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“I hope they’re alright. What if they miss us, Jinwoo? They’re too young to understand that we’re coming back-we should have brought them with us.”

“Woah, woah, hang on.” Jinwoo squeezed your hand and turned as you focused on the landscape zipping past from the window. “We’ll only be a few hours, baby. Igris and Beru are with them and I’ve put my other shadows on patrol. We’ll be back as soon as you know it.”

Fighting the tears threatening to explore your cheeks, you turned to him too. “But-”

“It’s okay. I don’t know if they’d be okay with my exchange either. And you wouldn’t want to risk that, right? And we can’t risk bringing the doctor back by train, it’ll be impossible to get her back without someone taking notice. So we take that luxury away from her.”

It made sense, of course it did. However, it did not remove the plunging sickness that spread through your body like a disease. You and your babies were separated and anything could happen. That had been made clear when a knife found its way into your stomach.

But, Jinwoo had a point. Putting your children at risk of Jinwoo’s exchange was foolish.

Just a few hours, and I can see them again.

“Yeah, you’re right. I uh, I’m sorry. I never anticipated this. Any of this. God, this is so fucked up. I hate this.”

Were you having a change of heart? Absolutely not. Did you wish this was all over so you could enjoy life with your family? Yes.

The end game was worth it. Your children were worth it. When you got your hands on that doctor, she’d suffer. And there were multiple times daily where you found yourself fantasising about how you’d do it, how you would torture the woman who tortured your family for money.

For fucking money.

Strangulation was a good one, maybe a broken bottle to her neck. Perhaps throwing her into an incinerator and seeing how she liked it. Listening to her screams of agony, burning alive with every nerve ending dying. Painfully. In a way she could come back and curse a golem town based on this mother's rage. Any way, as long as she suffered.

“I know. It’s been difficult. But we’re about to right that wrong.”

“Let’s go straight to her, I don’t want to wait about in a hotel for the right moment. Let’s nab her and call it a day.” Your hands shook, cracked knuckles along with the anticipation of the final train stop. 

"I'm glad you mentioned that." Jinwoo said, leaning back in his chair so that your head nestled closely. "Because I was gonna suggest the same thing."

For the remainder, You and Jinwoo sat in comfortable silence, resting on his shoulder for a quick nap you managed to scrounge up to make the time pass. And it worked, right to the hard stop, the train carriage ended abruptly.

“Baby, we’re here.”

You stretched, arms up and tight. “I can’t believe I managed to sleep…” Then it dawned on you. “Are the twins okay-I can’t believe I slept-”

“They’re fine. They’re fine. I know they’re sleeping right now.”

Audibly relieved, you sunk back into the seat. “Thank god.”

Jinwoo climbed to his feet first, grabbing the small backpack he came with and slung it over his shoulder. “Let’s get going. We’ll go straight to her.”

Over to the hotel, you and Jinwoo remained in silence, walking hand in hand while you fought the urge to check up on the doctor. To see where she was currently, was a gift. It soothed your anxiety and stopped your mind wondering to the possibilities of her get away. 

She knew you were coming for her, hence why she paced back and forth in the middle of the night, muttering to herself. Whether she knew you were close was a separate matter, and the closer you got, the more you wanted to see her squirm before you forced your way into that room and left without a trace.

No evidence left behind.

No body left behind either.

You wanted to see what she was doing right now before she only saw four glass walls in the basement, because she’d never see the light of day ever again. An eye for an eye and all that.

The urge. The urge to watch her made everything difficult-

“Okay, one more time.” Jinwoo stopped you outside of the hotel, its looming presence weighing over you like thunder. “Find out where she is one more time, and then please try to let it go, baby.”

He rubbed your cheek, pulling away a strand of hair that had stuck to your lip. “I can’t lose you again.”

The nose bleed, the vast amount of energy it was taking from you each time you checked. So much energy. It was as though it sucked every amount of nutrition from your body which had to slowly restore itself each time. Or perhaps it was a full night of no sleep, forced to work the next day and left you reeling without a nap until the following night.

Soul draining.

“Okay.”

He took your hands in his and you focused, thinking of all the things she put you through. It tugged on your entire heart, thinking of your babies and what they were doing right now.

My babies. All that time apart.

And there was the doctor. She was looking out of the window like some rotten princess who had been spoiled with riches and gold and still wasn’t satisfied. Anger. Impatience.

“No, they won’t come here… they won’t find me. There’s no way. There’s no fucking way… I’ll be long gone before those fuckers ever catch wind of me.”

“I’ll give her something to be angry over.”

“Hm? What are you seeing?”

“She’s up there.” Deep breaths did not stop your body from shaking. “She thinks she’ll get away with this.”

“Like hell she will.”

“You’re telling me.” You let go, storming off through the front door on a mission.

You ignored the staff and made a line right to the main desk. “Excuse me? I have a package I need to deliver.”

The man separated by the desk held up his finger dismissively, tapping away on the computer keyboard. “Please wait, I’m dealing with another customer. You'll need to wait.” He didn’t have the decency to even look at you.

“Listen.” Jinwoo growled. “Put whatever you’re doing on hold and listen to what she is asking. Understand?”

“Well uh, there’s a line. She has to wait.”

She? Like you weren’t even there. And it made your blood boil.

“And she.” Jinwoo addressed you, and mentioned the doctor's name in the same sentence. “Has a delivery for that doctor.”

“It’s from the new Chairman. Sung.”

It took a moment for the idiot to piece it together when he pulled his head from his ass, but he did nonetheless. “Oh… oh- Oh!”

He stopped typing immediately. “I am so sorry-I really am! P-Please allow me, I can take it to the room, personally."

“That won’t be necessary. I’m under strict instructions to deliver it myself.” Holding back the red you were seeing through, you lent in closer. “It’s official association business, you’ll be awfully helpful if we take this up, as it’s confidential.”

“Uh…” He looked between you, head darting back towards the elevator.

Jinwoo leant on the counter and flashed him the sweetest smile you’d ever seen when he wasn’t looking at you or the twins. “I promise you, you’re doing the right thing.”

“Well… Okay. But only one of you. Will that do?”

Fuck. Though before you could object, Jinwoo smiled again and agreed. “Of course. I’ll wait here while she delivers it. Maybe I could get a drink?”

"Of course, Chairman Sung!"

“O-Okay.” You said, unsure of how to get the doctor to him without causing a scene, but how Jinwoo acknowledged you, he must have put his trust in you.

Wouldn’t it have been better he go and take her back and have you take the train home? Of course not, you assumed he wouldn’t want you travelling home on your own. The thought you couldn’t bear actually. Further time away from your children.

Turning away, you approached the elevator with nothing in your hand and waited until the doors closed to see the doctor behind your eyes despite Jinwoo's request. You couldn't help it. She was still pacing, murmuring random things and watching the bedroom door with paranoia.

It was like she was waiting. Waiting for you. And you waiting for her. And after the floor blinked on the wall panel, the warm drip over your lip gave your body a reaction enough to notice.

Blood. All over your sleeve and a drop over your shirt. So much energy wasted, but worth it.

One door, then another, and one more before you found yourself just standing out of sight by the door in case she happened to glance through the peephole. You hated the sight of the numbers, knowing they were under her name as though she was someone who earned notable respect.

Wouldn’t that be a sight? The person you thought you had murdered, came back to life and stood staring right back through the peephole of the hotel room you were hunkered up in.

Knock Knock. “Housekeeping.”

It was more believable than room service.

And holy shit, it actually worked.

Fucking idiot.

“No thank you-holy shit.”

You rammed your foot in between the wall and door and pushed yourself through. She wasn’t exactly strong, though her desperation never wavered. With a bit of back and forth, silent shoving and panic, you closed the door behind you. You weren't able to get purchase on her clothing to keep her close and she moved back and out of the way.

She had the fucking audacity to back away like you were the murderer.

“H-How… How did you-holy crap! Look, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry-I didn’t mean it. I really didn’t mean it!” It was a pretty big change to the anger you saw not long ago.

After all that time waiting for this moment, to confront the woman who ruined everything, what could you say now that your brain had gone blank?

Fuck her, fuck her, kill her, fuck her!

“Please! I will run away. You’re alive, you have your babies back so let's just leave things as they are!” She kept glancing over your shoulder, wincing at the obvious red blush of fire across your cheeks.

“Leave things?” You said, a huff of sheltered amusement you never got to endure sticking to the back of your throat. “Just leave things? You killed me. Took away my children. You think I can just leave things?”

"Leave things?!"

“It all worked out for you. What more do you want from me?! I’ll have Sung on my ass for the rest of my life whenever he finds me. Is that not enough?!”

The raw emotions died down to quiet as soon as the hotel door opened once more.

“I found you.” 

“H-Hunter sung… Oh- oh my god!”

Storming up to her before she could break out of the shock when she saw Jinwooo enter the room, you yanked her away from her corner by a fistful of her hair. She kicked at the floor and knocked the coffee table with her feet, trying to scream.

“Shut up, bitch.”

With a slam to the mahogany table to her face, she quietened before she could empty her lungs. She sobbed, though she still tried to pathetically get away. Not that she ever would with a man like Jinwoo Sung nipping at her heels.

“Please. Please don’t do this-”

“You should have thought about that when you decided to steal my children and take my life.”

Jinwoo took a hold of your hand, tight with the hate and visceral shake at his knuckles. He ignored the doctor, tugging away at you as though you would let her go if she tried hard enough. 

“Let’s go home, baby.” He watched you with something other than the fury he entered with, as though melting away under your gaze. “Exchange.”

“No, no, no, no!-”

The hotel room sat empty, and it would do so under the name of the doctor. For she would never step foot in it again.

Not after you were done with her.

Part 48 <- Part 49 -> Part 50

Thank you for reading and all of the support on this fic! ❤️ Likes, reblogs and comments are appreciated and I appreciate you all! See you next time 🤗

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DISCLAIMER - Crossposted from my AO3 - I do not own any of the characters or anything from the anime or manhwa. This is a work of fan fiction and is absolutely not representative of the views or intentions of the original creator(s).

Enshittification isn’t just another way of saying “fraud” or “price gouging” or “wage theft.” Enshittification is intrinsically digital, because moving all those goodies around requires the flexibility that only comes with a digital businesses. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can’t rapidly change the price of eggs at Whole Foods without an army of kids with pricing guns on roller-skates. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can change the price of eggs on Amazon Fresh just by twiddling a knob on the service’s back-end.

Twiddling is the key to enshittification: rapidly adjusting prices, conditions and offers. As with any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Tech monopolists aren’t smarter than the Gilded Age sociopaths who monopolized rail or coal — they use the same tricks as those monsters of history, but they do them faster and with computers:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

If Rockefeller wanted to crush a freight company, he couldn’t just click a mouse and lay down a pipeline that ran on the same route, and then click another mouse to make it go away when he was done. When Bezos wants to bankrupt Diapers.com — a company that refused to sell itself to Amazon — he just moved a slider so that diapers on Amazon were being sold below cost. Amazon lost $100m over three months, diapers.com went bankrupt, and every investor learned that competing with Amazon was a losing bet:

https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-bezos-went-thermonuclear-on-diapers-com.html

That’s the power of twiddling — but twiddling cuts both ways. The same flexibility that digital businesses enjoy is hypothetically available to workers and users. The airlines pioneered twiddling ticket prices, and that naturally gave rise to countertwiddling, in the form of comparison shopping sites that scraped the airlines’ sites to predict when tickets would be cheapest:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin

The airlines — like all abusive businesses — refused to tolerate this. They were allowed to touch their knobs as much as they wanted — indeed, they couldn’t stop touching those knobs — but when we tried to twiddle back, that was “felony contempt of business model,” and the airlines sued:

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/30/airline-sues-man-for-founding-a-cheap-flights-website.html

And sued:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/business/southwest-airlines-lawsuit-prices.html

Platforms don’t just hate it when end-users twiddle back — if anything they are even more aggressive when their business-users dare to twiddle. Take Para, an app that Doordash drivers used to get a peek at the wages offered for jobs before they accepted them — something that Doordash hid from its workers. Doordash ruthlessly attacked Para, saying that by letting drivers know how much they’d earn before they did the work, Para was violating the law:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition

Which law? Well, take your pick. The modern meaning of “IP” is “any law that lets me use the law to control my competitors, competition or customers.” Platforms use a mix of anticircumvention law, patent, copyright, contract, cybersecurity and other legal systems to weave together a thicket of rules that allow them to shut down rivals for their Felony Contempt of Business Model:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Enshittification relies on unlimited twiddling (by platforms), and a general prohibition on countertwiddling (by platform users). Enshittification is a form of fishing, in which bait is dangled before different groups of users and then nimbly withdrawn when they lunge for it. Twiddling puts the suppleness into the enshittifier’s fishing-rod, and a ban on countertwiddling weighs down platform users so they’re always a bit too slow to catch the bait.

Nowhere do we see twiddling’s impact more than in the “gig economy,” where workers are misclassified as independent contractors and put to work for an app that scripts their every move to the finest degree. When an app is your boss, you work for an employer who docks your pay for violating rules that you aren’t allowed to know — and where your attempts to learn those rules are constantly frustrated by the endless back-end twiddling that changes the rules faster than you can learn them.

As with every question of technology, the issue isn’t twiddling per se — it’s who does the twiddling and who gets twiddled. A worker armed with digital tools can play gig work employers off each other and force them to bid up the price of their labor; they can form co-ops with other workers that auto-refuse jobs that don’t pay enough, and use digital tools to organize to shift power from bosses to workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

Take “reverse centaurs.” In AI research, a “centaur” is a human assisted by a machine that does more than either could do on their own. For example, a chess master and a chess program can play a better game together than either could play separately. A reverse centaur is a machine assisted by a human, where the machine is in charge and the human is a meat-puppet.

Think of Amazon warehouse workers wearing haptic location-aware wristbands that buzz at them continuously dictating where their hands must be; or Amazon drivers whose eye-movements are continuously tracked in order to penalize drivers who look in the “wrong” direction:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur

The difference between a centaur and a reverse centaur is the difference between a machine that makes your life better and a machine that makes your life worse so that your boss gets richer. Reverse centaurism is the 21st Century’s answer to Taylorism, the pseudoscience that saw white-coated “experts” subject workers to humiliating choreography down to the smallest movement of your fingertip:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

While reverse centaurism was born in warehouses and other company-owned facilities, gig work let it make the leap into workers’ homes and cars. The 21st century has seen a return to the cottage industry — a form of production that once saw workers labor far from their bosses and thus beyond their control — but shriven of the autonomy and dignity that working from home once afforded:

https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk-463e2730ef0d

The rise and rise of bossware — which allows for remote surveillance of workers in their homes and cars — has turned “work from home” into “live at work.” Reverse centaurs can now be chickenized — a term from labor economics that describes how poultry farmers, who sell their birds to one of three vast poultry processors who have divided up the country like the Pope dividing up the “New World,” are uniquely exploited:

https://onezero.medium.com/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs-b2e8d5cda826

A chickenized reverse centaur has it rough: they must pay for the machines they use to make money for their bosses, they must obey the orders of the app that controls their work, and they are denied any of the protections that a traditional worker might enjoy, even as they are prohibited from deploying digital self-help measures that let them twiddle back to bargain for a better wage.

All of this sets the stage for a phenomenon called algorithmic wage discrimination, in which two workers doing the same job under the same conditions will see radically different payouts for that work. These payouts are continuously tweaked in the background by an algorithm that tries to predict the minimum sum a worker will accept to remain available without payment, to ensure sufficient workers to pick up jobs as they arise.

This phenomenon — and proposed policy and labor solutions to it — is expertly analyzed in “On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination,” a superb paper by UC Law San Franciscos Veena Dubal:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

Dubal uses empirical data and enthnographic accounts from Uber drivers and other gig workers to explain how endless, self-directed twiddling allows gig companies pay workers less and pay themselves more. As @[email protected] explains in his LA Times article on Dubal’s research, the goal of the payment algorithm is to guess how often a given driver needs to receive fair compensation in order to keep them driving when the payments are unfair:

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-04-11/algorithmic-wage-discrimination

The algorithm combines nonconsensual dossiers compiled on individual drivers with population-scale data to seek an equilibrium between keeping drivers waiting, unpaid, for a job; and how much a driver needs to be paid for an individual job, in order to keep that driver from clocking out and doing something else. @ Here’s how that works. Sergio Avedian, a writer for The Rideshare Guy, ran an experiment with two brothers who both drove for Uber; one drove a Tesla and drove intermittently, the other brother rented a hybrid sedan and drove frequently. Sitting side-by-side with the brothers, Avedian showed how the brother with the Tesla was offered more for every trip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UADTiL3S67I

Uber wants to lure intermittent drivers into becoming frequent drivers. Uber doesn’t pay for an oversupply of drivers, because it only pays drivers when they have a passenger in the car. Having drivers on call — but idle — is a way for Uber to shift the cost of maintaining a capacity cushion to its workers.

What’s more, what Uber charges customers is not based on how much it pays its workers. As Uber’s head of product explained: Uber uses “machine-learning techniques to estimate how much groups of customers are willing to shell out for a ride. Uber calculates riders’ propensity for paying a higher price for a particular route at a certain time of day. For instance, someone traveling from a wealthy neighborhood to another tony spot might be asked to pay more than another person heading to a poorer part of town, even if demand, traffic and distance are the same.”

https://qz.com/990131/uber-is-practicing-price-discrimination-economists-say-that-might-not-be-a-bad-thing/

Uber has historically described its business a pure supply-and-demand matching system, where a rush of demand for rides triggers surge pricing, which lures out drivers, which takes care of the demand. That’s not how it works today, and it’s unclear if it ever worked that way. Today, a driver who consults the rider version of the Uber app before accepting a job — to compare how much the rider is paying to how much they stand to earn — is booted off the app and denied further journeys.

Surging, instead, has become just another way to twiddle drivers. One of Dubal’s subjects, Derrick, describes how Uber uses fake surges to lure drivers to airports: “You go to the airport, once the lot get kind of full, then the surge go away.” Other drivers describe how they use groupchats to call out fake surges: “I’m in the Marina. It’s dead. Fake surge.”

That’s pure twiddling. Twiddling turns gamification into gamblification, where your labor buys you a spin on a roulette wheel in a rigged casino. As a driver called Melissa, who had doubled down on her availability to earn a $100 bonus awarded for clocking a certain number of rides, told Dubal, “When you get close to the bonus, the rides start trickling in more slowly…. And it makes sense. It’s really the type of shit that they can do when it’s okay to have a surplus labor force that is just sitting there that they don’t have to pay for.”

Wherever you find reverse-centaurs, you get this kind of gamblification, where the rules are twiddled continuously to make sure that the house always wins. As a contract driver Amazon reverse centaur told Lauren Gurley for Motherboard, “Amazon uses these cameras allegedly to make sure they have a safer driving workforce, but they’re actually using them not to pay delivery companies”:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88npjv/amazons-ai-cameras-are-punishing-drivers-for-mistakes-they-didnt-make

Algorithmic wage discrimination is the robot overlord of our nightmares: its job is to relentlessly quest for vulnerabilities and exploit them. Drivers divide themselves into “ants” (drivers who take every job) and “pickers” (drivers who cherry-pick high-paying jobs). The algorithm’s job is ensuring that pickers get the plum assignments, not the ants, in the hopes of converting those pickers to app-dependent ants.

In my work on enshittification, I call this the “giant teddy bear” gambit. At every county fair, you’ll always spot some poor jerk carrying around a giant teddy-bear they “won” on the midway. But they didn’t win it — not by getting three balls in the peach-basket. Rather, the carny running the rigged game either chose not to operate the “scissor” that kicks balls out of the basket. Or, if the game is “honest” (that is, merely impossible to win, rather than gimmicked), the operator will make a too-good-to-refuse offer: “Get one ball in and I’ll give you this keychain. Win two keychains and I’ll let you trade them for this giant teddy bear.”

Carnies aren’t in the business of giving away giant teddy bears — rather, the gambit is an investment. Giving a mark a giant teddy bear to carry around the midway all day acts as a convincer, luring other marks to try to land three balls in the basket and win their own teddy bear.

In the same way, platforms like Uber distribute giant teddy bears to pickers, as a way of keeping the ants scurrying from job to job, and as a way of convincing the pickers to give up whatever work allows them to discriminate among Uber’s offers and hold out for the plum deals, whereupon then can be transmogrified into ants themselves.

Dubal describes the experience of Adil, a Syrian refugee who drives for Uber in the Bay Area. His colleagues are pickers, and showed him screenshots of how much they earned. Determined to get a share of that money, Adil became a model ant, driving two hours to San Francisco, driving three days straight, napping in his car, spending only one day per week with his family. The algorithm noticed that Adil needed the work, so it paid him less.

Adil responded the way the system predicted he would, by driving even more: “My friends they make it, so I keep going, maybe I can figure it out. It’s unsecure, and I don’t know how people they do it. I don’t know how I am doing it, but I have to. I mean, I don’t find another option. In a minute, if I find something else, oh man, I will be out immediately. I am a very patient person, that’s why I can continue.”

Another driver, Diego, told Dubal about how the winners of the giant teddy bears fell into the trap of thinking that they were “good at the app”: “Any time there’s some big shot getting high pay outs, they always shame everyone else and say you don’t know how to use the app. I think there’s secret PR campaigns going on that gives targeted payouts to select workers, and they just think it’s all them.”

That’s the power of twiddling: by hoarding all the flexibility offered by digital tools, the management at platforms can become centaurs, able to string along thousands of workers, while the workers are reverse-centaurs, puppeteered by the apps.

As the example of Adil shows, the algorithm doesn’t need to be very sophisticated in order to figure out which workers it can underpay. The system automates the kind of racial and gender discrimination that is formally illegal, but which is masked by the smokescreen of digitization. An employer who systematically paid women less than men, or Black people less than white people, would be liable to criminal and civil sanctions. But if an algorithm simply notices that people who have fewer job prospects drive more and will thus accept lower wages, that’s just “optimization,” not racism or sexism.

This is the key to understanding the AI hype bubble: when ghouls from multinational banks predict 13 trillion dollar markets for “AI,” what they mean is that digital tools will speed up the twiddling and other wage-suppression techniques to transfer $13T in value from workers and consumers to shareholders.

The American business lobby is relentlessly focused on the goal of reducing wages. That’s the force behind “free trade,” “right to work,” and other codewords for “paying workers less,” including “gig work.” Tech workers long saw themselves as above this fray, immune to labor exploitation because they worked for a noble profession that took care of its own.

But the epidemic of mass tech-worker layoffs, following on the heels of massive stock buybacks, has demonstrated that tech bosses are just like any other boss: willing to pay as little as they can get away with, and no more. Tech bosses are so comfortable with their market dominance and the lock-in of their customers that they are happy to turn out hundreds of thousands of skilled workers, convinced that the twiddling systems they’ve built are the kinds of self-licking ice-cream cones that are so simple even a manager can use them — no morlocks required.

The tech worker layoffs are best understood as an all-out war on tech worker morale, because that morale is the source of tech workers’ confidence and thus their demands for a larger share of the value generated by their labor. The current tech layoff template is very different from previous tech layoffs: today’s layoffs are taking place over a period of months, long after they are announced, and laid off tech worker is likely to be offered a months of paid post-layoff work, rather than severance. This means that tech workplaces are now haunted by the walking dead, workers who have been laid off but need to come into the office for months, even as the threat of layoffs looms over the heads of the workers who remain. As an old friend, recently laid off from Microsoft after decades of service, wrote to me, this is “a new arrow in the quiver of bringing tech workers to heel and ensuring that we’re properly thankful for the jobs we have (had?).”

Dubal is interested in more than analysis, she’s interested in action. She looks at the tactics already deployed by gig workers, who have not taken all this abuse lying down. Workers in the UK and EU organized through Worker Info Exchange and the App Drivers and Couriers Union have used the GDPR (the EU’s privacy law) to demand “algorithmic transparency,” as well as access to their data. In California, drivers hope to use similar provisions in the CCPA (a state privacy law) to do the same.

These efforts have borne fruit. When Cornell economists, led by Louis Hyman, published research (paid for by Uber) claiming that Uber drivers earned an average of $23/hour, it was data from these efforts that revealed the true average Uber driver’s wage was $9.74. Subsequent research in California found that Uber drivers’ wage fell to $6.22/hour after the passage of Prop 22, a worker misclassification law that gig companies spent $225m to pass, only to have the law struck down because of a careless drafting error:

https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2021-08-23/proposition-22-lyft-uber-decision-essential-california

But Dubal is skeptical that data-coops and transparency will achieve transformative change and build real worker power. Knowing how the algorithm works is useful, but it doesn’t mean you can do anything about it, not least because the platform owners can keep touching their knobs, twiddling the payout schedule on their rigged slot-machines.

Data co-ops start from the proposition that “data extraction is an inevitable form of labor for which workers should be remunerated.” It makes on-the-job surveillance acceptable, provided that workers are compensated for the spying. But co-ops aren’t unions, and they don’t have the power to bargain for a fair price for that data, and coops themselves lack the vast resources — “to store, clean, and understand” — data.

Co-ops are also badly situated to understand the true value of the data that is extracted from their members: “Workers cannot know whether the data collected will, at the population level, violate the civil rights of others or amplifies their own social oppression.”

Instead, Dubal wants an outright, nonwaivable prohibition on algorithmic wage discrimination. Just make it illegal. If firms cannot use gambling mechanisms to control worker behavior through variable pay systems, they will have to find ways to maintain flexible workforces while paying their workforce predictable wages under an employment model. If a firm cannot manage wages through digitally-determined variable pay systems, then the firm is less likely to employ algorithmic management.”

In other words, rather than using market mechanisms too constrain platform twiddling, Dubal just wants to make certain kinds of twiddling illegal. This is a growing trend in legal scholarship. For example, the economist Ramsi Woodcock has proposed a ban on surge pricing as a per se violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act:

https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-105-issue-4/the-efficient-queue-and-the-case-against-dynamic-pricing

Similarly, Dubal proposes that algorithmic wage discrimination violates another antitrust law: the Robinson-Patman Act, which “bans sellers from charging competing buyers different prices for the same commodity. Robinson-Patman enforcement was effectively halted under Reagan, kicking off a host of pathologies, like the rise of Walmart:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

I really liked Dubal’s legal reasoning and argument, and to it I would add a call to reinvigorate countertwiddling: reforming laws that get in the way of workers who want to reverse-engineer, spoof, and control the apps that currently control them. Adversarial interoperability (AKA competitive compatibility or comcom) is key tool for building worker power in an era of digital Taylorism:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

To see how that works, look to other jursidictions where workers have leapfrogged their European and American cousins, such as Indonesia, where gig workers and toolsmiths collaborate to make a whole suite of “tuyul apps,” which let them override the apps that gig companies expect them to use.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

For example, ride-hailing companies won’t assign a train-station pickup to a driver unless they’re circling the station — which is incredibly dangerous during the congested moments after a train arrives. A tuyul app lets a driver park nearby and then spoof their phone’s GPS fix to the ridehailing company so that they appear to be right out front of the station.

In an ideal world, those workers would have a union, and be able to dictate the app’s functionality to their bosses. But workers shouldn’t have to wait for an ideal world: they don’t just need jam tomorrow — they need jam today. Tuyul apps, and apps like Para, which allow workers to extract more money under better working conditions, are a prelude to unionization and employer regulation, not a substitute for it.

Employers will not give workers one iota more power than they have to. Just look at the asymmetry between the regulation of union employees versus union busters. Under US law, employees of a union need to account for every single hour they work, every mile they drive, every location they visit, in public filings. Meanwhile, the union-busting industry — far larger and richer than unions — operate under a cloak of total secrecy, Workers aren’t even told which union busters their employers have hired — let alone get an accounting of how those union busters spend money, or how many of them are working undercover, pretending to be workers in order to sabotage the union.

Twiddling will only get an employer so far. Twiddling — like all “AI” — is based on analyzing the past to predict the future. The heuristics an algorithm creates to lure workers into their cars can’t account for rapid changes in the wider world, which is why companies who relied on “AI” scheduling apps (for example, to prevent their employees from logging enough hours to be entitled to benefits) were caught flatfooted by the Great Resignation.

Workers suddenly found themselves with bargaining power thanks to the departure of millions of workers — a mix of early retirees and workers who were killed or permanently disabled by covid — and they used that shortage to demand a larger share of the fruits of their labor. The outraged howls of the capital class at this development were telling: these companies are operated by the kinds of “capitalists” that MLK once identified, who want “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.”

https://twitter.com/KaseyKlimes/status/821836823022354432/

There's only 5 days left in the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon's Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they're DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: Stephen Drake (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Analog_Test_Array_modular_synth_by_sduck409.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

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Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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Louis (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chestnut_horse_head,_all_excited.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

1 - How it starts

The way this scam works is by a friend of yours, or someone in the same server as you, falling for this scam and downloading then opening the malicious file that their friend had sent to them. In a very long line of things, it's a chain reaction of them hijacking and using the stolen account to then scam someone else. And if you're not quick enough, it can and will steal everything on your computer/phone.

Not everyone on the internet is scam savvy, but that's what guides like these are meant to help with. :)

Here are two images taken from reddit on what it looks like when you're contacted by the hijacked account:

Immediate red flags:

I'm a developer. Try my game. Can you test my game?

Other reported red flags to look out for:

I need you to beta test my game. Download my game and try it for 4-5 minutes then write a review. Here's a free key/password for the game go to this link. I'm working on a project and need someone to try my game. I'll give you free items/vip if you try my game. Try this new mobile game <link> ** and I'll give you items. I'll pay you $ via PayPal or give you Nitro if you try it.

What it boils down to, is that for this scam to work, they need you to download the file they send you, or a file that's uploaded via a link to a file sharing website, and then you have to open the file.

Do not do this, obviously.

Do not accept any suspicious .exe or .jar files from your friends or fellow server members if you do not know what might be inside it.

** Sometimes they will send you an APK file or a link to the google play store for a mobile game, and sadly this too, is malware, and it will steal your passwords. Again, do not download it.

2 - The Malware/Virus

If you were someone who downloaded a file like this and then opened it, you have now infected your computer, and... unfortunately, all of your Passwords, addresses, Crypto info, and credit card information, have now been compromised.

Nothing is safe with this Malware.

A more in depth explanation of spacers.exe can be found here as well as how to remove spacers.exe:

Here's a second NTTS video explaining how the inner workings of this can work from the scammers point of view:

3 - The Goal

The goal of this malware, as noted above, is not just to steal your passwords, credit card info, but also your discord account.

There are people who will pay for this malware (it is being sold for others to use, which sucks) so that they can take over your discord accounts if you have certain badges or names.

If a scummy individual running this scam wants something they don't have that you do, they will try to take it from you.

Do be warned that if you fall for this, you may also receive threatening emails to have your personal information leaked if you don't pay a ransom/money amount after you got infected.

This is a scare tactic.

This was noted in this post from Dec 3rd 2024:

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Final Thoughts: All I can say is.. common sense should be a big factor here. Internet safety 101 and all that. You shouldn't be clicking links to anything or anyone saying something's 'free' or with the offer of you getting some reward from it. Nor should you go believing or downloading things from your friends if they start acting weird or weirder than normal.

Pro tip: If you get a message on steam or discord by someone asking you to 'visit this website' to 'vote for my friend in <thing>' that too is a scam and it will steal your login information.

If you're like me and your best friend on the internet is someone you've known online for 18 years, having him suddenly say 'I'm a developer try my game' would be a big indicator to me that his account was compromised.

If you can, try to make sure you're connected with your friends through other outlets like tumblr or bluesky. Or even through e-mail (as old as that seems lol.)

Photographs WIP

(fyi no proof reading and its not even close to the finish product but idc anymore and 📒 anon asked)

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Click!

The camera shuttered, and soon enough an image printed out in front of it. Vernias grabbed the little slip of paper and shook it in the air as the film developed. Slowly, and what felt like forever, the picture fully cleared up. He smiled warmly at the image, even if it was mere moments ago. It was just a simple photo, him, Nick, Sophist and Brent just standing next to each other. They met up again and at the last minute decided to go to a convention nearby. Nothing crazy, just some local smash tournament, but they did have some free time. Vernias continued to study the photo, immediately noticing some imperfections in the print job, but more focusing on the others. He saw the stupid grin Sophist always had, how slightly akward Brent was, how smug Nick looked. Vernias found it endearing, their stupid little characters shown in their own little way. He almost didn’t notice the slight blush on his face.

“Hey let me see it!” Nick’s voice immediately snapped Vernias back to reality. He let the camera fall, only to be held up by his slash, and stuck out the photo to Nick. He studied it too, though not to the extent Vernias did, instead simply nodded before running to catch up to Brent and Sophist, who apparently already ran off. 

Vern quickly realised the others left, and quickly–though with care to not crumple it too much–placed the photo in his pocket. “Wait for me!”

-------------------------------------------

Click!

“Why’d you take a backshot of us, bro.” Vernias just sighed as he reached in front of the camera to grab the printed image. The other two had their usual set of complaints to Brent’s joke, though neither took their eyes off the screen. Vernias once again carefully put the photo in his pocket and let the camera fall to his side, joining Brent inbetween the other two playing. 

It was an open console type thing, and even if it wasn’t Nick and Sophist didn’t seem to care. More than anything the two seemed to be fucking around, neither of which played on their main, just instead fucking around with bottom tier characters. As soon as Vernias realised good content wasn’t going to be found, he took the more recent of the photos out of his pocket to study it. Even with its poor quality–it was some cheap instant camera, but it was good enough for what he wanted–

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(anyways yeah thats all mb)

when it comes to "i need you" it was an idea i literally came up with today

is it good? no idea but i already lost all my pride fuck it

the idea came to me when i was watching sophist's new video (popucom) and he said "I need you" when talking to brent. obviously it had more in game implications but my rpf pilled brain went "gay."

i plan to make it wotc ish (aka general premise but not exact cause im too lazy to not have any plotholes or controdictions) (aka brent and sophist end up on opposite sides of the war and while they obviously still care for eachother they're different sides don't allow for it to happen) and idk this could be their final scene before they break up. ig ill write smth quickly to better explain it but i promise it ain't going to be good, just a proof of concept.

(note this isn't the beginning i just can't start this properly)

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...

“I don’t need a king or a noble. I need you. I need my friend,” the final word came out like poison to both. “I need you more-” he paused, but at this point it was all over anyway, “ I need you more than a friend.” 

The silence that filled the room was deafening. Brent failed to find any words to convey his understanding, and Sophist just wanted to leave. 

“But if you don’t want that, then it's fine.” Sophist turned around, grabbing whatever hat he left lying around before making his way to the door. “I’ll just handle it on my own.” 

With the final words Sophist opened and closed the door before Brent could get the words out. He rushed to chase after him, to try and fix everything like he should’ve done the first time. He ran to the door, twisted the nob and desperately looked for him. Yet he was nowhere to be found. Either side of the corridor, which both stretched out to near infinity, didn’t hold Sophist nor any trace of him. 

All Brent could do is stand in the corridor. He felt the slightest breeze and prayed to whatever he would turn to see him, yet it was still an empty hallway. He felt his chest tighten with a pain he never understood before. 

Brent walked back into his room. He shut the door behind him, careful to not make any sound. He fell to the floor, the light from the sunset still shining in his room. All he was left with was a crown and the promise of night as he replayed the words he wished he said. 

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wow ok as i said yes this is very shit but again i wrote this in a panic in like 10 minutes so ig it should be bad??? idk maybe ill revise these ideas