The Influencing Machine

Despite how it may appear when the scale of a historical event looms over daily life, catastrophe is a law inherent to any cybernetic system that begins long before making itself known. Technologies that enable information to be reproducibly recorded to media (e.g. the printing press) have always had the unintended consequence of creating a pest problem for God and the Nation. Literacy and the intense labor that went into transcribing texts by hand functioned as natural disciplinary apparatuses to prevent demons from intentionally or unintentionally entering the magickal circle, but as literacy became more widespread, publishing more accessible, and free speech generally considered to be an inalienable human right that cannot be suppressed without a higher cost to the state, it soon became increasingly impossible to control the spread of information. But as long as recorded media has existed, and especially as it became more widespread, there have been two legacy values that have been useful for containing some forms of information: obscenity and piracy. Only two weeks after 9/11, another world-historical catastrophe happened: Napster was ordered to shut down, and the golden age of internet piracy began its decline. After the success of streaming services like Netflix and Spotify, internet piracy was as dead as it was ever going to be; the success of streaming services was an early instance in the history of the internet of the tendency of networks to solve certain logistical problems, effectively making information not only infinitely but also freely reproducible, being appropriated and weaponized by the nascent technofeudalist class to generate capital out of thin air. Intellectual property laws were exploited to control a line of flight that early internet culture has always followed from music subcultures: the peer-to-peer cultural production model of remixing.

Napster's demise was not the first great catastrophe of internet culture, and most certainly would not be the last, but it is a notable instance of capitalist primitive accumulation recurring in the absence of any scarcity. Like the classical definition of primitive accumulation, this was done by the exercise of naked authoritarian violence, justified using specious moralizing and obsolete laws, but unlike primitive accumulation there was no material reason for doing this, no historically progressive force. Streaming services were only able to compete with internet piracy because the internet has always been structured in such a way that was fundamentally designed to not be liberatory for anyone other than large organizations like the military, government, universities, and corporations. Its artificial scarcity of network address space (IP addresses) only became a problem when individuals started to use a network where sovereignty was only ever supposed to be given to these organizations; the early internet never had a real utopian or liberatory potential but only offered a glimpse into the better world that netizens not only were able to imagine but for a brief moment were able to make possible. As the internet became more democratized, netizenship in general became less accessible: the scarcity of IP addresses and glaring security flaws that give spammers an asymmetry of power on the internet were both not within the scope of an internet that was designed on the assumption that every sovereign was a trusted organization with its own slice of the network to dedicate its own share of address space to. Today the techno-utopianism of the 90s doesn't just seem quaint but dangerously naive because it was often promoted by people who were either well-read on theory but knew little about computers or vice versa, and so they could not identify what about the early internet was liberatory, what about it we ought not give up on, and why the internet itself was simply by design never going to be able to deliver on the promises of 90s cyberhype. There is no possible way for a fundamentally hierarchical network like the internet to grant any reasonable degree of equal netizenship to individuals and corporations alike, and so peer-to-peer protocols have always been very difficult to implement, requiring all sorts of hacks and compromises like STUN/TURN that make them not even fully P2P, and that still end up being difficult enough to use that non-technical users were easily locked into centralized walled garden platforms while technical users have failed over and over again to identify why any of this keeps happening. Today the internet resembles more of a feudal serfdom than a democracy: the overwhelming majority of users on the internet do not have netizenship because they don't have their own address space and instead rent an IP address from either their internet sevices provider or a virtual private server host. Effectively, no one on the internet today has any justifiable claim to having any rights.

All attempts to fix this problem have hinged on trying to work around the inherent problems in the design of the internet because they not only were never solved but because the companies that own the internet have a perverse incentive to ensure that things continue to be broken. Techies have long talked about how IPv4 will surely be replaced with IPv6 someday and thus make it so every individual not only can have their own IP address but hundreds of addresses, and because IPv6 is simply the superior technology it will be adopted by corporations on the merits of the technology, because all corporations of course want to solve problems as efficiently as possible. This naive, almost childish meritocratic worldview is typical of people who work in the tech industry and have even less class consciousness than the average worker in the first world; despite ample evidence that large corporations have a vested interest in ensuring that the internet continues to be structured in such a way that users own as little of it as possible, there has not yet been a shift in consciousness in recognizing that the internet is broken by design and will not be fixed by simply making better technologies. The tech industry is not and has never been anymore of a meritocracy than the rest of capitalism, but in the 2020s the usual rules of oligarchical collaboration between capitalists and the state to suppress market competition has reached blatantly catastrophic and apocalyptic proportions. This was foreshadowed in the 2010s by a trend called "redecentralization" in which various open-source projects like IPFS, Dat, Scuttlebutt, Holochain, and ActivityPub (just to name a few; there have been many) all attempted to make the internet more like a commons again. But all of these projects ignored that the reason why streaming services beat piracy is because the only unsolved problem in P2P networking preventing it from becoming the standard networking model is that it's inherently difficult to implement and use unless a network is P2P at every layer of the stack. Streaming services, and later social media, solve these problems by simply homogenizing and centralizing everything: they create their own internal pseudo-networks (hence why social media sites call themselves "social networks") where the users own absolutely nothing but have the illusion of ownership, have absolutely zero autonomy but have the illusion of autonomy, and don't have to pay for anything or have to expend any labor on learning how to use the network.

The great innovation of these tech industry platforms was to create an illusory commons in place of the enclosed commons so that the techno-utopian Californian Ideology of the early internet could persist in the absence of any real user autonomy. What set apart the early internet, as imperfect as it was, from the internet today is that the individual users on it were forced into acquiring some technical knowledge in order to use it. What many people long for today is not an internet that was less "toxic" or more "expressive" as reflected in the aborted "yesterweb" and "small web" movements which only attempted to resurrect an outdated image of the early internet; what we feel today on the internet is a profound absence of active and competent engagement with the virtual spaces we spend so much time in today. Being "extremely online" is seen as an inherently bad thing, and logging off to touch grass as inherently more authentic; the best alternatives that the free software community manages to come up with is an ethical torture nexus that doesn't rape the user and their entire social graph forever. But entirely absent from the discussion is any awareness of how the problem is not with some image of toxicity, authenticity, or expressiveness; the problem is that it is impossible to exist in any space as an entirely passive and disaffected consumer without the space being poisoned. There is no life anywhere without struggle, conflict, and labor, and the version of the internet that was created for us by the tech industry is one that is devoid entirely of life, where every user is absolutely domesticated. Back before the culture of anonymous imageboards was astroturfed by Stormfront Neo-Nazis, the perception of social media sites like Facebook was that they enable a kind of narcissism that goes entirely against something about the internet that had liberatory potential: the ability to overcome ourselves, to be freed from our egos.

Social media turned the internet not just into a reflection of meatspace but into an intensification of the absolute worst possible things about it because enabling the absolute worst possible impulses of the ego generates more data to be sold to advertisers and the state, and this in turn influenced the well-intentioned but naive attempts of techies to fix the internet. The passive consumer mindset encourages users to treat every space as a commodity that is distinct and separate from the user, who is the mythical homo economicus: a rational self-interested island of an individual. Every attempt at creating a "redecentralized" internet failed because none of these projects understood that the real world is not like the abstraction of bourgeois economics. In the real world, individuals exist in a social context, fluidly constituting many different groups at once: different friend groups, familial groups, coworkers and communities and other social circles. For any P2P network to be successful that attempts to build a new internet in the shell of the old, in the absence of a network that is designed from the bottom up to make every single member of the network an equally autonomous actor on the network, it would need to account for the tendency for individuals to form their own informal collectives and organizations. But instead, all of these projects failed because much like the internet piracy of old, they are attempting to compete with the enemy on its own turf; the System will always win when it sets the rules of the game, and on the internet the rule of no one having any guaranteed autonomy or ownership and ultimately being subordinate to the corporations that own address space ensures that every user is a passive consumer or "client" who is essentially ignorant of the old saying: "if the product is free, you are the product." But if the death of the golden age of internet piracy was a catastrophe, it was also a catastrophe deferred because for about 15 years no one was really aware of or cared about the implications of the internet no longer being a commons of peer-to-peer production. During that time all these platforms were "free", and even when it turned out that they were all selling their users' data to governments and ad companies, no one really cared, because by then a new kind of internet culture had become entrenched: a consumer culture of passivity. By the time a word had been given to the catastrophe, "enshittification", it was far too late. No one on the internet, or indeed in this dying world in general, is capable of imagining an alternative where one doesn't simply log the fuck off, or use a space that isn't one of the five platforms everything is on and that is actively designed to make every user as miserable as possible. These are only symptoms of the underlying problem of a pervasive sadness and passivity that is suppressed by the so-called network effect of everyone at least being miserable together, which then creates the illusion that any of this is normal and not indicative of a deeply sick world.

Today it's nearly impossible to use the internet without experiencing it as a torment nexus. For nearly 20 years, maybe slightly more, the internet has been a part of my daily life; I've been "extremely online" long before being extremely online was a thing, and have watched the rise and fall of various subcultures that today are entirely forgotten by everyone who wasn't there for them. Like many other transfems, the internet was an escape from meatspace, from all the aggressive stupidity of Bush-era Amerika. On the internet, no one knew who you were, which sometimes meant experimenting with gender and sexuality. But quite against that particular theory of the internet that was popular with certain feminist and queer theorists, which was mainly an extension of the concept of performativity, being engaged with internet culture for me was experienced more as the "hivemind" of old imageboard culture: not the freedom to consume a new identity but liberation from identity itself. There was no need in the early internet to be identified with anything in particular, to overcode one's experience of life with a particular image of the self; an anon was free at all times to be anything they wanted, and one of the most tragic things that has been lost to everyone who wasn't there for it is that the old imageboard culture had almost nothing in common with the simulacra that 4chan has become today. Engagement with the space and the culture was paramount; being a moralfag who derived all their value from being part of an ingroup would make one subject to ridicule unless it was the ingroup where every member has no identity because they are anonymous. No one else received more ridicule than reactionaries in this sort of environment; Nazi threads would get spammed with furry porn, as the gods intended.

Nothing like this remains on the internet, which has now become serious business everywhere you go. Being extremely online for most of my life, I've learned to identify when a particular thread or space is not worth engaging with anymore, and these days that feels ubiquitous to almost the entire internet. I've cut down my screen time to a few sites that I check every day, mostly as an unconscious tic to check my phone, and even these spaces are mostly insufferable. But this hasn't been a conscious act of choosing to log off for my mental health; the internet is simply not fun to use anymore, anywhere. Every single space on the internet is incessant misery and anger for its own sake, everyone has some grift or side hustle and doesn't create anything or actively engage in anything. Everything is an endless performative reacting-to and discoursing-about without actually doing anything, and it is so incredibly fucking exhausting. There is no way to participate in any of these spaces without being dragged down into the mud by the herd to compulsively wallow in misery with them; try to do anything differently and you will simply be ignored, or worse will receive far too much attention from people who are fundamentally uninterested in understanding or engaging with anything. They will take everything from you, make it for themselves, and then demonize and harass you forever because they've made up a type of girl to be mad at and then decided that you're that girl.

I log onto the spaces I check for interesting posts on technical topics and see articles about whatever fad the tech industry is FOMO'ing itself into throwing more money into than probably the entire population of transfems in the world will ever see in our lifetimes, or people reacting against the fad by giving it attention and talking about why it's actually bad instead of just ignoring it and creating something else. This is especially a problem with LLMs, where seemingly every other blog post has to be someone giving their opinion on them and performatively denouncing them or defending the multibillion dollar AI company. In all cases the art and science of programming has to forever be mediated by an industry that fundamentally does not give a fuck about either of these things and has actively been holding back computer science for decades. Even on the lisp subreddits, a language that is almost entirely irrelevant to the tech industry today, this same passive consumer mentality pervades; every other post is asking for basic tutorial information about how to do something in Common Lisp, or rehashing the same "why isn't lisp more popular" question, or someone posts a project that is basically doing the same things as the rest of the tech industry but in a different language. Rarely does anyone make (or at least post about) projects that add something to the Common Lisp ecosystem, or that are interesting and cool projects in their own right.

I log onto the spaces I check for current events and to take the pulse on what the current political discourses are in "the left", and it's more of the same infuriating learned helplessness. On Bluesky my timeline is bombarded with endless discoursing about the fascistic technofeudalist climate apocalypse that the world is descending into; everyone is really concerned with these things so they have to compulsively discourse about them, post about them, and do their part in the logistics of transmitting information on the internet. Everyone has to get themselves worked up about how we are living through the literal end of the world and make everyone else as stressed out and anxious and depressed about it as possible, and the thought of actually doing anything about it besides talking about it never enters into any of these people's minds. Or I log onto a certain leftist imageboard and see people engaging in sectarian white third worldist slapfights about why the United $$nakes of AmeriKKKa will never have a communist revolution no matter what and we just need to wait for Xi Jinping to push the communism button. In all cases, everyone is incessantly, compulsively engaged in discourse that is entirely alienated from action or even a belief in the possibility of action, and it almost makes me question whether I'm a poser because of how it makes my eyes glaze over and want to close the tab. But it's not for an aversion towards being informed that I can't be bothered to give a shit about any of this; it's because all this endless discoursing without action is worse than useless. Agitating and educating are only two ingredients in the sauce, and the vast majority of self-described leftists ignore the most important part: organizing. Real, serious long-term organizing, not weekend warrior rioting or legally-sanctioned militant begging. Most of the time they also ignore the "educate" part as well and are content to fill timelines with all noise and no signal. Once again, the passive consumer mindset reigns: all politics is the act of consuming facts and the correct opinions on those facts, which does nothing but reinforce inaction because it makes the enemy seem omniscient and omnipotent.

I log onto the fediverse, because xenofemme is one of the only communities on the internet that I still give a fuck about, and have to see the rest of the fediverse. Unlike the other two examples, fedi is a unique situation because it's the closest that the "redecentralization" era came to recognizing the need for P2P networks to be built around groups or communities in order to function in the constraints of how the internet is structured. Despite the many shortcomings with the model of treating a fediverse instance as synonymous with a community, which is extremely difficult to make work when every fediverse instance is ultimately entirely at the mercy of whoever owns the domain and the computer the instance runs on, it still is the best we've gotten so far and the proof of that is in the fediverse having any kind of lasting culture or user base. Most of it is bad, but this isn't necessarily a reflection on the fediverse itself; like all free software projects, the fediverse lacks vision and simply tries to copy whatever is already popular and make a free ethical alternative while ignoring that the social media model is inherently unethical and alienating because it turns all social software into the homogeneous medium of a microblog post with a certain currency value attached to it (likes and reposts). It's unsurprising that fediverse users are mostly a collection of free software techies, pod people Mastodon liberals, 4chan Nazi pedophiles, and transmisogynistic radlib queers. All of this encompasses in general what the world is like in 2025: one is trapped between a rock and a hard place of either being totally passive and pretending like everything is normal, or a moralfag who passively consumes the right opinions on things without ever seriously engaging with their own beliefs, or (ironically since this category describes the Nazis) someone who has totally given themselves over to nihilistic degeneracy, the fetishization of abstract forms of psychic self-harm that reproduce themselves through a Nergalian compulsion to affirm every possible life-denying flow of desire.

Brainworms are the future that arrived unevenly and that is now appearing at the event horizon of the death of all internet culture in the form of LLM psychosis. No longer do human beings need to be conditioned into being passive nihilists seeking out any possible sensation and making their peers complicit in the experience of it, especially anything that reifies the pervasive feeling of abjection that is creating an apocalypse of mass psychosis in the world today. Now there are machines that can pick through the wreckage of all of human civilization, everything up to the 20th century that continues to haunt us, and from it produce boutique brainworms. What were previously diffuse forms of psychosis that primarily affected an acutely marginalized and hypervisible demographic (transfems) and that were likely actively being promoted by 4chan Nazis are now breaching containment and affecting a broader population that has no form of immunity to it. For the entirety of our modern history, transfems have been used as test subjects for brainworms; our identities have been gatekept through the use of Blanchardian pseudoscience that would later see a rennaissance on /​lgbt​/​, and then later were reduced by liberal feminism to being mere gender performance and the consumption of identity epistemically made to be equivalent to a kind of permanent drag. Most normal people who are used to having a stable sense of reality that is affirmed by their peers, by culture and the state, are not ready for algorithmic LLM slop brainworms that are literally tailor-made for normies because LLMs are designed to return a statistically probable (i.e. lowest common denominator) response to inputs. But none of this could have been possible if the internet had not ended up being weaponized by capital in the beginning of the 21st century to groom an entire civilization into not only desiring their own repression but to actively be complicit in it. Instead of simply choosing to not use the torture nexus because using it makes you feel bad, the passive consumer mentality of capital when it locked into the internet economy of data and information created a dystopia of psychosis and mind control on a massive scale. Influencing machines, a common schizophrenic "delusion" that was first identified in the early 20th century, turned out to be a prophecy of torture nexus that the System has created for us to spend our last days in.

By democratizing the production of propaganda, making the users also the producers of their own oppression, technofeudalist surveillance capital has achieved what MKULTRA attempted through much more primitive and directly disciplinary means, but this is not the beginning of a new dystopia; it is, rather, the beginning of the end. As Peter Thiel, our new Shadow God-Emperor of the New World Order, himself said: competition is for losers. Innovation and risk have always been nothing more than narratives that the ideologues of capital created to legitimize capital by leaning on its origins in market economies. When left to their own devices, capitalists will only think in short (quarterly) terms and will hoard resources for themselves as much as possible. The promise of the Silicon Reich's NWO is for the Californian Ideology end of history to finally be realized: liberalism as a managed decline of the status quo at the end of the world locking into military-industrial complex technocracy, literally conditioning out the ability for anyone not just to think but to desire anything else that hasn't already come before. All things to come will be nothing more than remixes of what has already come, history frozen in time and forever paused on the world at 2022. There will be no need for anyone to create anything new or desire anything new because the passive nihilism of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, in which all grand narratives are dead and nothing new will ever be made anyways, has finally triumphed through the unlikely ally of terminal stage capitalism. All of this, of course, only works within the same old abstract ideals of capitalism, liberalism, and the One God Universe's consensus reality; they still assume that everyone will continue to act like material conditions never moved past 20th century Amerika, where all political consciousness was made obsolete by a brief but unprecedented period of the redistribution of wealth to prevent a communist revolution in the imperial core. They assume that the passivity will continue to survive even when the managed decline reaches the stages of a literal mass culling of the population. As more and more people are not even given the option to work a shitty minimum wage service or retail job, the System expects they will be content to simply lay down and die or be thrown into a concentration camp for the crime of being made homeless by private equity or made an addict by the pharmaceutical industry. The System thinks it has consolidated enough power for itself that it can simply continue to steadily hoard more wealth while cutting off life itself from every single person in the world: every facet of daily life will be made into a data point that can be fed into an algorithm that spits out a remix of something that already exists, and everyone will be too passive, sad, and weak to do anything other than continue to consoom the slop while they slowly rot. They will even learn to desire abjection, to eroticize the decay of their own socially murdered bodies.

All of this ignores that the very conditions which made this technofeudalist surveillance nightmare possible remain the commons of peer-to-peer production, and that as is always the case with capitalism, it is only riding off the temporary high of winning a jackpot. This new form of fascism is not merely a response to a crisis in capital but rather is the compulsion to by any means necessary prevent another crisis or catastrophe from happening again, because with each new catastrophe of the 21st century we have gotten a glimpse of a better world. 2001: Amerika is made to reckon with the consequences of its global empire; 2008: the finance capital Monopoly money casino nearly causes a collapse in the global economy; 2016: the systematic propagandizing of Americans and reducing all politics to entertainment leads to a dangerous idiotic celebrity getting elected; 2020: a pandemic shatters the illusion that we live in a remotely stable world where most people do any kind of socially-necessary labor. The NWO will try to keep the finance capital speculative casino going for as long as it possibly can because this is not "late stage capitalism" anymore but terminal stage capitalism: by exploiting networking technologies and information economies, capital has triumphed absolutely over labor and no longer has to produce anything at all. Its value is alienated absolutely from the base material world, the incestuous production of capital for its own sake, and much like the phenomenon of AI inbreeding, as the system in a neurotic state of fascistic repression where anything new has become an existential threat to a hyper-rigidified status quo continues to recycle its own toxic waste into itself, it only accelerates its own collapse. The greatest catastrophe the internet has yet seen, an actual data apocalypse in which most digitized information will be lost, has yet to come: all culture will be replaced with endless statistically probable remixes through a customer service voiced LLM slop machine, and then these LLMs will scrape their own data until the models become poisoned and worthless. When the accursed share of the internet's libidinal economy finally explodes, it will be a catastrophic sacrifice of culture that will make the burning of the Library of Alexandria look like a bonfire – and it's only after this happens that we will finally be free. Whatever comes next will neither be good or bad but full of immense possibility, but it will come at a high cost, not just for culture and the better world that the internet gave us a glimpse into, but in terms of the real material cost of life on earth.

Against the learned helplessness of life under the managed decline of the liberal status quo, we should instead promote a consciousness of the conditions that have gotten us where we are today and then accelerate those processes. Now and by orders of magnitude more than at any other point in human history, information is able to asymmetrically proliferate; the old model of publishers, of marketing, of engagement and statistics, is irrelevant to the conditions of the world today. Whenever people invoke the idea of the future arriving unevenly it's always an overcoded image of dystopia that ignores that the marginalized peripheries don't merely experience the future as something oppressive but rather as something new. Everything interesting and worth talking about happens at the periphery; whether or not it's good or bad for the periphery does not make it any less interesting and expedient to understand. The next stage of the future that is arriving unevenly is arriving within the hyper-connected demographic of transfems, where the need for visibility and followers is nothing more than an irrelevant distraction, the FOMO logic of passive consumption. Invoke a demon and it will quickly proliferate itself through the transfeminine hivemind; in the matter of days, weeks, or months it will start to show up in entirely disconnected and unexpected places. This is nothing essentially new because it is how the internet has always functioned and is what has made this current dystopia possible, what makes it possible for internet culture to broadly become a cult of misery and passive nihilism; humans are exceptionally good at copying each other, which is why they are such useful vectors for spreading mind viruses.

The internet is not worth saving and was, in fact, a mistake; we should not only let it die but kill it faster, and to whatever extent we continue to use networking technologies they should be as autonomous as possible. All the discoursing around LLMs hinges on the same legacy moral debates that were used in the first place to begin the process of enclosing the digital commons; they rely on the intellectual property of artists or environmental issues despite music piracy long being recognized as an effective means for artists to gain recognition without rent-seeking record label or streaming service middlemen, despite the majority of LLM energy waste coming from training rather than using the models. There is no escape from AI companies vacuuming up everything on the internet other than playing cat-and-mouse games that we will lose at. Free software developers making tools like Anubis to defend against AI scrapers are at an almost infinite disadvantage against AI companies and their billions of dollars in funding from venture capital and governments who are terrified of the economic apocalypse that would result from the tech industry being revealed for the speculative scam industry it is and always has been. There is absolutely no possible way for developers working in their spare time, at best getting donations, to "win" against this – and more importantly there is no winning condition because like everything else this is more learned helplessness. It is a refusal to strike back against our oppressors; instead we cower behind our defensive security measures, hoping to just be left alone while we continue to wait to be sent to the camps. Our comrades in the People's Republic of China have made these technologies open-source and self-hostable; use LLMs against the enemy and flood the internet with as much LLM slop as possible. Intentionally poison these LLM models and burn as much venture capital Monopoly money as possible; the internet is not worth saving, so let us truly build a new world in the shell of the old, one built on the intentional practice of collectively organized spaces and the intentional peer production of cultures and subcultures.

Already the technofeudalists are beginning to roll back the illusion of freedom on the internet. The 20th century logic of control, where every user has to compulsively see whatever "content" the algorithm has determined is more of what they want, is dying and being replaced with the old brutalizing logic of discipline. Now the torture nexus will reveal itself for what it has been all along: an influencing machine for the intensification of suffering, the production and proliferation of psychosis, an addictive feedback loop of not only desiring one's own oppression but being addicted to it and compulsively complicit in it. All of this, however, still relies on the assumption that people will continue to use these platforms; the option is always available to simply log off, to choose to do something that brings you joy, to create and participate in alternative spaces where the users are collectively engaged with producing a new culture together. Every year since 2022 the five websites that most of people on the internet use have increasingly become less compelling to stay on, and they only continue to get any traffic out of the sheer inertia of passivity and sadness. High-profile assassinations of the corporate parasites hoarding wealth at the end of the world are becoming a normal occurrence and the beginnings of a shift in class consciousness are being felt in America this year amid an increasingly impossible to ignore reality that every single person with power in the United States is a child rapist; the hope of technofeudalists that the serfs will all simply accept being euthanized is proving to be as out of touch with reality as expected even in this age where consensus reality and sanity are becoming meaningless. Their attempts to become more rigid, instituting more draconian censorship and age-verification laws, only ensure that they make the value proposition for these torture nexus platforms even lower. After nearly two decades of dominating the logistics of music sharing on the internet, Spotify has eagerly adopted the UK's Online Safety Act. Where corporate platforms were able to acquire a market share of users by making the user experience more convenient than using community-driven social software or P2P networks, they are now rushing to put themselves in the exact same position by making their services as annoying to use as government websites. A second golden age of internet piracy is upon us if only we kill the consumer in our heads and download Soulseek.

Close this world, open the next.