𝐅𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐤 𝐋𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐌𝐞
(A Lisa Frankenstein, Eddie Munson AU)
next ┊ 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐌𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭
Summary: After a series of unfortunate events in your life, and lonelier than ever, you often turn to a dead guy and his tombstone for comfort. Never in your wildest, fucked up dreams did you imagine he’d turn to you for the same thing, but you find yourself hiding a living corpse, bringing him further to life, reaping some justice, and cutting off a lot of body parts all while trying to fit in and falling in love.
a/n: Part One is here! Just want to say thank you to my friends for hearing me rant and rave about Lisa Frankenstein for weeks now, though I’ve been unbearable with this concept in my head. This will be the longest chapter, just to establish some stuff, but we’ll get to the slaying! Hope you love Undead!Zombie!Eddie as much as I do. Happy reading! (p.s.,there will be some romantic smut in a later part)
Chapter warnings: a bit steve harrington x reader, some eddie munson x other female, death of a family member, brief description of SA (bordered with RED DIVIDERS if you’d like to skip), mistreatment of Reader, suicidal ideation (reader just has dark humor), implied murder, very campy, very cunty.
THEN, 1986.
“Where you head’n too so in a hurry, boy?” Wayne Munson asked, sat on the couch with a mug of steaming hot coffee in one hand and the television remote in the other as he watched his nephew bounce around the trailer, grabbing all of the the items he let haphazardly around.
Wayne always told him to pick up his things, but like the rambunctious boy he was, there was no breaking out of his messy habits.
“I got people to see, pops. Things to do. Trouble to ‘cause, cops to anger, you know the drill.” Eddie didn’t even need to turn around to know his uncle was scowling but he was proven correct when he turned to throw his father figure a shit eating grin over his shoulder, “Kidding, old man. Mom had me baptized when I was a baby, remember? I can do no wrong, like Achilles.”
“Wha’?”
“Ugh, dad. If I have to explain the joke, it ruins it. I’ll be back by dinner, alright?”
Wayne fixed him with a pointed look, “You best be on your best behavior, you hear me?”
“Always.” Eddie gave a mock salute before dipping out the front door, still grinning as he tossed the keys of the van and caught them midair.
While he wasn’t necessarily going to cause trouble, he certainly would be providing the fun grass, powder and pills that were often behind it. Eddie knew Wayne was aware of what he did, had implied so when talking about how he knew Eddie was a good kid, just living in the wrong circumstances sometimes. Always said he wanted nothing but the best for his boy and for Eddie to realize he was meant for more than what this particular town forced on him.
Made Eddie’s chest tight, but seeing things like the broken patio board—Eddie had accidentally stomped through it after seeing a spider—reinforced Eddie’s belief that he’d much rather help out any way he could than let his uncle bear the financial weight of providing for him.
The van roared to life, after sputtering for a good seven seconds, and Eddie revved the engine a little. As he let her warm up, something in the side mirror caught his attention.
Someone.
Sheila. His neighbor in the trailer across the street. She was hauling a box to a car, looked rather heavy and Eddie would have dropped everything to scramble over and help her, had it not been for Mr.Brawn at her side.
Eddie watched as the guy, who stole the girl he was in love with right out of his arms, grabbed the box. The two lovers exchanged words which ended with them laughing at something as she followed him to the car.
He slid the box into the packed car as she climbed into the passenger seat, and before Eddie knew it, he was watching her drive away, right out of his life forever.
Eddie hadn’t even realized he was clutching his steering wheel so tight, his knuckles were straining against the skin, hot tears pooling at his waterline but he refused to let them fall. He’d shed more than enough tears over her, over what could have been.
They started off so promising; throwing flirty waves from their bedroom windows, occasionally at school, before she approached him for weed. After that, came the whirlwind romance and Eddie hadn’t considered himself a romantic before—hadn’t had a whole lot of opportunities to make that discovery but he was so fucking romantic. A big sap. And he wasn’t ashamed of it.
Until she’d graduated, and he hadn’t. Again. Turns out, not trying at academics all year and then aiming to ace finals wasn’t enough.
Suddenly, all the bullshit naive plans they had to run away somewhere far from Hawkins weren’t possible. At least, Sheila couldn’t with Eddie.
He lost her to a guy in another band, had made the mistake of taking a piss after he and Corroded Coffin performed to their tiny ass crowd, and had come back to see her talking to the keyboardist of the band that had gone on before them. She looked entranced, leaning forward to hang on to whatever the fuck he was saying. When Eddie had gone over to ask her if she was ready to head out, fully prepared to tuck her under his arm and way from the keyboardist, she’d insisted and told him to his face, in front of his apparent competition, that she was gonna stick around a little longer and he should head out without her.
He’d spent the entire night pacing in front of his window, glancing out of it every five minutes and every time he heard a pair of wheels turn onto the dirt road. Eddie got his confirmation when his car happened to be one of them. He’d watched, heart splintering, as the keyboardist got out of the car and walked around to open her door for her before they disappeared into her trailer. Eddie knew her dad worked nights. Knew what she and that musician were doing and he’d thrown up the entire contents of his stomach at the imagery before passing out.
Eddie woke up to Sheila hovering above him and framed by the glow of the bathroom light like some angel. She’d dumped him right there and left the spare key he’d trusted her with on the table.
And now, she was living her dream with someone else while Eddie got to stick around this shitty town with these people who could barely stand him for no reason (and yeah, okay, maybe he’d poke their buttons). In truth, while he was a little heartbroken over her, it was the fact that she still got her happy ending that hurt the most.
The girls around Hawkins might have been interested in maybe hooking up with him, but they weren’t interested in being Eddie’s girl. Weren’t interested in falling stupid in love with him, making plans to start a life together. Didn’t want him in their plans.
Eddie Munson was lonely. And it sucked.
With a heavy sigh, he cranked on the radio, fingers twisting the volume dial up to the most obnoxious level before shifting the gear to drive.
“It’ll get better, Munson. Love ain’t no stranger.” He mumbled, sucking on his teeth and pulling out on the road.
If he had known then where it would lead him, where the night would take him, he would have at least hugged his uncle. It would be the last time he saw him, and it would be the last time Wayne Munson saw his nephew alive.
Three days later, he’d be identifying and weeping over his boy’s body in the morgue after reporting Eddie missing when he didn’t come home.
NOW, 1989
“Where are you going? It’s almost time for breakfast.” Chrissy called out, head poking out from her bedroom as she watched you race down the hall.
“Not hungry! I’ll be back soon!” You called over your shoulder, the large sheet of craft paper wrinkling in your hand as you took the stairs two at a time before bounding down the short entryway.
You’d almost crossed the foyer and then slammed yourself back against the wall as you saw Laura, Chrissy’s mom, fiddling with something at the table. She had the radio on, some garbage self help tape spewing nonsense to her, and that condescending smile on her face.
Yeah, you’d be avoiding her, lest you wish to be verbally and eloquently belittled. How Chrissy came out of her toxic womb to be such a good person, you’d never understand.
When Laura crossed into the kitchen, you sprinted for the door, fumbling a little with the knob in your urgency, but once you got it open, you were out, running across the walkway and the fencing around the house until you were in the woods behind it.
Only then did you feel safe, the trees a welcome reprieve from your living situation, the magnifying glass this new town had you under, and from the world in general.
You’d come from a small town before Hawkins, so you were used to small town living. But these people were so judgemental. You hadn’t even grabbed a box from the moving van before your neighbors were casting you snide looks, noses turning up and backs to you as they watered their yard and lounged about.
Four months later, nothing had changed. If anything, they were more open with their disdain for you, commenting on your demeanor (and you were a cool fucking person), outfits, hair, body. It was annoying. They were annoying. EVERYTHING was annoying.
You didn’t even want to be there but you had no real choice. You’d graduated high school a couple of years ago and despite the popular teenage notion that you’d simply pack up your things, go to college and be successful at whatever career you wanted, life did not happen like the movies. The freedom you’d been promised by your own delusions never came. That bitch came with a hefty price tag and you weren’t exactly jumping into a safe of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck with your minimum wage job.
You’d gotten into several schools of your choice, but scholarships wouldn’t be nearly enough to cover it, and you’d literally have to sell your entire body to science if you wanted to be able to afford the loans you were being offered, since their interest rates were higher than the standard human beings’ lifespan.
So, living with the ‘rents was checked off on your list of things you didn’t want to continue doing past your high school graduation. And hey—you were only 19 years-old! You were still young! Just save up a few years, and maybe one day you’d be able to think about taking a loan. You had time. What could possibly go wrong to throw your plans off?
Your mother was murdered.
Yeah, that was a bummer. Could’ve been worse, you supposed. You could have died with her, when your home had been broken into, and sometimes you wish you had. Alas, you were still breathing, albeit extremely traumatized. But only good ol’ mom was six feet in the ground, in an entirely different town, because your father had also moved on a mere few months after her death, with the worst woman to leave flaming footprints on the earth’s crust, and they’d eloped after like six dates before moving you to a town where you knew no one.
Thinking about it actually made you sick and feel a little delusional.
The only real good thing about your entire soap opera of a year was the community college you’d been able to enroll in. You had no real idea what you wanted to do in life, had no real drive for career paths, but you were doing something, and that something kept the she-devil that was your stepmother off your back. Most of the time. Some of the time. She couldn’t say you were a deadbeat yet.
Chrissy, your sweet to a definitive and insensitive fault step-sister had pushed you into going with her for registration. Convinced you it was the perfect way to make some friends. It was hard to say no to Chrissy, she had a way with people and could make the meekest soul feel like they were capable of anything and everything. She could always see the best in people, and she was outgoing. Your time in Hawkins had been brief, but you’d easily gathered Chrissy was popular, a former cheerleader (and she’d successfully tried out for the community college team) and beloved by all. While part of you felt a little jealous at her confidence, you admired her more. She was never intentionally mean to you, either. She made the occasional comment, but it seemed like Chrissy had more so a filter problem, rather than spitting anything out with sugar coated hostility like her mother. Chrissy was...nice. After everything you've been through, you could use a little nice in your life.
And sometimes nice was also the woods behind your house, as it led to the Hawkins’ Cemetery.
Morbid, sure, but you couldn’t help yourself. After a particularly nasty encounter with Laura the first week of your Hawkins sentence, and feeling lonelier than you’d ever felt before, you’d gone for a walk, tears decorating your face with wet trails as you tried to physically hold yourself together, arms wrapped around yourself.
You’d arrived at the cemetery, and because you couldn’t pay your mother a visit, you decided the only decent thing to do was visit other lonely souls.
You’d stopped to pay your respects to just about every tombstone and plaque, but one in particular caught your attention.
Tucked away in a corner and separate from the other graves, under a weeping willow, was the most damaged tombstone of them all. Parts of it were broken off, a lot of the information pertaining to the individual underneath it was seemingly grated off. You had no idea who it was, the only remaining legible letters were MUN and you figured it was he simply because you’d taken some paper to the tombstone for etching and ran a black crayon over it. You’d been able to make out the word ‘he’ on the paper and deduced it had once read may he rest in peace.
The state of his tombstone surprised you, given how recent the date of death was. While his birth date had also been worn away, the year of death—1986–had been left. It was 1989. No way his grave should’ve looked like that.
Apparently, even the groundskeeper avoided his part of the cemetery. The grass around his grave was overgrown, and pitiful. So, you’d gone home, grabbed the lawn mower, and pushed it all the way over. You’d ended up disgusting, covered in grass, dirt and sweating like a cheater on a Sunday morning, but his grave was looking better. You’d taken to caring for his grave after that. A bunch of your trinkets and things you'd seen that you immediately thought he’d like surrounded him now and you’d even planted some bluebells.
He also made surprisingly good conversation, even though he never talked to you. His presence, while mostly imaginary to you, was comforting.
So, during any free time you had, you were sat against his tombstone, chatting about your day, life, whatever you wanted. Felt like he was always listening, no matter the subject and it was really lovely to be heard.
When you arrived at the cemetery, it was practically vacant, with just the red headed girl you normally saw. You didn’t see her all the time, she was just one of the faces you saw the most, and that was only a handful of occasions. For the most part, Hawkins didn’t seem keen on remembering the dead.
“Hope you haven’t been lonely without me,” You greeted as you approached his tombstone, ducking under a few low hanging willow branches that still brushed over you anyways. You’d have to ‘borrow’ Laura’s shears soon, the willow tree was hauntingly beautiful around his grave, but you wanted its branches and leaves to frame his grave, not conceal it, “I missed you.”
It was a little odd, but you did.
When you weren’t at his grave, you were thinking about him, trying to put a face to MUN, wondering what his life had been like. Did he have any loved ones? What had his interests been? How had he died? Had he felt as lonely as you did?
“I know, I know.” You settled onto the grass in front of his tombstone, securing the craft paper to his tombstone with some masking tape, “I was just here last night.” You imagined he would say.
“I just can’t stay away from you. You have a very intriguing aura: I can’t see it because you’re dead, and that makes me want to know you more.” You pulled a black crayon from your pocket and went about scribbling on the paper, over where you knew MUN would be etched in stone, “I’ve said it a million times, and you’ve probably turned over in your coffin repeatedly because of it, but you’re the only one who understands me. And you’re the only one here that I care about—probably in the whole world actually, except maybe Chrissy but I know her friends think I’m weird, and I don’t want to drag her down with me.”
Once the letters appeared on the paper, you sprawled out STER and you dropped the crayon to produce a pretty hot pink marker from your pocket instead, signing your name with a little heart to go with it just above the last name you’d crafted for him.
The odds of this dude being a Munster were slim to none, but you thought it was fitting for someone who lived in a cemetery.
You sat back on your haunches to admire it, it was a cute piece. Would look nice on your wall and whenever you missed him and found yourself longing to be near his grave, all you’d have to do is turn on your side and you'd be able to see part of him.
You ripped the paper off his tombstone, and weighed it down on the grass with a rock. With that out of the way, you gave him your full attention, shuffling until your head and shoulder were leaning against the stone, “Would you wanna be dragged down with me? Be seen with me? I’m somewhat of a pariah around here. Did you have better luck when you were still kicking?”
You figured with how fucked up his tombstone had been, probably not. You imagined he’d confirm it, too. Just out right say, ‘Nah, these assholes hated me.’
“Yeah, looks like we’re two peas in a pod.” Then you glanced down, fingers, twirling the blades of grass over his grave, “Or, you know. Casket.”
You let silence fall over you, broken only by the chirping of birds in surrounding trees.
“Goddamit, why do you have to be dead?” Your eyelids fluttered close, and instead of the cold stone, you imagined your head pressed against a warm chest, rising and falling with breaths, and a heartbeat thumping strong below your ear, pushing blood throughout his body. Imagined he was alive, arms slipping around you, firm and strong to hold you together so you didn't have to anymore.
But he wasn’t, and you were reminded when the groundskeeper shouted, “HEY!”
You shot up, glancing around until you saw him by the entrance with a leaf blower, “YOU AWAKE?”
What kind of a dumbass question was that? Sure, it had looked like you were asleep but you were clearly alert now.
“YEAH!” You shrieked back to be heard, and he went back to not caring.
“He can see me leaning against your tombstone, but he can’t see overgrown grass, weeds, rocks, or your grave in general when I’m not here. Men, always so selective, amirite?”
You glanced at the stone, half expecting it to respond. “Eh, what do you know, you’re just a man, too.” You reached your arm back, knuckles trailing over MUN.
“Despite you mouthing off to me most of the time, I brought you something.” You reached into your other pocket and pulled out a necklace, lined with black pearls and a cross pendant. It had been your mother’s. While she had a pension for religion, it wasn’t something you thought about. Dying, sure, but whatever afterlife? Not so much. Felt wrong, sometimes, to carry it around with you—felt like you were disrespecting her a little bit to not believe what she did, even though she had no qualms with it when she was alive. So, you figured why not trust it with the other important person in your life?
“Pretty, huh? It was my mom’s. She’s dead, like you. You wouldn’t happen to have seen her around, would you?” You joked, fingers stroking over the pearls. There was no risk in leaving them with your dead friend, people avoided him and you had a feeling even grave robbers wouldn’t dare step near the willow, so they’d probably be with him for the rest of eternity, “I want you to have them, take care of them for me.”
You placed the necklace over the peak of his tombstone, smiling when they didn’t fall from their place, “Mm, you look good in them. Better than I do, I’m not big on pearls. More of a silver jewelry kind of girl. I could do gold and diamonds, though, only for a wedding ring.”
You held your arm out, admiring your ring hand void of any actual rings, “Nothing too gaudy, of course. That’s what my earrings are for.”
Your eyes trailed from your outstretched fingers, to your wrist, and the watch decorating it. The time made you heave a heavy sigh, “I gotta go. Chrissy’s dragging me to a party tonight, so I’ve got to mentally prepare for that. You’ll think of me while I’m away, won’t you?”
Trailing a finger down the stone, you leaned forward to press your lips to it in a sweet kiss.
“I’ll be back soon, and this time I won’t forget my book of sonnets. I know how much you love the cynical poems I force on you.”
And though you announced your departure, you found it hard to leave him, like you always did. It took all you had to gather your crayon, marker, and your new poster (and you kept dropping all three to have an excuse to linger) and leave the cemetery behind, glancing back impulsively every couple of steps until it was no longer in view, and the moment it wasn’t you wanted to drop everything and run back to him.
You had to remind yourself he was a stranger, who didn’t care for you, rotting in the ground. And it sucked.
“I don’t wanna go.” You announced, staring into the bathroom mirror you shared with Chrissy. You’d just finished your makeup, eyes heavily lined, and lashes coated an electric blue that made your eyes pop. You were always a little heavy handed with your makeup, you figured the whole point of it was to use it as you wanted. Your hair had been manipulated to hell and back, but regardless of what you did, you were unsatisfied with the girl staring back at you, “I’ll just stay home.”
“Not on my watch!” Chrissy declared, reaching in front of you for her pink lipstick. The bathroom counter was littered with your combined beauty products, “This is the first major rager of the year, the perfect social gathering. You need to meet people, sissy.”
You scowled at the idea, “I have met people.”
Chrissy tubed the lipstick bullet, rubbing her lips together as she gave you a concerned side-eye, “People who like you, sissy.”
Ouch, there’s that brutal honesty.
“It’s not good for you to be on your own all the time,” She set the lipstick down so she could place a dainty hand on your shoulder, big blue eyes focused on you, “I worry about you. Daddy and mom worry about you. Your doctor worries about you. You need to get out more.” Chrissy stressed, pink lips pulling into a reassuring smile before she went back to focusing on the mirror and her makeup.
You let out a heavy sigh, mulling her words over. Definitely could have been phrased better, but Chrissy was right. You were currently the town recluse, and occupying your room and the town cemetery wouldn’t change that.
“That blush isn’t the right shade for you, sissy.” Chrissy broke you from your thoughts and your eyes drifted back over to your reflection, the girl looking so unsure and right back at you, “You really have to accentuate your features, compliment them, because you’re already beautiful.”
Didn’t feel like it.
Your expression must have given your inner thoughts away because Chrissy turned to you again, practically bouncing, “Wait a minute, you could use my tanning bed!”
You deadpanned at the mention of the ridiculous full on salon tanning bed that Chrissy owned. There was a dedicated mini garage in the backyard for it, next to the pool, and complete with neon lights, her beauty pageant trophies and sashes as well as her cheer trophies. The PG&E bill was always through the roof for the Tan Shack alone, and you still had no idea how Laura could afford it.
“No, Chrissy I-I don’t think that would work on me. At all.”
Chrissy waved off your concerns, “It’s not about the tan, or even if you can tan. It’s the experience. When I lay in that tanning bed, with those little goggles on my eyes and I can hear the buzzing, I feel myself blooming. Regardless of whether or not my skin actually tans,” It didn’t. Chrissy burned but she somehow still looked good, “I feel amazing about myself.”
“Are you sure that’s not cancer?”
“You’re so funny!” Chrissy laughed even though you were being serious, “Sissy, every girl deserves to feel beautiful. If I can provide you with an experience that might raise those confidence levels that are dragging across a nail-covered floor right now, why wouldn’t I?”
Your eyebrows furrowed, trying to decipher if that was a compliment or not, but you didn’t have long to mull it over before Chrissy was framing your face with her hands.
“And I can. Please, let me do this.”
You groaned, long and drawn out and awkward, before squeezing your eyes shut and slowly nodding your head. She squealed, clapped her hands together and dragged you out of the bathroom.
After explaining how it all worked, Chrissy bid you a cheerful goodbye and left you to your own devices so she could finish getting ready for the night ahead of you both.
You’d selected your tan level, positive you wouldn’t see any real results but maybe the ‘experience’ would benefit you and shed your fuzzy slippers and robe, leaving you in some boy shorts and a tank top as you tried to settle yourself in the tanning bed. The dip was awkward, and you couldn’t get a good grasp on the top of the tanning bed since it was meant to only open and close rather than stay in position so grasping onto it for balance as you lowered yourself in led to you conking yourself on the head with a noticeable bonk.
You hissed in pain, rubbing the sore area as you clambered the rest to the way in. Once you’d stretched your legs out, lowered the top, maneuvered the goggles over your face and waited for the magic to happen as you were surrounded by neon blue lights.
You heard the buzzing as the tanning bed started up. The magic happened alright. The entire tanning bed shocked you, and you shrieked as you felt the intense electric current ripple throughout your body, sparking every single pore in the worst way possible.
“I’m so sorry you got electrocuted, sissy.”
Chrissy broke the silence as you sulked in the passenger seat, your hair a little bigger than normal and not a result of styling. After getting all five senses shocked out of you, you’d come out with a hairdo that would not usually be up to par with you, and some serious case of static electricity. You’d tried to gently press your hair down and when you saw a literal spark in it, you decided to just leave it alone.
Your step-sister had been apologizing since.
“It’s alright. I survived.” And you wanted to forget about it.
You could see Chrissy glancing nervously at you from the corner of your eye as she drove you to the party location.
“So…how are you liking Hawkins Community, so far?” She asked, thankfully changing the subject.
“It’s fine. The campus looks relatively the same as the community college I toured in my old town. Classes are decent.” Pitiful. The classes were so boring and straight out of the book, but it cost you a fraction of a fraction of what you’d have to pay to attend a university.
Chrissy lips turned up in a mischievous smile and you internally groaned, fully expecting her next question.
“See any cute boys?” And then, as an afterthought, “Or…girls?” Then she took her eyes off the road again, squinting at you as if she was trying to assess something, “Or…..anyone?”
You betrayed yourself, eyes darting to the window before they were back on her and she perked up in the driver’s seat.
“Okay, spill.”
Your heart started thumping wildly in your chest as one particular guy came to mind, but you hadn’t thought about him too much. Hadn’t allowed yourself to entertain the idea of a romance with him. That’s how people got their hopes up and letdown.
“Sissy! Sissy, come on. You have to tell me. I’m your only friend!”
This time, you could tell she was joking, even though she did have merit. You bit your lip as she ribbed you a bit more, the corners of your lips tugging up into a smile.
“Okay, okay!” Your hands flew to cover your face, embarrassed, shy and a little giddy all at once to actually be admitting you had a crush.
“Steve Harrington.”
“STEVE HARRINGTON?” She repeated, incredulous and you shushed her even though it was only you two in the car.
“Sissy, that’s so unexpected! I haven’t really seen him since high school but I didn’t think he’d be your type.” Chrissy admitted with a shrug of her shoulders.
“He works in the library.” You sighed out, recalling your brief interactions with him when checking out a couple of books. He’d been kind, made a couple of humorous comments about the titles, and always tried to meet your avoidant gaze, which meant he was being nice to you. Coaxing you out of your shell. You actually didn't have much trouble interacting with people, you were more abrasive than you ever were shy, Steve was just a little too easy on the eyes. Made you forget how to talk, and on occasion, walk. It was embarrassing, “Always makes those cute displays with recommendations.”
“Good for him,” She commented, sounding impressed. “I didn’t really know he was intellectual. Wasn’t, the last I heard. Had a big reputation in high school, seemed kind of mean and everyone called him King Steve.”
You frowned, feeling the need to protect him, “Didn’t they call you the Queen of Hawkins High?”
“Yeah, but only to make me seem pretentious.”
You raised your eyebrows, glancing away. Chrissy was kind, but sometimes, she could be pretentious.
“And anyways, I’m not a student at Hawkins High anymore, so they can’t call me that. Maybe Steve really did change. Come to think of it, I haven’t heard much about him since he struck out with a series of girls. Maybe he took a good look at himself and decided a change was needed.” You could feel her eyes on you again.
“Does he flirt with you?”
“No.”
“See him flirt with any girls?”
“Nope.”
“Does he still make his hair all big and poofy?”
“Looks more voluminous than poofy.”
Chrissy hummed, “An improvement. Is he all beret wearing and drinking coffee now?”
You tried to recall ever seeing him in a hat, let alone a beret, “No, I don’t think so. If anything, he’s introspective.”
“He’s on the spectrum?”
Your smile waned when you realized she was asking a legitimate question, “Oh. No. That’s—that’s not what that means. I just meant he’s thinking about what he does; how he acts, how he behaves.”
It got quiet for a few moments.
”Well,” Chrissy broke the silence once more, “He might be there tonight. I’m not sure if they’re still friends, but Tommy Hagan is hosting tonight, and once upon a time, they were inseparable.”
You made a sound of acknowledgment, upper lip twitching in disgust. You knew Tommy, saw him around campus. He was a big jerk, you’d witnessed him throw some guy’s backpack in the trash and pour his drink on it. You wish you’d known it was his party you were going to in advance. Tommy was a nasty piece of work, so his friend group was the same. Out of all of them, though, Carol got on your nerves the most.
She didn’t pay you a whole lot of attention, but when you were walking in with Chrissy—and this is Chrissy, so she acknowledged everyone—and she said hi, Carol would just look you up and down before pursing her big mouth like she’d sucked on something sour. One day, you’d like to give her your fist to suck on.
”Patrick McKinney is bringing three kegs and I heard Reefer Rick is bringing his whole inventory.”
“Reefer Rick?”
“Yeah, he’s the local drug dealer now. I mean, he’s always been but he used to have somebody sell for him while he supplied, but he died.”
Your eyes widened while your pupils dilated, mind conjuring up some image of a poor dude being murdered for drugs and then the supplier just taking over, not fearful at all of meeting the same fate, “He died?”
Chrissy nodded her head, looking thoughtful, “Yeah, Eddie Munson.”
Munson.
You sat up in your seat, fully alert and invested in the conversation now, “Eddie Munson? Is he buried under the willow tree in the cemetery?”
You stared at Chrissy, willing her to think faster as she squinted and pursed her lips, “I think Tina mentioned something about someone peeing on a tree over there, so I think so.”
Your mouth dropped open, expression utterly horrified that someone could do that, “That’s beastly, what the fuck?”
“I know,” Chrissy sighed with a shake of her head. “I didn't know him all that much, bought some weed off of him a couple of times and he seemed a little scary—appearance and mannerism wise—but he seemed nice when you had to interact with him. He didn’t deserve that.”
“How did he die?” You asked, voice small and heart shrinking. You didn’t like where this was going. Didn’t like it one bit.
“Well, the official determination, if I remember right, was like a drug deal gone bad or something, but no one really believes it. He was known to have weed on him, kept the harder stuff somewhere else. Everyone knows he was murdered. They did a number on him, it was all everyone could talk about because Sydney Porter couldn’t even get her dad—he worked at the station—to show her pictures. He told her they messed Eddie up bad. People here really didn’t like him. No one knows who did it though.”
You sunk back into your seat, mind troubled and stomach turning. This whole time, you'd been tending to and caring for the grave of a murdered guy, taken from this world simply because people didn’t like him. He must have been so lonely. So scared. And they killed him.
Chrissy was wrong. People in this town knew who killed him, because one of them, or some of them, had to have been his murderers.
Your fingers curled into tight fists, painted nails digging into the flesh of your palms. Chrissy noticed the change in your demeanor.
“Oh, sissy. You’re such an empath. Don’t be so sad, I know it’s a horrible story, but he’s resting now. In peace.”
“No, he’s not. They fucked up his tombstone. He can’t even be dead in peace.” You huffed, furious on his behalf.
“How do you know?” Chrissy asked, raising a perfectly plucked eyebrow.
“I go there a lot, it’s nice. Quiet. A little creepy, but that adds to its charm, makes it relatively peaceful. I’ve been visiting all the graves, but I was drawn to him the most. Etched his tombstone. He’s my favorite.”
Despite the horrors you’d learned, the thought of Mun—Eddie, still brought a wistful smile to your lips. Maybe your presence was enough to settle him, bring him a little bit of peace this town and the people in it refused to give him.
“H-He’s your favorite…?”
“Yeah. I feel this….connection with him. From the very first time I visited. Now, I leave him gifts, flowers, pretty stones, poems I wrote, a book of sonnets I stole from the library.”
“You….should talk to your doctor about this, Sissy. That’s really weird. That’s really weird, sissy.”
You fought to not roll your eyes. As much as you cared about Chrissy, and knew she cared about you, she didn’t understand you.
“Well, since people ruined his grave, I thought it might be nice to clean it up and make sure he’s not forgotten.” You snapped, “It’s not like I call him my boyfriend or anything.”
Chrissy eyed you skeptically, “Well, then that’s nice of you, I guess. Just don’t go around telling everybody about that, or you’ll be known as the Ghost Whisperer.”
“He hasn’t talked back to me yet.”
Chrissy laughed, and freed one hand off the wheel to lightly slap your arm, “See, now that’s funny. If you do tell anyone, end it with that joke. You’ll be a riot.”
You smirked, staring out the front windshield. You’d let her think it was a joke. For now.
You made a sound of displeasure as Chrissy pulled into a clear space on the grass and parked. She jumped out to dance over to her friends, some wine coolers cradled in a plastic bag she clutched.
You allowed yourself a full minute to stew in your misery before getting out of the car and following after her. As you neared her group, you quickly realized that was a bad idea.
“Oh my GOD! Vickie, you fixed your teeth! They look so good. I wasn’t gonna say anything because I thought you were happy with the overcrowding, but now that you fixed it, I can’t look away!”
Yeesh. You beelined away from them and wandered around the crowded front lawn, dodging rowdy friend groups and couples until you spotted a cooler.
Maybe a drink would calm you down.
You squatted down and popped the lid, digging around the ice but all you spotted were Pepsi and Squirt cans.
“The liquid fun is inside.” A guy’s voice came from behind you and you rolled your eyes. You were so not in the mood to be hit on right now.
“What?” You asked, tone bored, but you didn’t want to make him seem helpful so you grabbed a Squirt.
“Alcohol. He keeps it inside.”
You slammed the cooler shut and popped the tab of the can, rising to your feet, “Yeah, I figured that mu—shhhh.”
Oh, shit.
Steve Harrington was standing before you, eyes alight with mirth as he smirked down at you.
You swallowed hard, hoping to god your tongue hadn’t gone down with the movement. See? Here you went getting all stupid around him.
”Funny seeing you here.”
You laughed nervously, “Yeah. I—uh, mhm.” You forced yourself to take a drink of your soda to keep from making an even bigger fool of yourself.
“Sorry if it’s weird of me to just walk up to you. I was chilling on the side of the house and thought I saw you, but I’m a little nearsighted and I didn’t bring my glasses.”
You pulled the can away from your mouth as your brain registered the lack of metal frames on the bridge of his nose. He looked handsome with and without them, that wasn’t fair. It was still throwing you off.
“It’s—It’s okay. Uhm, no harm done.” You shrugged your shoulders, hoping it looked cool and not as stiff as you felt. You even added in a smile with some teeth for a little razzle dazzle.
“I actually came over here to tell you your books are significantly overdue.” Steve deadpanned, tongue playing with his canine tooth as he scrutinized you and you shrunk, smile falling from your face. You had got to get better at following up on your due dates.
“Oh.”
He scoffed, face breaking out into a grin as his shoulders shook with his chuckles “I’m kidding.”
OH, THANK FUCK.
“Oh,” And then, because every god probably hates you, you started snorting with laughter. You cut that shit quick, clearing your throat as you took another sip of your beverage.
“So,” Steve took a step closer to you, “Are you enjoying─”
“Hey!” Carol stepped right up to Steve, practically leaning all over him as her ruby red lips spread into a seductive smile, eyes lidded and no doubt a few drinks in with a drink for Steve in her hand. For the billionth time that night, you rolled your eyes, trying not to gag at how desperate she was. You knew Tommy had recently dumped her, the entire town knew and now she was clearly trying to get into Steve’s pants, “I found the keg.”
She could eat shit, his pants were yours.
“Oh, Thank you.” Came Steve’s bleak reply and part of you thought he might have actually wanted to talk to just you. Now, you were really annoyed she’d interrupted.
“Hey, Carol.”
Carol looked surprised that you’d even dare speak to her, raising her eyebrows, “Hey. Hi— sorry, how do we know each other?”
“You’re my lab partner.” You were unimpressed, you expected her to be a better mean girl.
“Yay me.” The smile she directed at you was anything but friendly, reminding you of the one Laura would make after you did something in public she didn’t like, but she couldn’t yell at you until you were home. Carol swirled the liquid in her cup around, head tilting as she offered it to you, “You wanna sip, partner?”
“Carol.” Steve warned and she tutted, flicking her wrist.
“You’re right, I don’t know why I assumed she partied.”
“I’ll take a beer,” You could handle alcohol, had cleared your mother’s wine cabinet after she was murdered, so this would be no big deal.
Carol looked annoyed but handed you the cup, and to make sure you wouldn’t gag and vomit, you threw it back, throat opening as you swallowed the liquid as fast as you could to refuse it as much time on your taste buds as possible.
When you lowered the cup, you realized you’d made a mistake and glanced into it at the small amount left behind, watching as the ground in your peripheral view began to shift.
Steve seemed to realize something was wrong, quickly taking your cup and ingesting what was left. His suspicions were confirmed and he spat it out on the grass before scowling at Carol, “PCP? Really, Carol? What the fuck is wrong with you? Why the hell would you give that to her!?”
“Oopsie.”
But it was too late for you. You dropped the soda can in your other hand and lifted your hands to your face, watching the lines around your palms and fingers begin to move, swirling around and you backed away from them, watching as everything around you began to come undone.
“Hey!” You heard a voice next to you and someone started rubbing your back, you hadn’t even realized you were crouching. You craned your head up to see Chrissy and you frowned. Her voice was so different, distorted. She sounded more like your dad than Chrissy.
Her face was both far away and right in front of you, you reached a hand out to test the theory, see if it really was close. Chrissy caught your wrist, frowning at the state you were falling into.
Chrissy started asking you questions, about what you’d taken, what you drank but her voice was too loud for you, and the purple behind her head was distracting. Still, you nodded your head.
At your confirmation, Chrissy’s frown intensified and she helped you to the ground before darting over to chew Steve and Carol out.
You couldn’t stay on the grass for long, the blades of it stabbing you and sending pain shooting up your palms and into your bones so you crawled some distance away before you managed to push yourself up and stumble towards the house. It was hard.
Everything was moving. You heard a loud sound and glanced around wildly until you were staring up at the sky, mouth dropping open to see green clouds and lightning.
You had to get away, the need to escape, be safe was urgent but it felt like the closer you got to the front door, the farther away it went. Your breathing was heavy and panicked as you kept stumbling forward, arm outstretched and finally you reached it.
You yanked it open and nearly fell inside, tripping over your feet until you hit the back of the couch and used it to sink to the floor.
You heard your name being called and lifted your head, eyes crazed as you tried to find the source. Fred Benson approached you, the skinny boy squatting to be eye level with you.
“You okay?” He asked and you reached forward, grasping his face in your hand and squeezing to make sure he was a real person.
“You.” Was all you said, booping his nose but still suspicious of him. Was he real?
“Uh, yeah. It’s me. It’s Fred, we sit next to each other in ASL class.”
He looked like Fred. You still didn’t believe he was human, squinting as your hands grasped at the back of the couch.
“You don’t look so good,” Fred pushed the frame of his glasses up his nose, brows furrowed in concern, “Let's find somewhere for you to sit down for a minute. Or maybe a while. Man, what did you drink?”
He stood up, offering you a hand and you took it but didn’t pull yourself up. Fred heaved with all his might and managed to get you on your feet but he realized just walking you wouldn’t be enough, and so did you because you draped yourself over him, one arm over his scrawny shoulders.
Fred cursed under his breath but held your weight, leading you out of the populated living room and you watched a couple furiously make out on the couch cushions as you passed.
“I hate parties. I don’t know why I came—well, actually I do. I never got invited to these in high school, so I guess I’m living out my fantasy now. In all honesty, I’d much rather be watching Weird Science. So far tonight, I’ve seen three cheerleaders throw up and a baby being conceived.”
“Uh huh,” Was all you could get out, watching people swirl past you like shooting stars.
“Would you count that as escaping the teen pregnancy statistic? I know they’re out of high school, but we’re all still pretty young.” He commented as he led you up the stairs. You tripped several times and almost sent him flying down them but the two of you managed to make it.
Fred was heaving by the time you'd shouldered him into the hallway wall, his face and hands clammy.
”Good god, how did I pass P.E.?” The two of you paused there until he regained his breath while you plastered yourself against the wall, cheek pressed to it and hands stroking over the wallpaper. Eventually, Fred peeled you off of it and kept moving until he could find a place to put you.
“You like movies right? Got any favorite directors? Or favorite films?”
“Wall.”
“Huh? Oh, you’re just admiring the wallpaper.”
“Great Wall of China.”
Fred positioned you against the wall, looking a little annoyed. You didn’t care, could only focus on the framed photo of the Great Wall of China directly across from you.
“Oh.” Was all he said when he spotted it. “Stay right here.”
Then he disappeared and you watched as the painting came to life, and the stones of the wall began moving, rippling. You didn’t even know stones could move like that but now it made so much more sense.
Fred appeared again, tugging you along into an empty room. You spotted a trash can and nearly threw Fred into the bedroom wall as you dove for it, retching everything out of your stomach. You could hear Fred gagging, but he was decent enough to make sure your hair stayed out of your way. When you were done, he helped sit you up on the bed, and nearly collapsed next to you.
”We did it,” he cheered with no real gusto. And you sat there, still feeling the earth orbiting. It was the most odd sensation, you could feel a spot on your brain pulsing, like a migraine but it felt so euphoric to close your eyes.
“Here,” They snapped right back open and you glanced to your side to see Fred offering you a handkerchief. Of course Fred Benson carried around a handkerchief. How amusing.
“Thank you,” You gave the three versions of him you could see right then a smile and used the handkerchief to wipe your mouth, eyelids fluttering close just as the sound of thunder filled the room, and a flashing of lightning accompanied it.
“Huh, a rainless thunderstorm, looks like the angels are bowling.” You heard him muse next to you.
And it brought another smile to your face, “My mom used to say that.”
At the mention of her, your brain conjured up all the happy feelings and memories of her, huddled on your couch, in your old home watching black and white horror films. They didn’t scare her, so she could tolerate them. You missed her. She made you feel so light, so seen, so—no.
Something was wrong. Something felt very, very wrong.
Your smile faded and you felt your belly sink as you opened your eyes.
“Does that feel good?”
You didn’t want to, but you looked down to see Fred’s hand on your breast. Your breathing picked up and Fred let go of you to grab your wrist and force you to touch his crotch, “Well don’t just sit there, help me out. Finish what you started.”
Anger filled you and you yanked your hand away, “No.”
Fred opened his mouth as you got up, rushing away from him and stumbling back out the way you remembered while he yelled at you.
You had to get out, had to get away. Had to be safe, feel safe. You banged against walls as you went, desperate to get out of the house, away from Fred, from everyone, and to safety. That was your only concern as the drug really hit you.
All you could remember was seeing colors, hearing and feeling the wind against your sweaty skin, leaves blowing with it and gusting around you.
You had no idea how you escaped the mad house, how long you’d even been walking or how you actually got there, but you found yourself in front of the cemetery, a flash of lightning illuminating the gate.
To anyone else, a cemetery would have been the worst place to find themselves on a night like this, but you’d already been to hell so you trudged forward, feet taking you to him. Even in your drugged state, you were able to find your way to Eddie. Always would be.
Your knees dug into the grass as you collapsed in front of his tombstone, fingers reaching forward to trace over MUN and 1986 before your body curled around the large stone, hugging yourself to it. Electric blue tears slipped down your cheeks, staining them with your mascara.
“I wish I was with you.” You whispered, hating everything, hating this town, hating the people, hating Fred Benson, hating Carol, hating Laura Cunningham, hating how your mom wasn’t alive, hating how the one person you’d unknowingly sought for comfort was someone you’d never met before who was six feet under the ground. And you hated how you weren’t down there.
You laid there, hugging his tombstone for hours under the thunder and lightning as the PCP slowly left your system.
When you were able to stand up on your own, you gave the tombstone another kiss, rested your forehead against it and quietly thanked him for helping you find your way home before you left, following the path you’d made during all of your visits.
The house was quiet when you got in, and Chrissy’s car hadn’t been parked in the driveway when you’d walked up so you figured she was still at the party. Sluggishly, you made your way up the stairs, falling into your shared bathroom. Your hand searched the wall, struggling to find the switch. Once your fingertips made contact with it, you flipped it and squinted as the room was flooded with the warm light. It was still too much for your eyes but you kept it on and walked towards the mirror
The girl looking back at you was not the same one you’d last seen in it. This girl had blue smudged all around her eyes, faint trails of it over her cheeks and a rats nest for hair. Her eyes burned, not from the light, but from a fury within.
She was stuck in a life she didn’t want to live and couldn’t do anything about. As a large strike of lightning flashed from the window positioned at the back of the bathroom, towards the back of the house, you decided to put her out of her misery, picking up a blow dryer and smashing it against your reflection with a yell.
You stood there, chest heaving as you stared at the broken reflection. Then you tossed the blow dryer onto the counter, and went to bed.
Your dreams were much more pleasant than your reality, eyelids fluttering open to the ceiling of your old bedroom. A glance to your side confirmed your mother’s photo was at your bedside, next to your alarm clock on your old bedside table.
“Well?” Her photo asked, shooting you that gorgeous smile of hers, “What are you waiting for? Go get him.”
Your confusion was momentary, your mother raised her chin in a direction and you knew what would happen, you were giddy for it as you looked down to see yourself wrapped in the most beautiful wedding gown you’d ever seen.
You rose from the bed into a sitting position, picking up the bouquet on the pillow next to you. Your dresser mirror was directly across from your bed and you took a moment to admire the beautiful girl staring back at you. Where you last remember seeing trails of tears were diamonds, glittering against your skin. Her eyes sparkled with a joy you’d never known. You bid her one last smile as you turned your head to the figure sitting on the edge of your bed, dark curls cascading down his neck, past broad shoulders with his back to you.
His right arm was out, palm up.
He was waiting for you.
You shifted until you were on the edge of your bed next to him, staring straight forward just as he was.
Without looking, you knew exactly where his hand was, and you placed your left one over it, feeling the warmth of his skin against yours. Slowly, the two of you leaned towards each other, until your head was on his shoulder and his cheek was pressed against the top of your head, his fingers curling around your hand to ground you. You sighed, all the tension and weight of the world leaving you.
“Sissy. . .”
“Sissy…”
“SISSY!”
You groaned as Chrissy shook you awake, eyes prying through all the mascara that had crusted over your eyes. It took a couple of blinks until you regained your clear vision, gaze locking on Chrissy leaning over you. Her face was clean of any makeup, skin glowing and hair wrapped up in rollers.
She’d gotten home later than you and had still been able to look perfect.
What the hell?
“You better get up, sissy. My mom’s losing it over the bathroom mirror.”
You were confused for a second until you remembered smashing it with a blow dryer last night—or this morning. Well, it definitely would have broken at the sight of you now, anyways.
You frowned but made no move to get up so Chrissy tugged your blanket off of you, giggling when the both of you realized you had your hand in your underwear. Hastily, you yanked it out, and threw the blankets back over yourself.
“It’s okay, Sissy. Everyone does it. It’s natural.”
“Oh my god…”
“So, what happened last night to bring this on?” She wiggled her eyebrows and you stared at her for a second. Part of you wanted to yell at her, berate her for letting you stumble around while high on a drug you’d never taken before, the other half knew in Chrissy’s World, it was all rainbows and sunshine—at least, it had been since she’d forced her mother to respect her boundaries. Chrissy didn’t expect the worst in anyone, didn't expect anyone to take advantage of you and certainly didn't expect you to wind up walking to the cemetery and then home on a bad trip. No, in Chrissy’s World, you’d probably spent the night flirting with someone, probably Steve, maybe fooled around in his car before he drove you home.
You didn’t see it necessary to shatter her world so you groaned instead, the full force of your migraine hitting you now that you were out of sleep’s clutches, and covered your hands with your face.
“Ooh, your knees…”
You glanced down to see what she was staring at and sure enough, your knees were scratched up from kneeling at Eddie’s grave, but in Chrissy’s World…
“I fell.” Was the only excuse you could come up with and Chrissy smirked.
“Me, too.” Her eyelid dropped in a wink just as Laura yelled upstairs for you, so, begrudgingly, you wrapped yourself in your robe and headed downstairs to receive your punishment.
Just as you suspected, Laura had attacked you with allegations—that were true for once, you had smashed the bathroom mirror—and your dad looked like he could care less.
“You know,” She stated, fixing you with those unnaturally blue eyes of hers, “Your dad wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt. See the good in you, but I knew. I’m an Intuitive Person, you know. An IP. They’ve got seminars for people like me.”
Your mind flashed to How to Handle a Narcissist.
“Laura…” Your dad warned and Laura inhaled sharply, displeased that your dad was sticking up for you. For once.
“Did you know there was a tornado last night? It hailed. Wind blew the fence over. The yard is covered in debris, and now I have to focus on repairing the bathroom, too. I don’t think that’s fair.” She huffed and Chrissy spoke up from her place on the couch.
“It was a tornado watch, mom. Not a real tornado.”
“Actually, Chris, the weather was downright crazy last night. I mean, it was really something, I saw green lightning. Big balls of it in the sky.”
You and Chrissy shared secret smiles at hearing your dad talk about big balls.
“Love muffin, could you swap out being a weatherman for being a father, right now?” Laura gritted out through her chemically whitened teeth.
“It’s a Meteorologist,” You mumbled and her head snapped over to glare at you before she was speaking to your father again.
“Honey, your daughter is a vandal. She’s got a taste for vandalism, and she is deliberately vandalizing and destroying property. First, it was my collection of Precious Moments figurines─”
“That was an accident, you didn’t wrap them in bubble wrap and I dropped the box when I tripped over the front steps.”
“Mother,” Chrissy chided, hands crossing over her robe. “Be. Nice.”
“I am being nice,” Laura hissed, glare never leaving you, “But I refuse to coddle her. She’s headed straight to the nut house with this behavior.”
You frowned, wiping away some of the dried mascara under your eye, “Can you say that if you’re a Psych Nurse?”
Laura had the decency to look embarrassed before whacking your father’s arm. He sighed, putting his newspaper down, “Sweetheart─”
You clocked the twitch in Laura’s eyelid at the affectionate name your father used to refer to you.
“─You’re gonna clean your bathroom, alright? Sweep up all that glass.”
”And?” Laura pushed, still staring at you.
“And…..um. Pay for the mirror, I guess.” Laura turned her nose up, hurmphing.
“That’s fine, can I get ready for work now?”
Your dad nodded and Laura looked like she wanted to protest but you turned your back to her and made your way upstairs, hesitating at the top when your fathered turned the volume of the TV back on and you heard the news reporter reporting from the cemetery, talking about a grave, under a tree, that had been struck by lightning.
You wondered if it had been Eddie’s. There’s no way you’d be able to check today, you’d get home from work too late, so you’d have to check tomorrow.
You tried to stay busy during your shift at the local tailor’s. You didn’t really have a passion for it, but you were relatively good with a needle and thread. With the magnifier headlamp, you were practically unstoppable, altering coats, dresses, blouses, shirts, all with minimal finger injuries—though luminol on some of these clothing items would no doubt reveal traces of your blood.
But hey—you now knew what it meant to work so hard you put your blood into something and you always had band-aids on you, in case anyone needed one.
You were so invested in your work, you hadn’t heard the bell above the door chime when it was pushed open, and didn’t notice Steve leaning against the counter, watching you work until he cleared his throat.
You jumped, head swinging around to see your crush smiling at you and you raised the magnifying glass portion of the head lamp off your face, feeling embarrassed that he’d seen you with the headgear on in the first place.
“Hey! I didn’t know you worked here.”
You let out some nervous laughter, mind racing for ways to make this seem cool but you came up short. “Yeah, I—employed.”
“I can see that,” He chuckled, amused by your lack of verbal sparring.
You didn’t know what to say after that so you stared, fingers twisting and pulling the thread you’d been working with, desperate for him to say something or get out.
“Oh! Uh, I heard you guys also get rid of stains? I’ve got this one on my pan─”
“THAT WE DO!”
You sighed, eyes slipping shut as your moron of a boss came bursting out of the office.
“What can we do for you, Harrington?” Murray asked, leaning against the counter, causing Steve to lean back, smile now less than thrilled.
“Murray…I forgot you worked here.” Steve said it in a voice that made you think he would have avoided the shop had he known who it was that was currently in charge of running it.
“Yup, got me this sweet little gig. And no radios.” He gestured around to the shop, void of any technology save for the cash register—and he made sure it was never him operating it, “Would like to see the government try to control me now.”
“Right, I just came here to drop off my pants, spilled something on—well, it doesn’t really matter, I just spilled something on them.” Steve placed the folded pair of pants on the counter and Murray immediately unfolded them, searching through the fabric until he found the stain by his crotch. To both your horror and Steve’s, he lifted the strained fabric to his nose, sniffing deep.
“Mm. White wine?”
It took Steve a moment to find his voice and close his jaw, “Crush. The soda.”
“Same thing. We’ll get this right out, my man.”
You and Steve shared one more look of disbelief before he slowly backed away, the bell above the door sounding as he left.
“He’s a nice guy,” Murray commented and you shrugged your shoulders, wanting this conversation to be over, “I’m surprised you know him, little loser.”
You shot him a glare.
“Oh, c’mon, lets not pretend you’ve got an active social life—if I call you in for a shift, you’re available. Nothing wrong with being a loser. I was one throughout high school and look at me now. Who got the last laugh?”
You were positive the look of pain on your face should have told Murray that anyone other than him got the last laugh. He was a forty something year old, afraid of technology, convinced the government was watching him, who tried to befriend teenagers.
You’d have to kill yourself if you were anything like him.
When he disappeared back into the office, because of course you’d have to get rid of that stain for Steve, you snatched the pair of pants off the counter. Glancing around to make sure there weren’t any eyes on you, you pressed them to the side of your face, imagining yourself hugging Steve instead of the pants. They smelled like him. It was bliss.
Then your eyes snapped open.
Oh, god. You were a loser.
After your shift, you’d gone straight home. Normally, you’d stop to grab a bite or something, you still had to pay for the mirror you broke so fast food was off the table for a couple of weeks, but on your dining room table when you walked into the house.
A pizza box. Your stomach growled as you imagined the slice of cheese waiting for you.
“Is there any left?” You asked, already making a beeline for it.
“Should be a slice left,” Your dad mused and as you tossed the top of it open, all you wanted to do was maybe beat him with it.
There, on the parchment liner of the pizza box, was the skinniest and tiniest slice of pizza to ever be cut. Not even the width of two of your fingers.
“Want me to order another one, sweetheart?” Your dad asked and Laura immediately inserted herself into the conversation.
“She can eat it, love muffin. Besides, we’ve got vegetables in the fridge if she’s still not full.”
“I said we should have ordered two, but my mom had a coupon she wanted to use.” Chrissy didn’t sound impressed.
“Yes, we got a free soda!”
Chrissy ignored her mom, “Sissy, we’re going to the movies! You could get something there, they sell pizza and nachos, right?”
You knew she was trying to find a solution for you, but your bullshit meter for the day had already been capped. You didn’t want movie theater pizza or concessions, you wanted a reasonable slice of this pizza, not some scrap your step-mother had saved you. It was obvious she was implying that she, your dad and Chrissy were the perfect sized family and you were simply an afterthought. Unwelcome.
“Yeah, I’m passing on the movie.”
Before you could stomp upstairs, Chrissy caught your hand.
“Sissy, please? We’ve got to bond as a family, it’s crucial. If it takes two, how can I do it as one?” She pulled you into her side.
“Really, Chrissy, I’m super tired.”
“You’re tired?” Laura asked, incredulous. Here we go again.
“All you do is work with a sewing machine for hours like some old spinster, I can hardly imagine that being tiring, but my Chrissy just got back from a five hour long cheer practice. They were throwing her around like raggedy ann and she stuck every landing.”
“Mom, stop.” Chrissy blushed, but you could see how proud she was of herself, “I’m sure Sissy pokes herself with those needles all the time, and it hurts, I’ve been prodded myself during all of my custom fittings.”
“I have finger calluses so I don’t even bleed anymore,” You begrudgingly admitted, “I can take it.”
“I bet you can.”
After they’d left for the movies, you’d gone upstairs, showered, put on your comfiest pajamas and fuzziest slippers, you grabbed a bowl of chips and set yourself up in front of the TV to watch Dawn of the Dead. You had to give props to all these zombie actors, you couldn’t imagine having to act out being one of the walking undead, imagined it felt pretty stupid but the paycheck and experience must have been cool.
You popped another chip into your mouth just as someone knocked on the front door. As you placed the bowl of chips on the table to get up, the knocking got louder, more aggressive and you hesitated, fear beginning to swell up inside of you.
Maybe if you ignored it, they’d go away.
You turned your attention back to the tv, picking up the remote to lower the volume and hopefully hide your presence in the house.
Then, much to your horror, you heard the distinct sound of a pained, gurgling groan. It sounded very similar to the ones you’d heard the zombies making on your tv, but this one was louder.
And it was coming from outside your front door.
You crouched, duckwalking to the foyer where one of the house phones was placed. You’d just picked it up from the receiver when a shadow from the living room window caught your eye. You barely had time to turn your head when something came crashing through it, breaking the glass and yanking the curtains from the rod.
Shocked, the phone slipped from your hands, banging against the hardwood floor of the foyer and you let out a scream at the same time as the person on your TV, running away from the figure invading your home.
You made it to the dinning room. Literally scrambling across the table to put an obstacle between you and the stranger—no, creature. Tall, caked in mud, leaves and stems, it resembled the Swamp Thing. It grunted, groans low and reverberating off the walls.
“Uuuhhhnng…”
This couldn’t be happening to you, you couldn’t die like this!!!! It was supposed to be by your hand or nothing!
”STAY AWAY FROM ME!” You shrieked, picking up the decorative plates from the table to throw at the creature. You nailed it a couple of times, watching it stumble as the fine china shattered against it. When you ran out of plates, you bolted from the dinning room, screaming as you scrambled up the stairs, and lost one of your slippers in the process but to hell with it! You had to get out of there. Hopefully, one of your neighbors heard your shrieks of terror and called the police.
You peaked over the railing at the top of the stairs, to see the creature analyzing your slipper. While it was distracted, you locked yourself in your room and made your way to your bedroom window, pulling it open.
“Okay, okay. I can do this, no big deal. Stunt actors do it all the time.” You climbed outside of your window, body nearly convulsing as you almost slipped down the roof, “Nonononono.”
You tried to grip onto a couple of shingles but they gave away, slipping right off the house to shatter against the concrete walkway and you realized Laura had no fucking idea what she was doing when it came to house repairs, the dumb bitch had just laid the shingles out without securing them.
“OH MY GOD-I’M GONNA DIE! HELP!”
Your body slipped further down the roofing, until you were forced to grab the gutter, gagging when your fingers squelched against whatever was in it. You dangled a good six feet off the ground, and while it wasn’t exactly a ten story fall, with your luck, you’d land on your head and break your neck.
Whimpering, you tried to pull yourself back up the roof, but it was no use. You had nothing stable to grab onto as you yanked yet another shingle clean off. You glared at it and muttered a goddammit before tossing it somewhere behind you as you went back to hanging on for dear life.
“Oh, no.” You mumbled, terrified as your fingertips began to lose their grip, wet with the mystery sludge from the gutter. “No, NO!”
You lost your grip, plummeting down but you didn’t meet the concrete. No, the Creature broke your fall and you were now face to face with it. The pressure of you landing on it, made it spit up into your face, green sludge, and you gasped before breaking out into screams again.
Pushing yourself up and off of it as you ran around your front yard, nearly blind. You were not opening your eyes to let that bacteria infested swamp slime, water, whatever the hell it was, into your eyeballs.
You could hear the Creature stomping around behind you as you bobbed and weaved, could feel his presence and you could not believe you were actually gonna die fighting off a swamp monster in your front yard while blinded—in clear and plain view for your neighbors to see, by the way, and unbeknownst to you, an elderly couple was watching you, not even a little concerned about your well being or the creature chasing you around.
“Stop it!”
“Leave me alone!”
“Go away, I’m just a girl!”
The timed sprinklers went off and you were soon assaulted with them as well. With just about all your senses done for, and the sprinklers washing the guck away from your face, you made a run for the house, slamming your back against the door and locking it behind you.
Your chest was heaving, wet body pumping with adrenaline as the back of your head thumped against the door. You weren’t done yet. That creature was still out there!!!
You dove for the phone on the ground, hanging by its springy cord and shouted out hopefully loud enough for it to hear, “I’m calling the police, so if you don’t want your ass riddled with bullets, I’d suggest you leave! They shoot before asking questions!”
You frantically dialed 911 but there was no ringing, instead, you could still hear buttons being pressed on the other line.
Bleak, and accepting your fate, you put the phone back on the receiver, and turned towards the living room, where the other phone was located.
On the chair, next to where the table the phone normaly rested on, was The Creature.
You grabbed one of the lamps, ready to use it as a weapon but it didn’t attack you, just turned the phone receiver this way and that, as if admiring it.
Despite your fear, you took a reluctant step forward, casting the creature in the glow of the lamp you clutched and for like the billionth time that night, you gasped.
The sprinklers had washed some of the filth off of it, too. Before, its head had been caked in a mud helmet, but now, you could actually see it’s head. It had long, disgustingly dirty curls, and wore a leather jacket, jeans and tennis shoes, all covered in grime.
When it craned its head up to look at you, you readied the lamp, poised to throw it at it—him. It was a guy. Big brown eyes, stared up at you and he made no move to attack.
Slowly, you lowered the lamp, and crouched down a few feet away.
His attention returned to the phone—shoe shaped—in his hands and shakily, with stiff limbs, he put it back on the receiver.
“It’s…It’s cool looking, right? The-The shoe phone.”
He glanced over at you and then the phone again as you mumbled out an explanation,
“Our neighbor in our old town cheated on his wife and she threw all his stuff out the window at him and my dad snatched the phone.”
“Merrrruhhhhh.” He moaned out, picking up your slipper and offering it to you. When you just stared, he dropped it and you moved the lamp to the side, crossing your legs.
“I’ve never seen a zombie before.” You marveled, then squinted, “You are a zombie, right? An undead?”
It took him an entire minute to choppily raise his shoulders, you realized he was shrugging. Or trying to. Every movement he made was choppy. Reminded you of how stop motion was made, except his scenes weren’t being played fast enough to have fluid movements.
He tried to get up and promptly slipped, accidentally elbowing the mini sound system at his side. It turned on, Sinead O’Connor’s Drink Before the War playing. You’d been the last to use it.
You watched as his head tilted in interest as Sinead began to croon out lyrics.
“Do you like music? This is Sinead O’Connor. She makes music that heals souls.”
He raised his wrist to his chest and you inhaled sharply as you realized he was missing the hand on it.
“Uhm, no—I don’t think she healed your soul. I meant like, figuratively. Her music makes people feel.” You placed your hands on your own chest, trying to convey your meaning, “She’s one of my favorites.”
A surprisingly comforting silence fell over the two of you—though he sometimes made his quiet dead guy gross sounds—as you stared at him, taking in the green-gray tint of his skin beneath the dirt all over him, cheeks sunken in. You had a feeling if you touched his skin, it’d be hard, maybe waxy and it was a bit unnerving how human his eyes were, but duh! Of course they were, he was a human. Just. A dead one. At least he wasn’t a skeleton.
Man, Hollywood wasn’t too far off with their interpretation.
“C’mon,” You stood up, eyes taking in the state of your home and all the dirt the two of you had dragged in, “I gotta hide you, new dead friend.”
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My McLuhan lecture on enshittification
IT'S THE LAST DAY for the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.
Last night, I gave the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin. The event was sold out and while there's a video that'll be posted soon, they couldn't get a streaming setup installed in the Canadian embassy, where the talk was held:
https://transmediale.de/en/2024/event/mcluhan-2024
The talk went of fabulously, and was followed by commentary from Frederike Kaltheuner (Human Rights Watch) and a discussion moderated by Helen Starr. While you'll have to wait a bit for the video, I thought that I'd post my talk notes from last night for the impatient among you.
I want to thank the festival and the embassy staff for their hard work on an excellent event. And now, on to the talk!
Last year, I coined the term 'enshittification,' to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers, it really hit the zeitgeist. I mean, the American Dialect Society made it their Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I'm definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).
So what's enshittification and why did it catch fire? It's my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters – and what we can do about it.
We're all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.
It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying.
I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.
Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für Englisch Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).
But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let's examine how enshittification works.
It's a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Let's do a case study. What could be better than Facebook?
Facebook is a company that was founded to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that.
When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and k-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It told them: “Yes, I know you’re all using Myspace. But Myspace is owned by Rupert Murdoch, an evil, crapulent senescent Australian billionaire, who spies on you with every hour that God sends.
“Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world, and we will compose a personal feed consisting solely of what those people post for consumption by those who choose to follow them.”
That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end-users. Those end-users proceeded to lock themselves into FB. FB — like most tech businesses — has network effects on its side. A product or service enjoys network effects when it improves as more people sign up to use it. You joined FB because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there.
But FB didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem.
It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. You and your six friends here are going to struggle to agree on where to get drinks after tonight's lecture. How were you and your 200 Facebook friends ever gonna agree on when it was time to leave Facebook, and where to go?
So FB’s end-users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then FB exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end-users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers, and publishers.
To the advertisers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? We lied. We spy on them from asshole to appetite. We will sell you access to that surveillance data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting, and we will devote substantial engineering resources to thwarting ad-fraud. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it.'
To the publishers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? We lied!Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link, and we will nonconsensually cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetize as you please, and those users will become stuck to you when they subscribe to your feed.' And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too, dependent on those users.
The users held each other hostage, and those hostages took the publishers and advertisers hostage, too, so that everyone was locked in.
Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders.
For the users, that meant dialing down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers.
For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen by a person.
For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt, until anything less than fulltext was likely to be be disqualified from being sent to your subscribers, let alone included in algorithmic suggestion feeds.
And then FB started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting fulltext feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetization, via the increasingly crooked advertising service.
When any of these groups squawked, FB just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learned in the Darth Vader MBA: 'I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.'
Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus, and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders.
But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service but I can’t bring myself to quit it,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit? Get me the hell out of here!” is razor thin
All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then FB discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword.
If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go, too.
That’s terminal enshittification, the phase when a platform becomes a pile of shit. This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech bros euphemistically call 'pivoting.'
Which is how we get pivots like, 'In the future, all internet users will be transformed into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world called "metaverse," that we ripped off from a 25-year-old satirical cyberpunk novel.'
That's the procession of enshittification. If enshittification were a disease, we'd call that enshittification's "natural history." But that doesn't tell you how the enshittification works, nor why everything is enshittifying right now, and without those details, we can't know what to do about it.
What led to the enshittocene? What is it about this moment that led to the Great Enshittening? Was it the end of the Zero Interest Rate Policy? Was it a change in leadership at the tech giants? Is Mercury in retrograde?
None of the above.
The period of free fed money certainly led to tech companies having a lot of surplus to toss around. But Facebook started enshittifying long before ZIRP ended, so did Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Some of the tech giants got new leaders. But Google's enshittification got worse when the founders came back to oversee the company's AI panic (excuse me, 'AI pivot').
And it can't be Mercury in retrograde, because I'm a cancer, and as everyone knows, cancers don't believe in astrology.
When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that's a sign that the environment has changed, and that's what happened to tech.
Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.
The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honorable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality, and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty.
There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses.
First: competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices.
Second: regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.
These two forces affect all industries, but the next two are far more tech-specific.
Third: self-help. Computers are extremely flexible, and so are the digital products and services we make from them. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing-complete Von Neumann machine, a computer that can run every valid program.
That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company's shareholders. Think of a board-room table where someone says, 'I've calculated that making our ads 20% more invasive will net us 2% more revenue per user.'
In a digital world, someone else might well say 'Yes, but if we do that, 20% of our users will install ad-blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, forever.'
This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory maneuver will prompt their users to google, 'How do I disenshittify this?'
Fourth and finally: workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn't mean that tech workers don't have labor power. The historical "talent shortage" of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage over their bosses. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another job – a better job.
They knew it, and their bosses knew it. Ironically, this made tech workers highly exploitable. Tech workers overwhelmingly saw themselves as founders in waiting, entrepreneurs who were temporarily drawing a salary, heroic figures of the tech mission.
That's why mottoes like Google's 'don't be evil' and Facebook's 'make the world more open and connected' mattered: they instilled a sense of mission in workers. It's what Fobazi Ettarh calls 'vocational awe, 'or Elon Musk calls being 'extremely hardcore.'
Tech workers had lots of bargaining power, but they didn't flex it when their bosses demanded that they sacrifice their health, their families, their sleep to meet arbitrary deadlines.
So long as their bosses transformed their workplaces into whimsical 'campuses,' with gyms, gourmet cafeterias, laundry service, massages and egg-freezing, workers could tell themselves that they were being pampered – rather than being made to work like government mules.
But for bosses, there's a downside to motivating your workers with appeals to a sense of mission, namely: your workers will feel a sense of mission. So when you ask them to enshittify the products they ruined their health to ship, workers will experience a sense of profound moral injury, respond with outrage, and threaten to quit.
Thus tech workers themselves were the final bulwark against enshittification,
The pre-enshittification era wasn't a time of better leadership. The executives weren't better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power.
So what happened?
One by one, each of these constraints was eroded until it dissolved, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittoscene.
It started with competition. From the Gilded Age until the Reagan years, the purpose of competition law was to promote competition. US antitrust law treated corporate power as dangerous and sought to blunt it. European antitrust laws were modeled on US ones, imported by the architects of the Marshall Plan.
But starting in the neoliberal era, competition authorities all over the world adopted a doctrine called 'consumer welfare,' which held that monopolies were evidence of quality. If everyone was shopping at the same store and buying the same product, that meant it was the best store, selling the best product – not that anyone was cheating.
And so all over the world, governments stopped enforcing their competition laws. They just ignored them as companies flouted them. Those companies merged with their major competitors, absorbed small companies before they could grow to be big threats. They held an orgy of consolidation that produced the most inbred industries imaginable, whole sectors grown so incestuous they developed Habsburg jaws, from eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer.
Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with 'predatory pricing' that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold.
When Diapers.com refused Amazon's acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100m on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until diapers.com went bust, and Amazon bought them for pennies on the dollar, and shut them down.
Competition is a distant memory. As Tom Eastman says, the web has devolved into 'five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four,' so these giant companies no longer fear losing our business.
Lily Tomlin used to do a character on the TV show Laugh In, an AT&T telephone operator who'd do commercials for the Bell system. Each one would end with her saying 'We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.'
Today's giants are not constrained by competition.
They don't care. They don't have to. They're Google.
That's the first constraint gone, and as it slipped away, the second constraint – regulation – was also doomed.
When an industry consists of hundreds of small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is a mob, a rabble. Hundreds of companies can't agree on what to tell Parliament or Congress or the Commission. They can't even agree on how to cater a meeting where they'd discuss the matter.
But when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel.
Five companies, or four, or three, or two, or just one company finds it easy to converge on a single message for their regulators, and without "wasteful competition" eroding their profits, they have plenty of cash to spread around.
Like Facebook, handing former UK deputy PM Nick Clegg millions every year to sleaze around Europe, telling his former colleagues that Facebook is the only thing standing between 'European Cyberspace' and the Chinese Communist Party.
Tech's regulatory capture allows it to flout the rules that constrain less concentrated sectors. They can pretend that violating labor, consumer and privacy laws is fine, because they violate them with an app.
This is why competition matters: it's not just because competition makes companies work harder and share value with customers and workers, it's because competition keeps companies from becoming too big to fail, and too big to jail.
Now, there's plenty of things we don't want improved through competition, like privacy invasions. After the EU passed its landmark privacy law, the GDPR, there was a mass-extinction event for small EU ad-tech companies. These companies disappeared en masse, and that's fine.
They were even more invasive and reckless than US-based Big Tech companies. After all, they had less to lose. We don't want competition in commercial surveillance. We don't want to produce increasing efficiency in violating our human rights.
But: Google and Facebook – who pretend they are called Alphabet and Meta – have been unscathed by European privacy law. That's not because they don't violate the GDPR (they do!). It's because they pretend they are headquartered in Ireland, one of the EU's most notorious corporate crime-havens.
And Ireland competes with the EU other crime havens – Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and sometimes the Netherlands – to see which country can offer the most hospitable environment for all sorts of crimes. Because the kind of company that can fly an Irish flag of convenience is mobile enough to change to a Maltese flag if the Irish start enforcing EU laws.
Which is how you get an Irish Data Protection Commission that processes fewer than 20 major cases per year, while Germany's data commissioner handles more than 500 major cases, even though Ireland is nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent.
So Google and Facebook get to act as though they are immune to privacy law, because they violate the law with an app; just like Uber can violate labor law and claim it doesn't count because they do it with an app.
Uber's labor-pricing algorithm offers different drivers different payments for the same job, something Veena Dubal calls 'algorithmic wage discrimination.' If you're more selective about which jobs you'll take, Uber will pay you more for every ride.
But if you take those higher payouts and ditch whatever side-hustle let you cover your bills which being picky about your Uber drives, Uber will incrementally reduce the payment, toggling up and down as you grow more or less selective, playing you like a fish on a line until you eventually – inevitably – lose to the tireless pricing robot, and end up stuck with low wages and all your side-hustles gone.
Then there's Amazon, which violates consumer protection laws, but says it doesn't matter, because they do it with an app. Amazon makes $38b/year from its 'advertising' system. 'Advertising' in quotes because they're not selling ads, they're selling placements in search results.
The companies that spend the most on 'ads' go to the top, even if they're offering worse products at higher prices. If you click the first link in an Amazon search result, on average you will pay a 29% premium over the best price on the service. Click one of the first four items and you'll pay a 25% premium. On average you have to go seventeen items down to find the best deal on Amazon.
Any merchant that did this to you in a physical storefront would be fined into oblivion. But Amazon has captured its regulators, so it can violate your rights, and say, "it doesn't count, we did it with an app"
This is where that third constraint, self-help, would sure come in handy. If you don't want your privacy violated, you don't need to wait for the Irish privacy regulator to act, you can just install an ad-blocker.
More than half of all web users are blocking ads. But the web is an open platform, developed in the age when tech was hundreds of companies at each others' throats, unable to capture their regulators.
Today, the web is being devoured by apps, and apps are ripe for enshittification. Regulatory capture isn't just the ability to flout regulation, it's also the ability to co-opt regulation, to wield regulation against your adversaries.
Today's tech giants got big by exploiting self-help measures. When Facebook was telling Myspace users they needed to escape Rupert Murdoch’s evil crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, 'Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here'
It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your Myspace username and password, and it would login to Myspace and pretend to be you, and scrape everything waiting in your inbox, copying it to your FB inbox, and you could reply to it and it would autopilot your replies back to Myspace.
When Microsoft was choking off Apple's market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac – so that offices were throwing away their designers' Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator – Steve Jobs didn't beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office.
He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office, and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could perfectly read and write Microsoft's Word, Excel and Powerpoint files.
When Google entered the market, it sent its crawler to every web server on Earth, where it presented itself as a web-user: 'Hi! Hello! Do you have any web pages? Thanks! How about some more? How about more?'
But every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, that was progress. If you try to do it to them, that's piracy.
Try to make an alternative client for Facebook and they'll say you violated US laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and EU laws like Article 6 of the EUCD.
Try to make an Android program that can run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple's media stores and they'd bomb you until the rubble bounced.
Try to scrape all of Google and they'll nuke you until you glowed.
Tech's regulatory capture is mind-boggling. Take that law I mentioned earlier, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Bill Clinton signed it in 1998, and the EU imported it as Article 6 of the EUCD in 2001
It is a blanket prohibition on removing any kind of encryption that restricts access to a copyrighted work – things like ripping DVDs or jailbreaking a phone – with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.
This law has been so broadened that it can be used to imprison creators for granting access to their own creations
Here's how that works: In 2008, Amazon bought Audible, an audiobook platform, in an anticompetitive acquisition. Today, Audible is a monopolist with more than 90% of the audiobook market. Audible requires that all creators on their platform sell with Amazon's "digital rights management," which locks it to Amazon's apps.
So say I write a book, then I read it into a mic, then I pay a director and an engineer thousands of dollars to turn that into an audiobook, and sell it to you on the monopoly platform, Audible, that controls more than 90% of the market.
If I later decide to leave Amazon and want to let you come with me to a rival platform, I am out of luck. If I supply you with a tool to remove Amazon's encryption from my audiobook, so you can play it in another app, I commit a felony, punishable by a 5-year sentence and a half-million-dollar fine, for a first offense.
That's a stiffer penalty than you would face if you simply pirated the audiobook from a torrent site. But it's also harsher than the punishment you'd get for shoplifting the audiobook on CD from a truck-stop. It's harsher than the sentence you'd get for hijacking the truck that delivered the CD.
So think of our ad-blockers again. 50% of web users are running ad-blockers. 0% of app users are running ad-blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that's a felony (Jay Freeman calls this 'felony contempt of business-model').
So when someone in a board-room says, 'let's make our ads 20% more obnoxious and get a 2% revenue increase,' no one objects that this might prompt users to google, 'how do I block ads?' After all, the answer is, 'you can't.'
Indeed, it's more likely that someone in that board room will say, 'let's make our ads 100% more obnoxious and get a 10% revenue increase' (this is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website).
There's no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn't install a counter-app that coordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold.
No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete, or in other words: 'IP law.'
'IP' is just a euphemism for 'a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers.' And 'app' is just a euphemism for 'a web-page wrapped enough IP to make it a felony to mod it to protect the labor, consumer and privacy rights of its user.'
We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.
But what about that fourth constraint: workers?
For decades, tech workers' high degrees of bargaining power and vocational awe put a ceiling on enshittification. Even after the tech sector shrank to a handful of giants. Even after they captured their regulators so they could violate our consumer, privacy and labor rights. Even after they created 'felony contempt of business model' and extinguished self-help for tech users. Tech was still constrained by their workers' sense of moral injury in the face of the imperative to enshittify.
Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?
Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.
Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.
And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired last year six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.
Workers are no longer a check on their bosses' worst impulses
Today, the response to 'I refuse to make this product worse' is, 'turn in your badge and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.'
I get that this is all a little depressing
OK, really depressing.
But hear me out! We've identified the disease. We've traced its natural history. We've identified its underlying mechanism. Now we can get to work on a cure.
There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labor.
To reverse enshittification and guard against its reemergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these.
On competition, it's actually looking pretty good. The EU, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and China are all doing more on competition than they have in two generations. They're blocking mergers, unwinding existing ones, taking action on predatory pricing and other sleazy tactics.
Remember, in the US and Europe, we already have the laws to do this – we just stopped enforcing them in the Helmut Kohl era.
I've been fighting these fights with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 22 years now, and I've never seen a more hopeful moment for sound, informed tech policy.
Now, the enshittifiers aren't taking this laying down. The business press can't stop talking about how stupid and old-fashioned all this stuff is. They call people like me 'hipster antitrust,' and they hate any regulator who actually does their job.
Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has run more than 80 editorials trashing Khan, insisting that she's an ineffectual ideologue who can't get anything done.
Sure, Rupert, that's why you ran 80 editorials about her.
Because she can't get anything done.
Even Canada is stepping up on competition. Canada! Land of the evil billionaire! From Ted Rogers, who owns the country's telecoms; to Galen Weston, who owns the country's grocery stores; to the Irvings, who basically own the entire province of New Brunswick.
Even Canada is doing something about this. Last autumn, Trudeau's government promised to update Canada's creaking competition law to finally ban 'abuse of dominance.'
I mean, wow. I guess when Galen Weston decided to engage in a criminal conspiracy to fix the price of bread – the most Les Miz-ass crime imaginable – it finally got someone's attention, eh?
Competition has a long way to go, but all over the world, competition law is seeing a massive revitalization. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put antitrust law in a coma in the 80s – but it's awake, it's back, and it's pissed.
What about regulation? How will we get tech companies to stop doing that one weird trick of adding 'with an app' to their crimes and escaping enforcement?
Well, here in the EU, they're starting to figure it out. This year, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act went into effect, and they let people who get screwed by tech companies go straight to the federal European courts, bypassing the toothless watchdogs in Europe's notorious corporate crime havens like Ireland.
In America, they might finally get a digital privacy law. You people have no idea how backwards US privacy law is. The last time the US Congress enacted a broadly applicable privacy law was in 1988.
The Video Privacy Protection Act makes it a crime for video-store clerks to leak your video-rental history. It was passed after a right-wing judge who was up for the Supreme Court had his rentals published in a DC newspaper. The rentals weren't even all that embarrassing!
Sure, that judge, Robert Bork, wasn't confirmed for the Supreme Court, but that was because he was a virulently racist loudmouth and a crook who served as Nixon's Solicitor General.
But Congress got the idea that their video records might be next, freaked out, and passed the VPPA.
That was the last time Americans got a big, national privacy law. Nineteen. Eighty. Eight.
It's been a minute.
And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned Grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden?
Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google?
Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics?
Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms?
Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?
Having a federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems. There's a big coalition for that kind of privacy law.
What about self-help? That's a lot farther away, alas.
The EU's DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You'll be able to use Whatsapp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind.
But if you want to reverse-engineer one of those Big Tech products and mod it to work for you, not them, the EU's got nothing for you.
This is an area ripe for improvement, and I think the US might be the first ones to open this up.
It's certainly on-brand for the EU to be forcing tech companies to do things a certain way, while the US simply takes away tech companies' abilities to prevent others from changing how their stuff works.
My big hope here is that Stein's Law will take hold: 'Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop'
Letting companies decide how their customers must use their products is simply too tempting an invitation to mischief. HP has a whole building full of engineers thinking of new ways to lock your printer to its official ink cartridges, forcing you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink to print your boarding passes and shopping lists.
It's offensive. The only people who don't agree are the people running the monopolies in all the other industries, like the med-tech monopolists who are locking their insulin pumps to their glucose monitors, turning people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers.
Finally, there's labor. Here in Europe, there's much higher union density than in the US, which American tech barons are learning the hard way. There is nothing more satisfying in the daily news than the latest salvo by Nordic unions against that Tesla guy (Musk is the most Edison-ass Tesla guy imaginable).
But even in the USA, there's a massive surge in tech unions. Tech workers are realizing that they aren't founders in waiting. The days of free massages and facial piercings and getting to wear black tee shirts that say things your boss doesn't understand are coming to an end.
In Seattle, Amazon's tech workers walked out in sympathy with Amazon's warehouse workers, because they're all workers.
The only reason the tech workers aren't monitored by AI that notifies their managers if they visit the toilet during working hours is their rapidly dwindling bargaining power. The way things are going, Amazon programmers are going to be pissing in bottles next to their workstations (for a guy who built a penis-shaped rocket, Jeff Bezos really hates our kidneys).
We're seeing bold, muscular, global action on competition, regulation and labor, with self-help bringing up the rear. It's not a moment too soon, because the bad news is, enshittification is coming to every industry.
If it's got a networked computer in it, the people who made it can run the Darth Vader MBA playbook on it, changing the rules from moment to moment, violating your rights and then saying 'It's OK, we did it with an app.'
From Mercedes renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dishsoap, enshittification is metastasizing into every corner of our lives.
Software doesn't eat the world, it enshittifies it
But there's a bright side to all this: if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification.
Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive, it's unstoppable.
The cynics among you might be skeptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn't "enshittification" the same as "capitalism"?
Well, no.
Look, I'm not going to cape for capitalism here. I'm hardly a true believer in markets as the most efficient allocators of resources and arbiters of policy – if there was ever any doubt, capitalism's total failure to grapple with the climate emergency surely erases it.
But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and wooly internet, a space where people with disfavored views could find each other, offer mutual aid, and organize.
The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crapgadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand-names, and cryptocurrency scams.
The internet isn't more important than the climate emergency, nor gender justice, racial justice, genocide, or inequality.
But the internet is the terrain we'll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it's joined.
We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device.
We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to coordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, and save our planet and our species.
Martin Luther King said 'It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.'
And it may be true that the law can't force corporate sociopaths to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut-bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation.
But it can make that exec fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity, even if he doesn't think you deserve it.
And I think that's pretty important.
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/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel/a>
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