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Posts Tagged ‘Enshittification’

Feeling that the law shouldn’t apply to such matters…does absolutely nothing to change the…facts.  –  Elizabeth N. Brown

Neither Addiction Nor Epidemic (#1374) 

“Sex addiction” is basically a shared delusion of guilt-ridden patients and biased “therapists”:

Moral incongruence theory…has been used to explain why so-called sex addicts don’t have more sex than other people but feel worse about it.  When people hold moral beliefs about certain kinds of sexual behavior but still engage in those same behaviors, they are likely to experience shame…guilt…depression, distress, and anxiety…therapists who promote…sex and porn addiction do little to help resolve these moral conflicts and instead focus on the sexual behaviors.  This may be due to moral incongruence in the therapists themselves…No research supports treatments that address pornography as an addiction.  New research by Justine Meador…[showed that] certified sex addiction therapists…had a personal history of seeking sex addiction treatment themselves, compared to less than 5 percent of non-CSAT therapists…Mental health professionals who had higher levels of moral incongruence about their own sexuality were significantly more likely to diagnose porn addiction in other people…[even] when considering clinical vignettes containing symptoms of depression or bipolar disorder along with pornography use…

The Vultures Descend (#1417)

“Fetal personhood” policies are going to keep getting more absurd:

…Honeyhline and Jason Heidemann [used in-vitro fertilization in 2015 to conceive a daughter, and they cryogenically stored two remaining embryos.  An agreement they signed at the time specified that any frozen embryos would be owned jointly but did not say what would happen in the event of divorce.  When they divorced in 2018, they] couldn’t decide who should retain ownership of the frozen embryos…Honeyhline…wanted to use the frozen embryos to conceive another child…But [on] March 7, 2025…Judge Dontae L. Bugg…dismiss[ed her]…suit [under the ridiculous pretense] that “human embryos are not subject to partition” under Virginia law “as they do not constitute goods or chattels capable of being valued and sold.”  Bugg goes on to [opine] that there’s no way that two embryos can be divided equally between two people because “the unique nature of each human embryo means that an equal division cannot conveniently be made”…

Yes, American jurisprudence has now descended to the point where “two cannot be evenly divided by two” is supposed to be taken as a serious judicial opinion.

Enshittification

Another factor in the coming dark age: computer-generated garbage making records of this period unreliable:

There are thousands of…accounts [spew]ing thousands of [computer-generated video]s and images across every social media platform.  Large parts of the SEO industry have pivoted entirely to [CGI] content, as has some of the internet advertising industry…the brute force attack….relies on rapid trial-and-error to guess a password…[these] attacks are not very efficient, but they are effective.  An attacker relentlessly hammers the target until a vulnerability is found or a password is guessed…The best way to think of the slop and spam that [CGI] enables is as a brute force attack on the algorithms that control the internet and which govern how a large segment of the public interprets the nature of reality…the intended “audience” of [CGI] slop is social media and search algorithms, not human beings.  What this means…is that human-created content is getting almost entirely drowned out by [CGI] content because of the sheer amount of it…there is a near total collapse of the information ecosystem and thus of “reality” online…[so] many users seem to have completely lost the ability to tell what is real and what is fake, or simply do not care anymore…

Thought Control (#1491)

Just keep plunging that ice pick in; the bad thoughts will go away eventually:

Florida leads the nation in book [censorship], and [sane people] fear new legislation moving through the State Capitol would make [the problem even worse].  Currently, state law surrounding book challenges mirrors the national standard of obscenity, also known as the Miller Test…the new legislation approved by its first Senate committee Tuesday would prohibit school boards from [using any kind of human judgment] when [responding to a censorship demand, instead requiring them to robotically]…take a book down to its parts and pieces and [censor it if any Froot Loop objects to as much as a single word or line].  The bill also includes penalties for districts that [don’t censor enough books for state politicians’ liking], allowing the Department of Education to withhold state funding…

Vulture Watching (#1500)

Texas pretends to care about women’s health in defense of its crusade to kill more women:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton [crowed about] the arrest of Maria Margarita Rojas…for providing…abortions and illegally operating a network of clinics…without a license…Paxton [vomited disgusting propaganda onto the upturned faces of reporters, pretending to care about the health of pregnant women]…

Unsafe for Human Consumption (#1514)

The mad emperor wants to use copaganda to wreck the medical system and excuse even more state violence:

[Mad emperor] Trump [plans to] designat[e]…fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction…a…State [Department]…source speculates the purpose is a combination of designating fentanyl cartels as terrorist organizations…creating justification for conducting military [invasions of] Mexico and Canada…[and inventing] justification for rounding up homeless encampments and deporting drug users who are not citizens…[the imperial proclamation] “cites a statute that does not entail an authority to ‘designate’ substances as WMD” [and will obviously have] “negative effects on entities that legitimately handle, ship, and deliver opioids for pharmaceutical purposes”…

Do As I Say, Not As I Do (#1521)

Laws are for the peasantry, not the rulers:

Minnesota [Trumpist politician] Justin Eichorn was arrested…for…soliciting a [cop who was fantasy role-playing as]…a 16-year-old [girl online.  When he showed up to] meet [the imaginary teen sex worker]…he was arrested…

Just last week, Eichorn made national news for his nauseating display of bootlicking, proposing that he and three other MAGA cultists, none of who have PhDs in psychology, be allowed to invent an imaginary mental illness called “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, characterized by a revulsion for Trump and his disgusting behavior, and have it counted by actual mental health professionals as an actual mental illness in Minnesota.

 

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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My livelihood will never be as important as someone’s life or right to read what they want.  –  Summer Boismier

To Molest and Rape (#1324)

Rapist cops don’t only target women:

A [typical and representative Ohio cop named] James Stokes Sr. was…convicted of two [status] felonies…[for sexually assaulting] a man who…worked for Stokes…[at his] side [business] of removing junk…Stokes [tried to obtain compliance by] threatening [bogus charges of “unauthorized use” of his personal truck.  His body camera caught him making the threats and sexual comments, including]…”If I don’t get alone time tonight, I swear to God, I will file a charge on you, and I’ll have your butt arrested”…Stokes…[later molested him] at the [cop shop]…The [victim] told investigators he was trying to push Stokes off of him, and their relationship wasn’t sexual.  “He’s obsessed with me”…

The Missing Word (#1383)

If sex were involved, that word wouldn’t be 15 paragraphs in and blunted by qualifiers:

The number of foreign social care workers reporting that they are trapped in exploitative contracts has risen sixfold in the last three years, in the latest evidence of widespread abuse of migrants in the British care system…the Royal College of Nursing…was contacted 134 times in 2023-24 by care workers reporting that their employers were demanding large sums of money…to cover “hiring costs”, including visa processing, if they left their jobs…in one case [these costs] ran to £10,000…and [many include] threat[s of] deportation…

Above the Law (ROTW #5)

Had he not been caught at this stage, he’d have soon moved on to rape:

A U.S. Border Patrol [pig] has been charged [with mere misdemeanors for]…ordering women to show him their breasts…Shane Millan…[pretended the violations were “]searches[“, just as cops often do]…

Thought Control (#1443)

Politicians really do believe they can control people’s thoughts via threats:

Oklahoma’s education board has revoked the license of a former teacher who drew national attention during surging book-ban efforts across the U.S. in 2022 when she covered part of her classroom bookshelf in red tape with the words “Books the state didn’t want you to read”…a judge…advised the…Board…not to revoke the license of Summer Boismier, [but they did it anyway]…An attorney for Boismier, who now works at the Brooklyn Public Library in New York City, told reporters after the board meeting that they would seek to overturn the decision…

Vulture Watching (#1464)

Oh look, the totally-predictable results of bad laws are happening just as sane people said they would:

[There have been] six instances of child abandonment in Harris County [Texas] since the beginning of June.  In two cases, children died…States like Texas with near-total abortion bans are dealing with more [women] abandoning their children for several reasons like [they can’t afford a baby but Texas prevented them from having an abortion, and]…Texas’ safe haven law, or the Baby Moses law, allows a parent to leave a baby less than 60 days old safe and unharmed at a hospital, fire station, or EMS station…

Enshittification

How long before Google becomes completely useless?

Scams just keep popping up [on] Google…impostors of customer service for Delta and Coinbase…[have appeared] in the “People also ask” section high up in Google.  A group of people experienced in Google’s intricacies…said…that it took about 22 minutes to fool Google into highlighting a bogus business phone number in a prominent spot in search results…This fits a persistent pattern of…Google [being tricked] into showing scammers’ numbers for airlineshotels, local repair companiesbanks or other businesses…Fortune recently reported on a man who called what a Google listing said was Coinbase customer support, and instead it was an impostor who…tricked the man and stole $100,000…

The Cop Myth (#1466)

The cop establishment is trying hard to hide this one’s crimes:

A Massachusetts State [cop named]…Dylan Knox…[has been arrested for brutalizing his girlfriend]…on Aug. 15…Records are vague on the nature of…Knox[‘s crimes because]…prosecutors [are hiding the truth, but based on the charges Knox beat, pistol-whipped, and attempted to strangle her, then threatened a witness]…Knox is the second state trooper charged with domestic assault and battery in the last two weeks….

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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Most of my readers are probably familiar with the neologism “enshittification”, coined by writer Cory Doctorow in 2022; Wikipedia describes it thus:

Enshittification is a re-prioritization pattern where online product and service providers experience a decline in quality over time. It is observed as platforms transition through several stages: initially offering high-quality services to attract users, then shifting to favor business customers to increase profitability, and finally focusing on maximizing profits for shareholders at the expense of both users and business customers. This…results in a significant deterioration of the user experience

Doctorow has also referred to the phenomenon by the less-colorful term “platform decay”, similar to the term “link rot” (which refers to a different, but not unrelated, form of internet decline).  There’s little point in my discussing enshittification in a broad sense, because there’s already plenty on it online (especially by Doctorow himself); this is just a gripe stemming from one specific example, described by Wikipedia thus:

…Google Search…became dominant through relevant search results and minimal ads, then later degraded through increased advertising, search engine optimization, and outright fraud, benefiting its advertising customers…Doctorow…cites Google’s firing of 12,000 employees in January 2023, which coincided with a stock buyback scheme which “would have paid all their salaries for the next 27 years”, as well as Google’s rush to research an [ML] search chatbot, “a tool that won’t show you what you ask for, but rather, what it thinks you should see”...

When my blog was young (2010-14) it grew by leaps and bounds via Google, largely because I was writing about things virtually nobody else was, and my blog therefore stood out in search results.  But once Google became the dominant search engine, it began to “downrank” results that led to my blog because I talk about bad, dirty, nasty sex, and Google had to protect its puritanical advertisers from having icky adult discussions of such topics show up near their precious ads.  As a result, traffic reaching this site via Google dropped off to a shadow of its former volume.  My personal use of Google, though, didn’t change all that much because I tend to use very specific searches and scroll down past the ads without even looking at them.  In the past few years, however, it’s become harder to find any decent results from the engine, especially since the aforementioned machine learning systems were rudely inserted between my keyboard and the actual information I’m trying to find.  If there’s a way to turn this irritant off, I certainly don’t know about it; the concept of “consent” seems foreign to the company whose slogan was once “Don’t be evil”.

But Google doesn’t limit itself to nonconsensual search interference, oh no; now it’s also fucking with my actual writing process.  As I write, Google repeatedly “corrects” words that aren’t incorrect in the first place, thus changing the meanings of phrases and sentences (often from sense into nonsense).  In one recent and especially-annoying example, I was typing the verb “trumps” (in the sense of one factor overriding a less important one, a metaphorical reference to the card game mechanism), only to have Google change it automatically and without my permission to “Trump’s” (it did it just now, but I left it this time).  It’s not the first time I’ve seen this; my phone similarly capitalizes common nouns which happen to also be the names of tech corporations, as though normal people used those names more often than the common noun.  But in the past, it only annoyed me while using voice to text on my phone, rather than slowing me down and requiring an extra proofreading stage in my post or tweet writing.  I’ve searched online and there are no real solutions to the problem that I can find; every post claiming to have the solution is either ineffective or tells me to go to menus which don’t actually exist in the version of Chrome that appears on my computer.  So this is, as I said above, mostly a gripe; it is, however, also a warning that should you see some idiotic phrase that makes absolutely no semantic sense in one of my essays, it isn’t that I’m growing senile; it’s just that I failed to catch one of Google’s “improvements” before the essay posted.

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A number of readers have asked me why most of the links on my blog now lead to archived copies of web pages rather than the originals.  One reason is that many news sites are now paywalled, and archive sites circumvent 90% of paywalls; another is that so many sites now demand readers agree to be spied upon (“please approve our tracking cookies”) and archives circumvent that as well.  Many sites also feature adblocker-blockers, and since my brain can’t handle being bombarded with ads that blink, flash, jump, drift, pop up, and otherwise assault my vertigo and aggravate my anxiety, an adblocker is non-negotiable for me if I’m to use the internet at all.  But the most important reason of all is the title of this column: link rot, the phenomenon by which once-functional links now lead to nothing because the original page has been abandoned, deleted, censored, subjected to DMCA “takedown”, or memory-holed.  The problem has always existed, but it’s getting worse thanks to many factors including increasingly-aggressive puritanism, fascist systems that increasingly favor big corporations over the small sites that once made up most of the virtual landscape, and the growing popularity of censorship.  Worst of all, not all rotted links are completely dead; some lead to articles which have been bowdlerized, edited to hide inconvenient facts, or otherwise altered from the original.  Embedded YouTube videos have their own special kinds of rot:  videos can be removed, accounts can be cancelled because some corporate bully claimed “copyright violation“, and in the past few months YouTube has suddenly started enlarging embedded videos so they no longer fit properly on the screen (the better to lure the viewer to the main site, where they can be more effectively tracked and bombarded with ads); the only way to fix this is to go into the HTML code of every single stretched video, one at a time, and manually reset the height and width to their original dimensions.  It’s bad enough having to do that with videos; on a blog as extensive as this one, repairing other rotted links is quite impossible.  So the best I can do is to ensure that going forward, readers clicking on the links I embed will be able to see the article I linked to, in the same form as when I linked it.

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