Bruce said that reader should be treated as if theyâre dead, and Iâm assuming part of that is due to resentment for reader causing averyâs death , is the other reason because heâs like âwell theyâll be safer if theyâre not close to us since weâre vigilantesâ?
Or is it something else as well?- Iâm treating the comic books as if theyâre an alternate future here-
because reader made a good point in that the batfam treats them worse than a stranger, and if the end goal was to protect them from harm, that clearly flopped since the end result of treating them like theyâre dead was them being forgotten and ending up either dead-dead or worse than dead.
Ooh, you have no idea how much Iâve been waiting for a question like this or something similar.
Okayâ
First of all, I just realized while checking that thereâs a translation error in the English version⌠sorry about that.
The line that appears in the chapter three is âBecause sheâs the reason Avery is dead!â, but the original phrasing in Spanish is closer to: âBecause Avery is dead for this!â
Sorry for the mistakeâIâm not sure how it ended up like that. Iâll go fix it later.
It's a small detail, but there's a reason why it's written that way and not as it appears in the translation.
Back to your questionâ
I donât want to give too many spoilers, but I can clarify a few things so you can get a sense of where this is going.
As for whether itâs because theyâre vigilantesâthe answer is both yes and no.
You see, once Readerâs ânegligenceâ happens, the Bat-Family splits in two.
The first group includes the older members of the Batfamâspecifically Bruce, Dick, Jason, Alfred, Barbara, Luke, and maybe Kate (though Iâm still not sure if Iâll write her in, since I donât know her well enough yet).
This group was the one that initiated the neglect, gradually pushing Reader away. It wasnât with the intention of forgetting her, but thatâs how it turned out in the end.
The second group includes the younger members, who joined after the neglect had already started.
They either followed the patternâlike Timâor assumed it was because of the whole vigilante thingâlike Damian. Everyone in the Batfam is smart, so most of them can pick up on things⌠although that intuition isnât always accurate.
This group includes Tim, Steph, Cass, Damian, Duke, Harper, and Terry.
and I think I left a few things out there in a chapter, or maybe several chapters, who knows.
I think that more or less answers your question :D
Edit: I forgot to mention it, and for some reason I thought I had already said it, but the first group knows the real reason why the unintentional negligence started; the second one doesnât.
Although, thatâs at the beginning of the series â as it progresses, the second group starts to learn more.
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I adore the idea of a tiny rambling on and on to a giant, completely engrossed in their own talk and ideas. Meanwhile, the giant simply looks entertained at their tiny friend, ignoring the rambles and thinking instead how cute they are and how much cuter they'd be in the giant's mouth.
The tiny doesn't realize what's going on until they realize the shadow interrupting their rambles, seeing the giant's maw encompassing their vision.
Like, you know!?
...wait that's not what's happening here rightâ
*Looks at you standing there beneath my towering form, going on and rambling to yourself unaware that I've slowly managed to get you right in front of my mouth. A grin creeps over my face, revealing my sharp fangs as I see the look of realization on your tiny face*
I dunno... maybe Perseverance... it's the only one who fits in me...
Patience, is everything I don't have
Bravury, I'm not thaaat brave
Integrity, sorry but it's not possible
Kindness, I may seems kind but... I'm not always kind...
Justice, it would be but sometimes I don't know what's the right thing
Determination, I'm not determinated all time
My only problem with the "the anti-Blitzo party is extremely unhealthy and Verosika is a hypocrite" crowd is when some people say most expect for Verosika and Stolas were just one-night stands when there are literal scenes in Apology Tour of Blitz looking a certain people, implying that he had a little more than one stands with those specific party members to even pay attention to them and feel some guilt. The animators wonât brother doing that if everyone (minus Verosika and Stolas) were just one-night stands or randoms that wanted to go to a Verosika Mayday party.
My assumption is that that party had a mix of all different levels of relationships, one-night stands and everything inbetween.
Dennis was there and he at most had a make-out session with Blitz, and based on what Blitz said when he walked into the party even Blitz making rude comments or fucking your parent is enough to get you invited, but I'm sure some of them had some level of a relationship with him (doesn't neccesarily have to be a literal romantic relationship) that probably went deeper for them than it did for Blitz.
Stolas and Verosika are definitely the people at that party Blitz cares the most about and I will die on the hill Blitz could've fallen in love with Verosika if they had met under better circumstances and that Blitz already had at least some level of romantic attraction for her, because love isn't as simple as "in love or not in love".
Either way, my point is, that party has so many people and it really depends from person to person on how much and how exactly Blitz hurt them, but Verosika had a very narrow-minded view on this that being upset at Blitz for anything he could've done was already enough to join the anti-Blitzo party.
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hmo. (hi same anon with the italian curtis bros and japanese/honduran johnny heh)
dallys real name is alexander. he grew up in the country, so people would call him dallas cause his accent reminded his mother of a dallas accent like his dad has. he eventually grew out of the accent cause of his city life in nyc and then tulsa so when asked he just says dallas/dally cause hes used to people calling him it
dally having a fake name has always just been so canon to me, mostly cause iâve already engrained it into my russian dally lore but also âdallas winstonâ? come on. he isnât cool enough to have a name with that much awesomeness. youâre so correct đââď¸đââď¸
also w new yorker dally, heâs got the temperament and the attitude of your average new yorker. so it checks out. he mightâve lost the accent, but he certainly hasnât lost his eastern roots. you can take dally out of new york but you canât take new york out of dally.
NEXT WEEKEND (June 7â9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.
No one was better positioned to tell the tale of the largest sting operation in world history than veteran tech reporter Joseph Cox, and tell it he did, in Dark Wire, released today:
Cox â who was one of Motherboard's star cybersecurity reporters before leaving to co-found 404 Media â has spent years on the crimephone beat, tracking vendors who sold modded phones (first Blackberries, then Android phones) to criminal syndicates with the promise that they couldn't be wiretapped by law-enforcement.
It's possible that some of these phones were secure over long timescales, but all the ones we know about are ones that law enforcement eventually caught up with, usually by capturing the company's top founders explicitly stating that the phones were sold to assist in the commission of crimes, and admitting to remote-wiping phones to obstruct law-enforcement options. It's hard to prove intent but it gets a lot easier when the criminal puts that intent into writing (that's true of tech executives, too!):
But after a particularly spectacular bust landed one of the top crimephone sales reps in the FBI's power, they got a genuinely weird idea: why not start their own crimephone company?
The plan was to build an incredibly secure, best-of-breed crimephone, one with every feature that a criminal would want to truly insulate themselves from law enforcement while still offering everything a criminal could need to plan and execute crimes.
They would tap into the network of crimephone distributors around the world, not telling them who they were truly selling for â nor that every one of these phones had a back-door that allowed law-enforcement to access every single message, photo and file.
This is the beginning of an incredible tale that is really two incredible tales. The first is the story of the FBI and its partners as they scaled up Anom, their best-of-breed crimephone business. This is a (nearly) classic startup tale, full of all-nighters, heroic battles against the odds, and the terror and exhilaration of "hockey-stick" growth.
The difference between this startup and the others we're already familiar with is obvious: the FBI and its global partners are acting under a totally different set of constraints to normal startup founders. For one thing, their true mission and identity must be kept totally secret. For another, they have to navigate the bureaucratic barriers of not one, but many governments and their courts, constitutions and procedures.
Finally, there are the stakes: while the bulk of the crimes that the FBI targets with Anom are just the usual futile war-on-drugs nonsense (albeit at a never-before seen scale), they also routinely encounter murders, kidnappings, tortures, firebombings, and other serious crimes, either in the planning phase, or after they have been committed. They have to make moment-to-moment calls about when and whether to do something about these, as each action taken based on intercepts from Anom threatens to tip the FBI's hand.
That's one of the startup stories in Cox's book. The other one is the crime startup, the one that the hapless criminal syndicates that sign up to distribute Anom devices find themselves in the middle of. They, too, are experiencing hockey-stick growth. They, too, have a fantastically lucrative tiger by the tail. And they, too, have a unique set of challenges that make this startup different from any other.
The obvious difference is that they are involved in global criminal conspiracies. They have to both grow and remain hidden. The tradecraft and skullduggery are fascinating, in the manner of any great crime procedural tale. But there's another constraint: these criminals are competing with one another to corner the market on these incredibly lucrative phones. Being part of violent, global criminal conspiracies, they don't confine themselves to the normal Silicon Valley crimes of violating antitrust law â they are engaged in all-out warfare.
These two startups are, of course, the same startup, but only one side knows it. As Cox weaves these two tales together â along with glimpses into the lives of the hapless gig-work developers in Asia who are developing and maintaining the Anom platform â we get front seat in a series of high-speed, high-stakes near-collisions between these two groups.
And it's not always the cops who have the advantage. When an ambitious mobster figures out how to clone the "black boxes" that initialize new Anom phones, the FBI are caught flatfooted as the number of Anom devices in the hands of criminals balloons, producing a volume of intercepts that vastly exceeds their processing capacity.
Cox has been on this story for a decade, and it shows. He has impeccable sourcing and encyclopedic access to the court records and other public details that allow him to reproduce many of the most dramatic scenes in the Anom caper verbatim. This really shines in the final section of the book, when the FBI and its partners decide to roll up the company with a series of global arrests that culminate in a triumphant press-conference in which the true masters of Anom are revealed.
As a privacy and encryption advocate, there were moments in this story that made me a little uncomfortable. There are places where the FBI is chafing at the constitutional limits on its surveillance powers where we can't help buy sympathize with these "good guys" going after "bad guys." But this the the FBI, a lawless, unaccountable secret police who routinely bypass those limits by secretly buying data from sleazy data-brokers, or illegally sharing data with the NSA.
The conclusion really hammers home the point that the FBI's problem isn't constitutional niceties. Despite seizing hundreds of tons of illegal drugs and arresting thousands of high-ranking criminal syndicate bosses, Anom made no difference in the drug trade. Prohibition, after all, just makes criminals more wealthy and powerful. The Anom raids were, at worst, the cost of doing business â and at best, they were a global reset that cleared the board of established actors so that other criminals could seize their turf.
But even though Anom didn't triumph over crime, Dark Wire is a triumph. The book's out today, and there will shortly be a Netflix adaptation based on it, directed by Jason Bateman:
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:
