"lovie"
tldr: all the ways jeonghan uses your nickname
a/n: but mom, i love him. (there is a makeout scene in this...)
pesters: but only in good fun
“lovie,” he coos at you, encouraged by the blush on your cheeks. he could tell by the look in your eyes, you were embarrassed but not upset. you hadn’t thought anything of it when he suggested you wear the green hoodie in your closet to visit him and the members in the practice room.
“need to let everyone know we’re together?” he couldn’t help but poke fun at you as you walked into the room wearing a matching hoodie to his. you had no knowledge he had even worn the offending garment today. if you had, you wouldn’t be in yours, especially not in front of his members and their staff.
“i’m pretty sure everyone already knows.” his teasing didn’t let up, even as he wrapped his arms around you, pleased to see you had fallen right into his trap. you faintly heard joshua scoff somewhere behind you, too focused on the man in front of you to really give him any attention, “you guys are gross.”
whispers: when he wants to check in
“lovie,” his whisper pulls you from your thoughts. “i don’t think that pork will come back to life no matter how hard you stare at it. mingyu grilled it really well.” you rolled your eyes but turned to look at him nonetheless. he looked awfully handsome under the dim light of the bbq restaurant. he always looked handsome, you supposed.
“are you okay?” he was still whispering. wanted to keep this moment as private as possible so you could speak freely. he knew dinner with his members could be a lot, especially after a long day at work.
“you can tell me if you want to go. you know i’ll never pass up an opportunity to go home with you.” his eye dropped in a wink, and this time you smiled when you rolled your eyes. going home with him did kind of sound like a good idea…
breathes: in between kisses
“lovie,” it escapes him like a sigh, slipping out between you two in a heated moment. you were on his lap, completely blocking his view of the tv, and in the back of his mind he knows he wanted to see this one but he couldn’t bring himself to care. not with the way he is consumed with the feeling of your weight pressing on him, your warmth almost burning his skin even through layers of clothes.
when you pull back and look at him, he swears he feels his heart skip a beat. face oily and bare from the skin care you had completed before joining him on the couch for movie night, he’s never thought you more beautiful. he can feel your lip balm on and around his lips, a reminder you’d been there.
“whatever you’re doing, it’s working lovie,” he praises. “you’re practically glowing.” if he thought you were radiant before, you beamed under his praise. the last thing he saw before his eyes closed to continue kissing you was your toothy grin.
giggles: behind cupped hands
“lovie,” he was snickering when he pulled you into a secluded corner of seungchoel’s apartment. game night was in full swing and you had just started the third round of mafia. while the rest of the members were distracted by mingyu and soonyoung’s bickering, jeonghan whisked you away, his mischievous smirk on his face.
“can you keep a secret?” he was talking in hushed tones, hiding his mouth behind his hands to avoid prying eyes. when you nodded in confirmation, he leaned impossibly closer, breath tickling your ear.
“i’m the mafia.” it took everything in you to keep your face neutral. you didn’t want to blow him in after he spilled such a big secret. it warmed your heart that he trusted you enough to tell you his role in the game. “if you tell anyone, i’ll kill you next.”
scrawls: on a post-it
“lovie,” the note brought heat to your cheeks. you really hoped your coworker at the desk across from yours didn’t notice. when had he even slipped this in? you packed your own lunch and he wasn’t even awake when you left for your shift this morning, still snuggled beneath your comforter when you pulled your shoes on and headed out the door.
“i miss you. hope you’re having a good day!” his neat handwriting brought a smile to your face. this wasn’t the first time he had snuck a note into your lunchbox, but he didn’t do it often so this was really a treat. and on a friday, too! what a great way to end the week.
“i can’t wait to spend the weekend with you.” you shared the sentiment. looking forward to a free weekend with no plans or schedules. free to rot in your bed for the next two days with your beloved. “love you!”
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How Google’s trial secrecy lets it control the coverage
I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.
"Corporate crime" is practically an oxymoron in America. While it's true that the single most consequential and profligate theft in America is wage theft, its mechanisms are so obscure and, well, dull that it's easy to sell us on the false impression that the real problem is shoplifting:
https://newrepublic.com/post/175343/wage-theft-versus-shoplifting-crime
Corporate crime is often hidden behind Dana Clare's Shield Of Boringness, cloaked in euphemisms like "risk and compliance" or that old favorite, "white collar crime":
https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/07/solar-panel-for-a-sex-machine/#a-single-proposition
And corporate crime has a kind of performative complexity. The crimes come to us wreathed in specialized jargon and technical terminology that make them hard to discern. Which is wild, because corporate crimes occur on a scale that other crimes – even those committed by organized crime – can't hope to match:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/12/no-criminals-no-crimes/#get-out-of-jail-free-card
But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. After decades of official tolerance (and even encouragement), corporate criminals are finally in the crosshairs of federal enforcers. Take National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo's ruling in Cemex: when a company takes an illegal action to affect the outcome of a union election, the consequence is now automatic recognition of the union:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth
That's a huge deal. Before, a boss could fire union organizers and intimidate workers, scuttle the union election, and then, months or years later, pay a fine and some back-wages…and the union would be smashed.
The scale of corporate crime is directly proportional to the scale of corporations themselves. Big companies aren't (necessarily) led by worse people, but even small sins committed by the very largest companies can affect millions of lives.
That's why antitrust is so key to fighting corporate crime. To make corporate crimes less harmful, we must keep companies from attaining harmful scale. Big companies aren't just too big to fail and too big to jail – they're also too big for peaceful coexistence with a society of laws.
The revival of antitrust enforcement is such a breath of fresh air, but it's also fighting headwinds. For one thing, there's 40 years of bad precedent from the nightmare years of pro-monopoly Reaganomics to overturn:
https://pluralistic.net/ApexPredator
It's not just precedents in the outcomes of trials, either. Trial procedure has also been remade to favor corporations, with judges helping companies stack the deck in their own favor. The biggest factor here is secrecy: blocking recording devices from courts, refusing to livestream the proceedings, allowing accused corporate criminals to clear the courtroom when their executives take the stand, and redacting or suppressing the exhibits:
https://prospect.org/power/2023-09-27-redacted-case-against-amazon/
When a corporation can hide evidence and testimony from the public and the press, it gains broad latitude to dispute critics, including government enforcers, based on evidence that no one is allowed to see, or, in many cases, even describe. Take Project Nessie, the program that the FTC claims Amazon used to compel third-party sellers to hike prices across many categories of goods:
https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/amazon-used-secret-project-nessie-algorithm-to-raise-prices-6c593706
Amazon told the press that the FTC has "grossly mischaracterize[d]" Project Nessie. The DoJ disagrees, but it can't say why, because the Project Nessie files it based its accusations on have been redacted, at Amazon's insistence. Rather than rebutting Amazon's claim, FTC spokesman Douglas Farrar could only say "We once again call on Amazon to move swiftly to remove the redactions and allow the American public to see the full scope of what we allege are their illegal monopolistic practices."
It's quite a devastating gambit: when critics and prosecutors make specific allegations about corporate crimes, the corporation gets to tell journalists, "No, that's wrong, but you're not allowed to see the reason we say it's wrong."
It's a way to work the refs, to get journalists – or their editors – to wreathe bold claims in endless hedging language, or to avoid reporting on the most shocking allegations altogether. This, in turn, keeps corporate trials out of the public eye, which reassures judges that they can defer to further corporate demands for opacity without facing an outcry.
That's a tactic that serves Google well. When the company was dragged into court by the DoJ Antitrust Division, it demanded – and received – a veil of secrecy that is especially ironic given the company's promise "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful":
https://usvgoogle.org/trial-update-9-22
While this veil has parted somewhat, it is still intact enough to allow the company to work the refs and kill disfavorable reporting from the trial. Last week, Megan Gray – ex-FTC, ex-DuckDuckGo – published an editorial in Wired reporting on her impression of an explosive moment in the Google trial:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics
According to Gray, Google had run a program to mess with the "semantic matching" on queries, silently appending terms to users' searches that caused them to return more ads – and worse results. This generated more revenue for Google, at the expense of advertisers who got billed to serve ads that didn't even match user queries.
Google forcefully disputed this claim:
https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1709726778170786297
They contacted Gray's editors at Wired, but declined to release all the exhibits and testimony that Gray used to form her conclusions about Google's conduct; instead, they provided a subset of the relevant materials, which cast doubt on Gray's accusations.
Wired removed Gray's piece, with an unsigned notice that "WIRED editorial leadership has determined that the story does not meet our editorial standards. It has been removed":
https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/
But Gray stands by her piece. She admits that she might have gotten some of the fine details wrong, but that these were not material to the overall point of her story, that Google manipulated search queries to serve more ads at the expense of the quality of the results:
https://twitter.com/megangrA/status/1711035354134794529
She says that the piece could and should have been amended to reflect these fine-grained corrections, but that in the absence of a full record of the testimony and exhibits, it was impossible for her to prove to her editors that her piece was substantively correct.
I reviewed the limited evidence that Google permitted to be released and I find her defense compelling. Perhaps you don't. But the only way we can factually resolve this dispute is for Google to release the materials that they claim will exonerate them. And they won't, though this is fully within their power.
I've seen this playbook before. During the early months of the pandemic, a billionaire who owned a notorious cyberwarfare company used UK libel threats to erase this fact from the internet – including my own reporting – on the grounds that the underlying research made small, non-material errors in characterizing a hellishly complex financial Rube Goldberg machine that was, in my opinion, deliberately designed to confuse investigators.
Like the corporate crimes revealed in the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers, the gambit is complicated, but it's not sophisticated:
Make everything as complicated as possible;
Make everything as secret as possible;
Dismiss any accusations by claiming errors in the account of the deliberately complex arrangements, which can't be rectified because the relevant materials are a secret.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/09/working-the-refs/#but-id-have-to-kill-you
My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!
Image:
Jason Rosenberg (modified)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/underpants/12069086054/
CC BY
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
--
Japanexperterna.se (modified)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/
CC BY-SA 2.0:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
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