot young influencer with a huge following.... who disappears hours after visiting Terence. The FBI ask Rachel to come help because she somehow came up in the conversation between Maddison and Terence, and now Rachel is invested in finding out what exactly happened to Tessa and why she was brought into the conversation. Maddison might be a famous influencer, but there is no real information on her and who she really is outside of her curated social media. More questions begin to pile up as to why both Terence and Maddison have matching ouroboros tattoos and why said tattoo is also found on another victim that has just appeared despite the fact that Terrance is still in prison... which means there’s another killer on the outside. The real question is are Terence and the outside killer working together or is something else happening??? Rachel soon finds herself being the target of the killer, can she figure it out before its too late? This was a really fun mystery and it felt like an episode of Criminal Minds, with how we got the POVs between Rachel, The Killer, and Joe the FBI agent. I liked how the mystery played out and enjoyed that we got background info on the case in the format of Rachel’s podcast throughout the book. I’ve been a big fan of Megan Goldin’s books and this one did not disappoint!

*Thanks Netgalley and St. Martin's Press for sending me an arc in exchange for an honest review*

#book review #bookish #thriller book #dark corners

1 note · View note