Real-life Shadowrun character. Game content writer. Socialist menace. Aro, demi/bi, genderqueer (they/them).
GFFA Meta Rants, @styled4hire on Bluesky, ShaeTiann on AO3 Buy Me a Coffee
I'm inq, aka Shae, aka Eli (they/them). I'm queer, trying to survive as an ND in an NT world, and have some pretty strong progressive political opinions which are unlikely to change. I'm a stylist at a salon in Chicago. I still write content for video games, fanfic for fun, occasionally do art.
Please do not message me asking me to share your posts. I reblog fundraisers that have already been vetted by people I trust. Anyone who clearly has not read this will be presumed to be a spam bot or a scam.
TERFs will be blocked on sight.
In the off-chance the site implodes itself, here's where else I can be found:
Twitch: chanai_k (I don't have any content there right now but I've been considering streaming gameplay or art)
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
i think transfems should be allowed to be good at sports.
sometimes a trans woman wins against a cis woman. sometimes a cis woman wins against another cis woman too. yet only one of them is allowed to win without facing consequences.
it's not enough to support transfems in sports if your support hinges on us being bad at them.
unless its egregious, i'm not embarrassed to be fooled by ai. "oh i got lied to via something made by the Lying Machine the machine we made to Lie really well" like it's gonna happen it's no egg on your face. just be chill about it
We need to do something about straight women's misery in their hetero relationships they're largely just resigned to living in I'm so serious. Can we try women's lib again can we liberate the women
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Spotify Premium ad: “Imagine playing music without interruptions!
Infinite skipping! Replay the song you want! And even do it offline? No ads! Whatever songs you want! For a small monthly payme-”
Me: *nods, turns off Spotify and turns on my MP3 player and does all the things they offer, but for free and with songs they don’t even have*
You can also rip audio files from youtube and find files all over the internet. It is far easier to come across great and lesser known music if you dont limit yourself to spotify.
How US states and international trustbusters can beat Big Tech
THIS SATURDAY (Jul 11), I’ll be at the Idler Festival in LONDON.
For a minute there, it looked like Big Tech was on the ropes. Over the past decade, countries all over the world have gotten antitrust fever, from South Korea to Singapore, Europe to Australia, and even China:
Even more important: these international trustbusters shared a common enemy with Biden's antitrust enforcers, like Lina Khan (FTC), Rohit Chopra (CFPB) and Jonathan Kanter (DoJ Antitrust Division), who pursued the most aggressive antitrust agenda America has seen since Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan killed antitrust enforcement a half century ago.
This international collaboration was an especially rich and productive one. Today's global trustbusters have opportunities for collaboration that their Gilded Age predecessors could only dream of.
That's because modern monopolies are likewise global, running the same scam in every country that they operate in. It wasn't like this during the era of the first Robber Barons. John D Rockefeller's Standard Oil had many of the world's economies in chokeholds, but each country got its own, national chokehold. In the US, Standard Oil monopolized pipelines and refineries, but it found different chokepoints in other countries. For example, in Germany, Rockefeller monopolized the ports:
This meant that American and German enforcers had very little to say to one another. Sure, they had a common enemy, but even if US and German authorities commandeered a fleet of zeppelins and used them to ferry documents back and forth between their respective agencies, it wouldn't have done them any good. The fact patterns about German ports had nothing much in common with the cases being built in relation to America's captured oil refineries.
That's not how companies like Google, or Meta, or Apple, or Microsoft, or Oracle work. Like Standard Oil, these companies are planet-girding extraction machines that are strangling the world's economies. But unlike Standard Oil, these companies run the same playbook in every country, meaning that the facts that establish Google or Apple's guilt in Brussels can be translated and used to run cases in the UK, South Korea and Japan.
The opportunities for international cooperation don't stop there! It's been more than a century since the Gilded Age, and the intervening years saw the US enact the Marshall Plan, through which it redesigned the legal systems of countries shattered by WWII and the Korean War. The technocrats who oversaw the Marshall Plan understood that large, monopolistic firms played a key role in the rise of fascist governments in Europe and Japan, and so they transposed America's landmark antitrust laws – like the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act – onto lawbooks around the world:
That means that it's not just that the same companies are committing the same crimes everywhere around the world – it also means that most of these countries have substantively similar statutes establishing those crimes. A successful case in South Korea will likely be successful in the UK – providing that the company engages in the same conduct in both countries (which, again, it does).
During the Biden years, the UK Competition and Markets Authority ran these international tech antitrust summits in London where US enforcers and their UK, European, Singaporean, South Korean and Japanese counterparts met to plan a shared strategy to take down US Big Tech:
The presence of America's trustbusters at these meetings was key. Not only were they running a string of wildly successful cases against US Big Tech in America, but just by being there, they signaled that the US government would help foreign governments enforce their judgments against US tech giants. That's key, because – as the Marshall Plan's architects could tell you – giant national monopolies often become a de facto, private, unaccountable arm of the state in the countries where they are born, and can call upon the governments they've colonized to protect them from other countries' attempts to enforce their laws.
Which brings me to the Trump election, and the subsequent fusion of Big Tech with Trump's government. It started before Trump took office, when he traveled to Davos to warn the world's governments not to try to enforce their laws over his tech companies. Then there was the inauguration, where tech CEOs paid $1m each out of their pockets for a seat on the dais behind Trump. Big Tech ponied up millions for the Epstein Ballroom, and they also provide key material support to Trump's ethnic cleansing program. If you end up in a concentration camp thanks to one of Trump's ICE chuds, you can blame Microsoft for providing the administrative software; Google for providing the location data used to track you down; and Apple for blocking apps that warn you if you're about to get snatched by masked thugs:
All over the world, tech antitrust has gone into retreat. In Canada, ex-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau created sweeping new powers for the country's Competition Bureau, but now his successor Mark Carney is making equally sweeping cuts to the agency's funding. In the UK, PM Keir Starmer fired the devastatingly effective head of the Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the CEO of Amazon UK:
And in Ireland – the place where European tech regulation goes to die – they've just appointed an ex-Meta lobbyist named Niamh Sweeney to regulate the privacy practices of the US tech giants that pretend to be headquartered in Ireland in order to evade their taxes:
This is especially worrying because Meta has a history of binding its former executives with nondisclosure and nondisparagement clauses that forbid them from ever saying a mean word about Meta, or discussing anything they learned while working at the company. There are no ends to the lengths the company will go to in their war on their ex-employees. Take Sarah Wynn-Williams, who has been fined $111m by the company's arbitrator as punishment for her #1 NYT bestselling whistleblower memoir, Careless People. Meta has told Wynn-Williams that she may not appear in public to discuss anything, not just her book, and now they've sued her for standing motionless and silent for an hour on a stage at a literary festival:
When Sweeney was given the job of regulating her former employers, it naturally raised questions about whether she would be legally allowed to criticize – or even talk about – Meta. Sweeney declined to comment on this at all for seven months, and now, at last, she has issued a heavily lawyered statement that seems to affirm that she will be allowed to do her job:
But a close read of her words tells a different story: Sweeney has affirmed that she's not bound by the same gag order as Wynn-Williams, but not whether she has any restrictions on her conduct in respect of Meta. This shouldn't be complicated: if Sweeney is indeed free to vigorously enforce the law against Meta, then she could have published a statement the day her appointment was made public: "I do not have any contractual restrictions on my ability to discuss Meta or its current or former personnel." If she is truly able to do this job, then it shouldn't take her half a year to issue a weasel-worded, heavily caveated statement.
Having narrowly escaped the existential crisis of democratic and legal accountability, Big Tech has captured a string of states: Ireland and the UK, and (especially) the USA. The fears of the Marshall Plan technocrats have been realized: Big Tech is Trump and Trump is Big Tech, and together, they are executing an authoritarian takeover of the USA and countries around the world.
Without the US as a willing partner, other countries have precious little chance of enforcing their laws (which were originally American laws). Just look at how Apple has point-blank refused to follow Europe's new tech regulations:
(Worse: Trump has blacklisted the EU officials who worked on those laws and has permanently barred them from entering the USA, and has now requisitioned more official EU correspondence from Big Tech companies so he can locate and punish more of Big Tech's official enemies:)
Now that the US state has merged with US tech, every country around the world has motive, means and opportunity to build a "post-American internet" of open source apps running at local data centers:
But don't write US enforcers out of the picture just yet! Writing for The Sling, Tyler Clark calls for "regionalized enforcement" by US states against Big Tech companies:
You see, it's not just international governments whose lawbooks were rewritten through the Marshall Plan that have access to America's antitrust laws. When Congress wrote the Clayton Act, Sherman Act and other US federal antitrust laws, they explicitly wrote in the power of state Attorneys General to enforce them. That means that 50+ state AGs all have the ability to wield antitrust against US tech giants.
It seems Congress foresaw this moment, when federal enforcers partnered with American monopolists, trading open bribes for approval for corrupt mergers and other illegal conduct:
But where the Feds fail, the states can pick up the slack. When states fine US companies and order their breakup, it's a lot harder for those companies to flout those orders – unlike the EU or Canada or the UK, America's state governments are first class actors in the US judicial system.
That's where Clark comes in: he calls for coalitions of state enforcers to take on US Big Tech, filling the void created by Trump's pay-to-play fed enforcers. A (future) federal statute could enshrine this system through "regional FTC enforcement centers":
I like Clark's idea, but I think he's missing a trick: US regional antitrust enforcement doesn't need to lean on the US government for resources and collaboration. There are national governments all over the world whose antitrust laws were created by the Marshall Plan, and those are the same laws that state AGs have at their disposal. And of course, tech companies' crimes aren't just the same in France and Japan – they're also the same in New York State and California.
The US government isn't the only game in town. American state enforcers have a global buffet of enforcement partners, and those international enforcers need American collaborators who can collect the fines they levy and enforce the breakup orders they issue. It's a win-win (for the people, for international enforcers, and the states) and a big loss (for Trump's tech companies and his corrupt antitrust dingo babysitters).
One place this could start: joint hearings that call ex-Big Tech employees as key witnesses, daring companies like Meta to invoke their gag orders. It's one thing to tell Sarah Wynn-Williams she can't talk to a crowd at a book festival, but Meta has taken the position that she cannot speak before a legislature or regulator, either.
Wynn-Williams isn't alone. The Big Tech companies are laying off employees by the thousands, thanks to their failed 11-figure AI bets. Those ex-employees know where every body is buried. They know where to find the memos that establish their ex-bosses' intent to create and maintain monopolies and the hardest part of any antitrust case is establishing intent.
Together, US states and foreign enforcers have the opportunity of the century – a chance to shatter the power of Trump's tech giants, who are so key to Trump's authoritarian takeover.
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:
It turns out the great egg price increase that helped topple Joe Biden's regime was (checks notes) due to an alleged conspiracy among egg producers to artificially increase prices and the coverage of that fact is a blink-and-you-miss-it story on the NYT website
I disabled my comments section because it was full of bots trying to scam people
how someone sets their boundaries has absolutely nothing to do with censorship.
censorship is when someone tries to control other people what they can or can’t create and consume.
censorship is not about a random person disabling their own comments section for whatever reason. censorship is not about people blocking other people on social media as their way of setting boundaries and curating their internet experience. censorship is not about disrespecting other people’s boundaries and censorship is not about tolerating it when other people disrespect you or your boundaries.
so your comment is entirely irrelevant to the point. I say censorship is bad. you say but the sky is not green.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
FOR INSTAGRAM (and maybe other Meta networks in the future?)
Since this is Tumblr, this is more of a PSA. I posted this on Netherworld Post's instagram, threads, and Facebook account earlier.
Good to know if you run something elsewhere. There are plenty of people talking about it, but Meta certainly has not made any giant announcement that I have seen.
Email sign up is available at netherworldpost.com and emails will (very) likely be our primary source of contact (if not exclusive) when atticus gets back in August.
Email and… sigh, laugh, Tumblr, the system that seems to survive somehow everything.
If you're a new writer and you're asking yourself "is this too personal, is this too much, will people think this is weird" that feeling is the exact location of your actual voice. The stuff that makes you want to close the laptop is the stuff nobody else could write. The safe version is always worse. Always. I have never once read something and thought "this would have been better if it was a little less honest." go further. It's always go further.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Most of us have a gross food at a friend’s house while growing up story but mine was sooooo wild. We sat down to dinner, the side dishes were like white rice and broccoli and the main entree was shrimp. Just shrimp. Unseasoned steamed shrimp. Pink. Not a shred of any sort of herb or flavoring on that thang. I do not enjoy shrimp on the best of days but I can tolerate it, I bit into one just to make sure there wasn’t like a clear lemon sauce or something that wasn’t visible but no, this was really and truly completely unseasoned shrimp. This was a predicament. I was in maybe the third grade, I really wanted to make a good impression so I politely asked if there was any cocktail sauce to dip the shrimp in as that was what I was used to doing. Her dad laughed and said no.
I straight up could not make myself eat it. I tried very politely to nibble on the side dishes and I did not place additional shrimp on my plate as to be polite and not waste food but it was fucking surreal. The whole unseasoned meal combination was not human food, it was like a fancy meal for an expensive dog. Her, her parents and her brother are eating it like unseasoned rice, broccoli and shrimp is a completely normal meal. I feel it is important to note that this was occurring in North Carolina so I’m not used to dealing with this, I had never experienced an unseasoned shrimp with no sauce in my 9 or 10 years of life. I also feel it is important to note my friend is biracial, Black mom, white dad. This is not a midwestern Caucasian mom mealtime disaster, this is 100 miles inland from the fucking coast in North Carolina. Shrimp is not a cheap food so it’s not like they just couldn’t afford to season the protein. To this day, I still do not understand. Maybe they were health freaks, maybe someone in the household was on a low sodium diet but not a single HERB??? NOTHING????? WHY WERE THEY EATING LIKE THAT???????
My friend’s dad mentioned to my dad that I hadn’t eaten at dinner when they walked me home, presumably because he didn’t want my dad to think they had me over for dinner and refused to feed me when I went home starving. My parents taught me to always be polite and gracious and I’d get in trouble for being rude for things I did not completely understand were slights but I knew bonding over food is a big part of the culture in the south so not feeding someone when they’re at your house and/or not eating when offered is considered rude and bizarre. I waited for them to leave and I was sooooo worried I’d be in trouble but I explained the unseasoned shrimp dilemma to my dad and the look on his face was like 😟, he was also truly fucking baffled and I was absolved of all guilt.
