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sguidwards-bestfriend · 1 year

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New Dimension, Who’s This?

Dp x dc thoughts and stuff

I did not expect people to like this stuff, but I’m glad you're here

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

Danny POV

Danny was NOT having a good time. Dimension hopping should have been fun, but it was shit. All the ecto he'd found had been corrupted and even the human food tasted weird. That 8$ pb&j was a curse on both his tastes buds and his now empty wallet.

For almost a month Danny had been chasing down the most feint ecto trace, but it was the only one he could feel.

Living between Amity and the ghost zone meant he had a surpluses of that feeling, to the point that it became background noise. It being gone felt like loosing a sense.

He grumbled to himself as he floated to an abandoned mansion on a mostly empty road. He was so hungry it made him dizzy to walk so he floated most places. Which absolutely didn’t help him get any human food, since everyone who saw him ran.

He expected the small ecto signature to be a liminal being, like Cujo in his puppy form or one of box ghosts boxes. He hadn’t expect a guy who bolted the second he saw him.

He was definitely liminal, Danny could feel it, but this guy was crazy. A black car sped through the road, the man and the kid he was with jumped in and they left.

Just like that his food source was gone. Danny paused a second and decided he wouldn’t call the guy a "food source" next time they saw each other.

Which thankfully for Danny was only about 10 minutes later.

His actions really shouldn’t be a judgment of character, he was sleep deprived and starving.

...

Insulting this dudes dimension and his ecto signature was definitely not a great start.

At least he looked more human now, his kingly power automatically trying to make his subject more comfortable. Maybe he could convince them to get him a sandwich, or just ham, whatever really, anything at all.

A man in a butler outfit cleared his throat, "I'll get him a meal, don't destroy the furniture." Did Danny say that out loud... maybe the butler had magic.

After eating a decent, but ecto free meal Danny was introduced to Jason (food), Damian (might be food?), Tim (not food), and Alfred (not food).

He hadn't bothered saying a word until he'd finished his plate. Once he had he told them about the ghost zone and the earth he was from, which they very quickly realised was not the same one. He hadn't mentioned being king of said dimension, nor the sole hero of the latter.

They in turn told him about the many different heros that inhabited this earth and the various planets that some of them came from. Danny could tell they weren't telling him everything, but his kingly power did prove to him that they hadn't lied to him, at least Jason and Damian hadn't.

Explanations were cut short when Jason stood up and Danny bolted to his side. Just being near the dude helped, he definitely had a leak or something going on.

"Look man, I'm starving and you are spilling out ecto at an insane rate." Danny said with a hand on the man's shoulder.

Jason looked at him like he'd grown a second head, which he hoped he hadn't because that took more energy than he was willing to expend. "You gunna explain what the fuck you just said?"

Danny had been king long enough to have studied up on the few halfas that had existed. Most of them hadn't survived very long after forming, either becoming a full ghost or their ghost core shriveled away and left them human... with some minor side-effects. "You must have come back from the dead with an unformed ghost core, contaminated with bad ectoplasm. The bad ecto isn't letting the core close up, it's like you have a leak."

"The Lazarus pit goo!" Tim shot up from his seat and ran off.

Danny remembered the forth ecto puddle he had visited, "I heard that name, some fruitloop in a cape was yelling about one of the ones I emptied."

"You emptied them?" Jason said with a perplexed look on his face.

"I was hungry." Danny, ever the gremlin, let them stay confused as he continued. "Anyway, you weren't dead long enough to form a solid core, then the pit goo, as you called it, seeped into the cracks and kept you too alive for it to finish, but too dead for it to fade."

"So I'm stuck like this?" Jason's core started oozing out waves of fear, stress and uncertainty.

"No, no." Danny focused on feelings of ease and calm as best he could while trying to desperately feed off of him. "Probably not, your core wasn't tainted until later so it wasn't flash formed like mine, and you're alive. I'm mostly guessing, but I have two theories." Danny extended his hand to a nearby couch (how many couches did these people have?), they both sat and Danny continued. "Once the contaminated ecto goo is gone you'll fade back to being 100% human since you can't make your own ecto, or..."

"or?"

"Or your core can't keep you alive and you... die fully." Danny didn't look at his eyes as he finished. "I can't guarantee your core will survive that either. It'll have to starve from lack of ecto before we know if your heart and brain are alive enough to keep you going, and with a core so weak we dont really know how well that'll go."

Although Jason was good at hiding his emotions from prying eyes, even as a far off, mangled version of a liminal being he was still part of the ghost king's ruling. Danny didn't mention it, he seemed like he was going through a lot and mind (emotion?) reading tended to make those not used to it uncomfortable.

Jason breathed in deep, "Alright, what's the first step to finding out if my body works without ecto?"

Danny tried not to smile at his future meal as he said. "We get rid of the ecto faster than the bad ecto is coming."

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

Tags:

@bjurnberg, @skulld3mort-1fan, @akikkobara @undead-bi-dinosaur, @amyheart19, @phoenixdemonqueen, @not-your-average-url, @seraphinedemort, @theywontletmeusetheoneiwant (I wasn’t sure if you saying “I’d read more” meant you wanted to be tagged, if not pls tell me and I’ll remove you), @satisfactionbroughtmeback, @kyrianclawraith, @i-always-say-yea,

#eldritch danny #dp x dc #dp x dc au #Dp x dc thoughts and stuff #dp x dc crossover #Danny Phantom #Jason Todd

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sayitdido · 9 months

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minors do not interact! quick drabble

he had a charm and sense of humor that captivated everyone. this included you. you forgot about finding a story about nightwing and found yourself in his bed making out with him. you were in his trap but of course you didn't know. your mind was too busy with the boy on top of you. his beautiful face mesmerizing you every time he leaned to kiss you. messy sounds of your messy kisses alongside with your quieter moans and his heavy breathing filling up the room so nicely. your hands traveled to his hair to have a grip. your clothes starting to feel like surpluses. you needed to get rid them.

you felt relief when he started to unbutton your shirt as if he could read your mind. euphoric sensations getting more and more intense every moment. your naked body was at his mercy. as he started thrusting into you in such a sweet rhythm, you felt perpetual. praises from his mouth and his grip on your hair as his thrusts getting harder and harder. your arms losing the balance as you came making you fall to his mattress. him saying that he was close just few more thrusts as you recovered from your own high. as he filled the condom, you wished it was your walls instead.

all of txt but especially beomgyu

#txt smut #txt hard hours #txt hard thoughts #beomgyu hard hours #beomgyu hard thoughts #beomgyu smut #hueningkai hard hours #hueningkai hard thoughts #hueningkai smut #yeonjun hard hours #yeonjun hard thoughts #yeonjun smut #soobin hard thoughts #soobin hard hours #soobin smut #taehyun hard thoughts #taehyun hard hours #taehyun smut

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economicsresearch · 2 months

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page 562 - Do you ever feel overwhelmed scrolling through all the pictures you took, that you transferred from one phone to the next, backed up on a laptop or locked up in the cloud? Memories that could have been left to fallow, instead rise up zombie-like into your emotional present on a random Tuesday night when you scroll back too far?

There is so much and you don't need most of it. Most memory is meant to disappear after all; maybe only rising up when the light and the smell of an evening combine just so, or a photo falls out of an old notebook. Save the very few -- privileged or damned -- we all have corners and rooms that stay dark. You are meant to forget. It is not natural to scroll and be reminded of every 20 minutes from the last 15 years.

And so you feel feel sick from remembering. And you feel sick because you can't remember, because the remembering you just subjected yourself to isn't really remembering. It's forced and unnatural; a decisive moment abstracted from the life that surrounded it. There was smell and touch and emotion present when the photo was taken. Gone, killed by the visual. Another memory tried to surface, spurred by the photo in front of you. Gone, recall smashed apart by distraction. Only the remorseless engine remains, the piston of the scroll as a new picture is stamped over the old and again and again and anything gnawing at the edge of consciousness never has a chance. You're left with the feeling that you've lost something before it was even in your grasp. That you had finally remembered the combination to the safe where your most precious treasures are stored but the door was slammed, the dial spun and the numbers changed again.

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racefortheironthrone · 4 months

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Why do economists need to shut up about mercantilism, as you alluded to in your post about Louis XIV's chief ministers?

In part due to their supposed intellectual descent from Adam Smith and the other classical economists, contemporary economists are pretty uniformly hostile to mercantilism, seeing it as a wrong-headed political economy that held back human progress until it was replaced by that best of all ideas: capitalism.

As a student of economic history and the history of political economy, I find that economists generally have a pretty poor understanding of what mercantilists actually believed and what economic policies they actually supported. In reality, a lot of the things that economists see as key advances in the creation of capitalism - the invention of the joint-stock company, the creation of financial markets, etc. - were all accomplishments of mercantiism.

Rather than the crude stereotype of mercantilists as a bunch of monetary weirdos who thought the secret to prosperity was the hoarding of precious metals, mercantilists were actually lazer-focused on economic development. The whole business about trying to achieve a positive balance of trade and financial liquidity and restraining wages was all a means to an end of economic development. Trade surpluses could be invested in manufacturing and shipping, gold reserves played an important role in deepening capital pools and thus increasing levels of investment at lower interest rates that could support larger-scale and more capital intensive enterprises, and so forth.

Indeed, the arch-sin of mercantilism in the eyes of classical and contemporary economists, their interference in free trade through tariffs, monopolies, and other interventions, was all directed at the overriding economic goal of climbing the value-added ladder.

Thus, England (and later Britain) put a tariff on foreign textiles and an export tax on raw wool and forbade the emigration of skilled workers (while supporting the immigration of skilled workers to England) and other mercantilist policies to move up from being exporters of raw wool (which meant that most of the profits from the higher value-added part of the industry went to Burgundy) to being exporters of cheap wool cloth to being exporters of more advanced textiles. Hell, even Adam Smith saw the logic of the Navigation Acts!

And this is what brings me to the most devastating critique of the standard economist narrative about mercantilism: the majority of the countries that successfully industrialized did so using mercantilist principles rather than laissez-faire principles:

When England became the first industrial economy, it did so under strict protectionist policies and only converted to free trade once it had gained enough of a technological and economic advantage over its competitors that it didn't need protectionism any more.

When the United States industrialized in the 19th century and transformed itself into the largest economy in the world, it did so from behind high tariff walls.

When Germany made itself the leading industrial power on the Continent, it did so by rejecting English free trade economics and having the state invest heavily in coal, steel, and railroads. Free trade was only for within the Zollverein, not with the outside world.

And as Dani Rodrik, Ha-Joon Chang, and others have pointed out, you see the same thing with Japan, South Korea, China...everywhere you look, you see protectionism as the means of achieving economic development, and then free trade only working for already-developed economies.

#political economy #mercantilism #economic development #early modern state-building #early modern period #laissez-faire #classical liberalism #classical economics #economics #economic history

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matthyeu · 1 year

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i would rather die ― kjw.

pairing ⇢ kim jiwoong x gn!reader

genre ⇢ angst, fluff, enemies to lovers, royal!au

warnings ⇢ violence, blood, swearing

word count ⇢ 2.8k

synopsis ⇢ it only took a near death experience for you to realize the crown prince of vuiryn wasn't all that bad.

dressing up, dancing, laughing, eating small appetizers for aesthetic purposes. they were all things you never did in your everyday life despite your position as the child of your kingdom’s ruler. in technical terms, this was supposed to be your social group, fellow children of rulers or other noble people gathered together.

but it wasn’t.

before being the future ruler of your kingdom, you were the leader of the military, the leader who was forced to leave behind their comrades as you attended this gala your father pushed onto you. you thought while your kingdom was at war with several other rebelling countries, you should have been in the front line, guiding the troops and making plans. your father had other plans though, leaving your second in command to handle this week’s battles.

for he thought before you were a military general, you were the future of the kingdom, meaning it was your duty to ally yourself with many other future rulers. he wanted not only an allyship, but also a union of two rulers’ children, so your kingdoms would be tied and willing to help in times of despair like this. that was why in his eyes, you were more valuable dressed up to play spoiled royalty desperately looking for a spouse.

still, that wasn’t the kind of person you were, going up to the most known people at these gatherings, kissing up to them in hopes of seducing them to somehow grant your kingdom with surpluses of supplies to aid your losing battle.

besides, most of these people would never want to mingle with someone like you, a known royal who physically had blood on their hands, as if they didn’t have blood on their own from their neglect. at least yours wasn’t the blood of your own people.

“haven’t seen you for months.”

and there was the most arrogant one of them all, the one who probably had not only his hands covered but also his entire body. there was no way prince jiwoong of vuiryn didn’t have an overflowing pool of citizens’ blood in the back of his royal palace. his demeanor and powerful aura already exemplified that of a power-hungry ruler. if his ruling was anything like his father’s, you could count on that pool becoming a whole ocean of blood, a literal red sea, once he was crowned.

he was probably the only one your father didn’t want you to attempt to seduce. it would be favorable if your kingdom was not intertwined with the tyranny of vuiryan. it would not settle well with your people, knowing the reputation the current king had.

it was unfortunate that he was the only one of the royal social circle to even attempt conversing with you.

“must you always do this?” you asked, finishing the remains of the wine poured to you by one of the servers, its cost probably enough to cover important funding for your comrades’ weapons.

“i figured you would have liked some company. you’re always off on your own world at these gatherings. wouldn’t kill you to intersect the conversations y’know?” he attempted to joke with you.

he was always like that, playful but in a way that put himself on a pedestal to look down at you. even with his more positive attitude, you knew better than to place any trust in him. he too probably gossiped among the groups about how pathetic you always seemed when you were alone.

there was nothing good that came out of someone like kim jiwoong. he was just another child of one of the many tyrannical rulers across the land. you could never put partial blame on them for their parents’ actions, for your own father would probably act in a similar manner if you hadn’t taken it upon yourself to lead the military to protect your citizens.

“after all the times you’ve done this, i would think you understand i would like nothing to do with you,” you emphasized as you finished your drink, placing it in a bin of various dirty glasses to be cleaned. “now if you’re done annoying me, i’ll be going.”

you turned your heel, beginning to walk away from him. not long after, however, you felt a harsh grab at your wrist. immediately, your eyes rolled back, nearly enough to look into the interior of your skull. was he really going to do this?

did he really have to do this when you just wanted to go off to find some unsuspecting victim to seduce into granting your kingdom the needed money to fund the troops? he was really getting on your nerves.

“jiwoong, let go of me,” you sternly demanded, trying to thrash away from the grasp.

the first siren went off when the grip around your wrist tightened. as much as jiwoong liked to provoke you, he would have never gone this far, bringing such discomfort to you. there was something off about this.

your suspicions were confirmed as you felt cold metal across the skin of your neck and an equally cold voice whispering in your ear. “don’t move now, your highness.”

your eyes immediately darted around the room where many were in the same position as you, held at knifepoint and threatened with their life. some failed to follow instructions in a panic and paid the price as a consequence.

this was another reason you hated coming to royal gatherings. they were the perfect place to be ambushed. you couldn’t care less about leaving your kingdom without a future ruler, but to leave your comrades without a current one, that was something you could not do.

you obeyed his commands, stilling without any sign of resistance. you would figure something out. you always did. it was just…there was no way you could pull anything off in the position you were in. any move would leave you dead, and you didn’t have anything on you to wiggle yourself out of the situation. your father was stern on not bringing anything that would intimidate the rest of the guests. if only he knew that could cost the life of his dear child.

the only thing you could do was oblige to the commands. you could read their intentions. these people were not in it to kill. if so, they wouldn’t have let as many people run as they did. if they wanted to kill you, they already would have. they wanted ransom. you could figure out a plan once they took you to wherever they were planning.

“UUAGH.”

or not. the knife at your throat was lowered after your attacker was…well attacked by someone else. you looked over to see jiwoong, hands bloodied but still holding on. quickly, he grabbed you by the wrist and you two began your run, far away from the ballroom where hell had been let loose.

“let go of me!” you yelled as you struggled against his grasp, which almost caused both of you to tumble over.

a harsh motion was made to release your wrist, and you could see the annoyance on his face. “wow, not even a thank you. if you didn’t notice i just saved your fucking life. if you had stood there in shock any longer, you would be dead.”

you turned away from him, defeated that you couldn’t think of a witty remark to counter it. he was right. you had frozen the moment you were freed. if your attacker had gotten up, it would have been over for you. you whispered a few incoherent swears to yourself, frustrated you let your guard down so easily while at the gathering. it was not like you to do that, but now it had you on the brink of life and death.

“thanks,” you mumbled.

you heard him chuckle, somehow still mocking you at this moment. “can’t hear you you.”

you sighed, rolling your eyes as you two turned a corner. you still had yet to know where you were running to. the corridors of the palace seemed endless, and you didn’t know the way out. from the looks of how the two of you continued to run, jiwoong didn’t know either.

your lack of knowledge on the palace layout was your biggest drawback. as you turned another corner, you were met with several members of the attacker group, all armed and ready to take you down. it seemed they had shifted gears from kidnapping to killing seeing the resistance the two of you put up.

and here was your second mistake. when your original attacker had fallen back, you should have taken his weapon. not having one rendered both of you useless in this situation. both of you backed up until there was nowhere else to back up.

running seemed out of the question now as there was only a certain amount you two could run until fatigue caught up to you. there had been so much running involved in the earlier moments that your legs would probably give out within fifteen or so minutes of running at a fast pace. there was only a slim chance none of the six men in front of you would be still following you by then. you didn’t know how much stamina they had.

you two looked at each other, the first time you looked at him with genuine concern. this was life-or-death, not a time for you to express your burning hatred toward him.

“you go,” he ordered.

“what.”

with no further explanation, he headed into the crowd first, stalling for as much time as he could. they were too focused on him to even pay mind to you. they wanted the satisfaction of killing just one of you.

seeing the sight, you took off. it was probably better off him than you.

you had a whole future ahead, both for you and the army you led. you couldn’t let yourself perish now. jiwoong, he was just another prince who had no heart for others, no consideration for his citizens. if he was gone, vuiryn would not have another tyrannical ruler. this was completely fine.

however, the more you thought about it, the more it wasn’t fine. what on earth were you thinking? when was it better off if someone was dead? the only answer was if they were a horrible person, but…jiwoong had never even proved to be that kind of person to you. sure he was annoying, but you couldn’t recall a time where he had mentioned anything cruel or unsettling.

the overthinking made you pause in the hallway

maybe you had misjudged him. no. you definitely had misjudged him. if he was as cruel as you thought he was, why save you back in the ballroom? he had the stamina and strength to get out of there, but he had risked the extra time to help you.

even if he wasn’t all good like royalty tended to be, there were some things you would never know about him if you let him die.

immediately, you turned around, running back to where you had left him. on the way, you tried to scour for things to use to your advantage. the only thing you could make use of was a vase on display, but it was still better than nothing.

your lungs were already giving out. this was the fastest you had ever ran in this type of clothing, the kind where your legs felt restricted, so you needed to use more muscle to even try to move properly.

by the time you made it back to the scene, your arms and legs had almost made you collapse. you weren’t prepared to do this much running at a gala.

you took a pause at the corner, gripping onto the wall to steady yourself. you only hoped you had made it back in time. your determination would have been useless if he was already gone.

alas, you found yourself weirdly overjoyed seeing jiwoong still struggling with several men, now only two. it was impressive, but you could tell from the look of his stances he was about to lose this fight. you had to step in.

waiting for an opening, you ran back into the scene at the first glimpse of one. both of the attackers’ backs were turned to you, but you were in clear vision of jiwoong when you slammed the vase across their heads. screams of terror were released as you used that window to kick them back into the wall.

now, it was your turn to grab onto jiwoong to make a run for it.

“i told you to run.”

“a thank you would be nice, y’know.”

he laughed at your mockery of his earlier words. the situation had completely changed. now you were the one holding onto him tight as you tried to navigate a way out of the building.

“you seem like the type to want me dead though. change of heart?” he asked, heavy breaths accompanying his words.

“i thought about it, and i would rather die than be indebted to you.” you would never reveal the true reason you came back. it was far too embarrassing for you to admit.

finally, you two made it to an exit, pushing the doors out together in unison. outside, there stood many soldiers, some of them from your own kingdom. it seemed many kingdoms had dispatched soldiers to help clear the palace after the news spread. you felt pity for any soldiers who would have to find the bodies of their respective royals.

“general!” you whipped your head around to see some of your comrades worriedly approaching, “we were worried about you once we heard the news. we had just finished our own battle, but we wanted to come make sure everything was okay.”

you found their concern warming after such an eventful night. “of course i’m alright. i’m a military general after all.”

you heard jiwoong clear his throat behind you. “and because i had prince jiwoong to help me through it.”

you watched as your two comrades exchanged glances, both with each other and between the two of you. their smiles grew. “so you’ve nearly fulfilled your own mission, we see.”

eyes widening at their statement, you realized what they were hinting. jiwoong’s eyes furrowed, opening his mouth to ask a question you could predict. before he could though, you intersected, walking over to where they were administering first aid. “let’s make sure we get wrapped up to prevent infections.”

now, here the two of you sat, sitting across in silence as many doctors and nurses applied ointment at your wounds. there was an uncomfortable silence. neither of you knew how to start a conversation after everything that had happened that night.

it took until your treatment was finished for you to finally ask the one question bothering you the whole night.

“you know how to fight really well? i knew all royals had special training, but you really seemed like you knew what you were doing. i’ve never seen someone in the royal social circle be so unafraid of getting their hands dirty.”

jiwoong looked away with a smile on his face, unsure whether to take your comment as a compliment or an insult. “i’ve always wanted to be a soldier,” he admitted.

the declaration made your eyes widen, to the point where you swore they were about to pop out of your sockets. you had never heard a royal (besides yourself) say such a thing. everyone always called you crazy for the path you chose, so you always assumed he felt the same way.

“so, you don’t think i’m crazy?” you asked for clarification.

he shook his head. “no quite the opposite actually, i’ve been trying to become acquainted with you all this time. i admire your work, and wanted to ask you about how you convinced your father to let you do such a thing.”

your mouth dropped open. you were hating this man for no reason. your hatred was based on false accusations.

“wow, i really know nothing about you.”

“well, do you want to know more about me then?” he suggested.

you smiled at him. “sure, i would love that.”

even though vuiryn was the one kingdom your father didn’t want you to become close with, it was hard now that you knew its prince was nothing like its king. its prince was exactly like you. he truly was the only one who could talk to you because of that.

if that wasn’t enough convincing to allow him to become your ally, you didn’t know what would be.

“i also have thought you were really charming ever since we met, so it’s not just that i wanted to use you for advice. i really want to get to know you.”

or maybe this was the beginning of a union.

you hit him on the shoulder, laughing with him for the first time. “now hold on, we’re going a little fast here, buddy. let’s take it slow.”

#🐨 ― matthyeu #zerobaseone #zb1 #zb1 x reader #zerobaseone x reader #zerobaseone imagines #zb1 scenarios #zb1 drabbles #kim jiwoong #zb1 jiwoong #kim jiwoong x reader #zb1 jiwoong x reader #kim jiwoong imagines #kim jiwoong one-shot #angst #fluff

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Social Quitting

In “Social Quitting,” my latest Locus Magazine column, I advance a theory to explain the precipitous vibe shift in how many of us view the once-dominant social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, and how it is that we have so quickly gone asking what we can do to get these services out of our lives to where we should go now that we’re all ready to leave them:

https://locusmag.com/2023/01/commentary-cory-doctorow-social-quitting/

The core of the argument revolves around surpluses — that is, the value that exists in the service. For a user, surpluses are things like “being able to converse with your friends” and “being able to plan activities with your friends.” For advertisers, surpluses are things like “being able to target ads based on the extraction and processing of private user data” and “being able to force users to look at ads before they can talk to one another.”

For the platforms, surpluses are things like, “Being able to force advertisers and business customers to monetize their offerings through the platform, blocking rivals like Onlyfans, Patreon, Netflix, Amazon, etc” and things like “Being able to charge more for ads” and “being able to clone your business customers’ products and then switch your users to the in-house version.”

Platforms control most of the surplus-allocating options. They can tune your feed so that it mostly consists of media and text from people you explicitly chose to follow, or so that it consists of ads, sponsored posts, or posts they think will “boost engagement” by sinking you into a dismal clickhole. They can made ads skippable or unskippable. They can block posts with links to rival sites to force their business customers to transact within their platform, so they can skim fat commissions every time money changes hands and so that they can glean market intelligence about which of their business customers’ products they should clone and displace.

But platforms can’t just allocate surpluses will-ye or nill-ye. No one would join a brand-new platform whose sales-pitch was, “No matter who you follow, we’ll show you other stuff; there will be lots of ads that you can’t skip; we will spy on you a lot.” Likewise, no one would sign up to advertise or sell services on a platform whose pitch was “Our ads are really expensive. Any business you transact has to go through us, and we’ll take all your profits in junk fees. This also lets us clone you and put you out of business.”

Instead, platforms have to carefully shift their surpluses around: first they have to lure in users, who will attract business customers, who will generate the fat cash surpluses that can be creamed off for the platforms’ investors. All of this has to be orchestrated to lock in each group, so that they won’t go elsewhere when the service is enshittified as it processes through its life-cycle.

This is where network effects and switching costs come into play. A service has “network effects” if it gets more valuable as users join it. You joined Twitter to talk to the people who were already using it, and then other people joined so they could talk to you.

“Switching costs” are what you have to give up when you leave a service: if a service is siloed — if it blocks interoperability with rivals — then quitting that service means giving up access to the people whom you left behind. This is the single most important difference between ActivityPub-based Fediverse services like Mastodon and the silos like Twitter and Facebook — you can quit a Fediverse server and set up somewhere else, and still maintain your follows and followers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies

In the absence of interoperability, network effects impose their own switching cost: the “collective action problem” of deciding when to leave and where to go. If you depend on the people you follow and who follow you — for emotional support, for your livelihood, for community — then the extreme difficulty of convincing everyone to leave at the same time and go somewhere else means that you can be enticed into staying on a service that you no longer enjoy. The platforms can shift the surpluses away from you, provided that doing so makes you less miserable than abandoning your friends or fans or customers would. This is the Fiddler On the Roof problem: everyone stays put in the shtetl even though the cossacks ride through on the reg and beat the shit out of them, because they can’t all agree on where to go if they leave:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

So the first stage of the platform lifecycle is luring in users by allocating lots of surplus to them — making the service fun and great and satisfying to use. Few or no ads, little or no overt data-collection, feeds that emphasize the people you want to hear from, not the people willing to pay to reach you.

This continues until the service attains a critical mass: once it becomes impossible to, say, enroll your kid in a little-league baseball team without having a Facebook account, then Facebook can start shifting its surpluses to advertisers and other business-users of the platform, who will pay Facebook to interpose themselves in your use of the platform. You’ll hate it, but you won’t leave. Junior loves little-league.

Facebook can enshittify its user experience because the users are now locked in, holding each other hostage. If Facebook can use the courts and technological countermeasures to block interoperable services, it can increase its users’ switching costs, producing more opportunities for lucrative enshittification without the risk of losing the users that make Facebook valuable to advertisers. That’s why Facebook pioneered so many legal tactics for criminalizing interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power-ventures

This is the second phase of the toxic platform life-cycle: luring in business customers by shifting surpluses from users to advertisers, sellers, etc. This is the moment when the platforms offer cheap and easy monetization, low transaction fees, few barriers to off-platform monetization, etc. This is when, for example, a news organization can tease an article on its website with an off-platform link, luring users to click through and see the ads it controls.

Because Facebook has locked in its users through mutual hostage-taking, it can pollute their feeds with lots of these posts to news organizations’ sites, bumping down the messages from its users’ friends, and that means that Facebook can selectively tune how much traffic it gives to different kinds of business customers. If Facebook wants to lure in sports sites, it can cram those sites’ posts into millions of users’ feeds and send floods of traffic to sports outlets.

Outlets that don’t participate in Facebook lose out, and so they join Facebook, start shoveling their content into it, hiring SEO Kremlinologists to help them figure out how to please The Algorithm, in hopes of gaining a permanent, durable source of readers (and thus revenue) for their site.

But ironically, once a critical mass of sports sites are on Facebook, Facebook no longer needs to prioritize sports sites in its users’ feeds. Now that the sports sites all believe that a Facebook presence is a competitive necessity, they will hold each other hostage there, egging each other on to put more things on Facebook, even as the traffic dwindles.

Once sports sites have taken each other hostage, Facebook can claw back the surplus it allocated to them and use it to rope in another sector — health sites, casual games, employment seekers, financial advisors, etc etc. Each group is ensnared by a similar dynamic to the one that locks in the users.

But there is a difference between users’ surpluses and business’s surpluses. A user’s surplus is attention, and there is no such thing as an “attention economy.” You can’t use attention to pay for data-centers, or executive bonuses, or to lobby Congress. Attention is not a currency in the same way that cryptos are not currency — it is not a store of value, nor a unit of exchange, nor or a unit of account.

Turning attention into money requires the same tactics as turning crypto into money — you have to lure in people who have real, actual money and convince them to swap it for attention. With crypto, this involved paying Larry David, Matt Damon, Spike Lee and LeBron James to lie about crypto’s future in order to rope in suckers who would swap their perfectly cromulent “fiat” money for unspendable crypto tokens.

With platforms, you need to bring in business customers who get paid in actual cash and convince them to give you that cash in exchange for ethereal, fast-evaporating, inconstant, unmeasurable “attention.” This works like any Ponzi scheme (that is, it works like cryptos): you can use your shareholders’ cash to pay short-term returns to business customers, losing a little money as a convincer that brings in more trade.

That’s what Facebook did when it sent enormous amounts of traffic to a select few news-sites that fell for the pivot to video fraud, in order to convince their competitors to borrow billions of dollars to finance Facebook’s bid to compete with Youtube:

https://doctorow.medium.com/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video-adbe09319038

This convincer strategy is found in every con. If you go to the county fair, you’ll see some poor bastard walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that he “won” by throwing three balls into a peach-basket. The carny who operated that midway game let him win the teddy precisely so that he would walk around all day, advertising the game, which is rigged so that no one else wins the giant teddy-bear:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

Social media platforms can allocate giant teddy-bears to business-customers, and it can also withdraw them at will. Careful allocations mean that the platform can rope in a critical mass of business customers and then begin the final phase of its life-cycle: allocating surpluses to its shareholders.

We know what this looks like.

Rigged ad-markets:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

Understaffed content moderation departments:

https://www.dw.com/en/twitters-sacking-of-content-moderators-will-backfire-experts-warn/a-63778330

Knock-off products:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/08/twitter-is-the-latest-platform-to-test-a-tiktok-copycat-feature/

Nuking “trust and safety”:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-dissolves-trust-safety-council-2022-12-13/

Hiding posts that have links to rival services:

https://www.makeuseof.com/content-types-facebook-hides-why/

Or blocking posts that link to rival services:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go

Or worse, terminating accounts for linking to rival services:

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/12/twitter-suspends-mastodon-account-prevents-sharing-links/

That is, once a platform has its users locked in, and has its business customers locked in, it can enshittify its service to the point of near uselessness without losing either, allocating all the useful surplus in the business to its shareholders.

But this strategy has a problem: users and business customers don’t like to be locked in! They will constantly try to find ways to de-enshittify your service and/or leave for greener pastures. And being at war with your users and business customers means that your reputation continuously declines, because every time a user or business customer figures out a way to claw back some surplus, you have to visibly, obviously enshittify your service wrestle it back.

Every time a service makes headlines for blocking an ad-blocker, or increasing its transaction fees, or screwing over its users or business customers in some other way, it makes the case that the price you pay for using the service is not worth the value it delivers.

In other words, the platforms try to establish an equilibrium where they only leave business customers and users with the absolute bare minimum needed to keep them on the service, and extract the rest for their shareholders. But this is a very brittle equilibrium, because the prices that platforms impose on their users and business customers can change very quickly, even if the platforms don’t do anything differently.

Users and business customers can revalue the privacy costs, or the risks of staying on the platform based on exogenous factors. Privacy scandals and other ruptures can make the cost you’ve been paying for years seem higher than you realized and no longer worth it.

This problem isn’t unique to social media platforms, either. It’s endemic to end-stage capitalism, where companies can go on for years paying their workers just barely enough to survive (or even less, expecting them to get public assistance and/or a side-hustle), and those workers can tolerate it, and tolerate it, and tolerate it — until one day, they stop.

The Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, the mass desertions from the gig economy — they all prove the Stein’s Law: “Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop.”

Same for long, brittle supply-chains, where all the surplus has been squeezed out: concentrating all the microchip production in China and Taiwan, all the medical saline in Puerto Rico, all the shipping into three cartels… This strategy works well, and can be perfectly tuned with mathematical models that cut right to the joint, and they work and they work.

Until they stop. Until covid. Or war. Or wildfires. Or floods. Or interest rate hikes. Or revolution. All this stuff works great until you wake up and discover that the delicate balance between paying for guard labor and paying for a fair society has tilted, and now there’s a mob building a guillotine outside the gates of your luxury compound.

This is the force underpinning collapse: “slow at first, then all at once.” A steady erosion of the failsafes, flensing all the slack out of the system, extracting all the surpluses until there’s nothing left in the reservoir, no reason to stay.

It’s what caused the near-collapse of Barnes and Noble, and while there are plenty of ways to describe James Daunt’s successful turnaround, the most general characterization is, “He has reallocated the company’s surpluses to workers, readers, writers and publishers”:

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barnes-and

A system can never truly stabilize. This is why utopias are nonsense: even if you design the most perfect society in which everything works brilliantly, it will still have to cope with war and meteors and pandemics and other factors beyond your control. A system can’t just work well, it has to fail well.

This is why I object so strenuously to people who characterize my 2017 novel Walkaway as a “dystopian novel.” Yes, the protagonists are eking out survival amidst a climate emergency and a failing state, but they aren’t giving up, they’re building something new:

https://locusmag.com/2017/06/bruce-sterling-reviews-cory-doctorow/

“Dystopia” isn’t when things go wrong. Assuming nothing will go wrong doesn’t make you an optimist, it makes you an asshole. A dangerous asshole. Assuming nothing will go wrong is why they didn’t put enough lifeboats on the Titanic. Dystopia isn’t where things go wrong. Dystopia is when things go wrong, and nothing can be done about it.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. The social media barons who reeled users and business customers into a mutual hostage-taking were confident that their self-licking ice-cream cone — in which we all continued to energetically produce surpluses for them to harvest, because we couldn’t afford to leave — would last forever.

They were wrong. The important thing about the Fediverse isn’t that it’s noncommercial or decentralized — it’s that its design impedes surplus harvesting. The Fediverse is designed to keep switching costs as low as possible, by enshrining the Right Of Exit into the technical architecture of the system. The ability to leave a service without paying a price is the best defense we have against the scourge of enshittification.

(Thanks to Tim Harford for inspiring this column via an offhand remark in his kitchen a couple months ago!)

[Image ID: The Phillip Medhurst Picture Torah 397. The Israelites collect manna. Exodus cap 16 v 14. Luyken and son.]

#pluralistic #social media #post-twitter #post-facebook #switching costs #network effects #web theory #locus magazine #exodus #decentralization

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