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messylustt · 7 months

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v.05.10.23 day three: power imbalance ( nsfw )

YOU CAN’T LEAVE — miguel o’hara: miguel is your boss. a cold man who everyone fears, but how does he react when you walk in with a resignation letter?

marks power imbalance. dubcon. blackmailing. possessive!miggy. p in v.

even though your posture showed confidence and provided you with false assurance as you walked down the lavish hall of the company you worked for, your hands still stuck to the letter you were holding. you’re praying your sweat isn’t sinking into the paper.

once you reach mr. o’hara’s office door, you straighten your spine even more and knock. there’s a few moments of silence before you hear the gruff and clearly annoyed voice of your boss. “come in.” you push open the door, careful to de-crinkle the letter as you brush at your skirt.

the moment you stepped inside and shut the door, miguel’s eyes darted up. “finished already?” he leans back in his chair, his gaze flittering across your clothes, your hand readjusting your pencil skirt. “um, no sir, the papers are underway. i just came in to give you this.” you walk over, your heels clicking along the shining floor as you offer the letter to miguel.

miguel grabs it off you, his gaze only then leaving your form to look at the letter. he pauses once he catches the first word, typed out in bold. ‘resignation’. “what’s this?” his voice is still as cold as always, as you paste on a smile. “a resignation letter, sir.”

“why are giving this to me?” he asks to which your brows furrow. “because i mean to…resign.” you thought it was obvious. you had thought he’d be secretly jumping for joy at the prospect of you leaving. with his scolding and hard stares you didn’t think he liked you very much. “again, let me ask, why are you giving me this?” what you didn’t know was that the first feeling miguel got at the thought of you leaving was one of distaste, a sourness in his mouth, along with a pit in his stomach. leaving? you were leaving?

“i’ve loved working here, it’s given me many opportunities — ” you begin in that polite tone of yours but miguel cuts in. “get to the point.” you press your lips together as you hold back from retorting something you’ll regret. “i’ve been offered a job.” you say a little more bluntly. miguel stares at you, that coldness in his eyes actually sending shivers down your spine. “you have a job.” he remarks, his tone still indifferent.

“i don’t think this job is fit for me anymore.” you say. “and what makes you think that you can decide that?” his question has you pausing, mouth opening before closing again. “i’m sorry?”

miguel stands, walking around his desk slowly as you twist your body to face him. “do i have to keep repeating myself, miss?” you slightly shuffle back as subtly as possible as he nears, head tilted down at you. “i don’t understand the question, sir.”

“then what makes you think that you could do well anywhere else?” miguel’s tone has turned a little harsher, as he’s neared. “that’s a bit out of line—“ but miguel cuts you off. “i’m your boss. don’t you want your boss to be honest? because you and i both know that this is the only company you’re fit to work at.”

you stare up at him, really holding back, as you grind your teeth. “you may have forgotten, or plainly not heard me,” you mutter out, more quietly. “but i got offered the job. that means someone is wanting me to be a part of their company.” you say, sparing a look to the side, pretending to be glancing out the window, when in reality you only wanted to get away from his sharp gaze.

but miguel isn’t having that, grabbing your chin, as he redirects your focus back onto him. your breathing hitches a fraction at the now close proximity between you both. “and who is this someone?” he practically sneers. you go to step back, but he tightens his hold on your chin. “no no, come on. it’d be rude not to share with your boss.”

“you aren’t my boss anymore—“

“you’re my employee, miss,” He follows with with your last name. “Even by your little letter you still have a month here.” he speaks lowly. you hate the fact that he’s right. your contract states that you must give notice a month before hand. “but you aren’t leaving.”

“you can’t decide that, sir.” you say evenly, grabbing his wrist, and pulling his hand away. miguel raises his brows, before nodding, looking to the side with a scoff, his tongue poking out against his cheek. “is that right?”

“yes.” you say, finally creating some distance. “you seem unnaturally confident today.” he remarks. “what happened to that timid little thing who brought me coffee? don’t tell me you’re feeling all empowered now since you think you’re leaving?” throughout his words he’s begun to step closer. your backwards steps are matching his, as he nears you again. “because that’s a little pathetic if you feel confident about getting away from here. from me.” your lower back hits his desk, making you jolt a fraction. “is that it? you’re happy about getting away from me?”

“this has nothing to do with you…sir.” you say, trying your best to keep your voice even and professional. “it doesn’t? oh, well that’s good.” he remarks, making your face contort in further confusion. “i wouldn’t want you going off and babbling on about what a terrible boss i am.” he’s neared you, body practically pressed up against yours as you fold your lips behind your teeth. “mr. o’hara — ”

“no, tell me. is it something i did?” usually one sounds apologetic when they say this, but miguel sounds the farthest from it, almost challenging you to speak against him. you stay silent, darting your gaze around and towards the door. miguel watches you closely, before he leans in towards your ear. “or is it something i didn’t do?” his almost intimate tone has your back stiffening. “because you know you can always talk to me.” his overly sweet and almost mocking tone has you gulping. “i want to treat my employees with…care, don’t i?”

“sir, again, this isn’t about you — ” but he again cuts you off. “but it is.” he remarks, his expression away from your line of sight and far too close to your neck. he’s eyeing your skin, down your throat and towards your beating pulse. “let me repeat myself.” his breath hits your neck, as he leans back, tucking a strand of hair behind your ear. “you aren’t leaving.”

“…why?” exasperation has finally cracked through your tone, as he leans back to meet your gaze. “why?” he muses. then you’re suddenly being flipped around, body pressed right up against his desk as he bends you over, your chest squished against the expensive glass. your eyes grow wide when you feel his knee nudge your legs apart. a shiver runs down your spine as the cool air hits your closed pussy, the stretch of your skirt gaining miguel’s attention. you try to speak, to protest, but no words seem to surface, especially as miguel’s hands push your pencil skirt farther up, revealing your ass and panties to him.

“because you, have always been so good to me. so diligent. why would i settle for someone else when i have my perfect little assistant right here in front of me.” he continues, humming to himself as he strokes and manhandles your ass and thighs. “you can’t stop me from resigning.” you manage as you try to flip back around, but his grip on you makes it impossible. “i can do is a lot worse then that, querida.”

he then slips his hands into your panties making you squirm as he pushes them to the side. “you really think that you’d do well anywhere else? i take good care of you here, don’t i?” you can hear the zip and clank of his belt as you breath harder. “no other boss would treat you this well.” miguel pulls out his cock, pumping it a few times, but it’s already hard, his arousal having begun the moment you stepped into his office. “treat me well? you treat me horribly.” you hiss back, before you gasp as he pulls your panties up creating a string to rub right over your clit. you grip his desk, knuckles turning lighter.

“no, i’ve treated you far too well, because usually the moment that i want to fuck someone i do. i don’t care if it’s a work setting, hell, i don’t even care if someone sees. i’ve showed you restraint, because believe it or not you’ve actually been a rather helpful assistant to me. wouldn’t wanna scare you off. but you know what?” miguel pulls your panties to the side again, as he then, brushes the head of his cock through your wetness, his breathing heavier. “mierda…” he mutters out, eyes entirely focused on the way your pussy lips are hugging him, as your breathing stutters.

he leans over your body, grabbing your hair and pulling you back into him, a small groan leaving him as your ass pushes into him completely. “no matter what you did you always made me want to touch these pretty pussy lips of yours. and now…” he slips his hand down between you, widening your pussy lips with his fingers as he forces your back to arch even more. “now you’re gonna let me slip my cock inside you, and let me fuck you into my desk. you’re gonna let me do that, right?” his tone is demanding and full of manipulation, no room left for a ‘no’. “feel free to yell, call for help, because if you do just know that that little company who asked for you suddenly won’t be taking any new employees. along with every other business in the state.”

you gasp as he sinks into you, harshly pushing your skirt further up your body as his hips begin to move, thrusting into you. his hands find your back and neck, pushing you further down onto the desk. “widen your legs, querida…come on now…” he breathes, as his cock thrusts in and out of you, giving you no room to adjust to his size, as small hiccups and whimpers leave your lips, your body bouncing along the desk. “that’s it — ” he groans out, thrusting harder into you as your legs shake.

he scoffs as he watches your ass jiggle, slapping right up against his happy trail. his large hand squeezes and plays with a cheek, slapping occasionally just to hear you gasp for more breath. “can’t believe you came in here with that stupid letter.” each word is pronounced roughly with each thrust to match. “you really think that you can just leave? aw, my sweet girl, you’re a little stupid aren’t you?” he’s licking his lower lip, head slightly tilted back as he grips you harder, pulling you back onto his cock as all you can do is babble and murmur, your eyes threatening to roll back.

“who came up to you?” he breathlessly asks, switching the pace slower just to make you squirm. “hm? who offered you the job?” he tugs harshly on your hair when you don’t answer. “m-mr. dalton.” you manage, even though your throat is dry. “mr. dalton.” miguel repeats, as he lets your hair go, spreading your ass cheeks with both his hands, just to see the way his cock is sliding in and out of your dripping wet hole. “from that northside company?” he rhetorically asks. “i guess I’ll have to pay him a little visit then, won’t i?”

miguel leans over you, lips, tongue and teeth trailing your spine up to the back of your neck, as he continues to fuck you into his desk. “i’ll just have to let him know how unavailable you are. yeah…how you just love working for me far too much to leave.” he chuckles darkly into your skin, as your mouth falls open, your orgasm fast approaching. miguel’s hand slips around your thigh, as he rubs at your clit, making your grip tighten, your pants and heavy breathes fogging up his glass desk.

when miguel reached his orgasm, he barely let you finish before he was flipping you around and pushing you to sit on his desk, legs spread. you’ve barely caught your breath before miguel’s lifting one of your legs over his shoulder, your high heel rested on his back as his warm breath hits your sensitive pussy. oh he wanted so much more, as he whispered onto your clit. “tomorrow come in early. and that’s an order.”

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months

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Zuck’s gravity-defying metaverse money-pit

Tomorrow (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

Think of everything that makes you miserable as being caught between two opposing, irresistible, irrefutable truths:

"Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops" (Stein's Law)

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" (Keynes)

Both of these are true, even though they seemingly contradict one another, and no one embodies that contradiction more perfectly than Mark Zuckerberg.

Take the metaverse.

Zuck's "pivot" to a virtual world he ripped off from a quarter-century old cyberpunk novel (reminder: cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion) was born of desperation.

Zuck fancies himself an avatar of the Emperor Augustus (that's why he has that haircut) (no, really). The emperors of antiquity are infamous for getting all weepy when they run out of lands to conquer.

But the lachrymosity of emperors has little causal relationship to the anxieties of tech monopolists! Alexander weeps because he just loves a good conquest and when he finishes conquering the world, he's terminally bored. That's not Zuck's problem at all. When Zuck attains monopoly status, his company develops an autoimmune disorder, as his vicious princelings run out of enemies to destroy and begin to knife one another.

Any monopoly faces these destructive microincentives, but tech is exceptional here because tech has the realtime flexibility and speed that brick-and-mortar businesses can never match:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Sociopaths with tech monopolies are worse for the same reason that road-rage would be worse in a flying car: adding new capacity to indiscriminate self-destructive urges turns ordinary car crashes into low-level airburst warfare:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

The flexibility of digital gives tech platforms so much latitude to break things in tiny increments. A tech platform is like a Jenga tower composed of infinitely divisible blocks. The Jenga players are the product managers and executives who have run out of the ability to grow by attracting new business thanks to their monopoly dominance. Now they compete with one another to increase the yield from their respective divisions by visiting pain upon the business customers and end users their platform connects. By tiny increments, they increase the product's cost, lower its reliability, and strip it of its utility and then charge rent to restore its functionality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/24/cursed-bigness/#incentives-matter

This is the terminal stage of enshittification, the unstoppable autocannibalism of platforms as they seek to harvest all the value created by business customers and end users, leaving the absolute minimum of residual value needed to keep both stuck to the platform. This is a brittle equilibrium, because the difference between "I hate this service but I just can't stop using it," and "Get me the fuck out of here" is razor-thin.

All it takes is one tiny push – a whistleblower, a livestreamed mass-shooting, a Cambridge Analytica – and people bolt for the doors. This triggers the final stage: the "pivot," which is a tech euphemism for "panic."

For Zuck, the pivot got real after a disappointing earnings call triggered a mass sell-off of Facebook stock, history's worst one-day value incineration, which lopped a quarter of a trillion dollars off the company's market cap:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-19/dramatic-stock-moves-of-2022-led-by-meta-dive-nordic-flash-crash

This was when the metaverse became the company's top priority.

Now, in my theory of enshittification, the step that follows the pivot is death: "Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Many people have asked me about the conspicuous non-death of Facebook! That's where I have to fall back on Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Facebook can't continue to annihilate value, alienate its workers, harm the public, hemorrhage money in support of a mediocrity's cherished folly forever. Can it?

Admittedly, it sure seems like it can. Facebook's metaverse pivot has thus far cost the company $46,500,000,000. That is: $46.5 billion. That's even more money than Uber torched, seeking to maintain the illusion that they will be able to create monopolies on both transport and the labor market for driving and recoup the billions the Saudi royal family let them use for the con:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft

Don't worry: the Saudi royals are fine! They cashed out at the IPO, collecting a tidy profit at the expense of retail investors who assumed that a pile of shit as big as Uber must have a pony under it, somewhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

Uber has doubled the cost of rides and halved drivers' wages, using illegal gimmicks like "algorithmic wage discrimination" to squeeze a little more juice out of the nearly exhausted husks of its workforce:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But Stein's Law hasn't been repealed. Drivers can't drive for sub-subsistence wages. Do that long enough and they'll literally starve: that's what "subsistence" means. We lost a decade of transit investment thanks to the Uber con, at the same time as traditional taxi drivers were forced out of the industry. Uber can't be profitable and still pay a living wage, and the fantasy of self-driving cars as a means of zeroing out the wage-bill altogether remains stubbornly, lethally unworkable:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Which means we're at the point where you can get off a commuter train at a main station and find yourself stranded: no taxis at the taxi-queue, no busses due for an hour, and no Uber cars available unless you're willing to pay $95 for a ten-minute ride in a luxury SUV (why yes, this did happen to me recently, thanks for asking).

As more and more of us are exposed to these micro-crises, the political will to do something will increase. This can't go on forever. "Don't use commuter rail" isn't a viable option. "Walk three miles each way to the commuter rail station" isn't viable either. Neither is "Pay $95 for an Uber to get to the station." Something's gotta give…eventually.

"Eventually" is the key word here. Remember the corollary of Stein's Law: Keynes's maxim that "markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Sure, anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, but that is no guarantee of a soft landing. You can't smoke two packs a day forever – but in the absence of smoking cessation, the eventual terminus of that habit is stage-four lung cancer. Keep hammering butts into your face and your last smoke will come out a crematorium chimney.

Zuckerberg hasn't merely blown a whole-ass Twitter on the metaverse with nothing to show for it – he's gotten richer while doing it! In the past year, his net worth increased by 130%, to $59 billion, thanks to an increase in Facebook's share-price, driven by investors who stubbornly remain irrational, keeping the Boy Emperor solvent long past any reasonable assessment of his performance.

What are these investors betting on? One possibility is that the rise and rise of Facebook's share-price represents a bet on technofeudalism. Since the Communist Manifesto, Marxists have been predicting the end of capitalism. That end seems to have come, but what followed capitalism wasn't socialism, it was the return of feudalism, an economic system where elites derive their wealth from rents, not profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Profit is the income you get from investing in capital – machinery, systems, plant – and then harvesting the surplus value created by workers who mobilize this capital. Capitalism produces massive returns for its winners – in the Manifesto's first chapter, Marx and Engels just geek out about how productive and dynamic this system is.

But capitalism is also a Red Queen's Race, where the winners have to run faster and faster to stay in the same place. Capitalism drives competition, as other would-be winners pile into the sector, replicating the systems that the current winners are using and then improving on them. This is why the prophets of capitalist end-times like the FBI informant Peter Thiel say that "competition is for losers."

Capitalism's "profits" stand in contrast to the feudalist's "rents." Rents are income you get from owning something that other people need to produce things. The capitalist owns the coffee-shop, but the feudalist owns the building. When a rival capitalist opens a superior coffee-shop and drives the old shop out of business, the capitalist loses, but the rentier wins. Now they can rent out an empty storefront in the neighborhood everyone's coming to because of that hot new cafe.

Feudal and manorial lords also made their fortunes by extracting surplus value from workers, but these rentiers don't care about owning the means of production. The peasant in the field pays for their own agricultural equipment and livestock – control over the means of production is necessary for worker liberation, but it's not sufficient. The worker's co-op that owns its factory can still find the value it produces bled off by the landlord who owns the land the factory sits on.

The jury's still out on whether American workers really see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," but America's capitalists have a palpable, undeniable loathing for capitalism. The dream of an American "entrepreneur" is *PassiveIncome: money you get from owning something capitalists and/or workers use to create value. Digital technology creates exciting new possibilities for rent-extraction: a taxi-operator had to buy and maintain a car that someone else drove. Uber can offload this hassle onto its drivers and rent out access to the chokepoint it created between drivers and riders, charging all the traffic can bear. This is feudalism in the cloud – or as Yannis Varoufakis calls it, cloudalism.

In Varoufakis's Technofeudalism, he describes Amazon as a feudal venture. From a distance, Amazon seems like a bustling marketplace of manic capitalism, with sellers avidly competing to offer more variety and lower costs in a million independently operated storefronts. But closer inspection reveals that Amazon is a planned economy, not a market.

Every one of those storefronts pays rent to the same landlord – Amazon – which determines which goods can be offered for sale. Amazon sets pricing for those goods, and extracts 45-51% of every dollar those sellers make. Amazon even controls which goods are shelved at eye-height when you enter the store, and which ones are banished to a dusty storeroom in a distant sub-basement you'll never find:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/14/flywheel-shyster-and-flywheel/#unfulfilled-by-amazon

Zuck's metaverse is pure-play technofeudalism, Amazon taken to the logical extreme. It's easy to get distracted by the part of Zuck's vision that will convert us all into legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-resolution cartoon characters. But the real action isn't this digitization of our fleshy wants and needs. Zuck didn't spend $46.5B to torment us.

The cruelty isn't the point of the metaverse.

The point of the metaverse is to rent us out to capitalists.

Zuck doesn't know why we would use the metaverse, but he believes that if he can convince capitalists that we all want to live there, that they'll invest the capital to figure out how to serve us there, and then he can extract rent from those capitalists and start earning "passive income." It's an Uber for Cyberpunk Dystopias play.

Zuck's done this before. Remember the "pivot to video?" Zuckerberg wanted to compete with Youtube, but he didn't want to invest in paying for video production. Videos are really expensive to produce and the median video gets zero views. So Zuck used his captive audience to trick publishers into financing his move into video. He fraudulently told publishers that videos were blowing up on Facebook, outperforming boring old text by vast margins.

Publishers borrowed billions and raised billions more in the capital markets, financing the total conversion of newsrooms from text to video and precipitating a mass extinction event for print journalists. Zuck kept the con alive by giving away (fewer) billions to some of those publishers, falsely claiming that their videos were generating fortunes in advertising revenue. These lucky, credulous publishers became judas goats for their industry, luring others into the con, the same way that the "lucky" guy a carny lets win a giant teddy-bear at the start of the day lures others into putting down $5 to see if they can sink three balls in a rigged peach-basket.

But when we stubbornly refused to watch videos on Facebook, Zuck stopped spreading around these convincer payouts, and precipitated a second mass-extinction event in news media, as the new generation of video journalists joined their predecessors in Facebook-driven unemployment. Given this history, it's surreal to see publishers continue to insist that Facebook is stealing their content, when it is so clearly stealing their money:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

Metaverse is the new Pivot to Video. Zuckerberg is building a new world, which he will own, and he wants rent it to capitalists, who will compete with one another in just the way that Amazon's sellers compete. No matter who wins that competition, Zuckerberg will win. The prize for winning will be a rent increase, as Zuckerberg leverages the fact that your "successful" business relies on Facebook's metaverse to drain off all the value your workers have produced:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/

This can't last forever, but how long until Zuck's reality distortion field runs out of battery? That's the $46.5B question.

The market can certainly remain irrational for a hell of a long time. But the market isn't the only force that regulates corporate outcomes. Regulators also regulate. Europe's GDPR is now seven years old, and it plainly outlaws Facebook's surveillance.

For nearly a decade, Facebook has pretended that this wasn't true, and they got away with it. Mostly, that's thanks to the fact that Ireland is a corporate crime-haven with a worse-than-useless Data Protection Commission:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

But anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. Facebook has finally been dragged into EU federal jurisdiction, where it will face exterminatory fines if it continues to spy on Europeans:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/07/luck-of-the-irish/#schrems-revenge

In response, Facebook has rolled out a subscription version of its main service and its anticompetitive acquisition, Instagram:

https://about.fb.com/news/2023/10/facebook-and-instagram-to-offer-subscription-for-no-ads-in-europe/

For €10/month, Facebook will give you an ad-free experience across its service offerings (it's €13/month if you pay through an app, as Facebook recoups the 30% #AdTax rents that the feudal Google/Apple mobile duopoly extracts).

But this doesn't come close to satisfying Facebook's legal obligations under the GDPR. The GDPR doesn't ban ads, it bans spying. Facebook spies on every single internet user, all the time. The apps we use are built with "free" Facebook toolkits that extract rent from the capitalists who make them by harvesting our data as we use their apps. The web-pages we visit have embedded Facebook libraries that do the same thing for web publishers. Facebook buys our data from brokers. Facebook has so many ways of spying on us that there's almost certainly no way for Facebook to stop spying on you, without radically transforming it operation.

To comply with the GDPR, Facebook must halt surveillance advertising altogether. There's no way to square "spying on users" with "you can't surveil without explicit consent, and you can't punish people for refusing."

And of course, "not spying" isn't the same as "not advertising." "Contextual advertising" – where ads are placed based on the thing you're looking at, not who you are and what you do – is hundreds of years old. Context ads underperform surveillance ads by a slim margin – about 5% – but they're vastly more profitable for publishers. That's because surveillance ads are feudal, controlled by rentiers like Facebook, who own vast troves of the surveillance data needed to run these ads. Traditional ad intermediaries (agencies, brokers) took 10-15% out of the total advertising market. Ad-tech companies – the Google/Facebook duopoly – take 51% out of every ad dollar spent.

Eliminate surveillance ads and you torch their feudal estates. Facebook will always know more about someone reading a news article than the publisher – but the publisher will always know more about the article than Facebook does:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

There are rents under capitalism, just as there are profits under feudalism. The defining characteristic of a system is what happens when rents and profits come into conflict. If profits win – for example, if productive companies beat patent trolls, or if news publishers escape Facebook's rent-extraction – then the system is capitalist. If rents win – if investors continue to bet large on the metaverse as its losses pass $50 billion and head for the $100 billion mark – then the system is feudal.

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. The question isn't whether the platforms will eventually become so enshittified that they die – the question is whether they will go down in an all-consuming fireball, or whether they'll go down in a controlled demolition that lets us evacuate the people they've trapped inside them first:

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

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/2023/10/30/markets-remaining-irrational/#steins-law

Image: Diego Delso (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puente_de_las_cataratas_Victoria,_Zambia-Zimbabue,_2018-07-27,_DD_10.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

#pluralistic #mark zuckerberg #meta #enshittification #facebook #twitter #elon musk #billionaires #follies #failing up #metaverse #steins law #big tech #technofeudalism

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