GioCities

What Happened With Homestuck? (Recap)

2026-04-02T00:00:00-05:00

It’s been eight months since what I’ve jokingly called my Homestuck Divorce. I published The Unofficial Homestuck Collection Takedown and The Homestuck Union Was Always Fake explaining everything, but they’re very long. I think I did need to be thorough in documenting those details, but the information that’s relevant to most people is hard to consume. People kept asking me to summarize and I’d rather just have this out there so I don’t have to think about it again. I don’t want to have to come back to Homestuck, so this is a tl;dr retrospective summary to organize my thoughts and capture this question that still keeps coming up: “what happened?”

Hostile takeover of a fan project

The Unofficial Homestuck Collection was the definitive way to read Homestuck. It was a fan-born fan project released by necessity at a time when Flash was unsupported and the official website was offline indefinitely. After it was released it got the full endorsement of the official Homestuck team, including Andrew.¹ Despite some negative experiences I’d already had with Andrew, the collection was an archive, not an argument, and was only ever a celebration of Homestuck and its related works.

I have been in the Homestuck fandom for my entire adult life, and I’ve always tried to be a positive member of the community. My connections with creatives in the community and valuable contributions of creative work showed that you could be an overwhelmingly positive force in the community while still criticizing management decisions and occasionally being snarky. This is normal and how it should be, although it had become rare in Homestuck.

Homestuck Official reached out to us (the UHC project maintainers) saying they appreciated our work and wanted to work together in some kind of collaboration. They didn’t explain any details of what they were looking to do, though. HSO made a number of specific guarantees to work with us in a positive, good-faith relationship; they insisted they didn’t want the collection taken down and agreed, upfront, that any existing bad blood over past criticisms would never enter in to this. We were told we’d be working with James Roach and a new team that didn’t include Andrew, which gave us reason for optimism. When I brought up Andrew’s past comments that he’d “never speak to me”, Andrew’s representative dismissed the concern as silly.²

Over the following year they systematically broke these commitments (which they’d made in writing),³ threatening disproportionately harsh legal action⁴ unless we complied with a series of demands including:

Signing over the rights to our creative work not as part of a project, but as a precondition to engaging in dialogue at all⁵
Signing and agreeing to a “license” without allowing us to both read the document⁶
Cutting off our personal friendships with past Homestuck critics and publicly denouncing them as Andrew saw fit⁸
Rewriting past essays about Homestuck to reflect more favorably on Andrew⁷
Legally isolating ourselves from each other and communicating only through Andrew, with harsh legal penalties for outside contact⁹
Granting administrative access to the project files to a Homestuck employee and removing ourselves as maintainers entirely¹⁰
For me personally, publicly apologizing for harassment Homestuck employees committed against me, acknowledging I was at fault for implicitly prompting them to do it by being an available target.¹¹

In the end it was a just a hostile takeover briefly disguised as collaboration. Andrew wanted the program, they claimed it, and they were going to keep escalating until it was theirs. Instead of working with us to cement the project’s availability as they promised, Homestuck engaged in a campaign of deception and manipulation. From the outset, they only approached us as part of a scheme to gain control over projects and people Andrew saw as threats.

Not only did Andrew pressure us to sell out and repeatedly threaten us when we wouldn’t act against the interests of the community, he made it clear he was willing to escalate indefinitely and attempt to bankrupt the maintainers with legal fees.²⁰ I finally bailed when I was able to confirm Andrew was simply going to make unilateral demands, but getting that far still cost me four figures out of my pocket. The conduct included legal threats, making false claims of infringement in DMCA demands, directly lying to people in writing, forging signatures on documents,¹² and deliberate destruction of negotiation records.¹³

I know it’s easy to look at a messy conflict and attribute the conflict to fault on both sides. That’s often a fair assumption, but it was not the case here. We met Homestuck Official at their level when they reached out to us, offered to give them free promotion and use of our creative work, and played completely straight when they made it look like they wanted to negotiate. We were met with nothing but abuse.

I knew Andrew had a fixation on me as a critic. They’d already framed me to some people as the source of all their problems,¹⁴ either as a conscious lie or a post-hoc “nothing’s ever my fault” rationalization. I did not think they were so delusional as to call a fake détente in order to get my personal information so they could to sue me if I didn’t give them my work and take down my past writing.¹⁵ But that’s what they did; as soon as they felt I had been sufficiently entrapped they made these increasingly outrageous demands.

There are a lot of details it’s easy to get lost in — he-said-she-said in conversations, tone policing, IP rights, whether this was a true labor dispute or not, etc. But the most important part of what happened was that the entire operation was a scheme. Andrew said they knew the UHC was an independent project, they knew I was attached, and they insisted up-front that they were fine with all of that. Homestuck originally told us a licensing agreement was necessary to protect ourselves from VIZ Media, although they later admitted this was false, as they had re-obtained the rights at this point.¹⁶ This the intentional fraud made every attempt to try to assimilate us and extort me for favors that came after categorically unacceptable. By their own admission¹⁷, everything they did was based on materially false premises and done in service of a goal to violate these foundational promises. It was a genuinely absurd gambit executed by people who didn’t even consider sincerity before jumping to an overly-online wargame mentality.

I think Andrew does these things because they believes they’re playing this elaborate mastermind game to maintain control and curation over “their” fans. But when you lie directly to people and knowingly put false promises in writing as part of a transaction, that’s not being some kind of puppetmaster like Andrew loves to write about, it’s just committing fraud.

As part of the hostile takeover process, while I was waiting for Andrew to respond to me, the HICU made a copy of the project they started hosting at homestuck.github.io.¹⁹ (The reference to HICU ownership of the fork was later scrubbed as part of the shell game.) There are now common misconceptions that the UHC simply “moved”, HSO’s copy is the official¹⁸ home of the project, or that the availability somehow disproves the issues the takedown raised. None of this is true. Homestuck Official’s page claims the fork is a successor to the collection and control moved from the fan project to their official control, which is incorrect. Homestuck’s copy only serves to confuse people about the nature of the project. Since Andrew acknowledged our application was non-infringing and only sent takedown demands for the assets and the website, the up-to-date version of the reader program is still available from the original repository. Compared to the actual release, homestuck.github.io is a snapshot of an older version with bugs that were since fixed. At the time I thought this was obvious pettiness, but it seems to have succeeded in misleading people.

While the fork is deceptively marketed and ethically treacherous, I’m not making the claim that forking the project is theft or a copyright violation. The UHC is designed to stay as widely available as possible even if it’s thrown into legal limbo, which is what happened. It’s “fail-open” by design; when something goes wrong it’s built so that there are 2 copies, not 0. I believe that’s exactly how a community-focused project like the UHC needs to be.

Ultimately I stopped trying to work with Homestuck after they responded to a detailed conciliatory letter sent by my lawyer by threatening to bankrupt me with a phony lawsuit, accusing the project’s homepage of copyright infringement after all copyrighted material had been scrubbed from the site.²⁰ Homestuck’s behavior constituted multiple types of fraud, but importantly it reveals abusive tendencies and a viciousness that endangers any person in the vicinity of the IP.

All of this came at a turning point for the Homestuck brand as a whole. Andrew had been taking steps back for a while. In Pesterquest (2020), there’s a whole plot thread where Aysha U. Farah locks him in a closet.²¹ This peaked in 2023, while Andrew had formally discontinued his involvement in the Homestuck brand.²² In the wake of the publicity about Andrew’s previous misconduct, Homestuck and the Beyond Canon project made definitive statements asserting Andrew would not be involved going forward. After our talks with HSO started, the “Homestuck Independent Creative Union” was announced to manage the continuation of Beyond Canon. It called itself a real independent union doing fresh new work with the Homestuck license without oversight from Andrew.²³

This was false. The Union wasn’t a union, it was run by Andrew, who remained secretly in charge and managing everything. Once The Homestuck Union Was Always Fake was published demonstrating this, Andrew began making public authorial appearances again as if nothing had happened.²⁴ The “independent union” subsequently rebranded as “Furthest Ring Studios,”²⁵ obscuring the original deception.

This pattern of a scheming war mentality is hard to swallow because it’s a preposterous way for people to behave. It makes you feel insane for knowing it’s going on. The idea that there’s all this plotting and trickery and anger driving the decisions of the people in charge of the franchise seems so absurd that it must be an obvious lie. Even the fan communities who believed and understood it went “wow! what an outrageous event!” and then kept to the same routines. It’s hard to fight momentum. I still struggle to internalize it, and I lived it.

This is all an extra stab in the gut to me, because it’s coming from someone I once idolized. Even after discovering the Hiveswap deceptions²⁶ and seeing people denied professional credit as retribution and watching the vitriol thrown at Sarah Z,²⁷ I still fundamentally respected Andrew at some level. The MacGuffin of this whole story was The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, a monument to their work I crafted over the course of years. It is clear evidence that I was working constructively in a way that benefit them, even then. Andrew has a job that people would kill for. My friends trying to get into the creative industry talk about getting 4-5 likes, or getting a single comment on their art. Andrew has been incredibly fortunate. They’ve found an incredible amount of success as an online creator and they’re just squandering it by obsessing over clout and empire-building.

Covering up the story

That covers the events in the original writing. But the reaction to these articles has become its own significant part of the story.

There has been a campaign to bury the articles themselves in allegations and after-the-fact justifications that serve to keep people away from the topic. Any negative buzz you may have heard about the collection or these articles from the fandom today almost certainly comes from this. Some were workshopped by Homestuck Official, some of them were crowdsourced by fans. The instinct to exonerate someone you admire is natural. Especially among fans, people understandably don’t want to believe Andrew is a villain. But instinctive rationalization has prompted a slew of bad faith arguments, like:

There wasn’t really a takedown (there was),
My role as the project maintainer was somehow illegitimate or hidden (no),
This was driven by reasonable copyright concerns (it wasn’t — I show this in detail),
I didn’t respect Andrew’s stated pronouns (I did),
Maybe I forged all the conversation history (obviously not; that would be the easiest thing in the world to disprove),
At any point I refused to sign an NDA (I signed the NDA I was given immediately, and nothing I have written has violated it),
Having something negative to say proves it’s a bad-faith rant lacking substance (no),
Following someone on social media is endorsement (it means you want to see what they post sometimes),
I’m claiming Andrew “hates Homestuck” and was trying to deny people access to the comic (I argued the opposite of this),
I’m some kind of transphobe with a history of going after women (the one woman I was falsely accused of harassing away actually came back, unprompted, just to tell people it wasn’t true),
It’s a significant problem that I removed accidentally insensitive language as soon as someone flagged it (no, that’s how sensitivity works),

These are thought-terminating clichés. They’re individually ridiculous given the facts, but plausible enough on their surface to give people an excuse not to engage with the actual allegations.

All of these arguments are, at their core, hoaxes. These came from people who assumed I was ontologically evil and set off with the goal of discrediting me with whatever justifications they could scrape together. Loose connections were made after to the fact to things I had said to support this existing conclusion, so people could sell the argument to others. I remember watching, live, as people kept trying to brainstorm these and seeing what could stick. Of course there are moments in my life where I’ve failed to be charming, and certain internet obsessives collect screenshots of that to salivate over, but that’s true of everyone and irrelevant to the danger I’ve described.²⁸ These gotchas are crafted to seem plausible on social media and fill out a callout post, but they’re nonsense arguments no one would arrive at from a good-faith reading of the article.

Vessel Of Spirit@VesselOfSpirit
are the emperor's clothes real? i don't have direct information one way or the other. but i like to judge ideas by their fruits, and i can't help but notice that a lot of the voices on the "no" side are coming from whiny losers rotting in the emperor's dungeon
Sun Dec 07 10:02:03 +0000 2025

Weaponizing influence to blacklist

This is all an expected result of the dynamics I’ve grown to understand after working with Homestuck.

Andrew brandishes slander and social harm as a weapon. I’d seen this before and have now experienced it first-hand. Behind everything Andrew does is an implicit threat to ruin you, in a plausibly-deniable way, if you don’t keep them happy.

This behavior is very recognizable as a dominance game. The UHC conflict wasn’t about copyright or money or even reputation, it was about winning, dominating, and subordinating a victim. Since the UHC story first came out I’ve gotten multiple confirmations that Andrew admits this and brags about it in private. Andrew heard our boundaries, pretended to agree to them, then went thermonuclear when we required them to be respected.

Not only were threats made explicit during these talks, when the articles were published the social attack was immediately executed. It’s a technique parallel to the “Suppressive Person” label, where a credible threat to the narrative is labeled as toxic and need to be eradicated for the safety of the community.

People got direct instructions from Andrew to blacklist people for associating with me. Official Homestuck representatives secretly messaged project leads for fandom projects to demand people “fire” me over behavior they refused to describe. (The full LibsOfTiktok thing, but with no offensive posts, just false claims made by officials.) Official Homestuck employees began deflecting and seeding rumors, and influencers who had been granted access to Andrew began badmouthing the UHC project. Further violence escalated to doxxing attempts and direct threats of violence against me and my family, using an old address I gave as a shipping destination for official merch orders.

Very deliberately, none of these hoax accusations have been made on the record by anyone with any responsibility. If they did, they’d be lying, and their refusal to do it tells me they know that.²⁹ But what they can do is curate the vibe they want and make sure the hate and slander spreads. I later learned this was a tactic called “triangulation”, a strategy where the abuser (or their friend) spreads rumors about one of their victims to convince other people to pile on. This lets the dirty work spread while the aggressor maintains plausible deniability.

I wondered why in Sarah’s video Andrew was so fixated on “poisoning the narrative”. In retrospect, this was projection. A big part of their strategy is isolating people by cutting them off from community and support networks, through intimidation or slander. I’ve had friends show me screenshots where big name fans messaged them privately to “warn” them of how “problematic” I was, but then weren’t able to explain why, because it was bullshit they’d been told to repeat. It’s funny when it fails, but well-meaning people frequently buy in to this. They believe the victim is evil and they’re heroes for doing the dirty work of harassment the aggressor doesn’t want to be responsible for.

I have reason to believe this dynamic of social blackmail been the case for a very long time, but this incident has given me both first-hand knowledge and a paper trail. The legal threats were always documented, but there had also always been rumors and second-hand accounts about people willing to contradict the official narrative experiencing significant online harassment as a result. Now there’s documentation of this too.

The cult environment

This behavior is orchestrated harassment. In a cycle that keeps repeating, “inner circle” spaces become pressure cookers of hate³⁰ that turn Andrew’s personal enemies into mythologized villains for community leaders. They’re reality distortion environments, and I’ve watched them temporarily radicalize good people. First a false grievance against a scapegoat becomes part of an internal mythology.¹⁴ A siege mentality is reinforced to pressure people into being hyper-vigilant, and convince people some villain figure is an existential threat.

I may be the person in that slot right now but I’ve watched it rotate over the years. There is always a boogyman, and it’s always someone who offended Andrew by doing something short of complete agreement with their preferred narrative. Homestuck has no mythological enemies, it’s all just Andrew’s choices and their predictable outcomes.

Andrew positions himself as a guru and creates an environment so focused on manipulative scheming that everything anyone does is assumed to be a plot. This is always communicated as an emotional issue and a general feeling of “harm”. There are never any meaningful details.³¹ Any time anything bad happens (and it’s often self-inflicted), the event is spun as an outsider “endangering the team”. It’s projection, but everyone is whipped into legitimately feeling gangstalked. It is obsessive, scary, stalker stuff.

The people at the center of this are community influencers: organizers, moderators, PR people, respected contributors. The attitudes flow outward from them. Some people will wholeheartedly believe this and amplify it as a moral crusade.³² People act out in ways that might be justified if the rumors they were hearing were true, but they aren’t, and no one is allowed to verify any of it. People act in ways that might be justified if the rumors were true — but the rumors aren’t true, and no one is permitted to verify them.

Something I didn’t fully understand at the time is that Andrew’s demand I “show remorse” and admit fault wasn’t only about my humiliation satisfying Andrew personally, it was chumming the waters. Trying to get me to show “remorse” was an attempt to legitimize the hostility that had already been cultivated, and to justify the scale of hate he generates.

“Cult” is a strong word, but a significant amount of the most vicious harassment I’ve faced has been done by self-described “jubilities”, followers of the fictional religion Andrew invented. In the fictional story, Jubilism is based on a clown-themed cult leader manipulating online communities with a blend of “socialist demagoguery”, a “unique flavor of showmanship”, and an “ability to manipulate discourse and controversy to your benefit”. Her cult preaches religious-political principles like there is no tactic whatsoever that should be off the table. She maintains a list of everyone she considers a hater, a list she later uses to execute them in the street.³³ This has deeply resonated with some people, and Andrew now has adopted that same profile³⁴, like Qanon for a certain kind of fan. This Trumpyness is a running theme; Andrew hides behind clownish absurdism which makes the serious seem un-serious. It’s all designed to be goofy and plausibly deniable, but the harm it does is real.

This is not speculation. I’ve watched the war rooms myself and the attacks manifest in very visible ways. I’ve personally seen evidence that Andrew and company build profiles on people by compiling internal dox and tracking social media activity, then host war room meetings to organize campaigns against them.³⁵ This is characterized by disproportionate reactions and an instinct to “destroy” an enemy. There is seemingly no limit on how far they’re willing to go against people for even the smallest perceived slight.

Most recently this has culminated in Andrew and Homestuck’s second-in-command — in response to someone badmouthing Andrew online — jointly compiling dox on a victim and using it to file a restraining order. But then they also identified their family as immigrants, and after confirming that used the order to call the police on their home address.³⁶

The person in question was indisputably horrible. They did do nasty transphobic posting online, and I’d already blocked them myself. But it doesn’t matter how toxic a fan is or what “vibes” they were bringing to a community, you cannot put someone in physical danger for blogging about you disrespectfully.

This level of stalkerish obsession and hunger to retaliate is wildly inappropriate and dangerous, especially coming directly from Andrew and people in a top leadership position. There is no part of Discord moderation that involves “destroying your enemies”. They do not respect boundaries.

Andrew uses public pressure to suppress coverage of these incidents: raising concerns about documented misconduct gets re-framed as invasive personal attacks with therapy-speak. Accusations are “harassment”, gossip is “doxxing”, unwanted fan behavior is “obsessive”, etc.³⁷ Everything is always an attack.

This false labeling³⁸ is dangerous for falsely-accused victims, but it also means the real risk of harassment is diluted because the words becomes meaningless. Harassment and doxxing and obsessive stalking are all very real problems that happen, especially in a community like Homestuck full of marginalized people. But Homestuck’s attempts to write any annoyance off as a nuclear threat mean these words have lost their meaning.

Andrew also uses the vulnerable people around him as personal insulation, with staff absorbing public criticism that should reach him directly, and taking the fall when he wants to do something that could invite pushback.³⁹

The UHC takedown and failed takeover was a medium-sized incident in a history of much worse abuse. But it may have been the first time the dynamic had been captured in definitive paper records and wasn’t just hearsay. I absolutely don’t fault other victims for trying to protect themselves by publicly downplaying the extent of the harm, but I am glad I had a chance to warn people about the danger they’re in.

It’s rough on me, personally, because a lot of slander is spread by well-meaning people who are trying to combat negativity. There are good people I admire who don’t feel comfortable about me because of this, and I mourn that. They’re trying to defend against something they trust was bad, not knowing they’re downstream from deliberately crafted misinformation.

I know there are a some nasty “fans” who have harassed Homestuck’s large population of vulnerable people, which makes people defensive and suspicious. I obviously don’t condone anyone who crosses those lines; I’ve got no sympathy for the “life-ruining” crowds or the trolls and spammers,⁴⁰ and online drama never justifies putting someone in physical danger. I don’t even think it’s tasteful to broadcast information about Andrew’s personal life. Obviously, right? Since I did write about Homestuck conflicts but didn’t write about any biographical drama.

Articles

With the core story and its aftermath covered, the detailed accounts are available for those who want them.

The Unofficial Homestuck Collection Takedown documents our interactions with Andrew and his proxies over the collection — the manipulation, the broken commitments, and the legal threats.

There is also an extended conclusion: Homestuck is Radioactive. Andrew is willing to be extraordinarily hostile toward people, and anyone considering working with him should be aware that standard procedural safeguards have not been sufficient to protect people in the past.

Homestuck — as a corporate brand — needs to end. This is not what happened; more people have signed on to work with Andrew since this incident (not realizing they’re playing Calvinball) and Homestuck is pushing its marketable brand on children harder than ever.

The Homestuck Union Was Always Fake is an overview of the (at the time) Union, and how its structure was an elaborate deception. This also gets into the history of Homestuck’s relationships with fan projects, and how the recent attempts at revitalizing the brand hinged on a weird ploy.

Fandom and The Freedom Motif is an elaboration of my thesis from all of this, which is that it’s crucial for fandom to be structurally independent of corporate control, and how “official recognition” is a trap. It’s important that fandom spaces not need to be officially endorsed to exist. Officialization of some spaces creates a basis to shut others down. It provides exactly the kind of control people like Andrew want, and which people like them have to be kept away from.

Again, this has gone bad in the way I predicted. Ever since Homestuck Official launched its own Discord server and FRAF began encouraging official enclosure of fan projects, competing social spaces and unaffiliated projects have started going dark. Even some fan projects that at first embraced official licensing seem to have been embraced and extinguished.

There’s also the old Hiveswap landing page and the blog tag, Posts tagged #homestuck. God, I hope there are no more of those. I have drafts — good drafts — for essays about Homestuck as a literary work, about its cultural position, etc. Those aren’t happening now.

Recovery and non-recovery

The trouble is the ones who walk away from Omelas… walk away from Omelas. Fans get exhausted, or disgusted, or abused, or burned out, and so they leave fan spaces. Normally fan spaces have a healthy mixture of attitudes. But when disloyalty is punished so severely, those people leave. And only toxic positivity⁴¹ is left. As the people who push back are filtered out, the spaces sustain themselves on a steady intake of new, excited people who don’t yet know the history.⁴² That energy gets exploited, many of those people eventually get damaged, and the cycle continues.

Most fans don’t experience the inner circle toxicity personally, but everyone sees the symptoms: game development failing to happen, comics getting canceled and rebooted because their leads left, game developers being denied credit, books going out of print, spec work being solicited, merch failing to fulfill, MSPA getting blacklisted by publishing companies, etc. And these symptoms echo down to fan spaces: canceled projects, burn out in community spaces, hypervigilant canceling on social media, and general toxicity. Normal things that could plausibly happen, but happening with implausible frequency. Continually destroying historical records and focusing on a hype cycle hides this, as does the normal turnover of new fans.

Inner circle people do break free of this. Everyone has boundaries, and in an environment where boundaries aren’t respected, someone eventually stomps you. You either leave or let it chew through you and burn you out. I’ve had many conversations with ex-Homestucks who start very embarrassed from their participating in the vicious parts of this, but I want to say they’re being too hard on themselves. People are being flooded with stress and false information and they’re mostly doing their best to work from that bad foundation. It’s a whole high-control environment, and it takes time to recover from that. There’s the looming threat that leaving breaks your social circles, but at some point you have to bite the bullet and start recovering. And I want to give people who want to heal all the credit in the world.

I obviously don’t know how to “fix” this since the best move I came up with was to write a blog. But I do believe that speaking out against exploitation and unsafe situations is very, very important. Stop the spread of misinformation, push back when someone says something you know is wrong. One of the reasons I wrote the piece at all is that showing the public what goes on behind these closed doors is material support to every past victim, including the people who can’t speak out. I have gotten many touching messages thanking me for my work, and that needs to be more important than the attempts to drum up hate about it.

Still with love,
- Gio

Update 2026-05-31: Andrew Hussie published a callout post on his Google account. It’s long, and embarrassing, and wrong, and from my post-homestuck perspective isn’t worth debunking in any detail. It’s another leg in Andrew’s well-documented campaign to dodge responsibility and control the narrative.

I feel obligated to mention it somewhere because as evidenced by the table of contents the main purpose of that doc is to discredit me personally. But everything that has to say about me is either placing something innocuous in the context of an elaborate conspiracy they’ve imagined, or else materially false claims that fully cross the line into slander.

The doc confirms what I’ve already said here: the obsession, the scapegoating, the blacklisting, the post-hoc justifications, everything. There’s nothing more to say about it, Andrew is exactly as I’ve described him.

A discord mod had a nightmare about a lamppost and treated it as evidence I was a “fundamentally malicious actor” by wedging it between actual racists, nazis, and transphobes to smear me, because Andrew’s convinced them I’m a villain they need to destroy. It’s just an obvious gish-gallop.

Here’s a really basic thing: if someone writes an article accusing you of wrongdoing (whether it’s abuse or outright fraud), responding with “here’s why our victims deserved it” is not a refutation, it’s a confession. Andrew Hussie’s attempt to attack the character of his victims is an admission of guilt by its very structure. This is irrespective of whether those character attacks were false or not, which his also were.

I like to laugh at absurdity but what’s happening now (only a fraction of which has been publicly documented) is genuinely disturbing. It is obviously unstable and dangerous behavior that these people are still obsessing over individual fans Andrew has scapegoated, and acting on that hatred in ways designed to cause real harm. If you’re still affiliated with Homestuck (or wanting to be), for your own safety, get out now. It is rotten and collapsing, for the reasons I’ve written about and a myriad more too sensitive to publish. They want it to be a cult. You don’t want to be in a cult. You don’t need it. Just leave.

See Endorsement, James’ livestreams, etc.

↩
See Introductions.
October 02, 2023
- GiovanH 11:18 PM
  - feelings-wise, for me having criticized someone does not mean I’m unwilling to work with them. (obviously)
- miles 11:20 PM
  - so for whatever its worth, andrew knew you were a big contributor on this before we reached out, its not even close to a dealbreaker
- GiovanH 11:20 PM
  - by this point I figured he must have
- miles 11:21 PM
  - yeah! like
  - i guess what im getting at here is that we wanna work with you, we like what you guys are doing, and we definitely dont have any intention of getting weird about this lol
↩
October 01, 2023
- miles 10:09
  
  also! just wanna let you know, in the next couple days before andrew and i start chatting with you guys about what it is we wanna get into with you and sharing ideas, we are probably going to ask you to sign an NDA! the reason i tell you this now is just so that i can take the time to personally assure you that this is not some scary legal bullshit and we have no interest in like, being weird or punitive about shit, we just wanna do our due diligence to make sure that the privacy of the projects is respected
  
  if you have any questions at all about the document when the time comes, please dont hesitate to ask me
September 01, 2024, general
- miles 01:19 PM
  
  what i want to get into today is more of the nitty gritty of why it is we feel this is necessary from a more human point of view. to be more direct, what i mean by this is today, and in subsequent discussions until you show us that you understand the necessity of this, i want to talk about why it is that we’ve gotten to the point where the options here are either settlement or lawsuit. there was a real human cost to the way things went down a couple years ago, to say nothing of the damage that was done to Homestuck and Hiveswap by the way that fiasco went down. you weren’t the only person involved in this, obviously, but regardless of your intentions (which to be clear andrew and much of the involved parties still feel were at least partially rooted in like… rabblerousing, to get old-timey about it), things went down really, really nastily for the Homestuck and Hiveswap teams. this is something we need you to understand and talk to us about.
Miles later confirmed this was a lie from the beginning, and that a cease and desist “was in place before any of [them] were aware if [we’d] want to work with” them, and they were planning on hostility if we said no from the very start.

This wasn’t rogue behavior. Miles (Andrew’s representative) was acting as Andrew’s proxy when he lied to us, and he’s since been promoted. ↩
“Disproportionate” here is according to their own description, with NDA language threatening that “[Homestuck] will seek maximum financial damages, both to protect its financial interests, and more importantly, to vigilantly protect the privacy and safety of its members” to intimidate whistleblowers.
See NDAs as Isolation ↩
See the original Homestuck Community Participation and Release Agreement

The original waiver had an intellectual property provision that forces “all creative concepts, stories, characters, settings, dialogue, project ideas, plans, and all other information related to the Homestuck intellectual property” to be bound by the licensing contract between the HICU and Homestuck, Inc., which is a separate, secret document we were not allowed to see until after committing to it. This would turn any signatory into a “poison contributor” who couldn’t work on any independent fanwork.

You understand and agree that all creative concepts, stories, characters, settings, dialogue, project ideas, plans, and all other information related to the Homestuck intellectual property discussed by Group are bound by the conditions described in the licensing agreement between the Union and Homestuck, Inc. All information is deemed Confidential Information.

The license between the Union and Homestuck, Inc. was the first of two license agreements we were asked to sign into without being able to read. The license shown only to Bambosh was the second. ↩
Between Deadlock and Chasing Off Bambosh, Andrew was pressuring Bambosh to unilaterally sign a license on behalf of the entire project, something they were unable to do, since they’d be agreeing on my behalf to an agreement Andrew insisted the NDA prevented them from showing me. ↩
See Statement Demand
August 05, 2024

…
- miles 09:34 PM
  
  so, the next stage of all this is basically that before moving onto getting the license squared away, andrew wants to work on what’s referred to here as a settlement.
…

August 24, 2024, miles

…
- miles 05:50 PM
  
  to lay the groundwork for working with the UHC, andrew wants to reach a settlement that includes a retraction/rewrite
  
  the explicit details of this have yet to be hashed out and will probably be worked on in the coming weeks but its something andrew has made very clear he needs to see happen in some shape or form
  
  note that the rewrite/retraction itself doesnt have to happen RIGHT NOW or even necessarily before we get to work on UHC stuff, but agreeing to do it with the settlement is something andrew needs to see first
August 25, 2024, miles
- miles 03:03 PM
  
  but like. you GOTTA work with us, man
  
  the alternative is that if andrew feels much more stalled or like you arent operating with him in good faith, hes just going to switch gears, have the UHC taken down, replace it, and sue.
↩
See Statement Demand
September 01, 2024, general

…
- miles 01:19 PM
  
  what i want to get into today is more of the nitty gritty of why it is we feel this is necessary from a more human point of view. to be more direct, what i mean by this is today, and in subsequent discussions until you show us that you understand the necessity of this, i want to talk about why it is that we’ve gotten to the point where the options here are either settlement or lawsuit. there was a real human cost to the way things went down a couple years ago, to say nothing of the damage that was done to Homestuck and Hiveswap by the way that fiasco went down. you weren’t the only person involved in this, obviously, but regardless of your intentions (which to be clear andrew and much of the involved parties still feel were at least partially rooted in like… rabblerousing, to get old-timey about it), things went down really, really nastily for the Homestuck and Hiveswap teams. this is something we need you to understand and talk to us about.
…
- miles 01:19 PM
  
  as detailed in the pdf i just sent you, and as i mentioned previously, real damage was done not only to Homestuck and Hiveswap as productions/brands/however you wanna look at it, but there was a huge storm of harassment and outright abuse of many staff members that was like… fucking unacceptable.
  
  we’re not trying to hold you 100% accountable for all the bad shit that went down back then, but we’re also not about to pretend that your blog wasn’t a contributing factor of some significance that, among other things, “legitimized” sarah and emily’s video in the eyes of a bunch of rabid shitheads who weren’t interested so much in “accountability” or whatever the fuck reddit shit it was that they said as they were in dogpiling a group of creators just because they could. andrew also has made it clear to me, and wants me to communicate to you, that regardless of your intentions, he and other members of the team felt your behavior was stalkerish and unacceptable. there is history here that needs to be addressed.
  
  all this preamble is to say that really, before we do anything at all, we need to get real indication from you that this is something you understand, something you’re willing to show remorse for, and something you are willing to Concretely Commit to amending with us. if we’re going to collaborate at all, there has to be some kind of trust built here, and the only way that’s going to happen is for you to address this shit personally. we’re not interested in dancing around this any longer.
↩
See NDAs as Isolation

I have confirmed with my legal counsel that this is not remotely standard language for an NDA. It is designed to intimidate and lock signatories into a coercive, punitive situation. ↩
See Seizure Demand
- miles 02:19 AM
  - as i mentioned earlier, we’re going to step back vis a vis the rewrite stuff. in exchange, and considering the above paragraph, we need to see the UHC handed over to kohi. what that does is neutralize the threat implied earlier, as well as put the UHC in the hands of not only a member of the HICU but someone you yourself have mentioned you want to work with and someone you respect where these types of projects are concerned. andrew doesn’t want to see his own work held hostage and used as leverage against him, and putting the UHC into kohi’s stewardship eliminates that possibility in one simple move.
↩
See The Sarah Z Video Fallout

See Statement Demand

It was this [stalking] pattern of behavior, along with his sourcing practices in particular, which escalated in fully justified feelings of anger toward [Legal Name], which finally reached a boiling point when his blog was massively elevated on Youtube, when thereafter the angry reaction of the Hiveswap team was used against them to cause even more harm in a very public way.

↩
See Cynthia Dominguez

Cynthia Dominguez took the credit for writing this letter, as indicated by her later apology. But she didn’t write the letter, she only agreed to send it on behalf of the angry staff, which made the case to her that it was the right thing to do to stand up for the integrity of a staff under attack by a big platform. The content of the letter was written by friends of Aysha, Hiveswap staff members who felt aggrieved on her behalf … But of course the “legal threat” was then weaponized against the Hiveswap team even further, used as proof that What Pumpkin was a litigious, exploitative company which was trying to suppress criticism.

As at least one example of behavior (which Andrew didn’t treat as shocking or exceptional), they had Aysha ghost-write an angry letter and signed Cynthia’s name to it before sending it to a journalist. Then when they weren’t happy with Sarah’s depiction of them, they tried to use their deception about who said what to treat Sarah’s behavior (holding Cynthia responsible for the contents of the letter her name was on) as unfair. ↩
See Seizure Demand
September 28, 2024, general
- miles 02:19 AM
  - hey hey. you may notice we reset the general chat in here; we’re thinking of bringing in some more folks soon and we figure it isn’t productive to have the old discussion sitting there.
I didn’t find this out until later, but apparently this is a practiced move they do regularly with people. ↩
I really try to be as conservative as possible about posting screenshots, but to confirm I’m not exaggerating about this culture, here’s a conversation from September. The attitude was so dangerously unhinged that a friend of Vibri forwarded this to me because it was genuinely worrying:

This is false. But it’s accepted within those spaces because the misinformation comes directly from Andrew Hussie. It’s the scapegoating, the mythological villain, and the siege mentality all at once.

Andrew’s quite literally blaming me for all ills.
Andrew told me that himself, and Vibri (the current “homestuck community manager”) corroborates it. This is such an absurd claim that it only sticks to fresh faces who don’t know better. And communication is totally siloed off, so people who would know this is bullshit don’t hear it, they just get “I know he’s a monster” from friends who they trust.

It’s a three-step process: Andrew seeds the lies at a private level, then lets that attitude proliferate, and then the fandom will direct all the hate you can ask for at the target of their choice. ↩↩
The promise to donate the long-awaited commentary used as bait has disturbing parallels to Nintendo’s “subtle hint of interest in collaboration”, or Valve offering a hacker a fake job just to arrest them.. Miles essentially admits to this in a “damage control” post that ultimately just confirms the article is factually correct. ↩
Andrew had already purchased the rights back from VIZ, and when he threatened to sue us it was in his capacity as the sole owner. This was another deceptive and false claim the fraudulent negotiations were predicated on. Homestuck has since admitted to this publicly:

Homestuck, “Homestuck Community Issues”: …after regaining control of Homestuck and Homestuck.com from VIZ Media, Andrew began to explore their options for restoring full access to Homestuck and its website. One obvious avenue was to offer a license to the team behind the popular UHC project, who had already produced a working mirror of the comic so widely circulated among the fandom that it had become the de facto primary method to read Homestuck during this period.

↩
They’ve stated this many times as they’ve tried to shift the narrative to “Gio is bad”. An obvious and public example is Miles’ damage control thread.

Miles andrew asked me if i’d be comfortable acting as a liaison/go-between between him and bambosh+gio regarding offering a license to the Unofficial Homestuck Collection and bringing it into the fold …
…
any work any of us do for Homestuck or about Homestuck we do because we love it and the fandom, and the role that i played in this UHC scenario was because i thought i was going to be stepping in to mediate a quick situation that would help reconcile gio and andrew and give something cool to the fans at the same time, not because i was trying to, what, get involved in a messy situation for no reason other than to hurt people and punish the fans?
…
…i also strongly suspect did everything in his power to dissuade bambosh from licensing when it was bambosh andrew was doing the initial negotiating with, Precisely Because We Were Worried About Situations Like This. at the time i actually thought that was TOO paranoid, believe it or not, but holy shit was i wrong about that, lol.

The claims in this post are mostly demonstrably false, but it is Miles testifying that this was always about assimilating the project and I was always being treated with suspicion and hostility behind closed doors.

Note the importance placed on whether someone is “in the fold” or not. ↩
The Homestuck team keeps trying to call the fork “official”, which is incorrect. The UHC they’re hosting is a mixture of several different intellectual properties owned by several different rightsholders (one of which is me). They can host it but they don’t own it. And of those many owners, only one of the parties endorses Homestuck’s copy. If I draw Garfield I can’t call that official work just because I endorse it, and if Garfield reposts my art they can’t call that official work just because they took it. I was trying to work with Homestuck to make their UHC copy official, but they shut that process down. ↩
See HICU Fork ↩
See Andrew’s June Letter.
[Andrew’s Lawyer] (July) …
Let me be clear about where things stand:
- The recently reinstated Unofficial Homestuck Collection website is saturated with Homestuck’s protected intellectual property. This isn’t speculative; the site prominently features unauthorized use of my client’s assets, trademarks, and materials throughout.
…
- Your client’s trademark infringement is blatant. It appears in the domain name, the headers, marketing language, metadata, and across the website. There is no serious argument for nominative fair use here. The project offers a direct market replacement, creates consumer confusion regarding affiliation, and undermines my client’s ability to control its brand.
In short, your client’s copyright and trademark defenses are without merit. Their continued reliance on these arguments only increases their exposure.

As for the blog posts we’ve previously referenced - even if we were to set aside whether they are legally actionable (a point that remains under review), their removal is a non-negotiable prerequisite for any resolution. Your client cannot expect to maintain those disparaging materials and simultaneously negotiate a working relationship with my client.

At this point, your client has three primary options:
1. Refuse to cooperate, maintain the infringing content, and face both informal and formal legal action, including takedowns, injunctive relief, and pursuit of damages. To be clear, this is not an abstract threat. We have already begun taking steps in that direction, including preparations to pursue removal of your client’s website and related content through their domain registrar, hosting provider, and relevant platforms. We will pursue every available legal and technical remedy to bring this infringement to an end and to hold your client accountable for the existing and resulting damages.
2. Engage in the self-removal of infringing materials referenced in your email, and attempt to wage a public relations campaign. That approach neither eliminates liability for years of past infringement nor secures your client’s ability to operate going forward, nor does it prevent my client from undertaking any of the preceding actions. I’ll be blunt - we are not concerned about the court of public opinion. …
3. Engage in a structured, good-faith resolution, which includes:
  
  Removal of infringing content and unauthorized distribution;
  
  A properly documented license agreement if your client wishes to operate legitimately;
  
  Removal of defamatory or misleading public statements.
This third option is the only one that meaningfully limits your client’s liability, preserves the work they claim to care about, and provides a clear, legal path forward. It is also, frankly, the path of least resistance legally, financially, and reputationally.

We are still willing to pursue that option, but the opportunity to resolve this amicably will not remain open indefinitely. If your client is serious about resolving this dispute, now is the time to act. Otherwise, we will move forward with the steps necessary to protect my client’s rights.

Your client must immediately remove the UHC website and Carrd, pending an executed settlement, release, and/or license from Homestuck.
↩↩
↩
See Andrew Quits Homestuck

What Pumpkin In early 2020, Hussie officially left What Pumpkin to work on new projects unrelated to Homestuck. In the time since, they completed a new project called Psycholonials. The final chapter of this visual novel was just posted today, and is available on Steam and mobile platforms. While Hussie still retains ownership of the Homestuck IP, they decided last year to fully discontinue their creative involvement in any future Homestuck projects, and instead plans to continue independently developing more projects like Psycholonials.

↩
See The Promise of the HICU ↩
↩
See announcement ↩
See More on the Hiveswap Odd Gentlemen Debacle.

The original accusation I received and described was:

At some point during that time Andrew had TOG spend their budget (the Kickstarter funds) on making 3D animatics and animations for the Homestuck finale video (Act 7), instead of working on Hiveswap. Andrew justified this by saying the properties were related and the Act 7 assets would be used in Hiveswap.

Significant portions of the Act 7 animation were in progress or finalized as early as 2013, the work all done in secret by The Odd Gentlemen.

What Pumpkin responded by confirming this in a Kickstarter update. ↩
See Homestuck Sent Me A Legal Threat, And Then It Got Worse, etc. ↩
Selecting a target and then obsessively collecting whatever embarrassing moments in their life you can find is full-on KiwiFarms behavior, and it’s always shocking to watch it done by self-proclaimed leftists to target people they’re falsely accusing of stalking. ↩
Miles (Andrew’s representative throughout the UHC process) did post a damage control thread on their forum. While it avoids making substantive claims that are factually incorrect, it’s a complete misrepresentation of what happened. The post leans extremely hard into the “Andrew’s not trying to destroy Homestuck” line. This isn’t a rebuttal, it’s repeating exactly what I said but pretending that’s counter-evidence. It’s a deliberate straw man cooked up in a PR meeting.

Here’s what I wrote in the actual article:

The Unofficial Homestuck Collection Takedown Andrew is willing to be unimaginably hostile towards people. The problem is not that Andrew “hates their fans”, or is intentionally trying to destroy their community, or anything like that. The problem is that they’re willing to attack anyone if they see it as useful to the greater good of their own reputation. Over the smallest perceived slight Andrew will attack people’s careers, their professional lives, their financial stability, everything.

And here’s Miles very serious response to this.

miles …not because i was trying to, what, get involved in a messy situation for no reason other than to hurt people and punish the fans? why would i do that? or, for that matter, why would andrew?
…
my observation throughout this whole process was Not that gio was standing up as a stalwart defender of the rights of the fans to access homestuck, because andrew Wanted to work with him, and bambosh Wanted to work with us, and andrew doesn’t “hate homestuck and want it to go away” (the whole reason i’m allowed to make HS:BC with the HICU is because andrew wants the fandom to keep thriving!).
…
no, the UHC is not gone forever, there is a fork up right now. the Homestuck site itself is still being worked on and improved and andrew has no intentions of turning Homestuck into “lost media”, that’s not going to happen. Homestuck is not going away or in any danger of disappearing, i promise.
…
i’m of the opinion that gio’s article was pretty transparently not written out of a benevolent desire to protect homestuck fans’ access to the comic.
…
this article isn’t about you, the reader, as a fan and your threatened right to have continuous access to Homestuck, because that’s not in danger. i promise. i have worked on HS:BC for two awesome years now and i have never felt in danger of Homestuck Disappearing, and i wouldn’t BE working on HS:BC if i felt there was some attempt to destroy Homestuck (because, again, why??? would i do that???).
…
…the HICU and FRAF and andrew have all been trying in their own ways to make homestuck fans happy with comics, merch, fanworks, and more, and it’s been working, so gio decided to shit on that parade because he screwed himself out of being a part of it.

Ultimately all this does is confirm everything in my writing is factually correct, or else it could have been easily debunked without having to lean on tone policing. But the “im just a little bean!!” attitude ticks me off, especially as Miles in particular so consistently uses this image to mislead people. ↩
I’ll give an example of the viciousness of this space and the kind of slander that is produced. After I posted this, some log files from the Homestuck moderation chat were leaked, showing the seething hatred that they’re cultivating around me:

In response to this leak, the staff member responsible for the messages (discordantObserver) doubled-down:

Official Discord Mod Team Response to Reddit Accusations I meant and stand by everything I said. When I said “giovanh co-ordinated a harassment campaign, which escalated into a sexual harassment campaign” i meant “giovanh co-ordinated a harassment campaign, which escalated into a sexual harassment campaign”. I do not retract this because there is a level of proof that is completely irrefutable. The fandom decided that sexual harassment was fine at the time, and neither Makin nor GiovanH showed an iota of regret over said sexual harassment.

These horrifying accusations here are, of course, completely untrue. I’m familiar with the revenge porn incident being referenced here: a Homestuck staff member sold explicit images of herself which were then leaked. It is disgusting that this happened. This should go without saying, but I didn’t participate in acquiring or leaking this and I wouldn’t want to associate with anyone who did. I have continually denounced this kind of harassment, and I’m appalled that people would lie that I haven’t.

But it is also obvious that these accusations are untrue. As always, Homestuck staff gives an empty assertion that “proof” exists, and despite the fact that no one has ever seen it, declares that it’s “irrefutable”. But the accusations are false, so proof is never shown. Instead a demand is made that my guilt go without saying, and staff members declaring it to be “known” is the only evidence anyone should need to believe me to be a sexual abuser involved in distributing revenge porn.

There’s one final nail in the coffin. Out of respect for her privacy I haven’t broadcast this, but the victim of this revenge porn incident actually reached out unprompted to apologize to me for lashing out, something I found extremely personally meaningful. The current-day people who reach for this false accusation as a way to attack me are expressly violating the wishes of the victim. It shows that the attitude of people like discordantObserver does not come from a place of caring about victims, it is a rage that seeks justification.

↩
See Never Play Defense, etc. ↩
The irony is not lost on me that, in their forever war against the spectre of kiwifarms vibes and right-coded harassment campaigns, Homestuck has comfortably settled on conducting their own lib-coded harassment campaigns in response. ↩
“Executed on the street” is not a rhetorical flourish I use to suggest the possibility of future escalation. In conjunction with Andrew’s rhetoric, Homestuck staff has already posted (now deleted) public statements saying I needed to be shot dead in a ditch.

Andrew did not raise the subject of Homestuck apologizing for this as part of the UHC talks. ↩
See also Instagram ↩
There have been a lot of these war room/regime enemy “how do we destroy them” meetings, but I guess the most relevant one that I can introduce without dragging in any past victims is the one prompted by the UHC article itself. While I’ve been quietly working away at my own business and moving on with my life the Homestuck team has been feverishly obsessing over me. I’m sure others are experiencing the same, if not worse.

Is this supposed to be shocking? Oooh, ah? No. This is just the environment being the thing I said it was and doing the things I said it would do. Homestuck the brand was allowed to grow and FRAF’s didn’t last one month before going darkside. ↩
I first heard this story from another person who felt like they needed to report a credible threat.

The justification used was “stalking”, but Homestuck lies outright about people being “stalkers”. It’s a label they slap on anyone they dislike. Them choosing to use it does not in any way justify putting a family at risk of deportation. I’ve seen no justification that there was a real stalking problem here, and whenever Homestuck is asked about they deflect by talking about how the person was bad in unrelated ways.

I already knew the subject was a deeply nasty transphobe who had been banned from most community spaces, and I wouldn’t consider doing anything on their behalf in any kind of normal moderation scenario. They were bad and their behavior often called for harsh moderation. But that wasn’t relevant here. Homestuck targeted this person because they ran a tabloid blog that spreading gossip that embarrassed Andrew. Their actual faults were only used as justification.

Serving these papers is the job of a paralegal or process server. Insisting the police do this work instead is an intentional choice, and the conversation shows Vibri was aware this created material risk for this person and their family. Silencing a blogger was prioritized over the safety of their physical safety and the safety of the people around them. Doing all this in February 2026 made a statement.

Vibri’s vindictive behavior over this person spreading rumors raised such a concern for their their physical safety that a mod wanted me to reach out and see if I could at least confirm they hadn’t been SWATed and that ICE hadn’t gotten involved. The answer was: no, after Andrew and Vibri finished their business, I could not reach them. If the goal was to disappear this person, it worked.

Andrew has used his position of authority to attack a number of people over the years, and he’s been able to convincingly paint some of them in a bad light after the fact. This simply doesn’t matter. The question isn’t which of two story characters is the good guy, the question is are the people in a position of structural power exercising it responsibly? The answer is no.

I’d heard about this previously, but I didn’t publish it until it was independently reported as a side note in the r/Homestuck mod report, which mostly focused on the much less serious problem of Homestuck Official attempting to hijack r/Homestuck’s urls to point to official spaces instead.

In response to these reports, Homestuck staff posted:
April 13, 2026
- Maccus 10:07 am
  - To summarize, instead of doing anything productive to celebrate 4/13, a post was put up on the subreddit trying to turn people against us and claim every single person on the “official” side are boogeyman.
  - It’s so tired and played out. It’s been going on like that for years. There’s so much history to this, and a lot of misinformation that’s persisted for years because They have held the space forever and so there wasn’t a way to really counter it.
  - They don’t like this place existing very much because you can just interact with the team now. And like, hearing it from the source instead of whatever bullshit they packaged to you.
  - At the end of the day, we’re just trying to make this Fandom fun again instead of poisoned by all this animosity. We’re kind of sick of it always being a downer. Most of the people still working on Homestuck are just fans who are really passionate about this place and were trying to uplift the people wanting to improve things rather than always making it worse.
  - It’s just going to be a day. It’s a pity you guys are all riled up when you guys should be having a good day.
  - Yall are here because you like the thing right?
The appeal to “positivity” here is an extremely characteristic deflection. Everything Homestuck staff does, including putting its community in physical danger, is done for the purpose of “trying to make the Fandom fun instead of poisoned” (because that’s what the Others do). And if you have any concerns about that behavior, aren’t you the problem for not just having fun? Toxic Positivity.

There’s no room for plurality — staff views themselves as directly competing with fandom spaces that “package” information (read: have opinions) instead of people being forced to consume an official narrative. Any kind of independent space or commentary is treated as a threat. And it is a threat — to the false narratives Homestuck tries to push on people. ↩
Andrew often conspicuously refuses to apply labels like “obsessive” or “parasocial” in situations when they would be appropriate. Andrew doesn’t express any concern about the obsessiveness of fans making art of Andrew, or getting Homestuck tattoos, or naming themselves after Homestuck characters, or identifying with one of Andrew’s proprietary genders. The accusations are only ever deployed to defend their power and money. ↩
In a piece I’m not going to get into which Andrew published (seemingly coincidentally) four days after I wrote this, they write:

Andrew, “HVC Color Composer” I still have a lot of stalkers, and sometimes they shapeshift to avoid detection, and use clever tactics to launder their destructive stalker intentions through behavior which doesn’t outwardly scan as stalking to everyone. Tactics like spreading lies, invading my creative work, intentionally inciting widespread hatred, or desperately clinging to control of hostile server communities for apparently no other reason than to continue wielding a lever of harassment against me and my friends.

These examples are unsubtle barbs at specific people Andrew hates. “Invading my creative work” and “spreading lies” are undisguised jabs at my contributions, “hostile server communities” is a reference to Hussie’s war against the independent Homestuck Reddit, etc.

But what really strikes me is this “shapeshifter” framing. Andrew has all these different people he wants to paint as villains for many different reasons: scandals, control, fandom culture, etc. He groups all these disparate offenses — none of which have anything to do with stalking — as coming from “stalkers”, who are scheming and “avoiding detection” by sneakily not actually doing any of the stalking Andrew was hoping to see. The reality is Andrew’s complaints are about behavior that has nothing to do with stalking, but instead of acknowledging the harm they want to see isn’t there, they’re complaining that it’s not easier for him to justify outrage against them.

In contrast, stalking people while “avoiding detection” describes Andrew’s mode of operation to a T, making all this rhetoric seem like projection.

↩
See Throwing people under the bus and The Prototype, Risk, etc. ↩
I know there are transphobic cell groups there, and I give attempts to curb that nastiness the benefit of the doubt. But when HSO fights “the bad communities”, it isn’t a targeted defense, it’s a justification carelessly applied to anyone whenever it’s convenient.

I remember r/Homestuck was the first online space where someone called me “based”, and I did not care for it. I still don’t. But that’s not hate, that’s culture shock. I don’t care for the attitude and so don’t spend time there. But when a shared grievance that defines an entire community is people interpreting their revulsion of other cultures as harm being done to them, and that other cultural norms are an existential threat is… it’s not praxis, certainly. ↩
See Toxic Positivity ↩
And keeping real records is punished; the historians and recordkeepers have usually been the people targeted for abuse. ↩

Identity Verification is as Bad as It Can Be

2026-03-22T00:00:00-05:00

This is an addendum to OS-Level Age Attestation is the Good One, where I talk about the potential of legal standards for age attestation as an alternative to age verification. Not already convinced of the dangers of age verification? The extent of the evil waiting behind identification systems and deanonymization is unspeakably vast, and fortunately it’s getting extensive coverage. Here’s a quick look to get you up to speed.

Direct digital censorship

A lot of the energy behind age verification comes from authoritarians eager to censor political dissent, promote propaganda and retaliate against critics. This is a power grab, with bills designed to seize power over specific content the government objects to:

Ari Cohn@AriCohn
This House E&C Markup is off to a "saying the quiet part out loud" start, with the Chairman saying outright "algorithms amplify addictive, harmful content."
It is always, 100% of the time, about content. And that's why these bills continue to be unconstitutional.
Thu Mar 05 15:06:26 +0000 2026

Ari Cohn@AriCohn
"These platforms are engineered to capture kids' attention"
I hate to break it to Congress, but that's literally the point of all media. "Creating media that people want to keep consuming" is not a standard workable under the First Amendment.
Thu Mar 05 15:24:35 +0000 2026

Ari Cohn@AriCohn
@AOC Here's the problem: the FTC can just decide that whatever content it doesn't like is harming children, and find some way that platforms aren't acting "reasonably" to prevent it.
And it will.
Thu Mar 05 15:48:31 +0000 2026

Governments are, of course, trying to claim control over “public discourse”. Like all seizing of arbitrary power, the risks associated with this are volatile and unbounded, because they depend on who holds power at any given moment in a political system where power is expected to rotate.

Discord

As a case study, let’s take a look at one of the latest major services to attempt age verification: Discord. At time of writing, Discord is in the process of trying to switch to a “Teen Default” system, where every user is assumed to be a minor unless they can prove their age to Discord. Discord is a communications platform used widely by adults, and during COVID Discord very intentionally expanded their market domain beyond gaming to focus on being a global platform, so the assumption that all spaces are for kids is clearly incorrect.¹ But Discord is sometimes used by children, and since it’s a communications platform people can use it to communicate horrible things. Boomers have learned they can be insane about this, so Discord is under significant pressure to balance its goal of being a universal communications platform with child safety.

But Discord is also under significant pressure not to collect identifying data. Their attempts at identity-based age verification last year led to them storing government identification, which hackers stole in a data breach. Discord provided no recourse for the users it needlessly exposed to identity theft. It claims 70,000 users were exposed by this, although the hackers claimed to have vastly more data than this.

To add insult to injury, Discord claimed none of this data existed in the first place. Discord asserted that “Images of your identity documents and ID match selfies are deleted directly after your age group is confirmed”. This was an outright lie. Discord uploaded those images to a service that stored this private, personal information, perhaps indefinitely. The fact that made this claim (and still do today!) should tell you that when you see this language, you should assume it’s a lie.

That breach was revealed in October 2025. Hot off the heels of having all this publicly revealed, Discord launched another age verification effort. In this latest “teen default” effort Discord verified ages with a combination of government ID and biometrics. You could either submit government ID documents or give them a “video selfie” to determine if you looked adult enough for them.

Discord promised these videos would be analyzed on your device and immediately deleted. They’d never leave your device and no one would ever get private information. Only the inferred age would be sent.

Mark Smith (VP of Core Tech at Discord) Last, I know that there is concern about privacy and data leaks. That’s a real concern. The selfie system is built purely client-side, it never leaves your device, and we did that intentionally.

They repeated this policy emphatically, in bold unicode letters, with no room for ambiguity or qualification:

@discord ‣‣‣ 𝗙𝗮𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗻𝘀 𝗻𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗱𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗰𝗲. 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘃𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗼𝗿 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗻𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗶𝘁.

‣‣‣ 𝗜𝗗𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗱.

‣‣‣ 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗱 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗮𝗴𝗲 — 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝗶𝘁. 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁.

This was a lie. Instead of analyzing it privately on peoples’ local devices, Discord started secretly exfiltrating the videos from peoples’ devices anyway. Children took videos of themselves with an absolute expectation those videos would never be shared or analyzed by humans, but they were. Discord exploited these children.

This was an obvious and predictable turn. Even before you get into the base corporate instincts of data harvesting, the reason the age verification category exists at all is a refusal to trust the client device. As long as the client’s device can answer “yes”, client-side verification is attestation.

Discord didn’t analyze this video themselves, they sent it to a third-party biometric service provider, Persona. So what happens to government id or biometric information sent to Persona?

Persona is actually bulk screening users for an enormous list of troubling criteria. This was never disclosed by Persona or regulators, but documented by independently security researchers vmfunc, MDL, and Dziurwa. in the watchers: how openai, the US government, and persona built an identity surveillance machine that files reports on you to the feds.

When Persona runs a government ID, they don’t just verify the validity, they compile an identity dossier and return the full data compilation to their customer, including detailed personal information not provided on the ID. Its handling of biometric data is also disastrous. Persona’s watchlistdb program uses biometric data like selfies in conjunction with OpenAI to detect “Politically Exposed Persons”, compare identities against a list of “suspicion types” including “terrorist financing”, and worse. It compares screened identities to government watchlists, checking for sanctions, citizenship, nationality, “politically exposed persons”, and involvement with “business adverse media”.

A few choice conclusions from the vmfunc essay, which I recommend you read fully if you’re interested in this sort of thing:

the platform has a full SAR module for filing directly with FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, US Treasury). it’s not a third-party integration or an export. they literally have a “Send to FinCEN” button.
…
government agencies using this platform can flag individuals and generate FinCEN filings, Suspicious Activity Reports sent directly to the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. the code handles the full lifecycle from creation to government acceptance or rejection.
…
alongside US FinCEN, the platform files STRs (Suspicious Transaction Reports) with FINTRAC (Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada). the STR form schema maps 1:1 to FINTRAC’s reporting format
…
operators build facial databases, selfies from verifications get added, incoming verifications get matched against them, and it’s supposedly a 3-year max retention with automatic deletion.
…
the CheckName enum contains 269 individual verification checks across 14 check types. some highlights:

selfie checks (23):
 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
SelfieIdComparison              - face vs ID photo
SelfieAccountComparison         - face vs existing account
SelfieLivenessDetection         - spoof detection
SelfiePublicFigureDetection     - do you LOOK LIKE someone famous?
SelfieSuspiciousEntityDetection - you look "suspicious." literally.
SelfieExperimentalModelDetection - EXPERIMENTAL ML models on your face
SelfieRepeatDetection           - duplicate selfie detection
SelfieSimilarBackgroundDetection - same background as another user
SelfieAgeComparison             - estimated age from face
SelfieAgeInconsistencyDetection - age doesn't match ID
SelfieFaceCoveringDetection     - wearing a mask? flagged.
SelfieGlassesDetection          - glasses? noted.
SelfiePoseRepeatDetection       - same pose as last time?
SelfieSuspiciousEntityDetection. what makes a face “suspicious”? the code doesn’t say. the users aren’t told.

government ID checks (43): including AAMVA database lookup (US driver’s license database), physical tamper detection, MRZ detection, electronic replica detection, NFC chip reading with PKI validation, public figure detection, Real ID detection.

database checks (27): including deceased detection (SSA death master file), social security number comparison, phone carrier checks, SERPRO (Brazil) face comparison, Aadhaar (India) database checks, TIN validation.

document checks (29): including JPEG original image detection, PDF editor detection, PDF annotation detection, synthetic content detection, digital text modification detection.

business checks: including AI identity comparison, website backlink detection, domain age check, terms of service legitimacy detection.

269 checks. for wanting to use a chatbot in 2026.
…
the same company that takes your passport photo when you sign up for ChatGPT also operates a government platform that files Suspicious Activity Reports with FinCEN and tags them with intelligence program codenames. same codebase. confirmed by matching git commit hashes across deployments.

It’s bad. Once your data is in someone else’s hands, regardless of the purpose it was collected for, companies are hungry to use it for everything they can think of.

The Hunger

There is an insatiable hunger to misuse identity data. Tyrants are eager to wage war against an ever-expanding category of political enemies and are trying to accumulate arbitrary power to do it.

It’s no coincidence groups like the Heritage Foundation are pushing to tie online speech to legal identities while the government is exercising vicious policing power to treat legal speech as criminal terrorism. Activists are being arrested and jailed for possessing anarchist zines and owning a printing press to print left-wing books. People are being imprisoned for speaking political dissent and for reading political theory the current administration opposes.

In the digital world, people using their real names online are being deported for political speech. These are legal residents mocking personal allies of the current administration — not even elected officials — having their lives destroyed.

This is already happening in the UK, in the wake of the “Online Safety Act” which requires “highly effective” identity verification, such as linking social media accounts to a government ID. This is designed to impose sweeping restrictions on speech and expression. It’s disguised as a child safety measure, but its true purpose is (avowedly!) intentional control over “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”:

Juliet Samuel, “Online Safety Act was botched from the start” …the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act.

In their “what you share leaves a trace” campaign, UK counterterrorism brags about their ability to destroy the lives of children accused of reposting “terrorist content” links:

But what is “terrorist content?” Oh, you know. Holding pro-Palestinian political positions, for sure. Protesting overly-aggressive antiterrorism law that allows arresting protestors is terrorism too. There doesn’t appear to be any speech exempt from nuclear suppression if the regime decides they want it gone.

In the US, age verification laws are expected to force trans people to identify themselves on-record in order to use the internet even as a government-sanctioned genocide against people continually ramps up in ferocity. Age verification laws like KOSA are purposed to “Protect Kids from The Transgender”, and anti-trans groups like the Heritage Foundation are already foaming at the mouth, eager to use obscenity law to categorize “trans content” as generally harmful to minors as a way of wiping it out.

Identification mechanisms give eager busybodies who are not interested in preserving free expression tools to censor and regulate content. It’s a back door to invasive, unpopular, illegal regulation of peoples’ personal lives. They know it and that’s why they want it.

Gio :⁾@im.giovanh.com
I think any centralized product that’s designed to be voice chat for preteens can’t also be the backbone of the entire creative industry. I think that’s two things
2026-02-10T02:11:21.319Z

Gio :⁾@im.giovanh.com
I also think adults having functional, modern communication infrastructure is more important than chat for games for children. If I had a monopoly on both and someone told me at gunpoint I had to choose which thing to stop doing, it’d be accommodating children.
2026-02-10T02:15:51.280Z

↩

OS-Level Age Attestation is the Good One

2026-03-22T00:00:00-05:00

There’s a coordinated effort to use the “child safety” euphemism to cripple the internet with identity verification mandates. That’s bad. But buried in the mix there’s a genuinely good idea with enough political capital that it might stick around and do some good.

Every time I’ve tried to write an article on the topic of child internet safety my energy has fizzled into depression, because as one researches the topic it becomes obvious that everyone with any relevant power is refusing to solve the problem on purpose. It’s demoralizing and it’s been mostly useless for me to do any thought work in this area.

But California’s age attestation bill might be an exception to this. Because it’s age attestation, not age verification, it looks like a significant political step in the right direction, and with the right focus it could do a lot of good. A lot of people have (fairly!) assumed attestation was age verification or at least lays the groundwork, but I think this isn’t the case. There is always the danger of future bad legislation, but OS attestation doesn’t pave the way for it, it provides a strong defense against it. We need a good idea to win the child safety war, not because we’re in dire need of more online child safety, but because addressing the real concerns correctly blocks a whole slew of impossibly dangerous policies.

My ideal age filtering tool is a system of client attestation with trust rooted in the adult administrator, provided by an OS-level API provided as preemptive verification, enforced by compliant browsers and application stores. And we’re shockingly close to that.

There is room for improvement

People on the privacy side of the age verification war — my side — will argue that parents already have everything they need for comprehensive web filtering if they want to use it. I think this isn’t quite true; there’s one notable architectural gap that a technical solution could meaningfully fill.

There are many existing content filtering tools geared toward child safety but their weakness is that they’re reactive. Traffic filters can identify and block traffic from known websites and on-device content filters can try to detect and block specific content. But this requires the user reacting and defending against every possible source and behavior. It’s the same cat-and-mouse game as adblockers. And like adblockers, the more closed down the system is — like iOS or gaming consoles — the harder it is for developers to make exactly the right product.

The internet sometimes assumes minors are supervised — since they have parental consent to have the device in the first place — but this often isn’t the case. It’s very common for minors to have their own phones or tablets with unsupervised access. When they’re online or downloading apps, they’re not sitting with a parent, they’re unsupervised, roaming children. Parents are dropping their kids off in the city.

This isn’t inherently bad; it seems like parents and children both want children to be able to exist independently without granular supervision, and so there’s a desire to make that situation safer. That shouldn’t come at the cost of any adult liberty or even the liberty of children with parental consent; it just means we want an ecosystem that allows for unsupervised children to exist within it.

Right now the burden is on parents to be active defenders protecting their children from a vast ecosystem of companies investing research and capital into optimizing how efficiently they can exploit money and data out of everyone in the world. It would be a meaningful improvement if there were a safe way to prevent some of this exploitation by putting reasonable requirements on providers, so long as this can be done in a way that doesn’t cause more problems.

Political pressure for “child safety” is exploitable

But the lack of a perfect parental control system isn’t the main problem here. The real danger is the push for online identity verification using child safety as a justification.

Smart and privacy conscious people demand “No age verification” (quite reasonably!), but that doesn’t offer the quick fix people are looking for. More importantly, it doesn’t relieve the political pressure and so doesn’t take away the excuses of tyrants.

Normally “do nothing” would be the safest option here, but the danger of uninformed and reactionary voters means there is a great deal to gain by satisfying the concerns safely instead of letting the solution be evil. A technical standard for parents to somehow identify their children as children is the relief valve for dangerous political pressure. This doesn’t appease the fascists and censors. This doesn’t cede them any ground and it’d be wrong to try to; there’s no satisfying that hunger and it’s a dangerous mistake to feed it. What it does is actually improve the material conditions for the people they’re trying to trick.

A proactive system that puts some of the burden for protecting children on those companies is a real relief to this, and it would be a meaningful improvement if something could address this without causing bigger problems.

Taxonomy

There are three basic categories of age filtering: nothing, client attestation, and client verification. These provide services varying levels of confidence in their knowledge of users. (It’s tempting to simplify confidence to labels like “strong” or “weak” but it’s important to think about what’s actually being secured, and from who.) Different people call these different things, but here’s my taxonomy with the labels I’ll use.

The simplest case is nothing. One often doesn’t need to have age filtering at all. There may not be any system of authentication at all, or the same basic product may be available to authenticated and anonymous users alike. This is the public internet: all the same information is available to everyone. This provides the lowest level of confidence, but it’s usually not necessary for websites to have any information about their users in the first place. This includes sites like Wikipedia. Anyone can look up sexual reproduction without an account and there aren’t mechanisms to restrict information, according to their own principles of non-censorship. It’s an encyclopedia!

Age Attestation

The next case is client attestation. In attestation systems the client asserts their age in some sort of persistent way, and this is usually required for use. This is a trust-based system: the client attests or declares their own age and the service respects their statement. Depending on the mechanism this can provide widely varying levels of confidence. This includes any site that requires you to provide your age during account setup and only shows certain material to appropriately configured accounts. This has become an extremely common design pattern, especially for social media sites with a mix of child-friendly and adult content.

With attestation, services start with no knowledge about the user until they get an age signal. The service decides how it wants to handle this; they can provide anonymous users a limited view (requiring an affirmative signal before showing adult content, for instance) or simply require age information to use the service at all. When attestation is required for use it’s a form of preventative control rather than reactive content filtering.

Client attestation also includes any account system with a parental control feature where an account can be registered as a child managed by an adult administrator. This is omnipresent in the operating system space: it’s supported by Apple and Microsoft for their general purpose computers, and even Linux distributions like Ubuntu. It’s also supported on gaming systems including Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, Steam, etc.

This is ubiquitous and when people talk about existing controls being available and sufficient, this is why. It’s a myth that any of this is missing, or that “the off button doesn’t exist” for operating systems.

The people pointing out that parental controls exist already are right and that’s why. Where this is missing is within services: many social media platforms are a binary in-or-out without integrated parental control systems. The parent has control over whether any given app is installed or not, but within the app ecosystem parents are often not in control. This is intentional, not because the platforms are discriminating against parents, but because they’re aggressively against user configurability in the first place. They want to control how their platform works and they want to collect data and serve ads. The tech companies are bad, actually. They are trying to create addictive products without regard to psychological harms. That part’s true.

I will count the “confirmation box” design pattern as falling into the “nothing” category, not client attestation. The “are you 18, click yes or no” dialog, the Steam screen that requires you to enter your birth date every time you open a mature page, etc. The user is supplying their age here, but not in any meaningful way. There is no semi-permanent configuration and no tracking of user information. It’s essentially just giving the user an option to opt-out.

At the OS level though, while this usually provides sufficient control to parents, there is an asterisk here from the perspective of the service providers: this all still trusts the client. A user can enter a false date during account setup, a parent can allow their child to register as an adult without setting up parental controls, and an intentionally devious child could even register themselves under a parental account they control. It’s not obvious to the service whether the confirmation is being done by a third-party (the parent) or a first-party (an adult user). The service provider doesn’t have full confidence or “actual knowledge” of the age of the user, and they don’t know if the child is supervised or not.

Age Verification

Age verification pokes its ugly nose in when you refuse to trust the client. If implicit parental consent isn’t enough, if you absolutely positively need to know the real age of the user. Age verification requires some sort of third-party or technical verification of the user’s actual characteristics. This means not trusting the user and instead trusting… something else. This is usually either technical guesswork or confirmation with a third-party identity issuer. This is the most dangerous and most invasive form of age filtering that provides a level of confidence that should be rarely required, if ever.

Because this can’t trust the user and can’t fail-open, this means identifying every user who uses the service at all. Since age verification has to do new research on people this introduces topics of accuracy, handling false positives, false negatives, etc. This is categorically distinct from age attestation, where the decision has already been made by an authority and only needs to be communicated to a service.

Technical approaches are things like biometrics (face scanning), looking at account age, or analytic-based categorization. Think Discord, which began requiring biometric identification by confirming a “video selfie.”

Third party verification includes scanning and verifying government identification, but is also sometimes done by confirming a separate account like a credit card. Remember Sam Altman’s World organization and their terrible identification Orb? They want to be a third-party identity provider and license out their “World ID” service for identity verification. They do the biometrics, then you log in through them. The scheme here doesn’t actually look like data harvesting from individuals; they’re trying to become critical infrastructure so they can charge every website a license.

Identity verification is as bad as it can possibly be

Not already convinced of the dangers of age verification? The extent of the evil waiting behind identification systems and deanonymization is unspeakably vast, and fortunately it’s getting extensive coverage. If you want my quick summary, I’ve written a brief addendum about this. The stories are wild and scary, and I’m summarized a few of them.

What can and cannot be allowed in a solution

So our two real players are client attestation and client verification. Let’s take those frameworks, shove in the desire for better content filtering tools, and see what happens. How do we think about the problem?

Anything universal needs to have the maximization of liberty as its top priority. Whatever the global solution is, concerned parents can build additional systems on top of it according to their preference. But for any universal system everyone has to deal with, it’s imperative it has minimal or no impact on other lawful behavior. There must be minimal impact on legal behavior, or you have de facto government censorship of speech.

A responsible approach should have a minimal impact on adults if any, or else it infringes on the right to speech, expression, and free association by attaching pressures and risk to legal behavior. Regulation of speech must be “fail-open”, not “fail-closed”. If something goes wrong it’s imperative that most conduct be allowed by default, not banned by default.

Age filtering also can’t create a new data privacy risk, especially one that specifically endangers the identity of children. That means we can’t collect and store government ID or biometric information. Can we use identity documents or biometric verification ephemerally, so that it never leaves the device and we delete any information as soon as some on-device algorithm finishes processing it? Usually, no. All systems which the government audits for compliance have to store and report that data somehow in order for the company to actually demonstrate compliance.

We can’t require deanonymizing general online conduct and we can’t require storing any unnecessary data that could be used. Whatever we build has to be intensely structurally resistant to potential future abuse, because we can already see people eager to exploit and abuse these systems.

OS-level age attestation is the good one

Put this all together and you get the outline of a system I’ve been envisioning since I was a child.

My ideal age filtering tool is a system of client attestation with trust rooted in the adult administrator, provided by an OS-level API provided as preemptive verification, enforced by compliant browsers and application stores.

The device owner and administrator, the parent, can configure child-facing devices (phones, PCs, gaming consoles, etc.) as child accounts at the operating system level. The root of trust for this is the device owner. It’s not verifying a government ID or biometrics or registering with any kind of third party, it’s just a configuration option a non-administrative user can’t change.

These child accounts send age signals in the appropriate contexts (web browsing, app stores, etc.) that give service providers the necessary information to handle the request as appropriate. This may mean locking options, leaving out algorithmic feed sources, and handling the traffic in ways that don’t collect unnecessary user data.

This gives parents a simple setting, moves some responsibility for data handling to the companies, and doesn’t affect adults. With a minimal one-step setup parents can let their children on the internet unsupervised, and tech companies — who now have actual knowledge of children’s ages — have the responsibility to keep those particular users safe. But this only needs to ever affect children. Any adult with their own device can tick the “adult user” box, never identify themselves with any third party, and be treated as an adult on the internet.

Parental supervision makes self identification sufficient

At first anything falling under the category of “self-identification” seems like a mistake. You can’t rely on minors to accurately identify themselves (especially when it restricts them). I already said the user just confirming their age is equivalent to no security at all. The temptation here is to treat everyone as minors by default, and positively identify adults. This is when security people reach for facial recognition and AI and government ID validation and cryptographic protocols and identity verification services start getting rolled out.

But for this specific use case — children with parental supervision — none of this is required. For the parental control case, the assumption about “self-identification” is incorrect. Minor-owned devices self-identify on the authority of the parent without any sensitive data ever moving anywhere. You couldn’t use this for something like voting, but you absolutely can use it for child protection.

For this subject — parental controls for minors — the parent owns the device, not the child. When a minor has a personal smartphone it’s because a parent bought it and is letting their child use it. The child didn’t pay for it and doesn’t own it; their guardian can make using it conditional on whatever controls and restrictions they choose to require. As long as the child doesn’t have administrative access on a device, how it behaves can ultimately be supervised by management policy. (And if parents want to give their children administrative access, that’s their prerogative!) This means a simple OS-level solution is enough to handle the entire problem. All that’s required to distinguish adults and minors are the user account systems that already exist.

Preemptive verification, not filtering

The internet is a fetch medium. Whenever you visit a web page your computer sends a request to a web server. The server responds to the request, sends the information back, and your computer shows it. You don’t get any data unless the remote machine explicitly chooses to send it to you. This means if child-owned devices proactively identify themselves as such, services can make the relevant processing decisions and curate their responses as appropriate.

With the user age information provided to the servers, each website can respond with whatever modifications are appropriate for that age range. Any requests without the header should be assumed to come from legal adults or otherwise intentionally unlocked devices. Maybe that means changing very little, maybe that means blocking an entire site. The service itself regulates this. It’s highly dependent on the content, and the services themselves are in the best place to understand what compliance is required for their particular business.

OS level

“OS-level” sounds scary to tech people, and it should. This is the realm of Secure Boot, the Trusted Platform Module, attacks on user ownership of computing devices, ring zero control, etc. OS level age verification would be disastrous. You don’t want the operating system to have an obligation to proactively identify users correctly or have an obligation to gatekeep basic computing functionality behind age checks. This also isn’t secure boot or hardware vendor-deployed user-facing anti-tamper, just normal user space permissions. You never want a device defending itself against an owner. But age attestation is not that.

Doing this at the OS level is the right move for two reasons: that’s the best way to expose an interface for applications to use, and that’s where the enforcement power already is.

You don’t need individual services collecting and maintaining identifying information. It’s been proven to be a recipe for disaster and it is completely, utterly avoidable. It’s better to do age attestation once per device than once per service. A legal standard for OS level attestation removes the need for services to collect and store sensitive profiling data in the name of verification.

But it’s also structurally correct for the age identification part of this to be the responsibility of the parent. We should use the existing agency of parents over devices and send a signal that proactively informs sites not to serve devices that are voluntarily excluded. Not only is it much harder for services to verify a users’ age than it is for their parents to, that responsibility already lies with the parent.

App store and browser enforcement

The OS is where meaningful enforcement can be implemented between the owner and non-owner users. This is already incredibly normal in the computer world. Multi-user computers where different users have different sets of permissions are completely standard in home and enterprise environments and have been for decades.

All that’s required is some system — any system — to have an administrator identify a child user. Windows has had this since at least XP with administrative and plain user accounts, and while recent Microsoft account shenanigans have made that system more complex, all the systems for permission management are still there.

Normally I would say the hardest part of this problem is the OS communicating the relevant information to applications and web services, but infrastructure for this actually exists already too. Requirements from the business world have ensured operating systems already have in-depth systems for external permission management.

The Chrome Managed Browser system — widely used in corporate environments and on school Chromebooks — allows system-level control over browser policy. Managed browsers on Windows can read settings from Group Policy, Microsoft’s system for letting remote administrators manage operating system settings. I’m mostly familiar with the Google and Microsoft ecosystems here, but any comparable product is going to have an equivalent system.

Platforms like iOS — where each user is bound to an online identity — make it easy to identify an account as a child managed by a parent, and the operating system can do the rest. This is also trivial to implement on non-cloud systems with an administrator/user account scheme, or traditional “parental lock” mechanisms.

You could even manufacture tablets for children like they do now and hard-wire the setting into the system, throwing out any need for an administrator at all.

Having this permission set in a way the user can’t directly control solves another major problem with age attestation. Currently, because signals are optional, sites have to provide a “lowest common denominator” experience to anonymous users. If you have a child on an art site, for example, it’s not enough to only hide adult works from logged-in, self-identified users. Anyone can log out, or switch to incognito mode and browse the site anonymously. But controlling age signals with a permission system removes this escape hatch. This allows sites to add meaningful restrictions for self-attested minors (like reducing data collection) without having to bring the lowest-common denominator experience down to match it. You don’t need “teen by default” anymore.

Preventing problems

As I’ve said, age verification tech is extremely dangerous, especially in the current reactionary political climate. It’s not enough to just have good intentions, you also have to realistically understand the environment this will all exist in.

The political age verification movements are a tug-of-war between value systems. There are factions in the government trying to seize policing power, factions in tech looking to use their legal weight to secure permanent monopolies over social life, factions trying to capture identifying information, and worse.

It is of the utmost importance that any age filtering system not only be designed in a way that’s strongly opinionated towards liberty and privacy, but also be designed in a way that strongly resists future abuse or co-option of that intent. And I think this approach does that.

Providing flat, low-entropy category information

A great danger of any content filtering or censorship system is inappropriate violations of freedom that come from expanding it to additional topics and scopes. Even outside a specific political context where it’s already evident different factions want to do this, there’s a natural risk baked into the technology itself.

As long as adults control their own devices (which they need to!) it’s difficult or impossible to compel them to misidentify themselves as children. Child privacy laws like COPPA already strictly regulate how companies are allowed to sell and advertise to children, so companies are already incentivized to make adults identify as adults whenever possible. This same dynamic makes it much less prone to being used in domestic abuse or as a way for one person to cut another off from support and resources. This provides a way to enforce existing law governing how businesses serve children; it doesn’t provide a stalkerware mechanism. This only works for actual age checks.

This is why we want to send what’s called low entropy information: we want to reveal the minimal amount of information required without providing any additional detail that could be used to identify or fingerprint a user. We would not want to broadcast users’ birthdates since that’s personally identifiable information — and often used as a credential!

The ideal solution for this is using age categorization buckets. For example, if users are divided into categories like “0-13”, “13-18”, and “18+”, that reveals the information required for most age-based enforcement in US jurisdictions.

Unfortunately this isn’t a perfectly universal system to bake into some kind of technical standard, since the age ranges are designed around current US law.

A better solution would be an API like this: The operating system knows the user’s birthdate, but that information never leaves the device. If one is the device administrator they can change this value, and if they’re a child user they can’t.

An app store or website can craft a request requesting the specific bucket information it needs: a question like “Are you under 13?” or “Are you over 21?” and send that question to the operating system via an API. The OS would use the actual date information it has to craft a yes/no answer to the question, which the user may or may not be allowed to edit based on their permissions. The OS would then prompt a permission window, like they already do with other identifiable information like geographical location. The device would send the user a pop-up — “Service {NAME} wants to confirm your age as >13. Provide this information?” — before replying, which would alert the user to the privacy impacts and prevent sites from maliciously sending multiple requests to fingerprint an exact age.

Regardless of the exact approach, flattening the age parameter as much as possible makes it difficult to abuse it for universal censorship of other topics. While there are groups that argue for things like global eradication of pornography and anti-government sentiment, a flat “age” parameter makes it prohibitively difficult to try to force age restrictions on adult populations.

Keeping the device owner as the root of trust

I know I keep pointing this out, but it’s a critical distinction that the device owner is the root of trust with attestation. It’s not tracking an identity persistently, it’s not even verifying an identity up front, it’s only providing a mechanism for owners to exercise control over their own property. The minimalism of the age parameter intentionally and proactively cripples attempts to misuse it.

It’s far better and far safer than a mandatory universal identification, or every service with adult material anywhere on their platform transferring or maintaining a separate copy of personally identifying information.

Legal impact

So where’s the regulation part of this? If we’re not requiring people prove their identity to a third party, where’s the action needed to make this work?

This necessitates a new requirement, but it’s not a requirement for adults to provide identifying documents to their OS. It’s a requirement on two relatively constrained categories of tech companies.

The law would need to ensure availability of this system with the devices and services children actually use. Major operating system providers who provide operating systems used by children — Microsoft, Apple, Google, Nintendo, Sony — would need to implement this system in order to make it available to parents.

As I discussed earlier the basic framework for this already exists in all these major operating systems, even game consoles and some Linux distributions. The main missing piece is expanding these beyond those companies’ internal systems applications into an API that other programs (mostly web browsers) can query.

Enterprise or industrial equipment shouldn’t have this requirement, only devices that are actually provided to and used by children. This requirement that platforms provide this feature shouldn’t to apply to calculators, Linux distributions, etc., only the actually relevant systems children use. This shouldn’t prevent any adults from using old software that doesn’t support this particular feature, or require calculators and machinery to be reflashed, or anything like that. The goal here is for the mainstream providers to provide this feature to ensure it’s available for parents to use.

The other change is on compliance requirements for web companies, which would constrict in some ways and loosen in others. Specifically, getting age information from the OS needs to count as having what’s called actual knowledge of the user’s age. In other words, if a parent tells you someone is a minor, you have to believe them. This is the most drastic change because this is where the liability is added: if services are explicitly told a child is connecting they are required to treat the request appropriately and not ignore the signal.

For COPPA compliance purposes many websites are currently encouraged not to obtain real knowledge of users’ ages — sites can explicitly confirm the age of underage users and continue to allow them to use their services, but they aren’t able to collect all the same data and serve the same advertisements to those users. This encourages a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude where, if children don’t provide the information or are allowed to easily lie, the companies can exploit them more and the children can access more features. Age information provided by a standardized system would need to qualify as the site gaining actual knowledge of age. That would require them to comply with existing data protection law in ways they currently often don’t, claiming ignorance.

Since this counts as real knowledge of a user’s age status, this means sites would need to use this knowledge to comply with the existing law. If you’re a porn site, why would you choose to check for an age header and adjust your response accordingly? Because otherwise you’d be serving porn to self-identified minors, which is already very illegal.

Any service that intentionally operates in violation of the law is irrelevant to the policy discussion, since they’d ignore more restrictive policies that require affirmative adult verification too. This is a conversation about, y’know, Facebook, not Ukrainian pirate sites. For these cases, there’s filtering.

But what has me excited is the way this cuts in the other direction. Once this parental control protocol was ubiquitous, low-entropy age affirmation would also supply sites with actual knowledge of adulthood. If sites comply by collecting and acting on age affirmation data, that creates a safe haven for them to treat self-affirmed adults as adults.

I want services to be able to use age-specific attestation from the user to confirm users’ adulthood, and for the availability of attestation to make this a legally sound age confirmation method. This could make it much easier for adults to anonymously self-identity online and bypass obscenity regulation designed for minors. Platforms could more safely run adult spaces, and it would become far easier and safer for adults to safely access adult spaces online. Throw YouTube for Kids in the trash, replace it all with this.

This preempts much worse verification systems: if there’s a safe and built-in adulthood check, services can safely use those to confirm adult users and serve adult content without requiring invasive identification checks. That information they need — that someone isn’t an unsupervised child — would be provided without the data privacy risks involved with the current age verification technologies. Actual knowledge provides legal confidence to services that might otherwise be pressured into requiring worse and more invasive forms of identification, or purge adult material from their site completely.

You wouldn’t want to ban sweeping categories of existing services under age attestation law though. Companies can keep using any existing services or replace them entirely, so long as they’re also respecting the header. But if they require more than the age bucket, that’s evidence to the government and to the customer that they’re demanding private information that isn’t legally necessary. As with filtering, this just means any parent worried about child safety will have a push-button solution in addition to all the existing parental control products.

The requirement for downstream services to respect this data is the most important piece. There might need to be a regulatory requirement for OS providers to make this interface available, but once app stores, websites, and social media platforms are required to respect the age signals, mainstream OS providers are already incentivized to support this without needing any regulatory prodding. The operating systems don’t need to be forced; they’ll want to support the feature and they’ll want to lead the charge to design the industry-standard technical specifications.

And here’s the cool thing: we are astonishingly close to having good law on the books to do this already.

California AB 1043, Age verification signals: software applications and online services.

AB 1043 is an age attestation bill introduced and passed in the 2025-2026 session. Here’s how it’s described in comments:

Buffy Wicks California has enacted or proposed several laws to better protect minors in digital spaces, but enforcement and implementation remain stymied by a basic infrastructure gap: there is no standardized, privacy-preserving method for determining whether a user is a child. AB 1043, the Digital Age Assurance Act, seeks to fill that gap by establishing a secure signaling framework at the device and app store level. This framework allows developers to receive a tamper-resistant digital signal reflecting a user’s age bracket—without requiring the collection of personal data or documents—and to treat that signal as the authoritative indicator of a user’s age for compliance purposes under California law.

Striking a balance between parental control and children’s privacy. In protecting children from the potential harms on the internet, like those discussed previously, there must be a careful balance between appropriate parental control and the rights of older teens to access certain platforms. At the core of this bill is a conceptually elegant solution for establishing the age of the user. By sending an age assurance signal that developers are required to rely on for having actual knowledge of the age of the user, provides a number of significant benefits:

It alleviates concerns from privacy advocates that age verification would necessarily require everyone to provide developers and platforms with even greater sensitive personal information by having to upload official identification documents in order to prove that they are old enough to access the application or the content. It potentially removes the argument from the technology industry that have no definitive way of knowing the age of their users, thus allowing them to avoid responsibility for allowing children to access harmful content. As an example, applications that are restricted to adults generally simply ask the user to attest to whether or not they are old enough to access the site. With an age assurance signal, the platforms would be provided with actual knowledge of the age or age range of the user that they could then rely on to grant or deny access.

And here’s the relevant text of the bill:

1.81.9. Digital Age Assurance Act For the purposes of this title:

(a)(1)Account holder means an individual who is at least 18 years of age or a parent or legal guardian of a user who is under 18 years of age in the state.
…
(b)Age bracket data means nonpersonally identifiable data derived from a users birth date or age for the purpose of sharing with developers of applications that indicates the users age range, including, at a minimum, the following:
(1)Whether a user is under 13 years of age.
(2)Whether the user is at least 13 years of age and under 16 years of age.
(3)Whether the user is at least 16 years of age and under 18 years of age.
(4)Whether the user is at least 18 years of age.

(c)Application means a software application that may be run or directed by a user on a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device that can access a covered application store or download an application.

(d)Child means a natural person who is under 18 years of age.

(e)(1)Covered application store means a publicly available internet website, software application, online service, or platform that distributes and facilitates the download of applications from third-party developers to users of a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing that can access a covered application store or can download an application.
…
(f)Developer means a person that owns, maintains, or controls an application.

(g)Operating system provider means a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.

(h)Signal means age bracket data sent by a real-time secure application programming interface or operating system to an application.

(i)User means a child that is the primary user of the device.

1798.501.

(a)An operating system provider shall do all of the following:
(1)Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the users age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
(2)Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user:
…
(3)Send only the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this title and shall not share the digital signal information with a third party for a purpose not required by this title.

(b)(1)A developer shall request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched.

(2)(A)A developer that receives a signal pursuant to this title shall be deemed to have actual knowledge of the age range of the user to whom that signal pertains across all platforms of the application and points of access of the application even if the developer willfully disregards the signal.
…
(3)(A)Except as provided in subparagraph (B), a developer shall treat a signal received pursuant to this title as the primary indicator of a users age range for purposes of determining the users age.
…
(4)A developer that receives a signal pursuant to this title shall use that signal to comply with applicable law but shall not do either of the following:
(A)Request more information from an operating system provider or a covered application store than the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this title.
(B)Share the signal with a third party for a purpose not required by this title.
…
(c)An operating system provider or a covered application store shall comply with this title in a nondiscriminatory manner, including, but not limited to, by complying with both of the following:

(1)An operating system provider or a covered application store shall impose at least the same restrictions and obligations on its own applications and application distribution as it does on those from third-party applications or application distributors.
…
(g)This title does not impose liability on an operating system provider, a covered application store, or a developer that arises from the use of a device or application by a person who is not the user to whom a signal pertains.

1798.505. This title shall become operative on January 1, 2027.

This is honestly very good. I am never going to say “this law is safe, it creates a system that can only do good” because bad prosecutors and bad courts can always destroy these things. This is enforced by the Attorney General, and an AG could abuse this language to target political enemies and enforce beyond the intended design. California is not good about this — see the age appropriate design code saga — but this particular piece is good. Good law is hard to find so we should make the most of what we get.

It ticks most of my boxes. The bracket system means the data provided is non-identifying, low-entropy information. Users are required to identify themselves to the device, not a third party. It’s not based on biometrics or identity verification, only self-identification. There are privacy protections attached, and even a requirement for neutrality between first-party and third-party applications. Hugely important is that the age bracket signal constitutes “actual knowledge” of a users’ age, for the reasons discussed earlier. This makes it an authoritative signal. It’s both legally authoritative and minimal, without identity verification, and with only “indication” as the requirement.

I’ve seen this thoughtful concurrence from David Chisnall, focusing on the unix-y side of things:

david_chisnall@infosec.exchange So, I have actually read the text of California law CA AB1043 and, honestly, I don’t hate it. It requires operating systems to let you enter a date when you create a user account and requires a way for software to get a coarse-grained approximation of this that says either ‘over 18’ or one of three age ranges of under-18s. Importantly, it doesn’t require:

Remote attestation.

Tamper-proof storage of the age.

Any validation in the age.

In short, it’s a tool for parents: it allows you to set the age of a child’s account so that apps (including web browsers, which can then expose via JavaScript or whatever) can ask questions about what features they should expose.

In a UNIX-like system, this is easy to do, with a tiny amount of new userspace things:

Define four groups for the four age ranges (ideally, standardise their names!).

Add a /etc/user_birthdays file (or whatever name it is) that stores pairs of username (or uid) and birthdays.

Add a daily cron job that checks the above file and updates group membership.

Modify user-add scripts / GUIs to create an entry in the above file.

Add a tool to create an entry in the above file for existing user accounts.

This doesn’t require any kernel changes. Any process can query the set of groups that the user is in already.

If a parent wants to give their child root, they can update the file and bypass the check. And that’s fine, that’s a parent’s choice. And that’s what I want.

I like this approach far more than things that require users to provide scans of passports and other toxically personal information to be able to use services. If we had this feature, then the Online Safety Act could simply require that web browsers provide a JavaScript API to query the age bracket and didn’t work unless it returned ‘over 18’.

There are some remaining problems with the intent and implementation though.

The way “operating system provider” is defined is too broad. Only the major providers whose products are used by children need to be compelled to provide this feature. The current definition covers enterprise, industrial, or applications like enterprise Linux servers and specialty computers where there is no need or demand for parental control systems. As written, this could include a calculator or a smart thermostat. That’s silly. This could be addressed by an intentional reading of the law. Does installing Linux make you the operating system provider because you “control” the operating system software on a computer? An Attorney General could argue the point either way.

Similarly over broad is the requirement on users to identify themselves in a bucket to use a computer. See: “…requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.” You really only need a requirement on the operating system to provide this functionality. A better, more conservative system would be for users to be treated as adults implicitly unless they choose to configure parental controls, as they are now. For most specific or industrial purposes, a clause during setup indicating all accounts must be adults should be sufficient as identification — but again, you need a good Attorney General with the will to enforce this conservatively and not to weaponize it.

We need a protocol for everything, not just “apps”

The biggest problem is the focus on the modern Apple-style “app store” model. Unlike the other two issues this isn’t the law causing a problem, it’s a failure in scope. App stores are the least relevant domain because they already have parental systems policing exactly this kind of behavior, as described in the overview earlier. Where this functionality is really missing is within apps and online, something the language here doesn’t touch. On general purpose computers, “app” is a useful fiction for describing and packaging behavior, and plenty of behavior falls outside that taxonomy.

What I see as the crucial missing piece here is a bridge between the signal the OS provides to app stores and the public internet. It’s not meaningful to just lock off certain apps from being installed at all. Programs and browsers need to be able to query this signal to tailor specific behavior within their programs. Are web browsers “application stores” under this language? Again, it’s not clear, and the lack of clarity makes it difficult for websites and browsers to treat this as authoritative.

What we need now are protocols to apply this same information to web services so the entire internet can use device-reported configuration as actual knowledge age verification. Attestation law is a step in the right direction (especially compared to others), but this doesn’t yet provide everything it needs to.

Colorado SB26-051, Age Attestation on Computing Devices

Colorado has SB26-051 which is almost the same as California’s model bill word for word.

There are a few minor categorical distinctions. California categorizes it as consumer privacy, Colorado categorizes it as consumer protection. California’s takes effect in 2027, Colorado’s in 2028. The technical architecture is the same in both bills.

But Colorado includes this noteworthy exception:

(6) Notwithstanding any provision of this article 30 to the contrary, this article 30 does not apply to a developer if the predominant or exclusive function of the application that the developer writes, creates, maintains, or controls is:
(a) facilitating communication within a business or an enterprise among employees or affiliates of the business or enterprise, so long as access to the application is restricted to employees or affiliates of the business or enterprise;
(b) selling enterprise software to businesses, governments, or nonprofit organizations; or
(c) providing or obtaining technical support for a software platform, product, or service.

This is language designed to narrow the domain of “operating system provider”, which is good. This shouldn’t apply to enterprise software, internal systems, etc.

Arguments against

California and Colorado’s bills have “made the rounds” and gathered some criticism already. A lot of this is criticism of the age verification movement, in my opinion misdirected when aimed at CA/CO. There are a few arguments I want to respond to, though.

Confusing attestation with verification

Elorm Daniel A law that says Linux must perform age verification during account setup sounds reasonable at first… until you realize it completely misunderstands what Linux actually is.

Because who exactly is supposed to verify their age?
The server?
The router?
The fridge?
…
There’s nothing to verify against.

People very commonly simply confuse attestation with verification like this. The key point here is that it’s not verification. The parents attest to the age of the child, and the adults attests to the age of themselves.

Guardrails to make it clear that this is attestation and not validation would be helpful, but the CA/CO bills don’t prompt an open-ended question of “who validates it?”. The answer is — and should be — the device owner.

“Operating System Provider” is overbroad

The db48x calculator firmware project is why I have “calculator” in my head as an example of an operating system that shouldn’t be covered by this legislation.

A few weeks ago, the maintainer c3d added this notice to the project:

LEGAL-NOTICE.md …I, as the primary author of the software, do not have the legal resources to clarify what these laws mean by “operating system”, “mobile device”, “programming interface”, or any other weakly defined terminology in the legal text. I am clearly not alone having trouble with these texts. …

Consequently, any user who decides to install and run the software will need to consider that they became, in application of the license, the local distributor of the software and will need to bear any legal consequences, however unlikely, that would derive from this exercise of their freedom. If there are consequences and they don’t like them, I invite them to enter a fight to improve and fix the local laws.

Linux-oriented electronics company System76 also mentioned this in their press release about age verification laws:

System76 on Age Verification Laws In a bizarre twist, under its current wording, a Linux distribution downloaded from the internet could technically make the downloader the “device manufacturer”. They are the entity responsible for providing a freely distributed operating system to the device. In practice, this type of language is rarely enforced. Nonetheless, it highlights how laws written for centralized platforms like iOS and Android struggle to define who is responsible in open computing ecosystems where anyone can install or distribute the operating system.

In both cases, the criticism is the one I’ve already made: the design of the law is only considering the app store model. It doesn’t handle the much more common (and much more important) case of general-purpose computers administered by adults that are in no way related with children or social media. It feels like an obvious cognitive error; the text of the bill was written by people who are primarily exposed to the surface-level consumerist tech environment. They’re failing to grapple with the technical implications because the underlying systems don’t’ match their mental model.

Of course, I agree with this objection. The California bill is over-inclusive with its definition of “operating system provider”, and it’s unclear how it handles normal software and general-purpose computing projects outside a walled-garden app store environment. It would be an improvement to see the definition of “operating system provider” narrowed to only capture the relevant, mainstream operating systems. Or widened, to clarify that users who install non-covered operating systems act as their own administrator and provider.

Colorado’s bill is stronger since it has carve-outs for systems that aren’t expected to have (or care about) child users. I would want to see that exception to be even larger: since this is a parental control system, any adult should have a mechanism to self-exempt themselves or their own children from the requirement, so long as that doesn’t deny protections to others. Ideally OS providers would sort themselves into two categories: mainstream providers who want a widely-applicable product they can sell to adults and children, and industrial or hobbyist systems that aren’t expected to be used by children at all.

Ambiguity in law is always dangerous. This is why I emphasize the outsized importance of the Attorney General, who is the enforcement agent for this. They shouldn’t be able to stretch the law to criminalize behavior the law didn’t intend to regulate. If edge cases can be argued to be in violation of this bill that gives ammunition for the government to pressure and prosecute arbitrarily. So yes, this should have been refined, and hopefully it still will be.

The California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act

Prior to AB 1043, California attempted to enforce The California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, a highly restrictive bill modeled after UK regulation. This was enjoined by federal court, repeatedly, for being an overbroad, unconstitutional attempt to restrict speech. There’s a strong argument that — in context — AB 1043 is an attempt to try to achieve some of the same aims through a different, more constitutional mechanism.

Aakash Gupta …
AB-1043 shifts the burden from app developers to operating system providers. Instead of every app asking your age, your OS sends a “signal” to apps telling them whether you’re under 13, 13-16, 16-18, or 18+. Four age brackets, transmitted via API every time you launch an app.

The theory is clever. Courts struck down CAADCA because requiring every business to assess content harm to children was a content-based speech regulation that couldn’t survive strict scrutiny. AB-1043 sidesteps this by saying “we’re not regulating content, we’re just making the OS collect a birthday.”
…
The same trade group (NetChoice) that killed CAADCA will almost certainly challenge AB-1043. The First Amendment problem didn’t disappear because you moved the compliance obligation from the app layer to the kernel layer. You just added a step.

I think the answer to this is simple: It’s the content regulation that’s the problem, and AB-1043 doesn’t regulate content yet. It’s the part of the system that’s inoffensive. CAADCA was an unconstitutional attempt to put an obligation for content-based speech regulation on businesses. AB 1043 is not. It doesn’t do the same things and it doesn’t make the same people happy, and it doesn’t provide a strong foothold to build bad law on top of it. Maybe California will try to build more unconstitutional speech law on top of AB 1043, maybe it won’t. If so, that’s a separate offense.

Can’t enforce a global dragnet

A lot of criticism has come from people who see that this doesn’t form a “perfect seal”, and conclude it’s either unenforceable or a huge regulatory apparatus will be required to create a seal.

But this misses the basic picture of the thing: what’s enforced and in what direction. Age attestation should not be a secure, perfectly-enforced dragnet. It’s a feature tech companies should be required to provide to users, and web services should be required to respect, but it’s not designed to use the full weight of the law to compel individual parents or children.

This objection was also raised on the assembly floor by Samantha Corbin, who objected on the basis that this didn’t create a comprehensive, tamper-proof dragnet:

Samantha Corbin The greatest risk to children online comes not from the existence of platforms, but from millions of unregulated app developers, many of whom push unsafe, exploitative and sometimes predatory content. …

Children can and often do also misrepresent their ages during device setup. Devices are often shared across users or passed down, and burner phones are easily accessible. Nothing in 1043 prevents circumvention. It risks creating a false sense of security without actually reducing harm. And in fact, as written, 1043 undermines California’s privacy leadership and child protection laws.

The idea that this removes liability from developers is factually incorrect; services would be completely liable for properly handling user data and serving minors appriately. They’re still completely liable for misconduct, they just don’t have a responsibility to positively identify every user using personal information.

1043 does undermine some of California’s other privacy initatives. But those policies it preempts are bad, and that’s why 1043 is so good. The state of California simply doesn’t have the authority to police speech on the basis of “reducing harm”, as if the state is the party with a primary interest in how peoples’ children are raised. It gives parents access to easy, accessible, legally-required harm reduction but it doesn’t put the state in charge of policing the parenting of every child.

This focus on the possibility of preventing “circumvention” is a fundamental objection to the purpose of the effort. Rejecting this on the basis that it isn’t automatically flawless enforcement is like objecting to the existence of gun safes just because if a parent gives their child a loaded gun instead of locking it in the safe, it can still fire. The perfect becomes the enemy of the good: providing material safety improvements isn’t a “false sense of security”. It addresses the vast majority of cases effectively, even if it doesn’t create a magical, impossible layer of enforcement that ignores mechanical reality and only allows good things to ever happen.

The fact that speech is allowed if this system is intentionally not applied is a feature, not a bug. Age attestation needs to be a fail-open system. If the direction of this flips — if this becomes a system for absolute top-down control over which people can use which software, or use what communication platforms — that’s not age attestation. That’s a different system with different goals serving different people. There’s no central enforcement point. You can’t require this to be present in all software that exists, nor should you. The space we care about is commercial products for children, not all possible computing.

This backwards understanding also comes from users who object to enforceability. Quoting this one Reddit post that was quoted and amplified by PC Gamer’s coverage,

CatoDomine What really scares me is that we have lawmakers stupid enough to propose a law like this. This is basically impossible for California to enforce. Worst case, they are too stupid to know that. Best case, it is performative. Even if Linux Mint decides to add some kind of age verification, to comply with CA law, there’s no reason anyone would choose that version. There are hundreds of other jurisdictions in which Mint operates that don’t require this kind of stupidity. It’s more likely that they will put a disclaimer on their website “not for use in California”.

Again, enforcement. But this misses who age attestation is for and what it does. It provides universal parental controls to the parent. If Linux Mint added age attestation, it would add an annoyance for this user, and they’d be right to pick a distribution without that annoyance. But the feature provided here isn’t for the benefit of the state of California, it’s for parents. A parent — or school — might very well choose to use an attestation-compliant version to regulate their children. Or they might not! California has an interest in ensuring the availability of the protocol, but the owner must always have the right to choose.

System76 on Age Verification Laws …There is no actual age verification. Whoever installed the operating system or created the account simply says what age they are. They can lie. They will lie. They’re being encouraged to lie for fear of being restricted to a nerfed internet.

A parent that creates a non-admin account on a computer, sets the age for a child account they create, and hands the computer over is in no different state. The child can install a virtual machine, create an account on the virtual machine and set the age to 18 or over. It’s a similar technique to installing a VPN to get around the Great Firewall of China (just consider that for a moment). Or the child can simply re-install the OS and not tell their parents.

I think these contrived examples misunderstand enforcement. Yes, a dedicated enough child can find a way to get around an onerous requirement if you give them a general-purpose computer that’s allowed to download and install a virtual machine. (Which means the parent already choose not to enforce strict security.) But this requirement isn’t onerous, not yet. Maybe a parent can be onerous about it and generate conflict that way. But the goal here isn’t to create a perfect seal with perfect enforcement in the first place.

OS-level age verification is a hand-out to Meta, etc

some bluecheck hustler account on x.com Mark Zuckerberg keeps telling lawmakers and jurors that Apple and Google should verify everyone’s age at the operating system level.

➡️ He said it under oath last month in Los Angeles.
➡️ Meta, X, and Snap sent a joint letter to South Dakota legislators saying the same thing.
➡️ Meta’s youth safety policy director has testified in multiple state hearings pushing this approach.

The framing is always about protecting kids. But look at what OS-level age verification actually builds.

First, it moves legal liability off Meta. Zuckerberg is facing 1,600+ lawsuits alleging Instagram harmed minors. If Apple and Google own age enforcement, Meta’s lawyers get to point at Cupertino and Mountain View when enforcement fails.
…
Right now Meta relies on self-reported birthdates for age data. Their own internal documents showed millions of underage users slipping through.

An OS-verified age signal, potentially backed by government ID or biometrics, gives Meta a high-confidence demographic data point for every user, on every device, delivered via API, at zero implementation cost to Meta.

They don’t build the system. They don’t store the IDs. They don’t take the PR hit. They just read the signal and feed it into the ad targeting machine that generates $130B+ in annual revenue.

Meta gets identity infrastructure without the surveillance optics.
…
So when Zuckerberg says age verification at the phone level is “just a lot cleaner,” he’s right. It’s very clean.

For him.

First off, I don’t think this is a huge win for Meta. Having age signals which count as actual knowledge severely limits their ability to harvest data on minors. They don’t get the identity infrastructure because they don’t get the identities. Those “millions of underage users slipping through” are profits that this would cut off.

It’s true that this removes the responsibility for age verification from Meta. That’s a good thing. We don’t want Meta to be in charge of that. Meta shouldn’t “store the IDs”. Parents are the ones who should be authoritatively identifying minors. Meta shouldn’t be guessing and it certainly shouldn’t have access to the information that would allow it to make conclusive decisions. The age signal “does the work for them”.

Meta may want this for the wrong reason, but that doesn’t make it the wrong move. Objecting to anything that benefits Meta may be a decent rule of thumb but that’s not a perfect metric. This benefits them compared to other policies, but that’s because it doesn’t require them to do work they shouldn’t be doing.

Privacy

But ultimately this does expose new information.

Some additional data will be exposed to some new parties. The goal here is, necessarily, to identify users by age and discriminate against specific age categories, so this is unavoidable. There are privacy concerns inherent to any discrimination, but the current proposals and industry standards already carry extreme privacy risks and tend to expose much more personal information than simple age categories.

There’s a lot of detail I’m skimming over here. For privacy protection this can be treated as something similar to a high-entropy client hint that’s only sent if the server requests it and the client is configured to send it. There are other relevant security settings for headers to prevent this from leaking or being used in other fingerprinting. I’m simplifying the technical side here.

But theoretically this could be abused by malicious querying to give slightly more granular data:

Matías N. Goldberg@matiasgoldberg
If yesterday I queried your age and it said bracket < 17, and today I queried and it says >= 18.
CONGRATULATIONS! You've leaked the user's date of birth. Instead of protecting the user (specially children!), you've harmed them.
Malicious apps *will* query age every day.
Tue Mar 03 18:57:19 +0000 2026

There are ways to avoid this. Earlier I suggested some techniques for implementing low-entropy age bracket information, and subject-matter experts can design something even better, I’m sure.

But at a high level, this complaint doesn’t make sense. Introducing age bracket signals doesn’t introduce new harm because every alternative to this reveals much more information. If a malicious service abused a poorly-designed API for this, maybe they could get a more precise date of birth out of you. But the alternative — the system we have today — is an account setup process that requires people to enter their date of birth up front. Bracket information gives up far less data than this.

The bad ones (are worse)

Have you ever been in a room and realized you were trying to solve a completely different problem than everyone else? That the disconnect wasn’t just that you have different ideas about implementation, but that others were operating with a fundamentally different set of values and priorities than was appropriate?

Almost everywhere in the “age filter” world, people are working on the wrong problem. Everyone at every level of authority is incentivized against building systems that adequately protect privacy, even when that’s explicitly their job. Age attestation’s private, parent-centered approach is a rare gem in a mire of bad ideas.

I won’t be diving deep here, but here’s a quick overview of some of the other age filtering proposals. There’s a lot more wrong with these, but I’ll be focusing on the age filtering parts here.

New York’s Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act

SAFE does a few things that are sort of normal, like categorizing personalized feeds as a prohibited form of collecting data from minors, COPPA style. But the primary function of the law is to require age verification based on identification:

Proposal …The term Age Verification means to use generally accepted identification, including government-provided identification, or validation against an official records source, to confirm an individual’s age or age status.

The proposal hinges on requiring this high level of verification. It makes it unlawful for service providers to communicate with minors without age verification — meaning they’re required to verify everyone’s age authoritatively. Verification is judged by accuracy and verification requirements that do not use the authority and consent of the guardian as the root of trust. The law suggests using government-provided identification and later encourages biometric or AI identification so long as companies can prove accuracy.

There are steep penalties for failing to accurately verify this data and there is no remedy for mishandling or exposure of data. This incentivizes over-aggressive data collection and storage without doing anything to prevent or remedy data breaches.

It’s got more nastiness bundled in it too. It encodes the “social media addiction” myth into law. It has some truly absurd ideas, like time of day restrictions policing when social media is allowed to operate. Obvious freedom of speech issues aside, “compliant” services are exempted from this, so it’s just an obvious attempt at coercing sites into implementing age verification.

TX SB2420 App Store Accountability Act

Texas’s App Store Accountability Act is another mandatory identification law requiring verification, not attestation. It doesn’t just require services to correctly react to information provided, it imposes a duty on app stores to actively collect and verify identities.

It’s mandatory identification for the internet. It’s not narrowly tailored, it’s not content-neutral, and the liability it imposes forces invasive data collection.

The App Association — a global trade association for tech companies — released a press release debunking this effort, which summaries the problems well:

The App Store Accountability Act: Myths vs. Facts …
…because ASAA would impose a mandate, the app stores would be compelled to show compliance—and that means maintaining records of all of it. Moreover, ASAA doesn’t just ask app stores to verify age and parental consent status—it mandates that they share flags signifying that information with every single app developer, whether the app in question is TikTok or a weather widget built by a solo developer in Ohio.

It also replaces the existing parental consent mechanism with a new version with additional failure points. Currently (without ASAA), if a parent declines a download by their child, the download is stopped at the operating system level. But ASAA would require a flag indicating parental consent status to be sent to the developer, which may or may not be received or properly adhered to, depending on whether the developer has updated their app. This leaves developers holding the bag and robs parents of a consent mechanism that actually works.

…the bill’s strict liability standards make invasive ID collection a practical inevitability. ASAA demands that app stores verify users into four highly granular age categories—”young child” (under 13), “child” (13-15), “teenager” (16-17), and “adult” (18+)—using methods “reasonably designed to ensure accuracy.” Platforms face FTC enforcement and crushing financial penalties if they misclassify a 12-year-old as a 13-year-old or a 17-year-old as an 18-year-old.

Distinguishing between adjacent age groups is technically impossible using privacy preserving age assurance methods. As Graham Dufault, General Counsel at ACT | The App Association, noted in a recent FTC workshop on age verification, the accuracy demands of the ASAA proposals push platforms toward “direct evidence” of age and identity—government IDs, birth certificates—to avoid liability. Even the majority’s example of Apple Pay requires users to verify their identity with hard credentials before Apple Pay can be used for downstream verification. …

Experts know that age assurance is on a spectrum, with the most accurate (age verification) also posing the highest risks because it requires “direct evidence” of age and identity (government-issued IDs). Because verification is the highest-risk form of assurance, it is used only sparingly—in order to block access to goods or services that themselves pose especially severe age-related risks—and IDs that are checked in real life are usually not collected and stored. Creation of a credential, however—especially if doing so is required by law—necessitates the retention of ID information. ASAA demands more than just a quick check of an ID at the door. By requiring absolute “verification” instead of encouraging innovation in privacy-preserving age assurance sensitive to the risks it presents (and the risks it must address), ASAA fails the risk-based approach test age assurance requires.

The courts have already thrown out the ASAA as not narrowly-tailored, more restrictive than existing alternatives, filled with unevidenced assertions with no evidentiary support, and ultimately an unlawful regulation of speech.

SCREEN act

The Screen (Shielding Children’s Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net) Act is federal obscenity law dressed up as a child protection effort.

It’s designed with the intent to globally lock minors from accessing “obscene” or “pornographic” content. It’s not parental empowerment, it ignores the ability of a parent to regulate what they consider “obscene” and acts as a blanket ban on specific categories of information.

This has identity verification requirements bundled in:

(a) Covered platform requirements.—Beginning on the date that is 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act, a covered platform shall adopt and utilize technology verification measures on the platform to ensure that—
(1) users of the covered platform are not minors; and
(2) minors are prevented from accessing any content on the covered platform that is harmful to minors.

(b) Requirements for age verification measures.—In order to comply with the requirement of subsection (a), the technology verification measures adopted and utilized by a covered platform shall do the following:
(1) Use a technology verification measure in order to verify a user’s age.
(2) Provide that requiring a user to confirm that the user is not a minor shall not be sufficient to satisfy the requirement of subsection (a).
(3) Make publicly available the verification process that the covered platform is employing to comply with the requirements under this Act.

Not only is this third-party identity and age verification, it actually explicitly preempts user attestation. It’s looking for technical verification measures to prevent any minor — regardless of context or parental consent — from interacting with broad categories of information the government finds objectionable. See the root of trust shift: now it’s the companies who are obligated to verify identity, not the client.

As the SCREEN act says in its own preamble,

…the Supreme Court of the United States has struck down the previous efforts of Congress to shield children from pornographic content, finding that such legislation constituted a “compelling government interest” but that it was not the least restrictive means to achieve such interest.

And they’re correct! This isn’t legal, they know it’s not legal, we’re done here.

KIDS act

The KIDS Act is another age bill introduced at the federal level. With the full name “Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act”, it has the best backronym so far. But it’s another federal age verification law based on “obscenity” control very similar to SCREEN:

(4) Technology verification measure—
The term technology verification measure means technology that employs a system or process to determine whether it is more likely than not that a user of a covered platform is a minor.

(a) Covered platform requirements Beginning on the date that is 1 year after the date of the enactment of this Act, a provider of a covered platform shall— (1) adopt and utilize commercially available technology verification measures, reasonably designed to ensure accuracy, with respect to the covered platform of such provider to identify minors; and (2) prevent minors from accessing any sexual material harmful to minors on the covered platform.

(b) Additional requirements for compliance In order to comply with subsection (a), a provider of a covered platform (or a third party contracted by a provider of a covered platform with respect to such covered platform) shall, with respect to a covered platform of the provider, carry out the following:
(1) Use a technology verification measure in order to verify the age of a user.
(2) Provide that a user confirming that the user is not a minor is not sufficient to verify age.
(3) Provide clear and conspicuous notice containing information on the technology verification measures and other policies and procedures related to the technology verification measure data used to comply with this title.
(4) Take reasonable measures to address circumvention of technology verification measures.

KIDS ticks the usual bad boxes. Using commercially available verification measures designed ensure accuracy, inviting ID and biometric based identity management while ruling out parental age attestation as a vector.

KIDS also has a federal preemption clause:

No State, or political subdivision of a State, may prescribe, maintain, enforce, or continue in effect any law, rule, regulation, requirement, standard, or other provision having the force and effect of law to the extent that such law, rule, regulation, requirement, standard, or other provision requires a provider of a covered platform to use technology verification measures to prevent minors from accessing any sexual material harmful to minors on a covered platform of such provider.

Federal preemption is normal for interstate commerce regulation — it’s correct for this kind of thing to be regulated at the federal level rather than have many unique compliance requirements — but KIDS would be a bad law preempting a good one. Better age assurance methods, like the protocol established by California and Colorado, are “any law… that requires… a provider of a covered platform to use technology verification measures to prevent minors from accessing [material]”, and would be overturned by this clause, replacing good law with bad.

KOSA

In reviewing KOSA, I made a note that it has “lots of normal stuff”, more than I was expecting. Among the normal stuff are some inoffensive clauses requiring parental control tools which essentially describe technology already widespread today:

(1) Tools A covered platform shall provide readily accessible and easy-to-use parental tools for parents to support a user that the platform knows is a minor with respect to the use of the platform by that user.

(2) Requirements The parental tools provided by a covered platform under paragraph (1) shall include—

(A) the ability to manage a minor’s privacy and account settings, including the safeguards and options established under subsection (a), in a manner that allows parents to—
(i) view the privacy and account settings; and
(ii) in the case of a user that the platform knows is a child, change and control the privacy and account settings;
(B) the ability to restrict purchases and financial transactions by the minor, where applicable; and
(C) the ability to view metrics of total time spent on the covered platform and restrict time spent on the covered platform by the minor.

The KOSA draft works very hard to keep the exact language of age verification out of the bill, but it’s still designed to encourage sites to implement identity verification and places the burden on accurately determining this data on services, not parents.

The real problem is the push to expand the definition of what constitutes “reasonable effort” under COPPA to include verification (not attestation), using accurate commercial tools rather than prioritizing privacy or freedom of speech:

(B)Reasonable effort
A covered platform shall be deemed to have satisfied the requirement described in subparagraph (A) if the covered platform is in compliance with the requirements of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (15 U.S.C. 6501 et seq.) to use reasonable efforts (taking into consideration available technology) to provide a parent with the information described in subparagraph (A) and to obtain verifiable consent as required.

From the EFF’s research summary,

Jason Kelley, The Kids Online Safety Act is Still A Huge Danger to Our Rights Online …there is essentially no outcome where sites don’t implement age verification. There’s no way for platforms to block nebulous categories of content for minors without explicitly requiring age verification. If a 16-year-old user truthfully identifies herself, the law will hold platforms liable, unless they filter and block content. If a 16-year-old user identifies herself as an adult, and the platform does not use age verification, then it will still be held liable, because it should have “reasonably known” the user’s age.

A platform could, alternatively, skip age verification and simply institute blocking and filtering of certain types of content for all users regardless of age—which would be a terrible blow for speech online for everyone. So despite these bandaids on the bill, it still leaves platforms with no choices except to institute heavy-handed censorship and age verification requirements. These impacts would affect not just young people, but every user of the platform.

I spoke about the danger of the Attorney General’s power to selectively enforce attestation law on edge cases. Obscenity law is categorically worse. The Attorney General doesn’t just have the power to choose who to enforce the law on, they have the power to argue for what content they believe is obscene or objectionable.

Quoting the same EFF article again:

Jason Kelley, The Kids Online Safety Act is Still A Huge Danger to Our Rights Online KOSA’s co-author, Sen. Blackburn of Tennessee, has referred to education about race discrimination as “dangerous for kids.” Many states have agreed, and recently moved to limit public education about the history of race, gender, and sexuality discrimination. If KOSA passes, platforms are likely to preemptively block conversations that discuss these topics, as well as discussions about substance use, suicide, and eating disorders. As we’ve written in our previous commentary on the bill, KOSA could result in loss of access to information that a majority of people would agree is not dangerous. Again, issues like substance abuse, eating disorders, and depression are complex societal issues, and there is not clear agreement on their causes or their solutions. To pick just one example: in some communities, safe injection sites are seen as part of a solution to substance abuse; in others, they are seen as part of the problem. Under KOSA, could a platform be sued for displaying content about them—or about needle exchanges, naloxone, or other harm reduction techniques?
…
The same issue exists on both sides of the political spectrum. KOSA is ambiguous enough that an Attorney General who wanted to censor content regarding gun ownership, or Christianity, could argue that it has harmful effects on young people.

COPPA 2.0

S. 836: Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act or “COPPA 2.0” expands COPPA with new invasive requirements:

…(iii) to obtain verifiable consent from a parent of a child or from a teen before using or disclosing personal information of the child or teen for any purpose that is a material change from the original purposes and disclosure practices specified to the parent of the child or the teen under clause (i);

This “verifiable consent” is a massive new requirement. The “verification” required here applies to all users — not just children — to confirm their age. Everyone will have to prove their adulthood not just for adult material but for any data use.

This is the alternative to digital identification, let’s do this instead

Age verification very, very, very bad. Age attestation is better.

What makes them different isn’t just the text of a bill or a degree of enforcement, it’s their radically different purposes. Age verification requires platforms and services to antagonistically profile and restrict their users. Age attestation provides the device owner a tool to assert their own identity and make demands of the services they use.

Age attestation at the operating system level is a powerful tool that doesn’t just help parents, it protects the internet from a dangerous, sweeping censorship movement. The current age attestation proposals have their problems but they’re still categorical improvements over everything else out there.

When you see the movement for “user accounts set up with age brackets at the operating system level”, that’s not a euphemism for digital identity or backdoored chips, that is a ray of sunshine to a world falling into darkness. So long as it stays limited we need to push for it. It’s the good one.

We cannot (and will not) win the “the internet should be an unregulated anarchy” war. We can (and must!) win the “no personal identification needed to speak” war.

Anthropic and The Authoritarian Ethic

2026-03-03T00:00:00-06:00

This has been a wild weekend for the fields of tech policy and AI safety. As a writer I am not normally a news guy, but this moment has felt like kind of a perfect microcosm of both the AI industry and the Trump administration’s flavor of petulant authoritarianism.

The AI company Anthropic — known for their engineering-focused chatbot Claude — was founded by former OpenAI employees who left to form their own company because they weren’t satisfied with OpenAI’s safety standards. Anthropic’s prioritizing of ethics and care have not been a handicap for them; they’ve led to Claude, the best LLM product on the market today. In July 2025 Anthropic was awarded a two-year $200 million contract with the Department of Defense to support AI for use in classified government environments, mirroring similar contracts the government made with other companies. Despite the internal competition with ChatGPT and Llama, Claude was the highest-quality product and the only one approved for use in classified military systems.

But Anthropic’s culture of (relative) corporate responsibility set it up to be the target of a frenzy the Trump people had already worked themselves into: the specter of “woke AI.” The presidential order “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government (July 2025)” was an ideological rant typical of Trump’s presidential orders filled with false and foolish assertions to justify banning LLMs involved in federal workflows from “incorporating concepts” like “DEI”, “intersectionality”, and “transgenderism”.

In January 2026 this cause was taken up by Pete Hegseth, the self-proclaimed “secretary of war” — a fake extra-evil title he gave himself, analogous to if I made people call me “Dr. Destructo”. In a speech he gave at SpaceX, introduced by Elon Musk, he echoed Musk’s talking points about AI needing a right-wing ideological alignment:

Remarks by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth at SpaceX Today I want to clarify what responsible AI means at the Department of War. Gone are the days of equitable AI and other DEI and social justice infusions that constrain and confuse our employment of this technology. Effective immediately, responsible AI at the War Department means objectively truthful AI capabilities employed securely and within the laws governing the activities of the department. We will not employ AI models that won’t allow you to fight wars.

We will judge AI models on this standard alone; factually accurate, mission relevant, without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications. Department of War AI will not be woke. It will work for us. We’re building war ready weapons and systems, not chatbots for an Ivy League faculty lounge.

Pete Hegseth’s “Accelerating America’s Military AI Dominance” memo furthered this preemptive war against technology that conflicted with MAGA ideals, “as if we were at war:”

Clarifying “Responsible Al” at the DoW - Out with Utopian Idealism, In with Hard-Nosed Realism. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and social ideology have no place in the Do W, so we must not employ AI models which incorporate ideological “tuning” that interferes with their ability to provide objectively truthful responses to user prompts. The Department must also utilize models free from usage policy constraints that may limit lawful military applications. Therefore, I direct the CDAO to establish benchmarks for model objectivity as a primary procurement criterion within 90 days, and I direct the Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment to incorporate standard “any lawful use” language into any DoW contract through which AI services are procured within 180 days.

The demand to incorporate this new language allowing “any lawful use” into existing contracts was Pete starting a fight. The DoD intended for this to apply retroactively, meaning all existing AI contracts needed to be updated to expand the government’s authority to use the software not according to the agreed-upon scope in the contract and terms, but for “any lawful use.” This obviously doesn’t work because the existing two-year contracts were already approved by both parties with their current language. (It’s not true that “any lawful use” is a standard clause, because the Trump admin already choose not to use it in 2025.) All the current terms of all the existing contracts are terms the government and the firms agreed to with full knowledge. The pentagon already agreed that the existing contract didn’t tie its hands in any way that would prevent them from doing anything they considered critical.

This is a normal situation and gives both parties the stability that contracts are for. There’s no room for a firm to “pull the rug” and change terms of access, but neither is there room for the government to unilaterally change the agreement. It’s the Pentagon who’s trying to break the original contract and unilaterally change the terms, not Anthropic. So now they have to renegotiate, or else the Pentagon needs some excuse to back out of the agreement they made.

And Anthropic has provided Claude to the DoD as a project with a specific scope. The two main “red line” requirements in Anthropic’s Acceptable Use Policy that still applied to government use were that Claude could not be used for mass domestic surveillance or as part of a fully autonomous weapons system.

Anthropic, Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War (Feb 26, 2026) …in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do. Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now:

Mass domestic surveillance. We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties. …

Fully autonomous weapons. … They need to be deployed with proper guardrails, which don’t exist today.

To our knowledge, these two exceptions have not been a barrier to accelerating the adoption and use of our models within our armed forces to date.

Claude isn’t for panopticons and it’s not for killbots. If they wanted one, it’d have to be something different. The AUP doesn’t ban all possible evil use, but it does wall off these areas which are legitimate near-term risks where AI technology could plausibly be abused. The Pentagon now suddenly demands they have access to the system without these extremely basic safety guardrails in the contract language.

Anthropic is normal

While Anthropic is the hero of this particular story for being the most responsible person in the room, I am not here to cheer for it as my favorite team. It’s still a profit-driven company, it’s still contributing to the AI problems, and it even chose to become a defense contractor for the Trump administration. But they’ve been more responsible than their peers.

Nothing makes me angrier than people who don’t have principles and say whatever they have to say to gain power, even when their justifications are contradictory. In contrast to that, Anthropic has been consistently in favor of AI regulation. In 2025 they were the first tech company to endorse the SB 53 AI regulation bill which would mandate extra safety requirements on companies including themselves. They are not just mercanaries trying to grab power. They’re pro-safety and pro-regulation in general as a business strategy, even when that means the government takes power from them.

The fact that surveillance and killbots are the only issues left shows how minimal Anthropic’s terms with the government have actually been. They’ve already massively compromised on their ethical principles to work with the military. And I don’t mean in a guilt-by-association way, I mean very literally, Anthropic has already specially modified their policy with the government to permit the military to do almost anything it wants — far more than any commercial offering allows.

In their public Acceptable Use Policy, under “Universal Usage Standards”, Anthropic has a blanket prohibition on developing and designing weapons. In fact, most of their Universal Usage Standards are just a description of what it means to be the federal government in 2026:

These supposedly universal prohibitions do not extend to the US military; Anthropic submitted a bid to use Claude in coordinating autonomous drone swarms. Their only requirement was for a human to be in the loop on kill decisions — an absolutely minimal gesture towards safety made while still selling weapons to a rogue government.

Anthropic has been extremely focused on the design and tuning of Claude, as evident by their detailed constitution outlining what kind of character they want Claude to have. They’re not just trying to play legal games with terms of service, they’re trying to build something that resists certain categories of use at a structural level. But in terms of exercising legal power via contract or terms, they’re doing the bare minimum.

The obvious failure of Anthropic here is that they involved themselves with the defense industry in the first place. Since the original contract Claude has heavily contributed to the most sensitive and controversial military operations. Claude reportedly played a key role in the extrajudicial capture of Nicolás Maduro, and was used again when Trump attacked Iran.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has expressed ongoing concern over potential misuse of AI, and even noted the extralegal federal military engagements in Minnesota as evidence that the core values and principles in his ethical framework (namely, anti-autocracy) are at risk:

Dario Amodei@DarioAmodei
I've been working on this essay for a while, and it is mainly about AI and about the future. But given the horror we're seeing in Minnesota, its emphasis on the importance of preserving democratic values and rights at home is particularly relevant.
Mon Jan 26 17:03:46 +0000 2026

The threat of military violations seems to concern Anthropic not because they’re woke libs or antiwar hippies but because they’re normal people. And normal people who engage in second-order thinking understand the potential implications of playing a role in what appear to be multiple breaches of US and international law. Trump’s getting away with it, but for how long? And what warmongers will be held responsible along with him? Even for defense contractors, behaving responsibly is a long game it’s important to play.

It’s not just about killer robots and mass surveillance

It’s interesting to think about the imminent threat posed by weaponization of surveillance using AI. Mass surveillance is a very real, very serious issue. Autonomous killing robots are a less imminent threat, but still a serious issue given drone warfare.

So it’s easy to see a story here: there are two guardrails and the people being guarded by the guardrails have suddenly become very angry about them, which means they must want to break those particular rules. When people suddenly become willing to pour enormous resources into repealing a law or regulation it’s usually because there’s friction in that particular spot.

Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesias
Normal guy: “why would AI even be able to kill people?”
Yudkowsky: [Complicated account of deception and instrumental convergence.]
Hegseth: “We will force companies to make unsupervised killer robots, that’s why.”
Wed Feb 25 01:20:18 +0000 2026

I don’t think this is the most salient read of the situation. I think the issue is much deeper and much worse.

The authoritarian ethic

I don’t believe this conflict is primarily over any particular term or condition. It’s not driven by the Trump admin wanting to break those terms now, it’s that they object to working with anyone in a relationship that isn’t strictly authoritarian.

Authoritarianism has an internal value system, even though it’s deeply backwards. It places moral weight on power, loyalty, and hierarchy of authority. Anthropic is only showing the thinnest possible pretense of responsibility, but this tiny gesture towards real virtue is objectionable to Trump and Hegseth because it’s a genuine breach of their values. Anthropic’s token gestures towards humanity offend the misanthropes.

Trump and Hegseth are expressing genuine moral outrage at the idea that there could ever be an authority higher than their moment-to-moment whims. The idea of people with rights working with others is disturbing because it implies a system of rights, a world where people have value that isn’t bestowed on them by their betters. These people are genuinely outraged at the idea of having to work with others in any capacity except being served by subordinates.

The Trump admin is defined by a cult of blind loyalty. It’s not looking to do business with private companies for economic prosperity or technical efficacy, it is looking to force tech companies into an alliance with Trump’s fascist political project. And they see the USA as being engaged in a civil war. Against the Democratic Party, against democratic cities, against immigrants, against Antifa, against libs, against woke. To them a dispute is not a business matter, it is a wartime betrayal of allegiance others are expected to uphold, or else be classified as enemies.

The authoritarians fundamentally do not understand mutually beneficial arrangements and they have no sense of fair play. They see the world as a zero-sum game, and if they’re not winning they’re losing. There can be no force above them, so it’s a deep offense for them to be meaningfully bound by law or contract. They replace law with “policy”, unilaterally dictated by powerful executives without oversight, accountability, or recourse. (And the projection is obvious here, as they interpret “policy” as being equivalent to a whim when their enemies have it.)

In the real world, doing business with the government that involves scope-of-use provisions is completely normal. Being concerned about use of force in Minnesota is the duty of every responsible citizen. But growing authoritarianism is marked by a giddiness in demanding people act outside normalcy and making bigger and bigger claims on people.

What the Trump admin is violently objecting to is not tech policy, it is the idea that there could ever be such a thing as a higher standard at all. Not people, not nations, not contracts, not law, not ethics, not God. It is a “god complex” to ever consider checks and balances on the US government, in the eyes of these people who view themselves as the gods. This is a much worse problem than wanting to put Claude in killbots robots today, or wanting to identify political dissidents and execute them like in the Winter Soldier. It’s not any problem because it’s every problem. Seeing yourself as god means there’s no limit to the atrocities you’ll commit.

It is, to quote Eva, the ethos of the unapologetic rapist:

eva (^_^)/@eva.computer
people who are spiritually rapists react to being told "no" the same way in all contexts
2026-02-27T22:34:37.885Z

They fundamentally don’t want to work with people. They will force themselves onto whatever they want when given the opportunity. They don’t want to negotiate consent. They revel in the power imbalance itself and their ability to exploit it. They want to dominate and for others to submit.

The Trump administration has actually been completely upfront about this

Senior Official Jeremy Lewin@UnderSecretaryF
This isn’t about Anthropic or the specific conditions at issue. It’s about the broader premise that technology deeply embedded in our military must be under the exclusive control of our duly elected/appointed leaders. No private company can dictate normative terms of use—which can change and are subject to interpretation—for our most sensitive national security systems. The @DeptofWar obviously can’t trust a system a private company can switch off at any moment.
Fri Feb 27 04:53:18 +0000 2026

The conflict has nothing to do with a backdoor that they can “switch off at any moment”; no such risk exists. It’s over the premise that private property exists; that people are able to retain rights even when inconvenient for the government.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (@SecWar), Feb 27, 2026 This week, Anthropic delivered a master class[sic] in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon.

Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic.

Instead, @AnthropicAI and its CEO @DarioAmodei , have chosen duplicity. Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of “effective altruism,” they have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission - a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.
…
Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable.
…
Anthropic’s stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles. Their relationship with the United States Armed Forces and the Federal Government has therefore been permanently altered.

In conjunction with the President’s directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic’s technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.

America’s warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech. This decision is final.

Nearly every assertion of fact here is untrue. The DoD had no such requirement last summer when they agreed to the current contract and there is no potential for Anthropic to have any kind of veto power over operational decisions.

But the outrage is true and real. They see themselves making a unilateral demand and being told no as a fundamental “betrayal”. It’s “arrogance” because they see it as a lesser defying their betters. Their foundational belief is that it’s always wrong for anyone to say “no” to them. They don’t respect consent and agreement, only subordination. Not immediately violating your core principles when asked reads to them as an issue of dominance, because they see themselves as necessarily dominant. Anything other than immediate submission is strong-arming the Regime, who has every right to compel any behavior they want from anyone at any time.

We see the same position from Trump himself:

President Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump@truthsocial.net), Feb 27, 2026 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS! That decision belongs to YOUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, and the tremendous leaders I appoint to run our Military.

The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY.

Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again! There will be a Six Month phase out period for Agencies like the Department of War who are using Anthropic’s products, at various levels. Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow.

WE will decide the fate of our Country — NOT some out-of-control, Radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP

As always with Trump we are buffeted by an avalanche of the dumbest lies you’ve ever heard. Anthropic’s terms of service are in no way in conflict with the US Constitution. Anthropic is not “leftist”, it is a defense contractor selling millions of dollars of munitions to the federal government for their discretionary use. They kept doing this after the government used those weapons to commit crimes, and is still bragging about its commitment to giving the US government tools that the government consider extremely valuable. Anthropic contracted to Palantir in 2024. Radical leftists they are not.

But the emotions exactly explain the world Trump wants to lead. The only thing Trump values is loyalty and subservience, and so anything short of that makes you guilty of every evil: woke, radical, leftwing nutjobs. And still, even after pushing every nuclear option, all he wants to do is threaten. You “better get your act together” or I’ll make you. We’ll throw consequences at our enemies and justify them later. The only understanding of the situation is “we, not them”.

There’s this idea that this represents a coup and a fundamental threat to America, which at first seems absurd. But being denied is, in a weird way, a threat to the fundamental power of the government as they see it, because that power is based on fear instead of any form of order.

Nuclear retaliation over moderate behavior

As per the authoritarian ethic, Trump met what he perceived as disloyalty with a disproportionate, nuclear response.

Hegseth has now labeled Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, a designation reserved for foreign companies that might be compromised by enemy governments. This is used to prohibit material from nationalized firms like Huawei from entering anywhere in the “supply chain”. Hegseth is invoking this not to prevent a real risk, but to trigger existing clauses to prevent any federal contractor from using Claude at any point, as if it were so unsafe it could taint the entire lineage of any product. Not only does this deny Anthropic federal funding, it also prevents them from doing business with any businesses that work with the government.

At the same time, they threaten to invoke the Defense Production Act, a Korean War-era statue to nationalize critical industries to supply wartime emergencies. This could allow the government to compel Anthropic to do business in a specific way, but carries the exact opposite semantic designation of a supply chain risk. To invoke the DPA is to argue the product is so valuable and critical to national security that the government has the right to unilaterally seize it.

Dean W. Ball@deanwball
Nvidia, Amazon, Google will have to divest from Anthropic if Hegseth gets his way. This is simply attempted corporate murder. I could not possibly recommend investing in American AI to any investor; I could not possibly recommend starting an AI company in the United States.
Fri Feb 27 22:46:02 +0000 2026

The disproportionate response is intentional. This is attempting to bankrupt Anthropic as a punitive, retaliatory measure.

The administration is trying to make an example out of Anthropic as explicit intimidation of other companies. The goal is to extralegally punish Anthropic so hard for not unconditionally submitting themselves to the whims of the administration that no other AI company would dare show the same “resistance.” These are both outlandish nuclear options and misusing them like this is already criminal.

This is all more consequence-first-justification-later nonsense. They’ve proved as much by the military using Claude to attack Iran after claiming it was a security risk. It’s obviously pretextual (a legal term for “lying”), but it’s a way the government could abuse existing procedures to inflict damage on a political enemy. Which is their whole deal. The hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug.

It’s the same move Trump always does, the same move he’s pulled with tariffs. It’s deeply corrupt use of the government to coerce people with strong-arm economic pressure invented by the executive to make an example out of punishing enemies.

Lawful conduct is a joke

The argument against safeguards is that you don’t need any external safeguards because you can always trust in the good ol’ liberal process to set military policy safely and responsibly through the constitutional system. This is obviously nonsense. The Trump admin has never respected US law, not since day one. They’re thugs.

Prevention — even unenforced prevention that only establishes remedy, like a terms of service document — is perhaps the only defense against this. Take the risk of domestic surveillance: we see the same story continually. Something is secretly deployed, it’s leaked later, and by the time there’s a chance to object it’s considered “national security” and the damage can never be remediated. The courts failed already, and fail again for each tick of the clock.

With the trumpies especially, there is an obvious contempt for due process and any procedure that threatens leaders’ power to execute their personal decisions. They commit crimes faster than enforcement can catch up and it has, unfortunately, worked.

The Trumpist understanding of politics is immediate power at the expense of long-term stability. “As long as our hand is on the immediate means of enforcement, we have the power.”

Miles Taylor, “One step closer to bombing civilians” (2025) …
On the flight home, Stephen Miller — then a senior advisor to the president — sat down across from me and the head of the U.S. Coast Guard. What followed was a conversation I’ll never forget.

“Admiral,” Miller asked, “the military has aerial drones, correct?”

“Yes,” the Admiral answered.

“And some of those drones are equipped with missiles, correct?”

“Sure,” the Admiral said, beginning to catch on.

Miller pressed further: “And when a boat full of migrants is in international waters, they aren’t protected by the U.S. Constitution, right?”

The Admiral clarified that while technically true, international law still applied.

“Then tell me why,” Miller said, “can’t we use a Predator drone to obliterate that boat?”

The Admiral, a veteran of military command, was dumbfounded. “Because it would be against international law,” he replied. You can’t kill unarmed civilians just because you want to.

Stephen Miller didn’t appear interested in the legal implications. Indeed, he seemed more interested in whether anyone could stop Trump from committing such acts.

“Admiral,” he concluded, “I don’t think you understand the limitations of international law.”

Perhaps Anthropic has an idea of the limitations of “all lawful use” as adjudicated by the federal government. Their negotiations seem to imply so:

Ross Anderson, “Inside Anthropic’s Killer-Robot Dispute With the Pentagon” The Pentagon had kept trying to leave itself little escape hatches in the agreements that it proposed to Anthropic. It would pledge not to use Anthropic’s AI for mass domestic surveillance or for fully autonomous killing machines, but then qualify those pledges with loophole-y phrases like as appropriate—suggesting that the terms were subject to change, based on the administration’s interpretation of a given situation.

In the eyes of the people with the hands on the levers, “lawful use” doesn’t mean power specifically granted in law by congress, it means… literally whatever makes the lever move. Especially in unaccountable military contexts, the federal government will interpret text to mean whatever it wants.

The NSA’s mass surveillance program was ruled illegal, and in response they continued doing the same things under an exciting new set of definitions. Torture being illegal doesn’t mean the US won’t do it, it means “if it was authorized by the President”, it can’t be considered torture. The act itself comes first, and regardless of what was done it gets justified after the fact however necessary.

Mass surveillance as lawful use of commercial data

Illegal, unconstitutional mass-surveillance is completely compatible with the government’s interpretation of “lawful use”, according to their own reports. Commercially available data collected without a warrant (which the US government has admitted to doing) is more than enough for the kind of detailed surveillance and identification Anthropic is concerned about, and everyone knows it.

Per Mike Masnick, “you get the sense that someone at Anthropic knows how the intel community misleads by using definitions of words that are different than everyone else believes.”

I could spend an enormous amount of time zooming in on any point here going over the exact pathways and mechanisms and doublespeak, but you don’t need that to see the shape of it. The shape is that they’re rapists.

This is widely unpopular with everyone

The good news is this has been wildly unpopular with everyone.

Anthropic hasn’t prevented the DoD from getting AI they can misuse — no one can — but by standing by their principles they’ve forced the issue into public consciousness, which is a win.

It’s also a win how profoundly hated Hegseth’s behavior has been here. Polling from Blue Rose Research shows that people — including Trump voters — believe companies should be able to set limits with the military, and further that we should ban autonomous weapons outright regardless of vendor:

David Shor@davidshor
The public - including Republicans - are overwhelmingly against what @PeteHegseth and the Trump administration are trying to do here.
The people unsurprisingly do not want killer robots and do not trust Trump/Hegseth/the Republican party to do the right thing without limits.

Tue Feb 24 22:07:21 +0000 2026

Open letter

Tech workers are standing against this too. In “We Will Not Be Divided”, the employees of OpenAI and Google have signed a joint petition to continue to require these safeguards:

The Department of War is threatening to

Invoke the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to serve their model to the military and “tailor its model to the military’s needs”

Label the company a “supply chain risk”

All in retaliation for Anthropic sticking to their red lines to not allow their models to be used for domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing people without human oversight.

The Pentagon is negotiating with Google and OpenAI to try to get them to agree to what Anthropic has refused.

They’re trying to divide each company with fear that the other will give in. That strategy only works if none of us know where the others stand. This letter serves to create shared understanding and solidarity in the face of this pressure from the Department of War.

We are the employees of Google and OpenAI, two of the top AI companies in the world.

We hope our leaders will put aside their differences and stand together to continue to refuse the Department of War’s current demands for permission to use our models for domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing people without human oversight.

Even the crooks who will definitely sell out as soon as they have the chance are paying lip service to the merits here. Like Jeff Dean, lead of Google AI:

Jeff Dean@JeffDean
Agreed. Mass surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment and has a chilling effect on freedom of expression. Surveillance systems are prone to misuse for political or discriminatory purposes.
Wed Feb 25 07:54:37 +0000 2026

And… urgh, and Sam Altman, who talked a big game but immediately sold out and gave the DoD everything they wanted without meaningful conditions.

Sam Altman@sama
@QuantumTumbler If we were asked to do something unconstitutional or illegal, we will walk away. Please come visit me in jail if necessary.
Sun Mar 01 01:07:05 +0000 2026

“We will not be divided” is cool until you realize scabbing has a paycheck. More on that later, I guess.

Dean Ball

Hey, remember Dean Ball, who wrote that “attempted corporate murder” quote I mentioned earlier? Dean Ball is worth taking another look at; he’s not a random Twitter pull or a fellow critic, he was the Trump Administration’s Senior Policy Advisor for AI and Emerging Tech. He’s the buying-the-euphemism conservative who wrote their AI policy. And in writing this essay I discovered we independently arrived at the same conclusions.

Dean W. Ball@deanwball
As I have said since the beginning, this is about the principle of the thing for both parties. Anthropic is saying private firms should be able to set the terms on which they offer products and services to the government. USG is saying no, private firms may not set terms of use. In other words, the USG is saying that companies who provide services to the military are not quite “contractors” but instead assets to be deployed at will by the government, only to be constrained by the government’s interpretation of the law. There is no difference in principle from the government saying “we unilaterally dictate the price of every service and product we procure.” After all, price is just another term in a contract. This is why the government’s stance has a certain appeal, but is ultimately conceptually incoherent and a fundamental departure from the principles of ordered liberty that you and I both share.
The “coloring within the lines of our republic” response is for the government to say, fine, we won’t give you business and we will give business to your competitors. Perhaps even to make a public stink about it. I don’t know a single person who objects to that or thinks it’s illegitimate for the government to do.
But instead what the government is doing is trying to destroy Anthropic, using policy measures reserved only for foreign adversaries. This is obviously a different-in-kind response, and all principled classical liberals should reject it outright. This is not hard, or at least it should not be.
In short: You are focusing on the wrong thing. Of course DoW is free to have a principle that they will accept no limitations on their use of technology. The problem is that their policy response is not just doing that, but instead attacking the basic principles of private property: that people have the right to set the terms of their engagement with the government.
Fri Feb 27 13:05:49 +0000 2026

Dean W. Ball@deanwball
@teortaxesTex As far as I know, Anthropic’s contractual limitations on the use of Claude by DoW have not resulted in a single actual obstacle or slowdown to DoW operations. This is a matter of principle on both sides.
Fri Feb 27 00:37:46 +0000 2026

He doesn’t call it authoritarian, but he sees the conflict for what it is: a conflict of principles.

He also discusses the disproportionate response:

Dean W. Ball@deanwball
The U.S. government just essentially announced its intention to impose Iran-level sanctions, or China-level entity listing, on an American company. This is by a profoundly wide margin the most damaging policy move I have ever seen USG try to take (it probably will not succeed).
Fri Feb 27 23:37:06 +0000 2026

Dean W. Ball@deanwball
Think about the power Hegseth is asserting here. He is claiming that the DoD can force all contractors to stop doing business of any kind with arbitrary other companies.
In other words, every operating system vendor, every manufacturer of hardware, every hyperscaler, every type of firm the DoD contracts with—all their services and products can be denied to any economic actor at will by the Secretary of War.
This is obviously a psychotic power grab. It is almost surely illegal, but the message it sends is that the United States Government is a completely unreliable partner for any kind of business. The damage done to our business environment is profound. No amount of deregulatory vibes sent by this administration matters compared to this arson.
Fri Feb 27 23:08:30 +0000 2026

Dean Ball, “Clawed - On Anthropic and the Department of War” War Secretary Pete Hegseth has gone even further, saying he would prevent all military contractors from having “any commercial relations” with Anthropic. He almost surely lacks this power… Essentially, the United States Secretary of War announced his intention to commit corporate murder. The fact that his shot is unlikely to be lethal (only very bloody) does not change the message sent to every investor and corporation in America: do business on our terms, or we will end your business.

This strikes at a core principle of the American republic, one that has traditionally been especially dear to conservatives: private property. Suppose, for example, that the military approached Google and said “we would like to purchase individualized worldwide Google search data to do with whatever we want, and if you object, we will designate you a supply chain risk.” I don’t think they are going to do that, but there is no difference in principle between this and the message DoW is sending. There is no such thing as private property. If we need to use it for national security, we simply will. …

This threat will now hover over anyone who does business with the government, not just in the sense that you may be deemed a supply chain risk but also in the sense that any piece of technology you use could be as well.
…
With each passing presidential administration, American policymaking becomes yet more unpredictable, thuggish, arbitrary, and capricious—a gradual descent into madness. It is hard to know at what point ordered liberty itself simply evaporates and we fall into the purely tribal world.

This is another excellent point. I’ve been focused on the authoritarian attitude behind the motivation, but the consequences generalize just as much. This is an attack on free association. It is an attack on the right of people to choose who they do business with and what the terms of that business can be, whether you can negotiate terms with the government and whether you can say no if they show up at your door with demands. It is, like so many other things, the question of whether or not we are ruled by a king. And as always, by Trump’s logic and justifications, we are.

This tells you about the rest of the industry

This kind of nuclear reaction over one company trying to maintain the most basic safeguards you’ve ever heard of tells you everything you need to know about the rest of the AI industry. As long as unstable and violent people like Hegseth who want a free pass to direct, unaccountable, safety-off tech are getting everything they want from OpenAI and co, you know every blip about “AI safety” you hear from them is bullshit.

This incident has provided a clear-cut line to test whether a company is serious about AI safety or not. Research and conferences and stunts mean nothing if you won’t reject this government; a government who is not only out of control and eager to use AI for harm, but is also willing to turn on you at a moment’s notice.

Even if Anthropic’s talk of ethics had been a marketing ploy, it’s deeply shameful that other firms are refusing to match those standards. Worse yet, Anthropic’s virtue — relative to its competitors — broke an otherwise united front of tech companies’ complicity in Trump’s fascism.

And they’re all still complicit, of course. Google reversed policy and is now eager for contracts to bring AI to autonomous weapons systems.

Elon Musk is bringing Grok into classified settings too. The ban on “ideological” training doesn’t apply to Grok, of course, because it’s all bullshit.

Elon Musk@elonmusk
Grok 3 is so based 😂

Sun Feb 16 13:09:33 +0000 2025

And then there’s OpenAI, a company who keeps removing references to safety from its mission statement, the company whose safety practice was so unconscionable it sparked the creation of Anthropic in the first place. OpenAI threw themselves at the DoD the day of the Anthropic retaliation.

Sam Altman@sama
Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network.
In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome.
AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement.
We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only.
We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements.
We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.
Sat Feb 28 02:56:18 +0000 2026

It’s truly shameless scabbing. It’s a show of fealty, an eagerness to break ranks with safety and cuddle up to a reckless and dangerous military.

Bonus: OpenAI and their exciting new tech, lying

There’s a lot to say about OpenAI’s agreement. Despite doublespeak and naive, unsecured promises from Sam Altman, the new agreement gives the government everything they wanted.

Sam Altman has Poster’s Disease, so we got to see him talk way too much about this in real time.

Admitting to the performative loyalty-signaling aspect:

Max the VC 👨‍🚀@mreiffy
@sama @Jack_Raines Why move forward with the DoW agreement now, after months of more cautious talks, and how confident are you that the technical / policy safeguards will hold up in a real high stakes military setting?
Sun Mar 01 00:40:16 +0000 2026

Sam Altman@sama
@mreiffy @Jack_Raines The main reason for the rush was an attempt to de-escalate matters at a time when it felt like things could get extremely hot.
I am confident in our team's ability to build a safe system with all of their tools--including policy and legal matters, but also many technical layers.
Sun Mar 01 01:17:21 +0000 2026

and, either naively or lyingly, signaling confidence in the safeguards that were not present:

melissa “cancelled student debt” byrne@mcbyrne
@sama Will you turn off the tool if they violate the rules?
Sun Mar 01 01:05:57 +0000 2026

Sam Altman@sama
@mcbyrne Yes, we will turn it off in that very unlikely event, but we believe the U.S. government is an institution that does its best to follow law and policy.
What we won't do is turn it off because we disagree with a particular (legal military) decision. We trust their authority.
Sun Mar 01 01:11:06 +0000 2026

dave kasten@David_Kasten
The intelligence law section of this is very persuasive if you don’t realize that every bad intelligence scandal in the last 30 years had a legal memo saying it complied with those authorities
Sat Feb 28 20:51:39 +0000 2026

::: thread unified

Mike Masnick@masnick.com
I saw some folks asking what the difference was between what OpenAI signed with the DoD and what Anthropic said they wanted, and Sam more or less admits here the key point: OpenAI's deal requires them to trust the NSA. Anthropic's contract had real safeguards.
2026-03-01T04:38:17.736Z

Mike Masnick@masnick.com
The deal Sam signed is the kind of deal someone who doesn't know how the NSA lies by telling you what you want to hear, but then secretly changing their definition of the plain English words in the contract.
www.techdirt.com/2011/05/26/s...
2026-03-01T04:38:17.737Z

Maybe they’re fascist collaborators, or maybe they’re just conveniently naive. Maybe they just don’t understand the limitations of international law.

Don’t get in bed with tyrants

This whole situation is a microcosm of authoritarianism. Demands for fealty, treating normal business as betrayal, moral outrage over safeguards for things they have no business objecting to. They reference laws and procedures as justifications but they don’t care about any of that. They’re playing calvinball.

Anthropic is in this position because it struck a bargain with the devil. They knew what Trump was; they had all the same information I have. They gambled where they shouldn’t have been playing and they lost where they ought not to have bet.

There’s at least some benefit how badly this exposes the government as crooked, not that we needed more evidence there. They’re going to continue to use AI for military purposes and those purposes are going to continue to be horrible, but this incident shows how vile they are even to people who should be their partners.

But this is also the toxin at the core of fascism. Nothing is ever enough. Fascists lash out at their allies and reveal that they can’t be respected. Companies might profit at first but as authoritarianism chips away at the systems that make them money they’ll realize it’s a losing game, because it always has been. There is no appeasing it. It’s a destruction spiral for anything that gets caught in it, and it ultimately has to be destroyed for anyone to be safe, ever. Fascism only ever escalates with more and more extreme loyalty tests until no one is left. A forever purity war.

pavedwalden@pavedwalden
I like this new build-it-yourself approach to propaganda. "First have a strong emotional response. I don't know what upsets you but you can probably think of something. Got it? Ok, now associate that with this unrelated thing I bring up"
IKEA Goebbels

Fri Feb 27 05:54:10 +0000 2026

_bbctol@_bbctol
@pavedwalden I like how the nightmare doesn't really get referenced again. like he doesn't even say the claude constitution contains your worst nightmare, or will make it real. it's just like "make sure you're in a scared mood before I tell you this information"
Fri Feb 27 17:31:58 +0000 2026

Gwen Snyder is uncivil@gwensnyder.bsky.social
I really do think that as much as laziness, it's a function of having their brains fully cooked by far right-captured social media, primarily Vichy Twitter.
The Trump regime really thinks that what resonates there resonates with voters. They don't clock it as an artificial echo chamber.
2026-02-28T16:10:53.004Z

Interloper and Artistry in Impressionistic Horror

2025-12-16T00:00:00-06:00

Interloper is an unfiction ARG series for source nerds. It feels like Interloper was laser-targeted to drive me specifically insane, but it turns out that was true for a lot of people. After three years the first episode has 856k views, and the recently released final episode is a feature-length 1:54 film that earns its runtime.

Couldn’t “solve interloper”

I’ve been obsessing about Interloper since the beginning, and when I saw the finale I knew I had to finish it out properly. But this article is my third attempt to write something about Interloper, after spending several weeks just doing research.

My first instinct after seeing the finale was to “solve” it. There was an enormous amount of information available that was all interconnected and painted a picture of this huge, fascinating world. Interloper F didn’t answer all the questions the series asked, but surely with all the clues it gave us, someone who really understood the series would put the pieces together. Surely I could, if I gave it some time and attention.

But that didn’t work.

I have a 40,000 word red strings board. I have thousands of connections that map out, in excruciating detail, how every entity, concept, and pattern in the series relate to each other. I’ve pushed my mind-mapping software to the limits of its usefulness.

Do you want to know what all Sourcebox relates to and how? I know the answer to that question; the answer is “no”.

I just threw away 1,000 words of prose on the SFM 10th anniversary teaser alone. Did you know about all this cool secret data hidden in a meaningful, structured format? If you did you sure didn’t document it, because I had to learn SFM myself to see it.

I have a page of “contradictions” that don’t reveal any secrets but instead add up to a miserable Cinemasins-style nitpick.

If we think of these videos as real YouTube videos published to a channel, that means someone has final cut. I tried to work this out, and it’s nonsense. There is no changeover period where an account that was run by one party is now run by another.
Demos can’t just be recordings of memories because Eida was actively generating them on maps he submitted live. They have to be generated dynamically. But demos can’t be generated dynamically because demos can be records of real gameplay sessions and the Interlope command can return the same demo multiple times. They have to be pulling from a repository of recordings.
- Demos are labeled with a commit message in the format 09-09-13, but that isn’t a date, except for Type 7s when it’s TODAY and it is.

I wanted to come up with a grand comprehensive theory that puts everything in the series into one self-consistent model. But I couldn’t, not to my own satisfaction. The analytical lenses I am drawn to don’t really capture what needs to be captured about Interloper. After all that, I’m left in the same position as the character Anomidae himself; trying to figure how to explain an immense, fascinating thing you don’t fully understand, because no matter what you do the pieces don’t fit. And even without the perfect solution, it might be time to move on.

But that gives me the answer. I know exactly what I’m not capturing already, because I know I’m not capturing it. I know everything there is to know because I know what I don’t know. All I need to show is what I’m missing.

Showcase of Source engine practical effects

But before that, let me explain why I’m so interested in this series in the first place, because it stands out as incredible even among the best unfiction projects. It’s very easy to miss how cool this is if you aren’t already intimately familiar with the Source ecosystem, and as a result I think a lot of it goes over peoples’ heads, which is a tragedy.

Technical showcase, practical effects

See, what’s incredible is how much of it is real. It’s not just horror, it’s also a showcase of technical feats. Anomidae is able to craft phenomenally engaging fiction while keeping large parts of it grounded in what’s technically possible. It’s not just theoretically nonfiction, it’s reproducible at home. And not just reproducible if you download some new game Anomi made for the story, reproducible with a wide array of commercial games that weren’t designed to do any of this, and which Anomi had no special access to.

I’ve seen a lot of reactions to the series by people who aren’t already source fans, and invariably they aren’t able to spot the seam where the fiction meets the real tech. It’s easy to see that TF2 is real and Skycrash is not, but people end up assuming demos or cubemaps or Boxrocket were invented for this too, and they weren’t. The Source Sample Tool is real and I’m running it. It all goes to show how masterfully all these details are designed and presented as expressions and extensions of reality.

It’s like comparing CGI to practical effects. It’s still fiction and still depends on an elaborate contrivance to make look believable, but at the end of the day a lot of what happens was actually done. He didn’t just say this was happening in source; he made it happen in source.

This plays really well into the “scientific supernatural” story: these unusual, anomalous things can be concrete and examinable while still being bizarre and mysterious.

Even within the fiction of the series, Anomi showed almost all his work. Much more than he had to for fiction or puzzle purposes. And even if he still insisted on making something you could download and experiment, he could have done that by making a sourcemod with some extras in the engine code. He didn’t. Everything is done by stretching familiar tools as far as they’ll go.

The demo files — even many of the Type 5 demos — are real and replayable. The maps and demos can actually be examined. The SFM sessions are real. Kulcs and Ordinance both happened, with one side orchestrated but the other side fully exposed to the real world the whole time.

In Interloper 7 Anomi creates a narrative reason to invent a working pinhole camera using light baking tech from 2004, and then really does it. Is there a use case for this outside this contrived story? Not really, no. The story creates the framework needed to show off this interesting technical demonstration in a way that’s not just a fun tech demo but is narratively satisfying. And even that fits within the fiction of the world: within the kayfabe, all this is being done for the purpose of research.

Using familiar space

Source really is a special choice. It’s a family of games that — as the series points out — people feel deep, genuine nostalgia for. And that special but familiar space was used as the staging ground for everything.

Almost everything not explicitly supernatural was just a slight reframing of esoteric mechanics that really have been sitting around on all of our computers since 2004. The series doesn’t just show supernatural events that shouldn’t be possible on screen, it lets you see the whole trick for yourself, and it works.

It’s not a puzzle, it’s horror and presentation

It really is horror

But why haven’t I solved the puzzle? The basic answer is that Interloper isn’t a puzzle; it’s horror.

Interloper was a Halloween special published on October 25 with the description “Happy Halloween!”. The thumbnail is a spooky shadow man with glowing white eyes. You find the decal in a spooky dark alleyway in Ravenholm and then one jumps out and gets you. Interloper is thoroughly a horror series, to the point where it seems silly to try to prove it, except for how straight and scientifically Anomidae’s character plays it. But the series is, ultimately, horror. It’s at times fascinating, majestic, even epic. (I’ve watched too much Interloper and now when I watch the trickshot¹ I cry real tears.) But all of that is in service of a ghost story.

There is incredible attention to detail everywhere in the series, and at certain points there are puzzles that you use details to solve, so it’s very tempting to understand the series as being about detail. You could try to understand the series as the thing it purports to be: incrementally discovering more and more about a coherent truth. And if the series is fundamentally about revealing a mystery, you can rely on conservation of detail and linguistic relevance: understand every move as being a carefully calculated form of communication, procedurally revealing details towards the solution. But this mode of analysis ultimately fails. The series isn’t detailed because it’s meant to be a puzzle, it’s detailed because it’s great.

It’s not primarily a puzzle

Interloper’s first priority isn’t to be a perfectly satisfying puzzle. It comes back at this metaphor a few times: interesting pieces that don’t really connect to each other and don’t build a cohesive picture. Even when two pieces seem to align with each other, it’s not part of a clearly defined picture.

Interloper F …Honestly? At this point I just don’t even know. Like yeah, we have a lot of pieces here now, a lot of things we can put together, but again, the full picture here just doesn’t make sense, and there’s just no way, realistically, to connect all of this together

The primary driver of the narrative is presentation and spectacle. Interloper is a series but it is also 14² different stories. The primary focus isn’t on making every piece ultimately build one cohesive picture, it’s how cool and interesting each piece is and how fun it is that they connect at all. In a puzzle each piece is subordinate; it’s a means to a larger, pre-determined end. But that isn’t how this series works. Big moves are done for awe and aura purposes, and so the universe behind them is not perfectly consistent.

It’s not inconsistent in significant ways that break the consistency of the universe. What’s broken is the conservation of narrative detail: we’re not given all the pieces and the pieces we do have don’t all fit together. There are enough tweaks and shifts in direction here and there that you can’t trust every minor detail as intentional communication.

I’m not saying this was “by design” per se. I don’t know that the intent was always to make sure the pieces didn’t fit cleanly together. I think this is just a natural consequence of focusing on the best parts of the series: the presentation, the spectacle, and the unfathomable mystery of it all. And I’m sure some shifts are the results of rewrites, since the story wasn’t fully written out from the beginning. But I don’t think that’s a major problem here.

Anomidae has a paywalled post on Discord titled “The Importance of “Realistic Consistency”. I won’t quote it here directly, but his general perspective is, I think, compatible with I’m describing here: the events fit within the world. Even in supernatural fiction, for a universe to be believable it needs to have an internal set of rules. It’s important that nothing break the rules, but at the same time the stories aren’t the deterministic product of the rules of the universe. The stories are fit within the universe.

This means some themes are one-off appearances and others end up getting retooled to serve a different purpose later.

For example, does the white slide at the end of Interloper 1 mean that section is authored by someone else? It’s an early iteration of the white slides used by Project Skybox which will signify a different narrator later in the series. A strictly literal reading says this implies that PSB’s involvement wasn’t just early as INT1, they were actually the ones uploading the videos the whole time. But this doesn’t make sense without really foundational shifts in how we understand the series.

If it were all designed to be a perfect puzzle, this would be asking the viewer to completely disrupt the way they understand the series. Using different design languages is a vehicle to communicate information to the viewer, and later reveals could reveal who was talking when in order to fill in missing pieces, etc.

But I don’t think that’s the point here. The white slide is used in INT1 to emphasize the “quick edit” nature of the cut, but that design language gets retooled later to serve a different semantic purpose. The “differentness” of the white slides migrates to implying a separate author. It doesn’t “break” anything to do this, obviously: it’s entirely possible for Anomi to use whatever colors he wants. It’s just a narrative inefficiency for the series as a whole.

The meaning is in connections as language

Interloper isn’t a puzzle first and foremost, but that doesn’t mean the pieces of the story are disconnected or that connections are meaningless when they appear. The connections between pieces show narrative and thematic relationships. They are their own language and tell a rich story that greatly supplements the in-universe narration. The obtuse interrelations between mechanics form a language that describe an intensely interrelated world. And that’s the story!

Interloper invites you to chew on implications without necessarily making those critical to the narrative. It allows for a lot of big gasps without locking any narrative pieces into a system that can be understood. There’s a lot that adds narrative depth but isn’t required to understand the skeleton of the plot. This makes it resist mechanical analysis but reward thematic analysis. The beauty of the thing is in the language it uses; the connections are designed to recontextualize moments with narrative and thematic implications, even if those implications aren’t literally transitive. It’s not lock-and-key puzzles, it’s fridge horror. And I think understanding it isn’t so much understanding how exactly every mechanism in this world works as much as understanding the depth of the language it uses.

This mode of analysis is parallel to some writing I’m planning to do on Wham City. There is an impressionistic aspect to the work; the meaning is found more in the experience than in a literal truth of the world. The Ring isn’t “about” Samara being the human reincarnation of a sea demon, it’s about seeing the fly move.

Short connections

Let’s try to apply this logic to a simple question: who is Olive?

“makeface demo” shows a photo of a real human woman named olive.vtf, in Valve texture format.
Correcting the record shows Mona answer that their name is Olive.
⏺LIVE is the thumbnail of Interloper 4.
The umbrella man’s model (in higuy) is ent_dmnpc_65ge-se, with a mesh named olive.smd, with a texture named corpse1.
During Ordinance, when a VUL sacrifice is made with the name “olive”, the bot name becomes SERVICE MANAGER.

People try to flatten this all down into one unified identity; “olive.smd proves Mona was an umbrella man!” is an extremely common theory. But if you really try to flatten all these points together it doesn’t make sense:

Olive was a person involved with FSKY who then somehow became trapped as an ethereal entity in the source engine. She was captured by Eida who treated her as some kind of ghost, She tried to escape and Eida managed to tear off her limbs by using Sourcebox in conjunction with the DM Editor and the gmod dismemberment addon until she didn’t move anymore. Eida then drowned-deleted Mona outright using the DM Editor. Years later she still exists as an Umbrella Man, despite never having any of the behavior or abilities of an umbrella man prior to being deleted. She’s also the bust, so she’s also chilling at void bedrock waiting for Skyghost to kick off Kulcs.

Anomidae somehow knew some or all of this as early as Interloper 4, despite that stream happening before the model had been extracted or any of the relevant Eida videos had been reuploaded.

Maybe, maybe all of that’s true at once. But that’d create more complexity than it solves. That’d mean this is a story about real people, not AI. It’d also transitively imply drown-deleting turns dmnpcs into umbrella men, which transitively implies Cge7-193 is an umbrella man while being a server… the more links in the chain, the weaker it gets.

If you instead back up and just listen to what the references are trying to tell you, you can hear the music of the thing. Olive was someone involved with FSKY while they were developing Source tech. FSKY’s tech is connected to both Mona and the umbrella men. And that FSKY connection extends all the way to Cge7-193, where some logic still exists to treat Olive as a special administrative role. Meanwhile, as with the “Special Presentation” slide, Anomi is hinting that he knows more than he’s letting on, and is keeping some secrets about the investigation to himself.

This mode of analysis gives fewer concrete facts about the world, but I think it’s a much more faithful way of understanding it. Because of the focus on presentation, the flow of the thing is more important than every follow-on implication. These “short connections” are where the series shines. References are used to show an almost aesthetic flow of meaning and movement.

Examples: read for flow, not puzzles

I’ll list some more examples where a literal interpretation fails but the flow-language works. This is also my excuse to turn a bunch of scattered and interesting connections into prose. This is really subject matter that calls for a video essay going rapid-fire through clips, not a Buzzfeed-style article with a few words between a flood of screenshots. But video is not my métier d’art, so here are some interesting examples:

The Ravenholm alley is thematically treated as a link between the source void and the other world, even though there’s no single mechanic that explains it. Like all the other FSKY assets with injected text, the umbrella man decal appears to be a hotloaded asset streamed in from an external server, something Anomi much later goes out of his way to explain is possible. Much later Ordinance ends with the pawn using a key to open a secret door in that spot in the alleyway. It even requires a key to open, tying it to the idea of Sourcebox activation being a back door into the void.

There’s a recurring theme of “shadow people”: black figures with glowing white eyes. This includes the umbrella man, of course, but also the shambling figures from spookycoast, “NOBODY” the chair man from the SFM 10th video, ent_undef from officehead, and potentially even Mona (as the bust). Is this a clue? No, it’s just communication. These things all have a common anomalous nature. The visual design is semiotics.

Is there literally an alternate version of d1_town_01 in the void caused by someone at FSKY recompiling it with modified map geometry? Is there literally a source entity to handle the lock-and-key effect in some secret FSKY FGD manifest? I mean, maybe, sure, but that’s not something you could confidently base any other theory on because it doesn’t matter. Instead, that spot is thematic language to invoke the idea of the seam between worlds throughout the series. The decal — and the Interlope command itself — is dependent on the external state of a server. And the Ravenholm connection culminates in Final Transmission to dramatic effect.

What exactly is the purpose of the drawing program in Ordinance? Within the kayfabe it’s unclear. But to the flow of the narrative, it foreshadows a series of themes about rendering user-generated graphics, and then sprays turn out to be the key to streaming memories from the captured interloper. Being able to draw a texture onto the Ravenholm alleyway from within the void also reinforces the earlier point that the umbrella man decal is streamed in dynamically from outside and not part of the retail game.

I already mentioned the design language in the black and white slides. Once you’ve noticed the different video editing techniques and templates you can see which videos are polished and which are released with sloppy cuts. Interlopers 5 and F in particular don’t make sense no matter how you slice them: there’s a combination of material that no single person within the fiction would choose to edit upload as-is.

It doesn’t work if you try to “solve” who is editing the videos and why, but it does work if you look for the meaning the language is meant to convey. The mix of design languages shows how different voices and perspectives are tackling the situation in different ways. The editing in 5 conveys a hecticness and the editing in F conveys a tension.

Here I think we run into a constraint of the medium. The actual material in the videos is nonliteral, in a way, because things like Interloper F don’t make sense as artifacts that would exist within the text. The literality of the unfiction breaks down in order to convey more of the meaning of the story.

How exactly does Anomi get an umbrella swep in XEMU2 and what does it do? That’s not the point, the point is the shift in power dynamics. Anomi is the scary mysterious figure now. Anomi is the threat. In Interloper F we see Anomi is scared, and guilty, and desperate to protect the memories he’s found preserved. But in traveling to the coast and nuking the entity that he discovered was for sending out the hostile void probes, he attacks Skyghost: an innocent who only ever worked to help him. In trying to do what he thought was right, Anomi becomes someone else’s villain. That’s the story, and it’s not something we ever have narrated to us. We only get it by mining the subtext.

subroutine_hello is a door with two sides, and you can trace how — generally — the source void is on one side and normal source games are on the other. The further you map it out the less literally it works, eventually landing on the door from the end of Skycrash as being on both sides: opening the xemu connection from one side and kulcs on the other. But there is a symbolic intent behind it.

After Kulcs you can inspect the bizarre presence of the unused info_player_counterterrorist, info_player_allies, info_player_axis, and info_player_start entities in subroutine_hello and realize these maps were designed to allow many different incompatible source games to connect to them, just like int_menu. One server can’t really host all those different runtimes on the same map, but the entities signal that within the fiction of the world, that’s what’s meant to be happening.

If you look through the demo files and think through the timelines you can track how ent_dmnpc_anomi4e_UNREGISTERED seems to be the same entity that moves into Skyghost. This shows how she “came from the demos” but doesn’t necessarily mean her true name is anomi4e_UNREGISTERED or that her origin is literally an unregistered Sourcebox instance.

There’s an entire compressed video streaming mechanic teased as early as Interloper 4 that goes unexplained and uncommented on. The community sometimes calls this the “pixel shader”: it’s not pixels though, it’s MPEG compressed video at a variable bitrate and a distinct “render/derender” screen scrolling effect. It shows up as early as the wrong turn incident in INT4 as the pawn crosses the threshold and, eventually, renders a bitmap memory.

If you watch for it you see it the Spise tests, as a way to access some kind of “interior view” into the void. Spise 2 shows using an inside-out Sourcebox cube to see new locations in the void, Spise 4 takes place entirely within a render, and Spise 6 shows this used to get at a cone directly and mutilate Mona through gmod — something foreshadowed as early as Breen in the machine’s use of the gmod dismemberment addon. The video motif continues with the compressed Ordinance views and concludes in INTF, as memories can be interacted with through a compressed video stream. Dying in streamed map plays the drowning sound effect, which is another thematic connection to drowning signalling disconnection.

And so on and so forth, for everything. And once you speak the language you see the richness of it all.

Once you learn anomalies are cones you realize Lucy had some kind of secret knowledge about it.
Once you realize the Red Room can’t be subroutine_hello you can track the Portal RTX pawn actually fall off the level and fall through the source void before landing in subroutine during Ellisfloor.
- And then, if you pay close attention, you can see it’s actually called communicate
Once you recognize that Umbrella Men target and mutilate specific pawns you can see that the corrupted one in SKYCRASH was targeting Skyghost.
Once you get the series you’re able to understand how gut-wrenchingly horrifying the void damage to column_sky_fortress’s memories of Spice are.

The more you understand about the background the more you can appreciate the artistry of the work. That’s true of understanding how the source engine works but it’s also true of understanding how the pieces of the series reference each other.

Okay here are a few connections that don’t seem to go anywhere

There are, unfortunately, a lot of interesting and seemingly deliberate threads that don’t tie into anything yet, mechanically, emotionally, or otherwise. They may be significant to later SKY//BOX entries, but who knows. Here’s my section where I try to highlight some more interesting things without relapsing into full theorycrafting hell.

SFM 10

Okay though seriously what is up with the tidbits in the SFM 10th teaser.

“SHE IS GONE”, “SHE ISNT HERE ANYMORE”, and “THEY DONT DIE” could maybe connect to the loss of Spice or Skyghost, but the rest of this is encoded information that’s just never come up as relevant.

There’s been no mention of a CON code, nor has the answer to anything been 68. There’s been nothing in the series about “flesh”, and if these are source void natives it doesn’t make sense why that would matter. “fore v eForbs sodibgosdj” would look like garbage in a text editor but here it’s clearly an intentional value. I have no idea what it means.

Nobody in the series can be 47 years old. 1977 is exactly 47 years prior to 2024, which makes this sync with SILLY CONE HUNT, but not in a way that makes any sense. And definitely not in a way that made sense in 2022 when the SFM video went up.

Jman initials

Jman — the initial demonstrator of the Interlope command and Eida’s video partner — goes by <s.t>Jman in the original forum thread.

Two initials separated by a dot aren’t a standard way of writing initials in any locale. It’s seen very frequently in Interloper though: with FSKY staff. “A.Y”, “G.E”, “J.J” are all referenced in text inserted into FSKY files, and a character as pivotal as Jman having a reference is a red flag that hasn’t gone anywhere.

Skybar

During Skycrash, the pink crowbar changes colors several times in rp_christmastown and axlvote.

I’ve seen people try to write this off as shading, except that doesn’t make any sense. In real life the pink missing textures checkerboard isn’t shaded because it’s needs to stand out and can’t be allowed to “disappear” like it does in Skycrash. And in christmastown this happens in a wide-open area where there wouldn’t be anything like a vizleaf seam.

Prosaic

20140920 PROSAIC [Saxxy Awards 2014 Entry] (2021) is supposedly a reupload of a Columbidae Saxxy entry from 2014. There’s something weird here but I’m not sure what.

This is the only video on Saxxy Awards Archives, which looks like a single-purpose channel created during the timespan of the ARG. It’s notably absent from both the canonical list of 2014 Saxxy entries and Columbidae’s own The Saxxy Awards - Complete Collection playlist. But it does appear in 10 Years of improvement in 30 Seconds backdated to 2014… but that compilation actually released in 2022, a year after this “reupload”.

Maybe this was a dropped thread, or it could still be planned as part of a future project.

(and there’s more but I promised to restrain myself)

Expectations

All that to say, I think Interloper is phenomenal, and I still catch myself trying to tease out these fascinating little threads.

In writing this I’m reminded of my writing from the beginning of the year about Murder Drones, and superficially similar objections I had to a lack of mechanical consistency. It’s even the same bad triangle. Unlike Murder Drones though I don’t think Interloper’s “inconsistencies” make it weak, only different from the puzzle I found myself expecting.

When the series “fails”, it’s because it’s failing to meet an expectation. And it can be very easy to expect Interloper to be something it’s not, especially as it shifts in tone from horror to science to ARG to memoir. But if you’re eager for it to be what it is, and you follow the subtle paths it traces, it’s a really special thing.

And it’s special because of how well it does these two things: the realness of the practical effects in source and the richness of the subtext embedded in technical details.

One last thing

I have come through the other side enlightened. The cones, they are silly. Appreciating Interloper means understanding the incredible detail and artistry of the thing, and going hehe im interloping regardless.

Anyway, feel free to flip through my (still half-finished) notebook from when I was trying to construct a grand unified solution to everything. It’s been an enormous project compiling it, and maybe it’ll help illuminate the interconnected beauty of the Interloper world.

https://stash.giovanh.com/interloper-obsidian/videotable.html
(Unfortunately Obsidian does not support all the features I used in the web export.)

There’s a lot here that probably ought to be merged into the main wiki....

Mae Garden, “Interloper: hacking a source engine ARG”

I know I’m supposed to be thriving after the Homestuck divorce but if I said the trickshot sequence wasn’t a Homestuck flash, I’d be lying. We all just have to live with that. ↩
“Misty has been found” doesn’t count. ↩

Fandom and The Freedom Motif

2025-12-07T00:00:00-06:00

Fandom is the most important thing in the modern media industry. Fans buy the products and advertise the brand, but are also the primary source of feedback. The media is what the community forms around, but the community is what feeds the media.

But the relationship between a work’s copyright holder and its fan community is structurally antagonistic. The IP holder and members of the fan community have fundamentally different interests which sometimes align but sometimes don’t. The rightsholder depends on the goodwill of the fandom, but at the same time there is always danger of the community being attacked by the rightsholder. The law creates an implicit hovering threat of legal violence, and the profit motive encourages bad actors to pull the trigger. This doesn’t mean the relationship has to be antagonistic in practice, but it means there is always an underlying potential for conflict that has to be reasoned with. The threat is always there.

There is a productive tension here. Fanwork can serve functions official work can’t, and the community surrounding a work is one of the main things that gives a work “value”, in a base economic sense. They’re the ones buying the products. Media companies are desperate to have more fans because that directly translates into their ability to make money.

Likewise, the health of the franchise matters to the people who love it, and official recognition of fan communities can be a good thing.¹ Fan work can be elevated, talented creators can be brought on as part of official projects, etc. Official recognition can serve as a badge of honor and help platform and encourage talent and creativity in the community.²

But the deciding factor in whether the creator/fan relationship is healthy or exploitative is whether the community is allowed to be independent. It’s fine for official spaces — fourms, Discord servers, etc. — to exist, so long as the purpose isn’t to capture and enclose a community. Media and fandom can have a symbiotic relationship, but as soon as the corporation tries to exercise control over their fans, it turns into an ugly hostility.

The corporation cannot own its customers. The Sonic fandom can’t be a SEGA product. The Mario fandom can’t be a Nintendo product.

One of the most important merits of fanwork, discussion, and criticism is a plurality of perspectives, and the ability to present and analyze work through truly pluralistic viewpoints. This is why things like fan comics, fan games, fan resources, and fan events have been so extraordinarily valuable. They represent legitimate plurality where the community manages and supports itself.

When we were maintaining The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, this is something Bambosh and I talked about in our conference panel. While it may make sense for there to be an official collection, this would be subject to the IP holder and their vision of how to work should be presented, potentially narrowing the focus and scope of the work. One of the obvious dangers is this can lead to the marginalization and demonization of specific viewpoints the corporate interest doesn’t agree with, regardless of their artistic and intellectual merit. The fan-centered archive and the creator-centered archive fill fundamentally separate functions.

If the IP holder insists that all aspects relating to discussion of a work go through one unifying authority, this is an assault on the community and represents an act of aggression against fan-run fan-space. The author cannot be allowed to control all avenues for literary criticism of their work. The community cannot be governed by the same people it serves to police. If there is a demand that all work that exists be brought in under a single umbrella of control, this is a dangerous and precarious arrangement.

“Intellectual property” is often used to justify this, as if real people become an asset owned by companies just because they expect them to buy their product. They do not have the mandate to regulate the way people behave around their work.

Brands have their own interests that are fundamentally different — and often opposed — to constructive fandom. IP holders have to manage the risk associated with their official works very carefully, but applying that kind of control to all work quickly leads to corporate censorship and sanitization of unfriendly topics. Companies have a financial interest in protecting their brand, their image, but that does not give them authority to regulate the people involved, even as they “represent” that brand.

Stuck At Home Con was a wildly successful Homestuck fan convention run and organized for fans, by fans, with no official support or affiliation. As soon as official corporate representatives showed up they started making demands, and the whole thing fell apart in an ugly incident.

I know I’ve mentioned Homestuck several times now, but when I think about this I’m not even thinking primarily about my own experiences. I’m thinking about Nintendo trying to enclose the event space, VRChat trying to enclose creators, and the entire “platformization” trend where owners make themselves a chokepoint and arbitrator for anyone involved in a space of ideas. I talk about this a lot, but game companies love trying to try to claim a right to control how people play the games they already own, and it’s abhorrent. The community around a thing is a community. It’s not a thing, it’s not property, it’s not something money or copyright or anything else has a right to control. It’s people. People are people first and property never.

It does not matter how much or how little work is encapsulated by official support. A unification of community spaces through a central governing authority with the ability to enforce policy and preference is an existential threat to that community.

The threat of a community being beholden to a franchise is a true danger even before that authority proves itself dangerous and untrustworthy by deed. The danger is structural; it is a trap prepared and ready to spring. Even if the current leadership is well-meaning, that power can be replaced and existing structures can be hijacked to suddenly abuse a good faith relationship.

Fans are not the media’s property’s lieutenants, they are its guardrails. Their job is to encourage the good and discourage the bad. That can only happen when some spaces stay financially and organizationally independent.

When someone exerts control over others, that’s hostility… unless the other person is “their own”, and then it’s expected. As soon as a company has the ability to control something they have an obligation to leverage it to their benefit. If a fan criticizes a company, that’s normal discourse. If criticism comes from a company’s own PR manager, that’s the company failing to control its own people. Voices turn from discussion and community into forces capital has neglected to exploit. The difference between someone being independent and someone being an organ of an institution is not semantic, it is stark and extreme.

It’s especially important to set a good example of this with media with a young audience, many of which don’t know any better. We don’t have to put up with that and so we absolutely, positively must not.

Fan projects must be independent, and they must be allowed to operate without being coerced or threatened by an IP holder holding a gun to their head. Fandom is not a labor force or a brand asset. It is a community of free people. Its independence is not optional, it is the keystone holding the relationship together. Any time a brand starts demanding control over the communities of people around that, you need to understand that as the hostile threat that it is.

I’m picturing Christian_Whitehead here, who migrated from fan game development to official employment. But even there there is a clear distinction between which work is community-driven and which work is SEGA’s. ↩
But this can also create a conflict of interest. If some projects are favored but not others, suddenly there’s pressure to keep sponsors happy to maintain that relationship, etc. Again, official approval can be fine, but it’s something you have to be careful about. ↩

Graph Paper Lindenmeyer Systems

2025-11-02T00:00:00-05:00

When I was a kid I learned about Lindenmeyer Systems and the fun tree patterns they create. I even followed a Twitter bot that generated and posted random pretty lsystem renders.

These are similar to fractals, except unlike traditional fractals they don’t usually expand within a fixed space, they either continue to grow or loop back intersecting themselves.

Meanwhile I spent most of my time in school and needed something to occupy my hands with. I did a lot of notebook doodling, except people notice those. But I did have graph paper. And graph paper gives you enough structure to draw lsystems by hand. So I did, a lot.

I probably went through a notebook every two years, and I can’t remember once ever drawing an actual graph. This was when I was a child in childish ways and hadn’t yet learned about dot paper. Oh, misspent youth....

There are a couple interesting things about this mathematically.

First, there’s only really one interesting space-filling pattern to draw on graph paper, which is forking off in two 45 degree angles. Anything that doesn’t fit on the coordinate grid (like incrementally decreasing line lengths) becomes irregular very quickly. The main option to play with different patterns is by setting different starting conditions. (Seems like it’d get boring quick, right? I spent the rest of the time trying to apply the Four color theorem in an aesthetically satisfying way. Still haven’t solved that one.)

Second, drawing on a coordinate grid means using Chebyshev Geometry, where straight lines and diagonal lines are considered the same length. So a circle (points equally far apart from a center point) is a square. This is also sometimes called chessboard geometry, because it’s how pieces move on a grid.

Also, because I’m drawing this by hand, I can only keep track of visible tips. So if tips collide I count them as “resolved”, even if mathmatically they’d pass through each other.

But I kept hitting the end of the graph paper.

I was bored in a work meeting this week and ended up doing the same thing, and it made me wonder about the properties of the pattern. Did it repeat? Did it reach points of symmetry? I thought it would be fun to whip up a tool to run my by-hand algorithm to see.

There are lots of web toys for lsystems but none are designed with these graph paper constraints. So just as an exercise I built my own from scratch, and it’s pretty good at drawing my high-school pattern.

The answer to the pattern question is: it depends on the starting position! If you start with one line you start to see radial symmetry, but if you start with two lines facing away from each other (as in the animation) it’s more interesting. Neat.

Each generation is considered a state frame that keeps track of lines (for rendering), buds (for growing the next iteration), bloomed_buds (for bud collision) and squares (for line collision).

For the Chebyshev geometry I just keep every line at a 1.0 length and let the trigonometry functions round up.

I didn’t actually implement a parser for formal Lindenmeyer syntax, I just defined everything recursively in pure Javascript, using a definition to encapsulate details about the pattern:

const definition = {
  at(bud) {
    const lines = []
    const buds = []

    for (let angle of [
      bud.r - 0.25,
      bud.r + 0.25
    ]
    ) {
      const rads = Math.PI*angle
      let len = 1
      let xy = [bud.x + len*Math.sin(rads), bud.y + len*Math.cos(rads)]
      if (chebyshev) xy = xy.map(Math.round)
      lines.push(xy)
      buds.push({x: xy[0], y: xy[1], r: angle})
    }
    return {lines, buds}
  }
}

Then rendering is done recursively:

function get_frame(generation) {
  if (generation < 0) throw Error(`Invalid generation ${generation}`)

  if (!frames[generation]) {
    const frame = structuredClone(get_frame(generation - 1))

    const old_buds = [...frame.buds]
    const new_buds = []
    const new_squares = []
    for (const i in old_buds) {
      ...
    }
    frame.bloomed_buds = [...frame.bloomed_buds, ...old_buds]
    frame.squares = [...frame.squares, ...new_squares]
    frame.buds = prune_buds(new_buds, frame.bloomed_buds)

    frames[generation] = frame
  }

  return frames[generation]
}

There’s a slight complication to doing this cheaply with lines: on paper, there are cases where lines intersect, and in those cases I stop at walls, even if it means drawing a partial line. Doing that kind of collision detection here in vector space would be very complicated! And without it the pattern loops back on itself and doesn’t look as good, and definitely doesn’t match my notebooks:

The solution for this was very simple collision detection. The final program keeps tracks of which squares are “occupied” and breaks branches any time they’d collide.

I uploaded it to my stash if you want to play with it. As an added constraint I wrote everything by hand in one single-file html page.

The one problem with the tool (besides being bare-bones) is it renders the output as an SVG instead of a bitmap on a canvas. This “feels right”: they’re lines, might as well make them vectors. But on high values browsers have performance issues rendering very large quantities of DOM elements.

I’d rewrite the renderer to draw to a canvas instead except I like the idea of the infinite SVG canvas specifically. The point was to escape the edges of the graph paper, remember?

But I’d already abstracted line drawing so the line coordinates were stored in state frames, so it was easy to write an alternate renderer using the canvas API.

https://stash.giovanh.com/toys/lsys.html

Illustration by Cmglee - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link ↩

a wholesome plane has hit the second cozy tower

2025-10-22T00:00:00-05:00

Here’s an advertisement I got from a game company named Rogue Duck Interactive.

Rogue Duck Interactive@rogueducknet
Start your cozy airport security job!👮🏻‍♂️
Weigh and scan bags, ask passengers questions, and if you are not convinced, search their luggage for dangerous items.
Wishlist on Steam!
Thu Aug 28 05:05:07 +0000 2025

The game they’re advertising here — which they neglect to name outside the screenshot — is “Nothing to Declare.”¹ And it caught my eye, because there’s problems.

papers please

If you’ve been living under a rock for the last ten years you might not recognize this as the gameplay from Papers, Please.

Papers, Please (2013), of course, is the multi-million-selling dystopian bureaucracy simulator game where you work as an immigration enforcement officer for a despotic regime.

Papers is known as one of the games of all time. It uses the mechanics of rote bureaucracy — checking correctness of paperwork, matching dates, enforcing documentation requirements — to connect the player to a cruel and miserable world. The message and mechanics perfectly intertwine: the dystopia is entwined with the nature of the policing, which is both the setting and the game mechanic.

It’s an intense, profound piece that prompts the player to think about the way political structures affect real human lives. It prompts introspection about the role and agency of the individual within a system and how morality responds when someone is faced with a hard reality: a political and economic moment where harming others for profit may be the only way to feed your own family. Papers is “video games as true art”, “brilliantly written”, “grim yet affecting”.

Rogue Duck hasn’t been living under a rock. They know their game “takes inspo” from Papers, Please, but it has its own “original take and ideas.”

Rogue Duck Interactive@rogueducknet
@sensdertale Team definitely likes and takes inspo from Papers, Please. But I think both games can exist together, and I guarantee we will have our own original take and ideas in it.
Sun Sep 07 02:51:36 +0000 2025

but cozy

Now, I don’t care that Rogue Duck is iterating on Papers. What’s hooked me here is this original take they’re so excited about. Because Declare is more than a shameless clone: it has its own identity and it does have something to say. Nothing to Declare comes on stage following Papers, turns to the audience, and what it has to say is: “man, that guy was a downer, am I right?”

That fun new original idea Rogue Duck adds to the equation is that now the bureaucracy of immigration is fluffy and wholesome. A fun little action parallel to making postcards and pouring coffee.

This isn’t even an interpretation, they shoehorn it right in their store description.

In a wholesome setting, weigh and scan bags, ask passengers questions, and if you are not convinced, search their luggage for dangerous items.
…
Welcome to Nothing To Declare
Ever wondered what it’s like to work airport security… without the stress? In Nothing To Declare, you step into a cozy, hand-drawn world where your job is to keep things safe, with just a sprinkle of suspicion.

From weighing luggage to scanning x-rays and questioning quirky travelers, every shift brings surprises (and the occasional questionable electronic device). Use your judgment and intuition to decide: do you let it through… or unzip and investigate?
…
There’s nothing to declare… except a good time.

Security is stressless! The world is cozy! Suspicion is cute and sprinkled! Travelers are quirky!

But even if they weren’t incredibly explicit about it, every ounce of the design tells the same story. The entire design language tells you this world wants to cuddle. Every corner is shiny, every corner is beveled, every character is young and attractive. The goon who drags a would-be traveler off gives you a smirk and bedroom eyes through the fourth wall as he does it.

And I’m not writing this off as being generically pleasant, either. Just as Paper’s gritty, utilitarian, soviet design language was part of what the piece communicated, so is this. Choosing to take a political idea like this and assert that it is pleasant — that it can be pleasant — is asserting an explicitly ideological position.

So what’s gone wrong here?

This is the young witch in the alps problem.

Cozy game designers trying to craft the trappings of niceness without “grime”, but in doing so totally miss what’s meaningful about the work they’re trying to emulate. It’s a fetishization of comfort.

it’s bad if you think about it

As is so often the case it’s not clear whether this is evil or just brain-empty. The more you think through it the worse it is.

Declare takes the already unpleasant reality of immigration enforcement and merges it with — of all things — the post-9/11 airport security position which has only ever existed as a part of the war on terror. This isn’t lampshaded in the fiction of the game: the description for the game pitches that you’re doing all this because “It could be a bomb.”

Airport security is a wild profession to whitewash because I don’t know of any group anywhere along the political aisle that thinks it’s good. Conservatives see it as representative of the tragedy that travel represents danger, liberals see it as security theater, and leftists see it as a dangerous extension of policing power. And they’re all right!

This institution is what Rogue Duck is choosing to paint as cozy and wholesome. Declare is an aggressive attempt at sanitizating a disturbing thing. In the trailer they show a minigame where you use a scanner to see through the clothing of an attractive young woman with no grounds for suspicion. They’re using policing itself as a gameplay loop but without any of the darkness it deserves. In fact, they’re very intentionally depriving it of weight.

The fact that Declare so clearly derives from Papers makes this much worse. This works if you do the work of making a structural change such that the work in the utopia is fundamentally different from the work in the dystopia, but that hasn’t been done. They’ve tweaked the lighting, adjusted the design, shifted the political metaphor, but the fundamental work of policing that was so rightfully criticized as evil remains present. They’ve simply taken the dystopian and declared it wholesome as-is.

Or perhaps they’re not taking something evil and declaring it good. Perhaps they don’t think there’s a difference between good and bad things.

Imagine that everything is structurally neutral. The security in airport security isn’t a practice to protect anything from anything else, it’s just a motion. There are no implications to the necessity of security, no darkness involved in threats, no danger posed by enforcement.

The trailer also shows you finding a power saw in a man’s luggage. What’s that mean? What does it mean for someone to try to bring a weapon on an airplane? What would have been done with an uncaught saw, gun, bomb? Who would have used it and how? You’re not supposed to consider any of that. There are just two lists, and the game is to play at pattern recognition without thinking even a little bit about the world you’re in. Security is merely a motion that happens in life like branches waving in the wind. We can depict it, as is, losing nothing by isolating an event from context.

If you are an empty person and see the world as empty of value, this makes perfect sense. Papers wasn’t a look into the meaning of anything, it just combined its subject with dreariness because they had to pick something to do for atmosphere.

The policing work in Papers is structurally neutral too to you too, then. Detaining humans isn’t an action with any substance in and of itself, it’s just an action that can happen. In that case the only thing keeping it from being sweet and inoffensive would be a coat of paint. Now the desk is blue instead of brown and you feel good instead of bad. Detaining migrants can just as easily be turned into relaxing and mediative gameplay, because everything is just shells that contain whatever content you inject for today’s product.

actually, it’s all cozy

The more you think through it the worse it is, but it’s very possible I’m the first person to think about this at all, including the developers. They’re sanitizing something disturbing here, but I don’t think it’s fascist propaganda, I think it’s just bleaching out the grain of to sell it as a product. Art is second to comfort here.

“Rogue Duck” makes a lot of these identical-looking cozy and wholesome games produced at a suspicious pace. Rogue Duck Interactive does own the rogueduck.net address, but it just redirects to their Steam profile. Declare is probably just another in a list of uncomfortable jobs turned into stim games, like Cozy Lemonade Stand and Cozy Supermarket and Cozy Recycling Facility. Jobs are the same and they should all be wholesome. Video games shouldn’t be art, Duck argues: they’re content.

But if the issues with subject matter are due to a lack of care, flipping through the “Rogue Duck Interactive Franchise” (not what the word means!) shows there’s a smiliar lack of care in their other work.

Looking at their portfolio, Rogue Duck makes a lot of these identical-looking cozy and wholesome games. This includes Witchy Business, which is quite literally about a young witch and her cat.

But also on this list is Rentlord, a landlord simulation game where you “maximize rent while avoiding taxes.” It’s also a Balatro clone, somehow.

Their reviews have been mixed so far, but maybe they’re hoping to turn that around with the new Eviction Update. “If someone isn’t pulling their weight? Evict them. No hesitation. Sometimes eviction leads to more rent” Slumlord DLC coming soon! No, really, that’s the roadmap.

There’s also cozy wholesome shipping fulfillment warehouse. Cute postal infrastructure game? No, you’re literally packaging items in boxes, it’s a cute cozy Amazon fulfillment center, that’s the game.

Wait, actually, is that the same conveyor belt graphic?

It totally is, that’s fully copy-pasted.

thanks

gio :⁽@giovan_h
papers please was almost good but due to some sort of oversight it didn't come out as cozy and wholesome enough

Fri Oct 17 01:52:58 +0000 2025

gio :⁽@giovan_h
This is a really bizarre one for me because someone very clearly looked at papers please and their takeaway was that the way the game made you reflect on ethical and political ramifications of immigration policing was bad, it was bad that the game did that, and they should fix it
Fri Oct 17 01:56:16 +0000 2025

gio :⁽@giovan_h
for me this is up there with the hitler dating sims in terms of bizarre political statements that are increasingly evil if you think through them, but are probably just very stupid
Fri Oct 17 01:59:13 +0000 2025

It’s almost the same game and name as Nothing to Declare (2024), and if I were Flying Squirrel Games I’m sure I’d be annoyed about that. ↩

A Hack is Not Enough

2025-10-14T00:00:00-05:00

Recently we’ve seen sweeping attempts to censor the internet. The UK’s “Online Safety Act” imposes sweeping restrictions on speech and expression. It’s disguised a child safety measure, but its true purpose is (avowedly!) intentional control over “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”. And similar trends threaten the US, especially as lawmakers race to more aggressively categorize more speech as broadly harmful.

A common response to these restrictions has been to dismiss them as unenforceable: that’s not how the internet works, governments are foolish for thinking they can do this, and you can just use a VPN to get around crude attempts at content blocking.

But this “just use a workaround” dismissal is a dangerous, reductive mistake. Even if you can easily defeat an attempt to impose a restriction right now, you can’t take that for granted.

Dismissing technical restrictions as unenforceable

There is a tendency, especially among technically competent people, to use the ability to work around a requirement as an excuse to avoid dealing with it. When there is a political push to enforce a particular pattern of behavior — discourage or ban something, or make something socially unacceptable — there is an instinct for clever people with workarounds to respond with “you can just use my workaround”.

I see this a lot, in a lot of different forms:

“Geographic restrictions don’t matter, just use a VPN.”
“Media preservation by the industry doesn’t matter, just use pirated copies.”
“The application removing this feature doesn’t matter, just use this tool to do it for you.”
“Don’t pay for this feature, you can just do it yourself for free.¹”
“It’s “inevitable” that people will use their technology as they please regardless of the EULA.”
“Issues with digital ownership? Doesn’t affect me, I just pirate.”

All of these to one degree or another trivialize some sort of imposition based on the presumed ability to circumvent it. Sometimes this is because it seems genuinely impossible for the imposition to stick, but sometimes it’s a deflection used to avoid feeling helpless in the face of an issue that one can’t directly control.

It’s very tempting to dismiss restrictions as mechanically unenforceable. It feels great. It feels safe, feels powerful. How exciting, that the individual is technologically empowered to the point where skill and savvy can overcome unjust institutions? I don’t have to worry about atomic war if I just buy the right products. This story isn’t about a world that’s hostile and terrifying, it’s about me and my merit.

Policy is often out of line with technical realities

I fully understand this temptation. I’m willing to be particularly harsh in condemning this because it’s a mistake I tend toward myself. It’s often the case that policy is out of line with technical realities; people often attempt to toothlessly impose restrictions that far exceed what they can actually enforce.

Web document controls

You see this a lot on the internet. Someone decides their website needs to restrict the way visitors can use the page, and they implement this by politely forwarding the demand to your web browser, except that’s you.

The architecture of the internet was designed to opinionatedly prioritize the end user.² Browsers interpret web documents, but exactly what content a web browser displays and how it does is up to the browser, not the server. Browsers offer websites many ways to give hints on how their controls work because the site is expected to be cooperating to create a good user experience. When sites try to abuse this communication channel to do something obnoxious, the user can (rightfully!) opt not to take the suggestion.

Sometimes these wars have already been fought and so sensible mitigations for abuse are already built into most browsers. Pop-up blocking is an easy example here: all web browsers give users extensive control over when and why sites are allowed to open new windows because of the way this “feature” was historically abused.

But there are also many web nuisance behaviors that don’t yet have common remedies built into the browser, but can still be addressed with extensions. Some websites abuse semantic hinting to prevent people from right-clicking at all in an attempt to deny users the ability to interact with the page, but extensions like Enable right click easily circumvent this. Likewise DontFuckWithPaste tells the browser to ignore a site and enable pasting text, and Right Click Borescope lets you find and open images even if the option isn’t in the context menu. And other generic programmable extensions like Greasemonkey and stylus make it easy for people to write their own tweaks to fix behaviors on specific websites.

On the web there are a lot of restrictions you can just hack around, and you will probably still be able to until the internet becomes something fundamentally different.

Internet archival

Unenforceable restrictive demands are something I run into a lot in archival. Not just in a copyright “I control my content, come to me and see my advertisements” way either; it’s often about controlling how speech can be recorded and cited in the public record.

Quoting from the comments in Quora’s robots.txt file:

https://www.quora.com/robots.txt People share a lot of sensitive material on Quora - controversial political views, workplace gossip and compensation, and negative opinions held of companies. Over many years, as they change jobs or change their views, it is important that they can delete or anonymize their previously-written answers.

We opt out of the wayback machine because inclusion would allow people to discover the identity of authors who had written sensitive answers publicly and later had made them anonymous, and because it would prevent authors from being able to remove their content from the internet if they change their mind about publishing it. …

Meanwhile, if you are looking for an older version of any content on Quora, we have full edit history tracked and accessible in product (with the exception of content that has been removed by the author). …

Of course it’s not true that omitting a rule in a robots.txt file “allows” people to reference old material. Everyone is able to do that already.

It’s understandable why both Quora and its users would want this, especially given Quora’s culture of signing your full name and employment history to all your posts like it’s Linkedin. But sending people a robots.txt file isn’t something magic you can use to control their behavior, it’s a way of politely indicating how people ought to navigate. It’s a system we use in a civilized society to be nice to each other.

And it’s a good thing there’s no effective restriction here, because what Quora wants to do is wrong. A historical archive of published material separate from a live “product” serves a specific purpose, but it’s not to make Quora.com more money today. That’s reason enough for them to make these sweeping, toothless demands to control the way people cite work published on their site. Thankfully, text file or no, there’s nothing to stop anyone from making records of Quora posts. Here’s one now.

Archivists have long understood that the consent of the companies involved is not the deciding factor in whether material should be archived, and haven’t been shy in expressing this.³

Absurd demands are often unenforceable. It’s therefore very tempting to generalize this to the rule “all absurd demands are unenforceable.”

There is a hacker mythology that the righteousness of the libertarian cause serves as an inevitable structural defense against overreach of institutional power. Moreover, the myth implies that technology creates a self-enforcing meritocracy of systems; that overreach will fail because it deserves to fail; that the ease of copying digital files means both that copying files is intrinsically right and that it will remain possible forever as the result of a natural law.

But this is false. While this is a noble cause it can’t be taken for granted as a conclusion or else we fall into complacency. Just because something is morally right doesn’t mean that institutional power will never be able to kill it, and just because enforcing regulation would be technically difficult doesn’t mean it won’t be done. We sometimes like to think computing is an exception to this: since its structure has been so individualistic it can feel as if it has a hard defense against regulation.

It is not the case that technical realities flow directly from the divine order and the demands of would-be tyrants is futile against an ineffable good. The moral arc of the universe does not bend towards righteousness, even when righteousness is cheap and easy. Even when — as with computing — there is a “natural order of things”, you can’t rely on this as a hard rule; the structure the technology tends toward is not necessarily the same structure it gets shaped into. The user-empowering internet is unfortunately an outlier.

Relying on hacks and workarounds is a kind of “normalization of deviance”: a reliance on an unrecommended or unsafe practice that becomes standard operating procedure. The deviation here isn’t the workaround, it’s the reliance on the workaround. Trusting in the ability to hack around a requirement introduces risk: the potential for the workaround to be prevented without any alternative. When we succeed in avoiding trouble we feel prideful and superior instead of understanding that we’re still in constant danger.

It’s true that you shouldn’t have to fight a forever-war against corporations orders of magnitude more powerful than you are just to maintain your way of life. But even if you wanted to, you can’t. As hard and narrow as the path may be there’s nothing keeping it from being completely destroyed.

In reality, technical abilities are very much determined by social acceptability and political structures, even when the underlying technical structure suggests it shouldn’t be.⁵ While technical implementations carry tendencies⁴ towards political structures, these can be overcome. The inviolable laws of physics encourage man not to fly, yet we do. But the laws of biology tell us there are no racial hierarchies, yet we construct them. It takes effort and resources to work against the structure technology tends towards, but when doing so allows powerful groups to consolidate and expand their power, they’re often willing to expend those resources.

Hard restrictions that already exist

People point out that trying to ban specific technologies (like encryption) is as impossible as regulating math. But people who care more about their constructed imposition than anything else keep trying to do it anyway. The question is how much people want to enforce it, and what all they’ll do in order to try. Unfortunately, it sometimes works.

Things can be banned outright using technical measures, even if the history of the technology suggests people “shouldn’t be able to.” And this technical enforcement can be much stronger than traditional attempts at regulating behavior. The policeman is as strong as meat, encryption is as strong as math.

Sometimes this is obvious because the restriction is already present and effective.

HDCP

Let’s start with cables. Video cables exist to pipe video from one place to another. Whether analog or digital, the video information is necessarily sent in a standard format from a source to a destination, which has to be able to decode the image in order to display it. The information to display video is, by definition, the same information you need to create a copy.

This is how VCRs worked. The recorder sits between the source and destination, forwarding the signal on like the cable does but also making a copy of the signal. Modern day capture cards work the same way: they act like a cable in that they receive and transmit a video signal, but they also process the signal while they have it.

Obviously media companies don’t like that people have this ability (and really didn’t like being surprised by VHS), but this seems like a hard limitation. If you’re trusting users to pipe data around, they’re going to have access to that data. Like the “analog hole”, if you’re sending people video they have the video. It doesn’t matter how much money people throw at that, it’s just a technical reality that you can’t control the signal.

But then we got High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection, which is designed to do just that. HDCP is a content protection protocol that encrypts video signals in order to prevent man-in-the-middle processing like capture cards.

A device (or individual applications within a device) can choose to output HDCP-protected encrypted video instead of a freely decodable signal. Since HDCP signals are encrypted at the source any receiver needs the decryption key in order to handle the signal. The only way to legally decrypt HDCP is to license the right from Intel.⁶ In addition to a fee (which Intel reserves the right to set and raise), the HDCP license requires devices meet standards designed to protect copyright holders from the device’s users. Compliant devices must be designed so that they cannot copy signals, must always re-encrypt any HDCP signals they output, and generally “effectively frustrate attempts to defeat the content protection requirements of the HDCP Specification”⁷. Devices like capture cards obviously can’t obtain these licenses, and so fail to capture HDCP signals.

If you try to output video through a non-HDCP connection (like analog video) the source can choose to intentionally downgrade the video or refuse to play content outright. Even HDCP devices that read antiquated and broken DRM formats like CSS are required to output the signal using HDCP.

Having to go through this system is demonstrably worse than the alternative. No one would make the informed choice to use it, and it would be outcompeted in a heartbeat. Except you use it anyway.

The HDMI⁸ specification is designed around HDCP support. The wires themselves are designed to police the user. As ludicrous as it sounds that’s the only way to do it, so that’s what they made happen. The most widely used video cable is designed to prioritize maximizing profit for media companies first and only reliably communicates data if it doesn’t get in the way of that. And it’s not just copyright enforcement, because copyright comes with exceptions that the cables won’t honor.

If any of this is news to you, it’s probably because of the main thing HDCP has going for it: it mostly works. The big danger of any DRM system is the risk of denying authorized users access to material they’re entitled to, which HDCP mostly doesn’t. Applications are usually conservative about using HDCP at all, and so unless you’re trying to record something you shouldn’t, it usually “just works” in the background.⁹

It takes a lot for this kind of system to exist. It needs to use strong encryption, needs widespread international industry buy-in, and needs full use of an aggressive legal infrastructure to enforce the license. But it has all of that, and so here we are, “technical reality” be damned.

iOS

Meaningful restrictions can also be sprung on people without a generational technology upgrade or standards consortium. As a long-time jailbroken iPhone user I have seen and felt this crunch happen with iOS, which has all the same problems as any locked-down platform.

Up through ~2012 the ability to jailbreak your iPhone could be taken for granted. It took a little planning but you could reliably load your own OS software and even downgrade a device. Apple’s security — security to protect their device against the user — became much better in the following years. The ability to jailbreak a device quickly became rare, and when they worked they were worse. True untethered jailbreaks fully died out in 2016 with iOS 9. Looking at the table, it looks like every device released after 2018 can’t be reliably jailbroken.

The window used to be open. If you needed something Apple refused to allow you could just jailbreak your device. Then that window closed and you couldn’t anymore. This was never a dependable institution, as its failure shows. Apple never honored a right, jailbreaking was just a reality you could rely on until you couldn’t anymore. Workarounds fail, especially when people care to attack them.

Jailbreaking wasn’t done with a switch, not done with any right, not done with any piece of hardware guaranteed to exist. It was done with exploits. When people do manage to mod modern consoles or dump games, they’re not using a mechanism necessarily available to them or anything they’re legally entitled to. They’re exploiting hardware and software vulnerabilities, errors the vendors missed. And these exploitable errors are a rare commodity, made all the rarer by manufacturers willing to pay to get them first.

For most locked-down devices security is getting better every generation. Software and hardware updates both close security holes. Many updates don’t fix bugs or add features, but instead close “vulnerabilities” in order to actively keep functionality out of the hands of users.

The existence and health of any “modding” scene cannot be taken as a given, especially when the manufacturer is working to prevent it. It’s playing pool against all the smarts money can buy, and they go first. You’re not guaranteed a turn at all.

Console Modding

Video game consoles are, of course, computers. Unlike personal computers, game consoles are specifically designed to treat their user as a threat. Like iPhones, they’re locked-down. They’re designed to be more concerned about being cops than with being computers. Computer security is about protecting users from potentially unwanted software behavior. Console security is about protecting software from potentially unwanted user behavior.

This is a hobbyhorse of mine. I cannot stand how quickly people accept the ecosystem of locked-down machines just because one of the effects of that security is discouraging piracy.

I’ve talked about my disdain for the alienation of “homebrew” before:

How Nintendo Misuses Copyright “Homebrew” is a weird category. The word “homebrew” is used to box off normal software that isn’t provided by the manufacturer themselves into its own special category, instead of treating it as the default state that it is. It’s like if “cooking” only ever meant restaurant meals, and “home cooking” was treated as a frowned-upon edge case.

The only reason someone who wanted to develop homebrew games for a computer they own would care about console security is if something had gone very wrong already. Which, of course, it had: Nintendo wants to lock developers into partnering with them contractually in order to be able to develop (crippling the hobby development scene), and locks down all the general-purpose computing functionality of their consoles so they only run Nintendo-approved code.

Using the “homebrew” metaphor, being unable to run “homebrew” without authorization from the manufacturer is like being mandated to buy bottled tea and being physically prevented from taking tea leaves and brewing your own tea at home. It’s letting manufacturers wield an unconscionable level of control, especially for a category of tech that’s not just an entertainment product, but the means of production for an entire entertainment economy.

I won’t get into the history of game console hacking here, but here’s the short version. Computers used to be simpler, but the rollout of cheap, strong encryption has been very effective at locking things down, even hardware you’ve purchased and have complete access to. The more powerful computers get the more resources they have available to spend policing the user instead of working as desired.

Because of the incredible importance designers place on preventing piracy, every facet of a modern console is encrypted and tamper-resistant, from the operating system to the bootloader to the graphics card. Every step of the way is designed to tie the functionality of the device to its ability to cryptographically verify the identity and entitlements of the user. Since identities are centrally managed, policy enforcement can easily cross scopes because companies are free to set up any logic they want. Cheat detection from one game can ban you from others, a console suspected of piracy can be bricked entirely, and licenses for other games you purchased separately could be revoked too.

And piracy itself serves as a kludge to work around larger problems. Piracy currently acts as a relief valve¹⁰ for the game industry’s utter failure at responsible preservation. But advocacy around the issue of preservation and historical accessibility is hindered by the fact that the success of game piracy¹¹ has resulted in extensive preservation libraries despite the industry’s attempts to prevent this.

Game preservation — something we depend on as a matter of cultural and historical record — currently depends on piracy, an underground institution facing meaningful attacks. Policy failures — both at the corporate and governmental level — have the harms they do to preservation covered up by their inefficacy. But at the same time game companies are aggressively working to stamp out that ability, with both technical and legal controls. Shrugging off the preservation issue now creates the risk that game companies will get their way, effectively mitigate piracy, and doom preservation in the process.

This is not in any way limited to game consoles. The assumption that piracy will always exist as a matter of natural law is wishful thinking at best and delusion at worst.

This is frustrating within the context of gaming, but it has a much larger implication: there is no technical limitation preventing any other system from being secured in the same way. Mobile devices and personal computers can be designed to be incapable of running software that isn’t authorized by corporate or governmental authorities. Devices can be designed so the most basic functions — including the ability to start up at all — require identity verification. This is the promise of “zero-trust” architecture: every individual action can be linked to authentication and authorization, so central management systems are able to police behavior at an extremely granular level. The technical ability is already there, and every power structure is incentivized to use it to seize as much power as they can get away with.

Friction and marginalization

Unfortunately we can see the same problems of effective restriction even when workarounds aren’t effectively prevented. There’s a shortcut: marginalization via design friction.

Design — even “soft” design — matters.

There’s an infamous story: when Drew Houston pitched Dropbox as a startup in 2007, a commenter replied skeptically:

BrandonM: …For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

This is a classic structured way engineers think about the world: analyze something by deconstructing it into its functional components. But here this misses the point, clearly.

You can understand a system in terms of strict functional components, but that perspective doesn’t capture the totality of the system itself. The reality of the thing is not only the function, it is also the construction. Dropbox is worth $2.5 billion not because it invented the idea of network storage, but because of its design and usability. “What it does” isn’t just connecting to a fileserver, it’s enabling patterns of human behavior.

Soft Friction

But just as “soft” design can serve as enablement, it can also serve as discouragement. This makes it an important tool in our conversation about controlling behavior: before behavior is banned it can be made non-trivial and discouraged via design. And even though it’s “soft” enforcement, this friction matters.

Interfaces can be designed to encourage and discourage specific behavior. This can be done through structure and organization — adding steps, hiding menus, etc — but it can also be done through pure visual language. In design we call this “affordance”: the visual language used in the design of a thing to suggest how it can and should be used.

There are already whole fields where what should be trivial is made legitimately difficult, just by platform-controlled UIs. Alternate clients can do it easily. Minor modifications make it simple. There’s no technical (or even legal) reason it shouldn’t be trivial. But it’s been successfully made non-trivial in practice.

Copying Text

Let’s start by looking at one of the most basic ways people interact with computers: copying text. This is kind of a toy problem: no big clash of political interests yet, just noting how effective design can be at controlling behavior. Copying text is one of the most basic ways people are expected to interact with web documents, and websites display text by sending it to your computer where it should be completely available to the user. But simple design choices mean it’s often not.

I already listed some ways websites can try to prevent a user from interacting with documents — clicking, selecting, pasting, opening menus, etc — and extensions that easily bypass them. But of course most people don’t know those extensions exist at all. Of the people that do, many won’t bother installing them.

And even then, that only works because browsers are programmable: people can code behavior and share it as an extension. But this is often not the case! Extension support barely exists on mobile platforms, even for third-party browsers. And people often use computers that are not programmable — organization-managed or kiosk-style devices (like school Chromebooks) are usually locked down to prevent modification, including installing extensions.

The net result of this is that websites can, in fact, often block text copying. Even though workarounds exist (and, as long as the internet works the way it does now will always exist), websites still try to get in the user’s way and the websites usually win.

The removal of an affordance to discourage specific behavior isn’t necessarily exploitative. Consider password fields: input elements that don’t show what you type into them. Here’s one now:

Copying text out of password fields is almost always disabled not by the website but as a design choice made by the browser.¹² The value in the field is text the user entered and is completely available for programmatic use, but desktop¹³ browsers usually prevent actual humans from doing anything but entering text. This is a design choice primarily designed to prevent attackers with physical access from extracting plain-text passwords from a browser’s autofill feature which puts the text directly into the field. If you want to recover a password that’s already in the field, you can’t.

Well, you can: open developer tools. You can grab the value from the console. You can change the input type from password and the text is readily available. Once the information is available to the website it’s available to the client. Getting the text is completely technically possible, but the design discourages people from doing it and so it usually doesn’t happen. Because of the way the interface is designed, most people don’t consider that to be a tool available to them at all.

You can extend this beyond web browsers and look at UI design. There’s text everywhere and built into all of it are assumptions about what text should be copied and what shouldn’t which govern how people use it. You can’t copy text from buttons and labels not due to a technical limitation, but due to the authorial intent. There’s a lack of affordances there.

You can “just work around this” with a tool like PowerToys Text Extractor, a specialized screenshot OCR tool that lets you copy any text on the screen. (It’s kind of magic to watch.) The design pushes you one way but with effort and authority you can go another.

Removing video affordances

A lack of user affordances when it comes to audio and video has become a consistent norm online. Right-click an image and by default there’s an option to save it. Right-click a video and by default there isn’t. Web videos normally prevent people from downloading them, even though browsers can do it natively just like they do images. And there’s even less of an expectation for a video download action on mobile platforms.

There’s a whole story there in how expectations for computer usage changed in the period of time between the rollout of image transmission and video transmission. Unlike images, by the time people had the internet speed and storage capacity to download video it was already considered suspicious to do so. It’s not hard to see how this norm arises from a sort of mythical thinking about piracy.

The lack of intentionally designed affordances for this has opened the door to various workarounds. The hacks most commonly take the form of downloader bots that live directly on sites like Twitter and Reddit, where they live in another churn of avoiding bans and updating to handle new security.

Twitter blocking

In October 2024 Twitter made a design change to remove a soft design restriction by changing the behavior of the block function. Prior to this change, blocking a user meant not only that they couldn’t interact with your tweets, but that the blocked user wouldn’t see you organically at all. No tweets in the feed, no profiles in search, nothing.

Unless your Twitter account was fully private, this was a soft restriction. You wouldn’t see their posts in your feed, and if you were linked directly to a tweet or profile Twitter would only show a placeholder. But only if you were logged in as someone that user had blocked. Profiles and tweets are still public, so if someone actually wanted to hear from you they could just look at your profile while logged out and see everything, blocked or not.

Twitter, now “blaze your glory” 𝕏, reversed this:

Engineering@XEng
Soon we’ll be launching a change to how the block function works.
If your posts are set to public, accounts you have blocked will be able to view them, but they will not be able to engage (like, reply, repost, etc.).
Wed Oct 16 17:32:55 +0000 2024

Engineering@XEng
Today, block can be used by users to share and hide harmful or private information about those they’ve blocked. Users will be able to see if such behavior occurs with this update, allowing for greater transparency.
Wed Oct 16 17:32:55 +0000 2024

Elon Musk@elonmusk
@nima_owji High time this happened.
The block function will block that account from engaging with, but not block seeing, public post.
Mon Sep 23 18:33:02 +0000 2024

For me it’s easy to look at this as a security problem, do some quick mental math, and say “this is nothing.” This just makes it slightly easier to do something you could already do. If you’re publishing posts publicly anyone is able to see them just like before. If you’re blocked by a user you can see their posts, but that was already the case. The sets are the same; there’s no change in who is able to see what. Blocking people was never a way to hide yourself from someone, and arguably it gave people an unfounded sense of security. As Twitter staff noted in justifying the change, “preventing an account from seeing your posts does not work in practice. Anyone with any intent can find out what you post by simply creating another account or logging out”

If anything, I’d tend to assume a change like this was a good thing. To someone like me whose guiding light is accessibility and ease-of-access, a change that makes it easier for people to do what they were already doing is categorically good. By default, trying to manipulate people by intentionally making it unnecessarily difficult for them to work is wicked. Without extenuating circumstances, making it more onerous for people to do what they’re doing is inflicting harm on others.

But thinking about what sets of people are able to see what material misses the importance of design in influencing real behavior patterns. Blocking someone hadn’t been hard-and-fast security that the blocked person couldn’t see your posts, but it did affect how people actually acted by guiding organic interactions. The friction blocking added didn’t matter to set-theory security, but it did matter.

It mattered to the site’s culture, its norms, its society. The design didn’t add a meaningful layer of security, but it did directly impact how people actually interacted with each other in the normal course of business. Blocking went from encouraging disengagement to encouraging engagement. Instead of trying to diffuse conflict by separating people from people they objected to, Twitter is baiting negative engagement by chumming the waters. This also denies people a way to set a soft boundary. Now reading posts from an account which had blocked you isn’t a workaround, it’s not devious or sneaky behavior, it’s using the platform as intended.

There was a behavior — in this case, often a negative behavior — being effectively discouraged though design, even though that design didn’t provide any meaningful security.

Marginalizing the Holdouts

The Twitter blocking example shows friction (formerly) being used with largely prosocial ends. But this same kind of friction is often deployed in service of censorship and control. In the “friction” scenario the workaround exists, definitively; you can still fight the design. But the danger isn’t just having to fight the design: friction manipulates the Overton window. If you’re trying to impose a restriction, you need a social environment that will allow you to do that without blowback. But once you’ve already gotten people in the habit of acting within a restriction, it’s easy to portray protesters as cheats and criminals once you ramp up the demands.

The removal of design affordances is a form of systematic disenfranchisement. Design affects how people use the product and what motions they usually perform. Even if the product technically supports a feature, if the user doesn’t use it they don’t consider it part of their toolset. Once people aren’t in the habit of making the motion — once they don’t consider something to be an ability of theirs that can be taken away — that’s nearly the whole game won.

Sometimes bans are sweeping and broadly effective from the start. Going back to our original censorship/VPN example, Michigan H.B. 4938 takes a shotgun approach by simultaneously attacking “pornographic material” while also preemptively demanding that “An internet service provider providing internet service in this state shall actively monitor and block known circumvention tools” “including virtual private networks, proxy servers, and encrypted tunneling methods to evade content restrictions.” They are indeed already going after the workarounds.

It sometimes seems like people trying to impose restrictions are playing catch-up, like someone one move behind in chess, trying to create sufficient enforcement structure only after making the threats. I think this diffusion of impact can actually be more dangerous, not just because of the Overton window shifting norms, but because having workarounds makes the most important people in the conversation complacent. The techies people with functional workarounds are less likely to push back against a new requirement if it seems it can’t be enforced against them. But once the requirement is in place, attacking the workarounds is mere enforcement of existing policy.

Oppressive technical systems start with the marginalized: people who don’t see the extent of the danger or who don’t have the political standing to push back.

Once the practice takes hold among the marginalized it metastasizes. Changing the norms and expectations weakens the position of the hold-outs who were able to ignore and dismiss the restriction before. Discouraging something means fewer people are in the habit of doing it, and eventually the people being inconvenienced are a small enough population that they don’t have the political power to fight an effective ban. Once it’s being inflicted on everyone you lose the right to complain.

It’s a form of policy drift, or the ratchet effect: the scope and effect of policy changing over time with no formal expansion. The proliferation of workarounds meant that competent people were excluded from the effects of the policy. But on paper the policy always applied to them too, even if it wasn’t enforced. This allows an imposition to be rolled out in stages. After the written policy is normalized, increase security and enforcement until it includes everyone. Even though it’s a complete reversal of the effect for some people, the action passes itself off as a change in scale, not a change in kind.

The Smartbrains are not exempt from society. Once a policy is being enforced on the 80% of people who can’t fight or don’t care, it’s easy to categorize the deviants as cheats and criminals. All of a sudden it will be the case that you can’t adjust, and by then there will be systems to prevent any complaining from changing that fact. Best-case scenario the hackers are the last ones to fold which means by the time it affects them everyone else has already given up.

This is why I’m making the complaint I’m making. This is why it’s so dangerous for the technically enfranchised to be falsely confident. The people who care enough and understand the thing won’t raise as much of a fuss if they are given a way to work around the restriction. But this lack of pushback from experts encourages the shift to happen. The more normalized something is the harder it is to take action against it, and the more discouraged something is the easier it is to ban it and write off people who complain as fussy outliers. You can’t let a workaround be the last bastion standing between you and harm, because it will fall.

Sideloading

Earlier I talked about iOS jailbreaking and the way Apple has deployed increasingly strict security campaigns against their users.

The counterargument to the need for jailbreaking has always been competition. If you want an open phone ecosystem, use an Android. There can’t be a problem because there are competing options. This has always been mealy-mouthed — why should the existence of an alternative mean I can’t use my phone? If both companies are competing to maximize profit why should I expect a different one to treat me any better?

Apple’s locked-down approach to iOS was a problem for which Android acted as a workaround. The workaround acted like a pressure-release valve: the demand was onerous, but the people who objected the most had an outlet they could take without Apple actually accommodating their legitimate needs. This is the “clean your room” fallacy: the idea that the ability for a person to take some self-soothing action obligates them to do that instead of anyone ever addressing the root problem. It’s masturbatory.

But my whole point is that workarounds can’t be trusted even when they do exist. And now the Android workaround is dead too, as Google is going to block sideloaded apps too. This is all extremely predictable behavior that antitrust anticipates. The duopoly doesn’t matter when they both pick the policy that gives themselves the most power. People always needed the right to own their own phones. The fact that you could switch to a phone with a different kind of malware never addressed the underlying problem, it only diffused the outrage. But people getting used to the restrictions of iOS shifted expectations enough that Google believes it’s able to squeeze its customers in exactly the same way.

Conflicts

There are also places where an imposed restriction hasn’t fully bitten in yet, where wars are actively being fought in a meaningful way now.

YouTube forever war

Most content platforms have this conflict: they’re in the business of sending information to people so they can see it, but at the same time they desperately want to be in control of how people interact with them.

Let’s specifically look at YouTube, a video hosting service that badly wants to prevent people from downloading its videos.

There are a number of reasons for this — YouTube wants to keep users on its platform, track their behavior, serve them recommendations — but the most obvious is advertising. If you’ve downloaded a real video file you can play it on any device and with any software you want. That means not going through their proprietary video player and not letting it serve you advertisements. Of course the user doesn’t want advertisements and wouldn’t choose to watch them, so YouTube’s video hosting service depends on them restricting users’ access to video. That means blocking downloading and third-party clients to make sure their interface is a chokepoint.

There are good reasons to download videos, just like there are good reasons to tape shows. But YouTube isn’t in the business of making sure you’re able to do things you have good reason to do. YouTube only wants to send video if it trusts the client to act in YouTube’s best interest over the users. That means playing ads YouTube wants to play, collecting analytics YouTube wants to collect, pushing recommendations YouTube wants pushed. Anything to keep you hooked into a platform instead of treating YouTube as the infrastructure it is.

This looks like another impossible problem for YouTube; sending users playable video means giving them everything they need to record it. YouTube is already sending you a copy of the video for you to play; it’s the video cable problem all over again. But that hasn’t stopped YouTube from really, really trying.

There is a constant struggle back-and-forth as YouTube does what they can to break alternate clients and downloading tools. Cobalt, a web-based downloading tool, has faced particularly harsh pushback from YouTube, as the requests aren’t made by individual clients which has allowed YouTube to deny access to Cobalt’s servers. Paid, professional downloading software that used to be able to easily download video now has to piggyback off your personal YouTube account to work, putting you at risk if Google ever decides to retaliate against unauthorized use.

There was a significant escalation discovered just last week; YouTube is changing its delivery format to prevent tools from extracting data, and extractors are having to be more computationally expensive to parse the information. Google is working on various user attestation techniques like BotGuard and Proof of Origin tokens that all exist to prevent user behavior YouTube dislikes. You can’t just download the file YouTube is supposed to be sending you, you have to run a whole VM to solve the challenges they’re throwing out to prove you’re really watching their advertisements.

And they’ve tested the waters in taking this even further. Back in March, YouTube ran a test where they’d wrap all videos in proprietary DRM, including Creative Commons licensed videos where this DRM wrapping was explicitly prohibited.

YouTube can secure its content against users by requiring security upgrades on both the client and server (like HDCP’s locks on both ends of the cable), but this comes at the cost of compatibility. They have to choose between maintaining compatibility with older insecure-but-functional protocols or marginal security improvements. Unfortunately for everyone they often choose the latter, deeming the services they break “acceptable losses”. If you have an old smart TV or DVD player that shipped with a YouTube application, it probably doesn’t work anymore.

When I first wrote that I was thinking about embedded systems, like old smart TVs that aren’t getting updates. Then I remembered YouTube doesn’t work on my phone. I have an iPhone 6s, a hardware model first released in 2015. It’s my perfect device: it has a headphone jack and supports Touch ID and 3D Touch (the best feature). It’s the newest device Apple deems “obsolete.” I purchased it in 2020-something and it’s running the latest version of iOS available for it: iOS 15, released 2022. I have the latest version of the YouTube app available, and it doesn’t work because YouTube killed it. YouTube not only stopped supporting my version of YouTube, it’s fully cut off access and prevents it from functioning at all.

Right now I’m sharing a YouTube red account. I am a paying customer of their service. Does that mean I get to actually use it? No.

So when I talk about compatibility that doesn’t just mean the weird old embedded systems I was first picturing, that means anything short of the cutting-edge. If you’re living anything short of the disastrous yearly-phone-refresh hyperconsumer lifestyle, you’re subject to anything breaking at any time.

But it’s needless! The problem is not that YouTube has completely changed the service they provide and extensive changes to the client would be required to support the the many new features. YouTube’s service hasn’t changed, they’re just refusing to continue service to players who don’t defend YouTube against undesired user behavior enough for them.

The nuclear option is for YouTube to block you from watching (not downloading, just watching) videos at all, even though their maximally-supported channels. Despite this completely breaking the premise of their service, this is something they do regularly. If YouTube decides there’s “suspicious” behavior coming from any device on your network (or if it thinks you’re using a VPN), it can trip a flag that blocks public access to publicly posted videos. If your connection is flagged like this any attempt to access video will fail with the error “Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot” any time you try to watch a video without explicitly being logged into your YouTube account, which breaks video embeds in third-party programs. This lasts as long as they feel like keeping you blocked, with no way for you to even request they restore normal service.

This is another reality it seems impossible to get around: when push comes to shove, YouTube doesn’t have to send you any video at all. There is no negotiation here, YouTube signs itself unilateral authority. You’ve got no service-level agreement, no nothin’.

It’s easy to see how — depending on how the law and public sentiment swing — downloading video from YouTube as a practice could be entirely stamped out someday.

Microsoft accounts on Windows 11

Here’s an example that just happened very recently: Microsoft removing “workarounds” that allow you to install Windows without a Microsoft account and an internet connection. This puts together everything I’ve been talking about. It has the introduction of a new requirement, manufactured consent, manipulation via design, and systematically increasing pressure against objection.

First, don’t be confused by the nomenclature here: this is not about software licensing, this is about social media. On new installations of Windows, Microsoft has been gradually rolling out a requirement for already-licensed Windows installations that new users link their Windows operating system user account to their web account. This is part of a larger shift of the Windows ecosystem: tying your identity to every facet of the user experience. Every action you take can be governed not just by the hardware and software you own, but by your immediate relationship with Microsoft and the entitlements they choose to allow you.

This exact name and function of this account has evolved over time. In 2001 it was your MSN account if you used MSN Messenger. In 2005 it became your Windows Live account if you used Hotmail. In 2012 it was renamed “Microsoft account”, used for a bundle of services called Office 365, later renamed Microsoft 365 in 2022, and currently called… “The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office)”. At some point Bing was involved? In parallel to all this it also serves as your Xbox Live account. It’s the account you use for any Microsoft software-as-a-service products, and now you need an active account in good standing with Microsoft in order to use Windows at all. Whether Microsoft lets you use your computer or not hinges on the account you use to log into Minecraft.

The technology to do this exists. In fact, one of the new hardware requirements for Windows 11 is the “Trusted Platform Module”: a physical cryptography chip that enables even stronger device and tamper-prevention. This is the ring minus one chip designed to give manufacturers —rather than users — control of what behavior is allowed on people’s devices, in as granular a way as they care to enforce.

There’s a lot more to say about Microsoft shifting Windows from a software product you purchase to an ephemeral service, most of it bad. The entire campaign of digital tenancy is bad. Requiring an internet connection to install an operating system is bad. The Windows user experience turning into a vertically integrated nightmare is bad. Microsoft having the ability to deny you even the most basic access to a product you’ve purchased for policy reasons is bad. The policy reason itself — extending corporate control over the entire operating environment — is bad. Deanonymization and tying intimate usage information to data harvesting is bad. Digital feudalism is bad. Replacing real software with software-as-a-service is bad in general. It’s bad for software use to be defined as a forever-relationship users have with Microsoft tied to a web account Microsoft unilaterally controls.

Depending on a Microsoft account to use Windows means being obligated to meet any new requirements Microsoft might add to their terms at any time for any reason. Add that to Microsoft storing your files in the cloud by default, an environment with automatic content scanning and faulty detection of criminality¹⁴… there’s so, so much danger here. (In fact, Microsoft is rolling out even more scanning right now, and they’re already limiting users’ ability to control it.) They’ve already proven they don’t need this kind of invasive control to be wildly, wildly profitable. Microsoft assigns itself virtually unlimited authority over Microsoft accounts. This is the “not actually buying anything” case I’ve complained about before; no matter what you purchase Microsoft insists it doesn’t owe you anything. It’s just providing whatever services it chooses to provide, which it does regardless of whether you pay them money or not. There are no projects, no services, no software, no licenses. There are only casinos.

The point is, this is bad. But right now what I really want to look at is the ways people work around things which are bad. Which these are, and which they’ve been doing.

Microsoft has rolled this change out progressively, so most normal users have already been using Microsoft accounts for a while now, even on Windows 10. At first tying your user account to Microsoft was presented as an exciting new feature. Then it became the default as early as setup, and the only way to circumvent it was to disconnect the machine from the internet entirely. But Microsoft tightened the noose further and has finally made an internet connection and account registration a hard requirement for setup:

Tom Warren, “Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without an online account” Microsoft is cracking down on bypass methods that let Windows 11 installs use a local account, and avoid an internet requirement during the setup process. In a new Windows 11 test build released today, Microsoft says it’s removing known workarounds for creating local accounts…
…
“We are removing known mechanisms for creating a local account in the Windows Setup experience (OOBE),” says Amanda Langowski, the lead for the Windows Insider Program. “While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing users to exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use.”

The changes mean Windows 11 users will need to complete the OOBE screens with an internet connection and Microsoft account in future versions of the OS.

In its eagerness to seize more control over the entire desktop experience, Microsoft sees the Windows setup as a process that, as one of its core requirements, “ensures that all users exit setup with internet connectivity and a Microsoft Account.” Creating a regular on-device user account is now understood as an “exploit”, a “loophole” to get around “correct procedure.” And, under that framing, of course Microsoft is within its rights to “crack down” on people using unsupported techniques that leave their machine “misconfigured.”

The remaining holdouts are competent technical users who understand the problems and are willing to go to the effort of working around the new demand. But as Microsoft gets stricter and stricter the pool of holdouts gets smaller and smaller, and as the pool of holdouts shrinks they get more and more marginalized. “Privacy weirdos”, people who care more about imagined danger than actually getting work done. All of this is intentional, and so far the strategy is working. If this change had been rolled out in a way that required informed consent from users, opinion would’ve been split. Some people would’ve used it, some people wouldn’t. Instead the people who objected were temporarily placated until the Overton window shifted and the rug could be pulled from under them.

When linking your Microsoft account was first announced a lot of people assumed it would have to be optional at some level. It was too egregiously bad a practice to be delivered as a standard, let alone a requirement. Requiring the OS to phone home to complete setup was too outrageous, too out-of-line with how computers actually work. Microsoft would never actually be able to dictate which computers could run, even though — as the game industry did with its consoles, and Apple did with mobile devices — they’d constructed a technical and legal environment where doing that was possible. No matter what, a workaround would have to exist in some capacity. They couldn’t really make it a requirement, surely. But that’s exactly what’s happening!

Emily Young@EmilyAYoung1
People kept saying "you can just work around it!"
I've always asked "for how long?"
The answer was precisely this long.
I'm sure there'll be another workaround, but again for how long and how many mods will you need to do? oobe\bypassnro was always a Microsoft-supplied fix.
Tue Oct 07 21:34:16 +0000 2025

Let’s go back to NFTs, a distinctly goofy technology. This isn’t a war that’s being fought anymore; NFTs squarely lost this one. But let’s look at the conflict anyway.

First the technical backbone. NFTs necessarily reference the resource they identify as a matter of public record, and in order to “display” an NFT, you have to be able to look up and show whatever it’s referencing. Web browsers download the resource any time they want to “display” the NFT, and so anyone can in fact right-click and save it regardless of any “ownership information” present on a blockchain.

This was used as a dismissal of NFT hype; the value proposition was effectively deflated by tools everyone already had for free. There was a good bit of clowning as people learned for the first time how images worked, and even some feeble cries for new technical controls to protect the exclusivity of NFT assets against “right-clickers.”

But what if you really couldn’t right-click? I don’t think it’s as far-fetched as it sounds. Let’s imagine a world where Twitter followed-through with integrating NFT display into the main platform, like they made such a fuss of doing. People would link NFTs to their Twitter account as a form of wealth display, and you would interact with the display side of the system right on the Twitter app.

Jane "Not A Twïtter Employee" Manchun Wong@wongmjane
Twitter is working on Collectibles profile tab, NFT view and NFT details view

Sun Oct 24 20:35:17 +0000 2021

There’s no right-clicking here. On a mobile app you can only save what select elements the app offers you the ability to save. Actual user agency is already heavily regulated in ways that are designed to hijack end-user devices to further business interests at user expense. Screenshots can even be selectively disabled to hide content the app deems sensitive.

But doesn’t this break down with the Twitter website? They haven’t taken the operating system hostage there yet, and people would still be able to inspect pages and save resources, including NFT content. In this case Twitter can treat web browsers the same way YouTube treats “insecure” clients. They could deny access to “sensitive” resources like NFTs on the web client — displaying some downscaled preview if not blocking access entirely — with an upsell to use their official app instead, as so many sites already do.

Even if they did have some form of web client for this view, it’s not true that a web interface in any way “cracks open the system”. Even today on the web view you can’t save videos without special tooling.

But that kind of technical enforcement is not what happened. Instead, Twitter quietly rolled back its brief foray into NFT support in 2024. It wasn’t stopped because it was impossible; it was stopped because the NFT “movement” just didn’t have the juice. This wasn’t the entire electronics industry moving to support the entertainment industry, this was Elon Musk grifting the world’s dumbest investors, backed by the spare cycles of a skeleton crew. They barely put together a functional webpage, let alone effective technical restrictions.

🧪Eric🧪 - 2%@nervouswaffle
I think the funniest thing about this shitty Twitter NFT integration is that it still gives you the option to save the image. Great job, dipfucks.
#NewNFTProfilePic

Fri Jan 21 02:09:47 +0000 2022

In order to effectively institute a restriction like this you also need to manufacture a social consensus. This is why there was an intentional campaign to attack the social acceptability of refusing to dignify the society NFTs aimed to create. There was a miniature culture war for social acceptability of NFTs and the social structures that legitimacy would require, but like everything having to do with NFTs it was clumsy and heavy-handed.

NFT people tried to turn having their “property” right-click-saved as a form of victimhood. They tried to leverage mockery against their critics, accusing people of just “not getting it” and generally being lesser people for rejecting their vision. You even saw NFT people trying to turn right-clicking into a form of retaliatory violence.

The goal here is to deny social acceptability to behavior that breaks the business model. But it failed: there was a refusal to dignify the attempt to impose a social structure. Their demands weren’t humored and the technical enforcement they would have required wasn’t built.

Piracy?

This obviously seems goofy. Of course legitimizing NFTs as a meaningful form of “ownership” never could have worked, it’s simply too stupid. Why would people accept the introduction of artificial scarcity into a market that didn’t need it? Who would care this much about ownership of an idea? And what society would allow the imposition of an artificial social structure that benefits some at the expense of others?

This happens all the time, of course. Structurally, this isn’t really that different from the delegitimization of media copying as piracy, which more or less worked. The Intellectual Property people had better public relations, better propaganda, and better arguments. But they accomplished the same thing the NFT people wanted: social acceptability of an ownership status over non-rivalrous goods made artificially scarce via institutions.

And you know what the craziest part is? They were able to kill the social acceptability of right-clickers. And they had to really work for it.

Importantly, when these advertisements were published, they were false. At the time in Europe, “theft” and “stolen goods” were specifically defined in criminal law and didn’t include file copying! None of the behavior described by these antipiracy ads involved depriving someone else of the use of their property. It was copyright infringement, sure, but it wasn’t theft or even piracy!

Nintendo famously called video game rental “commercial rape”, but at least you could argue they were using a metaphor. The software industry was making a false equivalence: the assertion is that copyright infringement is theft, that they are literally the same thing. This is false, and the reason they had to lie and say one thing was something different is to manipulate public opinion.

It’s arguable how effective this kind of messaging was. I doubt heavy-handed propaganda changed the minds of the rotters picking up a tosh copy of Bloggo’s Pow from a dodgy monger, which was definitely real. But between public relations and legal pressure, most unapproved copying has been successfully branded as shameful piracy and relegated to the underground, with many techniques already dying out.

We already live in the world where the ownership weirdos won over right-clicker mentality. That’s fully a thing that happened.

Conclusion

It’s easy to see an absurd demand and write it off as impossible to enforce, but the technical infeasibility of a restriction doesn’t keep it from sticking. Social acceptability determines not just legality but day-to-day technical abilities in the long term. Hard restrictions preventing technically “natural” behavior are already in place and effective, and campaigns are paving the way for more right now.

What can and can’t be effectively enforced depends on motivation and social acceptability. Policies can be implemented with minimal blowback by rolling restrictions out gradually, starting with people who are uninterested or otherwise disenfranchised. The holdouts can be coerced and forced later, once the policy has momentum and people have already acquiesced to it.

In a cruel irony, the ability to work around impositions makes the people most knowledgeable about dangers and most equipped to communicate them complacent. Relying on hacks and workarounds can be a way of objecting something without actually imposing pushback: a smug “well, we’ll see about that”, up until you do in fact see yourself lose.

And what we lose is our way of life. Apple killing support for my perfectly good Pebble smartwatch isn’t something that shows up on my taxes or as a line item anywhere. But it does affect how I actually live my life every day, and that’s the thing that matters. And it’s extremely easy for it to be attacked. We live in a world where a corporation changing its policy about its own products is materially destructive to people with no right to remedy.

I’ve been talking about computers here, but this is just an expression of a much older truth. This is gradualism, solidarity, deontology. Just because something doesn’t affect you now doesn’t mean it won’t later. Being able to avoid trouble at first is a shortcut to a false sense of security and allows you to ignore structural problems even as they grow, eager to consume you too. You’re vulnerable when anyone is vulnerable. You’re one of everyone!

https://www.tumblr.com/alwinfy/735207462211321856

The “don’t pay” “just”s are the most dangerous ones for obvious reasons. ↩
Tracking is a notable exception to this, something I chalk up as having a lot to do with user touch points. People are immediately invested in how pages display and how they can interact with them, but tracking is usually invisible, which makes it harder to configure and control. ↩
See Mark Graham, “Robots.txt meant for search engines don’t work well for web archives”, Archiveteam, “Robots.txt” ↩
Artifacts have politics, etc. ↩
This is one of the main conclusions of Code 2.0: that computers can be regulable. And I argue that they indeed now are.

Lawrence Lessig, “Code 2.0” The claim for cyberspace was not just that government would not regulate cyberspace—it was that government could not regulate cyberspace. Cyberspace was, by nature, unavoidably free. Governments could threaten, but behavior could not be controlled; laws could be passed, but they would have no real effect. …
But what was never made clear in the midst of this celebration was why. Why was cyberspace incapable of regulation? What made it so?
…

The original architecture of the Internet made regulation extremely difficult. But that original architecture can change. And there is all the evidence in the world that it is changing. Indeed, under the architecture that I believe will emerge, cyberspace will be the most regulable space humans have ever known. The “nature” of the Net might once have been its unregulability; that “nature” is about to flip.

But I didn’t realize how closely connected Code 2.0 and this article were until it was already almost finished. Whoops! ↩
More specifically from Digital-CP, an Intel subsidiary. See https://www.digital-cp.com/ ↩
HDCP License Agreement (2007 revision) ROBUSTNESS RULES

1 Construction. Licensed Products as shipped shall comply with the Compliance Rules and shall be designed and manufactured in a manner that is clearly designed to effectively frustrate attempts to modify such Licensed Products to defeat the content protection requirements of the HDCP Specification and the Compliance Rules.

1.1 Functions Defeating the HDCP Specification. Licensed Products shall not include:
(a) switches, buttons, jumpers, or software equivalents thereof;
(b) specific traces that can be cut ; or
(c) functions (including service menus and remote-control functions);
in each case, by which the content protection requirements of the HDCP Specification or the Compliance Rules can be defeated or by which Decrypted HDCP Content can be exposed to unauthorized interception, re-distribution or copying.

1.2 Keep Secrets. Licensed Products shall be designed and manufactured in a manner that is clearly intended to effectively frustrate attempts to discover or reveal Device Keys or other Highly Confidential Information.

↩
And DisplayPort too, yes. Also DVI. Corporations have been trying to keep video from being video since it was first digitized. ↩
With some notable exceptions. I’m reminded of PlayStation applying HDCP as a blanket measure to all video output. See PS4 HDCP must be off to record gameplay but on to watch video apps, etc. ↩
You can generalize this: piracy acts as a relief valve for a lot. For instance the ability to pirate Adobe software, limited as it is, is the only thing keeping Adobe from effectively trying to do the harm it wants to do to the entire creative industry and thus being the actual devil. ↩
The ease of Nintendo Switch emulation in particular is a true aberration: it’s extremely rare that effective emulation software exists concurrently with official support for hardware. ↩
This does seem to be a browser design choice. The html specification says “The user agent should obscure the value so that people other than the user cannot see it”, which describes the asterisk behavior but doesn’t speak directly to the user’s ability to exfiltrate data.

For further research: I wonder if there are Chromium discussions about this design choice? ↩
It’s in style for mobile browsers to have a “show password” button. This is arguably off-spec, actually. ↩
Many such cases. See past reporting:
Including mine: Client CSAM scanning: a disaster already (2021)
Also note unresolved cases with Google and Microsoft and similar.

Currently incidents usually have to do with CSAM, which is currently the most politically acceptable thing to tie automated scanning and zero-tolerance enforcement to. But this is a system designed to be expanded on, and we’re already seeing data collection used to go after more behavior including abortion, immigration, and even journalism. ↩

The Homestuck Union Was Always Fake

2025-08-08T00:00:00-05:00

Oh no!

The Homestuck Independent Creative Union was announced in October 2023, claiming itself to be a “union” of creators working on Homestuck associated projects. The main selling point of this organization is that it was fully independent of Homestuck, Inc., Andrew Hussie, or any of the other existing management structures that had damaged their reputations. This was untrue from day one. The HICU was never a union and it was never independent of Andrew. In fact Andrew doesn’t just have theoretical authority, they’re actively wielding power over projects in secret.

I want to give a very important disclaimer for this “anti-HICU” looking article because I really, really don’t want to see blame misplaced because of this. I think when most people familiar with it think of the HICU, the reaction is “oh, they’re doing better” or even “yeah, I’m on their side.” I don’t fault you for this! Based on what they said about themselves many people — including me personally — gave the HICU a huge amount of good credit upfront, and they’ve done very little publicly to hurt that image. So if you’re an HICU person — if you’re with FRAF, or DCRC, or even Beyond Canon — I am not attacking you with this! I am not against your “side.” The problem here is not the creatives, it’s strictly management. Whether you’re a fan or someone trying to work with the union, you are the one at risk here and I want to help you most of all.

Around October 2023 Andrew Hussie “restructured” Homestuck’s publishing agreement with Viz Media in order to reestablish their “control over the brand.” Homestuck then announced the relaunch of Homestuck^2: Beyond Canon, run by the also newly-announced Homestuck Independent Creative Union.

The HICU is a fascinating organization. If it had been what Andrew Hussie and James Roach claimed it was, it could have been great. The stated goal was to loosen control on the Homestuck franchise and open the doors to community involvement. Instead it was a dangerous power grab — not just to consolidate control over the Homestuck property but maintain control over surrounding spaces — disguised as community outreach. The danger was never well-understood because the HICU was proficient at passing itself off as something it wasn’t, and people have already fallen victim to it.

To understand just how bad the HICU is, you have to understand what it was ostensibly for, what it promised it would do, and how it really worked.

Although it’s best known for Beyond Canon, HS:BC is a special case that I want to ignore for the purpose of this analysis. (For the purposes of this article when I talk about the HICU I’m not talking about the beyond canon comic team, I’m talking about the union as an administrative structure.) What’s very interesting to me — and I think the most critical promise the HICU makes — is the impact the union has on fanwork.

What the HICU license is for

Unlicensed fanwork

Most fanworks operate without any kind of license agreement with the IP holder, which puts them in a FAFO state.

The law gives rightsholders tremendous power over fanwork. Whether a fanwork is truly in violation of copyright or not, the legal system gives rightsholders of the original property the ability to either take down fanwork or force the issue to a court and financially ruin the people responsible with a war of attrition. Since fanwork is not-for-profit (in fact, it is often required to be), the resolution of the Morton’s Fork here is that IP holders have standing to attack fanwork by default. Fanworks are born with a gun to their head.

This creates a situation where, by default, fanwork is subject to the will of the rightsholder. The attitude the copyright holder has towards unlicensed can be anything. Some companies have a reputation for positive engagement with fanwork, like Sega. Other companies have a reputation for maintaining tight control over their brand and aggressively pursuing the takedown of anything they can, like Nintendo.

But that’s not due to any special property of those companies: as a fan creator, you are subject to the whims of the IP holder at all times. Regardless of any past behavior they could change their mind and take projects down anytime they want, so you have to keep them happy if you want to survive. There is no foundation to confidently build on — one decision can mean you have to shutter your project overnight.

This is especially dangerous because the people involved in fanwork are often already especially vulnerable, and so by simply threatening legal action companies — including Homestuck — can automatically intimidate artists with a war of attrition.

Licensed fanwork

Of course a company can choose to maintain a positive relationship with their fans by choosing not to attack fanwork, but that doesn’t change the fact that they have the ability to change their mind. There is nothing stopping them except their own policy, and so there is no safety, especially when the rightsholder has insulated themselves from blowback.

Licensing exists to create a firm foundation where your rights are defined by contract, not grace. If you want to use work but you don’t have the legal right to do so, you can negotiate a license with the rightsholder that grants you those rights through contract. Once you have a license, your rights to use the material are governed by the text of license, not the whims of the rightsholder. This means a license is valuable. The holder is giving up a level of control, something valuable to them, so licenses have to be negotiated and paid for.

This is a process that’s generally prohibitive for fans, either because the costs are too high or the company is categorically unwilling to open up avenues for discussion.

Open fanwork

One way creators can give fans a confident foundation without managing individual relationships is to release the entire work under a permissive license. This is usually done not through “putting the work into the public domain” (easier said than done!) but by releasing work under an open license which gives anyone rights to use the work. There are creative Commons license is for this, but you also see things like the Open Game License, which is designed so that third-party companies can build a business on a standing agreement with the rightsholder.

Homestuck is not released under a permissive license (which is strange — there have been pushes for it to be released openly, and it’s questionable whether it’s even eligible for copyright in the first place). But in recent years Homestuck has taken a different approach to giving fanworks a foundation: the HICU.

Homestuck’s Licensing Background

Historically, Homestuck has been very bad about this. They’ve been extremely territorial about claiming ownership of anything tangentially related to Homestuck and bombarding people with legal threats. The MSPA sales faq (somehow still live in 2025) is a good starter for this. It asserts that anyone selling any items based on Andrew’s work so is doing something illegal and categorically “disallows” (read: threatens) sales of just about every category of art they can list.

Homestuck was infamous for extremely vicious enforcement of merch policy back in the con heyday.¹ It’s famously true that you can’t copyright a hat, but that didn’t stop Homestuck from exploding at people over it. Rachel Rocklin got a lot of flak for being Andrew Hussie’s enforcement at the time, but time has shown that the one directing this position of hostility was ultimately Andrew, not Rachel.

As aggressive as the written policy is, Homestuck has often exceeded even this standard. For example, by demanding people take down things like free prop-building tutorials, even with no sales and no physical product. This is a particularly nasty and over-aggressive interpretation of copyright law, something I’ve already written about extensively.

This is an especially perverse position for Homestuck to take given the extraordinary liberties it takes with copyright, but that’s another essay entirely.²

But there’s also a danger in the interpersonal side of things, particularly with Homestuck. People know each other, which means whether Homestuck allows your project to exist could depend on whether its members were in Andrew’s good graces personally. This opens up the door to discrimination and a culture where an “inner circle” are able to do creative work, but others aren’t.

I’ve seen “in” people use copyrighted Homestuck assets and characters to promote their own commercial product and sell stickers of ripped Homestuck sprites to support their own media company, just in recent memory. With enforcement determined according to the discretion of executives who had personal relationships with the people involved, the main factor that determined who was safe from Andrew and who was vulnerable to legal harassment was simple favoritism.

The Promise of the HICU

According to the HICU’s self-description, it exists to create an environment somewhat similar to working under an open license. Here’s their basic self-definition:

Beyond Canon, About About the Homestuck Independent Creative Union
The Homestuck Independent Creative Union (HICU) is a union of creative contributors which was established to consolidate members of future Homestuck Projects, beginning with the launch of Homestuck: Beyond Canon.
The HICU is a totally independent entity from Andrew, What Pumpkin, VIZ Media, or any other corporate interest. Andrew has given the union a free license, so they may legally work within the full Homestuck universe and monetize their efforts to support the members. The union is both creatively and financially independent, and no outside individuals or companies are receiving any royalties or payments. Only the members benefit, and income will be distributed among members as equitably as possible.
Andrew is not creatively involved with these projects in any direct way, but remains available to the union for consultation at their request.

October 02, 2023

miles 10:22 PM

so to get colloquial about it, the Union is basically like

the collective of Homestuck Contributors

…

miles 10:22 PM

if it helps, think of the HICU as an actual union.

So the story is that HICU is bound to represent the interests not of Homestuck the company, but of its members — the creative community. They immediately establish that they’re entirely separate and distinct from any existing structures — including Andrew Hussie. Separate entities, separate responsibilities, separate interests.

There’s obviously one connection though: they have a license to work within the Homestuck property. Andrew (on behalf of Homestuck, Inc., the company that holds the actual rights) allegedly issued this organization something they’re calling a “free license”. As written, this is an act of good will toward the fan community designed to actively enable more creative work.

So why does this matter? How does one labeled organization having a license open the property to fans in general? Because the HICU isn’t just writing one comic; it’s reaching out to fan projects and offering partnerships with the union to set up similar licenses.

As described, partnering with the HICU to go under license is the opposite of giving Homestuck a blank check. For projects without a license Homestuck is already able to demand whatever it wants from anyone at any time or threaten legal destruction. But if a fanwork is under a clear license, it has a defined right to use the source material that can only be revoked as per the terms of the license as written. This creates a solid foundation where there was not one before.

The promise the HICU make is pretty unambiguous:

Austinado Andrew Hussie approached us and offered a free license to work with the IP. No royalties owed, no ties to What Pumpkin, VIZ Media, or any other corporate interest, and no outside influence from higher ups at the Homestuck Factory. (NOTE: The Homestuck Factory doesn’t exist. That was a joke.)

Basically, he said: “You guys do good work, keep doing that.” And then handed us the keys to our own little pocket of house-bound freedom.
… As far as creative direction and narrative plans go, the comic and its spin-offs will be unaffected.

Vitally, if this license is what they say it is, you can be under this license and still retain independence and creative control. This is the keystone the promise of the HICU hinges on. Once you’re under license, you have a right to use the material and a solid foundation to work on. You are no longer subject to the whims of any outside influence. Andrew can’t step in and make changes. Your management structure stays the same, only safer.

This design is a balancing act. While the stated goal is to grow as much as possible, the HICU is empowered to curate what projects it licenses, allowing for some moderation and quality control. This isn’t as open as an open license but it can do some of the same good.

The promise of the HICU to enable independent fan projects to operate without fear of licensing issues is a good one.

The Twist

Unfortunately this is all a sham, and has been since day one.

The primary purpose of the union is not to empower the fandom but to leverage control over it. The HICU organization is a facade: despite their claims there is no meaningful distinction between the HICU and existing Homestuck companies. I have observed that Andrew Hussie personally oversees the HICU and administrates it himself through proxies. By coaxing fan projects “under license”, the HICU takes control away from fans and consolidates it in one organization. Licensees are also forced to submit to an NDA, which Homestuck uses to prevent people from revealing the bullying and abusive behaviors they’re subject to.

The structure of the HICU is intentionally confusing to obscure the function it’s really performing. The HICU is not a separate entity, members do not necessarily have safety or creative freedom, and the union absolutely does not negotiate against Andrew as the name’s allusion to labor unions implies. I have been working with Homestuck staff since before the HICU label existed and seen them simply apply the label to projects they wanted to distance from Andrew’s negative reputation. As an early example, Requiem Café’s Homestuck project transitioned seemingly from a Homestuck Inc/Viz venture to an HICU venture, because the HICU is all the same people doing all the same things. I have personally seen “an invitation from the HICU” turn into “Andrew Hussie is suing your project unless you change it” in one step. It’s a bait-and-switch.

Unfortunately, because of the threat of legal retaliation, most people with direct evidence of this behavior are unable to give evidence of their experiences. However, there are exceptions to this that let us see through the cracks. I have personally been privy to the HICU’s attempts to ensnare outside projects since before the existence of the union was publicly announced in the first place. And as Homestuck uses the HICU to exercise more control over fan spaces, we’re seeing more and more evidence of abuse.

I would not be attesting to these things myself without doing my due diligence. I have confirmed, double-confirmed, triple-confirmed that this behavior is happening. This includes projects I am involved in, this includes projects I’m not involved in. This includes the UHC, this includes projects other than the UHC. I’m unable to publicly share much of the evidence that has convinced me of this, but there is still enough in the public record. The abuse is rampant and systematic.

Andrew’s Leadership

First and foremost, the HICU is in no way independent of existing structures. Despite the implication that this is a union of workers working with Andrew, Andrew themself is directly in charge of the “union.” Like every other Homestuck entity,³ it’s just a shell around Andrew Hussie.

Miles is currently the co-director of the HICU. He also acts a direct proxy for Andrew Hussie.

June 25, 2024, miles

…

miles 05:36 PM

i’ll let andrew know!

GiovanH 06:04 PM

have you noticed you have the job of “priest”

miles 06:09 PM

LMAO

low priest

ive never heard it put that way but i love the comparison

GiovanH 06:10 PM

it seems like a good gig

miles 06:10 PM

gives me an excuse to say “andrew works in mysterious ways”

September 02, 2024

GiovanH 12:41 AM

(@miles real quick before I get too deep into details here, you’re speaking on behalf of Andrew/Homestuck Inc here, correct?)

miles 01:37 PM

yes im speaking on behalf of andrew

In order to even be considered to join the Union, not only do you have to sign this perpetual NDA, Andrew has to personally interview and approve your membership. It is the clearest evidence imaginable that the union is in no way independent. Despite all its promises, the internal politics of the HICU is still just about clamoring for favor from Andrew Hussie.

October 02, 2023

miles 11:04 PM

the way we tend to do things in terms of folks the HICU is collaborating with is as follows

once (or if) you guys do feel comfortable signing the NDA, andrew and i are going to chat with each of you one on one. one at a time

think of it as like. idk i guess an interview?

not that we need your Credentials because your work speaks for itself, its just that andrew likes to have a chat with folks as well in a semi-formal setting so that he can be on top of everyone we collab with

When I was discussing the HICU “Community Participation and Release Agreement” (more on this later) with Miles, we found some typos in the document and a line we needed to strike. You’ll never believe who has final say over the text.

miles 10:36 PM

i can go ahead and have a look at that line and get back to you about maybe striking it, because i totally see your concern, even though i can straight up promise you man to man (whatever thats worth) that we have no intention of operating that way

because again, we’d love to work with you guys if that’s in the cards for us

Bambosh 10:39 PM

That would be excellent if you can make it happen

miles 10:39 PM

i can totally talk to andrew about it

To be clear this is not a license document that involves Homestuck, Inc., this is just the release agreement to work with the HICU. Their claim that “The HICU is a totally independent entity from Andrew, What Pumpkin, VIZ Media, or any other corporate interest.” is fully false.

This isn’t just a conflict of interest. The whole point of the union is to make sure everything serves Andrew’s interests. And, at the same time, it’s covering up the extent of Andrew’s personal involvement.

The latest announcement regarding Andrew’s status in regards to Homestuck was in 2021, when What Pumpkin asserted that “Hussie officially left What Pumpkin to work on new projects unrelated to Homestuck. … While Hussie still retains ownership of the Homestuck IP, they decided last year to fully discontinue their creative involvement in any future Homestuck projects, and instead plans to continue independently developing more projects like Psycholonials.” Note the load-bearing word “creative” there, the same as in “Andrew is not creatively involved with these projects in any direct way.” The intent of this messaging is to project the idea that Andrew is uninvolved and the show is basically running itself now. This is not the case.

I don’t know how much creative control Andrew is choosing to exert over current creative projects. They don’t seem interested in doing so, and so my assumption would be that projects like Beyond Canon and Hiveswap see minimal contribution or involvement from Andrew. What I know is that he’s still in a position to exercise control over aspects he cares about, when he chooses to. The goal here isn’t to secretly control everything, it’s to be able to secretly control something if he wants to. In the recent past he’s exercised personal authority to write announcements, license projects, and make legal demands, although it’s usually disguised with a series of proxies. This is a classic component of dysfunctional management: authority is exercised arbitrarily and without oversight.

I’ve experienced this myself with the UHC; I was working with the HICU right up until the moment it turned out I was working with Andrew the whole time.

I’ve also seen “HICU involvement” consist of Andrew picking out a project they’re personally interested in and establishing a private, direct line with one member of its leadership with no involvement from anyone in the union at all.

It is perverse to co-opt the word and called us a “union”. The job of a union (and the job of a union director) is not to do whatever it takes to make their boss happy. The purpose of a union is to protect the workforce from management and maintain a productive tension. Instead any time Andrew wants a specific thing, “union management” jumps to make it happen. The union already is management, just crudely disguised.

Reputation Laundering

This is an attempt to launder Andrew Hussie’s destroyed reputation. They know that’s what they’re doing, because they’re lying about it.

I’m not going to summarize how Homestuck management ruined its reputation in the past, because that ground is well-trod. Sarah Z’s video is one good start, or you could go all the way back to The Hiveswap Fiasco. That’s just the latest issue; if you want, you can keep digging and find more.... What matters is Homestuck thinks its reputation is trashed and so they’re doing a scheme about it.

Homestuck-the-work is good, and it has a huge and passionate fan base. People are desperate for Good Times and are willing to give a lot of faith to something in the shape of a management overhaul. Andrew Hussie took advantage of this. He’s ultimately managing Homestuck the same way, but he’s using proxies and a shiny new label to do it.

But this is incredibly risky and irresponsible. Andrew is gambling with the livelihood and reputation of others to enrich themself. When it comes out this is how he’s been abusing the union, he stays retired and on perpetual vacation, and James, Miles, and everyone else who depends on the Patreon are used up.

Isolation

Because the license isn’t open the actual text of the agreement isn’t public. Everything goes on behind closed doors, and both Andrew and the HICU require people to sign non-disclosure agreements before even being considered. There is an intense, conspicuous secrecy around anything and everything that would prove the HICU is actually doing what it says it is. This secrecy is necessary because the union is fake.

A common tool Andrew uses to isolate people and form a dependence on Andrew’s goodwill is NDA agreements, which are designed to be over-broad and punitive. They demand that association with Homestuck — including when they require you associate with them — be contingent on NDAs. These NDAs cover all conversations, which is used to cut off lines of communication victims can use to report abuse or even discuss issues with their peers.

Quoting directly from the HICU contract (again, not one I signed, but one some people have),

The purpose of this agreement is to secure confidentiality among an extended network of people… By joining this Group, you are committing to respecting the fact that statements of other Group members have been made only under the mutual understanding that all correspondence among members is private. Signing this form is a legally binding indication that you agree with these conditions of mutual respect and discretion.

… While protecting the financial interests of the Union is not the primary purpose of this agreement, and protecting the privacy and safety among Union and Group members is the primary purpose, nevertheless, if you violate the terms of this agreement, [Homestuck] will seek maximum financial damages, both to protect its financial interests, and more importantly, to vigilantly protect the privacy and safety of its members.
…
…you cannot terminate, cancel, or revoke this Agreement for any reason.
…
…You further agree to refrain from disclosing or using Confidential Information for any purpose other than participating in the Group. Your obligation to maintain the confidentiality of Confidential Information shall survive termination in perpetuity.
…
All information is deemed Confidential Information.⁴ …
…
You agree that any violation or threatened violation of this Agreement will cause irreparable injury to the Union, entitling the Union to obtain injunctive relief in addition to all legal remedies.

I have confirmed with my legal counsel that this is not remotely standard language for an NDA. It is designed to intimidate and lock signatories into a coercive, punitive situation. I don’t say that as a hypothetical way someone could interpret this language, I’m reporting that as something I’ve personally seen Homestuck use that exact language to do. And the thing this contract gives you? Is it a license, is it protection, is it a cut of Patreon revenue? No. If you sign this contract the HICU may have conversations with you about Homestuck, if they feel like it.

What Andrew wants is the ability to get whatever they want whenever they want it, and this environment gets him that. Homestuck inserts the NDA as a hard requirement for entry-level “access” to basic discussion space that should not require any such agreement. What it really does is ensure you can be intimidated into keeping any arbitrary behavior secret and create information silos ripe for manipulation. When you can’t communicate a problem the only source for remedy is to go through Andrew themselves and have him find the grace to give you what you ask for.

But even without the legal stranglehold of an NDA, Andrew uses traditional social isolation as a control tactic.

One of the long-term criticisms of Homestuck leadership has been a tendency to identify people they find undesirable and persecute them via disenfranchisement, cutting off peoples’ ability to network and exist in their community. This creates a culture of secrecy and fear, and requires people to stay in their supervisor’s good graces on a personal basis just to safely exist in the fan community. The HICU is a vast expansion of this power, and creates an opportunity for Homestuck to extend its ability to apply pressure to discriminate against certain people into fan projects.

I have seen the HICU expressly threaten to sue fan projects — including FRAF projects — unless they changed their leadership structure. The full mafia style “installing our own guy in secret” play.

In January of this year I was scheduled to publish my first game on Steam — a collaboration with several other Homestuck fans. Less than a week away from the launch date, Homestuck intervened as personal retaliation against me. They reached out to other members of the team privately and threatened legal action against them if they continued associating themselves with me. It worked. Homestuck cut me off from people I considered good friends, and the whole project was a loss. I am still heartbroken and angry from this. Not because of the game, but because of the relationships I had with other people that they attacked.

But they do that. They were willing to do it with me, I’ve seen them do it to others, and it seems like they’re willing to do it regularly. Isolate an enemy, make them even more dependent on getting your personal favor.

I think a part of being polite and friendly in any community is being somewhat conflict-averse. Nobody wants to “get caught up in drama.” It is important to avoid petty conflicts, but at the same time it is important to address and resolve real interpersonal issues, especially in a work environment. “Drama” is a term that describes petty arguments, but it can be misused to mask genuinely important conflict that needs to be resolved. This is a dynamic that can be weaponized; toxic positivity can act as a cog in the wheel of a larger intimidation machine. Shutting down attempts to resolve real issues with “don’t cause drama” is toxic positivity, parallel to shutting down self-expression with “don’t get political.” If someone is actively misbehaving, being overeager to moderate away conflict can lead to shutting down concerns as “starting conflict,” actively empowering the problem. Maintaining a positive disposition is a good goal but it isn’t the be-all-end-all: you also have to put in the work to make sure people aren’t being abused behind the scenes.

Controlling Terms

The license is a protection racket. Not all licenses are a protection racket, but this one is. Andrew has standing to launch a legal attack against fanwork and threatens to do so unless they negotiate a license from him. I have seen the HICU try to force people to sign an agreement to terms without giving them the ability to read the text of the terms they were agreeing to. Literally forcing people to sign a blank check, except it’s a full legal contract.

But I’m convinced that to Andrew the real value of the HICU isn’t that he can use it to extort money from fan projects, it’s that the HICU gives them control over fan projects themselves. The standard HICU waiver (including the NDA, discussed) is called the “Homestuck Community Participation and Release Agreement.” I think this is an extremely apt title. Homestuck’s position is that they should be the gatekeeper for participation in the community. The document traps you, gives Andrew leverage over you, and it’s all to participate in ways that shouldn’t require a waiver in the first place.

The purpose of a license should be to protect fanworks from Andrew; to reduce their power to threaten them in concrete ways. Even if Andrew really wanted to attack someone, them having a license should protect them from this threat. But every license or license-adjacent document I’ve read is either ineffective at this or explicitly does the opposite.

Homestuck’s one big for the merit of licensing is merch. Let’s talk merch. I love to quibble about what exactly copyright covers — can you enforce a so-called “closed species”? — but the kinds of work Homestuck is putting in its “licensed store” makes it very clear what’s going on here. Homestuck has always claimed far more than they have any justifiable legal right to, and that’s happening here too. Legally, you shouldn’t need a license from Homestuck to sell a print of your own art of your own character(bak), or a plain green shirt with a zodiac symbol(bak). If Homestuck is demanding one and threatening to sue you if you don’t play ball, that’s not licensing, that’s extortion.⁵

The license doesn’t give you a safe foundation to build on. In fact, it ensnares you further. Because the exact text of the license is being kept secret I haven’t read the full terms, so I don’t know if there’s a legal mechanism by which this is happening or if it’s just traditional bullying tactics. But I can personally confirm it’s happening, Andrew’s “moving in mysterious ways.” Not rarely but as a matter of course. I’ll get into some examples in a second.

Signing the HICU license is a deal-with-the devil worse than having no license at all. You’re still subject to the whims of everyone in Homestuck management, except now you’re also subject to nondisclosure and non-disparagement agreements so you’ve lost any ability to defend yourself. All you’ve done is hand over a kill switch and neuter your ability to complain.

The Purpose of the Ruse

So what’s the point of all this? They’re not lying just for the fun of lying. I think a lot of the song-and-dance of the HICU is to disguise an underlying trick. Homestuck can see that there are many fan projects succeeding and thriving without their involvement and without needing a license. They want to use the Homestuck association to seize control over these projects, but the tool they have to do this is legal threats. “You have something great here, hand it over to us or we’ll kill it” is an extremely hard sell when you’re a media company fundamentally dependent on the goodwill of the fans who already love these projects.

“Partnering with the HICU” acts as the public face to obscure this dynamic. From the outside it looks like fan-favorite projects are getting official recognition, getting new license rights, and unlocking new opportunities for growth. Even if “It just allows them to do what they’ve been doing the whole time without fear of legal repercussions.” Some projects may be doing just this and be happy so far. Some projects may well be signing on happily but then finding themselves subject to demands after their “partnership”. Some projects may find Homestuck’s terms so onerous that they don’t want to sign on at all but find that the NDA that allowed them to hear the terms in the first place also prevents them from explaining what happened. All these roads lead to the same place. Homestuck gets control over whatever projects it wants, shuts down anyone who won’t play ball, and carefully launders their reputation as they do this.

Case Studies

The Homestuck Independent Creative Union is promising projects autonomy, but these promises are meaningless because Andrew consistently breaks them. Looking at the legal structure can only get us so far. The smoking gun evidence is if Andrew actually exercises power over “partner” projects, and they do. The purpose of a system is what it does. SAHCon was promised Andrew wouldn’t make demands, and then Andrew did anyway. The Unofficial Homestuck Collection was promised Andrew wouldn’t make demands, and then Andrew did anyway. FRAF projects were promised Andrew wouldn’t make demands, and then Andrew did anyway.

SAHCon

Stuck At Home Con was an unofficial, fan-run Homestuck convention, and it was great. It was primarily a celebration of Homestuck fan community, fan projects, and textual criticism, but there was nothing stopping Homestuck itself from participating in the con. SAHCon has a history of working independently but productively with Homestuck: The Hiveswap teaser in 2022, James panel adjoining mine in 2023, etc.

In December 2023 SAHCon announced a partnership with “the HICU and Homestuck, Inc” to become officially licensed:

📢We here at Stuck at Home Con have great news!
We’ve partnered with the HICU and Homestuck, Inc. to become the first officially licensed Homestuck convention!
We’re really excited about what this means for the future!

🤔What DOES this mean?
It means working with the folks at the HICU to come up with new ideas for fun stuff to do with SAHCon!
It means new opportunities to promote and expand the con!

⁉️Is SAHCon changing hands?
SAHCon’s staff isn’t changing, and we’ll be running things basically the same!
We’ll still be doing the con online, along with our Winter/New Years and Friday showcases!

😎Thanks to everyone involved in the Con over the years - none of this would’ve happened without the hard work of our directors, moderators, artists, guests, and panelists…
And all of you for coming out to support us!
The future is bright, and we’re glad you’re here for it!

Right out of the gate this leaves a lot to be desired. What does SAHCon need a license for? Is Homestuck demanding a license for them to continue operating the way they have been, or was SAHCon just trying to ensure legal stability to prevent the possibility of being sued in the future? Is SAHCon going to be able to do new things now that they couldn’t before? If so, it’s strange that they don’t seem able to explain what they are, outside of “new opportunities.”

And, again, we have this incredible vagueness around the license itself. What is “partnered with the HICU and Homestuck, Inc.” supposed to mean? Those are supposed to be entirely separate entities. SAHCon is licensed, but what are the terms of the license? It’s conspicuously not the “free” license the HICU is getting with. So presumably SAHCon is paying some fee to someone (Homestuck, Inc.? The HICU?) as part of a license, but again, we don’t know what these license conditions are. Does this subject con events to any new policy?

Jonaya Riley @ Studio June Games@JonayaRiley
SAHCon has always, for me, represented a really positive space for fans to gather and share a love of the extended Homestuck universe. I've tried to carry that energy with me in my role as con director, because that's what drew me into the fandom in the first place -
Tue Jan 02 14:58:23 +0000 2024

Jonaya Riley @ Studio June Games@JonayaRiley
Now, with our recent deal to license the Homestuck IP for the con and partnership with the HICU, things are in a place I honestly never imagined they would be.
I'm very positive about this, but it's also both surreal and a little bit intimidating -
Tue Jan 02 14:58:24 +0000 2024

Jonaya Riley @ Studio June Games@JonayaRiley
This year promises to be a good one! I see a lot of promise in how the @Homestuck team is handling things with the official content, and the community feels alive with promise and potential - and that's something exciting to see! -
Tue Jan 02 14:58:26 +0000 2024

The one thing we’re told authoritatively is this is not a power grab. In all announcements on all platforms, SAHCon communicates clearly and concisely that “SAHCon’s staff isn’t changing, and we’ll be running things basically the same!” Homestuck’s involvement will absolutely, positively not change the nature of the conference, they swear it.

Except this turns out to be false.

In July 2025 (before SAHcon 2025), con staff Jojo “Funk” McLovin posts an account of how they were forced out of the con entirely.

Jojo “Funk” McLovin, “The Elephant in the Room” …
Though Cro and Jonaya have hosted SAHCon in years past, this was to be their final SAHCon before handing it off to new organizers. Who these organizers will be is anyone’s guess, because as far as I understand, SAHCon is essentially being taken over by Andrew Hussie and a team adjacent to him.

Who is on this team, why they have decided to take control of this final SAHCon is unknown to me, as whenever I ask, I am either brushed off or stymied by vague allusions to nondisclosure agreements.
…
The other reason I’m not going to participate in SAHCon was because I was asked not to. My friend Jonaya as of March of this year informed me that I would be able to participate in SAHCon in spite of a sexual harassment campaign that I have been suffering from. As of a few days ago, Jonaya informed me that decision had been reversed.

I’m not saying I am entitled to attend SAHCon, but an ostensible invitation being revoked unceremoniously is atrocious behavior, as I have been a loyal attendee, volunteer, and moderator for five years now. I single-handedly am responsible for the SAHCon album releases, contributing tracks, video graphics, and metadata. If not for me, the SAHCon album would be a series of MP3 files in a random Discord server.

The fact that this decision can be made above the head of Jonaya, who has been essentially in charge of SAHCon since 2020, is astounding to me, and because Jonaya was not at liberty to discuss the decision, I’m forced to assume Hussie himself descended from on high and smote me like YHWH of old.
…
I doubt that this is the whole story. I don’t know the reason I was excluded. I don’t know the reason Jonaya is no longer in charge. I don’t know who is going to run SAHCon from here on. I asked, and I received no response. They have never reached out to me. They have never spoken to me. I don’t know any of them personally. It is a black box.

What we have here is a perfect checklist confirming the absolute worst about the Homestuck Independent Creative Union. I have to thank Homestuck for making this so cut-and-dry. They made specific commitments and then violated them.

In 2023 SAHCon was able to guarantee that staff absolutely would not be changing. One convention later and Homestuck administration is reaching in from above and shaking things up against the will of the organizers. Allegedly — SAHCon hasn’t announced this yet — the project’s founders and organizers, Jonaya and Cro, are being pushed out by higher-ups. But regardless of what happens with Jonaya and Cro, we already have a direct account of con staff (Jojo) being unequivocably forced out. Jojo has a fantastic relationship with SAHCon staff; they would not happily pass order this down the chain, they must have fought it and lost. These decisions are explicitly not coming from the founders and administrators of the conference, but from forces they are suddenly subject to after signing a license with Homestuck.

It is not hard to connect these dots. Homestuck partnered with SAHCon under a false pretense that the con would retain autonomy, and they’re Homestuck is using authority they’ve claimed to seize control of the entire event.

Is this legal authority they’ve snuck into the license agreement? Does Homestuck have the right to unilaterally revoke the license if an arbitrary demand from them isn’t fulfilled? Or is this just a case of Homestuck threatening to sue SAHCon without sufficient legal standing? The exact mechanism in play doesn’t matter; what matters is Homestuck executives are exercising power over the project.

Meanwhile, the first thing they’re doing with that power is using it to participate in bullying. They’re blacklisting individual fans they’ve decided they object to and forcing them out of the very conference they were already invited to and even working at.

Unofficial Homestuck Collection

The Unofficial Homestuck Collection has its own full report, and this is where I got the majority of my first-hand evidence.

I’ll summarize the relevant points here: We were approached by a (proto-)HICU offering the UHC a similar free Homestuck license, with the same set of promises of autonomy and independence they’ve offered so many others. As soon as we began discussions they began the process of an out-and-out hostile takeover. This started with trying to force us into signing exploitative contracts. Then they made a series of entirely unreasonable demands about the project — about them controlling who administrated it, them censoring my past criticism of Homestuck administration, etc. When we pushed back on this they escalated to legal threats and then real legal action.

There this intermittent reinforcement throughout — they were extremely nice and they loved us, and the next day they were threatening to take everything down and sue us in court. And they repeated this cycle multiple times! Whenever they were being nice it was sold as the HICU, and whenever they were being aggressive it was sold as Homestuck, or Viz, or Andrew. Andrew was always the one responsible for everything, but they’d play games with putting on the HICU hat and using Miles as a proxy.

James Roach’s name was on all the paperwork, but he never had any administrative authority over the process. He never acted as a director, he was only there as a human shield for Andrew. (I don’t blame him for this though.)

The entire process was defined by coercion, manipulation, lies, and generally unconscionable practices. It was terrible, but in terms of the HICU it absolutely confirmed the pattern I’m describing here. The play was the full embrace-extend-extinguish.

In a response to this article Miles has stated that the HICU played “literally” no role in the UHC issue. This is flatly untrue and he is aware that it is. As soon as I signed my NDA in 2024, I was put in an official HICU discord server with the single admin homestuckicu along with Miles and James. Later homestuckicu would be the account to formally announce two separate DMCA takedown deliveries, officially stating “starting now, the HICU will be fully disengaged” at the very end of the process.

Despite that, the copy of the UHC they made as part of this process was labeled a “Homestuck Independant[sic] Creative Union controlled GitHub fork”, because that’s something they expected people to like. The day this article published and they realized it could get negative attention they changed the reference to the HICU to Homestuck, Inc. This public-facing change was made the day the article was published, not when they supposedly “fully disengaged” eight months prior.

The HICU took responsibility for this project until it went bad. Miles is trying to play games with the HICU label because the whole purpose of the HICU label is to be gamed. It’s a shell game.

Fruity Rumpus Asshole Factory

The new Fruity Rumpus Asshole Factory art collective scares the bejesus out of me. If Andrew has hooks on the FRAF like they do with so much else, and they’re able to keep up the appearance that things are working freely, that’s a nightmare.

The HICU announced FRAF in August 2025:

FRAF is a fanwork collective working in tandem with Homestuck/WP (and, to a pretty limited extent, the HICU) to platform Homestuck fanworks, allow them to license and monetize, and hopefully promote all sorts of cross-project creativity in the Homestuck fandom. It’s just now launching, and I expect it to grow and change a lot in the coming months/years as other fanworks join the league of FRAFfiliates in their beautiful new experiment, but it’ll be a pretty great time and maybe even a new frontier of Homestuck fanwork cross-pollination, and I’m super excited to see what they get up to.

Finally, Homestuck has grown up to become the Content Platform it always wanted to be. Vast Error is here too for some reason, despite already being partnered and licensed with the HICU separately. They don’t need another license so they’re just here to hang out.

FRAF describes itself like so:

fruityrumpus.com The Fruity Rumpus Asshole Factory is an officially licensed Homestuck fanwork collective. All projects under the FRAF label are autonomous, but have been given a free license by Andrew Hussie to jointly promote and monetize their projects in coordination with each other, and the Homestuck Independent Creative Union.

There are a lot of the same immediate concerns here. “Autonomous” is the same line we got about SAHCon, which turned out to be false.

FRAF describes their team as including Miles as the “HICU Representative”. This is the same conflict as always. Miles acts as a director of the HICU, but is at the same time a direct proxy for Andrew Hussie. FRAF is described as mostly working with Homestuck, yet the only connection they give is a representative with the HICU, which is supposed to be an entirely separate organization.

Based on a conversation I had with FRAF director Cami, it sounds like there’s little in the way of formal control. (This is a good thing!) FRAF is currently operating with good faith in both Homestuck and the HICU, and neither have made demands that would harm that. They don’t know Homestuck is radioactive because that’s been kept hidden. FRAF already has significant overlap with the HICU and Beyond Canon, and collaborative licensing between FRAF and Homestuck is what enables FRAF’s existence in the first place. FRAF is currently doing what it can to build its relationships with its big partners. This means being friendly and trying to make everyone happy, including Homestuck and the HICU.

The HICU already has a direct say in which projects FRAF is able to work with:

ABOUT FRAF How are FRAFWorks chosen?

FRAF Members nominate existing fanworks for consideration, which the FRAF Team and the HICU then review. We also plan to occassionally intake nominations through this website.

This isn’t a formal condition of the FRAF license, but something they’re doing voluntarily on good faith. So regardless of what FRAF administration would choose, the HICU (read: Homestuck) already has final say over licensing with the power to block affiliates. If Andrew or Miles suggest an affiliate, people trust that. If they raise an objection to a project, people trust that. Which means, in practice, Homestuck is still able to exercise control over admission and therefore licensing.

But what about ongoing control over works? Cami confirmed “there isn’t a formal stipulation to sign an NDA to be a FRAF affiliate”, although many of the current members are under NDA as part of the surprise launch, or due to other collaborations. And the same “try to make everyone happy” attitude extends, I’m sure, to all its operations.

People in FRAF have a mental model that they’re autonomous and Andrew’s not able to exercise control, but that doesn’t mean that’s true. The party line seems to be “Andrew’s not in control, it’s just that everyone loves him and would let have whatever they wants because we’re friends and also they’re the boss”. There are active Homestuck fans who wouldn’t let Andrew have whatever they want, and they’re not given power. This is not a free autonomous art collective, but they’ve only seen the carrot and not the stick. Show me Andrew really, honestly wanting a policy change at FRAF and not getting his way, or I’m not buying it.

FRAF hasn’t hit The Squeeze. They don’t know it yet, but they’re standing on the edge of a precipice. They’re still in the “love” phase of a love-bombing. Unlike SAHCon, the UHC, and other projects, FRAF hasn’t had to deal with a demand for something unacceptable. So what happens when they get it? Not just a social nudge, but a genuine disagreement FRAF has with its buddies? If history is any indicator, that’s when Homestuck will bare its fangs, and suddenly contingencies and legal liability will start to matter very fast.

Unfortunately, it already isn’t true that FRAF affiliates are really independent. While FRAF-the-organization may not have dealt with ultimatums yet, some of their projects have. I know because I saw it first hand. I was involved in some of these projects, one of which already had direct written confirmation that they “should” be fine with what they were doing, since it was composed of all original work. A few months ago they got orders from on high to clean house anyway. I have personally confirmed that Homestuck reached out to a project and instructed them that they were required to disassociate themselves with people on the Homestuck blacklist, or Homestuck would sue the project as direct quid-pro-quo retaliation. This was not a subtle “goodwill building” move, this demand was a hard cut: projects lost core personnel.

It is absolutely, objectively true that the HICU required people make changes to their project in order to avoid a lawsuit. FRAF membership did not protect these projects. If anything, “goodwill” with FRAF acted as additional pressure for people to give Andrew whatever they wanted. So these are not autonomous projects. Maybe they’re designed to feel like autonomous projects, maybe they’re told they’re still autonomous projects. It doesn’t matter; Andrew is absolutely throwing their weight around to get whatever changes they want made. In practice Andrew has final say over everything, a power they’ve exercising liberally to reward friends and punish enemies.

If FRAF projects really have a free license, good for them. They need to hold onto that, keep doing good work, and be ready to say “no” when demands come. If they’re in any way hooked by Andrew or Miles, they’ve got to cut that out like it’s cancer.

Freedom Motif

Because of the implicit threat of legal violence the relationship between a work’s copyright holder and its fan community is structurally antagonistic. The IP holder and members of the fan community have fundamentally different interests which sometimes align but sometimes don’t. This doesn’t mean the relationship has to be antagonistic in practice, but it means there is always an underlying potential for conflict that has to be reasoned with.

A fan community should be a symbiotic relationship. Fanwork can serve functions official work can’t, and the community surrounding a work is one of the main things that gives a work “value”, in a base economic sense. Likewise official recognition can be a good thing. Fanwork can be elevated, talented creators can be brought on as part of official projects, etc. Official recognition can serve as a badge of honor.

But the deciding factor in whether the creator/fan relationship is healthy or exploitative is whether the community is allowed to be independent. One of the most important merits of fanwork, discussion, and criticism is a plurality of perspectives, and the ability to present and analyze work through truly pluralistic viewpoints. This is why things like fan comics, fan games, fan resources, and fan events have been so extraordinarily valuable. They represent legitimate plurality where the community manages and supports itself.

If the IP holder insists that all aspects relating to discussion of a work go through one unifying authority, this is an assault on the community and represents an act of aggression against fan-run fan-space. If there is a demand that all work that exists be brought in under a single umbrella of control, this is a dangerous and precarious arrangement. It does not matter how much or how little work is encapsulated by official support. A unification of community spaces through a central governing authority with the ability to enforce policy and preference is an existential threat to that community.

This threat is a true danger even before that authority proves itself dangerous and untrustworthy by deed. The danger is structural; it is a trap prepared and ready to spring. Even if the current leadership is well-meaning, that power can be replaced and existing structures can be hijacked to suddenly abuse a good faith relationship.

Normally the problem with these structural issues is that they allow for behavior as unacceptable as retaliation for criticism to potentially happen in the future. But Andrew Hussie is not a potential danger, they are (in my opinion) an active danger. Andrew’s going around threatening fans with baseless lawsuits right now. Even if someone could be trusted to lord over a community as god-king, to own a harem of votaries, Andrew personally cannot.

Andrew is insisting that all communities relating to Homestuck can, if Andrew desires, be brought under their authority, and the HICU and FRAF represent a progression of this project. He knows what they’re doing is wrong and they know people would hate Andrew if they saw it, so the Homestuck Independent Creative Union acts as shield. The Homestuck Independent Creative Union is fake. It’s a cardboard cutout. It’s a lie.

I’m not saying Andrew Hussie wants to be 100% hands-on, micromanaging every aspect of every Homestuck project from the shadows. I think he’s completely happy being hands-off 90% of the time. He’s not the secret shadow author of every post-homestuck work. The problem is on any occasion he does decide he wants to control something he pursues that goal with ferocity and violence. He wants the ability to be as petty as he wants to be, and have the right to use any toy in anyone’s box to do it. He doesn’t demand to make every call, but he does demand the right to make the final call on anything he wants, which is more dangerous.

Fan projects must be independent, and they must be allowed to operate without being coerced or threatened by an IP holder holding a gun to their head. It’s especially important to set a good example of this with media with a young audience, many of which don’t know any better. We don’t have to put up with that and so we absolutely, positively must not. If Andrew is threatening to take good work down, better for the blood of the art to be on his hands than for people to submit to the bullying and let Andrew burn through more lives.

How to Fix This

I don’t expect Homestuck to respond well to this being revealed; Andrew is likely to get angrier, more protective, more insular. They’ll probably double-down on damage control, try to paint me as violent and rabblerousing, the usual patchwork. Their primary goal is just going to be trying to socially isolate me, drum up more baseless rumors, and anything else to construct a plausible reason not to listen to my warning. The party line might be switched from “all completely autonomous” to “of course Andrew retains control of everything, what did you expect” as if their promises of independence never mattered at all and the fault is on any fool who believed them.

But if Homestuck were sincere, if it were going to do the right thing, what would that look like? Simply: the HICU is a fake foundation, build a real one instead.

Here’s just one step: to enable independent artists to build fanwork using Homestuck as a platform, Andrew could release Homestuck under a permissive license. Not even “public domain”, but something like a Creative Commons license. People could build on Homestuck, like Andrew keeps insisting he wants them to. He’d still own the copyright, he’d still be able to merchandise and franchise whatever he wants, but so could others. It’d be enough to prevent anyone from making the argument that using a classpect symbol is copyright infringement.

Likewise put out a clear, binding, public policy that fanworks can merchandise themselves. People could use the Homestuck universe but still distribute and sell their own work. Groups would be able to publish fan games on Itch or Steam without the fear that offending the wrong person would lead to a punitive takedown against the whole thing. You could have something like FRAF or WLF on top of this — some sort of consolidated store for Homestuck fanworks, and HS could even take a cut — but that wouldn’t in any way bar people from doing their own business themselves.

You don’t need to start a witch hunt. You don’t need to dissolve the HICU, you don’t need to burn down FRAF. (But you do need to stop joining it.) You don’t even need to rework Beyond Canon much, just tear the weird licensing guts out of the HICU and let it be a group that can just write an exciting new comic like everybody else can.

All you need to do is establish a true foundation for a community to build on. For the Homestuck community to function without living in fear of Homestuck, Andrew needs to put concrete limits on himself and their companies. Give up the fantasy of living as a god-king. Only after Andrew can’t always get his way — can’t attack people — in the Homestuck community can it actually exist safely.

Vessel Of Spirit@VesselOfSpirit
are the emperor's clothes real? i don't have direct information one way or the other. but i like to judge ideas by their fruits, and i can't help but notice that a lot of the voices on the "no" side are coming from whiny losers rotting in the emperor's dungeon
Sun Dec 07 10:02:03 +0000 2025

And if we expand the scope of our search beyond merch to fanwork in general… Homestuck has a long, ugly history. Maybe another day.
For now here are some more examples of publicly announced threats of legal action by Homestuck against fan projects, for those interested in the history:
↩
gio :⁾@giovan_h
The Homestuck franchise is predicated on some of the most shockingly permissive understandings of fair use in modern history (good!!!), which makes the instances where they've turned around and tried to be extremely stringent about "their IP" so deeply perverse.

Mon Jul 22 19:43:38 +0000 2024
↩
As part of the original Hiveswap article I remember trying to construct some kind of org chart for the various legal entities involved. A complete waste: it’s all smoke and mirrors around Andrew Hussie. ↩
: ↩
See also Trouble a-brewin’ at Redbubble ↩

The Unofficial Homestuck Collection Takedown

2025-08-08T00:00:00-05:00

Bottom line up front

Since November 2023 The Unofficial Homestuck Collection has been entangled in legal discussions with Homestuck and Andrew Hussie.¹ This was quickly revealed to be a false pretext: in reality, Andrew Hussie used a fake offer of collaboration to launch a hostile takeover of the UHC.

Andrew Hussie has sent the UHC maintainers (GiovanH and Bambosh) a series of takedown demands and persistently threatened this project with spurious lawsuits. Andrew demanded we turn over full control of the fan project to them, demanded we remove previous essays on Homestuck, and demanded we denounce some specific critics of theirs they have a personal grudge against. They even threatened a lawsuit on the basis that we used the word “Homestuck” in the title “Unofficial Homestuck Collection”.

As a result of this outrageous conduct, I am forced to take down The Unofficial Homestuck Collection’s web presence at Homestuck’s demand. The current set of legal takedown demands does not affect the GitHub repository itself, so releases of the reader are still available separate from the website takedown we were forced to act on. An outdated copy of the reader and some assets are currently also available from a copy Homestuck made of the collection against our wishes (homestuck.github.io) — more on this later. However, the original team behind the collection (Bambosh and Gio) has been forced to stop supporting our work.

This was not driven by copyright concern, but was Andrew Hussie attempting a hostile takeover of a fan project and demanding absolute control over not only the content of the archive but which fans and creators its contributors were allowed to associate with. As I ultimately conclude: Homestuck is radioactive.

Hostile Takeover

In November 2023 Homestuck sent me and Bambosh (co-creators of the UHC) an offer to collaborate on The Unofficial Homestuck Collection. We initially engaged with this offer because it came with a commitment to respect the project’s independence and for the collaboration to be fully insulated from previous personal grievances.

But this pretense of constructive collaboration turned out to be false almost immediately. For the entire period of time since the first communication — now multiple years — Homestuck has used threats, lies, legal shakedowns, and other psychological pressure tactics to attempt to seize control of The Unofficial Homestuck Collection in a hostile takeover. There was never a legal basis for Homestuck to control The Unofficial collection, and so they have been attempting to use extra-legal tactics to do so.

While the archival impact is unfortunate, the main complaint here is not that we were entitled to distribute Homestuck and it’s wrong that we’ve had to stop. We have no particular legal right to reproduce or distribute the copyrighted Homestuck material, and so did not feel entitled to continue doing it. The fact that executing the takedown demands we’ve received results in material being inaccessible is a side effect of a deeper problem.

The problem is that the way Andrew acted is completely unacceptable. They demanded control over work that was not theirs, demanded we denounce their personal enemies, demanded we recant previous criticisms, and more. This was all done under a pretense of constructive collaboration with the community that turned out to be false from the beginning. Ultimately Andrew has demanded (in violation of their own assurances) that we denounce previous criticism of Homestuck management and give full managerial control over the independent Collection project over to Andrew and their chosen delegates. Under this extortion we would be required to participate in Andrew’s attempt to sweep their past professional misconduct under the rug, and we would remain subordinate to any other demands they made to use the project to attempt to control the fan community.

We have not allowed this hostile takeover to happen to the UHC. Since Andrew has fully committed to hostility towards us and fan projects in general and demanded things we cannot give them, I’m choosing to disengage rather than face a perpetual series of baseless legal attacks and other harassment.

Reluctance

My worst fear is that by explaining this I might appear at all eager to stir up trouble. I am not a rabble-rouser and I do not enjoy conflict. I am well aware that people are going to assume I’m being a hardheaded jerk or creating a conflict myself, but that simply isn’t true. Even now I am focusing on capturing the important parts, which means leaving out “juicy gossip” which is exciting but not load-bearing. Unlike people in the “content industry”, for me controversy is not revenue — it actively costs me money when people read my work. I am exiting this affair with many fewer thousands of dollars and a fun new set of stress-related health issues. If I am a clout-chaser, I am the worst to ever do it.

The archive work, the collection, and everything else I’ve done surrounding Homestuck has all only been motivated by a care for the work and the people in its community. I would still care for Andrew too, had they not been the absolute worst. If I could snap my fingers and get whatever I wanted, I would not have another exciting and scandalous story to tell, I would be happily maintaining a resource that people have found valuable. I can imagine nothing I’d rather do.

But The Unofficial Homestuck Collection is a community project, and project maintainer is a leadership position that comes with responsibilities. When people are harmed they’re entitled to clear and honest communication about what happened. Which, in this case, was very bad. I also feel a responsibility in cases like this to be transparent because doing so may help protect the safety of others.

I am also going to have to describe conversations I had with people, which I am loathe to do. One of the things I pride myself in is my ability to keep confidence, and I’d never discuss private conversations unless there are extraordinary circumstances. This is an extraordinary circumstance: not only did the parties involved already repeatedly violate my trust in eager attempts to harm me, keeping this kind of information secret has been a tactic they abuse to protect themselves from accountability.

Being Cooperative to a Fault

As I will show, I have done everything I can to avoid this contingency, to the point of folly.

I have been very careful to keep the door open to the original collaboration as promised or another amicable resolution. Homestuck rejected this continually and repeatedly. At no point did The Unofficial Homestuck Collection ask for any money or favors, or do anything other than offer to give them work for free. Any attempts to work constructively were violently shut down in favor of Andrew pursuing a personal vendetta and ultimately demanding absolute control of the project. Andrew could have also simply dropped the issue and returned to the status quo of the UHC operating unlicensed, but they refused to do this.

When I was told I needed to sign an NDA, I agreed to do so and then that NDA was never provided. When I was finally given a different NDA, I signed it. When I asked to discuss the possibility of me paying Homestuck for a license just to continue doing what they had already agreed they wanted us to continue to do, I was shut down.

I maintained a frog-and-the-scorpion dynamic: I was the frog,² taking a gamble and giving the scorpion a ride it needs. Andrew’s the scorpion: if they could overcome their nature, they get nice things for free. If they couldn’t, they’d sink themselves. For me it was just a matter of swimming Andrew to the goal and hoping they wouldn’t sink everything. I wanted to make the most generous possible effort in order to see if Andrew can possibly be reasoned with. They cannot.

Offensive behavior

Regardless of how it was done an assault on the collection is tragic. But the way Andrew went about doing it has been vile.

I have been astonished at the extent Homestuck is willing to flagrantly lie, manipulate, extort, and otherwise try to use bullying and pressure tactics in order to gain power over others. I was already skeptical about Homestuck’s project management skills from my postmortems of other projects, but I had never gotten such a close look at how truly brazen and malicious it all is. The shamelessness of it all has been genuinely shocking.

The concerns I brought up about Hiveswap amounted to one blip of data. Since then, I’ve been privy to many, many more incidents that form a clear patter of behavior. I have it on good authority that what I’m going to describe here isn’t an isolated incident; I’ve confirmed this has happened to other people, with other projects, with other sets of demands. The constant factor is the abuse of power. This isn’t just what they did, it’s what they’re like.

Andrew themself is manipulative and controlling: a matured and competent bully. The systems they build around themselves are designed to mask this behind plausible deniability. Because of Andrew/Homestuck’s almost mythological status, people are willing to extend them a lot of good faith, and they very aggressively exploit that. They are practiced at manipulation and use social and legal pressure in order to control others, especially people they view as problems.

Explicitly, the action taken against The Unofficial Homestuck Collection was not based on a good-faith attempt to protect Andrew’s rights, but was instead direct retaliation. This was the case not just with me but with Bambosh, someone Andrew had no complaint with until Bambosh didn’t yield to their demands. Even the slightest lack of deference was enough to make Andrew treat him like an enemy too. There is no material copyright complaint here, copyright is only a legal tool being weaponized. They made it clear throughout the process that they approve of the collection and want it to continue to exist, but only if they could exercise full control over it. Takedowns and similar demands were only ever used to apply pressure to force people to behave socially in the way Andrew demanded. This approach seems to have been their standard operating procedure for many years.

Andrew creates a coercive environment where they have a high degree of control over people. The various tactics Andrew employed with the UHC are all in a pursuit of the same common end we see in so much of their other behavior: getting people under their thumb. They manage power over people which they use to reward friends and punish enemies. I totally understand how they’ve gotten away with treating people like this. It’s practiced, effective manipulation. If I hadn’t already had it impressed on me that Andrew was a bad-faith actor I needed to be vigilant around, it’d probably have worked on me too.

If you are one of the people who have worked with Andrew in the past and this description does not ring true for you, I am happy for you. Unfortunately that does not change the fact that Andrew behaves this way with many others. If Andrew treated you decently, consider that if Andrew had treated others with the same decency there would be no problem, and we would all be much better off for it.

Abridged

This will necessarily be abridged. Unlike past reporting where I’ve had to draw conclusions from what little material was published, this has been a multiple-year ordeal and I have comprehensive documentation of every offense that took place along the way. If I covered every offense committed by Hussie/Homestuck as part of this process, that explanation would be longer than all the Hiveswap work put together. This is a summary, but there is no secret message buried in the cracks where they say it’s opposite day and they were actually cool and good the whole time.

One common motif I’ve had to edit around are platitudes that turn out to be demonstrably false a few moments later. There are a lot of them, and every time I include one I have to go back and note that it wasn’t true, or it sounds like I’m presenting it as fact. So it’s a lot of “that wasn’t true, that wasn’t true, that wasn’t true…” wasted on non load-bearing thoughts, and that just turns into speed bumps.

Background

Okay, summary over. Let’s get into it.

The Collection

If you’re not already familiar with The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, here’s the quick technical summary. The Unofficial Homestuck Collection (UHC) is an offline archive and reader for Homestuck and its related works. The collection was originally written by Bambosh approx. 2019-2020, and released 10/25/2020. It is a tool for reading Homestuck, but it’s not “just Homestuck”, it is an original creative work.

Homestuck referenced several websites that no longer exist and used deprecated technologies like Flash, and so it requires special restoration for people to read it. Special restoration is especially needed for people to read Homestuck now, as the homestuck.com website went offline entirely in early 2025.

I had actually been working on developing an equivalent program at the same time, so shortly after the release of the UHC I contacted Bambosh and offered to help polish and expand the collection. I’ve been working with him on the project ever since. Since 2021 I was formally made a “co-creator” of the project, and the Application was owned and copyrighted jointly between us.

The collection is licensed under GPL 3.0 with a §7 attribution clause. This just means anyone can contribute to the project, or modify it, or create a new spin-off version, as long as their changes allow other people to continue doing that. Because of the creative material represented, the §7 clause also requires crediting information to be retained in any copies or spinoffs.

The UHC has been an extremely rewarding project for me because of how much the community has appreciated it. Any time I see people talking about starting or re-reading Homestuck, I always see someone in the comments point them to the UHC, which really is incredible. The little utilitarian value function in my head is so happy with the reception the project got, not just because it’s a fan-favorite, but because of how much the whole community has really appreciated it being out there.

Asset Layer Cake

The Unofficial Homestuck Collection is split into two components: the reader program and the asset pack. It’s a simplified version of the emulator/ROM dichotomy. The reader is the application itself; it manages everything about the reading experience such as progress tracking and the new reader mode. The asset pack is a static archive of the relevant comic material.

The reader program is designed to be non-infringing: it’s all original work and doesn’t reproduce copyrighted material.³ The “Unofficial” in the title also clearly marks it as unaffiliated with Homestuck, so there’s no trademark issue either. The reader project is not part of “Homestuck”, it is original work that we own.

The asset pack is a little weirder. It’s a compilation of Homestuck content, of course, but not anything that was ever behind a paywall: everything that’s there is just an archive of material that was already published for free. But in the eyes of the law it is still a reproduction of Homestuck’s copyrighted material, so Andrew et al. would be within their rights to require folks to stop hosting it, if they chose to attack the project.

In summary, Homestuck (and Viz Media, for a time) always had every right to force us to stop distributing the asset pack. That constitutes making reproductions of Homestuck, which they have the exclusive right over. However the reader application is entirely new work, and the Homestuck IP does not have any special claim over it.

Endorsement

Fortunately, when it came out, Andrew didn’t attack it. In fact we saw the opposite. There was a stir at launch about people involved with the official team praising and recommending the UHC, which culminated in Andrew Hussie themselves updating their only web presence at the time to point to it:

Andrew even came back to Twitter to agree that the UHC was “100% the best way to read Homestuck”:

So that’s where this story starts: the creator of the original work telling the public their version of their own work is broken and people should use the fan archive instead. We are not entitled to make reproductions of Homestuck but we have been given an official blessing. By the time we get to the end of the story, the official website which Andrew called broken will have been fully abandoned, and Homestuck would exclusively direct people to this collection to read the comic.

First approach – October 2023

Around June 2023, Bambosh and I got the first hint that someone might be looking to contact us in an official capacity, and the project email account got a message in October.

This was notably late to be getting official communication; the UHC released in 2020 and exploded in popularity then, but here we were seeing first communications about it in 2023. As previously noted, Homestuck spent this time endorsing The Unofficial Homestuck Collection.

This delay turned out to be due to Andrew un-partnering with Viz in October, which gave Andrew control over the homestuck.com website. So if they wanted to fix the website, now they can. More on this later.

In October 2023, Bambosh and I get this email:

Miles (rcktpwrr), 2023-10-01 Hey there!

My name’s Miles and I hope this isn’t too out of the blue, but I’m reaching out to you because of your awesome work on the Unofficial Homestuck Collection.

I’m working on an upcoming Homestuck project and we’re sort of getting some stuff in gear, and Andrew mentioned that it’d be super cool to do a little work with you at some point in the future if that’s something you’d be amenable to. Andrew loves the Collection and thinks it’d be pretty cool to work with it in the future; he even has some ideas for contributions of content he’d love to add to the collection.

Would you be at all comfortable chatting with me on Discord sometime, and we can talk a little more details on this and maybe get you talking with Andrew at some point? You can reach me at [redacted] on Discord and pop me a message literally any time!

Also, just to be clear, we’re hoping to keep the work we’re doing private for right now, so Andrew and the team would super appreciate it if you kept this under your belt until we have a chance to explain a little more about the kind of things we wanna do. Sorry to be so cloak and dagger about it, hahaha.

Please feel free to write back or hit me on Discord literally whenever, but we’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Best, Miles

Takeaways:

This is before the relaunch of Homestuck^2: Beyond Canon and the start of the Homestuck Independent Creative Union, so the name Miles is new.
A team working with Andrew is working on a project and would like us to collaborate on it.
- This project, and possibly Andrew working on projects in general, is still secret
- This team would later be revealed as the HICU.
Andrew loves the collection

As far as official responses go, this is pretty good! If this had been true all would still be well.

Good Faith

Given what we know about how Homestuck has historically acted, the safest thing to do at this point would’ve been to tell them to go pound sand. But, it was also possible that things were actually changing internally at Homestuck for the better, which would delight me. We were also told we would be working with a new team, and our hope was Andrew’s lack of direct involvement would translate to a more stable working relationship.

Homestuck and The Unofficial Homestuck Collection were in a position to collaborate for mutual benefit. There is not a hierarchical relationship here. Homestuck was in a position to give the UHC a license to distribute the asset pack, promotion, and development support. The UHC was in the position to use UHC work in an official Homestuck website, give Homestuck a working archive of its inaccessible work, promote the Homestuck brand, and give Homestuck a license to use the UHC reader beyond the GPL. This was also a key opportunity for Homestuck to publicly legitimize the HICU by visibly working with its community and not against it.

There are three basic possible outcomes:

Win/Win: Andrew has the HICU work collaboratively with the existing fan project. Maybe we put together licensing that lets us distribute the asset pack, or maybe we fold the thing into an official project with new licensing.⁴ There are many mutually-beneficial options here.
Neutral: Homestuck doesn’t have to pursue any action here at all. They can continue to allow the collection to be distributed as it was, but retain the ability to take it down at any time if they want.
Lose/Lose: Andrew demands an arrangement that’s not mutually beneficial. They think they can take control of the project, or compel me to give them a blank check, or whatever. I refuse, Andrew takes legal action, I take down the project. I put together a report on what happens (you are here), it’s revealed how bad Andrew was, the UHC is harder for anyone to use including Homestuck.

This process started before the HICU and before “free licenses” were being talked about, and so I was fully ready to license the UHC by paying money out-of-pocket. I would have (and, in fact did) make personal sacrifices to make this work.

But I’m not dumb. There’s a requirement on us to be responsible about what commitments we make.

The Unofficial Homestuck Collection is a community project. It’s not just my work, it’s the work of dozens of community members. As the maintainer of the project I’m responsible for doing right by the whole project and everyone who trusts me to maintain it, including both its contributors and its users.

Part of what it means to be a responsible and trustworthy member of the community is not being negligent. I can’t make agreements that put valuable resources like The Unofficial Homestuck Collection at risk just because it would be easier for me to trust someone, especially when their trustworthiness is already in question.

If Andrew made a bad deal with Viz that resulted in them not doing right by the website, that’s Andrew’s neglectful error. If I make a bad deal that lets Andrew not do right by the collection, that’s my neglectful error.

But what I have here is a very, very good deal for Andrew. It’s a free house for you, Jim! We’ve done this enormous amount of work for free, and we were happy to keep doing it in ways that more directly profited them. The only requirement we ever had is that we would be working with Homestuck, not for Homestuck. To unilaterally hand a community project over would be to treat its many collaborators inappropriately and ultimately compromise the work.

From the beginning I was aware of the possibility that Andrew would try to abuse this situation, but it wouldn’t make sense for them to do so. If Andrew doesn’t see this as primarily being about asserting dominance over an enemy, this should be easily navigable. If they can only play dominance games, it’ll collapse. I was always pushing to do the kind of collaboration they approached us to do, but I was never willing to cross the line into predicating any work on some public humiliation ritual.

If Andrew wants to help us they can. If they want us to give them our help they can have it for free. If they want to control or bully us they can’t. It’s that simple.

⁵

Scorpion, frog. If Andrew can overcome their nature, they get nice things for free. If they don’t, they sink themselves. For me it was just a matter of swimming Andrew to the goal and hoping they wouldn’t sink everything.

At the time James Roach was the person most visibly handling the day-to-day handling of Homestuck operations, and from what I’d seen of him he seemed completely professional and reasonable. So if we would be working with him this could easily work out. My expectation from the beginning was that the more Andrew involved themselves the more they would shoot themselves (and therefore the project) in the foot. So the emphasis placed on Andrew’s minimal involvement made us think we could avoid this problem, and maybe someone else even understood it too. What they said throughout the introductory phase — and the fact that they were asking to work with me at all — indicated that was the case, although this would later turn out to be false.

So we took the responsible route: we decided to allow them to prove their goodwill by being as cooperative and friendly as possible while doing our due diligence to not create vulnerabilities that a bad actor could exploit. I was going to try to pursue a mutually-beneficial collaboration, but I was going to be sure that in doing so I wasn’t leaving myself open to being exploited. Good faith without being negligent. I still think this was the right approach, even though it came at significant personal expense.

Introductions and Context – October 2023

We reached out to Miles via Discord⁶ shortly after getting the email.

October 01, 2023

…

miles 10:45

but yeah thanks so much for getting back to us so quickly! i think itd be really cool to link up and do some work together with the Collection, i know andrew has some ideas for contributions as well

assuming, of course, that you’re amenable to that! it’s your baby, we don’t wanna do anything you arent comfortable with

but we can cover the details later, at any rate im just glad you check that email address LOL

…

Bambosh 10:55

And yeah, definitely open to any suggestions.

Gio’s whole thing was that he approached me with a bunch of good ones and like dang I’m definitely not gonna turn down the help Basically all the new stuff since the original release was his work

…

Bambosh

He’ll literally just DM me out of nowhere like “hey check out this whole ass thing I did” and it’s awesome every time

miles 10:57

sweet LOL

by the way! on the topic of privacy, hermit life, etc

at the risk of sounding a bit cloak-and-dagger, would you mind keeping the fact that we reached out to you under wraps for a little bit?

basically just until we’ve worked out more of whatever this is going to be and the stuff we’ll be doing together hehe

Bambosh 11:02

Absolute zipperlips - though can we get Gio in on it as well? For the aforementioned Valuable Working Partner reasons

miles

yeah for sure! as youve mentioned gio is a big contributor so we expect you both to be locked in here as the conversation coalesces around what it is we’re gonna be doing together

For Now, if possible, id appreciate it if you kept it to yourself just because i wanna make sure i have the go-ahead from andrew to loop whoever you feel is relevant in, but again, it’s your project and i can’t imagine gio wouldnt be on it as well

i’d ask him right now but i think he’s out doing something LOL

…

miles 10:09

also! just wanna let you know, in the next couple days before andrew and i start chatting with you guys about what it is we wanna get into with you and sharing ideas, we are probably going to ask you to sign an NDA! the reason i tell you this now is just so that i can take the time to personally assure you that this is not some scary legal bullshit and we have no interest in like, being weird or punitive about shit, we just wanna do our due diligence to make sure that the privacy of the projects is respected

if you have any questions at all about the document when the time comes, please dont hesitate to ask me

Takeaways:

The tone⁷ was friendly and casual, and overwhelmingly positive about our work so far and the continued health of the collection, as well as the continued direction of me and Bambosh.
Andrew/Miles (later explained as the HICU) wants to “do some work together with the Collection” and “make contributions” to the project
This is all to be at our discretion: they promised not to do anything with the project we weren’t comfortable with
I am introduced in the very first conversation as being key to the project and it’s completely expected for us to be a package deal. It’s clear Homestuck is fine with this
There is an NDA to keep things secret, but there will absolutely not be any “punitive legal bullshit”

Roles and Agents

Andrew forces people to be intentionally vague about an enormous amount of important information. That includes who all is acting in what exact role, requiring me to do additional untangling here to explain it.

I’m convinced this is an intentional strategy. it’s a power play.

Miles is here as a representative of Homestuck, Inc. and Andrew Hussie. Consistently, Miles acts as a direct proxy for Andrew’s intent (sometimes copy-pasting their actual messages), which is why I’m treating Andrew and Miles as a unit. Miles sometimes attempts to do some persuasion on Andrew’s behalf, but this is done as an empowered agent. There were a few personal conversations I had with Miles, but he went out of his way to clearly mark those as speaking on his own behalf, in contrast to his usual role as a direct proxy for Andrew.

June 25, 2024, miles

…

miles 05:36 PM

i’ll let andrew know!

GiovanH 06:04 PM

have you noticed you have the job of “priest”

miles 06:09 PM

LMAO

low priest

ive never heard it put that way but i love the comparison

GiovanH 06:10 PM

it seems like a good gig

miles 06:10 PM

gives me an excuse to say “andrew works in mysterious ways”

As a member of the HICU, Miles is straddled in what should be a tricky position with conflicts of interest, except that the labels are mostly fake. Andrew is the interest that counts and everything else is smoke and mirrors.

When they later try to make a distinction between Andrew and the HICU, Miles continues to represent Andrew while James Roach essentially represents himself in a management role at the HICU, although it turns out the structure of the HICU allows Andrew to overrule him on any point.

September 02, 2024

GiovanH 12:41 AM

(@miles real quick before I get too deep into details here, you’re speaking on behalf of Andrew/Homestuck Inc here, correct?)

miles 01:37 PM

yes im speaking on behalf of andrew

…

JAMES 08:58 PM

also for the record, since it seems like thats kind of an important point: i dont represent andrew legally or even personally im just sort of here to kind of help out where i can as an interested party in the longevity and wellbeing of homestuck as a whole

GiovanH 08:59 PM

(yeah, I’m conceptualizing james as being here for the hicu, basically)

JAMES 08:59 PM

much more interested now that i’m sort of at the helm of some stuff, my name and reputation being very intimately tied to the property at this point

As a rule Andrew has refused to directly use their own name for anything. To maintain plausible deniability, maybe. It’s a cheap stunt and I’m not letting you fall for it. When I talk about “Homestuck” as an actor, I’m talking about Andrew Hussie or a duly appointed representative. Andrew, ultimately, is responsible for these choices. If occasionally Miles or James or some other layer of Homestuck management was the one to type a message, it doesn’t matter. Andrew has final say, Andrew set up the management to work the way it does, and Andrew is ultimately responsible for events they cause.

I know the Joker’s Trick here is to set James or Miles up to take the entire fall when this goes south, but that’s a sad ploy and you’re not going to fall for it this time. No more of this plausible deniability human buffer crumple zone trickery. It’s just Andrew’s decisions, sometimes with a human shield if Andrew thinks it’ll benefit themself.

That being said I really, really don’t want to see blame misplaced because of this. I think when most people familiar with it think of the HICU, the reaction is “oh, they’re doing better” or even “yeah, I’m on their side.” I don’t fault you for this! Based on what they said about themselves many people — including me personally — gave the HICU a huge amount of good credit upfront, and they’ve done very little publicly to hurt that image.

In this article I have criticisms of Andrew and Miles. This is not a general indictment of the HICU crew and it’s certainly not an indictment of FRAF. Do not — do not — let other fan creators get caught up any blame from this. This is about Andrew’s handling of the UHC. I have another article about the HICU, which also does not fault the creative teams.

In response to this article, Miles published a post that directly confirms everything I said about the agent relationship here.

Miles i wanna pause and emphasize something here, because it’s one of the most important things i want to get across. i was acting as a Liaison for andrew, as a MESSENGER, FOR andrew, not as like, a Lawyer or and Advisor or a “coconspirator” or the guy who authored the decisions that actually got made here. i did not and do not tell andrew what to do about anything, certainly not about how to handle the Homestuck IP or any moves he wants to make legally. i gave some advice on how to communicate and actually Did The Communicating, but during all of this i wasn’t even the director on HS:BC, i was literally just a writer who thought he was stepping into a short, sweet process to get a cool collaboration going between the UHC and Homestuck as an IP.

It’s all Andrew.

You Know Gio’s Here, Right?

So, there is an obvious elephant in the room, which is the fact that I’ve been a harsh critic of Andrew Hussie’s professional behavior before, and they took it very poorly. Andrew specifically said that they’d never have anything to do with me and falsely implied I was a stalker and sex pest. So this conversation happening at all was weird, and it was even weirder how this was insistently painted as a complete non-issue.

As for my side of things, I had thought this through before we replied to the original email. For the sake of the project, since there was the potential to do real good on the table, I had decided to take an attitude of “agree to disagree” and simply not make it an issue. I’d already been working on The Unofficial Homestuck Collection without letting my personal frustrations impact the work. I could work with Andrew as long as they were being reasonable, and if they insisted on bringing up old hostilities in a way I couldn’t brush past, we would have to part ways on the project.

But Andrew rejecting my involvement — or even instigating hostilities over it — would deny them goodwill and access to The Unofficial Homestuck Collection. There was never any possibility where their refusing to work with me would end up with them getting control of the project and me leaving it. If they wanted to work, we could work, but they would have to at least tolerate working with the people in charge of the project, as is obviously the case for anyone wanting to collaborate with anyone.

I wasn’t expecting to be working much with Andrew, though. It seemed much more likely I would be working on projects through James Roach, or Miles, and that would have been my preference anyway. So it caught me off guard when Andrew wanted to communicate with both of us privately.

October 02, 2023

miles 11:04 PM

the way we tend to do things in terms of folks the HICU is collaborating with is as follows

once (or if) you guys do feel comfortable signing the NDA, andrew and i are going to chat with each of you one on one. one at a time

think of it as like. idk i guess an interview?

not that we need your Credentials because your work speaks for itself, its just that andrew likes to have a chat with folks as well in a semi-formal setting so that he can be on top of everyone we collab with

again for reasons of, yknow, privacy comfort etc

so when the time comes, we’re gonna basically wait for you to sign the NDA (we’ll get another draft to you before then and ofc no need to sign until we’ve agreed on the form that’s gonna take), then we’re going to chat with bambosh, then we’re gonna chat with gio, and then probably after that we’re all gonna chat as a foursome

Bambosh 11:07 PM

That sounds agreeable to me

miles 11:07 PM

cool!

GiovanH 11:08 PM

~~that seems like a terrible idea~~

Bambosh 11:08 PM

:O

miles 11:08 PM

?

GiovanH 11:08 PM

that will be the most uncomfortable conversation I’ve ever had in my life

miles 11:09 PM

really?

GiovanH 11:09 PM

but okay? if he wants???

miles 11:10 PM

can i ask why itd be uncomfortable?

GiovanH 11:11 PM

the last thing andrew said about me is “I don’t trust him, I will never speak to him, and probably no one from WP ever will either.”

so I was just planning on granting him blanket permission to skip that part if he wanted

…

GiovanH 11:14 PM

if he wants to, I’ll do it.

i’m just anticipating that being extra interesting

miles 11:15 PM

i mean speaking frankly i cant imagine andrew has any desire to get “interesting” about anything LOL, we just wanna chat with folks and work with you guys via the protocols we have in place to make sure the team is comfortable

…

miles 11:16 PM

yeah no worries, again we’re here chatting now because i wanna get the ball rolling on how you guys are feeling

but yeah at that point its gonna be the sign -> chat pipeline, and beyond that theres nothing more we really wanna do

…

GiovanH 11:18 PM

feelings-wise, for me having criticized someone does not mean I’m unwilling to work with them. (obviously)

miles 11:20 PM

so for whatever its worth, andrew knew you were a big contributor on this before we reached out, its not even close to a dealbreaker

GiovanH 11:20 PM

by this point I figured he must have

miles 11:21 PM

yeah! like

i guess what im getting at here is that we wanna work with you, we like what you guys are doing, and we definitely dont have any intention of getting weird about this lol

Takeaways:

Miles emphasizes yet again that my involvement is a non-issue, to the point of acting confused by my hesitancy
Andrew’s involvement is described as minor — “an interview”
They know really thoroughly that I’m a major contributor to the project and that wasn’t ever going to be a dealbreaker
Yet more promises that nothing should be unpleasant or hostile, they triple-promise not to be weird about it

This absolute commitment that there would be no discrimination against me over past disputed complaints is the only reason either of us were willing to engage in any of this in the first place. It was the premise of everything that came after. Every time you see them contradict this basis represents an absolute forfeit of credibility and integrity from them. It is the whole game lost each time. I need you to really, really commit this to memory. Put an extra copy up next the article. This foundation is going to slip through your fingers so fast it’ll seem bizarre it was ever there.

Andrew agreeing to work with me without making an incident of it was the mature thing to do, but still unexpected. I had made the decision that the responsible way to handle a working relationship with Homestuck would to be to make it a point not to try to abuse my position to try to rehash old conflicts or “balance the books”, and instead just work on individual projects where we could find mutually-beneficial arrangements. Homestuck was promising it would do the same. Trucies.

Within those extremely minimal ground rules, I was completely willing to put bad blood behind us and work constructively. Maybe this was naiveté, but I prefer to think of it as insisting on acting in responsible good faith. If something went wrong, it was going to be because someone attacked me, not because I refused.

Homestuck Independent Creative Union

Miles had been very secretive about what actual plans there were, saying we needed to be under NDA first. At a high level that sort of makes sense, so we talked about the structure of this new HICU while we reviewed the waiver, which includes an incredibly broad non-disclosure agreement.

I spend a lot of time emphasizing how important it is that this doesn’t hijack any existing work (because the language of the waiver indicates that it will), and Miles goes out of his way to reassure us that it won’t be.

October 02, 2023, Bambosh, miles

…

miles 10:13 PM

can you tell me what kind of conflicts you guys are concerned about?

i wanna make sure i can assuage your worries as best i can but itll help me to understand what your concerns are

…

GiovanH 10:16 PM

in general, making sure the UHC stays an independent project, and not assigning Homestuck/Viz/whoever rights over the software/editorial decisions/etc

miles 10:16 PM

okay cool cool

anything else jump out at you guys?

GiovanH 10:17 PM

Big picture, I’m okay with an NDA to keep any New Unreleased Happenings secret

miles 10:17 PM

alrighty

Despite all this lip service, the first draft of the “Homestuck Community Participation and Release Agreement” itself contained an attempt to strip signatories of creative independence. The original waiver had an intellectual property provision that forces “all creative concepts, stories, characters, settings, dialogue, project ideas, plans, and all other information related to the Homestuck intellectual property” to be bound by the licensing contract between the HICU and Homestuck, Inc., which is a separate, secret document we were not allowed to see until after committing to it. This would turn any signatory into a “poison contributor” who couldn’t work on any independent fanwork.

GiovanH 10:27 PM

can you give me an example of a scenario you’re worried about?

ok for example

You understand and agree that all creative concepts, stories, characters, settings, dialogue, project ideas, plans, and all other information related to the Homestuck intellectual property discussed by Group are bound by the conditions described in the licensing agreement between the Union and Homestuck, Inc. All information is deemed Confidential Information.

this seems overbroad, and would (accidently?) capture all “information related to the Homestuck intellectual property” that we discuss with each other, including UHC work, as the IP of Homestuck Inc

as well as fanwork and other stuff

which I don’t think is anyone’s intent, but that’s a kill-switch I don’t want to make

…

miles 10:36 PM

i can go ahead and have a look at that line and get back to you about maybe striking it, because i totally see your concern, even though i can straight up promise you man to man (whatever thats worth) that we have no intention of operating that way

because again, we’d love to work with you guys if that’s in the cards for us

Bambosh 10:39 PM

That would be excellent if you can make it happen

miles 10:39 PM

i can totally talk to andrew about it

At our request, we had this line struck from the participation waiver, since the purpose of the NDA in the first place was to allow us to discuss project plans together, and once a basic goal was established a sensible license could be drawn up around that. Even though what was struck was the absurd “blank check” clause — where they commit you to follow a separate document you’re not allowed to read first — they still grumbled about making this exception.

There’s a lot more wrong here, but a full analysis of the release document is outside the scope of this story.

We also get an early description of the union here which matches the description the HICU would later give itself:

October 02, 2023, Bambosh, miles

GiovanH 10:22 PM

also, is the Union the same as the Group, or is there a managment layer? I wasn’t clear on that from the doc

miles 10:22 PM

so to get colloquial about it, the Union is basically like

the collective of Homestuck Contributors

…

miles 10:22 PM

if it helps, think of the HICU as an actual union.

Beyond Canon, About About the Homestuck Independent Creative Union
The Homestuck Independent Creative Union (HICU) is a union of creative contributors which was established to consolidate members of future Homestuck Projects, beginning with the launch of Homestuck: Beyond Canon.
The HICU is a totally independent entity from Andrew, What Pumpkin, VIZ Media, or any other corporate interest. Andrew has given the union a free license, so they may legally work within the full Homestuck universe and monetize their efforts to support the members. The union is both creatively and financially independent, and no outside individuals or companies are receiving any royalties or payments. Only the members benefit, and income will be distributed among members as equitably as possible.
Andrew is not creatively involved with these projects in any direct way, but remains available to the union for consultation at their request.

First, they’re calling themselves a union of creatives. Although not a formal labor union, they’re committing to act like a labor union: “an organization of workers formed for the purpose of serving the members’ interests with respect to wages and working conditions.” The HICU is bound to represent the interests of its members, not Homestuck’s. They immediately establish that they’re entirely separate and distinct from any existing structures — including Andrew Hussie. Separate entities, separate responsibilities, separate interests. We’re supposed to treat the union like a union.

If you’re paying close attention, you’ll notice another problem here: why is Andrew involved in Union business? If the Union is really independent of Homestuck and Andrew, why is Andrew intimately involved in the basic process of onboarding people to the union? That’s an immediate conflict of interest.

In fact, why is Andrew involved in any business related to Homestuck at all? What Pumpkin announced not only that Andrew left What Pumpkin in 2020, but that they chose to “fully discontinue their creative involvement in any future Homestuck projects”.

It will turn out later that these labels — “What Pumpkin”, “Homestuck, Inc.”, “The Silence Mill”, “the Homestuck Independent Creative Union” — they’re all a shell game. The HICU isn’t at all what it says it is; Miles misrepresenting the union from day one, and the union itself continued lying about their independence on their webpage for years. The HICU label was being used by Andrew whenever he wanted to get goodwill by masking his involvement. But that’s another story.

Commentary contribution

Part of the sell here is Homestuck making the pitch that working with them would allow us to do genuinely useful things. What kinds of things was Homestuck looking to contribute, besides official support? I was always keeping in mind the possibility of using the UHC, or a version of the UHC, to replace or supplement the Homestuck website.

But one of the first things Homestuck pitched to entice us was this: it turns out the rest of the Homestuck commentary is finished, and it’s just been locked in a vault. This is the commentary they already committed to releasing as part of the book collection they and Viz announced and failed to complete.

October 02, 2023, Bambosh, miles

…

miles 10:03 PM

but as regards the collection, one of the things i think is okay to let you guys know is that andrew thinks itd be cool to get the last of his author’s commentary in the collection

which would actually be Exclusive to the collection!

GiovanH 10:04 PM

Oh, that would be very cool. I wasn’t sure if that had been written, actually

miles 10:04 PM

heh they totally have

and because viz isn’t really doing the books anymore, the collection seems like it might be the best of all possible homes for them

but there are some other ideas andrew is playing with that could crystallize as we work together with you guys and the Collection

This is a dynamic I’ve seen before: creators providing access and approval as compensation to fans. This is sometimes — but not always — suspect. I’m reminded of Nintendo’s “subtle hint of interest in collaboration” used to arrest Homebrew developers, and Valve offering a hacker a fake job just to arrest them.. But there’s also Sonic Mania. Christian Whitehead wasn’t compensated for his work in “commentary”, but I’m sure he saw access as a perk.

This is a pattern with Andrew in particular. He curates this image of himself as “the guy with answers” and creates excitement by doling out lore. Now, Andrew is not a sacred figure, and his words are not so valuable that they need to be captured. Even when it comes to Homestuck, according to his own philosophy. But this commentary, like the rest of the comic, would have been valuable to fans, and so it was a reason for us to continue and expect a collaboration with mutual benefit.

The HICU NDA Deadlock – October-June 2023

The basic schedule is this: Bambosh signs the HICU waiver and onboards with Andrew, then I do the same, then we start discussing plans properly. We still haven’t even discussed what they want to do in any detail, since that’s a project they want covered by NDA. So the NDA has to come first for both of us before we can start discussing ideas at all, let alone make any commitments.

Bambosh gets his agreement signed but Andrew is on vacation, so it’ll be a while before there’s further progress. (There is an “Andrew vacation” between most of the pauses in this timeline; I’ll try to omit them.)

October 02, 2023

miles 11:07 PM

so when the time comes, we’re gonna basically wait for you to sign the NDA (we’ll get another draft to you before then and ofc no need to sign until we’ve agreed on the form that’s gonna take), then we’re going to chat with bambosh, then we’re gonna chat with gio, and then probably after that we’re all gonna chat as a foursome

…

miles 11:16 PM

yeah no worries, again we’re here chatting now because i wanna get the ball rolling on how you guys are feeling

but yeah at that point its gonna be the sign -> chat pipeline, and beyond that theres nothing more we really wanna do

…

October 04, 2023

GiovanH 09:51 AM

@miles based on what you’ve said I’m assuming you’ll have an NDA for me roughly immediately after bambosh signs his?

miles 11:29 AM

hey! yeah that’s pretty much the game plan, bambosh signs and we pop an NDA to you afterwards, we have our conversations etc and from there we can talk shop

…

October 05, 2023

…

Bambosh 09:11 PM

Alright, signed on my end

Bambosh 09:11 PM

Time to chill for a few weeks

Crucially, from this point on, I am cut out of any discussions Miles, Bambosh, and Andrew have behind closed doors, because they claim every aspect of conversation is covered by the NDA.

…

miles 04:53 PM

yeah there are probably more talks to come before you guys explicitly are under license

about things such as this, the direction the UHC (or, perhaps, the HC) would go

GiovanH 04:56 PM

I have quite a few licensing thoughts but I assume those will have to wait until NDA’d

miles 04:56 PM

definitely LOL

…

GiovanH 04:57 PM

yeah it’s weird trying to make plans when we’re disjointed

the HC

no don’t you’ll break everything

where am I gonna put the star

miles 04:58 PM

at any rate ill get to andrew about getting you the NDA to sign so we can chat as a fearsome foursome

Beyond Canon

Just a few days after this (while Andrew was still on vacation), the Beyond Canon reboot announcement and new site went live.

Miles himself would shortly after be confirmed to be a writer on HS:BC himself:

Meet the Team — Posted on 25 October 2023 by James What can I say about Miles? Miles has known Andrew and I for years, and has such a natural and charismatic charm to him. I knew him largely as a comedy writer before this but seeing him pour himself into worldbuilding and plot mapping has really inspired me. Miles brings an important element to the team, in that he’s kind of a bro. The kind of guy that could probably best some kind of beast in singular combat. His favorite guys are Equius and Dirk. You really need that kind of energy sometimes. Miles’s writing is so full of character and charm. I’m excited for you all to see what he has to offer. I personally think this project could not exist without him.

NDA Deadlock

This is when we get the first major stall to the project, and it’s caused by Miles and Andrew trying to pull another fast one with licensing.

Now that Andrew has Bambosh behind closed doors, instead of moving on to the next step of giving me an NDA to sign and onboarding me, they cut me off entirely and start putting pressure on Bambosh to write them a blank check. At this point, the NDA makes it impossible for us to coordinate and communicate, so it serves here to isolate and corner a victim who is unable to communicate the aggression to the outside world. I keep asking to also be allowed to sign the same NDA, but am always rebuffed.

November 07, 2023

GiovanH 04:47 PM

speaking of which, any paperwork updates for me yet?

i know you were doing it staggered

miles 04:48 PM

yeah i think we may or may not be doing one more meeting with bambosh, who has some paperwork of his own to look through, before we move forward

…

GiovanH 04:50 PM

If that’s uhc-related paperwork that’s usually something I deal with and/or w/ bambosh, fyi

Bambosh 04:51 PM

Yeah, that’s kinda where the discussions gonna go when I get back from lawyer stuff

GiovanH 04:51 PM

<- fake internet lawyer

Bambosh 04:52 PM

Like, even if the paperwork is good I can’t sign anything if I can’t even talk it over with this guy here

GiovanH 04:52 PM

heyo

but yes definitely talk with real lawyers too

miles 04:53 PM

yeah we wanted to give you a chance to go to like, an actual legal expert, who will be able to assure you that this license is legit LOL

We already knew the NDA clause in the waiver was extremely broad, but we didn’t know if the intent was to protect peoples’ privacy as we were told, or if the plan was to weaponize it. We now know the purpose of the NDA was to be weaponized because that’s how Andrew immediately used it.

With this trap set up, Andrew tries to get Bambosh to sign more paperwork and commit the project to a new, secret set of terms under a new previously-undiscussed license. This is an intentional violation of the previously proposed schedule — Bambosh is only supposed to be doing a nominal interview here, not getting pressured to agree to a new set of terms. Instead they’re demanding a blank check before we even sit down to talk ideas. Basic divide-and-conquer.

The manipulation and pressuring comes in a number of forms: social pressures, pointing out the possibility of Viz Media going after unlicensed work, and ultimately making their own direct legal threats.

The line became that Bambosh had to sign a license before anything could continue. This is obviously untrue, not only because they just finished saying the opposite thing, but because the licensing details are heavily dependent on what the project is, which was yet to even be discussed. This time is not being used to try to continue project discussions without me or otherwise nudge me out of the project, Andrew is just blatantly trying to seize power via contract, and I’m being kept out to keep up the pressure and deny Bambosh any defense.

It seems like Andrew was under the impression they could exploit Bambosh as a single point of failure who could be pressured into giving up the project. But that didn’t work, and not just because Bambosh isn’t a fool, but because that’s simply not how the project is structured. Since we’re co-owners, this can’t happen. Neither of us can make any major decisions about the project without consulting with each other. We designed it that way on purpose. Bambosh cannot legally sign anything without showing the paperwork to me, which Andrew insists the NDA prevents him from doing. There is no play here; neither of us could consent to any policy changes without the consent of the other, and a unilateral change in ownership was literally impossible.

So for an extended period of time Andrew and Miles don’t allow me to review the mysterious new documents Andrew is demanding Bambosh sign, and Bambosh can’t sign them until I can review them. All progress is stonewalled by Hussie. By breaking procedure and trying to bully their way into power, Andrew has deadlocked the project.

Baring Fangs

During this wheel-spinning, Homestuck ramps up the pressure.

November 15, 2023

…

miles 06:16 PM

HEY. sorry im finishing up some work shit and i just today got back from vacation so ive been catching up

basically insofar as working with you guys on this goes, nothing has changed. we’re still amenable to your involvement on this, gio, and although i’ve seen the tone get sort of Legalesey i wanna emphasize that we’d still vastly prefer working with the UHC to any sort of takedown bullshit

that’s not at all what we want to happen

This is a huge shift and represents Homestuck completely backtracking on every assurance they’ve given up to this point. Suddenly my involvement is something they’re still “amenable” to, not something taken as a given. But most importantly Homestuck has started brandishing legal threats as a weapon. They have gone directly from “it’s your baby, we don’t wanna do anything you arent comfortable with” to “you can either do work under whatever conditions we dictate or we’ll personally attack you.” From “I’d never hurt you” to “don’t make me hurt you.” This is a clear threat: this is no longer about forging a collaborative relationship, they’ve started waving around a loaded gun.

Reality distortion as manipulation

But also pay attention to how this complete reversal of their position is presented explicitly as “nothing has changed”, even though this is obviously false. This gaslighting is part of the psychological manipulation I’ve come to realize is a weapon Homestuck considers to be one of its most vital tools.

Homestuck chooses to work with people who are dependent on its good graces whenever it can orchestrate such a situation. This can come from hero worship, financial dependence, or threats of legal violence. But this “upper hand” Homestuck maintains allows it to get away with these constant reality distortions, even in cases like this where it’s put everything in writing. If the victim calls them out on the lie Homestuck is able to reverse victim and attacker and treat the objection as an aggression being made against Homestuck. And in almost all cases, Homestuck has set up legal traps that make describing the lie to anyone else an offense in and of itself.

So Homestuck has gotten used to being able to distort reality like this whenever they want. It makes trying to seriously talk with Homestuck a truly absurd affair because they’ll simply demand people accept false histories of things that just happened. Miles is able to transition seamlessly from “ofc no need to sign until we’ve agreed on the form that’s gonna take” to “we aren’t going to be getting any of this work done without you guys being under license”.

“Don’t make me hurt you”

Meanwhile, Andrew has their lawyer load a cease-and-desist into the chamber so they can frame himself as “delaying” it — as if the lawyer is some uncontrollable attack dog they’re holding back, rather than a professional they’re actively paying to carry out his wishes. This is obviously false, and when I told my lawyer who I’d had to hire about it he laughed out loud. Lawyers don’t randomly go around C&Ding people on instinct. Those hours are billable — if the lawyer is priming a C&D, it’s because of their client’s wishes to fire it at someone.

My understanding is that Andrew’s lawyer is thought well of in his industry and has a reputation for being reasonable. He is not independently aggressive, he’s acting here on the direct instruction of his client.

This is an argument Homestuck makes a few times throughout this process: “We don’t want to sue you, but unless you agree to [arbitrary demand] we will have to.” It’s a threat, but it comes in this extremely manipulative wrapper.

It’s a familiar move in high-stakes legal brinkmanship: “We don’t want to go to court, but unless you agree to [arbitrary demand], we’ll have no choice.” It’s not a casual remark; it’s calculated to box the other side in. The harm is positioned as inevitable unless you concede immediately, and the blame for escalation is shifted entirely onto you.

…

miles 06:18 PM

the caveat being that from the getgo there has been a point that we need you guys to understand, which is that we aren’t going to be getting any of this work done without you guys being under license. it’s just not going to happen

bambosh needs time to check with a lawyer and so we’re amenable to giving that time, and again i think andrew is As We Speak instructing his lawyer to get the C&D delayed a while, but the problem is that we’ve seen very little from your end that indicates you guys Are, In Fact, Working With A Lawyer, and it’d be really helpful for us to, yknow… talk to that guy

so we can get this movin

The rhetorical trick here is to paint the threat as reluctant — we really don’t want to do this, but you’re leaving us no choice. The damage becomes your fault for “forcing” their hand, even though the escalation was always part of the plan. It’s a professional version of “Don’t make me hurt you,” played out in legalese and email threads instead of raised voices.

Wheel spinning

I’ve pointed out the deadlock problem before, and as nicely as possible I point it out again here.

…

miles 06:20 PM

are there problems with the lawyer on your end?

GiovanH 06:20 PM

I’m happy to review a license, and I actually have some constructive ideas along those lines of my own, but as long as I’m still locked out we Can’t Do Anything.

You’re saying you’re already working with C&Ds even though you know we can’t sign any license yet?

I literally cannot even review one.

I’m sure Bambosh has already explained this, but the way the project is structured, nothing can happen until we’re both involved in the decision-making process. Anything else is gridlocked.

miles 06:21 PM

no, i’m saying that we’re DELAYING a C&D that we have no intention of following through with because again, We Want To Work With You Guys. andrews lawyer has it on the table because thats how lawyers operate⁸, but andrew is, again probably Literally as we speak, instructing the lawyer to back off on that

as for your involvement, running the project as a twosome, we get it and as im just now getting back we can look into getting you under NDA so you can mutually look over the license

Just a few sentences later Miles jumps right back to “oh, no, you’re right, the next thing that has to happen is for us to offer you an NDA”, which exactly disproves his original threat. But those are the words he has to say, so he says them regardless.

At the same time the line is that Andrew is supposedly “delaying” legal action, but in reality it’s their decision to initiate it in the first place. It’s obviously deeply manipulative for Homestuck to talk about a C&D like this. It went seamlessly from an impossibility to something on the table. And even after loading the gun themselves and threatening to fire it they’re acting as if their lawyer is some wild beast Andrew is trying to rein in and not a professional they are actively paying to be their agent. Andrew is the one threatening to initiate legal hostilities against us if we don’t write them a blank check. Literally, they’re asking us to sign an agreement we can’t read.

There also is no “our” lawyer; Andrew has made it extremely clear I’m not to be involved in this stage, let alone legally. Again, legally Bambosh can’t tell me why talking with Andrew’s lawyer has made him suddenly have to get counsel to review documents they’re demanding he sign before we proceed, but what’s happening is that they’re pressuring him to sign some kind of hostile license. I’m only being included in the above thread so there’s an extra person to threaten; Miles knows perfectly well Homestuck tied my hands themselves.

This predictably spins in circles — without me ever being offered that NDA, of course — for a while until Andrew finally does send us a C&D, still keeping me out of the conversation.

James and Beyond Canon Teasers – Jan-Feb 2023

James Roach was ostensibly leading the HICU, and his name was on the paperwork, but we still hadn’t talked about the UHC project. But apparently he was still optimistic about the project, judging by him teasing it in some newsposts:

Beyond Canon Newspost, posted on 1 January 2024 by James …
Speaking of updates on things… some of you sleuths may have noticed some changes. I’d like to go into a little more detail about them to the extent that I am able. I also wanted to do this in an official newspost, and not on socials etc, so that there is no question about it.

The contract with VIZ media has been restructured. What does this mean? Well, let’s start a little further back. We have gotten a lot of questions about Andrew’s involvement with HS:BC and Homestuck as a whole. I mentioned before that Andrew approached me to finish HS:BC. As many of you know a few years ago Andrew stepped back from having a creative role. This has allowed him to focus on oversight, and some behind-the-scenes stuff. A large part of that was regaining a sort of legal control of the brand as a whole.

So who “Owns Homestuck?” Well Andrew still does. Who has the publishing rights? We’re working on that! The HICU has a license to do what we want with the property, which is what has allowed us to do some of the more creative things we are trying to do. Is the Website going to be fixed? They’re working on that! I have very little to do with that, personally, but once there is something solid to announce there and the concerned parties are comfortable with it I’ll let you know. What does this mean for the commentaries? Behind the scenes, some ideas about how to handle the issues with the way Homestuck is going to be published are being discussed. Some of these ideas may include a new way to release the future book commentary in absence of the books themselves. Wow!
…

Hey, that’s us! Is the goal to use the Collection to fix up the Homestuck website? Who knows, maybe. James refers here to the Viz changes that allowed Andrew to involve themself in this project. And hey, there’s the commentary mentioned again.

Beyond Canon Newspost, posted on 2 February 2024 by James Hi, James Here. Another Month, Another Post. That is the way of the world sometimes. Not much to report this month, I don’t think? Andrew offered some new HICU licenses, but the one I was most excited to announce is still… being worked on? Some sort of legal situation being hammered out. Booooooooring. I used 8 o’s there for fun. I hope you liked it.
…

Always nice to be appreciated.

I hadn’t yet spoken to James about any of this before, which always struck me as odd. He was the one leading the HICU team, he was the one responsible for the project as a whole, his signature was on all the paperwork.

February 06, 2024, James

James 10:52 PM

hows the stuff with the uhhh

collection going?

i was looking forward to tellin the community about that i think a lot of people will be real excited

GiovanH 10:53 PM

I saw your newspost

James 10:53 PM

i dont really like, ask about how things are going if they dont directly involve me LMAO

GiovanH 10:53 PM

yeah

I’m assuming you’re not familiar with the details then but right now from what I’ve been told things are locked up with lawyers for some reason

James 10:54 PM

aint that just the way

well, itll sort itself out

…

GiovanH 10:55 PM

my understanding is there’s not much that can happen until I sign an NDA (which makes total sense) but they haven’t sent me one yet, so we’re stuck at the moment

James had some high-level knowledge that things were in talks but I don’t get the sense that he knew any the details or how things had turned sour. Of everyone involved, it seems like he should be the most motivated to make sure this was working well.

Andrew chases off Bambosh – May-June 2024

Eventually Andrew’s unfulfillable demands on Bambosh pass the breaking point as Andrew just directly starts threatening imminent legal action.

May 07, 2024, Bambosh, miles

miles 08:10 PM

hey guys, not super happy i have to reach out like this but its looking like this is where this needs to go. i wanna preface this by saying that im not really interested in opening up a discussion tonight, so id like you to read this message and just think on what it is we have to say before you guys respond. we can talk more in the coming days if you want, but everything that needs to be said vis-a-vis our point of view is going to be said now.

andrew, HS legal counsel, and i all feel that your lawyer is essentially just stalling around and we’ve been making absolutely no meaningful progress, which honestly feels like a tactic you guys are playing at while you try to work something else out. communication is way, way too sparse to get anything productive done, we haven’t heard anything at all from your lawyer in three weeks (all while andrew’s lawyer has been pinging him weekly and getting ghosted more often than not throughout this entire process) and we’re getting fed up with it.

at this point we’re interested in only 3 courses of action from you which are essentially non-negotiable and need to happen within about a week:
1: you get your lawyer to get back in touch with us seriously in a way that actually leads to anything getting done.
2: you sign the current version of the license as drawn up and presented by andrew’s lawyer.
3: if you don’t do either of the above, we start moving to issue a strike against the UHC, take it down, and replace it with a similar tool of our own design.

we’d rather things didn’t have to go the option 3 route at all, but we feel that you guys have made a process that should honestly have been fairly simple an extremely drawn out affair, eating up over half a year of time we could have been collaborating productively. all things considered, the offers we already made in terms of keeping you guys on the project, onboarding you to work with HS and the HICU, licensing you, and PAYING you have been extremely, extremely generous considering you’ve been publishing a giant hoard of almost the entirety of andrew’s body of work with no permission whatsoever, to say nothing of gio’s harmful behavior towards the hiveswap team that andrew was nonetheless fully willing to look past. we all sort of danced around this as you two were consistently trying to pull gio into talks before we were comfortable, but it’s something we all knew, and to be clear it is something we are going to expect gio to own up to and make amends on if we’re going to continue working together.

honestly speaking, andrew’s lawyers actually advised us before we even reached out to you initially to not even bother with any of this, copyright strike it, and be done with it. instead, andrew wanted, and still wants, to reach out and do something with you guys.

considering all of the above, however, and the way all our offers were essentially met with stalling and a lack of willingness to commit or to even have your lawyer communicate with ours in a timely manner, this is essentially the last chance we are willing to give you guys. in the event that you two decide not to play ball here, it’s looking highly likely that we’re just going to have to make moves to quickly copyright strike the UHC, remove it, and replace it with a tool of our own design. it’ll be inconvenient to have to do this, and the fans are going to be upset because the tool is great, but we can whip up a new one pretty easily if we need to.

we would still rather just work with you and the tool that already exists. that said, we are at the point where we feel like you are either not taking this seriously, or angling to leverage this in a way that we find unacceptable. we have given you two ample time, opportunity, and consideration, and we feel like you’ve returned that courtesy with a lack of effort to our faces and what we are starting to assume, as mentioned previously, is some attempt to spin this in a way that is advantageous for you.

i need to be clear here: there is no such spin. i mentioned before that if we have to take this down, we know that fans of homestuck and of your tool are going to be upset, but if that has to come to pass, we aren’t going to be shy about explaining to the fandom at large why it is we weren’t able to work together, and we are going to work as quickly as we can to provide them with a replacement ourselves. the long and short of it is that we reached out in good faith to you guys, offered you a license, and you sat on it for eight months.

we aren’t interested in dragging out this preliminary phase any longer. read this again, think on it, and please do get back to us soon.

The accusations here are all nonsense, of course. It’s a description of what reality would have to be for them to be in the right, presented as if the fiction were a given. There is still no “our” lawyer; Bambosh’s personal legal representation explained to them he wasn’t able to unilaterally sign a document in secret and Andrew simply refused to hear it. I was certainly not privy to any discussion about any money flowing any direction except from us to Andrew. It’s not true that they ever offered “us” anything. And once again, Andrew is trying to “good cop, bad cop” themself by claiming they’re against all the legal proceedings they’ve started and that they aren’t making the threats they’re making. Saying at the end that they’re acting in “good faith” is demonstrably false.

They keep trying to complain about delays even though the project has been held up by them at every stage. We didn’t need an NDA to talk about the project in the first place, that’s something they chose to demand! There was clearly no NDA required for The Unofficial Homestuck Collection to operate well and collaborate with other talent, as evidenced by the fact that we’d already been doing it successfully for years. Almost every delay has been (and will be) from something expensive they tried to impose.

Most importantly, the reason no progress has been made and license has been signed is neither Bambosh or I can unilaterally sign a license without the other, something we’ve repeatedly explained and Miles had acknowledged. Communication is sparse because they forced it to be! In the same breath he complains about insufficient communication Miles manages to also complain about our making them “uncomfortable” by trying to talk, presenting communicating as an offense. We have only ever tried to work toward cooperation while they tried to put leverage on us, and yet Homestuck tries to spin it as us leveraging them.

Importantly, we get legal action followed by replacing it “with a similar tool of our own design” presented, explicitly, as a threat. As presented, the primary purpose of a future “official collection” without our involvement would be a punishment to spite the UHC, not to serve as a real tool.

And on top of all that Homestuck is trying to redefine its relationship with me yet again. Now they were never willing to work together unless I made “amends” for some ambiguous harmful behavior no one has ever been able to specify.

I wouldn’t bother to let myself slow down to refute obvious falsehoods except that it’s important to show how Miles and Andrew slide seamlessly into threats and ultimatums. Nothing he’s saying is true and he’s just forcing his way through it. There is a complete disinterest in integrity; it’s dismissively thrown to the side in order to pursue threats and bully tactics.

The net result of all this was that Andrew Hussie’s behavior was so egregiously bad it chased Bambosh off his own project. Andrew isolated Bambosh and subjected him to intense bullying and pressure tactics, and it was disturbing to see even from the outside. So, for legal purposes, Bambosh disconnected himself from the UHC project on June 18, just before Andrew could Actually Sue Him. This left me fully responsible to handle things from there.

June 18, 2024

Bambosh

Okay, here’s my response:

I developed this project out of a love for Homestuck. I put everything I had into it, to create the version of Homestuck I wanted to exist. This project was for me above anyone else, and the fact that it resonated with the larger community was always less important to me than the fact that I enjoyed developing it. Once I released the 1.1 version, I was pretty much spent - I’d put everything I had into the project, and wanted to move on. The only thing keeping me attached to the project so far has been Gio’s involvement. If he hadn’t stepped in, it would have been stagnant since 2020. He has contributed every single piece of code to the project since the V1.1 release, and written more code in total for the project than I did. Discarding all external context, I personally owe him a great deal for doing a massive amount of unpaid work for my project.⁹ This is why I’ve been hesitant to proceed without him. After everything he’s done for me, I believed it was the right thing to do to figure out what his place would be in the project before proceeding.

You’ve claimed this to be a good faith outreach, and I was genuinely exited to join in.

[Redacted: Conversation regarding particular interactions]

Every time I’ve tried to talk like a reasonable human being, you’ve shot it down. Every interaction we’ve had has been a thinly veiled threat legal threat towards me. I should think the fact that I’ve been spending my limited personal funds on a lawyer to engage with you on your terms would be enough to demonstrate that I really really wanted to make this work, but apparently not.

I developed this project out of a love for Homestuck. And thanks to this entire negotiation, that love does not exist anymore. Frankly, every time I think about the shit you’ve tried to pull over me in this negotiation, I feel physically ill. I cannot imagine a world in which I sign this contract and can just resume business as usual. The moment has passed. You’ve beaten the motivation out of me.

So, you’re getting what you want. I’m taking the project down, and abdicating all responsibility for it. I don’t want anything to do with it anymore. You guys can just make your own version. I wish you the best of luck. Don’t contact me again.

Gio Era – 2024-2025

So I became the primary maintainer of the project.

If I were sensible I would have stopped there. Andrew and Miles had already been caught in enough lies that it was obvious that they weren’t willing to engage in good faith, especially with me. The Unofficial Homestuck Collection doesn’t support me financially in any way, so to keep trying to work with these people meant taking on legal and financial risk with no real possibility of reward. Best case scenario, I would continue to do valuable work for the Homestuck brand for free.

If they had been working with someone without my tough skin, their behavior would have blown this up already. In fact, they were working with someone without my extraordinary patience previously, and they did in fact just blow that up, so it’s not a hypothetical. Andrew had burned through their best shot, but I could still manufacture one last chance for them to be reasonable, just once, for their own good.

But I gave it one more shot. I decide that I’m going to be as amenable as anyone possibly could be, and if they turned nasty again, it’d be them turning nasty again. And at the very least I’d get to see them do it. I decided to play it out. If they were going to attack us I wouldn’t be able to stop them, but I determined the project wouldn’t collapse because I didn’t want to do the legwork.

Making nice to me

What happens next is fascinating: they reset the board and try to run the cycle a second time.

June 18, 2024, miles

miles 09:55 PM

hey man, do you have some time to chat?

…

GiovanH 10:22 PM

Obviously you know Bambosh dropped out, and I wasn’t privy to the details on exactly why that happened, but I’m still amenable to talk

That’s just where I’m at right now

…

miles 10:22 PM

so, to sum up whats happened, andrew decided today that he wanted bambosh to sign the license.

…

miles 10:22 PM

and hes frustrated, and unfortunately the result of our conversation with bambosh tonight was that bambosh said he wants to wash his hands of all this and he torched the UHC off github, took it down, etc

GiovanH 10:26 PM

So, to be clear, he dropped off the project and left the codebase to me. everything still exists but I’m leaving it down temporarily while we sort things out

miles 10:26 PM

okay, thats excellent to hear.

…

miles 10:27 PM

like again i want to be one hundred percent real with you here, it sucks that the UHC is down right now for the fans, but it also sucks to me on like… a personal level, insofar as i NEVER ever ever wanted bambosh or you to feel like we were trying to punish or be assholes about this.

GiovanH 10:28 PM

I know the communication has been nightmarish

miles 10:28 PM

the fact that this might have really hurt bambosh’s feelings sucks. i think hes a good guy and we value his love for homestuck.

…

miles 10:36 PM

yeah..

anyway

like, last on this before we move on to a little business

i just want him to know that, i guess.

andrew has been frustrated, we’ve had to move in very official, stern, and sometimes cold ways, and i want him to understand that like… real people behind this do not want him to feel fucked up about this, and do not want him to feel like… forced out

For my part I explain the picking up of the pieces, which Homestuck didn’t seem to understand. Namely, we transferred mantainership of the project.

Also as soon as Bambosh was out of the picture, Miles immediately rubberbands back to fawning. We’re so sorry if he felt stressed, we didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, etc. He even goes so far as to say “we’ve had to be cold” here. Nobody “had” to be anything; Andrew left the project alone for years, then they decided they wanted it and started throwing punches. The obviously neutral stance would be to simply stop making demands, but Andrew always goes out of their way to pretend that isn’t a possibility. I know the concern for Bambosh isn’t true, I see the attempt at manipulation, it’s gross.

Putting out the fire

I start explaining my basic position, and Miles rubberbands back from knee-breaker to once again being a fun little guy.

…

GiovanH 10:29 PM

Also, while we’re being frank

miles 10:29 PM

of course!

GiovanH 10:31 PM

I think that, pragmatically, it’s not actually to my advantage to try to keep engaging constructively here, because I’m going in blind and there are already hurt feelings and takedown threats sitting around

like, there are already takedown threats in the other thread, and I’m signing up to be the fall guy here

miles 10:31 PM

so let’s talk about that a little

GiovanH 10:32 PM

BUT I still see a win-win here that I’d actually really like to see happen

so I’m choosing to take the riskier path here instead of just closing up shop

miles 10:33 PM

i appreciate that

so like

lemme get into logistics a bit, but before i do that i do wanna emphasize one more time that like

idk how else to say this so im just gonna speak as Me, and not as like a representative of anything,

████████

…

miles

so, to segue from personal to business.

GiovanH 10:40 PM

I have some basic ideas for next steps but I’ll let you go first

miles 10:40 PM

whats happening right now is that obv the UHC is down. im REALLY, really happy that bambosh didnt just torch everything, because its a fucking cool tool and we always wanted to work with it.

GiovanH 10:40 PM

My current plan is for it to not go away if possible

miles 10:40 PM

great. that’s ours as well

Great! They want the collection to keep existing for sure. This has been the most consistent part of their position all along. They love the thing! But things get real weird real quick, because Homestuck just can’t help itself.

…

miles 10:40 PM

now, whats gonna happen is that as of right now, andrew IS invoking copyright strike to keep the UHC down, even though we didnt want it offline today if we could help it. what id like you to understand up front though is that andrew making that move legally and officially does NOT mean he wants it down forever, he and i are of one mind that we’d rather keep working with it

so what’s going to happen now is that tomorrow, andrew’s lawyers are gonna get in touch with you. do you have legal representation yet?

GiovanH 10:43 PM

So issuing a C&D before we even talk definitely seems like a step in the wrong direction

And yes.

miles 10:44 PM

great. lemme talk to andrew about the C&D because i kind of agree, but what he chooses to do with that is ultimately up to him and i have no say in his final call, nor what his legal team wants to do. BUT, i want to be one hundred percent clear here: what we want to do is start working out the process of getting the UHC back up, get you licensed, maybe bambosh as well if hes open to coming back, and get things moving again.

GiovanH 10:44 PM

Like, making legal demands is a really hostile move, not something you do automatically just to do it

I don’t know that I can just coexist with that

miles 10:45 PM

so lemme talk to andrew tonight to see where he lands on that.

but let me be clear on this because i keep getting distracted making other points.

GiovanH 10:46 PM

I’m good to move forward cooperatively as long as nobody starts launching attacks, but if that happens that is a big deal

miles 10:47 PM

so like, we’re still open to working with you specifically, this CD thing was in place before any of us were aware if youd want to work with us

so we can come to a conclusion on that as soon as tonight

but yeah, if bambosh is out, hes out. if he wants to come back wed be happy to have him because again, its important he know that we actually straight up do value him, but if he wants to wash his hands of this its regrettable but understandable.

…

miles 10:47 PM

but already it looks like i think andrew is amenable to keeping a C+D/copyright strike off the record for now

which is great. i agree that if we’re just gonna be working together theres really no need to go right to that

if youd like i can ask him that in no uncertain terms RIGHT NOW?

…

GiovanH 10:55 PM

Basically my offer is that I’m still willing to go forward in good faith so long as we’re all friendly and no one is making legal threats

But, like, the threat of a lawsuit is a really big deal, and doesn’t just happen casually

So let’s do whatever we can to avoid that

Because if there is a real-deal cease and desist that I have to act on, I’ll have to act on it and cease and desist, and then I’ll have to explain what happened, and that’s the lose-lose-lose scenario

miles 10:57 PM

so i do understand that andrew is gonna want to work legally with a capital L with you on some kinda framework going forward if for no other reason than to address the past bad blood, but i just talked to him about the C+D and he’s agreed there is no reason to do a copyright strike if you’re willing to move forward with us, sign an NDA, and work on getting licensed.

to be clear, andrew is fine dropping the C+D for now

GiovanH 10:57 PM

👍

miles 10:57 PM

which is good!

obviously LOL

again, we arent trying to do threats, as you said. its a dumb waste of everyones time. we just want to get set up in a way andrew is comfortable with, get you under license, and move this thing forward

If you’re thinking it’s bizarre for someone to say they’re glad they’re working with you but also want to immediately threaten a lawsuit, it’s because you’re right. This is the main recurring theme again: Andrew continually trying to get me legally on a leash while I force a smile and politely yet firmly refuse to collar myself.

The cease and desist here is the one they were about to attack Bambosh with. I almost didn’t catch it, but Miles drops that “this CD thing was in place before any of us were aware if youd want to work with us,” verifying that this whole friendly collab approach was a lie from the very beginning. I have to spell out that the collaborative partnership they insist they still want is incompatible with them exerting legal force. This is extremely basic, and I don’t really believe anyone involved didn’t understand that starting off with a C&D was an uncalled for form of legal violence.

My consistent position

OK, but what am I thinking here? Given how antagonistic and aggressive Andrew has already been, why am I playing this through instead of just letting Andrew very publicly dig their own grave, as they keep threatening to do? It’s still the same scorpion-and-the-frog dynamic, except we’re already down a frog and Homestuck’s stinger is already being brandished again. Homestuck isn’t going to be nice to Gio — is he stupid? Maybe.

If I act like a glutton for punishment that’s partially because my goal really was to work together and produce something cool and valuable, not to get some cheap-shot drama points. Even if Andrew had a tantrum they wanted to throw, maybe James would be there to put a hand on their shoulder. Heck, maybe once Andrew’s lawyer is in the room he’ll be the responsible one to temper Andrew with sound legal advice.

But I knew if they were going to blow it up, they were going to blow it up. I was not going to allow anyone any leeway to claim that somehow I was too demanding. I’m keeping everything scoped strictly to the collection project because that’s what was agreed on and that’s what allows us to work in the first place. Above all I’m going to be professional.

I still find myself trying to make excuses for Andrew. They’re Andrew! They are the god king of fiction. I know because they wrote themselves that way. Part of why I let this stretch on for as long as I did to my own detriment was to really definitively prove it to myself, that this wasn’t just in my head. I am a scientist and that means evidence before conclusion¹⁰, and every blow I took was evidence.

If I were trying to farm offense I’d have had them dead to rights since the first takedown threat, but that’s never been me; I really did want to see them do this right if they possibly could. In stark contrast to Andrew I have no threats to make and no special pressure I can put on them.

So that’s the implicit experiment behind this: if I gave Homestuck every measure of grace anyone could give, would that be enough? Or was Homestuck fully radioactive?

Back to work – June-July 2024

So, with a pointless C&D off the table for now, we talked about how we could productively move things forward. Homestuck went back to lovey-dovey.

GiovanH 10:59 PM

to talk shop for a sec, I see basically two separate projects here: licensing the collection so it’s not a risk is one, and then whatever further collaboration (i.e. official version or website work) is another

miles 10:59 PM

and, preferably, get the UHC up ASAP

we can talk the deets of that going forward!

…

miles 11:02 PM

like.... after the NDA, getting the license up is literally first on our list. all other projects we do with ya would be happening under that framework

ok yeah so as i was saying

in summary!

a: andrew and lawyers will reach out to you and lawyers soon, to get started on talking about the terms under which we’d like to work together

b: once those terms are set, which we really hope doesnt take too long for the reasons we’ve laid out already, the UHC will get licensed and become the OHC or something like that, we can play around with it

c: we settle a few new things as we figure out the Workflow Situation with the U/OHC and then begin new projects

bc again, we fuck with the tool mega heavily and are excited for new stuff to happen

Vitally, despite the threat of having lawyers send me a cease-and-desist order mere minutes ago, Homestuck made it overwhelmingly clear that they wanted me to continue to keep the collection up for now. I did too, of course, but getting explicit permission from Homestuck means they can’t turn around and threaten me of copyright infringement, because I was acting how they asked me to. So this was a step in the right direction.

GiovanH 11:11 PM

I’m still pondering whether the replacement is the best option but we’ll talk and do whatever makes sense. depends if he’s looking for something very different or basically the same

but that’s deets

miles 11:13 PM

for sure

in the immediate, we’d actually want to keep the UHC up or get it back up ASAP, if possible, because none of us want to punish the fans for this

…

miles 11:13 PM

NDA will be first step, then we can chat about getting you set up with the U/OHC to andrews satisfaction and talk about the details of that arrangement and then finally do some fucking cool shit

GiovanH 11:22 PM

And I will see about spinning up a mirror

miles 11:23 PM

alrighty, awesome

…

GiovanH 11:25 PM

Ok everything should be totally continuous now, just with name changes

I also want to avoid panic so long as nothing’s actually going wrong

miles 11:27 PM

yeah definitely

ok yeah getting it up again is fine for now, we’ll figure out its final zone later but itll be good to have it available for folks now

so, right now id prefer if there was minimal to no public communication on this besides whats absolutely necessary

…

GiovanH 11:31 PM

as far as I’m concerned all we’ve done is change the project maintainer

miles 11:31 PM

wonderful

GiovanH 11:33 PM

I 100% agree that having to announce at any point that we’re shutting down because we’ve had legal action taken against us is the Bad End and I’ll put in work to avoid that

as previously discussed

miles 11:34 PM

yep!

glad we’re of one mind on this

Miles is overwhelmingly clear about Homestuck’s position here: they want the collection to stay up, they want me hosting the website and the asset pack, and my doing that constitutes actively working with them. We also have a schedule now, which is the same schedule from before:

I sign an NDA
I work with Andrew to agree on a license, which Miles also refers to as “terms”
Happy collaboration forever

Different NDA signed June 27, 2024

When they finally sent me an NDA I signed it quickly. This confuses the narrative because it’s weird behavior on their part, but the mechanics are simple.

The reason I’m able to bring these details past this point to light is that the NDA they sent me next was not the HICU community release agreement that includes the overbroad NDA designed to stifle communication, but an entirely different standard mutual NDA suitable for protection of creative and technical data.

My NDA is properly scoped and covers a broad category of creative information I’m not allowed to discuss if Homestuck, Inc. shares it with me. I would not be able to leak you details I learned from the Beyond Canon writer’s room, for instance. But it does not generally silence me from talking about my experience, or prevent me from talking about information I had prior to the NDA. I was extremely careful about verifying this with my lawyer before signing, because I know about Andrew’s tendency to try to abuse NDAs.

I don’t know why they switched out the forms like this. Maybe it was to ensure I still couldn’t compare notes with Bambosh or other HICU members. Maybe it was to keep me at arms length from the rest of the HICU group. Maybe it was to further an ongoing campaign to try to estrange me from the larger fan community by preventing me from calling myself an HICU member. Maybe it was just to make sure nothing I signed committed them to treat me fairly. Whatever the reason, I was never going to agree to something that would tie my hands in the event of this kind of contingency that demands transparency into the proceedings, and I was careful to ensure I did not do so. So this, also, worked out.

As soon as they get my signature Andrew refuses to call me by my chosen name and instead uses my full legal name wherever they possibly can. Notably, they do not do this for Bambosh or anyone else. Apparently they’d been using my legal name with other people before I told them, meaning they’d been digging up info on my identity themself.

It’s a small, petty grossness. It comes off that as Andrew being pleased with themself that they have a socially-acceptable way to deny me one mote of dignity. It’s embarrassingly childish behavior. It’s truly incredible how this guy cares about bullying more than anything else.

NDA as Isolation

Andrew relies on social isolation tactics, especially coercing isolation by using threats of legal violence. This has been true before but it’s made especially evident in the UHC story by the NDA language.

A common tool for this is NDA agreements which are designed to be overbroad and punitive. They demand that association with Homestuck — including when they require you associate with them — be contingent on NDAs. These NDAs cover all conversations and things like “workplace conditions”. This is used to cut off lines of communication victims could use to report abuse or even discuss issues with their peers.

Quoting directly from the HICU contract (again, not one I signed, but one some people have),

The purpose of this agreement is to secure confidentiality among an extended network of people… By joining this Group, you are committing to respecting the fact that statements of other Group members have been made only under the mutual understanding that all correspondence among members is private. Signing this form is a legally binding indication that you agree with these conditions of mutual respect and discretion.

… While protecting the financial interests of the Union is not the primary purpose of this agreement, and protecting the privacy and safety among Union and Group members is the primary purpose, nevertheless, if you violate the terms of this agreement, [Homestuck] will seek maximum financial damages, both to protect its financial interests, and more importantly, to vigilantly protect the privacy and safety of its members.
…
…you cannot terminate, cancel, or revoke this Agreement for any reason.
…
…You further agree to refrain from disclosing or using Confidential Information for any purpose other than participating in the Group. Your obligation to maintain the confidentiality of Confidential Information shall survive termination in perpetuity.
…
All information is deemed Confidential Information.¹¹ …
…
You agree that any violation or threatened violation of this Agreement will cause irreparable injury to the Union, entitling the Union to obtain injunctive relief in addition to all legal remedies.

I have confirmed with my legal counsel that this is not remotely standard language for an NDA. It is designed to intimidate and lock signatories into a coercive, punitive situation. Andrew relies on an ability to abuse NDAs, including by intentionally misrepresenting situations to people with the confidence that people who know the truth will be unable to correct them. I don’t say that as a hypothetical way someone could interpret this language, I’m reporting that as something I’ve personally seen Homestuck use that exact language to do.

What Andrew wants is the ability to get whatever they want whenever they want it, and this environment gets them that. The only source for remedy is to go through Andrew themself and have them find the grace to give you what you ask for. It is an abuser’s playground.

But even without the legal stranglehold of an NDA, Andrew uses traditional social isolation as a control tactic. Skipping ahead in the timeline, in January of this year I was scheduled to publish my first game on Steam — a collaboration with several other Homestuck fans. Less than a week away from the launch date, Homestuck intervened as personal retaliation against me. They reached out to other members of the team privately and threatened legal action against them if they continued associating themselves with me. This was paired — as far as I can tell — with some set of accusations about me they said NDA language prevented them from justifying, which wasn’t true. The play worked. Homestuck cut me off from people I considered good friends, and the whole project was a loss. I am still heartbroken and angry from this. Not just because of the game, but because of the relationships I had with other people that they attacked.

But they do that. They were willing to do it with me, I’ve seen them do it to others, and it seems like they’re willing to do it regularly. Isolate an enemy and make them even more dependent on getting your personal favor, with social ostracization as a weapon to retaliate if they don’t.

Statement demand – August 2024

So now, starting in June 2024, I’m in a room with Miles and James, but no Andrew¹² and no lawyers.

With the NDA signed we can finally get things moving again. I can have that “interview” with Andrew that was promised a year ago, we’ll put together a license that covers the kind of project Homestuck wants to work on and then it’s smooth sailing.

Dear reader, that is not what happened.

August 05, 2024

…

miles 09:34 PM

so, the next stage of all this is basically that before moving onto getting the license squared away, andrew wants to work on what’s referred to here as a settlement.

…

August 24, 2024, miles

…

miles 05:50 PM

at any rate, in the meantime im just gonna summarize where we’re looking to go in terms of next steps

to lay the groundwork for working with the UHC, andrew wants to reach a settlement that includes a retraction/rewrite

the explicit details of this have yet to be hashed out and will probably be worked on in the coming weeks but its something andrew has made very clear he needs to see happen in some shape or form

note that the rewrite/retraction itself doesnt have to happen RIGHT NOW or even necessarily before we get to work on UHC stuff, but agreeing to do it with the settlement is something andrew needs to see first

August 25, 2024, miles

miles 03:03 PM

but like. you GOTTA work with us, man

the alternative is that if andrew feels much more stalled¹³ or like you arent operating with him in good faith, hes just going to switch gears, have the UHC taken down, replace it, and sue.¹⁵ the whole point of the settlement is so he doesnt have to do any of that shit¹⁴, because none of it is desirable and we dont wanna waste our time or energy on it when we could instead be making productive strides together

…

September 01, 2024, general

miles 01:19 PM

what i need to establish now before this conversation goes any further is that i think i’ve been pretty light in my rhetoric for the most part, barring some cases when i needed to try and hustle bambosh and/or you along, but for today i have to be really, really clear: right now the only thing we’re interested in talking about is the settlement, and why it’s necessary, full-stop, before we consider doing literally anything else with you.

im not gonna draw out a point i already made to you a few days ago, but just to recenter the conversation around this, we came to you guys 10 months ago open to collaboration (in the face of you guys publishing the UHC with no license) and we got put off and had all this drawn out for nearly a year so now more than ever, we feel like coming to an understanding about the settlement, what we want, and why its necessary to do before we get around to any work is like… mandatory.

…

Homestuck quickly moves from “we aren’t trying to do threats” to actually, they have demands and retaliation ready if their demands aren’t met.

This yields a series of demands from Andrew, which he sent in the form of a google doc.

The complaint in these demands has nothing to do with The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, but is instead rehashed Hiveswap whining. Before anything else can happen, I need to do whatever it takes to “repair my relationship”, and their first idea of how I can start to do this is releasing a public statement of confession. I as the wretched sinner must supplicate myself before Andrew the righteous god-king of Homestuck and confess my sins so I might be granted a tenuous stay into their glorious kingdom.

This is not the license discussion. In fact, this has been explicitly injected before the license discussion as a newly announced prerequisite.

Despite this being the stage for the scheduled interview, Andrew simply refuses to show up for this. Communication is still through copy-pasted text dumps and occasionally PDFs. It’s not a surprise but it is yet another breach of agreement.

September 01, 2024, general

…

miles 01:19 PM

what i want to get into today is more of the nitty gritty of why it is we feel this is necessary from a more human point of view. to be more direct, what i mean by this is today, and in subsequent discussions until you show us that you understand the necessity of this, i want to talk about why it is that we’ve gotten to the point where the options here are either settlement or lawsuit. there was a real human cost to the way things went down a couple years ago, to say nothing of the damage that was done to Homestuck and Hiveswap by the way that fiasco went down. you weren’t the only person involved in this, obviously, but regardless of your intentions (which to be clear andrew and much of the involved parties still feel were at least partially rooted in like… rabblerousing, to get old-timey about it), things went down really, really nastily for the Homestuck and Hiveswap teams. this is something we need you to understand and talk to us about.

…

miles 01:19 PM

as detailed in the pdf i just sent you, and as i mentioned previously, real damage was done not only to Homestuck and Hiveswap as productions/brands/however you wanna look at it, but there was a huge storm of harassment and outright abuse of many staff members that was like… fucking unacceptable.²²

we’re not trying to hold you 100% accountable for all the bad shit that went down back then, but we’re also not about to pretend that your blog wasn’t a contributing factor of some significance that, among other things, “legitimized” sarah and emily’s video in the eyes of a bunch of rabid shitheads who weren’t interested so much in “accountability” or whatever the fuck reddit shit it was that they said as they were in dogpiling a group of creators just because they could. andrew also has made it clear to me, and wants me to communicate to you, that regardless of your intentions, he and other members of the team felt your behavior was stalkerish and unacceptable. there is history here that needs to be addressed.

all this preamble is to say that really, before we do anything at all, we need to get real indication from you that this is something you understand, something you’re willing to show remorse for, and something you are willing to Concretely Commit to amending with us. if we’re going to collaborate at all, there has to be some kind of trust built here, and the only way that’s going to happen is for you to address this shit personally. we’re not interested in dancing around this any longer.

The fact that there even is a Homestuck Collection is all but forgotten. The only thing that matters is Andrew feels “owed” for the consequences of my old writing. This is about the fact that they consider me, personally, to be a problem. They have not bothered at any point to contact me about any of this. But now we’re in a room together, and they hope that maybe if they corner me and threatens me with a big enough gun I’ll be able to un-hurt their feelings.

I was always concerned they would leverage copyright as an excuse for retaliation over my past writing. What I truly did not expect is that it would be completely blatant. We have spelled out in writing quid pro quo retaliation. Andrew doesn’t even mention copyright here, that’s clearly not what they care about. It’s just a weapon to be brought out later if I’m not subservient enough.

The consistent thing about this sophistry is they can’t point to anything objectionable I’ve ever done. The best excuse they can make is that other people were bad to them in a way they won’t explain either. The options are not “settlement or lawsuit” — there is no Hiveswap business that requires any settlement, and there’s no new offense that would create grounds to sue. They’re just loud and angry.

Details irrelevant

I hesitate to even go into body of the document and the demands themselves, because they fundamentally don’t matter. I’ll give a few key examples in a moment, but don’t lose sight of the role this plays in the story. It’s all nonsense implemented with the now-expected meandering threatening pages of Andrew sophistry and to give it a line-by-line inspection is to give it unearned dignity. The demand that I satisfy Andrew’s personal grievances is inappropriate in and of itself. It’s an attack, it’s breaking a truce, it’s a breach of agreement. It is, most importantly, an insistence on asserting dominance and creating a clear hierarchical relationship.

Earlier, I talked about what it looked like when I was trying to work constructively with someone I had a disagreement with. A big part of that is making sure not to predicate anything on “balancing the books”, since that’s a surefire way to turn this into foolish attempts to pin the other person to the ground. So no refusing to speak to each other until our anger is satisfied, no coming into the room angry at all. There’s no way to proceed down that road and everyone still emerge happy. I graciously agreed to set aside my disagreements and work with someone I had major outstanding criticisms of. We could work together for mutual benefit but that was it.

In contrast, what we have here is a demand that I prostrate myself before my master and beg their forgiveness before any kind of working relationship could be considered, as if he were a god too holy for a mere sinner to approach without first finding a way to satisfy their demand for punitive justice. Which, compared to my willingness to work together despite past conflict, is a really solid example of not doing that.

Good faith cannot coexist with this threatening and demanding behavior. If the first words out of my mouth were “sure, I’ll work for you… for $2,485,506” or “sure, but you have to release a statement apologizing for the MSPA Forums first” or even “sure, but first you have to publicly apologize for the death threats you’re indirectly responsible for”, that would put me in the wrong. That’d be me being aggressive and bringing non-UHC topics inappropriately into a scoped space. We were here to collaborate, not explicitly map out some sort of Petersonian dominance hierarchy.

Homestuck already agreed to work with me, not some alternate version of me who thinks Andrew did nothing wrong they imagines could exist if they bend me hard enough.

The goal here is to manufacture this false hierarchical relationship. That and that alone marks this as another collapse of trust and pushes the relationship into aggression instead of cooperation. “Satisfy our grudge or we’ll sting you with our great big scorpion tail.”

Perhaps one day I’ll do a deep-dive into these documents because they’re truly absurd. For now though I’ll zoom in on just a couple of ideas.

Reversing Victim and Offender

A common thread in the mess of sophistry is Andrew blaming me for their own “feelings of anger” towards me. I do not describe them as angry pejoratively either — this is the self description they gave to justify their own behavior. They assert that — for no reason they can describe — they had “every reason to believe [I] was acting in bad faith”, which they claim makes me directly responsible for their “feeling” that I was stalking them.

They are not able to articulate any specific action that happened that led them to this anger, or how my actual actions might have contributed to it. They imply that “unacceptable” events happened as some kind of consequence of my writing, but they are not able to give a single example of one and don’t even attempt to explain how anything I’ve done could be causal to any possible harm.

It isn’t true that they had any reason to target me, but more importantly they always paint other people as being at fault for their own emotions and actions. They describe a straightforward situation of themself baselessly lashing out at people around them, but spend pages and pages of words insisting every problem they cause themself is always someone else’s fault.

Of course writing did not cause Hiveswap to fail. I wrote a description of how Hiveswap had already failed. This is not a tricky, subtle distinction, this is the kind of question psychologists test one and two year olds on to determine when the human mind learns how time works. It is not a real argument an adult can make to their adult audience. And it’s certainly not an argument they can make directly to me with a straight face on the hope that they’re intimidating enough that I don’t notice.

So much ink has been spilled over what a creative genius Andrew Hussie is, what a monumental contribution to culture Homestuck has been, the excellence of this one individual’s writing and humor. I’ve contributed extensively to it! It’s so bizarre, then, to see even the most basic and obvious criticism treated as an offense of impossible magnitude. It paints the picture of someone who doesn’t understand how their success was a confluence of many factors — talent, but also wealth, timing, and simple good fortune — and instead sees themselves of deserving absolute reverence regardless of facts.

On Aysha’s Behalf

In a particularly disturbing example, Andrew explicitly brings up Aysha U. Farah’s harassment against me, something I have reason to believe was originally prompted by Andrew as retaliation for my previous criticism. This is one of the things I was intentionally not bringing up in order to be extra-generous to Hussie, but they actually describe this as a way in which I had harmed her by being a visible target for her to be “angry” towards. Andrew references the story of Aysha’s participation and orchestration in an entirely baseless harassment campaign against me.

aysha 2:57 PM

go get this bitch https://twitter.com/giovan_h/status/1382045007008399367

this fucking STALER

STALKER

…

aysha 4:19 PM

can you guys please go rip him apart

i’m freaking out

I originally included a few examples of the people Andrew invoked participating in this harassment, but since then they’ve actually reached out to apologize for their behavior which I greatly appreciate.

Homestuck is very good at intimidation. Part of this is legal pressure but Andrew Hussie also controls people with the standing threat that criticism will prompt fans to conduct a stochastic smear and harassment campaign. Andrew has shown they use false rumors which stir people up to violently attack their personal enemies, which is likely what happened here too. My goal here isn’t to put any particular person on blast just for contributing to this attack, it’s to address Andrew’s bizarre new demands. When people who were involved regret their participation, that’s the happy ending.

The power Andrew has over people makes it very easy to execute a smear campaign which spreads through their fanbase like wildfire. I’ve already seen that happen in reaction to this very piece as a transparent attempt to discredit me with false allegations of things like transphobia, antisemitism, racism, etc. Entirely false labels that are just enough to give people a reason to defame me on Andrew’s behalf.

This has done very real, very personal damage to me. I have real stalkers now, as a direct result of the slander spread by Andrew and Aysha. There is a very real discussion to have around children on the Internet stalking me and sending me death threats in the name of “Jubilism”, Andrew’s personal fictional religion whose practices include assassinating your online haters.¹⁶ I have had to explain to my mother that posting on Facebook about the nice lunch she had with me leads to my getting threatening messages about that lunch the next day. It’s brutal.

When this is described it’s not that angry people attacked a scapegoat or even as a colossal management failure, but that — in a sort of Trumpian word avalanche —:

It was this [stalking] pattern of behavior, along with his sourcing practices in particular, which escalated in fully justified feelings of anger toward [Legal Name], which finally reached a boiling point when his blog was massively elevated on Youtube, when thereafter the angry reaction of the Hiveswap team was used against them to cause even more harm in a very public way.

“The angry reaction of the Hiveswap team was used against them to cause even more harm in a very public way” is the kind of sentence I would write as a joke, except it’s the very real thesis of their argument. Andrew and his friends were angry and acted in that anger. They targeted me, started circulating lies, started openly coordinating a harassment campaign against me, because somebody didn’t like my tone. People saw this behavior and were horrified. It was vile and obviously so. And Andrew has the audacity to describe this as me “using their reaction against them.” If Aysha is indeed facing some pushback for the way she behaves, I can only be relieved. She was doing whatever it took to benefit herself even when it meant causing unnecessary harm to others; people like that shouldn’t be welcome in the creative industry. She was a danger to everyone around her, and I have to assume she still is.

To really cap off the absurdity, I find out it was probably Andrew themself who started claiming I was “stalking him”. I’ve always been confused how this claim started — did I really make someone uncomfortable? — but this ends my concerns. I’ve never written about Andrew’s personal life, even the public aspects of it that are widely known.¹⁷ But in this incident I’ve finally directly confirmed that Andrew is responsible for the rumor. For NDA reasons I can’t show you the exact reason they gave, but it had absolutely nothing to do with information about them, it was just an excuse to badmouth a “stuck cog.” There was never any misunderstanding, it’s always just been slander repeated by people who still view them as trustworthy.

Andrew attempts the same DARVO attack on Sarah Z’s video, saying that “the ‘legal threat’ was then weaponized against the Hiveswap team even further, used as proof that What Pumpkin was a litigious, exploitative company which was trying to suppress criticism.”

Of course it was a very real legal threat — no scare quotes required — and Homestuck is indeed a litigious, exploitative company trying to suppress criticism. They look bad because they behaved terribly. It’s true that Sarah’s video was devastating to Andrew’s personal reputation, but that’s because it was a straightforward account of terrible things Andrew did. It damaged their brand the way any scoundrel’s reputation is damaged when they’re caught.

But Andrew argues that all this must not be their fault, and is therefore Sarah’s. Listening to them, Andrew and his friends’ emotions are always justified. Their actions are always justified by their emotions, and the only fault that can ever be found is in people for their reactions to them. Any negative reactions, any negative consequences are always an attack against them.

Okay, one more insane thing, because this boggles my mind:

Cynthia Dominguez took the credit for writing this letter, as indicated by her later apology. But she didn’t write the letter, she only agreed to send it on behalf of the angry staff, which made the case to her that it was the right thing to do to stand up for the integrity of a staff under attack by a big platform. The content of the letter was written by friends of Aysha, Hiveswap staff members who felt aggrieved on her behalf … But of course the “legal threat” was then weaponized against the Hiveswap team even further, used as proof that What Pumpkin was a litigious, exploitative company which was trying to suppress criticism.

There’s this thing Andrew does where in trying to justify some wrongdoing, they confess to new offenses instead. Andrew describes Sarah as making an error here by misattributing the contents of the letter to Cindy Dominguez. This, Andrew explains, is because the content of the letter was written by others (almost certainly Aysha), but was sent under Cindy’s name as an intentional deception.

They’re just liars! That’s their whole thing!

“Blackmail”

Another thing I will pull out as important foreshadowing is this:

Bambosh¹⁸ had a chance to move this along very easily, but when he was pushed on it after his lawyer signaled final approval of the terms, he seems to have snapped and invoked the sudden takedown option as a kneejerk response, which essentially made good on the drama-blackmail implication which was the only real claim to any “leverage”¹⁹ a fan project like this actually has to hold over a creator and his teams. I’m not going to put too fine a point why that was a bad idea, because I assume [Legal Name] is in agreement.

I added a few footnote annotations to some of the absurdity in that, but what I really want to highlight here is this incredibly disingenuous argument about “blackmail” Andrew keeps going back to. Andrew repeatedly describes negative public perception as a result of them doing something objectionable in public as blackmail. In this case Andrew argues that even though they’re the one making a threat to take down the collection, Bambosh taking down the collection in response to that demand would be Bambosh “blackmailing” Andrew, because having made a legal threat would make Andrew look bad.

This is, of course, fundamentally absurd. If you do something very objectionable in public and your audience abhors it, that’s not people attacking you. You do not have the right to be universally loved, and people making justified complaints isn’t the same as being attacked.

This is a mirroring of a favorite fallacy of Andrew’s I’ve already examined: that any negative consequence is evidence of malice and attack. In Homestuck’s case, the consequences they suffer stem from a combination of mismanagement and genuinely offensive behavior, a pattern which has not changed since before I started writing. The writing only captures what is already there. The problem is the act, not the window they did it in front of.

Andrew refuses to even consider the possibility they could be at fault, ever, for anything they do. Any and all negative consequences are always attacks someone else does to them, not just the human condition where if you do massively unpopular things in public people will dislike you.

Why should you face consequences for something just because you’ve said or done it? Something, something, cancel culture.

Backlash to poor conduct is a natural and predictable consequence, but Andrew knows this because they’re a grown adult. So how do we end up with these insane claims?

I think the answer to this is clear in context. Andrew views the ability to demand a takedown not as an ability to demand a takedown, but as a general-purpose forcing device. The logical framing they start with is “Do what I want or I’ll hurt you with ___“, and the tool they have to slot into that spot is legal force. In this case, a takedown demand.

But after it’s constructed this argument makes no sense. “Sign your project over to me or I’ll destroy it, but I also will not allow it to be destroyed” is an incoherent position, and so there’s this hastily-constructed “also, letting me destroy it is you blackmailing me” tacked onto the end. It’s so absurd it makes it easy to work backwards, like seeing a poor photoshop job where the outline is still visible. Andrew was just reaching for the nearest threat because their M.O. is to use threats to squeeze others. The fact that they’re trying to frame this as blackmail is just evidence of their shamelessness.

The goal is to exercise arbitrary power over people, to force them to do what they want. They want to always get whatever they want with no friction. Actually executing on the threat is — ironically — a failure to exercise the power they wanted to. And because it’s an undesirable outcome, even though it’s one they’re directly causing, Andrew insists on finding a way to blame someone else.

Demand response

There’s so much anger here but nothing to do with anything I was responsible for, so I’m not eager to take responsibility for it. I’m not going to lie and post some statement lying about Sarah’s documentation of Homestuck threatening her just because Homestuck’s threatening me the same way. Integrity means standing by your work unless it’s wrong.

But even if this first set of demands had been somewhat reasonable, I’ve already seen that cowering in a subordinate role like Andrew wants would only lead to more demands, forever. Andrew uses people up.

I give Miles the same basic explanation I’ve given here. That’s not licensing or negotiating, that’s just dominance. This is not collaboration, this isn’t respectful, this is the scorpion stinging the frog. I make it clear I’m happy to negotiate and put together a license, but demands for specific performance like this that are not obviously reasonable will have to go through a lawyer.

This is responded to with an escalation of threats.

August 24, 2024, miles²⁰

GiovanH 05:55 PM

I already have many thoughts about this but I’ll need to tag up with [my legal representation] first.

…

GiovanH 06:02 PM

but also, at a high level, off the record, deciding to make UHC work dependent on some kind of rehashing of four-year-old drama is one of the few choices with the potential to sabotage the project, so a step toward that is concerning

miles 06:03 PM

thats also something we’re happy to talk about

because ive had the same thought, we wanna do this in a way that doesnt just like

dredge up old bullshit unproductively²¹

so like i said, signing the settlement doesnt mean you necessarily have to do this rewrite before we get any UHC work done

it just means youve agreed to do it at some point as we work out the details and timing

…

miles 03:03 PM

i dont know how else to put it, signing a license with us doesnt legally complicate anything

the situation you are in NOW, unsigned, and unafilliated with us, is legally complicated

originally amending that was as simple as licensing up with us and getting to work on UHC stuff, which we still and always have wanted to do

instead we are here, 10 months later, and only marginally closer to working together, and i dont know how else to put it, we feel fucked around here.

the fact that lawyers are involved at all is kind of an unfortunate artifact of the fact that instead of just working with us when we came to you guys with open arms, you held us at arms length for months while sitting on a public repository of like, most of andrew’s life’s work as an artist, unlicensed

and so the reason that we’re approaching you now with regards to a settlement is that, on top of the unfortunate business of all the hiveswap drama years ago that your writing did play a role in, when we came to you to try and just put that water under the bridge and work together, with some stipulations about your involvement that nonetheless were fully ready to make room for you, we were stalled

frankly, to work with you, andrew at this point wants not only demonstrations of good faith which we feel like weve been dancing around at best and not getting at worst, but he wants that settlement signed so that he knows that you are actually serious about working with us, doing cool shit moving forward, and also trying to amend for some of the unfortunate bullshit that happened in the past

…

miles

the alternative is that if andrew feels much more stalled or like you arent operating with him in good faith, hes just going to switch gears, have the UHC taken down, replace it, and sue. the whole point of the settlement is so he doesnt have to do any of that shit, because none of it is desirable and we dont wanna waste our time or energy on it when we could instead be making productive strides together

i dont know what more there is to say on our end right now. im a pretty nonconfrontational person so i dont like laying down ultimatums at all but you need to at least like get in the server and start talking to me and james or andrew feels like hes just going to have to take the UHC down.

There’s a lot wrong here, most of it covered already. We have another threat of a takedown, another threat of a lawsuit, another sugar-coating “but we don’t want to! just do what we say and no one has to get hurt”. Despite everything that’s happened I’m still trying to give them the chance to work together, a show of good faith that crosses the line into folly on my part.

Homestuck claiming that we weren’t “working with us when we came to you guys with open arms” and that “you held us at arms length” is truly outrageous. This is the exact opposite of what happened. Bambosh and I both responded to their invitations eagerly, but Andrew kept throwing up roadblocks and demands, very conspicuously keeping us at arm’s length.

The collection as “his work”

What I will pause here to address is this idea Miles gestures to, that the collection is “a public repository of like, most of andrew’s life’s work as an artist”. This comes up a few more times, always couched in vagaries:

August 25, 2024, James

James 04:23 PM

anyway good luck gettin caught up looking forward to seeing you in there and getting this all squared away

ive been using the UHC to stream its a good resource

…

James 04:25 PM

so it makes sense to just like, build on something like this that exists already, didnt realize it was such a complicated thing

just gotta get everyone on the same page

GiovanH 04:26 PM

this kinda gets to what I was saying before

IMO you’re right that it shouldn’t need to be a complicated thing

James 04:28 PM

well idk i guess i get it

andrew wanting to be protective of like, his entire lifes body of work and stuff

September 28, 2024, miles

…

miles 09:04 PM

and its frustrating for him because, and im not at all trying to diminish the value of the work you and bambosh do on the UHC because if it wasnt a cool tool we wouldnt even have come to you guys trying to work with you on it, its ultimately a tool that the Main Point Of And Entire Meat Of is like, all his comics and his art

like the H in UHC stands for homestuck, which like… belongs to homestuck? and andrew? and so he feels spurned when instead of just taking it down he was like “hey come do some work for me because you guys clearly know what youre doing” and the answer was like… all this that’s happened since

James 05:38 PM

yeah i guess this is like

ultimately its andrews body of work being collected so he can probably do with it whatever he wants

Right off the bat it will always be disingenuous to treat the archival act itself as an offense because Andrew’s stated goal is to do the same thing. Never mind that this is an archive of freely-available published works, Homestuck has repeatedly stated they like The Unofficial Homestuck Collection in its current form. They’ve endorsed it. There’s never been any objection to any of the material included, or the way it’s been presented, or any other criticism of the work we’ve been doing. The thing that’s happened here is an incredible amount of volunteer labor went into providing value for the Homestuck brand, for free. The work, they keep insisting, is good and what they want.

The idea here is that this incredible outpouring of volunteer labor is not something we’re providing, but something Andrew is entitled to. Andrew is demanding control over something they did not make and does not own on the basis that it’s about them. This argument implies that Andrew has the right to own any fanwork, and its creator doesn’t. That if you draw a Homestuck character, not only are they allowed to require you not to post the image, Andrew’s entitled to sell prints and pocket the money. That Homestuck “is theirs”, in some sort of nebulous sense that far exceeds the work itself and extends to ownership of original fanwork.

Homestuck is theirs, and it was their job to get all this work done. That’s true in a sense of ownership-as-responsibility, that it’s an offense for companies to take authority but not responsibility for preservation. But it’s also true that they explicitly committed to deliver this exact product and completely failed to do so. They took money to get it done and then they didn’t. Then they made some sort of deal with Viz Media that was advertised as obligating them to do it but it apparently did not, because they didn’t do it.

Not only does the UHC address this negligence by making the work readable, my offer to work directly with Homestuck on licensing terms means by working with me they could even repurpose the UHC to fulfill their existing financial commitments.

The fact that Homestuck owns some material in the asset pack gives them the right to take down the asset pack, and that’s it. No matter how “theirs” it feels, the fact that the Homestuck collection collects Homestuck doesn’t give Homestuck any special right to compel any specific performance from anybody.

Andrew is on vacation and unavailable for most of this, busy flaunting their wealth on Instagram. They appear to just be on vacation for the rest of their life with a few brief exceptions. Throwing Makeship money into the slots while taking down the UHC, like Nero playing violin as Rome burns.

Resetting expectations

This is the point where I start just writing this article directly to them via Discord. Perhaps expectations were set wrong innocently and I needed to explain the baseline, because clearly they’d lost the plot.

So, in no uncertain terms, I explicitly communicate that

We both want something the other person can give us
There are mutually beneficial collaborations that are free win-wins
If they attack, that’s not a win for them, it’s a lose-lose

August 25, 2024, James

…

GiovanH 04:34 PM

for instance the last doc I saw tried to make everything depend on a lot of commitments about stuff unrelated to the UHC, and everything like that dramatically complicates things

I keep saying there are some simple obvious wins we could be getting but that hasn’t happened yet

anyway, more Monday

James 04:36 PM

oh yeah i guess i usually just go along with stuff like that so everyone calms down and i can do w/e i need to actually be doin

in my experience people just kinda wanna feel seen a lot of the time maybe

you know?

though idk easy way to get walked on i guess? (this is not that important to me, but i understand how it is for others)

GiovanH 04:38 PM

so far it’s felt more like people wanting to put a gun to my head

James 04:38 PM

eesh

GiovanH 04:39 PM

which I realize is a very comfortable position for them to be in, but not good for collaboration

James 04:39 PM

sorry man that sucks

well i’ll see what i can do to cool some heads or w/e

…

GiovanH 04:42 PM

yeah and hopefully the group helps with that

like I’ve said from the start, I am happy to agree to disagree on old stuff and just work collaboratively on win-win stuff. But trying to turn this into some dominance game or use it to relitigate old drama is the main path to breaking all this, and I’m trying to keep us away from that if I can

James 04:45 PM

yeah i think just gettin everyone together cooler heads will prevail etc

GiovanH 04:45 PM

I just wanna do the win-wins, and I feel like there’s lots of them

September 02, 2024

GiovanH 08:47 PM

So, there’s a lot going on here, but this is basically what I had gamed out as the failure scenario, so I’d much rather back up for a moment before talking about details.

First, at a very high level, before I get into the body of this, I think trying to predicate UHC work on some “balancing of the books” is a very, very bad idea.
This is something I’ve signposted since the very beginning. Andrew and I have complaints with each other. But acting on those would be the exact opposite of what you want.

I was surprised you reached out offering to work with us given that feelings were probably still hurt, but you went out of your way to say, explicitly, that that wouldn’t be an issue. I decided early on that I wasn’t going to take this as an opportunity to be petty. We can agree to disagree and still work together productively.

But what I’m seeing here is the opposite; it looks like there’s an enormous amount of resentment against me, and you’re specifically saying that if we don’t resolve that to your satisfaction, that’s a complete dealbreaker. In the conversation that brought me to this room in the first place, you promised the exact opposite; that we would be able to work on this specific project, perhaps begrudgingly, without fighting each other through every past fight and squabble we could scrape together.

I also want to say that my objection here isn’t just about hiveswap, or aysha, or any individual bit of fandom drama. For four years now, I have invited you to contact me if you wanted to make any corrections or comments, and that offer still stands. I am happy to address inaccuracies in my writing, and I am happy to work to resolve interpersonal issues with members of the team as needed. I am on board to cooperate, and bend in places as needed

But that’s not what this is asking for. What this writing is demanding is a great show of force, that you feel that before we can work together on anything you need to go through a ritual of performing dominance over an enemy.
And I am not going to humor that. I will absolutely work with you on resolving reasonable issues, but what I see here fundamentally isn’t about that. It is, very obviously, a dramatic show of force, and cannot possibly work as the basis for what you said you wanted to do here.

Making threats and demands about past grievances that are fundamentally unrelated to this project is the exact opposite of collaboration. They aren’t compatible with each other at all. Collaboration is cooperative, and what I see written here is intensely, intentionally hostile. And I don’t know why you would choose to go that lose-lose direction when there is an obvious win-win here. You shouldn’t scorpion-and-the-frog this.

I really, really don’t want to fight this fight, and neither of you should either.
This is a conflict that can only end terribly, and it’s completely avoidable.

This conversation is our opportunity to all be adults in the room.

JAMES 08:53 PM

sorry just checkin in now lemme catch up

ok yeah im caught up

well, i dont know that i’m interested in like bare knuckle brawling anything here either. and i think you being willing to work with us and work on corrections etc is a good starting point.

GiovanH 08:57 PM

The worst case scenario for the project is if Andrew isn’t taking it seriously at all. If he doesn’t see this as an opportunity for a collaboration, or even for me to just give him a bunch of free stuff. He doesn’t care about the UHC at all, really. He instead thinks this is a big chance to get leverage over me for a series of past slights. And it’s just not. But that’s what I’m seeing so far, and that’s disappointing.

…

JAMES 09:01 PM

so, i think that, i don’t disagree about this not needing to be some display of dominance but i think, just as an outside observer here at least like some sort of understanding between parties would go a long way. theres a lot of legalese in these exchanges and i think that maybe thats amplifying things to feel very aggressive

i dont wanna derail things, and i’ll let miles have a crack at it (im figuring out what to eat for dinner) but i also don’t want you to feel like you’re being bullied here by THE MAN or anything

i think you have been misrepresented and scapegoated

but i think there is still probably a level of responsibility and at least acknowledgement that will probably need to be involved. im glad you’re willing to work with us. and i know we’re willing to work with you. and i think the point of this channel of communication is to sort out how we can do that without getting weeks of lawyering involved

GiovanH 09:04 PM

To reluctantly talk about the content of these PDFs (which I think are just prose andrew wrote? I am positive [Andrew’s lawyer] didn’t sign off on this), I think there’s just a ton of resent against me, and in the minds of a few people I’ve basically been scapegoated as being responsible for all evils. And I think it’s misplaced! Like, just factually, the idea that I was some hostile force was never right, and the conclusions predicated on that misunderstanding aren’t true either.

I am 100% willing to talk about specific issues and work through real conflicts, but I am not going to sign up to be crucified for the sins of all redditors

…

GiovanH 09:07 PM

I think this basically snowballed from some initial misperceptions, which was maybe encouraged by some preexisting anger toward me by some members on the team. Literally, predating hiveswap, just over vriscourse.

JAMES 09:07 PM

whoa, had no clue

i think i didnt know who you were until the document, though at first i mistook you for [REDACTED]

who was the one who was getting very personal and stalky

…

GiovanH 09:08 PM

a lot of the really nasty hate I get can be traced back to a few people who decided I was ontologically evil before I said anything about hiveswap, and to this day I don’t know exactly what I did that they fixated on me so hard

…

GiovanH 09:17 PM

giving me pages and pages of text to nitpick is such good giobait, but I really think what I said there is the most important focus right now

miles 09:17 PM

yeah, i think itll be good to also just sit down and like

talk message to message for w hile

*a while

GiovanH 09:21 PM

and also, going off what james said, it sounds like there is probably some de-scapegoating work to do here, if you’re really working off the understanding that I need to be made to pay for all the sins in those lists

because this whole base assumption that my whole game is destroying people on the internet to accumulate clout is fundamentally not true

…

GiovanH 09:28 PM

like, reading that “human cost” doc[^human-cost], it talks about “holding me accountable” for stuff that happened three or four degrees removed from me, which is why I say it’s hard to take seriously as any sort of good-faith conflict resolution

miles 09:29 PM

sure

so to address a question you asked earlier, these docs are essentially communications written by andrew that me (and also james on a pretty unofficial level, now) have been asked to communicate to you

so lemme like

attempt to synthesize a point here rq which you can respond to

basically im not gonna insult your intelligence by being like “oh theres no hard feelings” because of course thats not true

but a lot of the discussion about like…

“accountability” as youve said

it’s sort of been mixed in with what it is we want to put OUT, later, and in a way that may be kind of confusing, so to clarify

sorry if my thoughts seem scattered btw im carbed out

the settlement, license, etc, what we want you to sign, the good faith that goes into you signing that and agreeing to work with us is the vast majority of the “accountability” we’re hoping to see

which has been spurred, in a way that i will be fair and cede is NOT fully your fault, by the pace at which things proceeded from last october

i wont say that things havent got more tense than then but a lot of that is because its kind of baffling to us why we aren’t already like… 7 months deep into a collab?

…

GiovanH 09:49 PM

Well, from where I’m standing, the question of whether Andrew wants to prioritize the a big dominance display above the UHC still remains. In fact, going from the last thing you said, the working answer to that is “yes”, which is why I’ve asked you to reconsider all that.

I just am not going to sign a blank check.

miles 09:51 PM

whats like… i mean maybe this is a pointless exercise but like whats the thing youre the most worried about happening vis a vis a “blank check”

which btw is not like… what we’re asking

but just hit me with the worst case scenario

GiovanH 09:55 PM

I am not going to accept fault for things I wasn’t responsible for, I’m not going to agree to open-ended “until our satisfaction” language, and I’m not going to give someone else editorial control over an article published on my site in my name.

But I think it’s a mistake to even be talking about this. I still think you ought to back way, way up, and decide if we’re going the in-good-faith collaboration path or the hostile threats-and-demands path. Because the more we talk about demands, the more we’re on the wrong track.

You ought to be thinking in terms of specific things I can reasonably do as a show of good faith rather than trying to pack together the most aggressive demands you think you can get away with. And, again, what I’ve read so far has been the latter.

If the answer is Andrew blows up the UHC over pettiness, that’s the answer. He shouldn’t pick that answer, but he can.

…

GiovanH 10:04 PM

I also think Andrew may still be unfamiliar with the thing he’s asking about. I was under the impression that the report from the disgruntled person was the big offense, but that’s not “the hiveswap article”

it is a disconnected side-article, and very intentionally so

“the hiveswap article” is essentially a timeline of confirmable things that publically happened

miles 10:08 PM

i mean, it’s “disconnected” but it’s not like it’s unrelated to the series of events that went down which by and large cause immense damage to homestuck’s reputation and the hiveswap team’s wellbeing (though again, part of this rewrite is giving you an opportunity to point out YOURSELF that this harm was far more on the shoulders of sarah and emily than any other Indivual People)

GiovanH 10:09 PM

And we’re back to multiple degrees of separation. If WP did a thing and I said that it happened, and people didn’t like that WP did it, that’s not me wronging WP.

“It lead to a PR problem” is not a fault on me, unless I am PR staff.

miles 10:12 PM

andrew and you obviously have different ideas about your levels of like, Personal Culpability, but this is getting exacerbated by the fact that we were like “hey, come work with us on the UHC and get cool shit and get paid [which, to be clear, was a nice offer to people who were publishing the entirety of his life’s work for free with no license]” and we keep getting this stall treatment

GiovanH 10:12 PM

Nobody ever talked to me about getting paid, and I never stalled anybody.

The criticisms you are making are not applicable.

miles 10:15 PM

andrew, the guy whose work you are publishing and whose reputation was (directly or indirectly) affected by your writing, feels that they are? and he’s looking for some kind of show of good faith from you that he’s just not getting

he is, in my mind very fairly, cautious about this shit, because 4 years ago a bunch of people went apeshit and tried to burn his whole situation to the ground²³

GiovanH 10:16 PM

I am in this room, talking, trying very hard to make this work instead of doing the safe thing and walking away.

miles 10:16 PM

i understand that that’s not nothing

if this feels unproductive would you mind if we tried something else?

GiovanH 10:17 PM

I feel like I’m just repeating myself now. I am entirely willing to participate in conflict resolution for specific offenses. I am not going to play dominance games or be made to account for a cloud of vagaries, none of which actually stick.

…

GiovanH 10:20 PM

I mean, I am literally working very hard to give Andrew free stuff that makes his property more valuable. I choose to try to cooperate instead of trying to the situation as leverage for pettiness. I am paying for a lawyer. I do not have to do any of that, but I am doing it and so there is value you can take for free, if you don’t sting the frog.

…

GiovanH 10:23 PM

We are still on the adversarial path, and we do not need to be.

JAMES 10:23 PM

i think from andrews pov, he’s working with the information presented to him, so maybe with a little bit of conversation we can walk back some of it.

GiovanH 10:24 PM

I definitely think some of this is stemming from bad info.

miles 10:24 PM

it very well may be? that’s part of what you’d be helping to clarify

JAMES 10:25 PM

i also think that, getting into the semantics of “apologize for these specific things” doesn’t really help anybody. i dont think anybody really wants that, even.

kinda weird

GiovanH 10:26 PM

And, like, I do still have things I think Andrew is at fault for doing, but I am choosing to put that aside here. Because we’re adults.

…

JAMES 10:26 PM

if we’re gonna work together, and i’d still like that because i think its beneficial for all of us, i think we need to take some time to be on the same page here.

so we have a base idea of what andrew wants, and i think this is probably more flexible than it sounds. or at least, can be worked with in a way that is good for both parties

gio what would you like to come out of this

…

GiovanH 10:29 PM

I am here to collaborate on a whole panel of possible ways the UHC work can be more useful. I think there are lots of fun ways that could go.

I am also happy to license the collection in a form similar to how it is now so it can operate without tension. Again, multiple ways to approach that.

There are still ways I feel I’ve been misrepresented and wronged by various homestuck people, including Andrew, but I would rather work constructively with people if I can than stir up old conflict. Agreeing to disagree, if needed.

Like I said in my Big Message, I think cooperation can work as a win-win, and I think hostilities are a lose-lose, and I’m naive enough to still be aiming for the win-win. Which, if you haven’t gamed it out, is a big show of good faith

JAMES 10:36 PM

yeah i think thats reasonable

…

JAMES 10:46 PM

im not interested in villainizing you, and i dont think anybody really wants you to feel like you’re an enemy

GiovanH 10:46 PM

let’s hope!

JAMES 10:46 PM

well, i dont anyway. i think theres a little drama and theatrics here. a bit of flexing on both ends

but who amongst us isnt guilty of that from time to time. lets tentatively put a pin in it for tonight because its getting late and im getting very sweaty (its very warm in my apartment) we’ll see what we can work up.

miles 10:47 PM

yeah thats fine

GiovanH 10:48 PM

sure thing

miles 10:48 PM

ill pop in on the wrap up statements and clarify that i am with james that i think we all really do want this to work out

JAMES 10:49 PM

if i have random thoughts in the middle of the night about it i’ll drop em in here

yeah yeah

GiovanH 10:49 PM

yeah feel free

miles 10:49 PM

and like we mentioned i appreciate you are here talking to us about this, and i hope that despite things getting testy from time to time its apparent that we also want to work with you especially insofar as we’re talking this out at all

GiovanH 10:50 PM

from what I’ve heard it sounds like the big block is that Andrew has, like, a really demonized image of me, and hopefully he can rethink that a little

The last conversation leaves off at “maybe Andrew is operating off misinformation, because all the things they said are wrong.” I think this is another case of normal inspection forcing Homestuck into the most reasonable justification possible for their previous behavior. But would it stick?

Seizure demand – September 2024

That was almost a productive conversation at the end there, right? What happens next is not “de-scapegoating” that we all concluded was reasonable. Instead, astonishingly, they begin the next conversation by using privileges they gave themselves in the Discord server they set up for these discussion to clean the productive parts of the slate.

September 28, 2024, general

miles 02:19 AM

hey hey. you may notice we reset the general chat in here; we’re thinking of bringing in some more folks soon and we figure it isn’t productive to have the old discussion sitting there.

They privated the old general chat and made a new one. This is yet another exhausting power play, but when legal action is involved (like it is here) it also goes by the exciting name spoliation. (Also, I didn’t find this out until later, but apparently this is a practiced move they do regularly with people.) They never did return these records, but fortunately I’ve been keeping my own set too since I’m a responsible adult.

But perhaps despite this insane swing all the things they have to say now will be normal?

miles 02:19 AM

vis a vis that, andrew and james and i sort of had a think about how things have been progressing, and we’ve decided to change course here. we’re gonna table the blog rewrite/settlement stuff and move on from it for now so we can get to UHC stuff instead of sitting around for months haggling over that; it’s not proceeding in any way that any of us find productive, least of all you, so we’re just gonna move past it until further notice.

what we’re thinking is within the next week or two, we want to get kohi onboarded to this chat so we can get back into more solid and productive discussions of Things We Could Do With The UHC, getting it into the HICU/Homestuck network. i know you’ve got ideas, kohi has ideas, ideas abound; at some point maybe we can just strike the U and it’ll become the HC, but that’s more future talk and better suited to when kohi is in here talking shop.

So this starts well enough. Demanding I make some absurd statement is indeed not a productive path. It would be much better to talk shop. I’ve already been talking with Kohi about the collection. They’re great; I’d love to work with them, especially on UHC work. We have a solid gesture here in the direction of actually collaborating instead of letting Andrew posture.

But then Homestuck jams another stick into the spokes of the bike, because every decency they’ve given has just been an attempt to build credit to let them be awful later.

miles 02:19 AM

to that point, however, there is something that was clarified in our last talks that has to be addressed before we move along with this any further. you mentioned, more than once, that you were aware that you had the potential to leverage our worst-case-scenario takedown of the UHC as a way to make us look bad in the eyes of the fans. that confirmed to us that you’ve considered the use of the UHC as a weapon against the Homestuck team if things don’t proceed in a direction that you’re satisfied with, which is obviously unacceptable to us. andrew has no interest in proceeding through talks while his own body of work is used against him as blackmail.

as i mentioned earlier, we’re going to step back vis a vis the rewrite stuff. in exchange, and considering the above paragraph, we need to see the UHC handed over to kohi. what that does is neutralize the threat implied earlier, as well as put the UHC in the hands of not only a member of the HICU but someone you yourself have mentioned you want to work with and someone you respect where these types of projects are concerned. andrew doesn’t want to see his own work held hostage and used as leverage against him, and putting the UHC into kohi’s stewardship eliminates that possibility in one simple move.

there’s still work we can do together, but for that to happen we have to be operating in a sphere where threats aren’t on the table, and that isn’t going to be possible until we know that the fans are going to have access to the UHC, and all of andrew’s work that’s on it, without the risk of its retraction being intentionally weaponized to cause drama that will hurt not only the fandom but the entire HS labor force.

They call it “The Art of the Deal.”

We’ve talked about the absurdity of this “blackmail” claim already; Andrew’s used the word several times to describe the scenario where they force me to take down the collection and I do so, and this is no exception. From my point of view it’s been intentionally hidden, but here’s the conversation they’re characterizing as a “blackmail threat”:

September 02, 2024

miles 10:15 PM

[Andrew]’s looking for some kind of show of good faith from you that he’s just not getting

…

GiovanH 10:20 PM

I mean, I am literally working very hard to give Andrew free stuff that makes his property more valuable. I choose to try to cooperate instead of trying to the situation as leverage for pettiness. I am paying for a lawyer. I do not have to do any of that, but I am doing it and so there is value you can take for free, if you don’t sting the frog.

…

GiovanH 10:29 PM

I am here to collaborate on a whole panel of possible ways the UHC work can be more useful. I think there are lots of fun ways that could go.

I am also happy to license the collection in a form similar to how it is now so it can operate without tension. Again, multiple ways to approach that.

…

GiovanH 10:38 PM

like, if I were a provocatour, the quick win would be to let andrew C&D the collection, go “oh! oh! andrew broke your toy!” and get a bunch of clicks on my web site or whatever it is that clout is

and this is me not doing that²⁴

…

JAMES 10:41 PM

also yeah thats a good point, so thank you for that

anyway, a little progress even if it doesn’t seem like it. we’ll work on things on our end to see if we cant soften expectation a little bit, i can say im glad you’re willing to work with us and are like amicable and even willing to play along a bit for the sake of moving forward. appreciate that.

They asked about good faith, and I gave an example. I am already stretching myself to work with Homestuck, and if I stopped trying to force a peace at any point it would be Andrew who suffers. This is me finally pointing out the elephant in the room, which is that the case where they attack me is the case where they lose, something Andrew seemed unwilling to acknowledge. The response was “that’s a good point, thank you.”

But we get the same inane blackmail logic as before. I’m working hard to protect Andrew from themself, and eventually I might have to stop. This is not a trap I’ve imposed on Andrew, this is me holding up the world like a poor man’s Atlas while they keep knocking all the supports away. The fact that I might stop doing that is inconvenient, so it has to be turned into something offensive I’m doing to them.

And this supposed offense is the justification they give for a whole new absurd demand: that I simply “hand over” the project to them. It’s the full smartgeniusnewadmin. Kohi’s great. I’d trust Kohi with this entirely, except I’ve been shown very clearly that I can’t trust their boss.

This is the culmination of all the absurd power plays: just demanding, outright, that I give them everything for free. I was braced for them to try to slowly push me out in a plausibly deniable way. But no, the power-play is so important to them they keep firing smoking guns. Andrew Hussie is not going to make me sign control of a fan project over to somebody they like more because they do not get to do that. No one in their position can ever be allowed to do anything like that.

This isn’t just a demand, it’s a pushy demand. They’re trying to get me caught up in the flow. The channel’s made, we’re about to invite Kohi in, everything’s all ready to go except you’ve got to real quick forfeit your work to people who have proven they can’t be trusted. Don’t think about it, let’s get moving, chop-chop.

Seizure-response wheel-spinning

I am exhausted from trying to coax Homestuck into acting like an adult, and I just spell the problem out directly.

GiovanH 05:24 PM

Don’t be absurd.

Again, let me try to skip over correcting factual inaccuracies and try to address the problem at the core of this:

You know perfectly well that I haven’t said anything even remotely approaching leveraging anything as “blackmail”, even though you’ve just tried to delete the evidence of that. I pointed out that if I stopped actively trying to push this towards a common goal, your stated intent to send me a cease and desist order would be an unprovoked attack that people would react negatively to. That’s not me doing a blackmail to artificially make you look bad, that’s me trying very hard to keep you from very publicly shooting yourselves in the foot, which you seem intent on doing.
That you would try to spin this as me being a threatening presence is shameful, and embarrassing.
James may not be aware of this, but you’ve brought up this notion that a public outcry against you acting aggressively towards me would somehow be considered my fault, and it’s as wrong now as it was then.

As much as I like Kohi and would love to work with him on the project, I am not going to voluntarily hand over any legal rights at the end of the barrel of a gun. Or in some way that you perceive as me being at the barrel of a gun, even if that’s not reflective of any reality of the situation.

I will say again, as I’ve said repeatedly before, that this collaboration fundamentally does not work if you insist on viewing my having agency in this collaboration as a “threat” that you must necessarily nullify. Frankly, I’m astonished you don’t see that. In fact, you said you did; As is now typical of this project, the demands you’re making now are for things that, in just our last conversation, we all agreed would be unreasonable to ask for, and removed from the table.

There is not going to be a dominance ritual. There is not going to be a point in this process where I sacrifice all my reputation, rights, and agency over to someone else so they can pretend they’re the god-king. This is an opportunity for a collaboration between creators. It is not, and has never been, an opportunity for anyone to make unilateral demands of anyone else.

Moreover I’m really disappointed to see your doubling-down in all of the points I had described as representing bad-faith action, even to the point of trying to erase what productive conversation we did have. I don’t know how transparent you’ve been with others about this, but Miles should know full well that he’s been acting in violation of specific commitments he’s made. You are not in any position to act like I’m the one putting strain on this. I’ve been very diligent about that.

As I’ve made extremely clear, I’ve been trying to get us off the track of absurd hostilities and back toward working cooperatively, which has included trying to brush over the flagrant bad faith you’ve been displaying so far. You’ve already burnt through a fuse by chasing Bambosh off the project, and you’re obviously doing your best to burn through all the goodwill I’ve managed to produce for this project too. I am flabbergasted that you’ve chosen to proceed in this fashion.

September 28, 2024, miles

…

miles 09:04 PM

i get that things keep feeling unproductive and like the wheels are just spinning for no reason but like… the reason thats happening isnt because the goal of all this has been to punish you or some shit, because thats dumb and pointless and serves literally nobody? but what gets andrew feeling defensive, or feeling like… frustrated and warded away, i guess? is that this went from a thing we thought was gonna take like, 3 weeks, for you and bambosh to just sign up and get under license and work with homestuck, to this continually drawn out process where we keep coming to you guys with this request to come under homestucks network and work with us, and the answer kept being No. No. No. No.

and its frustrating for him because, and im not at all trying to diminish the value of the work you and bambosh do on the UHC because if it wasnt a cool tool we wouldnt even have come to you guys trying to work with you on it, its ultimately a tool that the Main Point Of And Entire Meat Of is like, all his comics and his art

like the H in UHC stands for homestuck, which like… belongs to homestuck? and andrew? and so he feels spurned when instead of just taking it down he was like “hey come do some work for me because you guys clearly know what youre doing” and the answer was like… all this that’s happened since

…

GiovanH 09:41 PM

I don’t really have any new information

I can’t speak to Bambosh, but my answer to collaboration stuff has always been “yes”. What’s caused “no”s hasn’t been the work itself, it’s been the addition of additional demands and threats.

“All this that’s happened since” hasn’t been me trying to be difficult, it’s been complications arising due to setting out one thing as a plan and then doing something very different.

The collaboration part is easy. The extreme defensiveness, demands, and general squeezing is what’s introduced complications.

The now-removed chat starts with me saying “hey, let’s do work” and you saying “ok, first off, we aren’t doing squat until you confess to a new list of accusations”

i get that things keep feeling unproductive and like the wheels are just spinning for no reason but like… the […]

All that to say, this framing is simply not true.

Neither is the framing of me as threatening “blackmail”, nor the framing of me as a threat that needs to be diffused. You’re not being honest about this anymore.

…

miles 10:16 PM

nobody wants to like… make another bambosh situation happen

speaking of which, is bambosh doing alright?

i mean you dont really have to answer that if it feels private, idk

GiovanH 10:20 PM

And yet they’re willing to offend without limit.

I mean, I don’t think he’s any fan of Andew yet.

miles 10:22 PM

all i can really say to that is what ive said before which is that it isnt anyones intention to try and offend or attack anyone, i just asked because i know he got frayed pretty bad towards the end and whether you believe it or not im sorry that he got that stressed by all of it

but like i said i dont wanna get too deep into anything else so ill just leave you with like that, but as always if something else comes up feel free to hit me up

GiovanH 10:29 PM

If Andrew was doing this same knives-out aggression with him, I think it’s a wonder he held on as long as he did.

September 28, 2024, James

…

James 07:12 PM

yeesh this is a lot for a saturday evening

hm.

GiovanH 07:13 PM

this is what it’s been like all year, on my end

James 07:13 PM

well this is the opposite of dialing it back

…

James 07:24 PM

i feel like this could have been so easy and its actually very frustrating and disappointing that it hasnt been.

GiovanH 07:24 PM

That is exactly where I am.

This should be such an easy win.

…

James 07:29 PM

i appreciate that

for what its worth i really appreciate your patience and like

dignity here. i’ll see what i can do. i guess thats my job.

GiovanH 07:30 PM

Like I said in the thing, you would not believe how many promises have been broken already.

James 07:30 PM

sorry man

GiovanH 07:31 PM

It is what it is.

I am guessing what happened previously is that Bambosh did not have quite as much patience for a torrent of aggression than I do. But that is what it’s been.

…

GiovanH 07:37 PM

Well, since it looks like you’ve gotten stuck with the job of consensus-building, you certainly have my sympathies for that.

I will continue to support any not-trainwreck options as long as they don’t involve my de-personing.

James 07:49 PM

appreciate it

HICU fork – Nov 2, 2024

The next attempt to just shut me down comes in the form of the HICU “Unofficial Homestuck Collection” fork. Unceremoniously, the official Homestuck github account forks the UHC project and puts up a sparce landing page that is essentially false.

About the Unofficial Homestuck Collection

Originally developed by Bambosh and Giovan_h, The Unofficial Homestuck Collection is a fan-created browser for reading Homestuck and other works by Andrew Hussie as they were originally intended to be experienced with native Flash support. The browser does not fetch content from the internet and instead utilizes an Asset Pack that must be downloaded by the user alongside the software for it to serve content. The UHC includes a “New Reader Mode” to present Homestuck as it was originally released, an inline media player for streaming music from the Homestuck Bandcamp, and many more features to enhance the user’s reading experience.

A new “Official” Homestuck Collection is now in development, and the original Unofficial Homestuck Collection will continue to be preserved and available here. It should be noted that while it remains open source, any official updates or changes will be made on a new Homestuck Independant[sic] Creative Union controlled GitHub fork that can be found here.

The HICU describes the UHC as being “originally” developed by us — stylizing my name incorrectly in the process — but explaining that it has been replaced by this new version, “controlled” by the Homestuck Independent Creative Union. This is done by the Homestuck Independent Creative Union under the official “Homestuck” GitHub account, because they’re functionally interchangeable.

Even publicly, the fork is narratively framing itself as a “successor” to the original UHC, supplanting the original. And it only differentiates itself by having different management. The implication is they have some sort of consent or authority to make this decision, but they do not. It’s the equivalent of mirroring a fan comic while demanding its original author stop writing and distributing their own work. The whole move is another example of Andrew trying to impose their will through force and pressure instead of treating the people around them with respect or allowing any sort of process that respects the rights and dignity of others.

The HICU and Homestuck Inc both claim ownership over the fork. What’s going on here? It’s actually very simple: there is no underlying separation between the two. A lot of work has gone into describing the HICU as separate from existing baggage but that simply isn’t how the organization is structured or how it acts. There is nothing independent about it and it’s certainly nothing like any union.

They wanted to control the UHC, or else replace it with something they controlled. So far they’d entirely failed on both fronts, so instead of working with the people they’d need to work with, they just made a new website declaring it true.

They’re also distributing the Asset Pack V2 package Bambosh and I constructed. This is an incredible move because not only are they distributing the only thing the UHC doesn’t have the right to distribute, they don’t have the right to distribute it either. Some of the copyrighted materials it contains are things they have the right to share, but the asset pack also has many resources they absolutely cannot freely distribute themselves, including Adobe’s flash binaries.

Like I’ve mentioned Kohi had previously chatted about Unofficial Homestuck Collection development work on the practical side. I am confident any involvement they had in the OHC fork was done in good faith without an understanding of how it fit in the larger puzzle.

At the time I made no complaint about this or demand that they cease. From a copyright perspective, this is actually fine. They are licensing the reader application from me, but so far they’re doing it more-or-less under the terms of the license. So long as they respect the project license, them distributing the asset pack like this would actually allow me to focus entirely on the reader application without needing any license from Homestuck.

DMCA Nov/Dec 2024

The next thing they do is once again refuse to respond with any of the ideas I’ve presented, but instead escalate even further in the form of a DMCA takedown.

December 02, 2024, followup

homestuckicu 06:39 PM

Please read the attached DMCA notice. This was just delivered to your counsel by Andrew’s counsel.

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homestuckicu 06:39 PM

The future of the UHC will be made apparent once we see compliance with the DMCA. The intention here is not to kill the project. But it’s essential that you show a willingness to cooperate with the notice from Andrew’s counsel before the next steps are taken.

All of our correspondence has been turned over to Andrew and his counsel, including the conversations in this server, and all relevant DMs. We were asked to do this by Andrew and his counsel so that they had thorough background context to consider their approach. All conversations will remain confidential.

Andrew and his counsel have been extremely critical of many statements you’ve made, and the way you’ve handled yourself in general during this process. He’s asked that none of his remarks be quoted or summarized here. His view may be communicated through legal channels in the future, but starting now, the HICU will be fully disengaged from that process.

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homestuckicu 06:39 PM

We wish you all the best with your future endeavors, where they do not conflict with the interests of Homestuck, its creator, and its labor force.

Kind regards,

The Homestuck Independent Creative Union

This is the first message ever sent from the “homestuckicu” discord account, the account used to hide records earlier. God only knows who actually wrote this.

Note how the operating party here is the HICU even though the rightsholder is Homestuck, Inc. and the executor is Andrew. The labels aren’t placed carefully because they’re all functionally interchangeable. The HICU would later claim it wasn’t involved in these affairs at all, which is simply false.

The actual DMCA sent from Andrew’s legal representation is standard and concise:

[Andrew’s Lawyer], Nov 22, 2024 …
As you are aware, our office represents Homestuck Inc. (“Homestuck”). This letter serves as an official notification of copyright infringement by your client, [Legal Name] (your “Client”) pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 512) for infringing materials located on your Client’s website, https://homestuck.giovanh.com/unofficial-homestuck-collection/. We respectfully request that you forward this correspondence to your Client, or in the alternative, notify us that you do not represent your Client with regard to this matter.

Homestuck is the rights holder of the registered and copyrighted material that has been improperly displayed on and otherwise incorporated into your Client’s website, which consists of the copyrights of the webcomic “Homestuck,” the originals of which can be found at https://www.homestuck.com/. The infringing works are a direct copy of our client’s original copyrighted work or is substantially similar to our client’s work.

We have a good faith belief that Homestuck’s rights are being infringed and these materials are posted without proper authorization from Homestuck, any of its agents, or the law. The information in this notification is correct and we swear under the penalty of perjury that we are authorized to act on behalf of the owner of these exclusive rights. This includes, specifically, the copyrights that we allege to be infringed upon.

Upon receipt of this notification, your Client now has actual notice that the material on your Client’s system is infringing and, in order to avoid liability, it is incumbent upon your Client pursuant to 17 U.S.C § 512 to remove and/or disable the infringing materials immediately.
…

This is the anticipated request for us to stop hosting and linking to the asset pack, which does indeed contain a direct copy of some of Homestuck’s copyrighted work. Up until now for as long as I’ve been maintaining the project I was only hosting the asset pack on the direct request of Homestuck itself, but they have the right to require its removal and so we remove it. This includes all links to the asset pack and the material it contains, but also required the removal of the live UHC webapp.

The only thing that was left was the project description page at https://homestuck.giovanh.com with the asset pack removed:

wow, look! nothing!

Importantly, this pairs with the HICU fork as an attempt at a particularly nasty Indiana Jones switcheroo. If I have to take my reader application down at the same time as they’ve created a copy, it looks like the project really did “move” to them, which is not at all what’s happened.

December 11, 2024, James

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GiovanH 04:34 PM

In general I’m just trying to get the legal demands properly addressed right now through the lawyers too

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GiovanH 04:35 PM

So I was kind of thrown for a loop by the announcement and various legal runarounds I’ve been seeing

if andrew wants to shut down the discord conversation and have the lawyers slowly put something together, I guess that’s okay, but that only works if you’re not also releasing big confident public announcements about what he’s guessing the results of that process will be

James 04:37 PM

well from what i understand it represents a large bit of work you’ve done, so i can understand the apprehension in taking it down entirely. is there a specific issue with like a redirect etc (forgive me if im a bit slow on the uptake)

GiovanH 04:40 PM

So, high level, from my perspective, what I’m seeing now is the “hostile takeover” scenario, where seemingly the main goal is to cut me out of my work and let andrew effectively take ownership of it

and if the way they’re trying to do that now is copy the whole project without me involved and then obliterate the original project, so from the outside it’s a sleight-of-hand where it looks like the same project but I’ve mysteriously left, I have some objections to that

and if whatever happens happens through overtly hostile legal action (as it’s leaning towards now) instead of any kind of working relationship, I’m probably going to be sour on the new thing

It’s not at all lost on me that I’ve been persistently trying to talk about collaborating on a project (which was the original pitch) and sorting out a licensing arrangement, and instead all Andrew has been interested in doing is talking about rewriting old hiveswap posts, and me writing the HICU blank checks, and then getting progressively more hostile when I say I’d rather do the HICU stuff they invited me to do instead.

It really seems like there’s a personal vendetta against me first and foremost, and the UHC is almost an afterthought to that.

I had a whole plan where I would pay homestuck/hicu/whoever a license fee just to continue providing the collection in its current form

and another where you and kohi and I would convert the project to something that looks more like the official collection they’re wanting now

and another where in addition to the UHC I help the HICU create their own downstream OHC fork

and I was never even given the chance to talk about any of that, because it’s just been 100% guns-to-heads, the whole time

James 04:52 PM

yeah, seems like the whole things gone a bit south, despite any effort i had to keep it regular. is there any kinda statement you’d be fine with, i guess? since its already at this point

i think theres been a lot of “waiting to see how it goes” and then, this is how it went because of that.

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GiovanH 04:54 PM

notes in the official announcement that stood out to be as big red flags were how it was framed as a “moving” (again, that’s a sleight of hand, what they’re currently doing is this legally aggressive replacement thing), and also how they’re in “licensing talks”, when what actually happened is I tried to offer them a license and they threatened to sue me instead, then cut off the talks

James 04:57 PM

dang, guess thats fair. sorry just as an aside how on earth does everyone just have a lawyer thats crazy

[…] this lawyer shit is bonkers to me

GiovanH 04:58 PM

i mean, just looking at the message from miles

Andrew’s intentions now are to have both of your counsels work together until the legal issues surrounding this matter are put to rest. This will take time, and any provocative gestures you make publicly will complicate that process and possibly put you in more significant legal jeopardy than you’d prefer. It will also incite drama within the fandom, which innocent members of the Homestuck creative teams will have to contend with.

again, this is fine, but this cuts both ways; when andrew makes provocative public gestures before stuff is resolved, that complicates the legal process and incites drama too

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James 04:58 PM

ok so basically just a timing thing, that make sense

i can see what i can do to like, at least let them wait til the dusts settled before making some sort of public thing.

which i guess will result in some sort of downtime, which sucks, but also probably the only real way to let it get sorted out

GiovanH 05:00 PM

I mean, the discord conversation was the way to avoid that, but he’s cut that off

James 05:00 PM

yeah

i mean im not like ignorant i know im the “smooth it over” guy a lot of the time, but thanks for talkin to me about it either way

GiovanH 05:01 PM

if the thing andrew fundamentally wants to do is bully, there’s only so much comms can do about that

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GiovanH 05:25 PM

I know I keep saying I’m not interested in drama but literally the prospect of this ending in some legally hostile or forceful way and me having to untangle these events and put out some kind of post explaining what happened has me so stressed out I think it’s affecting me medically

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GiovanH 05:27 PM

this is why stuff like “Andrew and his counsel have been extremely critical of many statements you’ve made, and the way you’ve handled yourself in general during this process.” gets to me, because I have really been trying, here

Dec 2024 Escalation

Despite my removal of the copyrighted assets they required us to remove, Homestuck sends another DMCA request as if their first one was never honored.

[The Unofficial Homestuck Collection’s Lawyer], Dec 11, 2024 …
Thank you for your patience. My understanding is that my client had removed the bulk of the IP belonging to your clients, but not the app itself, which contains de minimus references to/examples of their content. If the former has been put back up, it may be in error and I will inquire. Here is how my client breaks down the different things he has related to this matter:

The Asset Pack

Links to this were present at the now-disabled https://homestuck.giovanh.com/unofficial-homestuck-collection/ address

The reader application, which is the open-source codebase. It contains minimal-to-no copyrighted material.

Links to this were present at the now-disabled https://homestuck.giovanh.com/unofficial-homestuck-collection/ address, and it also has code and releases on github.

The Web Application, which is a modified version of the reader that works in a browser. It contains minimal-to-no copyrighted material. It mostly fetches resources from elsewhere on the internet. If they objected to this, I would need a clear explanation of what about it was objectionable, so it could be reworked not to trigger those complaints.

This was hosted at the root https://homestuck.giovanh.com/ address, not the unofficial-homestuck-collection subpage. This is also currently disabled.

Can you please advise on what is currently available that your clients object to and where it is located?

Homestuck ultimately argues that the infringing material is the two screenshots of the UHC, which include fragments of two Homestuck panels:

[Andrew’s Lawyer], Dec 20, 2024 Regarding your client’s copyright infringement, I am happy to clarify in the interest of furthering this matter to swift resolution. Attached you’ll find a .pdf of the page as of this email. In that, I’ve outlined in bold red boxes and circles the most obvious examples of your client’s website displaying my client’s copyrighted work. Most notably, the files marked as collection.gif and bandcamp.gif are portions of my client’s copyrighted works, and subject to the previously transmitted takedown. …

I also must inform you that your client has engaged in ongoing and continuous trademark infringement, which must immediately cease and desist. Our client is the owner of the trademark HOMESTUCK (Reg # 4691366) …

It is incumbent upon your client to immediately remove their website entitled The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, including their use of the URL for the same (https://homestuck.giovanh.com/unofficial-homestuck-collection/), as the same is a clear and obvious violation of our client’s trademark rights.

Our client is willing to come to an amicable resolution, but shall do so only under terms acceptable to them. To date, your client’s actions have not reflected their respect for the intellectual property rights of my client, which is unacceptable. Our client is willing and prepared to take all actions necessary to defend and enforce their intellectual property.

I appreciate your ongoing attention to this matter and reiterate that our hope is to bring this matter to an amicable resolution, however, our client is unable to ignore flagrant, ongoing, and widespread abuses and infringement of its rights to both its creative work and business interests. The same must immediately cease.

I was also later able to confirm with the group chat that, yes, Andrew’s assertion was that they had the right to take down the website describing the collection even when there was no distribution of Homestuck taking place.

Meanwhile the Hiveswap name Andrew cares about so much is being displaced by a crypto token, but all Andrew’s legal resources are going into bullying people who use the word “Homestuck” to describe the comic of the same name.

As always I was being as generous as possible with their demands, which meant taking the entire site down until the lawyers could get this straightened out.

January 06, 2025, miles, James

GiovanH 07:21 PM

Before I ask specific questions, does anyone want to give me a status update? Vibe check?

miles 09:01 PM

so as things stand currently, there isn’t really anything more for james and i to say to you on andrew’s behalf (or ours) that hasn’t already been said, except that while we’re here i’m gonna check in on the status of the DMCA that was sent to your lawyer almost 3 weeks ago on december 11th. for the record, that DMCA required that you take down the infringing content (namely the UHC site, which you put back up in violation of a previous DMCA sent earlier in december that you momentarily followed) and provide written confirmation of that within 3 days, which would’ve been december 14th, basically 3 weeks ago. the site’s still up.

…

miles 09:01 PM

anyway, all there really is to say here is that there isn’t anything to say here, and certainly nothing james and i can do for or with you, prior to you abiding by the DMCA and getting your lawyer back in touch with andrew’s lawyer. the DMCA’s a legal order from andrew’s team, 3 weeks late, not a suggestion, and there’s really not much andrew feels like saying or any details he feels like talking about until you’re back in compliance with it. the whole point of us sort of disconnecting a month or so back was specifically to get the lawyers hashing this out.

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GiovanH 09:04 PM

Ah, that explains it

My current belief is I did honor the DMCA request as soon as it was received by taking down all the copyrighted assets, including the webapp. There’s still a website at the address, but it’s a placeholder that no longer distributes the assets. We wanted to confirm this with Andrew’s legal representation though, so we’ve sent Andrew a request for confirmation that we’ve taken down the claimed content, and ask if there’s any additional scope they’re claiming needs to be removed. Now I’m just waiting for confirmation from Andrew’s legal representation that I’ve addressed his legal grievance.

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GiovanH 09:04 PM

The point is I’m very much not trying to give anyone the middle finger by keeping stuff up. We processed the DMCA notice when it was received and the current understanding of myself and my representation is we’re in full compliance, although we’re still waiting on them to confirm they’re satisfied with that

It was not at all my understanding that there was a concern that the remediation was insufficient, or anything’s current state still constituted any violation

If Andrew’s representation has not had a confirmation from us sitting in his inbox from December, let me know and I’ll get it re-sent.

Please do let me know if you see any asset packs still being distributed under my control and I’ll scrub them, although I’ve already scrubbed everything I could think of.

The point is I’m very much not trying to give anyone the middle finger by keeping stuff up.

in fact, if it’s working right, I set the site to detect when people click links to pages within the webapp and redirect people to the corresponding page on the homestuck.com website instead

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GiovanH 09:04 PM

very sorry if people were under the impression I had taken some sort of defiant posture! I was trying to honor your request for me to send updates to your representation from now on, but word travels slow through laywers

miles 09:31 PM

obviously im not andrews lawyer so i cant sum this up in a Legal Manner but to clarify (although reading the DMCA i feel like it’s pretty clear?) andrew and HS legal’s position is that no, having the site up at all is absolutely not in compliance with the second DMCA. the entire website is dripping with the homestuck IP, trademark etc, and the entire purpose of the site is to proliferate a tool used specifically to host all that material. the fact that it happens to not have those assets on there anymore is not at all considered by andrew or his team to be a sufficient or satisfactory response to the DMCA.

i dont know the full text of that response or have access to it myself, i never read it, but again for clarity’s sake andrew’s position here is that having the site up and the tool up, asset packs or no, is a fundamental violation of andrew’s trademark, and the DMCA is an order to take it all down.

GiovanH 09:33 PM

I have not seen this clarification! My most recent legal counsel was that what’s currently up was not infringing, but I may be one communication behind. I’ll call and see.

miles 09:33 PM

ok, definitely do that sooner than later

but again, for clarity’s sake, andrew and HS legal see having the site up as a defiant posture, so the number one step of amending that that i’d highly recommend doing like, NOW, is taking it down immediately

GiovanH 09:35 PM

In the meantime my inclination is to take things down until I can confirm my position with representation

Yeah, that

Although my recollection is the last request was to keep the tooling up because the fork wasn’t done yet… I can definitely hide things now in response to what you’ve just said though

I can’t speak to the soundness of any of the legal arguments (i.e. whether the claims are valid or not) but in this interim period before I get updated counsel on that, I’ll delist what I can

miles 09:39 PM

yeah i mean im not here to speak to the legal arguments either, just to confirm that “compliance” here means taking it all down and, like you said, getting updated counsel and also preferably getting the lawyers back in touch pronto to discuss next steps

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GiovanH 09:43 PM

https://homestuck.giovanh.com/unofficial-homestuck-collection/ 451’d

miles 09:43 PM

perfect

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GiovanH 10:00 PM

ok, good

yeah, the DMCA just says “the webcomic Homestuck”, which is the part we’d done the takedown for

so the remaining step will be to address whatever was added in this third message, which it sounds like is “everything else”

GiovanH 10:00 PM

fwiw my status is I thought I was maintaining this patient, respectful public silence about this whole process. (also, I had a whole analysis piece written about HS2 written that I shelved just to make sure that in this sensitive window, nobody even felt like I was criticizing them.) sucks that that’s not at all what folks were perceiving it as. hate that kind of sitcom communication gap

These objections are, of course, very silly on their face. It’s obviously fair use to show a fragment of a Homestuck panel in a screenshot, and using the word “Homestuck” to describe Homestuck isn’t a trademark violation.

Despite this we still brought the website down. Not based on the text of the DMCA order or any legal request, but based on the description they said they would have liked the DMCA order to mean. In this, as in all things, I extended them every possible latitude.

[The Unofficial Homestuck Collection’s Lawyer], Jan 9, 2025 To address the present status: The website is currently entirely offline and will remain so until we further our discussion.

To address your points in order:

1) Thank you for your further explanation. While we do not necessarily agree that the website implies the completeness which bothers you, it will be addressed and clarified before we put the site back online.
2) Regarding the .gif files, we feel that a reasonable person could consider this a fair use, but rather than dispute it and to show our good faith we will remove them before the website goes back online.
3) Regarding the trademark issue, we feel it is fairly obvious to a reasonable person, including a participant in the relevant market, that this is a nominative use only, especially with the prominent word “UNOFFICIAL” proximal to the mark. We maintain that this nominative use is necessary to indicate to website viewers what the app is useful for and otherwise does no harm to, nor causes any likelihood of confusion with, your client’s mark. If you would prefer some alternate presentation or wording, please advise and we will do our best to reach a reasonable accommodation with you.

We would also like to reach a reasonable agreement and accommodation with your client, as we feel that the continued availability of the app is mutually beneficial to both parties. We appreciate your position and will work to be more responsive in future to this end.

June, Blog Demand and Response

After some back and forth, we get another communication about a “settlement”, once again fixated not on any UHC-related harm but on Andrew’s anger over previous reporting.

[Andrew’s Legal Agency], Jun 16, 2025 After speaking with our client, Homestuck is willing to settle if several conditions are met.

First, the five blog posts I list below need to be removed. As you are probably aware, Homestuck fundamentally believes these five blog posts to be libel and we cannot move forward with any settlement without these being removed.

https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2020/10/03/the-hiveswap-fiasco/
https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2020/10/03/accountability-on-kickstarter/
https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2021/01/14/more-on-the-hiveswap-odd-gentlemen-debacle/
https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2021/06/30/the-sarah-z-video-fallout/
https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2021/11/11/polygons-life-after-homestuck-thread/

Second, [Legal Name] needs to remove any Homestuck assets or links to those assets from the UHC site. We do not have an issue with the reader itself, but the Homestuck assets, including the torrent links on the Carrd site, need to be removed. [Legal Name] may direct customers to the official channels for the assets, which Homestuck will provide on the same.

Finally, the parties sign a release agreement which includes an NDA, an agreement the parties will cooperate with each other, and a non-disparagement clause. As part of the release agreement, [Legal Name] may release a mutually approved statement on his blog explaining the situation.

Of course since they’re hosting the assets themselves now, “the reader itself” is the only thing they could have a claim against. Meanwhile, remember how Homestuck was going to “move past” the blog stuff because it was obviously “unproductive?” They sure don’t. My understanding is that Andrew’s lawyer is thought well of in his industry, and I have no idea how Andrew managed to talk him into participating in this inane “libel” argument.

I will just let my lawyer speak for me here, because his response is an excellent summary of the situation.

[The Unofficial Homestuck Collection’s Lawyer], Jun 27, 2025 We are glad to hear that regardless of any settlement you do not object to the reader application. As I’ve written before we also believe the reader is non-infringing and we are grateful to have a clear confirmation that you agree on this point.

The purpose of my client’s website is for the distribution and documentation of the reader application, the software you have said you do not object to. It does not currently distribute illegal copies of the protected Homestuck assets, nor is that its purpose. If that page links to another website that’s currently distributing unauthorized copies, such as the unaffiliated caard page, we can comply with removing those links if necessary. If you believe we are in error regarding any assets not mentioned herein, please advise.

Note that since Homestuck is providing the same files themselves, the could link to Homestuck’s distribution of the assets without any substantive change in content. Even without Homestuck hosting this specific file though, the Homestuck assets have been widely distributed for several years now with the full knowledge and even support of Homestuck and its executives, so my client modifying his page will not have an effect on the material’s availability. We acknowledge that this does not affect your client’s distribution rights, but we suggest that a simple license to distribute the asset pack with proper attribution and terms could be a reasonable element of any proposed settlement.

That being the case it’s unclear what material matters remain for such a settlement to resolve. When [Legal Name] inherited responsibility for maintaining the project’s websites he had both explicit permission and explicit direction from Homestuck to continue distributing those assets and not interrupt the availability of the project. When your office sent us a DMCA request we took down all copyrighted material that could be considered infringing pending further discussion and agreement. In fact my client has gone above and beyond the requirements by de-listing the entire website while we try to resolve the underlying dispute. We have only recently restored the website for the reader application after being unable to reach [Andrew’s Lawyer] or any of Homestuck’s agents for an extended period of time, which we took to indicate a loss of interest in the matter.

Prior to the DMCA letter your office sent us, my client was also in the middle of a productive conversation with Homestuck about licensing the collection itself. A specific plan was outlined in which Homestuck executives would meet with my client, onboard them to the “Homestuck Independent Creative Union”, and then discuss approaches to collaborating on the existing project in both artistic and technical capacities. Unfortunately Homestuck shut this communication down before following through on this procedure or discussing details of such a license.

The topics that precipitated Homestuck’s ending of this productive conversation to the best of my knowledge were unrelated to the license or the project, but rather related to demands by Homestuck representatives that Homestuck take control of the project in its entirety (something they had previously agreed not to do) and for my client to perform a vague sort of public obeisance and/or apology, including regarding the blog posts you’ve referenced. In fact, the original DMCA request that precipitated [Andrew’s Firm’s] involvement was not a reaction to the distribution of any copyrighted material, but instead direct retaliation for not assigning Homestuck Inc. ownership and management control over the reader application. At times, to be blunt, we have questioned whether Homestuck is/was acting in good faith when it presents copyright infringement as its objection. Over the past three years, Homestuck has supported our distribution of the Homestuck assets currently being objected to, even directing people to download from my client this very same asset pack. They only stopped directing people to use us as a distributor for these resources after they decided they wanted to take ownership of the reader application. Again, we acknowledge that this does not affect your client’s distribution rights, but we suggest that a simple license to distribute the asset pack with proper attribution and terms could be a reasonable element of any proposed settlement if the copyrighted materials are in fact the issue Homestuck wants to address.

With regard to the accusations of defamatory blog posts, this is a topic unrelated to the question of copyrigt,[sic] but I will address it as Homestuck sees this matter as strongly relevant to their relationship with my client. First and foremost, we strenuously deny and disagree with any assertion that defamatory statements exist in these posts or any other work published by my client. [Legal Name] has shown me communications between him and Homestuck representatives wherein he repeatedly responds to these accusations with requests for clarification, and clarification was never given. Some of these conversations happened as part of the recent Homestuck Collection project, but some were as old as requests for comment made before the posts were ever published. In addition, we have communication from Andrew Hussie dated 2024-09-02 wherein he describes said articles not as containing any false statements, but as being “cynical” and “destructive” and needing to be deleted regardless of their actual content. This leads us to believe Homestuck does not actually believe there to be any actual defamation in these works either. If you and your client believe there are false or defamatory statements in the posts in question, please identify such statements with particularity, and we will review them and take any appropriate action.

When it comes to defamation, if anything, we have reason to believe that Homestuck and its agents have engaged in spreading false and defamatory claims about my client, not the other way around. It seems more likely that your client wants to predicate work on the condition that my client remove writing containing facts and/or opinions Homestuck finds unflattering, which is a very different conversation than an accusation of defamation.

Either way, we find it problematic to bundle the question of these posts with the idea of a settlement regarding alleged copyright infringement, especially since they predate Homestuck reaching out to [Legal Name] with offers to collaborate on The Unofficial Homestuck Collection project. I reviewed the initial series of communication between [Legal Name] and Homestuck. Before proceeding into the conversation at all, my client points out this risk of “bad blood” as something that could impact a working relationship, and Homestuck explicitly dismisses those concerns, unequivocally reassuring my client that past criticisms would not interfere with either licensing issues or Homestuck’s request to participate in some yet-to-be-determined mutually agreeable form. Homestuck clearly did not condition an association with [Legal Name] on the removal of this material, as their representatives themselves represented. As noted, if you identify particular defamatory statements, we will review them and take appropriate action. Such action will be taken whether or not we reach a copyright settlement, as my client of course does not wish to defame anyone.

Without disparaging or denying the actual rights your clients may have, in some ways, again to be blunt, they appear to be trying to use the alleged infringement as an excuse to pursue an inappropriate personal vendetta against my client and unlawfully seize management of The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, his own intellectual property. Despite all this my client has continually emphasized that his goal is not to engage in a hostile relationship with Homestuck. His stated goal is not to exploit or harm Homestuck in any way, but to simply create and publish his own independent and valuable work. In the event of unsustainable legal hostility from Homestuck, rather than pursue legal action, a much more likely scenario is for him to simply bow out, cease maintaining this project, and publicly explain why he has been forced to do. But we are cognizant of the fact that doing so risks creating new conflict and doing significant damage to your brand, which is why we’ve taken steps so far to try to work with Homestuck cooperatively in order to avoid that lose-lose scenario.

In my previous communication with [Andrew’s Lawyer], I discussed my client’s interest in pursuing a true settlement to resolve some of these claims and even potentially license his work to Homestuck for commercial use — something they’ve expressed a strong interest in — while preventing an avoidable conflict that would inevitably end with Homestuck framed in a negative light. We are interested in continuing that discussion, but Homestuck must move past trying to pursue a personal grudge in order to do that and come to an amicable and mutually-beneficial conclusion to this.

July, Andrew’s Final Demand

[Andrew’s Lawyer] (July) …
Let me be clear about where things stand:

The recently reinstated Unofficial Homestuck Collection website is saturated with Homestuck’s protected intellectual property. This isn’t speculative; the site prominently features unauthorized use of my client’s assets, trademarks, and materials throughout.

…

Your client’s trademark infringement is blatant. It appears in the domain name, the headers, marketing language, metadata, and across the website. There is no serious argument for nominative fair use here. The project offers a direct market replacement, creates consumer confusion regarding affiliation, and undermines my client’s ability to control its brand.

In short, your client’s copyright and trademark defenses are without merit. Their continued reliance on these arguments only increases their exposure.

As for the blog posts we’ve previously referenced - even if we were to set aside whether they are legally actionable (a point that remains under review), their removal is a non-negotiable prerequisite for any resolution. Your client cannot expect to maintain those disparaging materials and simultaneously negotiate a working relationship with my client.

At this point, your client has three primary options:

Refuse to cooperate, maintain the infringing content, and face both informal and formal legal action, including takedowns, injunctive relief, and pursuit of damages. To be clear, this is not an abstract threat. We have already begun taking steps in that direction, including preparations to pursue removal of your client’s website and related content through their domain registrar, hosting provider, and relevant platforms. We will pursue every available legal and technical remedy to bring this infringement to an end and to hold your client accountable for the existing and resulting damages.

Engage in the self-removal of infringing materials referenced in your email, and attempt to wage a public relations campaign. That approach neither eliminates liability for years of past infringement nor secures your client’s ability to operate going forward, nor does it prevent my client from undertaking any of the preceding actions. I’ll be blunt - we are not concerned about the court of public opinion. …

Engage in a structured, good-faith resolution, which includes:

Removal of infringing content and unauthorized distribution;

A properly documented license agreement if your client wishes to operate legitimately;

Removal of defamatory or misleading public statements.

This third option is the only one that meaningfully limits your client’s liability, preserves the work they claim to care about, and provides a clear, legal path forward. It is also, frankly, the path of least resistance legally, financially, and reputationally.

We are still willing to pursue that option, but the opportunity to resolve this amicably will not remain open indefinitely. If your client is serious about resolving this dispute, now is the time to act. Otherwise, we will move forward with the steps necessary to protect my client’s rights.

Your client must immediately remove the UHC website and Carrd, pending an executed settlement, release, and/or license from Homestuck.

This is overstating their position, to say the least. Andrew once again categorically refuses to consider the particularities — there’s not even a “While X is true, Y” type transition. Instead they’re simply refusing to address any of the issues we raised and just restating the most aggressive position possible. For the entire period of time I’ve maintained the Unofficial Homestuck Collection site in a theoretically infringing way it was on the direct request Homestuck made in writing, as I’ve detailed here. That counts. There’s also no trademark issue — we’re using the word Homestuck clear as a description of the thing itself. The UHC is only ever described as unofficial and if anyone’s confused it’s because the Homestuck website was down. By the time we got this letter any blank page was a “direct market replacement” for homestuck.com, since after getting it back from Viz they’d turned it off. The best they can do is just desperately declare us “without merit”. It’s intimidation. (Note the explicit threat to cause “reputational” damage to me.) I’m sure this works on anyone who hasn’t already had to hire a lawyer but after review I know better.

They declare we “cannot expect” to negotiate a working relationship despite the fact that they themselves were the ones who offered that relationship without any of the newly described conditions. They throw in how little they care about “public opinion” while at the same time threatening a frivolous lawsuit unless I personally help improve Andrew’s reputation and clean up their public image. (For some reason people think they like to threaten lawsuits — this must somehow be due to the Haters.)

But the most interesting thing is that the purpose of all this is to force me not to simply address the copyright concern, but for me to remove information I’ve published that paints Andrew in a negative light. And in so doing, I would publicly imply the falsehood that the writing itself was objectionable. In order to talk about the blog posts at all they have to “set aside” the question of whether the posts are true or not, because despite already claiming otherwise Homestuck know they are. This is the same demand Homestuck already said could be ignored if I gave them control of the UHC. It’s just the same exhausting demand for a public show of submission again. They boast about all the attacks they’ve set up against me as if they’re impressive and strong, when each one is itself an offense. All these paths funnel towards the same demand for “removal of defamatory or misleading public statements”, which is just Andrew’s original grudge. It’s all about Andrew’s personal grudges through-and-through. Everything else is set dressing.

Conclusions

This wasn’t a blunder. This wasn’t cognitive dissonance. This wasn’t a dumb guy misplaying their hand. This is an intentional strategy of practiced, coordinated abusive behavior. What happened here was misconduct performed as a matter of regular practice.

These explicit legal attacks only cap off a series of social attacks that have been underway for years against various people, with various degrees of visibility. What I’m able to share now is not the extent of the data, it’s just the most freely shareable data. For everything I can write about publicly there are five private incidents.

I say this only to explain my confidence. To be explicitly clear, “dude, trust me” is not a valid way to criticize a person. Insisting that there’s a real but secret concern one can’t articulate but demands others act on is not behaving responsibly. In fact, it’s how an abuser uses their influence to alienate personal enemies without cause. I only point out that the specific evidence I’ve pointed out here (and elsewhere) are not the extent, but points in a cloud of stories that have mostly been hushed up.

Archival Disaster

It is obviously bad for the archive to be unavailable, especially when the archive is the best version out there. Even with the original program and the HICU fork available, there’s work I needed to do that now isn’t going to happen.

Homestuck has communicated extremely strongly for years — both when Andrew was visibly in charge and now, when they’re a shadow leader — that they’re willing to cause however much damage they feel like causing. They do not see themselves as having any sort of responsibility, and don’t even see providing a good product as a goal that they have at all.

If Andrew is interested in taking the responsibility of custodianship for the comic seriously and making sure what they provide is the best thing for the community, that would be good. We already know for a fact they haven’t been historically: this is what necessitated we build the collection in the first place. And the union hasn’t been involved for long, but they have made it extremely clear that respect for their community is of no importance to them.

The Homestuck website could be up and fully-featured right now. Andrew could be selling copies of the UHC on Steam right now, for money. But the price tag for that was “please, please just be normal” and they spat on it. Homestuck had a clear choice here between doing right by people or maintaining an image of Andrew as perfect, and they chose the bad one.

Has to be said

I hate to be a negative voice, especially another time about this same franchise I love, but the only thing worse than exposing what’s going on here would be to cover it up and let it keep getting worse. Andrew would only keep harming and exploiting more and more people. We saw this same dynamic in the accounts from workers who were mistreated during the Hiveswap days: professional abuse was covered up, terrible practices were normalized, and so those practices and that abuse just continued to hurt more and more people, because no one would talk about it.

I don’t like the thought that this is going to negatively impact some of the good projects the HICU seems to be working with, but hiding what’s happening here would be irresponsible and negligent of me. Although Andrew’s legal representative bizarrely asserted in writing that they don’t care about reputational damage, I still care about minimizing the harm this inflicts on innocents. I have done what I can to reduce collateral harm without covering up points people need to know. Ultimately I believe openness with the community about these incidents is foundational to real harm mitigation because it’s the only way to discourage the people committing the harm from continuing.

I am not throwing anyone under the bus here. Andrew Hussie and company have driven a bus over a crowd of people and I have to deliver the bad news to their grieving families. I know this news impacts a lot of people — some very severely — and so I don’t give it lightly. I promise I tried other avenues before it came to this. But Andrew doing this hurts more people than just themself, and as much as I want to I can’t protect everyone in their blast radius while being honest.

If Homestuck ever does come back and remedy the damage they’ve done that would change the story. But that’s a tall ask and I expect if they do anything they’ll do the opposite. Their primary goal is just going to be trying to socially isolate me, drum up more baseless rumors, and anything else to construct a plausible reason for people to ignore my warning.

Freedom Motif

A fan community should be a symbiotic relationship. Fanwork can serve functions official work can’t, and the community surrounding a work is one of the main things that gives a work “value”, in a base economic sense. Likewise official recognition can be a good thing. Fan work can be elevated, talented creators can be brought on as part of official projects, etc. Official recognition can serve as a badge of honor.

But the deciding factor in whether the creator/fan relationship is healthy or exploitative is whether the community is allowed to be independent. One of the most important merits of fanwork, discussion, and criticism is a plurality of perspectives, and the ability to present and analyze work through truly pluralistic viewpoints. This is why things like fan comics, fan games, fan resources, and fan events (like Stuck At Home Con) have been so extraordinarily valuable. They represent legitimate plurality where the community manages and supports itself.

This is something Bambosh and I talked about in our conference panel. While it may make sense for there to be an official collection, this would be subject to the IP holder and their vision of how to work should be presented, potentially narrowing the focus and scope of the work. One of the obvious dangers is this can lead to the marginalization and demonization of specific viewpoints the corporate interest doesn’t agree with, regardless of their artistic and intellectual merit. The fan-centered archive and the creator-centered archive fill fundamentally separate functions.

If the IP holder insists that all aspects relating to discussion of a work go through one unifying authority, this is an assault on the community and represents an act of aggression against fan-run fan-space. If there is a demand that all work that exists be brought in under a single umbrella of control, this is a dangerous and precarious arrangement. It does not matter how much or how little work is encapsulated by official support. A unification of community spaces through a central governing authority with the ability to enforce policy and preference is an existential threat to that community.

Or, in extraordinarily blatant corruption like we see here, the control can be used to prevent valid criticisms of the work or the people involved in its management, as has happened here. In Homestuck’s case, not only is there this structural danger, Homestuck’s past and present leadership has proven itself to be not just potentially problematic, but actively and eagerly abusive of power it can acquire over community spaces. Especially toxic to fan spaces is Homestuck’s eagerness to blacklist and socially isolate people on its “enemies list”, leading to a sort of guilt-by-association virus that attacks the very foundations of community. Homestuck has consistently historically abused any power it can acquire for the personal enrichment of its few executives. It does this, like a parasite, directly at the expense of the people who support it.

Homestuck is Radioactive

The Unofficial Homestuck Collection didn’t have a right to exist. I’m not entitled to unilaterally distribute Homestuck. That’s why we took it down when we were finally asked. The problem here isn’t that I didn’t get what I wanted, the problem was the mistreatment and deception throughout, the inordinate amount of retaliatory violence that Andrew was willing to wield. The problem is the way Homestuck operates.

Homestuck is, at its core, a bad faith actor at a scale that’s genuinely difficult to convey without sounding overdramatic. They already were before this, but this incident has proven it beyond argument. People keep falling for the friendly act and keep getting irreparably harmed for their trouble.

Andrew is willing to be unimaginably hostile towards people. The problem is not that Andrew “hates their fans”, or is intentionally trying to destroy their community, or anything like that. The problem is that they’re willing to attack anyone if they see it as useful to the greater good of their own reputation. Over the smallest perceived slight Andrew will attack people’s careers, their professional lives, their financial stability, everything. I gave Andrew more chances to set themself right than anyone could have asked me to give them. I gave James every chance to set them straight. I gave their lawyer every chance to set them straight. If the leeway I gave them to be angry was not enough, no amount of leeway will ever be.

This is not an exceptional situation, this is the capstone to a long and consistent history of controlling and violently litigious behavior — not just over copyright issues, but for any whim Andrew is willing to pursue.

This primarily concerns fan spaces, but is in no way limited to them. I am convinced it is not a coincidence Andrew has seemingly never been able to work with people. This obviously includes big names like The Odd Gentlemen, Fellow Traveller, and Viz Media²⁵, but don’t forget about art/music team turnover, Requiem Cafe, or that Andrew has already burned through two management teams on Homestuck^2 alone.

Not only is Homestuck radioactive, Andrew has gone to great lengths to prove that no matter what they say has changed, it will always be radioactive.²⁶ I cannot overemphasize the fact that Homestuck will just lie outright. Whether this is because they’re confident they can retaliate against people who catch them or not, they freely do it. If Homestuck comes to you for anything, even if they’re nice, even if they make explicit guarantees in writing, even if they explicitly promise Andrew isn’t involved, their willingness to lie here shows you can’t trust any of it. They have gone through all the ways they could possibly be trustworthy, all the ways they could be expected to be reasonable, and systematically violated each of them.

If Homestuck reaches out to you to collaborate, to license work, or for anything else, cut bait on day one. If they start making takedown threats, let them follow through and announce what’s happened. It’s better than any alternative.

It does not matter that Homestuck’s current salesman is making seem chill and reasonable. It does not matter that there’s some new organization that structures you comfortably far away from the labels that were attached to previous abuses. It does not matter that they’ve agreed to everything they should have and promised to be generous and reasonable. It does not matter what they put on paper. You cannot shrewdly navigate this. You are handing away power to a person eager to harm you in ways a reasonable person would have no reason to even consider to be a possibility. You are signing up to play Calvinball.

Take the word of everyone who has tried to do this before you and failed, and let the silence of those pressured into keeping quiet as indictment.

Don’t Support This

The point of this isn’t to get everyone riled up and angry. Don’t harass anyone over this, don’t start a manhunt. If you have a copy of the UHC please continue to enjoy it. I have no legal fund, even though I have paid multiple thousands of dollars out of pocket for legal defense during this time. (If Andrew still tries to sue me, perhaps I will need one.) But what you should do is not tolerate this behavior.

I still love Homestuck so much. I love the people, I love the community, I love the art. I love the various people on the Homestuck workforce! They’re not responsible for these problems, they’re just caught up in it. I even still love the work itself.

Homestuck is art. It’s an important literary work. But it’s far past time for it to go full Hatsune Miku. Make the fanart. Love the comic. Talk about the work. Go to prom! Make conventions and celebrate the wonderful community Homestuck has fostered. Be excellent to each other. But it is vital not to do anything on any kind of leash. It’s time for Homestuck-as-a-corporation to be fully over. No more merch, no more official, no more brand. Let the fan scene thrive, but if you see an outstretched hand, cut it off. For Homestuck to continue under any form of Andrew’s leadership is to condemn it to rot with the Harry Potters and Dilberts and Good Omens of history.

No one should be willing to work with disgruntled ex-cartoonist Andrew Hussie, including by proxy. At worst you’re at risk of entering into an abusive relationship and at best you’re propping them up and lending your credibility to someone who spends other people’s credibility like it’s money.

You especially shouldn’t support this right now, when the currently running major Homestuck project is running a Patreon whose money pays Andrew and Miles. Makeship Karkat isn’t worth having when he pays these salaries. Off the back of this story I’m just going to come out and make an explicit value judgment: you should not be giving Homestuck your money, and if you are you should stop. I think we should encourage fan merchandise and support attempts to create and sell new things, but not when Homestuck gets a cut. Homestuck has done half a dozen things during this process that individually warrant that. I wish they hadn’t, but they did. Putting them all together, I cannot possibly justify saying that continuing to financially support this behavior is reasonable. It’s not.

Hoping to go back to fun stuff soon.
With love,
- Gio

When this was first published it was written with he/him pronouns for Andrew throughout, since at the time James Roach, Miles, and Andrew’s legal representation all used he/him for Andrew. I got several comments reminding me that Andrew has been using “any pronouns”, and so using he/him (as well as calling them a man) could be read as a transmisogynistic jab, which was never the intent.

To clarify that intent and make sure this doesn’t read to anyone as some kind of transphobic trash I’ve rewritten the piece with they/them use instaed.

I have criticisms of Andrew here, obviously, but I want it to be very clear I’m not taking any cheap shots over identity. I use whatever set of pronouns someone uses. That’s not what this is about.

Let me know if I’ve missed a spot and I’ll fix it. ↩
Bambosh was also the frog. ↩
For the sake of trying to reduce asset pack updates (because they’re extremely large files that people have trouble with) some later updates to the Application contain a few tiny assets to “patch” the asset pack, but those are considered minimal and non-infringing, and can be removed if needed. ↩
As the copyright holder I have the right to re-license the collection outside GPL3, so if they wanted to use it in one of the ways GPL3 doesn’t allow, I can enable that. This is the kind of thing I would expect their lawyer to have explained to them if they consulted with him properly. ↩
By Kurzon - Own work, CC BY 4.0, Link ↩
A quick note on these discord quotes; These are all carefully transcribed so they’re accessible on all screen sizes and on screen readers. As with all blockquotes, an ellipsis indicates a cut. I also do have very crunchy screenshots and other evidence for these, but collaging them in to a readable article would make for even nastier reading.

No, being text doesn’t make my quotes suspicious. It’s incredibly easy to mock up a fake screenshot, and using screenshots in this article would have only made it difficult to read. You can check the validity by looking at Andrew’s response. If I’d fabricated anything it would be trivial for him to prove it and disprove this entire piece, which he’d love to do. ↩
I’m going to linger on these early moments to show you the tone but don’t worry, I won’t go this in-depth for every exchange of messages. I simply cannot. ↩
i promise you it is not ↩
I didn’t get to see this message until more than a year later, but it’s very sweet. Seriously, Bambosh? What a guy. ↩
Well, evidence before conclusion chronologically. I may still give summaries of things I know before showing the details. I had to go through everything many times over before I understood the whole picture, and now I’m trying to give you the benefit of that work in one shot. That’s my little gift to you called writing. ↩
: ↩
There’s a very “Trump handshake” aspect to all this. ↩
I haven’t been spending much time on timestamps and date gaps, but it’s flatly untrue that I’ve stalled anything or even been unresponsive. Perhaps there’s a feeling of not making progress left over from the deadlock which they caused themselves. ↩
Another example of the “don’t make me hit you” reversal of victim and offender. Andrew doesn’t have to make any attacks, they’re choosing to do it. Discussed previously. ↩
Another example of using the creation of a UHC fork as a threat designed to punish rather than something they’re willing to maintain. Discussed previously. ↩
Andrew cultivates this strange inversion of Jester’s Privilege, where taking on the trappings of comedy and unseriousness shields the otherwise powerless jester from responsibility, allowing one to tell truth to power. Except in Andrew’s case the person claiming it is the one with all the power, and they’re using ambiguous Goofs to situationally infantilize themselves to dodge responsibility for serious harms they’ve caused not with jokes, but with professional malpractice. ↩
I know a common avenue of textual analysis is psychoanalysis of Andrew’s personal life. “Oh, it’s because their father…”, “Oh, it’s because their brother…”. I have never participated in any of this. I think it’s speculative and distasteful. ↩
Andrew can’t resist but try to throw Bambosh under the bus, something even Miles knew not to do. There was no “kneejerk snap”, Andrew directly began legal proceedings against Bambosh who rightfully disconnected from the project in response. Although Bambosh’s exit was sudden there was also no sudden takedown — the collection was down for a few minutes at most while we migrated the maintainer behind the scenes. But complaining about a takedown in the first place is absurd, because the very thing Andrew keeps threatening to do — and in Bambosh’s case, already legally demanded — is a takedown. ↩
Andrew also keeps modeling things as “leverage”; who’s under whose thumb, who’s gun is to whose head, which one is the alpha and which one is the simp. The reality, as I’ve already described, is we’re two people who would like things from each other, and we’re meeting to pursue mutual benefit. But Andrew simply refuses to work this way; they consistently demand power over others first. ↩
“But Miles can’t be responding to the settlement demands! You said those were sent in September, and this chat is from August! Are you making this all up?” Good question, no. Some of the docs were sent over earlier in August, which is the discussion here. September is the first date they were all available, which is why I attribute it that way. As I discussed in the intro, some non-impactful streamlining is necessary for this to be readable. ↩
A truly deranged thing to claim, given that the injection of the demand that I make a public statement is the most clearcut case of “dredging up old bullshit unproductively” I can imagine ↩
This is flatly untrue; the documents don’t detail any damage done to the brand and don’t explain any amount of “harassment”. At best, Andrew asserts it’s the case without explaining how. ↩
I actually have no idea what’s being referred to here. It sounds like Andrew feels like somebody did them wrong but refuses to articulate what it was, which is behavior I’ve learned not to give credence to from them. ↩
Of course, I have still not done that. This post is the opposite of a “quick win”, it was — as you’ll read — a very last resort, forced by Andrew’s continued legal violence. ↩
In fact, according to Andrew, VIZ media “left the project and brand hanging out to dry a few years prior” to 2021, almost immediately after the original deal in 2017. ↩
An argument Homestuck could give was that this one public incident was the worst they’ve ever behaved, and just happened to be the one that was publicized. I don’t believe that for a second, but if it were true Andrew can prove it.

If Homestuck wants to disprove any of this, all they need to do is waive NDAs they’re using to censor people. Guarantee a representative sample of people they’ve affected immunity and let them give their stories too. Let’s hear from the folks who interacted with Homestuck and then were mysteriously harmed for secret reasons.

Waive the NDA with Bambosh, let him describe what he experienced too. Let’s have open conversations with everybody. All they need to do to prove me wrong is open the floor, and all they need to do to prove me right is to keep up the isolation tactics and play damage control. ↩

Can You Keep a Secret?

2025-06-04T00:00:00-05:00

Deltarune came out! Weirdly, that’s kind of a problem? People who care about the game have this immediate need to stay off social media so as not to be spoiled. There is a rush to for anyone who ever wants to play the game to do so immediately, because if you don’t the Internet will ensure you don’t get a blind experience. You’re forced to binge it or be spoiled.

I was just thinking about chapter 2, and how I would’ve loved to have found the secret twist for myself, even though it was hidden away a little. If the game has indicated there was something to find, people would have found it on their own. Instead, I’m willing to bet the experience for the vast majority of people was finding out online first and then reproducing what they saw for themselves.

Narrative spoilers

But this is not a Deltarune thing. For any narrative media, the experience depends on the work presenting the narrative flow it intends to. This includes reveals, this includes pacing, this includes characterization.

Getting information out of turn spoils the game. It does this so aggressively that breaking narrative flow has become one of the definitions for the word “spoil”, as in “ruin”. I have a much longer piece I want to write some day about information filtering in general, which is maybe the hardest problem ever?

For games like Deltarune, it’s taken for granted that people have at most a week of courtesy before the Internet is flooded with information. And of course there are some people out there who are eager to get that information as soon as possible; it is not universally true that people want to experience narrative as intended.

Except sometimes we care a lot

But is this a little silly? Is narrative purity so reverential that information should not flow through the normal channels by which ideas are pushed to us, like social media?

Here’s what piqued my interest about this today: gaming does have a reverence for not letting experiences be spoiled. It’s just very selective right now. We see this absolute demand that knowledge not be leaked, that games be allowed to communicate information to the player on their own terms. But beyond extremely new releases, we see this almost exclusively with regard to knowledge-based games or metroidbrainias, where knowledge is the gameplay mechanic.

These are games like The Outer Wilds, Tunic, The Witness, Return of the Obra Dinn. Games — often freeform open-world games — where the main gameplay mechanic is the knowledge the player has about the world and its mechanics. Jumps in player ability come not from being given a new ability or opening a previously-locked door, but from reveals about how the world works and what you can do in it.

Spoiling these — even long after their release — is seen as crossing a line, in a way talking about Undertale isn’t.

Distinction

But isn’t this a strange distinction? What is it about brainiovania games it drives people to protect the experience in a uniquely extreme way?

People talk about metroidbrainias as uniquely un-replayable, but this clearly isn’t true. You don’t get the same experience if you play it again, but that’s true of all stories.

Mechanical fetishization?

So where do we find the distinction? Is it really just that the thing being spoiled is the mechanic of the game, rather than the story? In both normal story games and metroidbrainias the experience is different on a subsequent playthrough, but in metroidbrainias the challenge is also uniquely removed, or so it seems. Is the deciding factor that knowledge determines what routes are available to you rather than knowledge determining your experience of the narrative? Is mechanical purity being elevated in importance above story?

Taxonomy

But how do you even draw a line between metroidbrainias and any narrative game? It seems like the opposite of a metroidbrainia is a “mastery” game, where the question is just how good you are at the game.

But is there even such a thing as a “true” mastery games? When I try to think of the platonic ideal of a mastery game, the first thing that jumps to mind is UFO 50’s Magic Garden, a simple-but-hard score challenge. The game teaches you the controls, drops you in, and the only question is how well you execute and how quickly you can react.

Except… there’s strategy. When you start, you don’t know what’s effective. The most effective way to score points is to collect a line of oppies, turn them to enemies, and cut through the whole row like pac-man championship edition. The game does not teach you this move.

So what does that even mean? The structures of games rely on knowledge for mechanical purposes to varying degrees, with mastery games on one side of the spectrum and metroidbrainias on the other. But there’s also a dimension of the importance of story, which is another way games rely on knowledge to deliver an experience. And when it comes to resisting the urge to spoil games we’re better about visual novels, where the story eclipses the gameplay entirely.

At some point on that scale is a cutoff for what’s socially acceptable to talk about openly and what isn’t. Arcade section? Free-for-all. We love talking about these, we love sharing techniques, we love the community aspect of mastery. Speedrunning is often about forcing a dynamic of mastery on games that aren’t designed for it just to enjoy this community dynamic. The Metroidbrainia section? In my experience, very carefully defended. People who play the games value the experience and want to share that with others, and communicating too much about the details doesn’t share that joy, it ruins it.

But the importance story has to the social acceptability of spoilers is weird. Spoilers for story details of extremely narrative-focused games like visual novels are generally kept out of public consciousness but still readily available, in a book-club way. But when a game has a story but also some mechanic other than story, the importance we give to the purity of the narrative flow seems unfairly reduced.

Fandom

But here’s the thing: I don’t think this is due to fetishizing the value of mechanics in games over narrative intent. I think the answer is much simpler: stories have funny little guys in them.

We want to talk about the guys. We want to talk about how cool the reveals were. We want to make memes.

We take it for granted that we desperately want to talk about the story, and that everyone has seen it already. So now the task is to strike some sort of balance between that drive and the need to keep the experience available for new players, depending on how much weight we give to that.

Have you ever seen — in the wild — a meme about the spacial relationships between the orbital patterns of celestial bodies in the outer wilds? About the rules of the line patterns in The Witness? I haven’t, and I don’t think it’s because those secrets are more secret than the big twist that you get to fight Sans. I think it’s because they’re just not fun to talk about.

So here is a strange dynamic. Internet fandom culture has baked into it this temptation to cannibalize some of the value of stories by sharing too many details too widely, because stories are just so fun to share with people. In contrast, metroidbrainia games are kind of incompatible with modern fandom. The details that are there to spoil aren’t the kinds of things people want to talk about.

SUPERHOT VR's Story was Removed. What?

2025-05-14T00:00:00-05:00

SUPERHOT VR released in 2017. Then in 2021 the game’s entire story was removed.

What’s happened here is fascinating, but somehow nobody has talked about it seriously. Because it’s censorship in a video game — a topic the gaming community cannot be normal about — it is nearly impossible to even think about the issue through all the noise. Anyone aware of this topic at all seems to be screaming about Woke, or complaining about games becoming “political”, as if “political” is just a switch you can throw to make media worse.

Wikipedia summarizes the discourse as:

The choice to remove these games led to the game getting review bombed on Steam, with some users claiming that Superhot Team was giving in to “snowflakes” and others believing it to be a form of virtue signaling.

But this is insane! A historically significant VR game — one of the greatest of all time — had one of its defining characteristics removed, without any explanation or replacement. This isn’t some Stellar Blade fake controversy, something weird happened here. There are real, understandable things to object to, and none of them are right-wing culture war buzzwords.

But what is SUPERHOT?

SUPERHOT was originally developed for the 2013 7 Day FPS Challenge game jam by Polish team “The Bricky Blues”, directed by Piotr Iwanicki. In September 2013 it was released on the Blue Brick Software and Embedded Systems website in three separate “episodes” because the levels were developed in parallel in three separate unity projects for the jam.

After the demo received positive feedback, SUPERHOT went to Kickstarter (after they got Kickstarter to support Poland) and was successfully overfunded in June 2014. (With the success of SUPERHOT, the Blue Brick company seems to have been abandoned.) SUPERHOT (2016) was then released in February.

The main game was directed by Piotr Iwanicki with additional story and writing credits.¹

Then focus shifted to releasing SUPERHOT VR, as teased by the original Kickstarter campaign. VR work had been a goal since 2013 but the technology was extremely new at the time, and focus had been on the Kickstarter and releasing the desktop game. SUPERHOT VR was originally designed for the Oculus Rift in 2014, which was cutting-edge tech at the time. SUPERHOT VR was such a big deal Oculus choose it as their spotlighted feature at E3 2014. Here it is on TV!

After some minor drama about Oculus exclusivity, SUPERHOT VR released cross-platform in 2016. It made bullet time real and let you be Neo. It was perfect.

SUPERHOT: Mind Control Delete (2020) is more SUPERHOT, and isn’t too shy to complain about that.² It was originally going to be free DLC, but then it wasn’t. For our purposes here, the interesting thing about MCD is that it was directed by writer Cezary Skorupka and art director Marcin Surma, not by the original game’s designer and director Piotr Iwanicki.³

Also, the official SUPERHOT website has a similar timeline, but I didn’t know about that before I put together everything here by hand from primary sources. Oops!

SUPERHOT is about abusive subordination

The SUPERHOT franchise is mostly about the “time moves when you move” ultra-violent combat mechanic from the original game jam prototype, but the full game hinges on an equally engaging story used as a framing device for the gameplay.

In SUPERHOT (2016), you’re sent a cracked copy of SUPERHOT, some sort of unreleased game you’re not supposed to play. As you play through the game, (which is a VR game in-universe), you’re continually “discovered” by the company whose servers you’re hijacking and kicked out of the game, but you continually break back in to play more. At first the levels seem like disconnected arcade-y action scenes punctuated by the mantra-like SUPER HOT screen, but as you progress through you’re teased by the promise of a narrative resolution as you seemingly reveal a throughline.

The penny drops near the one-third mark. Instead of just kicking you out of the game the program locates where the (fictional) player is playing the game in their real life, and then starts rewriting their own chat messages so they can’t communicate what’s happening. You’re unable to warn your friend or reach out for help. Instead, you can only make the game sound more enticing.

The game then keeps iterating on the theme that you have lost control over both the game and yourself. Using some combination of traditional hacking and Pavlovian conditioning, SUPERHOT is rewriting the player to be subordinate to the game. By playing the game you have trapped your mind in a cage, which the game substantiates in a somewhat literal way.

The more you choose to play the game, the more of your own personhood you lose. To keep playing this game is to lose yourself to it entirely. Just as the game’s been telling you the whole time, every level you play is “handing over control.” But the player keeps going anyway.

In the next escalation you pay yourself a visit. You find the random red guy playing SUPERHOT that is you. This reveals that the “random red guys” are real people. But more importantly, you learn — in the most visceral way possible — that this isn’t just a game, but a system that can destroy you.

But you still keep going. Whether it’s just the dopamine spikes of the gameplay or some more sinister sort of conditioning, you’re hooked completely by the trap, and fall fully into the system and its principles: Mind is software. Bodies are disposable. The system will set you free. Messages that have been encoded into the SUPERHOT mantra from the start, and you’ve been continually programming yourself with.

Finally, in the finale of the game, you’ve transferred your mind completely over to the system. You’re dropped back in the “real life” scene — the one you so badly injured yourself before with a punch earlier — but this time you’re given a gun. Seemingly on our own initiative, you “free yourself” from your body by shooting yourself in the head. No pain this time, just victory in the system.

This is a good story! It’s an intriguing meta-story about psychological conditioning and addiction that parallels the dopamine-hit structure of the game. It was also developed pre-Undertale, and game plot about questioning the relationship between player and game was novel and refreshing.

The story is dark, but not only does it still play well in practice, it’s backed by these interesting themes that mesh perfectly with the ludonarrative.

In SUPERHOT’s gameplay you are the perfect action hero. You can overpower impossible odds and dodge every bullet, and look sick as hell while you do it. It’s the moment in the Matrix when Neo overcomes the laws of reality stretched out into unlimited gameplay.

This is — of course — a power fantasy based on mechanics of player control. You can achieve total mastery over the environment because you have such granular control over how time works. Time moves when you move. Enemies only move when you let them move. If you die you restart with perfect knowledge of every move that’s about to happen. Everything shatters in the most satisfying way possible because their purpose is to futilely oppose you and make it as enjoyable as possible for you to kill them.

This isn’t a bad thing. Most FPS games are power fantasies (it takes a lot of fantasy to keep gunplay from being horrifying) and that’s fine, because they’re entertainment. They’re distortions of reality, and there’s a lot to learn about the human condition from how we distort reality, but it’s designed to be safe escapist fun, and it completely succeeds at this.

It is a masterstroke, then, that the narrative framing that gameplay critiques that power fantasy. Where the gameplay’s job is to be fun, the story’s job is to be intriguing. So it takes all these ideas exposed by the gameplay — control, agency, stimulation — and subvert them in clever and interesting ways. It’s not true that SUPERHOT is an allegory, strictly speaking; the mechanics were built first to be fun, not to support a preexisting narrative. But the narrative is built up along the lines of thought the gameplay naturally prompts. The structure of intense, satisfying, high-agency action followed by a replay and mantra creates a loop of dopamine spikes. The story is built to fit the structure of the game. Not everything has to be a deconstruction. But SUPERHOT is, and it’s good at it.

This story also serves explicitly as metacommentary on the game loop itself and the addictive cycle pushed on people by the gaming industry, as the game’s directory Piotr (somewhat frantically) described at GDC 2016:

Piotr Iwanicki, Game Design and Mind Control in SUPERHOT (alt) This game is strange because it has really no reason to continue for the character inside the game. The reason for to continuing the game it was always you. It was always like a player wants to play more games so he drives this character inside the game which is a lot like him into Insanity. So this strange game quickly turns into this kind of mind control that’s driving your experience like a game that doesn’t treat you really well. He said that “you are good dog” for following orders, things like that.

So our reference for that was a cruel and abusive relationship, or a drug, right? So it’s like totally against reason. There is this game that gives you this blissful in-control experience, but also there is this force behind it that just wants you to hook up to it. Like a cruel and abusive relationship, like a drug.

And evil masterminds behind the SUPERHOT ex[?] thing… there are also game developers. And like most because games do this thing a lot! Like there are idle games; like I love idle games, I love to play them, right? But it’s also… you know the feeling of playing this game, it’s often like this mindless feeling of just clicking things. And this is fascinating. Like imagine an evil cult or a sect a religious thing using idle games as a form of like everyday prayer. This is a thing like that.

So we took those things that games are doing, like you know “remember to play” whatever you say, in this evil Russian voice, it will always fit into this mind control scheme. “Remember to play our game”, like “tell others about the game”, like “stay in our system and bring your friends”, it’s just like that.

Everyone is so into this story that it’s impossible to find any discussion of SUPERHOT online that doesn’t include people parroting the line from the ending: “SUPERHOT is the most innovative shooter I’ve played in years.”

SUPERHOT VR has the same themes

SUPERHOT is excellent, but in my opinion SUPERHOT VR is where the series becomes truly spectacular. All the way back in 2013 — before VR existed as a real platform — the SUPERHOT development team saw the time-moves-when-you move dynamic and knew it would be perfect to experience in VR, and they were right. SUPERHOT VR has a few obvious mechanical differences. It’s shorter than the original, both you-the-player and the player character are in VR, and traditional FPS controls are replaced with full-body movement. And it still holds up as one of the best VR games, even ten years later.

The same dark themes are here too, seen from a (very slightly) different angle. SUPERHOT is still a mental virus that reprograms people, and the player is indoctrinated with the same mantra: mind is software, bodies are disposable. And the plot of the game is once again about horrifying mind control and subordination of the self.

In the same theme as SUPERHOT, the player continually subordinates themselves to this system they discover. After the first segment of the game, SUPERHOT asks the player to “prove their dedication” by shooting their avatar in VR, which is a parallel to the scene in the first game where you punch your real body. The shot knocks off the player’s headset and reveals the player’s room for the first time:

In an early scene, the player is made to take a leap of faith and throw themselves off a building in pursuit of the symbolic pyramid. Bodies are disposable. As the game progresses, the line between game and reality blurs, and even in the real world the player perceives more and more virtual conditioning and desensitization. Mind is software.

The idea of mental reprogramming is emphasized on further in the last chapter of the game, which requires you to load the SUPERHOT disc not into the computer, but directly into your own head:

After the last level, the final act of dedication parallels both the earlier pistol scene and the ending of the first game. You’re once again given a pistol in the room with your real body, and it’s obvious what you’re expected to do with it.

The exact ending after this is left ambiguous. Depending on your interpretation, this scene with the pyramid might have also been virtual reality, and your shiny hands after the ending imply you’ve successfully uploaded yourself into the system. Whatever the case, you’re now free to play SUPERHOT forever.

Dark art

VR’s ending is visceral and profound

VR’s ending is undeniably a more visceral and profound experience. Both games end by emphasizing the main theme of self-destructive subordination by having the player kill themselves. In SUPERHOT, this just means highlighting your red guy and clicking. But in SUPERHOT VR, this means taking a gun in your hand, pointing it at your own head, and pulling the trigger.

What makes an “artistic experience”? An experience itself is a subjective phenomenon, but what are the inputs that determine how a person experiences a work? The work itself is one, clearly, but so is the person themselves. The experience is an interaction between the sensory inputs of the work and our preexisting knowledge, sensibilities, values, and beliefs.

ebbits

So how much is art able to communicate? If the qualia of experience is so heavily influenced by the state of the audience, the artist is limited in how much control they have over the effect, and so the amount of experience that is communicated by artist intent rather than generated by the viewer’s experience is limited. But this varies proportionally to the specificity of the work. A large picture can communicate more specifics about a scene than a small one. A movie can communicate more specifics about a scene than a radio play. In a hypothetical future with a virtual reality technology that’s truly indistinguishable from reality, it might be possible to record and replay the entirety of an experience, captured exactly as intended. Modern VR is obviously not this, but certainly allows for a particular deepness of immersion. And that creates a new scope of artistic possibilities.

All this to say that VR games are remarkable in their ability to communicate the feeling of experiencing specific scenarios. Video games in general are able to lead their audience through crafted scenarios, and VR allows for further immersion and intensity of experience.

The emotion SUPERHOT VR manages to invoke here is an experiential marvel. It’s been years since I played the game, and I still remember living through this specific scene. The ability to capture such a specific scene backed by narrative buildup and deliver it to people as art they can experience is magnificent. This intense, intimate communication of emotion to the audience is a kind of art specifically made possible by VR, and it proves the medium can be a canvas for profound artistic communication. Video games are art; pack it up, we’re done.

It’s much more than an artistic depiction of suicide, it’s something closer to communicating the experience of it. The quiet of the room, the expectations, the unknown.... It’s extremely not a glorification of suicide, nor is it a “trainer”, but it’s able to make your heart leap just a little more in your chest, because your mind is processing the ideas in a more intense way. Your mind is tuned a little bit less into the scenario as a hypothetical and your subconscious is more engaged with the scenario.

But my excitement about this doesn’t mean the effect is pleasant. I can still remember playing the scene, and what I got from it wasn’t enjoyment. The game so clearly leads to this point that you don’t get any special instruction. Having just been told “collect your reward”, I knew exactly what to do. I remember putting the gun in my hand and being so viscerally uncomfortable with the idea of acting out the act of pulling the trigger that I actually moved my headset so when I pulled the trigger on the controller, the trajectory of the virtual gun wouldn’t map to my position in real life. The game started in whitespace VR and then broke out a conceptual layer to create a more “real” narrative layer, and used the story to demand I self-harm in increasingly “real” ways. It was deeply uncomfortable.

And that’s fantastic. Art gets to do that. Art is a controlled and consensual environment where you can explore as much of the human experience as you can manage. And this particular technology demonstrated an ability to reach into that range of experience just a little bit deeper, to present a slightly more emotional moment.

I am astonishingly glad we do this. We should be exploring! We should be exploring art, we should be exploring mediums, we should be exploring the human psyche. Limiting ourselves beyond basic safety to specific little gardens of curated emotions is bad. Maybe emotional safety is the right place for some people at certain times, but we cannot generally confine ourselves. A deep and intrinsic part of human merit is exploration and discovery, especially in the domains of philosophy and art. And, on the flip side, the urge to regulate people into philosophical and emotional patterns is a classically evil one. This is the fascist monoculture, the thought policing of a repressive society, the town from Footloose.

Still, I do want to stress the importance of consensually engaging with art. It’s still wrong to unnecessarily put people into an uncomfortable situation they don’t want or need to be in. Obviously people aren’t coerced into playing video games and can always stop playing whenever they want to, so this is a relatively minor concern. But within a game if an unpleasant gate isn’t skippable, players have to weigh the “cost” of the gate against the “reward” of the material behind it. It’s a classic accessibility conversation, whether the gate is a trigger or just difficulty. To me this reads as an accessibility issue.

This is a concern that applies to SUPERHOT VR. There are several of these scenes in the game, and you have to play through them to progress through the game. This creates the possibility that someone who only wants to play the fun Matrix game but isn’t comfortable with these scenes being coerced into doing them. But in a game like SUPERHOT where the narrative is somewhat decoupled from the gameplay, this whole problem is easily avoidable with something like a skip button, or a preference option that skips these scenes for you. It wouldn’t be the “intended experience”, but for some subset of players this could unlock a locked game. The developers clearly did put some amount of thought into this, as there is a “skip disturbing scenes” option in the preferences, even though most people probably never opened the menu.

But the story was cut from the game

All these scenes were all cut from the game.

In 2021 (after the release of MCD), a mandatory patch was pushed to SUPERHOT VR, removing all the story content and leaving abrupt transitions between disks. The game that’s available now is a hollowed-out arcade experience of disconnected scenes bridged by a strictly utilitarian hub area. There was no option to revisit the scenes, and while a Steam beta branch for the old version was temporarily available, the developers quickly removed it, leaving the story completely inaccessible except to pirates.

The game was bombarded with negative reviews for a short time, but as new players who bought SUPERHOT VR didn’t know it was missing anything, the reviews went back to reflecting the (still very good) gameplay shortly after.

And kinda only the game

But there’s a lot that didn’t change. Both SUPERHOT and MIND CONTROL DELETE remain unrevised. You’re still mind controlled, you’re still killing real people, you still destroy your own body, and you still end the game by shooting yourself in the head. All the story removed from SUPERHOT VR remains untouched in the other games.

Not all the SUPERHOT VR story material is gone, either. It’s been ripped out of the game, but it’s so central to the product that in the real world it can’t just be cleanly removed. The press materials they’re still actively promoting on their website are still marketing the game on its intriguing story.

from the press kit

And why wouldn’t they? The story is a key part of the game. It’s the brand because it’s the product because it’s all one cohesive whole. The only thing awkwardly out of place here is the state of the game itself.

Deeper analysis with context

So what happened here? For me there are two obvious avenues for analysis.

The first is of the producer/consumer relationship and consumer rights. I find this less interesting, because SUPERHOT is straightforwardly in the wrong. They sold a product and then hijacked distribution channels to forcibly remove it from people. No contest here: this was wrong to do, shouldn’t be allowed, and squarely places the publisher in the role of a villain who is shamelessly anti-consumer. If all I needed to do is say whether the change was bad or not I could pack it up right here and go home.

The much more interesting question to me comes from examining the relationship at play here between art and artist. Why did this happen? Who was responsible for the decision? How do they see the issue as artists? And surely those beliefs won’t have any pernicious dangers baked into them, right?

There were two announcements explaining the change. The first was a Steam news update:

SUPERHOT VR - Important update (1.0.22.1) - 2021 “Skip disturbing scenes” toggle was added in a previous update. Considering sensitive time[sic] we’re living in, we can do better than that. You deserve better. All scenes alluding to self harm are now completely removed from the game. These scenes have no place in superhot virtual reality. We regret it took us so long.

We’re commited[sic] to shipping this update to all vr platforms.

- superhot team

The second was this discord post:

July 22, 2021

zxc 09:09 PM

piotr here, designer and ceo of superhot.

I just saw steam reviews for superhot vr moderated, which feels weird. Crushing game’s reviews like that was a valid message. It’s not the most pleasant, but I get it: something was taken from a game, as if stolen remotely. This didn’t feel right and you reacted.

SUPERHOT VR is now a scarred experience, as its’ ‘story’ hinges on the offending scenes removed. If you played before the update: you played a classic. This version is now history and we are not erasing it - we’re simply living on, responsibly. I don’t want us to sell this version any more. It does not feel right.

We’re still commited to removing these scenes on all VR platforms.

Place where time freezes until you move is far more interesting on its own, without the edgy narrative that forces you through a set of levels and until you get a “you win” message. Further updates will sharpen focus on gameplay and presence.

When I wrote “you deserve better”, I really really meant it. We first developed superhot for a 7 Day FPS Jam in 2013 and it was a massive success ever since. This was a taxing experience for everyone involved, myself included. Almost 8 years have passed and we’re still stuck making games about self-destructive loops: this is a fingerprint of this pressure. You deserve better than the product of stress and depression that we feel obliged to preserve because of the possible outrage of content removal.

superhot is a place where time stops until you move. You cannot possibly experience that without virtual reality. This place is made of hard concrete and brittle crystal exacly because this physics of shattering can be so mesmerising in slow motion. This place is safe in a weird way: even if it’s crumbling around you, the danger will not reach you until you move. If you ever froze still, scared of an object fast approaching - we deliver what your instincts wanted in that moment. This is the core of superhot virtual reality.

Scenes alluding to self-harm will not be part of this place. Neither will I allow for manipulative design and illusion of achievement. In Poland we call this ‘dzidzi-bobo design’⁴. We’re past that. Time freezing for you means you are in control and let this be foundation for all things superhot from now on.

I hope this clears up our intentions behind this important update. It was not easy to do and is not easy to communicate. I kept the original message minimal, but that only spawned confusion and in the end you deserve to know what is happening. I’m open to suggestions on how to preserve the old version, but maybe it’s better off as a folk tale rather than a working software.

Peace.

So apparently Piotr was behind cutting the story⁵, and he was quite insistent on keeping it gone.

But this is where things get interesting. The official discord server that was in use at the time still exists with that very message in the pins, and since Piotr did not peace out, we can read the actual thoughts and responses Piotr had at the time, in all their messiness. Piotr continued to explain his thought process in a back-and-forth with the community. Between the above text dump and his continuing conversation, there’s a lot of information to glean.

Carefully thinking through all the thoughts published here, a few key themes emerge. I’ve tried to organize them here.

Motivation is some feeling of “responsibility”

First, this is being done out of some sort of feeling of responsibility. From what I can see there was no outrage about the story as it existed. No complaints, no issue with ratings, no pressure to make a change. In fact, all the pressure was to keep the story as it was, and perhaps add to it. All the pressure here is internal, not external.

This is not a company trying to appeal to a market, this is a zealot.

zxc 09:09 PM

When I wrote “you deserve better”, I really really meant it. We first developed superhot for a 7 Day FPS Jam in 2013 and it was a massive success ever since. This was a taxing experience for everyone involved, myself included. Almost 8 years have passed and we’re still stuck making games about self-destructive loops: this is a fingerprint of this pressure. You deserve better than the product of stress and depression that we feel obliged to preserve because of the possible outrage of content removal.

Mr. OVERKILL 09:17 PM

What happened, @zxc ? Did the studio suffer a loss? What’s with this?

zxc 09:21 PM

I realised that we cannot proceed further without addressing the toxic issues at heart of this work. It took me a while. If this game is to grow, it is through rethinking of fundamentals instead of just adding more and more

Mr. OVERKILL 09:22 PM

These sounds like the ramblings of a madman at this point. Are you ok?

Toxic issues? There were no toxic issues

It was an interesting game within the VR space

A piece of art

zxc 09:22 PM

Yes, I am. I feel lighter as the game is free of those scenes.

zxc 09:52 PM

“updates that add content make people happy, updates that remove content make people unhappy” - lol. it became impossible for us to work without addressing the scenes in question.

The problem is that there is this “toxicity” in the game. Piotr felt he couldn’t “proceed” without purifying it. He found it “impossible to work” while the story remained as it was. Censoring the game made Piotr “feel lighter.”

zxc 01:21 AM

I long thought that this kind of update - removing self-harm - cannot be done without adding something great to the game. When recently I played this game again I realized that removing some parts is enough to hugely improve the game. I’ve made a new cut of a game. It’s really different and already feels more complete. Taking anything away is not my intent, but as superhot grows it also changes? thay means confronting the past.

These themes are so offensive to him, in fact, that he feels it’s improved just by removing the content. He argues that a version with a toggle — even one that’s off by default — is so substantially worse than the “new cut” that just removing the content is a “huge improvement.”

He’s arguing here that there is something intrinsically wrong with the story as it existed, and he sees the act of cutting this content as meritorious in and of itself simply because it removes something he now finds vile. Something about the story — either the self-destructive theme or the act of suicide itself — is somehow objectively and universally unacceptable and there was an absolute moral requirement that someone in the position to eliminate it do so. We “deserve better” because what we had before was objectively bad.

For obvious reason I object to these assertions, but I want to circle back to that later. Let’s see what all else is in play first.

As for why he identifies the themes of suicide as particularly objectionable, there’s this one curious comment:

zxc 02:15 AM

This is a matter of emotions. Story within a story is an intriguing concept. Virtual Virtual Reality does that great and wholesome: taking off the headsets is so swift that you can take them off and off and off. It’s a wonderful VR story.

Our handling of it was never this clean technically and it was never this wholesome. It was heavy-handed and only fuelled the auto-destructive story. I’m glad playing through our story was not disturbing for you, it can be a kick when the game crosses boundaries a bit. I don’t want to engage on this level anymore, though. As a creator I see lots of good things to be done so the story won’t be missed.

He references Virtual Virtual Reality, which I find so strange. VVR is bright and colorful and surrealist and doesn’t involve any pistols, but if you actually play the game it’s sometimes fun, sometimes sad, sometimes scary, and sometimes dark. I really hate to see “wholesome” art positioned as intrinsically better than art that’s complex or in the first place, but the comparison being made here is so painfully shallow. Especially if you’re familiar with the ending of VVR, which is weirdly the same as SUPERHOT’s: uploading your consciousness into a system while your body is violently destroyed. The reaction here is just “it made me feel nicer when there wasn’t a gun there :)”. Is this really coming from such a shallow place?

Actually, invoking Virtual Virtual Reality just reminds me that the themes in SUPERHOT VR aren’t an outlier, even for the nascent VR medium. VVR lets the player destroy their body and subject their consciousness to a fate worse than death. And — in another instance where I kind of couldn’t believe the game was doing what it was — Bonelab starts with the player character literally being lynched.

Objection to allowing even the option of restoring content

While the original announcement teased the possibility of optionally restoring content somehow, Piotr’s further comments solidified the fact that he was not going to allow this in any capacity.

zxc 09:09 PM

Scenes alluding to self-harm will not be part of this place. …

I hope this clears up our intentions behind this important update. It was not easy to do and is not easy to communicate. I kept the original message minimal, but that only spawned confusion and in the end you deserve to know what is happening. I’m open to suggestions on how to preserve the old version, but maybe it’s better off as a folk tale rather than a working software.

…

Mr. OVERKILL 09:12 PM

I don’t understand why be so adamant about “you deserve better” when this is CLEARLY not better?

Can we get a “beta” branch or a “DLC” with the deleted scenes then?

Or a “classic” realease for the current owners

This needs a fix, not a sweep under the rug

zxc 09:17 PM

Well, people differ in definition of ‘good’.

Mr. OVERKILL 09:17 PM

Yes they do. Very clearly.

Art is provocative sometimes.

zxc 09:17 PM

The deleted scenes are not coming back.

The earlier line about being “open to suggestions” appears to have been an attempt to let off pressure, not an honest, good-faith explanation of intent. The desire here is not to provide content warnings or create a guardrail, it’s to forcefully deny people one specific experience.

zxc 09:33 PM

Violence is part of gameplay of superhot. You shoot virtual enemies, you feel whatever you want doing it. It’s fantasy. Shooting others is not okay, but shooting virtual enemies I consider acceptable.

Game gatekeeping you from further levels and requiring to shoot yourself is manipulative. That’s wrong.

bustercody3 09:34 PM

That’s where the scene toggle came in perfectly fine

Mr. OVERKILL 09:34 PM

Isn’t the core of the game that you’re manipulated?

The toggle was fine, as buster said

bustercody3 09:34 PM

disable it by default, whatever, but what if other people (the main amount of people playing the game) finds those scenes intriguing

just leave the toggle

…

bustercody3 09:35 PM

I get your point, it’s not like I’m going to quit the game over this, I love the mechanics, but I really liked the whole plot

it just seems weird

you had a toggle

zxc 09:36 PM

Toggle is a lame solution. This toggle wasn’t really visible: you had to know about it to use it so it’s not a real interface solution

July 23, 2021

zxc 01:10 AM

I don’t think toggle was a good idea. It wasn’t a visible toggle, the scenes still came as a surprise, which is careless design. we could have worked on it more and try fixing it: opt-in vs. opt-out, but that poses a question should we really enable this option. what good does it do for the game? i couldn’t find a reason to keep those scenes in the game.

There’s a nod here toward the issue of consent I discussed previously. If levels are locked behind something offensive or triggering, isn’t that a kind of coercion? You’re no longer consensually engaging in whatever art you choose, you’re being forced through one specific gate, forced to experience one specific thing.

But the idea of allowing the scenes to be available at all is still being treated as unacceptable. Including — explicitly — a version of the game where the scenes were off by default, which would subvert the issue of coercion completely by making sure most people would never know it existed. This shows that his supposed objection to the game “gatekeeping you from further levels” isn’t the real concern.

Piotr clearly isn’t at all concerned with audience consent here, as he’s trying to impose a specific artistic vision on people and actively fighting them to do so. He sees a problem here, but it has nothing to do with consent. The problem as he understands it is that the existing art is objectionable in such a way that the only adequate “solution” is to fully obliterate it.

Gesturing towards the idea of audience consent like this is dishonest and wears down my ability to imagine Piotr as acting in good faith. Pretending you’re willing to preserve the content but then revealing you’re not is suspicious, but then trying to distract people by pointing to a concern you don’t really have reveals this behavior to be dishonest and manipulative.

Authority to impose this vision

Again, from a consumer perspective, it’s straightforwardly unacceptable to destroy someone’s copy of a game after they bought it from you. No room for debate there. That being said, it’s worth seeing how he tries to justify it:

zxc 09:09 PM

Scenes alluding to self-harm will not be part of this place. […]

…

zxc 09:39 PM

We’re making games, this is personal software that reaches each and everyone individually. We don’t control the context those games are played in.

…

Mr. OVERKILL 09:43 PM

I PAID for it

zxc 09:43 PM

“It’s complicated”

Mr. OVERKILL 09:43 PM

I buy music on CD and vinyl so that it doesn’t disappear on a whim. I buy games on GOG for the same reason.

The digital age is screwing with people’s perception of ownership, really shows

If I buy a piece of art to hang on a wall - I don’t expect the artist to show up 2 years later to change it

This would be nonsensical

notradaem 09:46 PM

i guess my priorities when it comes to this art are different than yours.

Mr. OVERKILL 09:46 PM

Happy for you, so?

zxc 09:46 PM

virtual reality is different somehow. currently platforms are focused on ‘apps’ or ‘games’, but the atomic (smallest) piece of VR content is more like ‘an object’ or ‘a place’. If you think of superhot as a virtual place it’s only natural that this place changes over time.

There is a specific assertion of authority here. The claim is that VR — for some unspecified reason — fundamentally transforms the relationship between work and audience. Because the products themselves are like a “place”, and in the real world we often visit places that change on other peoples’ authority, people simply shouldn’t expect to have any control over virtual reality. Ironically, this argument is that games aren’t atomic things that people can have, but instead players must subject themselves to a foreign system. Playing the game means some CEO has power over you, and that’s — so Piotr argues — right.

I find this really objectionable, for reasons I simply cannot stop talking about. It’s an unjustified claim of feudalist power that sees the player as a tenant of a space they have no claim to. It sees a chain of relationships based on unidirectional power disparities: the player as a subject of the game company, who is the subject of the platform, who is the subject of the hardware manufacturer, and so on and so forth forever until you get to the king.

But there’s a lot about this situation that makes it particularly strange to claim that kind of power. Live service games are very much a thing (one I famously hate) but this isn’t one. This is a standalone forever game that was feature-complete when it was sold. It got a few content updates, which were nice, but for the most part the developers moved on to working on other games, which was perfectly fine and expected. There is no expectation that this “place” would be something dynamic that would change over time, whether for good or for ill.

The specific basis Piotr uses here is particularly bizarre: it’s basically just vibes. There’s an argument here about power derived from intuitiveness: because it feels right for users to be subject to outsized outside influence in virtual reality. This is, of course, extraordinarily terrible. The presentation of a thing can’t change its ownership status, especially when the presentation is determined by an outside party with an interest in hoarding power.

In my wildest fears, this is why corporations were so giddy about the “metaverse”: the ability to manipulate presentation to keep a power grab from feeling objectionable creates the opportunity to further transform the business-customer relationship to one of owner-subject. This is a dystopia where, due to hard control over the technology used to access and define a space, there would be no limiting principle on what the worst people in the world could make “only natural.”

But there is potential for utopia in VR too. Like all computing, VR offers the possibility for people to realize incredible capabilities, so long as the architecture isn’t intentionally compromised. An incredible merit of every media format is the ability to preserve ideas and experiences. If it can be digitized, it can be perfectly saved in a format that doesn’t decay, and can be copied and shared freely. But to remove the security of the individual over their own affairs is to cripple the medium. As long as platforms aren’t held captive, as long as individual executives can’t wield arbitrary control over people’s personal choices, computers can be good. But SUPERHOT VR is doing its part to make sure we don’t get there.

Insisting the story doesn’t matter

Piotr also takes the interesting stance⁶ that the gameplay is the only thing of value in SUPERHOT VR, and the story isn’t part of the work. (Or if it is, it shouldn’t be, or something.)

Don’t confuse this with the purpose of the removal. The story being “insignificant” is not why it’s being removed — it’s being removed because of his offense to the darkness of the themes. The purpose of arguing that the story doesn’t matter is to defuse the obvious objection to the removal: that it’s a defining characteristic that should not be removed. The trivialization is a defense of the negative action, not a positive explanation for why it was done.

zxc 01:10 AM

I don’t think toggle was a good idea. It wasn’t a visible toggle, the scenes still came as a surprise, which is careless design. we could have worked on it more and try fixing it: opt-in vs. opt-out, but that poses a question should we really enable this option. what good does it do for the game? i couldn’t find a reason to keep those scenes in the game.

zxc 09:23 PM

Time freezing until you move is the real vr product here. It’s interesting to work on it, still.

…

zxc 09:33 PM

Violence is part of gameplay of superhot. You shoot virtual enemies, you feel whatever you want doing it. It’s fantasy. Shooting others is not okay, but shooting virtual enemies I consider acceptable.

…

zxc 09:54 PM

it’s not like the manipulative power of this game is so strong.

It’s just not the message we’re want to send out. It’s not important to the game’s core.

zxc 10:12 PM

From the inside view of development I see a lot of time put into things not significant (auto-destructive narrative), while the core of the game - physics, shattering in slow motion, sound - get skipped over. We focused on wrong things, because important stuff is difficult technically. That’s the negative message from my point of view.

…

zxc 10:18 PM

We’re adults too and we don’t treat other adults with these kind of scenes. It’s not respectful to the kind strangers trying out our game

Deleted User 10:53 PM

This is why piracy exists. People will pirate old versions because the devs won’t add major features back.

zxc 10:54 PM

I’m okay with that. Piracy is default.

I’m done pretending that this scenes are major feature. If they really are - we failed.

Piotr consistently insists that the story of SUPERHOT does not matter. The violence is fine, but because it’s part of the gameplay. The theme of the story — the game manipulating the player — is not essential to the piece. He argues that the time mechanic is the only thing of value and the story won’t be missed. In fact, he says that if people valued the story they told, it was a failure on his part. “Time freezing until you move is the real vr product here.”

I find this to be incredibly reductive. Even in a gameplay-first piece like SUPERHOT, there is something deeply juvenile about going “my game is tainted with this unnecessary story” akin to “my movie is tainted with this unnecessary set design”. It’s failing to see that the thing is its whole: that the flavorings and the connective tissue are the bow tying the work together, not dead weight to be hacked away. Like any art, the game is greater than the sum of its parts, and it’s much greater than any one of its parts by itself in a void. But you can’t just look at the different discrete components of a game and pick which one matters. When you have a perfect cake, you can’t ask for a list of the ingredients and pick your favorite off the list and expect that to be the same as cake but better.

But just to peel back the layers, let’s say the game mechanics are the most significant “core” of this particular game, and anything else in the package is only valid insofar as it serves that core purpose. It’s certainly true that a story could need to be removed or retooled if it detracted from the rest of the game. But that’s an important “if”! Does the story of SUPERHOT actually detract in any way from gameplay? Clearly not; everything up to this point has been focused on how well the mechanics and this plot cohered. Piotr even talked about this himself at GDC. The gameplay lends itself to sprints of intense focus followed by dopamine spikes, which meshes perfectly with the story theme which makes a commentary on that exact mechanic. Ludonarrative harmony.

Plasmaguy 10:27 PM

have you even READ the DOG entries from MCD?

legitimately

have you?!

zxc 10:28 PM

i legitimately haven’t

Piotr’s personal disregard for story also lines up with peoples’ roles on the project. The scenes aren’t a “major feature” and he won’t “pretend” they are, but they’re also notably not work he did. Based on the credits, the stories of both games were primarily driven by other writers. There’s this weird line “because important stuff is difficult technically” that reads as a snub: “they didn’t want to do the hard work, so they spent their time on this frivolous story instead.” I can’t help but imagine a bias here — “only my thing matters” — but hopefully that’s just projection.

The other writers may have been on board with Piotr’s effort, or this may have been against their creative wishes as well. (If the latter, how sad to have your work destroyed like this....) Everything I’ve talked about so far — the cuts themselves, the Steam announcement, the community response — seem to have been done by Piotr unilaterally without the involvement of other members of the team. Cezary Skorupk and Marcin Surma haven’t spoken about this, so it’s only a guess how they feel about it. As for people who have spoken about this topic… well, they’ve promised this exact situation wouldn’t happen:

And the story may be cancerous to the game

Out of all my points on this list this is the one I have the least confidence in, but I feel like I am seeing a thread here that’s worth noting.

When describing SUPERHOT, Piotr always describes how the game is centered on one fundamental mechanic, and everything else comes from iterating on that. He talked about this during the game jam, he talked about this at GDC, and he’s still talking about it on Discord:

Piotr Iwanicki in Superhot Interview: Becoming the Weapon in a Turn Based FPS Environment I come from making tiny flash games and it was a field where you would often make a game that boiled down to one idea. You then build around this idea, but at the core it’s this pure simplicity. What worked really well for me in coming up with those unique cores for games was always trying to combine things that you’ve already seen somehow and make it into a something completely new. For SUPERHOT the starting point was “a turn-based FPS”, which quickly was boiled down to fluid turn “time moves when you move FPS”.

Piotr Iwanicki, Game Design and Mind Control in SUPERHOT (alt) You can treat this ‘time moves only when you move’ as a gimmick. You could use it in just some sections of the game, or make it a power-up. But we wanted to make this … the core idea and let it resonate through all the other aspects of gameplay.

zxc 09:09 PM

Scenes alluding to self-harm will not be part of this place. Neither will I allow for manipulative design and illusion of achievement. In Poland we call this ‘dzidzi-bobo design’. We’re past that. Time freezing for you means you are in control and let this be foundation for all things superhot from now on.

zxc 09:09 PM

We first developed superhot for a 7 Day FPS Jam in 2013 and it was a massive success ever since. This was a taxing experience for everyone involved, myself included. Almost 8 years have passed and we’re still stuck making games about self-destructive loops: this is a fingerprint of this pressure. You deserve better than the product of stress and depression that we feel obliged to preserve because of the possible outrage of content removal.

We already saw the idea that the story doesn’t matter and the core gameplay is the value of the game. There is a gesture here in the direction of saying that the story is something that emerged from stress and depression, and now is a malignant thing detracting from the health of the host.

July 23, 2021

Lollerobot 12:18 AM

there will be at least one more update.

I noticed this from the long conversation. Is that update going to bring more gameplay content or is it just going to remedy the story which is now a bit lacking?

Also, are you guys planning on any more VR games in the future or was SuperhotVR a one time special treat?

zxc 12:48 AM

What do you mean by remedy the story?

I started with pure gameplay and added shuffling levels: you start the game immediately in the zwishenplatz void with a pyramid in front of you. grabbing it starts random level with level phases shuffled. effectively it a surprise any time you grab a pyramid, you land in different part of the original game.

Adding new content to that would require a VR editor which can be simple enough: maybe just select a place on an existing level, put items, put enemies, maybe give items to enemies? i don’t know. simple stuff.

I consider superhot still an unfinished game, but most of superhot team is doing other vr games, on their own.

This is a description of the games’ endless modes, unlocked after finishing the story. Is that something closer to what Piotr thinks the game should have been? An arcade-style shuffle of disconnected levels?

Specific rejection of the theme of the story

As I described at the top of the article, SUPERHOT is a beautiful mesh of a power fantasy and a critique of the power fantasy. But Piotr specifically rejects this:

zxc 09:09 PM

superhot is a place where time stops until you move. You cannot possibly experience that without virtual reality. This place is made of hard concrete and brittle crystal exacly because this physics of shattering can be so mesmerising in slow motion. This place is safe in a weird way: even if it’s crumbling around you, the danger will not reach you until you move. If you ever froze still, scared of an object fast approaching - we deliver what your instincts wanted in that moment. This is the core of superhot virtual reality.

Scenes alluding to self-harm will not be part of this place. Neither will I allow for manipulative design and illusion of achievement. In Poland we call this ‘dzidzi-bobo design’. We’re past that. Time freezing for you means you are in control and let this be foundation for all things superhot from now on.

He unironically parrots exactly the sentiment the games point out as foolish and bad; “it’s just killing red guys.” The SUPERHOT games make a point of critiquing exactly this attitude of uncritical hunger for a raw power fantasy.

But to hear Piotr talk, uncritical hunger for a raw power fantasy is the whole point. It’s in VR because that lets you fully experience how rad it is. It’s supposed to feel safe because being able to feel safe whenever you want feels great. It’s supposed to be mesmerizing and beautiful and fun. What SUPERHOT means is looking cool as hell and bouncing from dopamine hit to dopamine hit and how great it is to be the best boy.

These are all things that make for good gameplay, but here Piotr is elevating them to be the goal of the work overall. The demand is that the control fantasy not just be a merit of the gameplay, it needs to define your entire relationship with the work. The aspect of the game that is most masturbatory needs to be the only thing. The pleasure needs to drown out any other experience you might have with the work.

Do we object so strongly to even the possibility of mental friction? Is this a toy that people should be able to interact with at their leisure; should we pick it up when we want, put it down when we want, and think our own thoughts about the matter? Or is Piotr simply the same as the villainous SUPERHOT? Is the only goal to keep people playing, keep people in that flow state, keep brains hooked up to that dopamine response?

So what do we think

Ultimately, what happened is a developer had a change of heart about what their game should have been after the fact. And the way they acted on that wasn’t to release a new cut or make a new game, but to deface the old work they were no longer happy with. People are extremely sensitive about the idea of outside tampering, but sometimes legitimately objectionable tampering can come from the original creator. In this case, someone acting out some compulsion of “responsibility” to remove one specific idea from the game. There’s no outside pressure to blame, no woke mob. Just the person who made it.

It’s clear that the objection is to one arbitrary moment — VR scenes involving self-harm — due to the specificity of what was removed. The self-destructive themes and even the acting out of self-harm and suicide are still fully present in the other SUPERHOT games. SUPERHOT VR is itself still an orgy of gun violence. This is just one person fixated on a specific topic who now insists that it be absent from their work.

But the thing that really disturbs me is the artistic sanitization. SUPERHOT VR was a work that had disturbing elements. It had the potential to make people uncomfortable. It disgusts me to see things like “discomfort” treated as objectively harmful in art. A self-destructive spiral leading to suicide is disturbing and uncomfortable, but I also found it to be a profound experience. It’s good to consider and interact with discomfort! The death of an unnamed fictional character is not so obscene that it cannot be allowed to be depicted, no matter how immersive the depiction is. Is it okay for these stories to exist? The answer to this question must be yes, but with the SUPERHOT VR cuts, someone is clumsily trying to answer no.

My objection hinges on the fact that the work was already published without expectation of change and is now being worsened. I am not arguing that people be compelled to produce art in a specific way. I do not demand anything fit a specific set of criteria, nor do I demand artists filter or unfilter their expressive process in any particular way. If SUPERHOT VR had come out with no story this might still be a topic for analysis, but nothing would have been objectively wrong.

But in this case the work came out and then defaced years later, in an act explicitly predicated on a reconsideration of the work. The change of removing the story was not in any way a continuation of the creative process, it was a separate act of destruction.

Even though the motivation seems to have been internally driven, it disgusts me that Piotr felt a responsibility to make his work something other than what it was. By choosing to deface the work so long after publication, the author isn’t giving the work the respect it’s due as art, nor are they taking their custodial responsibilities seriously. One of the reasons this is wrong is because the work had artistic significance. This is an act of destruction that not only denies agency to individual players, but also cuts off the “Long Tail” of the artistic impact of the work. It’s an opinionated act trying to enforce a specific judgment: “this work should not exist.”

But the author is dead, and this is why. “This work should not exist” is a position that falls within a range of acceptability. But it’s not the only judgment anyone should be able to have about the work, even if it did come from someone involved in the original act of creation. It’s imperative to have a culture of pluralistic artistic discourse. There can’t be any one person who dictates an objective truth about how any one work should be judged, or what topics should and should not be discussed in general.

Piotr is taking an opinionated artistic stance here about whether a piece was good. It’s ironic that he is standing in opposition his past self and to people who think his past work was good, but what matters is this is not a neutral stance but one position out of many. To demand the power to enforce it as an objective fact is wrong, and made wronger by the fact that this interpretation is so decidedly fringe. It is not an error for someone to think work has merit, and it is not an error for someone to dislike of work. What is unacceptable is to demand one specific reaction to an idea and attempt to enforce it via some side channel means of control over the audience.

Ultimately, SUPERHOT VR doesn’t matter. As Piotr said, people are free to just pirate the game if they care so much about preserving those scenes. (If they’re on open platforms, anyway....) This all happened back in 2021, and while a lot of extraordinarily terrible things have happened since then, I don’t think they can be attributed to this.

But this shouldn’t have happened! This shouldn’t have happened here, and I don’t want to see it happen anywhere else either. So much of my life is watching idiots at the top throwing levers and breaking things they don’t value or don’t understand. It’s bizarre to see something like SUPERHOT follow the same pattern.

Some footage from Spazbo4 and Schlauchi at WorldOfLongplays, used with thanks!

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I actually have no idea what Piotr means by this. The only references online to anything approaching “dzidzi-bobo” are quotations of this one chat message. “Dzidzi” and “bobo” can be translated as “baby”, so this would be something like “baby design.” I don’t know why Piotr would mean by this in context here, though.... ↩
Also, I’m pretty sure Piotr wrote that steam announcement himself and fired it off without going through copy-editors, Elon Musk style. Other announcements consistently stylize the name as “SUPERHOT” in capital letters, and aren’t riddled with typos. This isn’t a personal judgment — I don’t think English is his first language — but it does indicate that this was just injected by him personally. ↩
This is all somewhat contradictory with his original acknowledgment that “SUPERHOT VR is now a scarred experience, as its’ ‘story’ hinges on the offending scenes removed” ↩

Why training AI can't be IP theft

2025-04-03T00:00:00-05:00

AI is a huge subject, so it’s hard to boil my thoughts down into any single digestible take. That’s probably a good thing. As a rule, if you can fit your understanding of something complex into a tweet, you’re usually wrong. So I’m continuing to divide and conquer here, eat the elephant one bite at a time, etc.

Right now I want to address one specific question: whether people have the right to train AI in the first place. The argument that they do not¹ goes like this:

When a corporation trains generative AI they have unfairly used other people’s work without consent or compensation to create a new product they own. Worse, the new product directly competes with the original workers. Since the corporations didn’t own the original material and weren’t granted any specific rights to use it for training, they did not have the right to train with it. When the work was published, there was no expectation it would be used like this, as the technology didn’t exist and people did not even consider “training” as a possibility. Ultimately, the material is copyrighted, and this action violates the authors’ copyright.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about this argument and its implications. Unfortunately, even though I think that while this identifies a legitimate complaint, the argument is dangerously wrong, and the consequences of acting on it (especially enforcing a new IP right) would be disastrous. Let me work through why:

The complaint is real

Artists wanting to use copyright to limit the “right to train” isn’t the right approach, but not because their complaint isn’t valid. Sometimes a course of action is bad because the goal is bad, but in this case I think people making this complaint are trying to address a real problem.

I agree that the dynamic of corporations making for-profit tools using previously published material to directly compete with the original authors, especially when that work was published freely, is “bad.” This is also a real thing companies want to do. Replacing labor that has to be paid wages with capital that can be owned outright increases profits, which is every company’s purpose. And there’s certainly a push right now to do this. For owners and executives production without workers has always been the dream. But even though it’s economically incentivized for corporations, the wholesale replacement of human work in creative industries would be disastrous for art, artists, and society as a whole.

So there’s a fine line to walk here, because I don’t want to dismiss the fear. The problem is real and the emotions are valid, but that doesn’t mean none of the reactions are reactionary and dangerous. And the idea that corporations training on material is copyright infringement is just that.

The learning rights approach

So let me focus in on the idea that one needs to license a “right to train”, especially for training that uses copyrighted work. Although I’m ultimately going to argue against it, I think this is a reasonable first thought. It’s also a very serious proposal that’s actively being argued for in significant forums.

Copyright isn’t a stupid first thought. Copyright (or creative rights in general) intuitively seems like the relevant mechanism for protecting work from unauthorized uses and plagiarism, since the AI models are trained using copyrighted work that is licensed for public viewing but not for commercial use. Fundamentally, the thing copyright is “for” is making sure artists are paid for their work.

This was one of my first thoughts too. Looking at the inputs and outputs, as well as the overall dynamic of unfair exploitation of creative work, “copyright violation” is a good place to start. I even have a draft article where I was going to argue for this same point myself. But as I’ve thought through the problem further, that logic breaks down. And the more I work through it, every IP-based argument I’ve seen to try to support artists has massively harmful implications that make the cure worse than the disease.

Definition, proposals, assertions

The idea of a learning right is this: in addition to the traditional reproduction right copyright reserves to the author, authors should be able to prevent people from training AI on their work by withholding the right.

This learning right would be parallel to other reservable rights, like reproduction: it could be denied outright, or licensed separately from both viewing and reproduction rights at the discretion of the rightsholder. Material could be published such that people were freely able to view it but not able to use it as part of a process that would eventually create new work, including training AI. The mechanical ability to train data is not severable from the ability to view it, but the legal right would be.

This is already being widely discussed in various forms, usually as a theory of legal interpretation or a proposal for new policy.

Asserting this right already exists

Typically, when the learning rights theory is seen in the wild it’s being pushed by copyright rightsholders who are asserting that the right to restrict others from training on their works already exists.

A prime example of this is the book publishing company Penguin Random House, which asserts that the right to train an AI from a work is already a right that they can reserve:

Penguin Random House Copyright Statement (Oct 2024) No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. In accordance with Article 4(3) of the Digital Single Market Directive 2019/790, Penguin Random House expressly reserves this work from the text and data mining exception.

In the same story, the Society of Authors explicitly affirms the idea that AI training cannot be done without a license, especially if that right is explicitly claimed:

Anna Ganley, Society of Authors CEO …we’re pleased to see publishers starting to add to the ‘All rights reserved’ notice to explicitly exclude the use of a work for the purpose of training [generative AI], as it provides greater clarity and helps to explain to readers what cannot be done without rights-holder consent.

Battersby does a good job here in highlighting that it is explicitly the training action being objected to, irrespective of potential future outputs:

Matilda Battersby, “Penguin Random House underscores copyright protection in AI rebuff” (Oct 2024) Publishing lawyer Chien‑Wei Lui, senior associate at Fox Williams LLP, told The Bookseller that “the chances of an AI platform providing an output that is, in itself, a copy or infringement of an author’s work, is incredibly low.” She said it was the training of LLMs “which is the infringing action, and publishers should be ensuring they can control that action for the benefit of themselves and their authors”.

Proposal to create a new right

Asserting that the right already exists is the norm. An approach — and in my opinion, a more honest one — is to argue that while it doesn’t already exist, it needs to be created. Actual lawsuits are loath to admit in their complaint that the law they want enforced doesn’t exist yet, so this logic mostly comes indirectly from advocacy organizations, like the (particularly gross) Authors Guild:

The Authors Guild, “AG Statement on Writers’ Lawsuits Against OpenAI” The Authors Guild has been lobbying aggressively for guardrails around generative AI because of the urgency of the problem; specifically, we are seeking legislation that will clarify that permission is required to use books, articles, and other copyright-protected work in generative AI systems, and a collective licensing solution to make this feasible.

Andrew Albanese, “Authors Join the Brewing Legal Battle Over AI” In a June 29 statement, the Authors Guild applauded the filing of the litigation—but also appeared to acknowledge the difficult legal road the cases may face in court. “Using books and other copyrighted works to build highly profitable generative AI technologies without the consent or compensation of the authors of those works is blatantly unfair—whether or not a court ultimately finds it to be fair use,” the statement read. Guild officials go on to note that they have been “lobbying aggressively” for legislation that would “clarify that permission is required to use books, articles, and other copyright-protected work in generative AI systems,” and for establishing “a collective licensing solution” to make getting permissions feasible. A subsequent June 30 open letter, signed by a who’s who of authors, urges tech industry leaders to “mitigate the damage to our profession” by agreeing to “obtain permission” and “compensate writers fairly” for using books in their AI.

Naive copying

There is also a black-sheep variation of this idea that insists training is itself copying the work. In this case there would be no need for separate rights and protections around training, since it’s a trivial application of existing copyright protection.

In their lawsuit against Stability AI, artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, Karla Ortiz, Hawke Southworth, Grzegorz Rutkowski, Gregory Manchess, Gerald Brom, Jingna Zhang, Julia Kaye, and Adam Ellis assert that training itself is an illegal copy, and models themselves are “compressed” copies of original works.

In an interview, complainant Kelly McKernan explains that the lawsuit is explicitly a demand to require companies to negotiate a license to train AI on work, not a general stand against generative AI existing.

Emilia David, “What’s next for artists suing Stability AI and Midjourney” What do you want to see for yourself and how companies view, work and help distribute artists’ work after this lawsuit?

[Kelly McKernan:]
For one thing, I’m hoping to see that just the movement, in this case, is going to highlight the very problematic parts of these models and instead help move it into a phase of generative AI that has models with licensed content and with artists getting paid as it should have been the entire time.

The judge acknowledges in the order that it has the potential to take down every single model that uses Stability, and I feel it can eliminate a whole class of plagiarizing models. No company would want to mess with that, and people and other companies would be more thoughtful and ask if the data in the AI model is licensed.

Setting boundaries: human learning is good

Unlike most people earnestly making the learning rights argument, proposals to expand copyright often don’t limit the proposed expansion in a human-reasonable way. This makes sense, since they’re focused on making progress in one specific direction. So just to establish a ground rule for discussion: in the reasonable argument I’m seeing reasonable people make, regardless of how we treat AI, people learning from art is a good thing. In a good-faith discussion, I’m assuming your goal is to defend against AI, not sabotage existing human artists.

The right for people to learn from anything they’re allowed to see is crucial, for what should be obvious reasons. People have an inalienable right to think. Human creativity involves creating new ideas drawing from a lived experience of ideas, designs, and practice. Influences influence people, and those people create new artistic work using their own skill and knowledge of the craft, which they own themselves. We shouldn’t need a special license for works we see to influence the way we think about the world, or to use published work to inform our knowledge of creative craft.

If humans were somehow required to have an explicit license to learn from work, it would be the end of individual creativity as we know it. In our real world, requiring licensing for every source of inspiration and skill would collapse artistic work down to a miserable chain-of-custody system that only massive established corporations could effectively participate in. That, and/or some kind of dystopian Black Mirror affair, where the human mind is technologically incapable of ingesting new information unless it comes with the requisite DRM.

People have the rights to own and use their own skills and abilities by default, unless there’s a very specific reason barring them from a particular practice. You have every right to learn multiple styles and even imitate other artists, for instance. But you don’t have the right to use that skill to counterfeit, forge, copy, or otherwise plagiarize someone else, because that action is specifically harmful and prohibited. This is all very straightforward.

Unfortunately there does exist an unhinged territorial artist mindset among people who feel an unlimited right to “control their work”, including literally preventing other people from learning from it. But the idea that people shouldn’t be able to learn from published work is genuinely evil, and to people seriously trying to argue for it are deranged.

The weird way Hitler particles keep appearing in artist discourse is fascinating, but probably a topic for another day. For now, suffice it to say this mentality exists and I do not respect it.

Not within existing copyright

Regardless of what new IP rights can and should be created, a reservable learning does not exist within copyright now.

Viewing rights

People are only able to learn from work we can observe in the first place, so let’s think about the set of instructional and inspiring work a given person/company has the right to view.

If you own a physical copy of something you’re obviously able — both physically and legally — to observe it. Examples of this are books, prints, posters, and any other physical media. You have it, it inspires you, you reference it, you’re golden. There are also cases when you don’t own a copy, but have the right to observe a performance. Examples of this are ticketed performances and theater showings, but also things like publicly and privately displayed work. If you visit a museum you can view the works; if you visit a library you can read the books.

When you post your creative work publicly (on the internet or elsewhere), you own the copyright (since it’s creative work fixed in a medium), but posting it publicly also means you are publishing the work. This scenario of someone having the right to view something but not owning a copy or any particular license is extremely common on the internet. If you put a work online, anyone you serve a copy to (or authorize a platform to serve a copy to) has the right to view it.

Just publishing something publicly doesn’t mean you forfeit the copyright to it. But you inevitably lose certain “soft power” over it, such as secrecy and the ability to prevent discussion of the work. But that doesn’t mean the work is in the public domain, and it doesn’t mean people have an unlimited right to reproduce or commercialize work just because it’s on the internet. Publishing a work does not mean you’re relinquishing any reserved right, except possibly licensing a web platform to serve the file to people. Putting work “out there” does not grant the public the reserved rights of copying, redistributing, or using your work commercially. Just because a stock image is on Google Images doesn’t mean you have the right to use it in a commercial product.

Fortunately I think this all maps pretty cleanly to people’s actual expectations in the medium. If someone posts art, they know other people can see it, but they also know the public isn’t allowed to freely redistribute it or commercialize it. It’s just public to view.

Unenumerated right

But talking about who does and doesn’t “have” a “viewing right” is a backwards way to think about it.

Copyright grants creators specific reserved rights. Without copyright, people would be able to act lawfully: do whatever they want to do as long as there wasn’t a specific law or contractual agreement against it, including copying creative works and using them commercially without permission. Copyright singles out a few rights — namely the reproduction right — and reserves them to the creator, who can then manage those rights at their discretion. People are still able to do whatever they want with creative works as long as there isn’t a specific law prohibiting it or a reserved permission they don’t have. They can’t reproduce work by default, but only because that right is explicitly reserved.

Reserved rights are enumerated: only rights explicitly listed are reserved. Non-reserved rights are unenumerated: they’re not on any comprehensive list, but you have a right to do anything unless there’s a specific prohibition against it. It’s allow-by-default with a blacklist of exception, not deny-by-default with a whitelist. You can’t stab someone in the eye with a fork, not because “stabbing” is missing from your list of allowed actions, but because “stabbing” is assault, which is explicitly on a short list of things you are expressly prohibited from doing.

If you hold the copyright to a work you are automatically granted a reserved reproduction right, and you can manage that right in an extremely granular way. You can reserve the right to make copies to yourself, or you can license specific parties to be able to copy and distribute the work by contract, or you can make a work generally redistributable under specific conditions, or you can relinquish these rights and release things as open-source or public domain². Because the law allows you to explicitly reserve that particular right, and that right can be sublicensed, you retain extremely specific control over the specific behavior that right covers.

But only a few rights are enumerated and reserved by copyright. Viewing, like most actions, is an unenumerated right; you don’t need any particular active permission to do it, you just need to not be actively infringing on a reserved right. If you’re able to view something and there’s nothing specifically denying you the right, you have the right to view it. And the right to restrict someone from viewing something they’re already able to view isn’t one of the special rights copyright reserves.

Learning

Learning is another unenumerated right, and is nearly the same thing as viewing already. If you’re able to learn from something, you’re allowed to do so. And this unenumerated right can’t be decoupled from the viewing. Learning isn’t a reserved right, so you don’t need specific permission to do it. You have the right by default, and the only way for people to deny you that right is to keep you from experiencing the work at all.

You don’t have to negotiate a commercial license for work just because knowing about it influenced something you did. That’s not reserved, and so isn’t a licensable right. You don’t have to negotiate a license from the creator, because the creator isn’t able to reserve an “education” right they can grant you. It would be absurd if they could!

Mike Godwin 🇺🇸@sfmnemonic
Don't want to trigger anyone, but I have to confess that I trained my writing algorithms by reading other people's books, including countless books I didn't pay for.
Fri Sep 29 23:16:07 +0000 2023

All that means the right to learn is mechanically coupled to the right to view. Rightsholders can use the reproduction right to control who is able to view a work, but if someone can view it, they can learn from it. There’s no way to separate the two. You can’t withhold the right for people to learn and still publish material for them to view.

You have the right to use materials that you already have the right to view to learn the craft. If you buy a painting, or someone posts an image online, your right to view it (which you’ve been granted) is inextricable from your right to think about that image. It’s definitely not “theft” to learn from work!

In an all-time hall-of-fame screw up, the CEO of Microsoft AI Mustafa Suleyman responded to the question of whether “the AI companies have effectively stolen the world’s IP” with this historically disastrous answer:

I think that with respect to content that’s already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the ‘90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been “freeware,” if you like, that’s been the understanding.

But, — and this is me being extremely generous — I think what he was trying to get at here was the same point I’m trying to make: that people do have every right to learn from already-published material. He was just so staggeringly incompetent at selling it that instead of saying any of that he made a different, wrong claim.

The flip side of this is that you do actually have to be able to lawfully view the material for any of this logic to apply. There is not an unlimited, automatic right to be able to view and learn from all information. You can’t demand free access to copyrighted work just because you want to learn from it. You can buy a copy, use a library, or find it published on the internet, but you still need to have a lawful way to access it in the first place.

So, if a company just pirates all the copyrighted material they can and use it to train a model, that’s still obviously illegal. In addition to the unfair competition issue, that particular model is the direct result of specifically criminal activity, and it’d be totally inappropriate if the company could still make money off it.

Meta did exactly that, because they don’t care about any of this high-minded “what’s actually legal” business. They’re just crooks.

Kate Knibbs, “Meta Secretly Trained Its AI on a Notorious Piracy Database, Newly Unredacted Court Docs Reveal” These newly unredacted documents reveal exchanges between Meta employees unearthed in the discovery process, like a Meta engineer telling a colleague that they hesitated to access LibGen data because “torrenting from a [Meta-owned] corporate laptop doesn’t feel right 😃”. They also allege that internal discussions about using LibGen data were escalated to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (referred to as “MZ” in the memo handed over during discovery) and that Meta’s AI team was “approved to use” the pirated material.

“Meta has treated the so-called ‘public availability’ of shadow datasets as a get-out-of-jail-free card, notwithstanding that internal Meta records show every relevant decision-maker at Meta, up to and including its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, knew LibGen was ‘a dataset we know to be pirated,’” the plaintiffs allege in this motion.

This is a completely different situation than using works you own or scraping publicly available data from the internet. This is just doing crimes for profit. The model created from pirated data is criminal proceeds, and Meta should absolutely not be permitted to use the ill-gotten assets as part of any further business.

Meta’s behavior here is an extremely relevant case because it’s an explicit example of crossing the line into illegality. By my logic here, Meta had an extraordinarily large amount of data they could have trained on: any data in the public domain, any data published on the open web, and any media they purchased even one copy of. But instead they chose to train using more data than they had any right to access in the first place. Even though I’m arguing that most training should be legal, by engaging in unabashed media piracy to acquire the data in the first place Meta shows a clear example of what violating the limits and engaging in illegal training looks like.

Feature, not a bug

Copyright allowing people to freely learn from creative works makes complete sense because it also maps directly to what copyright is ultimately for.

The point of copyright in the first place is to incentivize development and progress of the arts by offsetting a possible perverse incentive that would stop people from creating new work. Learning from other work and using that knowledge to develop new works is exactly the behavior copyright is designed to encourage. Moreover, when copyright does grant exclusive rights to creators, it only protects tangible creative expressions. It’s not a monopoly right over a vast possibility space of all the work they could theoretically make. So it’s exactly correct that learning is not a reserved right, and letting people view work necessarily allows them to learn from it.

Hinge question: is training copying?

So let’s bring this back around to the main question: whether existing copyright principles let creators restrict AI training.

Training an AI involves processing large volumes of creative material. In the standard scenario where the entity training the model has the right to view that work but no particular license to copy it, is the act of training a copyright violation? The vital question this hinges on is this: is the actual act of training an AI equivalent to copying, or is it more comparable to viewing and analysis? Are companies training on work copying that work (which they do not have the right to do) or reviewing the work (which they do)? If training is copying, then training on this data would be a copyright violation. If not, we’ll have to dig deeper to find a reason model training on unlicensed material could be illegal.

I think the unambiguous answer to this question is that the act of training is viewing and analysis, not copying. There is no particular copy of the work (or any copyrightable elements) stored in the model. While some models are capable of producing work similar to their inputs, this isn’t their intended function, and that ability is instead an effect of their general utility. Models use input work as the subject of analysis, but they only “keep” the understanding created, not the original work.

Training is analysis

Before understanding what training isn’t (copying), it’s important to understand what training is for, on both a technical and practical level.

A surprisingly popular understanding is that generative AI is a database, and constructing an output image is just collaging existing images it looks up on a table. This is completely incorrect. The ways generative AI training actually works is something legitimately parallel to how humans “learn” what things should look like. It’s genuinely incredible technology, and it’s not somehow “buying the hype” to accurately understand the process.

Training is the process of mathematically analyzing data and identifying underlying relationships, then outputting a machine-usable model of information that describes how to use those relationships to generate new outputs that follow the same patterns. The data in the model isn’t copied from the work, it’s the analysis of the work.

This is something even the original complaint in the Andersen v. Stability AI case gets right:

Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd. Complaint The program relies on complicated mathematics, linear algebra, and a series of algorithms and requires powerful computers and computer processing to recognize underlying relationships in the data.

With generative AI, the purpose of models is to use this “understanding” as a tool to create entirely new outputs. The goal is generalization: the ability to “generalize” concepts from inputs and store this information not as a copy, but as vectors that can be combined to form outputs composed not of the words or pixels of training data, but their ideas. Generalization has been one of the main selling points — if not the selling point — of generative AI, ever since the earliest products:

DALL·E: Creating images from text (OpenAI Milestone, 2021)

DALL·E is a 12-billion parameter version of GPT‑3⁠ trained to generate images from text descriptions, using a dataset of text–image pairs. We’ve found that it has a diverse set of capabilities, including creating anthropomorphized versions of animals and objects, combining unrelated concepts in plausible ways, rendering text, and applying transformations to existing images.
…

Combining unrelated concepts
The compositional nature of language allows us to put together concepts to describe both real and imaginary things. We find that DALL·E also has the ability to combine disparate ideas to synthesize objects, some of which are unlikely to exist in the real world. We explore this ability in two instances: transferring qualities from various concepts to animals, and designing products by taking inspiration from unrelated concepts.

While elements of the output like “form”, “technique”, and “style” bear resemblance to their source data, the form and function of the final generated product is up to the user and doesn’t need to resemble any of the training inputs.

Training saves the results of this analysis as a model. Copyright, though, is concerned with the reproduction of works. The compositional elements that training captures, like technique and style, are explicitly un-copyrightable. You can’t copyright non-creative choices: you can’t copyright a style, you can’t copyright a practice, you can’t copyright a technique, you can’t copyright a motif, and you can’t copyright a fact.

This means many elements of copyrighted works are not themselves copyrighted or copyrightable. For example, “cats have four legs and a tail” is a fact that might be encapsulated in art, and an AI might be able to “understand” that well enough to know to compose a depiction of a cat. But creating another picture of a cat isn’t violating any copyright, because even if a copyrighted work was used to convey the information, you can’t reserve an exclusive right over the knowledge of what cats are. The data training captures is an understanding of these un-copyrightable elements.

“Understanding” in tools

What’s fascinating about generative AI, from a technological perspective, is how this modeled understanding of relationships in the data is unlike traditional programming and instead functions like subconscious pattern recognition. The model does not understand the meaning of the patterns, and so doesn’t start with a human-authored description of the subject, nor does it construct an articulated program that can be run to produce a specific kind of output. The model is instead an attempt to capture an unarticulated understanding of what correct forms and patterns “seem like”.

I’m using the word “understanding” here to capture the functionality of the tool, but I don’t mean to imply that it’s conscious or sentient. Machine learning is not a magical thinking machine, but it’s also not a database of examples it copies. It’s a specific approach to solving a particular kind of problem. In the same way scripted languages emulate conscious executive function, machine learning emulates unconscious processes.

In terms of real-life tasks, there’s a type of mental task that’s done “consciously” by executive function, and a type of task that’s done “unconsciously.” Traditional programming is based on creating a machine that executes a program composed of consciously-written instructions, mirroring executive function. Mathematics, organization, logic, etc are things we learn to do consciously with intent, and can describe as a procedure.

But there are also mental tasks people do unconsciously like shape recognition, writing recognition, facial recognition, et cetera. For these, we’re not doing active analysis according to a procedure. There’s some unconscious subsystem that gives our executive consciousness information, but not according to a procedure we consciously understand or can articulate as a procedure a machine could follow.

AI instead tries to emulate these functionalities of the unconscious mind. For machine learning tasks like image recognition, instead of describing a logical procedure for recognizing various objects, the process of training creates a model that can later be used to “intuit” answers that reflect the relationships that were captured in the model. Instead of defining a specific procedure, the relationships identified in training reflect a model of what “correctness” is, and so allows a program to work according to a model never explicitly defined by human statements. When the program runs, the output behavior is primarily driven by the data in the model, which is an “understanding” of the relationships found in correct practice.

That’s why I think that the process of training really is, both mechanically and philosophically, more like human learning than anything else. It’s not quite “learning”, since the computer is a tool and not an actor in its own right, but it’s absolutely parallel to the process of training a subconscious. “Training” to create a “model” is the right description of what’s happening.

Training is not copying

Even if it’s for the purpose of analysis, it’s still critical that training not involve copying and storing the input data, which would be unlicensed reproduction. But training itself isn’t copying or reproduction, on either a technical or practical level. Not only does training not store the original data in the model, the model it generates isn’t designed to reproduce the inputs.

Not storing the original data

First, copies of the training data are not stored in the model at all, not even as thumbnails. Text models don’t have excerpts of works and image models don’t have low-resolution thumbnails or any pixel data at all.

This is such a common misconception that this myth was the argument made by the Stability lawsuit I described in “Naive copying”, that the act of training is literally storage of compressed copies of the inputs:

Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd. Complaint By training Stable Diffusion on the Training Images, Stability caused those images to be stored at and incorporated into Stable Diffusion as compressed copies. Stability made them without the consent of the artists and without compensating any of those artists.

When used to produce images from prompts by its users, Stable Diffusion uses the Training Images to produce seemingly new images through a mathematical software process. These “new” images are based entirely on the Training Images and are derivative works of the particular images Stable Diffusion draws from when assembling a given output. Ultimately, it is merely a complex collage tool. …
All AI Image Products operate in substantially the same way and store and incorporate countless copyrighted images as Training Images. …
Stability did not attempt to negotiate licenses for any of the Training Images. Stability simply took them. Stability has embedded and stored compressed copies of the Training Images within Stable Diffusion.

This description is entirely wrong. While it might be understandable as a naive guess at what’s going on, it’s provably false that this is what’s happening. It’s objectively untrue that the input data is stored in the model. Not only is that data not found in the models themselves, but the general technology is based on published research, and the process of training simply does not involve doing that. It’s baffling that anyone was willing to go on the record as saying this, let alone make it the basis of a major lawsuit.

But even without requiring any knowledge of the process or the ability to inspect the models (both of which we do have), it’s literally impossible for the final model to contain compressed copies of the training images, because the model file simply isn’t big enough. From a data science perspective, we know full artistic works simply cannot be compressed down to one byte and reinflated, no matter how large your data set is. This should align with your intuition, too; you can’t fit huge amounts of data in a tiny space!

Kit Walsh, How We Think About Copyright and AI Art The Stable Diffusion model makes four gigabytes of observations regarding more than five billion images. That means that its model contains less than one byte of information per image analyzed (a byte is just eight bits—a zero or a one). The complaint against Stable Diffusion characterizes this as “compressing” (and thus storing) the training images, but that’s just wrong. With few exceptions, there is no way to recreate the images used in the model based on the facts about them that are stored. Even the tiniest image file contains many thousands of bytes; most will include millions. Mathematically speaking, Stable Diffusion cannot be storing copies …

This is a technical reality, but it also makes intuitive sense that it doesn’t need to store images to work. The model isn’t trying to copy any given work, it’s only storing an understanding of the patterns and relationships between pixels. When an artist is sketching on paper and considering their line quality, that process doesn’t involve thinking through millions of specific memories of individual works. The new work comes from an understanding: information generated from study of the works, but not a memorized copy of any set of specific images.

There is a red-herring argument people make at this point about “unauthorized copying” that goes like this:

The act of training on copyrighted work, even work distributed freely, requires the trainer to make copies of copyrighted work to use as input data. Even without getting into the details of training itself, AI companies have to download and “scrape” massive amounts of copyrighted work as a prerequisite. These are all unauthorized copies already, and constitute copyright violations.

It’s true that training requires copying copyrighted work as a prerequisite. Data sets used for image training pair images with text descriptions, but the data sets usually include a URL to where the image is publicly hosted instead of attaching the image files themselves. This means that before you can train a model on the data set, you have to download ephemeral copies of all the images in the data set.

But this downloaded “copy” is irrelevant to the question of copyright. By definition, the images at these public web addresses are already published and actively being shared for the public. There is already full permission for anyone to view them, and on the internet that includes downloading these temporary copies. The general public already has permission to view and study these images. So the acquisition of publicly published data is irrelevant, and the question still hinges on whether the act of training is a copyright violation.

Not reproducing

The Stable Diffusion lawsuit also makes the accusation that image diffusion is fundamentally a system to reconstruct the input images, and that the model is still effectively a reproduction tool:

Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd. Complaint Diffusion is a way for a machine-learning model to calculate how to reconstruct a copy of its Training Images. For each Training Image, a diffusion model finds the sequence of denoising steps to reconstruct that specific image. Then it stores this sequence of steps. … A diffusion model is then able to reconstruct copies of each Training Image. Furthermore, being able to reconstruct copies of the Training Images is not an incidental side effect. The primary goal of a diffusion model is to reconstruct copies of the training data with maximum accuracy and fidelity to the Training Image. It is meant to be a duplicate.
…
Because a trained diffusion model can produce a copy of any of its Training Images—which could number in the billions—the diffusion model can be considered an alternative way of storing a copy of those images.

If this were the case, it would be a solid argument against generative AI. Even if the model itself doesn’t contain literal copies of input work, it would still be a copyright violation for it to reproduce its inputs (or approximations of them) on-demand. And if the primary purpose of the tool were to make unlicensed copies of copyrighted inputs, that could make training a problem. Even if we can’t show copies being made during training, or analyze the model to find stored copies, if the main thing the tool does is make unlicensed reproductions of existing input works, that’s an issue.

But are any of those accusations actually true? Pretty solidly “no”. The claim made in the suit is fundamentally wrong on all accounts. Not only does generative AI work like this in general, this isn’t even how Stable Diffusion works in particular.
From a technical, logical, and philosophical perspective, we know the models don’t have copies of the original data, only information about the relationships between forms. They try to generate new work to match a prompt, and the new work is the product of the prompt, the model, and a random seed. There’s nothing close to a “make a copy of this specific input image please” button, and if you try to make it do that anyway, it doesn’t work.

When people have tried to demonstrate a reproductive effect in generative AI — even incredibly highly motivated people arguing a case in a court of law — they have been unable to do so. This played out dramatically in the Stability AI lawsuit, where complainants were unable to show cases of output even substantially similar to their copyrighted inputs, and so didn’t even make an allegation that was the case. Instead, they made the argument that there was somehow a derivative work involved even though there was nothing even resembling reproduction, and the judge rightly struck it down:

SARAH ANDERSEN, et al., v. STABILITY AI LTD., et al., ORDER ON MOTIONS TO DISMISS AND STRIKE … I am not convinced that copyright claims based [on] a derivative theory can survive absent ‘substantial similarity’ type allegations. The cases plaintiffs rely on appear to recognize that the alleged infringer’s derivative work must still bear some similarity to the original work or contain the protected elements of the original work.

Carl Franzen, “Stability, Midjourney, Runway hit back in AI art lawsuit” However, the AI video generation company Runway — which collaborated with Stability AI to fund the training of the open-source image generator model Stable Diffusion — has an interesting perspective on this. It notes that simply by including these research papers in their amended complaint, the artists are basically giving up the game — they aren’t showing any examples of Runway making exact copies of their work. Rather, they are relying on third-party ML researchers to state that’s what AI diffusion models are trying to do.

As Runway’s filing puts it: “First, the mere fact that Plaintiffs must rely on these papers to allege that models can “store” training images demonstrates that their theory is meritless, because it shows that Plaintiffs have been unable to elicit any “stored” copies of their own registered works from Stable Diffusion, despite ample opportunities to try. And that is fatal to their claim.”The complaint goes on:“…nowhere do [the artists] allege that they, or anyone else, have been able to elicit replicas of their registered works from Stable Diffusion by entering text prompts. Plaintiffs’ silence on this issue speaks volumes, and by itself defeats their Model Theory.”

The same dynamic played out in another case, this time with complainants unable to demonstrate similarity even with much simpler text examples:

Blake Brittain, “US judge trims AI copyright lawsuit against Meta” The authors sued Meta and Microsoft-backed OpenAI in July. They argued that the companies infringed their copyrights by using their books to train AI language models, and separately said that the models’ output also violates their copyrights.

[U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria] criticized the second claim on Thursday, casting doubt on the idea that the text generated by Llama copies or resembles their works.

“When I make a query of Llama, I’m not asking for a copy of Sarah Silverman’s book – I’m not even asking for an excerpt,” Chhabria said.

The authors also argued that Llama itself is an infringing work. Chhabria said the theory “would have to mean that if you put the Llama language model next to Sarah Silverman’s book, you would say they’re similar.”
…
The judge said he would dismiss most of the claims with leave to amend, and that he would dismiss them again if the authors failed to argue that Llama’s output was substantially similar to their works.

It’s also not true that generated outputs are “mosaics”, collages”, or snippets of existing artwork interpolated together. The tool fundamentally doesn’t work like that; it neither reproduces and composes image segments nor interpolates image chunks. Asserting that generative AI is a “collage” tool isn’t even reductive, it’s entirely wrong at all levels.

Memorization and Overfitting

I have to take time away from my main argument here to make an important caveat, which is that it’s not true to categorically say generative AI is truly incapable of reproducing any of the work it was trained on. This is true from a data science perspective (since the domain of the training data overlaps with the domain of possible outputs), but it’s also practically possible to use a model to generate images that resemble its inputs, under specific conditions.

In the field of generative AI research, if even 1%-2% of the outputs of a generative model are similar to any of the model’s inputs, that’s called overfitting, and it’s a bug. Overfitting is waste, and prevents these tools from being able to do their job.

“Memorization” is a similar bug that’s describes exactly what it sounds like: when an AI model is able to reproduce something very close to one of its inputs. Overwhelmingly, memorization is caused by bad training data that includes multiple copies of the same work. Since famous works of art are often duplicated in data sets of publicly available images, the model “knows” them very well and is able to reproduce them with a high level of fidelity if prompted:

Original Mona Lisa on left, Midjourney v4, “The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci” on right

So far in this article I’ve been discussing generative AI at a very high level. The actual frequency of overfitting and “input memorization” varies significantly depending on the dataset, training methodology, and other technical factors specific to individual products.

By running “attacks” on Stable Diffusion, models can be tricked into reproducing some of its input images to a reasonable degree of recognizability. Carlini, N., Hayes, J., Nasr, M., Jagielski, M., Sehwag, V., Tramèr, F., Balle, B., Ippolito, D., & Wallace, E. (2023). Extracting Training Data from Diffusion Models was one study in memorization. Researchers trained their own Stable Diffusion model on the CIFAR-10 dataset of publicly-available images. Given full access to the original data and their trained model, they attempted to generate image thumbnails that were significantly similar to images found in the input data. They were able to show “memorization” of only 1,280 images, or 2.5% of the training data.

I think, once again, this is very parallel to the human process. If you asked someone to draw a specific piece they’ve seen, they could probably approximate it around 2% of the time.

The case where a very generic prompt is able to produce a relatively specific work seems suspicious, but — again — makes sense when compared to a human. If you asked a human artist for something extremely tightly tied to one kind of work like “Italian video game plumber” they’d probably make the same associations you do, and draw something related to Mario unless you told them not to.

Since the entire purpose of generative models is to be able to generate entirely new output, it’s very important to make sure individual input images are dependent mostly on the prompt given to the generator and not any particular images in the training data. Generative AI needs to have the broadest possible possibility space, and so significant amounts of research go towards that goal:

Ruiz, N., Li, Y., Jampani, V., Pritch, Y., Rubinstein, M., & Aberman, K. (2022). DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation

This isn’t a cover-your-ass measure to make sure a service isn’t accidentally reproducing copyrighted materials (like Google Books, which stores full copies of books but is careful not to expose the underlying data to the public). The entire value of generative AI is that its outputs are new and not redundant. Accidentally outputting images that are even remotely similar to the inputs is poor performance for the product itself.

In this way, AI training is once again parallel to human learning. Generative AI and human work have the same criteria for success. As an artist learning on material, you don’t want the input images to be closely mimicked in the outputs. You don’t want your style or pose choices to be dependent on specifics from your example material. You want to learn how to make art, and then you should be able to make anything.

Don’t expand copyright to do this

So, we can rule out AI training as being a copyright violation at this point. Training only requires the same ability to view and analyze work people already have. The training itself doesn’t involve “compressing” or making a copy of the work, and it doesn’t result in a tool that acts as a database that will reproduce the original inputs on demand. So just the act of training a model isn’t a copyright violation, even if the material used was copyrighted.

But is this the wrong outcome? Copyright isn’t a natural law that can only be understood and worked within; it’s an institution humans have created in order to meet specific policy goals. So should copyright powers be expanded to give creators and rightsholders a mechanism to prevent AI training on their works unless they license those rights? Can you somehow split the right to view the material and the right to learn from the material? Or could you isolate AI training as a case where the rates could be separate?

The answer to all these questions is no. You can’t (and shouldn’t) expand copyright to limit how people can train on the material, no matter what tools are involved.

Creative work should not be considered a “derivative work” of every inspiring source and every work that their author used to develop their skills. And there’s not a sound way to make an argument for heavy creative restrictions that only “sticks” to generative AI, and not human actors.

It’s against sound philosophical principles — including copyright’s — to try to attack tools and not specific objectionable actions. The applications of AI that are specifically offensive (i.e., plagiarism) are applications. Trying to go after the tools early is overaggressive enforcement that short-circuits due process in a way that prevents huge amounts of behavior that doesn’t represent any kind of legitimate offense against artists. There’s also not a clear way to cut a line between training and human learning.

AI is a general-purpose tool and offenses are downstream

First, generative AI is a general-purpose tool. It’s possible for people to intentionally use it in objectionable ways (plagiarism, replication, etc.), but the vast majority of its uses and outputs don’t constitute any sort of legitimate offense against anyone. The argument against training is that it creates a model that could be misused in the future, but it’s completely inappropriate to use copyright legislation to prevent the creation of a tool in the first place. Law has no business banning general-purpose tools just because they could potentially* be used later in infringing ways.

Generative AI is a tool, and has to be used by a human agent to produce anything other than noise. There’s agreement on this point across the spectrum, including the very wrong papers arguing for expansion of copyright to cover learning rights:

Jiang, H. H., Brown, L., Cheng, J., Khan, M., Gupta, A., Workman, D., Hanna, A., Flowers, J., & Gebru, T. (2023). AI Art and its Impact on Artists. Proceedings of the 2023 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 363–374. In conclusion, image generators are not artists: they require human aims and purposes to direct their “production” or “reproduction,” and it is these human aims and purposes that shape the directions to which their outputs are produced.

The tools used don’t single-handedly determine if a particular action constitutes copyright infringement. Whether creating a new work constitutes copyright infringement (or even plagiarism more generally) is determined by the nature of the new work, not the method of its creation. If a tool is generally useful, you can’t argue that using that particular tool is evidence of foul play. It’s the play that can be foul, and that comes from the person using the tool. The evaluation of the work depends on the work itself.

Imagine the scenario where someone opens an image in Paint, changes it slightly, and passes the altered copy off as their original work. That’s copyright infringement because the output is an infringing copy and plagiarism because it’s being falsely presented as original authorship. The fact that Paint was used doesn’t mean Paint is inherently nefarious or that any other work made with Paint should be presumed to be nefarious.

The user was responsible for the direction and output of the tool. Neither the software nor its vendor participated; the user who actively used the tool towards a specific goal was the only relevant agent. The fact that the computer internally copies bytes from disk to RAM to disk doesn’t mean computers, disks, or RAM are inherently evil either. Tools just make people effective, and a person used that ability to commit orthogonal offenses.

Plagiarism and copyright infringement aren’t the only harms generative AI can be used to inflict on people. “Invasive style mimicry” can be a component of all sorts of horrible abuse:

Jiang, H. H., Brown, L., Cheng, J., Khan, M., Gupta, A., Workman, D., Hanna, A., Flowers, J., & Gebru, T. (2023). AI Art and its Impact on Artists. Proceedings of the 2023 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 363–374. This type of invasive style mimicry can have more severe consequences if an artist’s style is mimicked for nefarious purposes such as harassment, hate speech and genocide denial. In her New York Times Op-ed, artist Sarah Andersen writes about how even before the advent of image generators people edited her work “to reflect violently racist messages advocating genocide and Holocaust denial, complete with swastikas and the introduction of people getting pushed into ovens. The images proliferated online, with sites like Twitter and Reddit rarely taking them down.” She adds that “Through the bombardment of my social media with these images, the alt-right created a shadow version of me, a version that advocated neo-Nazi ideology… I received outraged messages and had to contact my publisher to make my stance against this ultraclear.” She underscores how this issue is exacerbated by the advent of image generators, writing “The notion that someone could type my name into a generator and produce an image in my style immediately disturbed me… I felt violated.”

But these aren’t issues uniquely enabled by AI, and harsh restrictions on AI won’t foil Nazism.

Plagiarism, forgery, and other forms of harmful mimicry are not novel dynamics. Generative AI does not introduce these problems into a culture that hasn’t already been dealing with them. These are categories of violations that aren’t coupled to specific tools, but are things people do using whatever means are available.

The same logic applies to everything. Using copy-paste while editing a document doesn’t mean the final product doesn’t represent your original work, even though plagiarism is one of the things copy-paste can do. Tracing and reference images can be used for plagiarism, but the tools in use don’t determine the function of the product.

Learning isn’t theft. If it’s a machine for doing something that is not theft, it’s not a theft machine. It’s just a machine that humans can use to do the same things they were already doing.

Short-circuiting process

Going after the tools early to enforce/prevent copies is an attempt to short-circuit due process.

The idea that we should structure technology such that people are mechanically unable to do a particular objectionable thing is a familiar perversion of enforcement. This is a topic I want to write on later in more depth, but as it relates to learning rights, this is a pretty clear attempt to aggressively prevent whole categories of behavior by preemptively disabling people from a whole category of behavior.

Media companies frequently make the argument that an entire category of tools (from VHS to hard drives) needs to be penalized or banned entirely just because it’s possible to use the tool in a way that infringes copyright. Arguing to prevent the training of generative AI in the first place is exactly the same cheat: trying to criminalize a tool instead of adjudicating specific violations as appropriate.

Because no one has been able to show that models are actually infringing works, anti-AI lawsuits are reduced to trying to make the act of training illegal. This is a dangerously wrong approach. The actual question copyright is concerned with is whether a specific work infringes on a reserved right. This is a question you can only effectively ask after a potentially infringing work is produced, and in order to evaluate the claim you have to examine the work in question.

This is obviously not what corporations with “IP assets” would prefer. It would be much safer for them if no potentially infringing work could be created in the first place. If it’s impossible to make new art at all, not only do the rightsholders not have to make a specific claim and argue a specific case, they don’t risk any “damage” being done by circulation of an infringing work before they can catch it.

It makes complete sense that this is what they’d prefer, but total prevention satisfies that party at the expense of everyone else (and creativity as a whole), so it’s the job of a functional system to not accommodate it. The whole point of copyright needs to be encouraging the creation of new works, not giving rightsholders whatever conveniences they can think to ask for. Overaggressive enforcement that prevents whole categories of work from being produced in the first place needs to be completely off the table.

Going after tools instead of individual works is an attempt to short-circuit the system. People creating work and being challenged if there’s a valid challenge to make is the only way this can reasonably be managed. If tools are banned and copyright expansionists are successful in preventing vast spaces of completely legitimate, non-infringing works from being created in the first place, that’s a disaster. In effect those works are all being banned without anything approaching due process. Artists have a right to defend themselves against accusations of copyright infringement, but if whole categories of work are guilty until proven innocent, the work can’t be created in the first place, and the opportunity for due process people are owed is implicitly smothered.

No clear line to cut against “automation”

People objecting to training generative AI are objecting to a kind of learning, but they don’t have that same objection when people do the same thing. As I’ve said, I don’t think any reasonable person actually objects to humans learning from existing work they have access to. No, the objection to model training is tied to the “automatedness” of the training and the “ownability” of the models. Humans doing functionally the same thing (but slower) isn’t an issue.

So, if the problem is how automated or synthetic the tool is, is that somewhere we can draw a policy line? Is the right approach to say only humans can learn freely, and an automated system needs an explicit license to do the equivalent training?

I think this is another direction that makes some sense as a first thought, but quickly breaks down when taken to its logical conclusions. There simply isn’t a meaningful way to distinguish between a “tool-assisted” process and a “natural” process. Any requirement trying to limit AI training on the basis of its actual function of learning from work would necessarily limit human learning as well. And not in a way that can be solved by just writing down “no it doesn’t” as part of the policy!

Remember, AI is a tool, not an actor. There’s no sentient AI wanting to learn how to make art, only people building art-producing tools. So if you want to make a distinction here, it’s not between a person-actor and a machine-actor, it’s between a person with a tool and a person without a tool.

This is a pet issue of mine. I am convinced that trying to draw a clean line between “people” and “technology” is a disastrously bad idea, especially if that distinction is meant to be a load-bearing part of policy. People aren’t separable from technology. The fact that we use tools is a fundamental part of our intelligence and sapience. Every person is a will enacting itself on the world through various technical measures. If you don’t let a builder use a hammer or a painter use a brush, you’re crippling them just as if you’d disabled their arms. And — looking in the other direction — the body is a machine we use the same way as we use any tool. We use technology and tools as prosthesis that fundamentally extend human function, which is a good thing.

This “real person” distraction is a common stumbling point in discussions about things like accessibility. The goal is not to determine some “standard human” with a fixed set of capabilities and enforce that standard on people. The goal isn’t just to “elevate” the “disabled” to some minimum viable standard, and it’s certainly not to reduce the function of over-performers until everyone fits the same mold.³ Access and function are goods in and of themselves, and it’s worthwhile to extend both.

AI is fundamentally the same kind of tool we expect people to use regularly, but a degree more “advanced” than our expectations. The people arguing that AI is anti-art aren’t arguing that the correct state of affairs is a technological jihad, they’re wanting to return to “good technology”, like Blender. But that’s no basis for a categorical distinction.

aLec robBins@alecrobbins
you wanna know what kind of tech ACTUALLY “democratizes art”? MSPaint, iMovie, RPGMaker, Garage Band, VLC Player, Godot, Twine, Audacity, Blender, archive dot org, GitHub, aseprite, Windows Movie Maker, GIMP,
Sun Mar 30 19:53:27 +0000 2025

If you’re trying to divide technology into categories of “good tools” and “bad tools”, you need a clear categorical distinction. But what is the criteria that makes generative AI uniquely bad? There doesn’t appear to be one. It’s obviously not just that generative AI is software. It also can’t be that generative AI is “theft-based”, because it obviously isn’t. It’s performing the same dynamic of learning that we want to see, but using software to do it. And we know “using software to do it” doesn’t turn a good thing bad. And it’s obviously absurd to say we should stop building new tools at some arbitrary point, and only techniques that were already invented and established are valid to use.

Trying to find separate criteria that happens to map onto the result that makes sense to you, at the moment, is a dangerous mistake. (A “policy hack”, which is another topic I plan to write on later....) No, if you’re going to try to regulate a specific dynamic (in this case, learning) you need to actually regulate the dynamic in question in a clear, internally-consistent way.

This gets extra ugly when you start throwing around words like “art.”

I’ve seen people argue that AI outputs must necessarily be uncreative, and work can’t be considered to be “true” human authorship. “The final output reflects the user’s acceptance of [a system], rather than [authorship].” This logic is unconvincing. How does this differ from photoshop use reflecting “acceptance of a program’s facilities”, or a photograph reflecting “acceptance” of an existing view?

There is a strange circular reasoning here. Even if you want to define art as something uniquely done by humans, tool-assisted art is still clearly human agency producing artistic output which is usually indistinguishable from work produced without the aid of the tool. There is no categorical distinction to make about the artistic products, either.

Consequence of new learning rights enforcement

There’s also a bigger-picture reason the learning rights approach is bad, even for the people still convinced copyright law should be expanded to include learning rights: doing this would not accomplish the things they want to accomplish, and instead make the world worse for everyone. And, importantly, it won’t eliminate the technology or keep corporations from abusing artist labor, which are the outcomes the people pushing for change want.

This is a common problem with reactionary movements. There’s an earnest, almost panicked energy that there’s a need to “get something done”, but if that energy goes to the wrong place, you’re just doing unnecessary harm.

The reason I care about the “philosophy of copyright” or whatever isn’t to invent a reason to let harm continue to be done unabated. Systems matter because systems affect reality, and understanding the mechanics is necessary to keep a reactionary response from doing more harm. Even if you want to “cheat” and get something done right now, the “break-glass” workarounds just aren’t pragmatic.

Expanding copyright disadvantages individuals

People are using the threat of AI to argue for new copyright expansions in order to protect artists from exploitation. But this misunderstands a fundamental dynamic, which is that expanding copyright in general is bad for artists because of the way the system is weighted in favor of corporations against individuals.

All the systems of power involved in IP enforcement that currently exist are heavily, heavily weighted in the favor of large corporations. The most basic example of this is that going through a legally-adjudicated copyright dispute in the courts can be made into a battle of attrition, and so the companies that can afford extensive legal expenses can simply outspend individuals in disputes. This makes any expansion of copyright automatically benefit corporations over small artists, just procedurally. Massively strengthening copyright enforcement power is not going to help the artists whose work is being used when the powers being enforced are already slanted to disadvantage those artists.

Gio :⁾@im.giovanh.com
Trying to enclose and commodify information so that only people who can pay a competitive market rate won’t somehow disadvantage the corporations. Setting up a system that requires you to be optimally efficient at converting information to US dollars is not going to give the common man a leg up.
2024-11-28T07:25:32.729Z

When the question is very hard, and all the general systems of power are pointed in the wrong direction, “We have to take immediate action to fix this!” is a wrong and very dangerous response. Anti-AI artists are supporting copyright as the thing it’s supposed to be, but the power they try to give it goes to a system of power that works against them instead.

Artists compelled to relinquish rights to gatekeepers

Creating a learning right would create a new licensable right, and so seems like this would create a new valuable asset creators could own. But think about what happens to the rights creators already have: huge media companies already own most of “the rights” to work, because they’re able to demand artists relinquish them in order to participate in the system at all. This is the Chokepoint Capitalism thesis.

Artists are already compelled to assign platforms and publishers rights over their creative work as a condition for employment or distribution. If the “learning rights” to your work suddenly become a licensable asset, that doesn’t actually make you richer. That just creates another right companies like Penguin Random House can demand themselves as part of a publishing contract, and then resell to AI companies without you ever seeing a dime from it.

In anticipation of learning rights becoming a real thing, companies like Meta and Adobe are already using whatever dirty tricks they can invent to strip individual creators of those rights and stockpile them for corporate profit.

This dynamic has already been covered thoroughly, to the point where I can cover the topic completely by simply quoting existing work:

Katharine Trendacosta and Cory Doctorow, “AI Art Generators and the Online Image Market” Requiring a person using an AI generator to get a license from everyone who has rights in an image in the training data set is unlikely to eliminate this kind of technology. Rather, it will have the perverse effect of limiting this technology development to the very largest companies, who can assemble a data set by compelling their workers to assign the “training right” as a condition of employment or content creation.

… Creative labor markets are intensely concentrated: a small number of companies—including Getty—commission millions of works every year from working creators. These companies already enjoy tremendous bargaining power, which means they can subject artists to standard, non-negotiable terms that give the firms too much control, for too little compensation.

If the right to train a model is contingent on a copyright holder’s permission, then these very large firms could simply amend their boilerplate contracts to require creators to sign away their model-training rights as a condition of doing business. That’s what game companies that employ legions of voice-actors are doing, requiring voice actors to begin every session by recording themselves waiving any right to control whether a model can be trained from their voices.

If large firms like Getty win the right to control model training, they could simply acquire the training rights to any creative worker hoping to do business with them. And since Getty’s largest single expense is the fees it pays to creative workers—fees that it wouldn’t owe in the event that it could use a model to substitute for its workers’ images—it has a powerful incentive to produce a high-quality model to replace those workers.

This would result in the worst of all worlds: the companies that today have cornered the market for creative labor could use AI models to replace their workers, while the individuals who rarely—or never—have cause to commission a creative work would be barred from using AI tools to express themselves.

This would let the handful of firms that pay creative workers for illustration—like the duopoly that controls nearly all comic book creation, or the monopoly that controls the majority of role-playing games—require illustrators to sign away their model-training rights, and replace their paid illustrators with models. Giant corporations wouldn’t have to pay creators—and the GM at your weekly gaming session couldn’t use an AI model to make a visual aid for a key encounter, nor could a kid make their own comic book using text prompts.

Cory Doctorow, Everything Made By an AI Is In the Public Domain Giving more copyright to a creative worker under those circumstances is like giving your bullied schoolkid extra lunch money. It doesn’t matter how much lunch money you give your kid — the bullies are just going to take it.

In those circumstances, giving your kid extra lunch money is just an indirect way of giving the bullies more money. … But the individual creative worker who bargains with Disney-ABC-Muppets-Pixar-Marvel-Lucasfilm-Fox is not in a situation comparable to, say, Coca-Cola renewing its sponsorship deal for Disneyland. For an individual worker, the bargain goes like this: “We’ll take everything we can, and give you as little as we can get away with, and maybe we won’t even pay you that.”
…
Every expansion of copyright over the past forty years — the expansions that made entertainment giants richer as artists got poorer — was enacted in the name of “protecting artists.”

The five publishers, four studios and three record labels know that they are unsympathetic figures when they lobby Congress for more exclusive rights (doubly so right now, after their mustache-twirling denunciations of creative workers picketing outside their gates). The only way they could successfully lobby for another expansion on copyright, an exclusive right to train a model, is by claiming they’re doing it for us — for creative workers. But they hate us. They don’t want to pay us, ever. The only reason they’d lobby for that new AI training right is because they believe — correctly — that they can force us to sign it over to them. The bullies want your kid to get as much lunch money as possible.

Andrew Albanese, “Authors Join the Brewing Legal Battle Over AI” But a permissions-based licensing solution for written works seems unlikely, lawyers told PW. And more to the point, even if such a system somehow came to pass there are questions about whether it would sufficiently address the potentially massive issues associated with the emergence of generative AI.

“AI could really devastate a certain subset of the creative economy, but I don’t think licensing is the way to prevent that,” said Brandon Butler, intellectual property and licensing director at the University of Virginia Library. “Whatever pennies that would flow to somebody from this kind of a license is not going to come close to making up for the disruption that could happen here. And it could put fetters on the development of AI that may be undesirable from a policy point of view.” Butler said AI presents a “creative policy problem” that will likely require a broader approach.

But even if artists could realistically keep the rights to their own work, there are other obvious problems with trying to extend copyright such that all work is a “derivative” of the resources used to train the artists.

Monopolies prevent future art

A learning right in particular would be a massive hand-out to media companies like Adobe or stock photo companies who own licenses over vast libraries of images. If people need to license the right to learn from any work in that data set, those companies suddenly have strong grounds to make an argument that almost any new art was derived from art they have exclusive rights over. These companies already have a strong incentive to try to prevent any new competition from being created, so giving them a tool to do exactly that would be disastrous for art.

This would effectively stifle independent artists from creating any new future work. A corporation with a content library can take any work from an individual artist, find the closest work in the library of their own work, and accuse the targeted work of being a product of “unlicensed learning”. An individual artist without a “content library” to draw from would be unable to show that any new work didn’t infringe on this nebulous right. This would give media conglomerates excessive power over artists: they could extort artists for payment or use the threat of a protracted legal battle to selectively censor material they deemed harmful to their own financial interests.

This would exacerbate all the worst problems in the current media ecosystem. Creative industries would necessarily consolidate around a few powerful rightsholder conglomerates, and new artists would face insurmountable barriers to entry. Even without looming threats of fascism and dystopian control, consolidation would lead (as it does) to sanitization, fewer perspectives, and a less pluralistic culture. Much, much more art would necessarily become a corporate output, censored to whatever standards that might require. This might not effectively “destroy art”, but since corporations would have vast power over cases they cared about, it would un-democratize art where it mattered.

And even before the environment got as drastic as that, one obvious thing a learning right does is destroy fan work. Since being able to draw a character or environment is obvious evidence that you learned how to do so from the original work, media properties would have an airtight case that any fan works or parody that references their IP is prima facie evidence of unlicensed training on the material. Even in cases where the fanwork itself isn’t infringing any copyright, this work would be evidence of illegal and unlicensed training on material. This would create a back-door way for media companies to control depictions of their own properties, and yet again extort or censor independent artists.

Not enforceable without invasive DRM on almost all information

Meanwhile, even as an IP regime that enforces learning rights makes artists poorer, it makes digital life hell.

Because the model isn’t copying the work, you can’t reliably determine what work a model was trained on just by examining the model. So in order to enforce a learning right, you have to prevent training in the first place. And to do that, you need chain-of-custody DRM on basically all information.

I would love for this to be the absurd hyperbolic speculation it sounds like, but the IP ghouls are already salivating over the idea. The Adobe/Microsoft Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) campaign is a topic for another essay entirely, but it’s bleak. And Adobe and StabilityAI are already pushing the senate to mandate it.

Astroturfing and reinforced error

Karla Ortiz locking arms with Adobe to petition Congress to expand copyright is a reminder that this is another example of reinforced error.

aly@neojacquardian
huge day for maximizing corporate greed and making it impossible to create art freely without deep pockets and massive IP centralization. thanks karla! you're a piece of shit.
Tue Aug 13 21:05:14 +0000 2024

Pushes for copyright expansion have always benefited corporations at the expense of artists, but that’s a tough sell. The IP monopolists — the Adobes, the Disneys — need to sell copyright expansion as a measure that “protects artists”, even though it doesn’t.

So, predictably, the “anti-AI” learning rights campaign is the same familiar megacorporations and lobbying groups baiting in and publicly platforming artists, all while arguing for actual policy proposals that enrich themselves at the artists’ expense.

Look behind any door and you’ll see it.

RJ Palmer@arvalis
The Concept Art Association is raising money to hire a lobbyist to take the fight against AI image generators to DC. This is the most solid plan we have yet, support below.

Fri Dec 16 00:47:39 +0000 2022

The “concept art association” launching a GoFundMe grassroots campaign to support human artists? No, it’s just Karla Ortiz again, this time buying the already-notorious Copyright Alliance a new D.C. lobbyist.

The “Fairly Trained” group proposes to “respect creators’ rights” by coming up with some sort of “certification criteria.” Who’s behind this, you wonder? It’s the same handful of companies who artists are rightfully trying to defend themselves against:

Fairly Trained launches certification for generative AI models that respect creators’ rights — Fairly Trained We’re pleased that a number of organizations and companies have expressed support for Fairly Trained: the Association of American Publishers, the Association of Independent Music Publishers, Concord, Pro Sound Effects, and Universal Music Group.

The IP coalition has always been “corporations, and a rotation of reactionary artists they tricked”, and this issue is no exception.

Identifying the labor problem

When there’s a legitimate problem to be addressed, ruling out one approach doesn’t mean you’re done with the work; it means you haven’t even identified the work that needs to be done yet. So if copyright expansion isn’t the answer, what’s the right way to address the concern?

Let’s look at that original complaint one more time:

When a corporation trains generative AI, they have unfairly used other people’s work without consent or compensation to create a new product they own. Worse, the new product directly competes with the original workers. Since the corporations didn’t own the original material and weren’t granted any specific rights to use it for training, they did not have the right to train with it. When the work was published, there was no expectation it would be used like this, as the technology didn’t exist and people did not even consider “training” as a possibility. Ultimately, the material is copyrighted, and this action violates the authors’ copyright.

Fundamentally, the complaint here isn’t about copyright. What’s being (rightfully!) objected to is a new kind of labor issue.

Corporations unfairly competing with workers: labor issue. Use of new technology to displace the workers who enabled it: labor issue. Using new methods to extract additional value from work without compensation: labor issue.

AI threatens to put creative workers out of a job, and make the world a worse place as it does so:

Xe Iaso, Soylent Green is people My livelihood is made by thinking really hard about something and then rending a chunk of my soul out to the public. If I can’t do that anymore because a machine that doesn’t need to sleep, eat, pay rent, have a life, get sick, or have a family can do it 80% as good as I can for 20% of the cost, what the hell am I supposed to do if I want to eat?

Building highly profitable new tools without compensation is simply unfair:

AG Statement on Writers’ Lawsuits Against OpenAI - The Authors Guild Using books and other copyrighted works to build highly profitable generative AI technologies without the consent or compensation of the authors of those works is blatantly unfair

Corporations are entirely willing to be “disrespectful” in the way they use available labor without consent and compensation, and are doing so in a way that’s entirely willing to harm workers:

Annie Gilbertson, Apple, Nvidia, Anthropic Used Thousands of Swiped YouTube Videos to Train AI Wiskus said it’s “disrespectful” to use creators’ work without their consent, especially since studios may use “generative AI to replace as many of the artists along the way as they can.”

The fear with copyrightabillity of AI-generated expressive works is destroying demand, displacing creative jobs, and exacerbating income inequalities:

Annie Gilbertson, Apple, Nvidia, Anthropic Used Thousands of Swiped YouTube Videos to Train AI “It’s still the sheer principle of it,” said Dave Farina, the host of “Professor Dave Explains,” whose channel showcasing chemistry and other science tutorials has 3 million subscribers and had 140 videos lifted for YouTube Subtitles. “If you’re profiting off of work that I’ve done [to build a product] that will put me out of work or people like me out of work, then there needs to be a conversation on the table about compensation or some kind of regulation,” he said.

Andrew Tarantola, “Modern copyright law can’t keep pace with thinking machines” The fear, [Ben] Sobel explains, is that the subsequent, AI-generated work will supplant the market for the original. “We’re concerned about the ways in which particular works are used, how it would affect demand for that work,” he said.

“It’s not inconceivable to imagine that we would see the rise of the technology that could threaten not just the individual work on which it is trained,” Sobel continued. “But also, looking forward, could generate stuff that threatens the authors of those works.” Therefore, he argued to IPW, “If expressive machine learning threatens to displace human authors, it seems unfair to train AI on copyrighted works without compensating the authors of those works.”

Even when Meta pirates artists’ work outright, the piracy complaint isn’t really about piracy. The objection isn’t to the use (since people aren’t as critical individuals engaging in the same piracy), it’s that the work is being used to make money in a way that’s directly harmful to the workers who enabled that profit. It’s about unfair competition.

CrouchingPenguinHiddenSword@sgtwaddles42.bsky.social
Using this as an example—not calling this poster out specifically—since I've seen this a few times in the replies:
Very few of the responses are critical of LibGen or its normal users
The complaint is that Meta created a product, "AI", to *make money* off *their* works w/o paying *them*
2025-03-21T01:23:52.145Z

There is a fairness problem here. It just doesn’t have anything to do with copyright. It’s labor.

Unfortunately, that’s a much harder policy sell. Copyright is a neutral-sounding enforcement mechanism. It’s fluid enough that corporations, lawmakers, and artists can sometimes be found arguing on the same side, even if the artists are getting duped. Labor is a much more divisive word. Lobbying has trained people to turn off their brains as soon as they hear the word, and fair labor proposals are rarely even crafted, let alone considered.

But the difference between copyright expansion and labor rights is the latter option actually addresses the complaint. It’d be nice if there were an easy salve, but given the choice between something hard that works and something easy that makes things worse, you’re obligated to push the former.

Fortunately⁴, making sure AI is only used in ways that are fair to the workers who enable it is an idea that’s picked up serious traction in the space of union negotiations. Just to zoom in on one group,⁵ SAG-AFTRA has made AI one of its key issues.

AI was a key issue in the SAG-AFTRA TV negotiations, which included the 2023 TV strike. The final contract for TV workers included provisions requiring informed consent and limited scope, so studios would be required to pay people based on roles played, whether AI is used in the process or not.

But the fight continues for other workers, like voice actors and video game acting. As early as September 2023, the SAG-AFTRA union authorized striking action against video game companies over the issue of fair compensation for AI:

SAG-AFTRA Members Approve Video Game Strike Authorization Vote With 98.32% Yes Vote | SAG-AFTRA SAG-AFTRA members have voted 98.32% in favor of a strike authorization on the Interactive Media Agreement that covers members’ work on video games. …

“After five rounds of bargaining, it has become abundantly clear that the video game companies aren’t willing to meaningfully engage on the critical issues: compensation undercut by inflation, unregulated use of AI and safety,” said SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland. “I remain hopeful that we will be able to reach an agreement that meets members’ needs, but our members are done being exploited, and if these corporations aren’t willing to offer a fair deal, our next stop will be the picket lines.”

“Between the exploitative uses of AI and lagging wages, those who work in video games are facing many of the same issues as those who work in film and television,” said Chief Contracts Officer Ray Rodriguez. “This strike authorization makes an emphatic statement that we must reach an agreement that will fairly compensate these talented performers, provide common-sense safety measures, and allow them to work with dignity. Our members’ livelihoods depend on it.”

The union didn’t back down on this issue, and went on strike in July 2024 over this issue in particular:

Stephen Totilo, “Video game actors to go on strike over AI” Video game voice and performance actors will go on strike a minute after midnight (Pacific) tonight, citing an impasse after 21 months of negotiations between the SAG-AFTRA union and major western video game companies, for a new deal.

The sticking point, it seems, is generative AI and concerns that it can be trained to create synthetic voices that would cost actors’ jobs.

“We’re not going to consent to a contract that allows companies to abuse A.I. to the detriment of our members,” SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher said in a statement.

Member Message: Video Game Strike Update | SAG-AFTRA We encourage you to read this extensive updated comparison chart of A.I. proposals to see for yourself how far apart we remain on fundamental A.I. protections for all performers.

They want to use all past performances and any performance they can source from outside the contract without any of the protections being bargained at all. You could be told nothing about your replica being used, offered nothing in the way of payment, and you could do nothing about it. They want to be able to make your replica continue to work, as you, during a future strike, whether you like it or not. And once you’ve given your specific consent for how your replica can be used, they refuse to tell you what they actually did with it.

Contract negotiations are a good place to work this out. There are ways to use AI that are fair to workers and ways to use AI that are unfair and exploitative. And the question at hand is whether companies have to pay artists or not, which isn’t something that can be left to corporate discretion.

The idea of a learning right is such a fundamentally bad idea, I think a valid way to interpret it is not as a serious proposal in the first place, but rather a mutual-destruction threat by tech companies who are intentionally moving the conversation away from labor rights⁶. The amount of copyright expansion necessary to create an enforceable right to control how people learn from published work is absurd, and would devastate the creative industries.

AI companies are pushing the idea that copyright expansion is the only way to prevent a new category of worker exploitation they’ve invented. They’re waving around the poison pill of copyright expansion around so it looks the only way to defend against unfair exploitation is crippling expression. All of that distracts from the fact that the real danger is unfair exploitation of artistic labor, and labor law could directly address the problem. It’s harder work, but unlike the candy-coated copyright expansion poison-pill proposals, it won’t actively destroy the artists it’s claiming to protect.

Lawsuit

Labor

Learning

Copyright office

Corps bad

Tech

There are many arguments people make about AI, but for now I’m specifically responding to this one, or ones that look like it.

There are many:

Statement on AI training The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.

↩
Although under current copyright law, releasing work directly into the public domain is not a straightforward process, since work is copyrighted by default. See CC0 for more on this. ↩
This is sometimes done in sports, but that’s because competitive sports have a different and unique goal. ↩
That being said, I dislike how union PR has flattened the issue down to “AI bad”, because that runs the risk of falling into incorrect understandings of the issue and people decrying “theft” where theft isn’t happening. ↩
There are other union and advocacy groups aligned the same way, see NAVA ↩
Cory Doctorow, How To Think About Scraping But as ever-larger, more concentrated corporations captured more of their regulators, we’ve essentially forgotten that there are domains of law other than copyright — that is, other than the kind of law that corporations use to enrich themselves. Copyright has some uses in creative labor markets, but it’s no substitute for labor law. Likewise, copyright might be useful at the margins when it comes to protecting your biometric privacy, but it’s no substitute for privacy law. When the AI companies say, “There’s no way to use copyright to fix AI’s facial recognition or labor abuses without causing a lot of collateral damage,” they’re not lying — but they’re also not being entirely truthful. If they were being truthful, they’d say, “There’s no way to use copyright to fix AI’s facial recognition problems, that’s something we need a privacy law to fix.”If they were being truthful, they’d say, “There’s no way to use copyright to fix AI’s labor abuse problems, that’s something we need labor laws to fix.”

↩

The imperfections of Murder Drones

2025-01-12T00:00:00-06:00

I love murder drones. I think they’re such great little guys. Bring me a robot maid and I am yours forever, etc. But watching through the series itself actually took me a few stabs, and I think it’s due to a few design decisions that make following the plot unintuitive and add some friction to what’s otherwise a very fun show. So I want to talk a little bit about that friction, even though the entire thing is still a good time overall.

Indie Animation

First, the obviously relevant context is that Murder Drones is made by Glitch, which is a small independent animation studio. And independent animation necessarily comes with constraints. It’s incredibly exciting that we have the technology for small teams to make work with this quality and scale, and I don’t at all want to take that for granted. But I think a lot of the friction I have to talk about comes from fundamental trade-offs that come from that setup.

Since their resources are very limited and good animation is expensive work, there’s a pressure for everything to be compressed. Short episodes with short shots in an eight-episode miniseries mean the project is feasible, but it’s hard to get all your fun ideas in while still sufficiently paving the way for them to land properly.

Structurally, a small indie team also carries the risk of skill gaps. I don’t mean to make any criticisms of anyone in particular on the project here, but this kind of team might not necessarily have experienced television writers or producers. And, with a small independent team, there might not be enough of a test audience to catch things that could be improved, or not enough budget to re-iterate for minor improvements. So those are all categories of things that can easily run into trouble.

Independent serialized animation like this is a relatively new phenomenon, but these are going to be the same sorts of challenges projects like RWBY and Helluva Boss have. (Although I think Murder Drones is significantly better than both of those.) So while there are common environmental factors that can make this kind of project a little extra rough, the way that roughness actually manifests is interesting.

It’s not glaringly bad

The reason I’m interested in talking about this at all is that I noticed the friction as part of my own experience, but it wasn’t linked to any obvious problems. In fact, the whole reason I’m writing this is Murder Drones felt like it should be great, and I was surprised there were things that still weren’t quite clicking. In re-watching the series to write this, slowing down and zooming in to catch every piece made the effect much harder to see. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what caused the effect. Which is why I want to! The dynamics you can barely see are always the most interesting to understand.

This is one of the reasons I really like understanding rules and best practices, because when you’re zoomed-in working on something, it can be easy to miss subtle things about the way the work comes across. Something can seem good as you’re studying it but still have a problem. And when you can’t see the problem directly, you can work it from the other direction.

Things that are fine

There are a lot of obvious things about the show that might seem like evidence of “low-quality” internet media, but I actually don’t object to any of those.

You can feel, in its construction, an intent to appeal to modern fandom culture. It’s like… you know the Hasbro shows like G.I. Joe that were mostly designed to market toys? It’s like a non-evil version of that. Instead of trying to sell you products, the show baits you to engage with the show. There are so many fun characters, and there are lots of great outfits to put them in. And you gotta make a drone ‘sona.

It’s all very shippy. It has so many characters who are incredibly cute together, and it’s just begging you to draw fanart of your faves kissing. There’s a big climactic resolution where the two love interests cement themselves as a ship, and they live happy, harmonious lives in a good* ending.

Like, in the third episode, right after a dramatic wedge is driven between them Uzi and N take each other to prom, complete with a dress and a tuxedo. And then this fight happens.

show knows what it’s about

And with all that set up, I feel like I’m poised to really tear down the show with some really biting cynicism, but that isn’t my point at all. I’m guessing there’s some hate for the show from people who subliminally feel pandered to by all that, but I actually think it’s fine.

It’s not a sin to understand and cater to the specific media environment you know you’re operating in. One might argue that’s part of making a good show. I think it’s easy to take the odd vibes the show prompts and pair those to this sort of fandom cynicism the show also prompts, except I repeat I don’t think the fandomism is the problem.

As a show, it really intentionally embraces the edgy random mid-2000s teen vibe, and I’m not holding that against it. It gives the show some fun character. The whole show is really kind of a love letter not just to fandom, but that particular cringy dorky teenager version fandomhood. Which is just a fun angle to take teen characters and run with!

The silly background humor is fine, the homages are fine, poking fun at tropes is fine too. (Although the humor in the pilot is particularly weak, unfortunately.) There is definitely a “cringe” flavor in the background, but I don’t think that actually hurts it.

And before I get into what does hurt it, I have to list off a few more ways the whole show is genuinely excellent:

Character design
Species design
great looking animation, lighting, textures
- A lot of stuff is glowy but it’s the right kind/amount of glowy
- faces are great
- Thanks Unreal Engine 5
Consistently sick as hell AS effects
- good lord

Solid voice acting
- Good performances
- Characters felt right
- Never took me out of the moment
Soundtrack!
- Just the right combination of fitting and memorable
- but not overbearing even in an already crowded show
it’s got The Juice

Confusion and signaling

No, I think the core problem is confusion. Not any one confusing decision, but a cumulative effect from many tiny things that don’t communicate information well to the viewer. The overall effect is that the plot is hard to follow, and so despite its good qualities, the show is more difficult to watch as a story than it needs to be.

The show makes it unnecessarily difficult for a new viewer’s to intuit a mental model of the story, the world and its characters. Several factors interfere with the story’s ability to communicate, and so people have a hard time forming an understanding of both the mechanics of the world (powers, technology, setting, and elements of the mystery) and the characters themselves (histories, relationships, motivations). Many small factors add up and confuse the plot, creating a narrative situation where a fact can be telegraphed to the viewer without them knowing what that is supposed to mean.

After watching through the series I’m not still confused by the plot, so I don’t think it’s “confusing” in retrospect. The problem is the interaction it has with people trying to watch through the series for the first time, without knowledge from later episodes. And Murder Drones being a finished series is a relatively new phenomenon, so for a long time, that group included everyone.

I think my first reaction at the top of the article about loving the little guys is a common reaction of the show as a whole. Fans of murder drones seem to be fans of the characters first and foremost.

So the answer to “what’s wrong?” is “a lot of nitpicky technical things”. Most of these aren’t even mistakes or errors per se. The pieces aren’t objectively wrong, they just have the wrong effect when put together. And I have no particular film training that would let me talk precisely about these little mechanical things! But I’m going to try anyway.

Also, I’m not Cinemasins, and I’m not here to list “plot holes”. That’s not the problem I care about here. There’s a scene in the pilot episode where one robot fires an EMP blast at another robot, and only her target was hurt. And it’s fine. It was part of a fight scene, it obviously read as a direct attack, and it feels narratively consistent for a hit to the target to only hurt them. A story doesn’t have to be perfectly realistic; what matters is the experience, which requires that it be effectively communicated to the audience.

Why am I writing about all the parts I don’t like if I think the show is fun and you should watch it? Because I already spent all this time asking myself what was bugging me and painstakingly figuring out the answer. And maybe I just wanted an excuse to take a whole bunch of pictures of them. Criticism is my love language. I’m so sorry.

Visual

Everything is gray

The show is set on an exoplanet where the atmosphere has been destroyed, leaving the planet in a permanent winter only robots can inhabit. Originally this was a mining planet set up as a utilitarian space, and most interiors are industrial spacer bunkers built with utilitarian industrial lighting. The problem is when your main locations are space-y metal interiors lit by cold fluorescent light and cold gray outdoor snowscapes, everything is just a foggy blue-gray, all the time, indoors and outdoors.

Weather: gray

It’s gray inside too. These are all different locations

This one’s a rustic wooden cabin

This is kind of the opposite of a visual language. Instead of using visual cues to give the viewer more information and signal a contrast between different locations as shots change, the lighting/design almost obscures information about the environment, and even obfuscates some scene transitions.

There are some fun exceptions to this, like the human-inhabited areas that get incandescent lighting, as opposed to cold industrial light. Uzi is consistently color-coded purple, and Doll gets this interesting orange-red. Episode 3 gives characters’ personal rooms this very vibrant color coding that I think works really well.

Bad early character recognizability

Not everybody, just the four disassembly drones.

All the disassembly drones share the same white/black/yellow/hazard color scheme, the same hair color, the same wings, the same tail, the same silhouette (sans J), and the same set of facial expressions. When they’re engaged in combat, they switch to an alternate combat form which is the same for all three of them with no distinctions. We’re introduced to three of these characters at once.

The color scheme issue alone is a killer, but all three drones sharing most of the same secondary and even tertiary characteristics is murder for readability.

This is most impactful in the pilot, because that’s when viewers are first introduced to the characters, and also when there are the most disassembly drones around at once. And it doesn’t help that V and J have the same basic alignment and narrative relationship to N and Uzi. Or that the serial designation letter names “N”, “V”, and “J” trigger the foreign name effect. It helps a lot that they get rid of J for most of the series.

But even after the pilot, this does keep coming up. Especially when a figure is obscured, it can be genuinely unclear who’s who.

generic disassembly drone or someone we know personally? it matters!

Weirdly, even though they’re much less important to recognize, the relatively unimportant worker drones have much more recognizable distinct characteristics. And not by a small margin! They have actual designs complete with color schemes!

even if most of their designs came free with their archetype

Similarity in general

This issue of things being similar to each other in unhelpful ways keeps coming up. Sometimes two things are vaguely similar and it turns out they’re supposed to be deeply connected, and sometimes things are extremely similar but totally unrelated to each other.

This creates a little conceptual problem. I called this Bad Triangle as a placeholder name, and I can’t think of anything better, so I present to you the Bad Triangle:

Concept A is introduced, and then it’s revealed that it has the same relationship to B as it does to C. This is classic Writing: if a parallel structure is set up like this, it should be to communicate that B and C have a sibling-like relationship. But if they don’t, then the viewer can’t reliably make connections and can’t form a clear understanding of the puzzle. Many of the communication issues I’ll point out are Bad Triangle Problems.

This isn’t limited to strictly visual similarity. Episode 2 and episode 3 both start with scenes where a lone worker drone inside their bunker is singled out in the dark and murdered by a supernatural force. These events are completely unrelated. They’re done by two different murderers using two different methods for two different motivations. They don’t even know the other one happened. Thematically, these events are utterly unrelated, but the viewer is signaled to think they’re parallel, since they’re presented in the same way in quick succession.

We’re shown a design of cute little robot bugs in episode 3 as a symbol of death and decay, but then that same model and design is reused for a sentient helper robot. And it’s still a bug they pick off the ground. Two very different roles for the same thing, presented in such quick succession there’s no indication which one is the anomaly in this world.

As another quick example, Uzi’s organic bat tail has a distinctive design that is noticeably identical to JCJ sentinels, even though they’re totally unconnected.

But, at the same time, you’re supposed to be able to intuit that these are just two variants of the same thing, only knowing they’re two things that both had material impacts on the world:

Finding out these phenomena are related would be a twist, except we know you are meant to intuit this, because Uzi does it!

An example of this being done well is the Cabin Fever insignias. Episode 3 is all about Doll and her strange powers, we learn that Uzi has the same powers and also share this necklace in common. This chains directly into the next episode where we get a quick flashback where Uzi figures out what the symbol means, and then they go investigate that location. Bing, bang, boom.

Personal

Ambiguous character motivations and expectations

This is far and away the most severe issue with the first half of the show: It is almost constantly unclear what people’s thoughts and motivations are. The sin is the effect — the viewer not understanding the motivations and goals of the characters, and so not having proper expectations — but there are a few different things that all cause this.

A common cause of this is characters communicating in ambiguous ways about their relationships with major plot elements.

Let’s start with the Absolute Solver, the main plot of the series. One of the first things we learn about disassembly drones is that they have this pseudo-magical auto-repair healing factor that worker drones don’t.

In the next episode, Uzi sees J’s Absolute Solver aftermath and makes the wild leap that the Absolute Solver is a program of some sort that manipulates matter in order to autonomously heal drones.

So — very basic question — what do our two disassembly drones think about this? N says he’s totally surprised by the snake-crab, and the fear that there’s something monstrous inside disassembly drones (besides their already monstrous vampirism) drives a wedge between N and Uzi.

Uzi asks N “what are you things?” and N does this strange ashamed runaway instead of acting horrified. It’s framed as him being embarrassed of his ~~race~~ category, but again it’s left unclear whether any of this is understood or expected.

N then goes to V and… sits in silence in the corner. Does this always happen? Had no disassembly drone ever sustained damage before? Now that it’s happened, do they think J was an anomaly, or are they in danger of the same thing? We’re led to assume this was totally new information for them, but we’re then led to believe that V is familiar with the solver snake-crab effect. So for N’s reaction to make sense, they’d have to have two totally different understandings of the world, despite their squad already working together so much they’ve created a whole corpse spire.

In the next episode, N asserts to V that “we can’t interact with the worker drones, we’re too dangerous.” Why has he started to think this? Presumably J, except that’s hardly more dangerous to the workers than the genocide they were already committing. Or did two things change simultaneously, and N’s changed both his opinion on worker drones in general and also his own nature? Why would arguing that they’re dangerous convince V, who is still doing the genocide?

These aren’t “plot holes”. Every character is allowed to be wrong about things and fail to communicate effectively with others. In fact, that can be very narratively interesting! That’s not what’s wrong here. The problem is the story is hidden from the audience. We don’t know who is doing what, and why. The overall plot is a mystery, but also every character interaction is a puzzle we don’t have the pieces to.

As another example, let’s look at V in the first few episodes. How are we supposed to conceptualize her? What’s her personality and motivation, other than “psychopath”? We get pretty direct exposition, from her, that she doesn’t recognize the symbol, doesn’t know about the Absolute Solver, and is still primarily motivated to perform the drone genocide.

Then Cabin Fever comes, and we get a nice emotional arc between Uzi and V. As V sees N and Uzi care for each other, her attitude towards Uzi shifts from predatory (for both pragmatic and possessive reasons) to one of accepting and even actively looking after Uzi. Classic character work.

it’s weird that they “fit right in”, right? more on that in a bit

(This is also a pretty big unexplained shift from the pilot. V went from not caring about N at all to actively possessive about N, and keeping secrets from him to protect him, for some reason. Now, when N asks about anything, the answer is “stop prying into that stuff.” I think it’s just a retcon, but it’s totally un-lampshaded, and it’s so contradictory that it leaves the audience without an understanding of the character.)

The problem is, in the middle of that Cabin Fever emotional uzi-acceptance arc, the main plot of the episode is Uzi’s newly-discovered Solver powers manifesting in strange fleshy ways that V recognizes and wants to destroy, for reasons she doesn’t disclose to anyone else.

So it suddenly becomes very hard to get a non-contradictory idea of what V thinks or wants. Is she reacting to Uzi’s new suspiciously disassembly drone-like traits? No one knew that could happen at all. Or is she reacting to the parts of her transformation that are anomalous? Or her solver powers (even though V was fine with that earlier)? Or the fact that she goes on a vampiric killing spree and eats several of her classmates (even though V also does that)?

All those things happen at once, by the way. And there are reasons for all of them to be disturbing to different people for different reasons. There’s a lot to react to, but not only is it unclear what V is reacting to, it’s unclear what exactly her reaction is. V and N have a conflict/conversation with incredibly tightly packed emotional swings and reactions, but none of them tell us anything meaningful about the characters or plot, because everybody is all over the place all the time.

And because all the characters are keeping secrets from each other, it’s never revealed to the viewer what the conflict is, which is a pretty important component, narratively.

Also, in a move that felt like they just did it to screw with me, we then see Uzi use these same fleshy powers that sent her into an insane corruption rampage masterfully and casually, with no one (including V) reacting or mentioning it.

This problem keeps happening. Episode 3 is a whole tangled mess of this, specifically in regard to Lizzy. There’s a subplot where she’s manipulated by V to give V the chance to genocide their prom, but at the same time Lizzy is working with Doll, who is openly showing Lizzy her insane vampire murder life. Meanwhile, all these plots work together to accomplish totally disjointed set of goals (including V at prom) that didn’t require the murders that constituted the main plot of the episode.

With full hindsight, my best-guess answer to all that is: V and N do have two sets of information, N didn’t know about the solver and V did. But, somehow, V didn’t know about the most distinguishing feature of the solver, the symbol. (This was retconned without anyone telling the audience, maybe?) Moreover, when Uzi began exhibiting monster traits, V recognized them as related to Cyn, who she was trying to keep N safe from(???). She then had to weigh her two significant motivations — her care for N, and her antagonism toward Cyn — and made the gamble to trust Uzi to satisfy the former at the expense of risking vulnerability to the latter. Doll’s plan made no sense because the purpose of the episode was for Doll to do a big dramatic heel-turn for the audience, and Lizzy is just a psychopath.

This is a very complicated answer and not one you can formulate when you first watch the show, which means you don’t have enough information to understand the characters or conflicts.

In the middle of writing this I watched Jacob and Leo Untangle the Brilliance of DEVS, a retrospective on the TV show Devs, and Jacob Geller made this comment I agree with:

And the show does that [thing I want Sci-Fi to do more which] is just have characters talk through ramifications of things. Like, you know, I want to hear those conversations. And so them kind of having all the arguments that you would have I think is so interesting.

If having these conversations so consistently is part of what makes Devs engaging, characters refusing to ever discuss the implications of their world makes it that much harder to engage with it. The drones are all encountering huge, crazy new concepts that should totally realign their views of the world, and they don’t communicate how they’re dealing with that.

There’s another category of narrative confusion that’s tightly related to all this. I said earlier that I didn’t have an issue with the humor of the show. Poking at tropes can be fun, turning social interactions into clownish performances can be funny, etc. No problem here. What is a problem is when these gags aren’t in service to the main task of communicating the story. And this happens a lot.

In the early show, the most significant dynamic to understand in this whole fictional world is how the societies of the worker drones and the disassembly drones relate to each other. These groups and their relationship is the worldbuilding of the show, and defining and later subverting it is absolutely fundamental.

In the pilot this is spelled out. Uzi’s full name is Uzi Doorman, because she’s from the vitally important Doorman family, the family that makes the giant doors to protect the workers from the titular murder drones. Their entire society is defined by worker drones defending against the existential threat of disassembly drones, who are actively committing genocide against them.

But Uzi delivers all that exposition before anyone even knows disassembly drones can speak. Most of that backstory is eventually contradicted or disproven, so it’s not at all a set-in-stone truth given by a reliable narrator. Subverting the worldview expressed in the opening exposition is a core thread of the show’s plot.

So, given that this “interspecies” relationship a core part of this world that’s in flux throughout the series, the audience needs to understand its norms. Especially — as is the case in Murder Drones — that relationship is the crux of a radical societal shift. So it’s a problem when every interaction between workers and disassembly drones is played for laughs.

Right off the bat, immediately after leading an invasion force into the bunker that slaughters its citizens, N is granted access by the guards by giving a cute face and saying “sorry” nicely.

Uzi’s father takes her to prom, where she’s faced with the question “how could you side with the murder drones, they killed our families?” This is an extremely valid question, but tonally it manages to clash with the episode, because everyone is seemingly okay with everything, all the time.

At prom, Lizzy helps reassemble a damaged V while chiding her for her attempted mass-murder. This whole conversation is significantly less important to everyone in the room than being mean to N.

A minute later, disassembly drones serve as chaperones of a school field trip as a pretext to explore the area. Everybody hangs out and does fun camp activities. At this point, V has not stopped doing the genocide, and actively murders and eats children during the trip.

This is the same trip where Uzi becomes a vampire and goes on a killing spree, murdering and eating many of her classmates. This is never dealt with in any capacity.

It all adds up to a bullet point I had labeled “people are generally cool with stuff they shouldn’t be”. It’s supposed to be a combination of clowning, trope humor, and plot lubricant, which are all fine in moderation. But in Murder Drones, the way this permeates the story — including plot-crucial points — creates a genuine problem. Fundamentally, it’s not clear what kinds of behaviors are normative in this world and what’s considered a meaningful violation of standards. Which makes it unclear what those standards are, which makes it hard to understand the world the story is taking place in. Which matters!

Plot

Human twist doesn’t land

In the very first episode, it’s ambiguous whether humanity died out or just the humans on the one exoplanet. This is a critical plot point!

“Ambiguous” is me being generous here. Uzi says, outright, that “all humans” were killed, and it was easy to pick up where “they” (humans? humanity?) left off. When Tessa shows up, that’s a twist, and so the assumption has to change to be that humans are still around somewhere, maybe in colony ships. (Ironically, “Tessa” showing up doesn’t mean anything for the state of the human race, actually.) So, when Tessa drops the big twist that Earth was destroyed just like the drones’ exoplanet, it doesn’t land. It’s not a twist if it was completely reasonable to assume that had been the case the whole time.

This might just be a victim of a chance in plot direction since the pilot. But if that’s the case, by the time they got to episode six out of eight and were ready to reveal the reveal, they needed to lampshade this somehow in order to make the twist land. Instead, the pieces just don’t connect well, at the expense of the story.

Eye colors

I’ve already mentioned how the blue lighting hurts scene recognizability. But here’s a specific bone I have to pick with lighting choices not just affecting scene readability, but directly hurting the communication of the story. Here’s N in a flashback in episode 2:

It’s an important plot beat that N’s eyes are white and not yellow in this shot. Unfortunately it’s literally impossible to tell that’s the case, because the scene is lit with yellow incandescent lights, so everything white is yellow anyway.

Our best chance at noticing something here is to compare N’s white eyes with yellow eyes directly in this same lighting, which we fortunately get. But here’s what that looks like:

As a visual language, this is illegible.

The only screenshot I was able to get where you can see the difference at all is this one brief shot where both characters are in the same shot and lighting at the same time:

But as a point of reference, here’s an earlier shot showing V with white eyes compared to N’s yellow:

You can see the same kind of contrast here, except in this shot it’s meaningless. Both sets of eyes are still supposed to be yellow here. Which means that major plot point comfortably falls into the margin of “animation error.” That’s real bad!

Mechanics

Too many similar mechanics

This is the cousin of the visual similarity problem. There are a lot of mechanical effects in Murder Drones. Big ol’ tech tree. But there are a lot of different mechanical things that look the same but have totally different causes, or a single cause that can be expressed in very different ways.

Too many kinds of regeneration are introduced at once. In episode 1, we get two different kinds of healing: N’s liquid metal self-repair is one distinct ability, but then the healing saliva is another distinct repair mechanism that works on other units too. (This never comes up again.) One episode later and we get the snake-crab, which seems to be J’s core using an as-of-yet unexplained matter manipulation ability to rebuild her robot body. We then learn that the core is controlled by an autonomous program, not J, and then much later we learn that it’s not a program, but an undefinable eldritch entity. Uzi also gets her own regeneration ability, which uses a distinct soldering effect.

Ultimately, the significance of death (writers take note: this matters) is very muddy. In addition to all the ways drones (and non-drones!) can regenerate what should be fatal damage, we see in J that some robots can literally be replaced with duplicate copies even after permanently killed. It’s also implied that worker drones might have access to the same powers as disassembly drones, but the extent of this isn’t clear, so it’s never obvious if any particular damage is significant or not.

Then, halfway through the series, the idea of cores as a standard worker drone component (as opposed as exclusive to either disassembly drones or snake-crab monsters) is introduced, and now that’s the only time death is significant.

And yes, cores are another unacknowledged retcon. The pilot shows a bisected, coreless worker drone. But even not including that, J’s core being the Absolute Solver instead of having J’s own personality is inconsistent and doesn’t make any sense, especially since J wasn’t ever even a solver host.

Meanwhile, with regard to death, the Absolute Solver seems to transcend the idea of bodies entirely and is usually freely possessing multiple robots simultaneously. Until damage to one particular possessed drone’s core effectively seals her away despite that.

But there are also issues with mechanics less significant than death itself that still play a role in the mystery.

Episode 5 introduces the idea that magnets knock drones out. Episode 6 introduces sentinels which also knock drones out, but also magnets don’t do that anymore, they’re just mild sedatives. Again, the problem isn’t that this is a “plot hole”, it’s that it’s the same mechanic being too different too quickly, making it hard to understand the world as a coherent system.

Disassembly drones’ “vampirism” means they have to consume oil, specifically to prevent from overheating. (Uzi picks up this trait too as she begins to use the solver.) We see drones attack and eat other drones to sate this need. The problem with this is we later see this exact behavior in Cyn’s drones during the culling of Earth, and it’s against fleshy, bloody humans.

This obviously doesn’t involve ingesting drone oil, and seems like it couldn’t have any of the physical effects oil is supposed to give them. So we have the same action done in two different ways, signaling a thematic parallel but not actually paralleling any of the same ideas. Bad triangle problem.

An exciting and marketable thing disassembly drones can do is turn their face into an elongated X, to signify that they’re little rascals. This starts as a trait unique to disassembly drones, but then in a big reveal Uzi does it too.

Wow, is she turning into a disassembly drone??? No, she’s turning into a third kind of bat-thing that’s mechanically very similar to a disassembly drone (face, wings, vampirism…) but distinct in a few obtuse ways that aren’t explained (fleshy, weaponless, possessable…).

As for the elongated X face, we’re given a lore dump that says it’s an indicator of a “Faulty OS String”. It’s very nice to have information like this conveyed at all, but here it doesn’t land, because when we see it in-universe it’s an expression rather than a consistent indicator. Also, we don’t know what an OS String is, or why that’d be relevant. The implication is disassembly drones have theirs changed, I guess, but nothing ever indicates why anyone would have done that or why it’d show up on Uzi.

Transformations

Similarly, there are too many alternate forms of things. Disassembly drones seem able to transform in a number of ways by design: their wings can be deployed or undeployed at will, and their arms can transform into seemingly any kind of weaponry. That’s all supposedly standard, but then there are more transformations added in that are key to the plot.

In episode 2, we learn disassembly drones can apparently become snake-crab monsters. In episode 3, we learn that worker drones can become some sort of teleporting psychokinetic ghost. In episode 4 we see a worker drone transform into a beastly form that resembles disassembly drones but is still very different, and in episode 5 we see that our disassembly drones were originally maids and butlers, which are called worker drones but are very clearly physiologically different from all the other worker drones we know.

Actually, let me dig into the maid droid angle, because that’s very representative of this problem. The flashback scenes were supposed to be the big reveal that disassembly drones were originally worker drones. But instead they’re shown to be an entirely different third thing that doesn’t fit anywhere within any of the previously established taxonomies. The flashback servants have the stature of disassembly drones, but the limbs of worker drones, and a job and environment that’s also totally new.

Narratively, this is supposed to be the “A was B all along” twist, but the introduction of the new variant breaks the “all along” part. It’s like if planet of the apes revealed at the end that they were on a planet that’s a lot like earth but still a different place. So it doesn’t click. None of the pegs fit in the holes, because every peg and every hole is a different shape every time. When everything is novel all the time, the viewer doesn’t get a frame of reference.

All of these effects have different triggers and different significances to the plot, but none of them are explained or understood (by characters or viewers) before the next one is introduced. Most of them are justifiable in hindsight, but in an “ok, I suppose that justifies how that was able to work” way, not in an “oh, that clicks into place, that’s so clever” way.

And they could have clicked into place in a satisfying way. The transformation designs are great and the logic behind them is mostly wired up. They’re 90% of the way there, but that missing 10% noticeably takes the edge off. Again, the piece that’s weak here is how well this world is communicated to the audience.

There’s an attempt to unify a lot of these mechanics and effects under the eldritch “solver” label, but…

Solver powers are very poorly defined

So what actually is the “Absolute Solver”? I might put this question under “mechanics”, except one of the things the Solver is is a sentient person! The same name is used for both the main antagonist of the series and the main supernatural mechanic. It’s the whole metaplot, so it’s important to know what it is. Even in retrospect, this is remarkably hard to do!

So, by my count, here’s what all is explicitly referred to by the name “Absolute Solver”, in order of appearance:

0: ~~A boolean variable in worker drones’ OS that can be toggled~~ (probably retconned)

Disassembly drones’ autonomous repair functions (saliva, liquid metal, etc.)
A sentient emergency-repair system (snake-crab) to reconstitute disassembly drones triggered by major damage
A set of consciously-invoked abilities (matter manipulation, teleportation) some drones (Doll, Uzi, Cyn) are able to tap into
A non-sentient layer of OS programming in disassembly drones to suppress and wipe certain memories
An eldritch entity whose conduit is mutated disposed AI who possesses drones

One thing these all have in common is they’re all reliably sick as hell any time they’re on-screen and don’t think for a moment I don’t appreciate that.

Some of these are compatible with each other, but not all of them at once. That’s right, it’s Bad Triangle time!

1 and 4 could be the same thing, but they can’t also be the same thing as 5, because disassembly drones who have 1 and 4 aren’t ever possessed and seemingly can’t be.
2 and 5 seem like the same entity, with 2 just being 5 possessing a drone core, except 2 is embedded in (some?) disassembly drones and 5 is not. We also see disassembly drones hit the condition to trigger 2, but nothing happens.
3 is probably a property of 5, and drones with 3 are either actively possessed, have been possessed previously, or are descended from a once-possessed drone. But worker drones with 3 don’t have the abilities of 1 or 2.
Uzi using 3 seems to make her a conduit for 5, except we see two other drones (Nori, Doll) freely using 3 without triggering or risking possession.
The eldritch nature of 5 consistently has themes of fleshiness and corruption, especially in Uzi and Cyn. We see this fleshy effect on all drones with any of those numbered traits.

Even if we’re open to a more complex mechanical than the “Absolute Solver” being any cohesive idea, lots of other things prevent any reasonably simple model from working. Once Uzi exhibits 3, she acquires the disassembly drone vampiric weaknesses of burning in sunlight and having to consume oil to keep from overheating. But disassembly drones don’t have any of those powers, and Uzi never exhibits any of the abilities of disassembly drones.

Once we’re away from a strict definition, we have to factor in all the signifiers and associated symbology, and it works less and less. I actually went through the whole series a third time just to fill out this table to try to figure out what powers correspond with what causes, and it just doesn’t work.

This leaves me unable to answer really basic questions. Are DDs hosts for 5, like Uzi, Doll, and Cyn? solver!Tessa says that no, only Uzi is a target, and most evidence agrees and suggests either special experimentation or a genetic component is required, but J proves otherwise with 2.

“Having the Solver” (3) lets Doll and Cyn teleport at will, but not anybody else. What’s the common factor unique to those two but not Uzi and Nora? Nothing! I checked the table!

This isn’t a dumb powerscaling question, this is literally one of the core mysteries of the series. And if I can’t even pin it down with three rewatches and a spreadsheet, a new viewer won’t be able to intuit any of it. And that’s what matters, not my autistic little spreadsheet.

Magic

So if all these powers are cool, why doesn’t it click? This question got me thinking about magic systems in fiction in general.

These robots and powers do form a magic system. Not counting the more explicitly supernatural, eldritch properties of the Solver, the drones and their various abilities are all part of one world, and every mechanic relates to the others. So it’s a system, but it is also magic: these are not physical systems and rules the audience is already familiar with, because they don’t exist in our world.

So if you have a new system of extra-natural abilities, and you want to use that as background for a larger story, how do you write that? This is not a new question. Looking at how people have answered it led me to Sanderson’s Laws Of Magic, a set of essays on writing and communicating magic systems in fiction, the point being that there are best practices for writing magic that works with the narrative:

Sanderson’s First Law As a storyteller, I want a setting element that is narratively sound and which offers room for mystery and discovery. A good magic system should both visually appealing and should work to enhance the mood of a story. It should facilitate the narrative, and provide a source of conflict.

The laws are:

An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.
Limitations > Powers
Expand what you already have before you add something new.

For the purposes of Murder Drones, we can tick #2 off as done, since Uzi’s solver powers are explicitly corrupting, and the narrative does a good job at framing an internal and external conflict around the tradeoffs involved in using them. Of the remaining two, a new power isn’t usually presented as a solution to conflict, so I think #3 is what Murder Drones has the most trouble with.

I think a lot of the reason this is an issue is due to the “indie rush” I talked about at the beginning of this essay. If you have a lot of good ideas but fit them into too small a space, they don’t have room to breathe and build on each other.

Sanderson’s point here is not just about pacing out how frequently you introduce new mechanics, but also that it’s often better to develop and extrapolate the mechanics you already have. Keep the rules, play with the consequences.

Sanderson’s Third Law of Magic Often, the best storytelling happens when a thoughtful writer changes one or two things about what we know, then extrapolates purposefully through all of the ramifications of that change. … Extrapolating, to me, is about asking the “what happens when” questions. … Instead of giving every character a new power, can you have different takes on the same powers, used in different ways?

As I’ve been discussing, Murder Drones pathologically avoids letting characters work through the ramifications of things. It’s difficult just understanding a character’s thoughts and motivations, and the show usually introduces new ideas and characters instead of doing new things with the tools it’s already introduced. (See: Alice.) In other words, it’s good at making “what happen”, but is weak at tying it to the “when”.

I really like the point here about exploring variations of established mechanics, which seems like something that would fit into Murder Drones very well. N and V have the same sets of abilities as disassembly drones, but they express themselves with them very differently. N is very utilitarian and stays in “civilian mode” most of the time, whereas V tends to stay in wings-out, arms-rotating combat mode whenever there’s any excuse.

The king of personality though would be the Absolute Solver itself. The triangle-glyph matter-manipulation power of people actively wielding the Solver is extremely versatile, and almost a magic system in and of itself.

GLITCH@glitch_prod
robot witchcraft was used in the making of this concept art

Wed Jun 21 19:01:00 +0000 2023

There’s a lot of potential here for variation as a narrative tool. What if one drone used editing as their go-to action, and another just used translation as telekinesis? You can use the flexibility of the power as a narrative device here, use specialization and style as a method of characterization. The one thing we get that’s close to this in the story is the null bomb Cyn frequently uses, but that’s more of a special case than an extension of the existing toolset. So this strikes me as an angle that could have easily created some rich narrative and characterization, but was left unused.

So what?

I don’t know! I liked murder drones and I thought it was interesting to think through all this.

Like I said in the opening, I don’t even know that any of this means that the show is “bad”. But I love that you can notice something feels off and identify the reasons that might be. And I also like identifying how some of these mechanical issues in communicating the story could be mechanically fixable, even if this particular show may not have had the resources to do it.

FSE sprite compression

2025-01-03T00:00:00-06:00

This was originally published 2020-07-07 as a reward for sponsors of Befriendus

A Domain-Specific Compression Algorithm — as I later found out this is called — is a compression algorithm that uses the specific nature of the target data as a way to efficiently compress it. The more you know about the structure of the data you’re compressing and what tools you have to reconstruct data, the more efficient the system can be.

I wrote a script for the Fansim Engine that does this with character sprites. It takes character poses, identifies the parts that have changed and the parts that stay the same, and creates identical Ren’py displayables that take up dramatically less room.

Why?

For a little background on why I wanted to do this at all, let me show you how Hiveswap Friendsim handles character sprites.

Hiveswap Friendsim is big.

Given that it’s a fairly simple visual novel with static sprites and a few music tracks, it’s huge. The final version on Steam (with all the DLC and updates) clocks in at 1.3 GB. Pesterquest is also stupid big at 1.43 GB.

Cursory inspection shows that the bulk of this space is taken up by RPA (Ren’Py Archive) files, as is to be expected. You can unpack those, though, which shows what’s taking up all this space:

There are two culprits here: inexplicably uncompressed WAV files (50 MB for a 5 minute loop? what on earth) and character sprites. Both of these stand out as obvious mistakes, because they’re both easily compressible.

I’m not an audio engineer, so I won’t try to explain the WAV thing in-depth, but those files are enormous and could have been compressed down to less than a tenth of their size without any noticeable loss in quality. So, uh, that really should have been done.

What I can speak to personally is the character sprites. Character poses in many visual novels — but particularly Hiveswap — tend to look like this:

The keen-eyed may have already noticed that there is some redundant data being stored here. This is the same character, in the same pose, with a different facial expression. Now, my complaint isn’t that this is somehow “lazy art”; this looks fine in gameplay. The problem is when you’re storing an identical “body” section for every pose, you’re going to end up wasting a ton of space. Which they do.

We can do better.

Sprite compression

If you’ve ever gone on spriters-resource.com (which you probably have done) or opened up a chunk of game memory in yy-chr (which you probably have not done), you’ve probably noticed that sprites aren’t stored as large, copied images, but small pieces that the game puts together at runtime. Like this, or this.

This is especially true for “big” sprites that are significantly larger than the tile size. (Although in ren’py, there isn’t a “tile size”, the principle still stands.) When your space is limited, you want to avoid storing the same thing multiple times if at all possible. Space is always limited, but bad programmers like to pretend it’s not on modern PCs, grumble.

I wanted to create something that took and compressed sprites that were already drawn, in a way that wouldn’t impose extra limits on the artists or really require any additional work.

How it works

To explain the technical details of how I implemented this, I’ll walk through running the program on Mituna’s sprites from Befriendus. This is — mostly — a recreation of how I actually handled Mituna’s sprites for the game proper.

If you’re interested in the nitty-gritty, the source code is available on the Fansim Engine github repo, although that project is no longer in active development.

Basic principles

First, I build a tree of poses. Each pose can have “children”, which are the original pose with a small “patch” somewhere to create a second pose. Ren’py will happily treat a logical “displayable” defined in code like this as an image, and even let you continue making edits recursively, so this design pattern matches perfectly.

Put simply, we can make a full sprite of Mituna frowning by putting a “frowning” segment over the standard idle pose. We don’t need to keep duplicating the whole body pose.

We can simply take the “frown” part and composite it over its base, the idle pose:

Ren’py will do this composite operation at runtime very efficiently if we just tell it what images to composite and where. This requires storing far fewer “pixels” on disk, at the cost of some slight runtime processing.

For convenience, I want all the child poses of a parent to have the same image dimensions. First, I remove any extra whitespace from the sides of the poses, and then I add whitespace until each pose is the same size, centered at the middle.

There’s another gotcha here, too: I can’t just composite the new bit on top of the old sprite, because it’s possible the new pose is transparent in a place the old one wasn’t, and image composition gets that wrong. Instead, I have to “cut a hole” in the base pose by cropping it into 5 pieces, removing the “middle piece”, and replacing it with the patch.

Step by step

I start with a big folder of sprites. Mituna’s sprites look like this:

By default, the “tree” is built based on the filenames of the sprites, although there’s optionally a way to specify a tree manually. After some renaming based on the actual logic of the poses and expressions, the program can interpret the files and build a tree fairly easily:

$ python3 makechars.py --make-demo --character-dirs mituna
INFO: Loaded 30 poses from directory 'mituna'
INFO: Remove old rpydiff_out/characterp/mituna
INFO: Remove old rpydiff_out_demo/characterp/mituna
INFO: Building pose hierarchy...
INFO: Global parent <Pose mituna idle v1* of None>
INFO:  - <Pose mituna idle v1* of None>
INFO:    - <Pose mituna idle frown v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO:      - <Pose mituna idle frown talk v1* of !mituna idle frown>
INFO:    - <Pose mituna idle smile v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO:      - <Pose mituna idle smile talk v1* of !mituna idle smile>
INFO:    - <Pose mituna idle spark v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO:      - <Pose mituna idle spark talk v1* of !mituna idle spark>
INFO:    - <Pose mituna idle talk v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO:    - <Pose mituna angry v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO:      - <Pose mituna angry spark v1* of !mituna angry>
INFO:        - <Pose mituna angry spark talk v1* of !mituna angry spark>
INFO:      - <Pose mituna angry talk v1* of !mituna angry>
INFO:    - <Pose mituna confused v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO:      - <Pose mituna confused talk v1* of !mituna confused>
INFO:    - <Pose mituna cry v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO:    - <Pose mituna defensive v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO:      - <Pose mituna defensive blush v1* of !mituna defensive>
INFO:    - <Pose mituna explode v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO:    - <Pose mituna frustrated v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO:      - <Pose mituna frustrated spark v1* of !mituna frustrated>
INFO:        - <Pose mituna frustrated spark talk v1* of !mituna frustrated spark>
INFO:      - <Pose mituna frustrated talk v1* of !mituna frustrated>
INFO:    - <Pose mituna grin v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO:    - <Pose mituna nervous v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO:      - <Pose mituna nervous alt v1* of !mituna nervous>
INFO:        - <Pose mituna nervous alt talk v1* of !mituna nervous alt>
INFO:      - <Pose mituna nervous spark v1* of !mituna nervous>
INFO:        - <Pose mituna nervous spark alt v1* of !mituna nervous spark>
INFO:          - <Pose mituna nervous spark alt talk v1* of !mituna nervous spark alt>
INFO:        - <Pose mituna nervous spark talk v1* of !mituna nervous spark>

Here, idle frown is a subpose of idle. angry is also a subpose of idle, because here idle is the global root. There needs to be a global root for the tree, which by default is idle or neutral or a variation thereof.

We then iterate through the tree, starting at the leaves, and create patches.

INFO: Expanding canvases...
INFO: Generating patches...
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna idle frown talk v1* of !mituna idle frown>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna idle smile talk v1* of !mituna idle smile>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna idle spark talk v1* of !mituna idle spark>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna angry spark talk v1* of !mituna angry spark>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna angry spark v1* of !mituna angry>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna angry talk v1* of !mituna angry>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna confused talk v1* of !mituna confused>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna defensive blush v1* of !mituna defensive>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna frustrated spark talk v1* of !mituna frustrated spark>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna frustrated spark v1* of !mituna frustrated>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna frustrated talk v1* of !mituna frustrated>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna nervous alt talk v1* of !mituna nervous alt>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna nervous spark alt talk v1* of !mituna nervous spark alt>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna nervous spark alt v1* of !mituna nervous spark>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna nervous spark talk v1* of !mituna nervous spark>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna nervous alt v1* of !mituna nervous>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna nervous spark v1* of !mituna nervous>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna idle frown v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna idle smile v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna idle spark v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna idle talk v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna angry v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna confused v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna cry v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna defensive v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna explode v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna frustrated v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna grin v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO: Creating patch of <Pose mituna nervous v1* of !mituna idle>

For each patch, the algorithm takes a “base” image and an “updated” image, and tries to find the smallest rectangle of “difference” between the images. The patch is then a note of the rectangle from the updated image that needs to placed over the base image to recreate the updated image.

There are fuzzing options, of course, so very small compression differences go ignored. There are also cases where the “different” area is so large that it makes more sense to just treat the updated pose as a new pose, rather than an awkward edit of the parent. The result should be intuitive as well as efficient.

We then get a new tree made of patches and normal poses:

INFO:  - <Pose mituna idle v1* of None>
INFO:    - <Pose mituna angry v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO:      - <Pose mituna angry spark v1* of !mituna angry>
INFO:        - <PatchPose mituna angry spark talk v1* of !mituna angry spark@314,195>
INFO:      - <PatchPose mituna angry talk v1* of !mituna angry@314,195>
INFO:    - <Pose mituna cry v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO:    - <Pose mituna explode v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO:    - <Pose mituna frustrated v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO:      - <PatchPose mituna frustrated spark v1* of !mituna frustrated@155,169>
INFO:        - <PatchPose mituna frustrated spark talk v1* of !mituna frustrated spark@327,219>
INFO:      - <PatchPose mituna frustrated talk v1* of !mituna frustrated@327,219>
INFO:    - <Pose mituna grin v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO:    - <Pose mituna nervous v1* of !mituna idle>
INFO:      - <Pose mituna nervous spark v1* of !mituna nervous>
INFO:        - <PatchPose mituna nervous spark alt v1* of !mituna nervous spark@310,112>
INFO:          - <PatchPose mituna nervous spark alt talk v1* of !mituna nervous spark alt@324,224>
INFO:        - <PatchPose mituna nervous spark talk v1* of !mituna nervous spark@314,195>
INFO:      - <PatchPose mituna nervous alt v1* of !mituna nervous@310,112>
INFO:        - <PatchPose mituna nervous alt talk v1* of !mituna nervous alt@324,224>
INFO:    - <PatchPose mituna idle frown v1* of !mituna idle@248,45>
INFO:      - <PatchPose mituna idle frown talk v1* of !mituna idle frown@323,221>
INFO:    - <PatchPose mituna idle smile v1* of !mituna idle@311,148>
INFO:      - <PatchPose mituna idle smile talk v1* of !mituna idle smile@324,224>
INFO:    - <PatchPose mituna idle spark v1* of !mituna idle@159,148>
INFO:      - <PatchPose mituna idle spark talk v1* of !mituna idle spark@324,224>
INFO:    - <PatchPose mituna idle talk v1* of !mituna idle@324,224>
INFO:    - <PatchPose mituna confused v1* of !mituna idle@214,45>
INFO:      - <PatchPose mituna confused talk v1* of !mituna confused@312,236>
INFO:    - <PatchPose mituna defensive v1* of !mituna idle@228,45>
INFO:      - <PatchPose mituna defensive blush v1* of !mituna defensive@343,272>

You can see here, for instance, that “angry” was so different from “idle” that it was treated as a separate pose. Looking at the poses together, this makes perfect sense:

The program also (optionally) creates visualizations of the process so you can review the decisions and tweak the settings as needed.

Here, the areas that are the same are in black (or pink), and the differences are highlighted. There are so many spaces that the new patch would have to be almost as large as the original image, and so there is not a significant performance benefit in creating a patch for these two.

Between angry and angry talk, though, there is only a slight difference in the mouth area. This is a prime candidate to compress.

We then get two pieces of output. First, a new set of image files, but only the pieces used by the revised pose tree:

You can see that these have a dramatically reduced size. All we have here are the pieces we need: in Mituna’s case, some base poses that include the whole body, and subsections of his face for expressions.

We also get this middle layer; a Ren’py file that defines the displayable image files:

image !mituna idle = Image("{{assets}}/characterp/mituna/idle.png", yanchor=0.95)
image !mituna angry = Image("{{assets}}/characterp/mituna/angry.png", yanchor=0.95)
image !mituna angry talk = Composite(
    (780, 780),
    (0, 0), Crop((0, 0, 780, 195), "__p__mituna angry"),
    (0, 195), Crop((0, 195, 314, 309), "__p__mituna angry"),
    (314, 195), "{{assets}}/characterp/mituna/angry_talk 314,195.png",
    (462, 195), Crop((462, 195, 780, 309), "__p__mituna angry"),
    (0, 309), Crop((0, 309, 780, 780), "__p__mituna angry"), yanchor=0.95
)
...

mituna idle and mituna angry are fairly standard definitions (“Just show this image”). mituna angry talk is a complex object made up of sliced sprites. This is the “cut a hole” system mentioned earlier. The top, bottom, left, and right are just subsections of the original mituna angry pose, but in the middle, there’s a patch inserted. You can see how this would be completely impractical to do at hand, at scale.

The results

This method frees up a significant amount of space. Using the Mituna example, his original sprites were about 4.3M all together:

$ du -sh mituna/
4.3M    mituna/

After compression, his sprite folder was almost half that, at 2.2M:

$ du -sh rpydiff_out/characterp/mituna/
2.2M    rpydiff_out/characterp/mituna/

(This doesn’t include the mituna.rpy character definition file, which is a negligible 9.41 kb.)

That’s a 50% compression compression ratio that losslessly encodes a character worth of sprites in just a few seconds. And, once the compression is done, the performance benefit for all the users is free.²

At first I thought that the RPA format Ren’py uses to store assets might be smart enough to do some of this compression for me, but a quick test revealed that… not so much.

$ du -sh *
2.1M    mituna_compressed.rpa
4.2M    mituna_uncompressed.rpa

I think there is a much better reason to use RPA archives than just naive copy-protection though, which is the game delivery pipeline. If your renpy build is properly configured, different archives can contain data for different portions of the game. That structure, combined with a smart content updating system like Steam, can let developers push incremental updates that only have to change a few files, instead of having to redownload the whole game from scratch.

Conclusion

This is… really good? Astonishingly good, considering that the program can do the work without intervention. This all took a few days and about 800 SLOC of python that’s available as a script in my Fansim Engine github repo. Hopefully it makes sense; the application logic (especially the recursion) can get very complex in code. This also isn’t optimized at all; it’s all done single-threaded and synchronously, the code that finds the smallest bounding box is native python that looks like this:

    for x in range(w):    # for every col:
        for y in range(h):    # For every row
            op = originalp[x, y]
            up = updatep[x, y]
            same = (op == up) or (op[3] == 0 and up[3] == 0)
            if not same and distance(op, up) > fuzz:
                x1 = min(x1, x)
                y1 = min(y1, y)
                x2 = max(x2, x + 1)
                y2 = max(y2, y + 1)

I guess my takeaways here are:

Think about sensible ways to do things
Choosing not to optimize your game files is rude
Befriendus is good, go play it.

Caveats

There are a few things I have to mention here:

Performance cost

The tradeoff here is between the space savings and a slight performance cost. When Ren’py starts up, it caches the images at runtime, which involves doing image processing essentially on-the-fly. As far as I can tell, the performance cost here is negligable on modern systems, although I haven’t found a reliable way of actually testing that.

Side effects

I have had a single report of a case where Ren’py didn’t stitch the textures together properly, pictured here:

As far as I can tell, what’s happening here is this: When Ren’py starts in full screen (or any nonstandard resolution), it resizes the textures internally and caches them at the desired resolution. What’s happening here, I think, is that the resize is happening before the texture stitching, leading to visual artifacts around the edges. This would be similar behavior to something I saw with the very first version of Befriendus, where the frame background was scaled and aliased before the texture was tiled, leading to subpixel artifacting:

The slightly hacky workaround for the subpixel scaling issue was to simply add a 1-pixel border around the edge of the tiled area, so when it aliased, it would blend to black instead of yellow. This isn’t the best fix, but it works, and rendering is so low-level in Ren’py that it’s probably more stable to leave it alone when possible.

These are made using Wiztree, which is a very good way of looking at disk space consumption. ↩↩
See Performance cost ↩

Making Thanos work

2024-12-17T00:00:00-06:00

Did you know there are still people who think the MCU’s Thanos is a deep character with interesting motivations? For all the CinemaSins “why didn’t he use his powers to end scarcity, is he stupid” types, there are still “Thanos did nothing wrong” chuds.

This is stupid, of course. But after seeing people be wrong on the internet, it occurred to me recently that there are a couple of genuinely interesting ways to spin the character without changing his mechanical role in the story. In fact, with just a tiny bit of re-framing, you can turn Thanos from a stupid dumb-dumb into a genuinely great villain.

Why Thanos doesn’t work

First, a super-quick summary of what I’m reacting to.

The original sin here is how the MCU signals Thanos to the audience. The text makes a deliberate gesture toward Thanos’ actions and motivations being based on a philosophy of balancing the universe for the greater good and thus morally ambiguous, but it’s not backed up by anything and immediately collapses when inspected.

Thanos grew up on Titan, which suffered an overpopulation crisis. Thanos suggested reducing their resource costs by killing a random half of the population, a proposal which was rejected so thoroughly they exiled him from the planet for it. The planet eventually does succumb to an overpopulation crisis. Thanos is convinced his genocide plan is necessary to keep the same thing from happening everywhere, and starts a centuries-long campaign of wars that end with him indiscriminately killing half the population of any place he can find.

The movie plays him as “reluctant”, which he is not. When his planet is destroyed, Thanos centers this around himself — not just a “loss” but a conflict he lost — and spends the rest of his life trying to prove to himself his plan would have worked and so he was the one wronged. His noble model of “balance” is internalized bullshit to cover an ultimately childish motivation.

Simple enough. I’m not covering any new ground here, I don’t think.

So how do you make a cosmic genocider complex and interesting?

First, you pretty much have to give up on “moral ambiguity”, unless you’re making that the main plot of your movie. The convergent instrument fallacy “I demand to have my boot on your face because I think that’s best for everyone” doesn’t cut it. You also don’t want to change Thanos’s mechanical role in the story for this. He still needs to be an immensely powerful conquering force who ultimately kills half the population. No Infamous Iron Man’ing.

So here’s how you fix it:

Thanos starts from a position of power — the royal family — but when he tried to impose his idea he didn’t have enough power to actualize his vision. So, in reaction (almost as a trauma response) he starts accruing power in the form of military might. Thanos is already a talented military tactician himself when he’s exiled from Titan, so we know Titan wasn’t really edenic. Titan wasn’t overtly evil, but it was militaristic enough that Thanos transitions straight into position as a conquering warlord.

With a militaristic head-start, Thanos spends his military career developing the strength of his armies, with an absolute focus on this idea of balance through destruction. But this keeps Thanos immersed in a military culture of his own creation for centuries, which becomes a feedback loop that changes the way his mind works and how he views the world.

That’s the hook. Thanos’ problem is that he’s wearing horse blinders. His background has fundamentally limited how he thinks about the world, and this is what stunts him. The only solutions he can imagine to any problem are violent because his thought patterns have boxed him in to a way of thinking that only produces that flavor of idea. All he has is a hammer.

So far everything I’ve been talking about applies to Thanos as a warlord. But this does mean he’s limited by the fact that he’s only wielding the tools of war. He physically only has a hammer.

The introduction of the infinity gauntlet is the perfect linchpin to this theme. Completing the gauntlet should represent a moment of immense freedom. After centuries of pursuing his goals with force, he’s finally handed a true blank check. While before he was limited by the paradigms of force, he can finally choose any result he wants and achieve it directly. It’s absolute power, limited only by the imagination of the user.

And instead of addressing the root cause of the problem, he just intensifies his pursuit of genocide. With this, what was ostensibly an instrumental goal becomes the thing he chooses to affirm instead of the original goal that prompted this whole course of action.

This should be the culmination of the theme: Thanos is stupid. His fatal flaw is that he is indeed limited by his own imagination. He’s spent so much time pursuing his path with absolute focus that he can’t stop when it’s time. All at once he has every tool in the world, but all his psyche wants to do is hammer. What’s interesting about Thanos isn’t that his original motivation was harm mitigation, it’s that at some point he stopped wanting that.

Wonder Woman

This is a plot beat that was handled better in — of all things — Wonder Woman 1984. The plot of 1984 is a guy gets the power to accumulate power by granting other people’s wishes like a genie, and also Wonder Woman is there. This causes horrible problems, not only because the wishes have ironic consequences, but because wish for stupid, naive stuff.

This leads to this scene, where Wish Man gets an audience with the President of the United States, and offers him absolutely anything he wants:

This is the Thanos dynamic done right, I think. POTUS gets a blank check, a liberating moment where they’re freed from the limitations of reality and resources. And that creates the horrifying moment when you realize how they want to spend their checks. POTUS doesn’t want peace, he doesn’t want domination, he doesn’t want victory, he wants more. More everything, more weapons, more brinkmanship, more distance along exactly the same path he was on already.

That’s the perfect Thanos moment. The tragedy, the horror, is that the man has been bent into the shape of an intermediate goal. The responses these people have to power are fundamentally wrong, because the way they think about problems is dictated by the shape of themselves. They can’t even conceive of genuine benefit.

That’s how you turn the snap from a cultural joke to something interesting: make it real. Do what comics do best: take an aspect of humanity and extrapolate it to mythic proportions.

There is another interesting way to play the character. I think this is a lot weaker than the horse-blinder characterization, but it’s still better than the text, so I’ll mention it.

One of Thanos’ characteristics is a facade of neutrality. With the exception of the big fun superhero fights, he acts out his brutality through layers of constructed systems. Populations are carefully divided up at random The lack of criteria is part of his MO, but so is this insistence on a level of indirectness between himself and the actual suffering.

He doesn’t kill people directly. He doesn’t stay around to enjoy the results. He’s a bureaucrat.

Characterize Thanos by leaning into this. He’s that kind of heartless that reduces people down to numbers and line-items before making efficient decisions about them. He’s Scrooge killing Tiny Tim through wage theft. He’s the healthcare provider denying necessary care. He’s the unjust judge who condemns men for the rest of their lives.

He refuses to take responsibility for the gravity of his actions. He conceptualizes himself as a mindless force acting out a fundamental truth of the universe, not an active participant. It’s not that he’s indomitable, it’s that he’s “inevitable”. And a dispassionate evil can be a greater threat, because it scales.

Verification on Bluesky is already perfect

2024-12-03T00:00:00-06:00

Bluesky has very quickly become a serious social media platform. This means it’s having to deal with all the problems social media platforms have to deal with, including impersonation. A lot of people flocked to Bluesky from Twitter, and so recreating something like Twitter’s verification system seems like a natural step.

Bluesky Safety@safety.bsky.app
6/ We also hear your feedback: users want more ways to verify their identity beyond domain verification. We’re exploring additional options to enhance account verification, and we hope to share more shortly.
2024-11-29T20:46:33.430Z

But you don’t need to do that! Bluesky’s current verification system is actually very good and does what verification is supposed to do.

In 2022 I wrote a retrospective essay about the “verified account” design pattern on Twitter, which tried to preempt this conversation a little bit, but unfortunately got bogged down a little with Elon breaking Twitter verification. This piece will talk about a lot of the same ideas, but applied more specifically to Bluesky’s ecosystem.

Bluesky handle verification

Bluesky already has a very good self-verification system called domain handles. The idea is simple: if you have a website, your bluesky handle can be that website, and that verifies that the bluesky account is also the person who manages the site.

There are a number of ways to confirm your identity for this; if you own the DNS record you can verify yourself through DNS, but you can also verify yourself by putting code in the body of a page. This means any “real” website you administer, including things like neocities, can be used as verification. These domains can also be provided by an employer, like <name>.nytimes.com

Other services, including mastodon, have a similar system for self-verifying based on web domains. Bluesky’s verification stands out better though, since it uses your website for your handle. Any verification on the account will show up in every post, at the very top. You don’t need to dig through someone’s profile to confirm their identity, everyone wears it on their sleeve.

Don’t overload verification

One of my main points from The Failure of Account Verification was that the reason the blue check was ineffective was that it was semantically overloaded. It wasn’t clear what it was supposed to mean, because it could mean so many things. Does it confirm you’re who you claim to be? Or does it confirm that you’re a celebrity? Or does it constitute endorsement by the platform? Or does it mean you’re a first-class citizen of Elon Musk’s X The Everything App?

Bluesky has the perfect opportunity to short-circuit this problem, because verification is already explicitly defined. It means you control a specific web domain.

Web domains

Web domains are a heirarchial system. The components of the domain name are separated by .s, and each component is a subdomain of the domain to its right. So mail.google.com means com has the subdomain google, which has the subdomain mail. google controls mail.google.com, and com (an ICANN top-level domain) controls google.com.

A really useful feature of this system is that the trust chain is visible in the domain name, and you can understand the hierarchical relationship a domain represents at a glance. This means you don’t have to memorize every domain that exists, as some people have ludicrously argued. You just have to be able to read a domain name, which is not much to ask. It’s not an esoteric skill, it’s basic literacy.

This trust-chain-in-the-name feature is what lets verification work for domains like neocities or senate.gov: If you have a neocities account, you control <site>.neocities.com. You can’t pose as neocities itself, or a different neocities user, because you only have access to that one subdomain.

Dylan Freedman@dylanfreedman.nytimes.com
Update: I'm now @dylanfreedman.nytimes.com!
2024-12-02T20:09:36.196Z

Non-verified Bluesky handles conform to this system too. If you have a <user>.bsky.social handle, that just means bsky.social has you as a user. The hierarchy is still there and it’s still correct.

What do you want verification to do?

If you want a “pure” system of verification that verifies the authenticity — and only the authenticity — of accounts, Bluesky already has exactly what you want: an unambiguous, purely technical verification system that isn’t dependent on value judgements from human moderators. It doesn’t mean someone is “trustworthy”, it just means they are who they say they are. “Legit” is not an intrinsic property a person can have. Domain verification communicates one thing, and does it well: this person is the same person from this website.

Trying to add an additional verification system (like a badge) that adds other connotations (like prestige) can only add confusion to this signal.

I’ve seen lots of people on Bluesky complaining that domain verification is “insufficient” because people can make generic impersonation accounts under bsky.social, or that there’s some need for a “real” verification system. But this logic doesn’t hold up.

Having a blue checkmark in your name won’t stop people from making unverified accounts impersonating you on the generic bsky.social domain, obviously. The blue check only helps in comparing a fake account to the real one, because the real one will have authenticating information in the handle. This is, of course, exactly the same thing domain verification does.

Problems with Bluesky verification

Just because the current system is “pure” and “unambiguous” doesn’t mean there aren’t issues. I don’t think any of these are helped by a badge system, but I do think they’re weaknesses it’s good to be aware of.

Revocation

If your verified Bluesky handle is <name>.<newsroom>.com, to verify that you’re currently employed by newsroom, what happens when you quit? Assuming newsroom correctly deactivates your page (hopefully leaving it up for historical purposes, but removing the verification code), what happens on Bluesky?

There has to be a system to periodically re-check these verified handles to see if something has changed in the domain verification chain, like your company no longer authenticating you as an active member. If that happens, what happens to your Bluesky handle? Is there action required to fix it (i.e. the “invalid handle” state), or are you reassigned a generic name again? What happens to links to your old name; can you leave a redirection notice?

Currently, in this case, Bluesky will revert the account to a .bsky.social handle, but accounts will keep their history and followers.

Bad actor domains

Domains themselves can be fake. We already see this as part of phishing attack chains: you get an email from your bank with a link to <bankname>.net, but you don’t realize bankname’s real domain is <bankname>.com!

Now, imagine the same attack but with Bluesky handles. You’re contacted by service.<bankname>.net, and it seems like they’ve verified themselves as authorized representatives of bankname. But they’re not!

Comfortably Numb@numb.comfortab.ly
Speaking of verification via domain name handle. This is fake.
2024-12-04T01:38:30.821Z

There are a few ways to handle this. Accounts that are engaged in malicious impersonation can still be banned by Bluesky moderation, regardless of their handle. But in this case, the top-level domain and ICANN can also exert pressure from the domain side. Web hosts do not want to be responsible for phishing campaigns, and reputable top-level domains don’t want to implicitly approve fake subdomains. In the above example, .net itself can moderate the fake site, and even remove it from the .net domain.

It doesn’t mark who the angels are

This is what everybody wants, right? I think a lot boils down to this.

People want a filter they can put over the world that tells them who they can trust and who they can’t, ingroup-outgroup membership signifies, friend-or-foe colors. People want shinigami eyes. But that’s just not how society works! It’s not how trust works, it’s not how people work. And if you take this vague, impossible wish, and try to build a technical system to accomplish it, you end up making a confused, overloaded system that just injects more bad information.

Domain verification is good

It’s a good system! It does exactly what it says it does. Compared to domain handles, a human-approved badge system would add more room for errors in judgement, not less.

The ambiguous "use"

2024-11-15T00:00:00-06:00

I keep seeing people make this error, especially in social media discourse. Somebody wants to “use” something. Except obviously, it’s not theirs, and so it’s absurd for them to make that demand, right?

Quick examples

I’m not trying to pick on this person at all: they’re not a twitter main character, they’re not expressing an unusual opinion here, they seem completely nice and cool. But I think this cartoon they drew does a good job of capturing this sort of argument-interaction, which I’ve seen a lot:

crumb@cuptoast
???

Sun Sep 22 22:20:02 +0000 2024

I’ve also seen the exact inverse of this: people getting upset at artists because once the work is “out there” anyone should be able to “use” it. (But I don’t have a cartoon of this.)

There is an extremely specific error being made in both cases here, and if you can learn to spot it, you can save yourself some grief. What misuse is being objected to? What are the rights to “certain things” being claimed?

The problem is that “use” is an extremely ambiguous word that can mean anything from “study” to “pirate” to “copy and resell”. It can also cover particularly sensitive cases, like creating pornography or editing it to make a political argument.

But everything people do is “using” something. By itself, “use” is not a meaningful category or designation. Say you buy a song — listening to it, sampling it, sharing it, performing it, discussing it, and using it in a video are all “uses”, but the conversations about whether each is appropriate or not are extremely distinct. If you have an objection, it matters a lot what specific use you’re talking about.

But if you’re not specific, there are unlimited combinations of “uses” you could be talking about, and you could mean any of them. And when people respond, they could be responding to any of those interpretations. There’s no coherent argument in any sweeping statement about “use”; the only things being communicated are frustration and a team-sports-style siding with either “artists” or “consumers” (which is a terrible distinction to make!).

Formal logic

This is not a new problem. This is the Fallacy of Equivocation, which is a subcategory of Fallacies of Ambiguity. This is when a word (in this case, “use”) has more than one meaning, and an argument uses the word in such a way that the entire position and its validity hinge on which definition the reader assumes.

The example of this that always comes to my mind first is “respect”, because this one tumblr post from 2015 said it so well:

flyingpurplepizzaeater Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”

and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”

and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.

See, here the “argument” relies on implying a false symmetry between two clauses that use the same word but with totally different meanings. And, in disambiguating the word, the problem becomes obvious.

Short-form social media really exacerbates the equivocation problem by encouraging people to be concise, which leads to accidental ambiguity. But social media also encourages people to take offense at someone else being wrong as the beginning of a “conversation”, which encourages people to use whatever definition of other people’s words makes them the wrongest.

Copyright examples

Since I’m already aware that copyright is a special interest of mine, I try to avoid falling into the trap of modeling everything in terms of copyright by default, Boss Baby style. But this is literally the case of a debate over who has the “right” to various “uses” of things that are usually intangible ideas, so I think it’s unavoidably copyright time again.

95% of the time when people complain about a “use” being inappropriate, or complain about people feeling “entitled” to a “use”, they’re talking about a specific kind of use that has its own field of study under the broad category of “intellectual property”.

When people categorically object to “use” of their work, this can mean one of two things. One is that they subscribe to the extremely juvenile idea that authors have an unlimited, perpetual, inalienable right to control all publication, derivation, and interpretation of work “they created”, for some definition of “create”. This is wrong. The question of “what rights do people have over information they produce” is an incredibly complex topic, and the answer isn’t “all of them, stupid”.

The other case — and this is usually the case — is that they mean something much more specific by the word “use”, and have simply failed to explain it. Maybe they specifically mean redistribution, or plagiarism, or a more nebulous idea of “ripping off”, or some combination of those things. Maybe you agree with this, or maybe you don’t, you don’t even know. You can’t possibly talk about it until they define what their assertion is!

This means in arguments about rights to “use” work which refuse to specify the exact rights they mean, the “sides” are effectively talking past each other. In good faith, this can just be a mistake, but in bad faith can be deliberate outrage farming. Unfortunately, this turns out to be a very effective sleight of hand when used deliberately.

It is very easy for someone to “feel” wronged when someone else is “using” “their” “thing”. But, if they haven’t actually been wronged, they’ll find it dificult to articulate why there’s a legitimate grievance, because they don’t have one. When this happens, instead of reconsidering their own emotions, people often cover up their own error by pretending they don’t need to articulate their grievance at all, and keep all their complaints convincingly ambiguous.

This happened with the Internet Archive lawsuit, an ugly saga I’ve discussed in detail. The rhetorical argument against the archive was this wiggly little “use”: “they’re using our books without paying us!” When in reality, the way the Internet Archive’s library was “using” them was lending out books they owned legally. But “we’re demanding libraries stop lending our books” makes you sound obviously evil, whereas “you have to pay us when you use our IP” doesn’t.

A person who believes “artists should be paid when you use their work” might also agree that “the builder doesn’t get paid every time the house sells” and “artists should study books on technique”. But the second two statements both conflict with the first one! How can they all make sense at once? Because the first statement uses a wiggly “use” that folds itself down to be as reasonable as you want it to be.

AI “use”

I have another piece I’m writing about the very complicated relationship LLM AI has with “using” work. I’ll talk about this much more in-depth then, but here are some early thoughts to chew on. People really like using the ambiguous “use” with regards to AI, and I think one of the reasons is to create an outrage that’s amplified by the ambiguous metaphor.

Take the article¹ OpenAI Pleads That It Can’t Make Money Without Using Copyrighted Materials For Free. Only in the body of the piece does it explain that the actual conflict is the unsettled question of whether or not AI training — an act that is mechanically very different from copying — is considered to be a violation of copyright that needs specific licensing.

This is a pretty detailed and technical question, actually, and one I have an upcoming major essay dedicated to. It’s also an important question! It deserves to be considered carefully and given a thoughtful, specific answer. Simplifying it down to “use” isn’t just inaccurate, it’s intellectually lazy.

An accurate summary would be “OpenAI argues Training on Copyrighted Materials Is Non-Infringing Use”, which is the thing that happened. But “OpenAI can’t make money without using copyrighted materials for free” bakes the outrage directly into the headline, and creates an easily-digestible narrative for people: OpenAI is profiting by exploiting a resource it should be paying for. But that all hinges on the ambiguous “use” in the title.

Same thing with News Corp sues Perplexity for ripping off WSJ and New York Post by Emma Roth², where the imprecise phrase “ripping off” lets the reader immediately stop thinking about the problem. What does “ripping off” mean? It sure sounds bad when you don’t explain what happened. Was it plagiarism? Direct copy-paste? Why does News Corp think it was wronged?

In reality, Perplexity made a website that told people what another website said. Some people will agree with News Corp that telling users what another website says is an offensive misappropriation, but other people will argue that describing the content of other sites should be allowed speech. Both positions are interesting! But by using the vague phrase “ripping off” instead of describing the situation to people, this headline is actively obfuscating the question at hand and instead focusing on the “feeling” of offense. Framing the story as “News Corp feels offended” instead of describing the event in question turns the conversation into the team sports “who do you like more” contest, which is worthless.

Conclusion

Don’t talk past each other!

Encourage an understanding of the topics you care about!

Don’t reduce complex questions down to team sports!

Precision of language!

this is another xerox-of-a-xerox article; it’s mostly just an unnecessary summary of actual reporting by The Telegraph. ↩
Hey, look at that byline, she’s another crypto skeptic who naturally pivoted to AI skepticism. We just talked about that! ↩

Game patent grab bag

2024-09-18T00:00:00-05:00

This was originally something I was going to talk about in Corporations have Rejected Copyright, back when that series was going to just be one long post (really!). But since I saw Nintendo apparently sued Palworld today, I wanted to put this up as background information.

You should definitely read You’ve Never Seen Copyright first, particularly the explanation of what patents are, because this conversation directly follows from that. The most important thing to pick up on is how the Doctrine of Equivalents lets companies use patents that are supposedly very specific to threaten other implementations that are similar, even if they aren’t using the patented design.

Game patents are revelatory, because game rules as a category explicitly do not fall within the realm of patent rights, but companies have managed to file and defend fraudulent patents anyway.

Namco

I’m obliged to start by talking about Namco’s patent for Recording medium, method of loading games program code means, and games machine, aka “The Loading Screen Game Patent”.

This patent gave Namco a monopoly over the idea of avoiding “unnecessary wastage of time” by having a “main game and an auxiliary game” from 1995-2015. Translated, that means playing a simple game while the console loads the main game. Like Squid Jump!

This incredibly simple concept went totally unused, locked under patent for two decades, and it violates everything a patent is meant for.

It doesn’t publicise any useful information or techniques for doing anything new, because nothing was invented. There was no trade, no exchange of inventive scientific information in exchange for patent protection. Namco hadn’t created anything, they were just making a land grab in the hopes of forcing other game companies to license the concept of minigames.

Not only can concepts not be patented in the first place, this wasn’t even a particularly inventive one! Playing a game while you wait for another game to load is an incidental improvement to the “loading screen” technology. This is clearly evidenced by the fact that Namco themselves made it as an incidental improvement. Their product isn’t an innovative new minigame system, that’s just something they made as part of making a good video game. They only filed the patent for it after the fact in order to claim as much monopoly power as they could.

Not only that, that patent was filed fraudulently in the first place, because the concept was one that had already been invented and Namco themselves copied!

Elliot Harmon, “The Loading Screen Game Patent Finally Expires” In 1998, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued Patent 5,718,632, on a method for avoiding “unnecessary wastage of time” in video games.

According to the law, a person isn’t entitled to a patent if the claimed invention already existed when the application was filed or would have been obvious to someone skilled in the relevant technology area. The idea of playing a small game while the larger one loads has been around for a very long time. In 1987, many years before Namco filed its patent application, Richard Aplin created Invade-a-Load, a utility for developers who wrote games for the Commodore 64 computer. As a game developer, you could package Invade-a-Load with your game; while players waited for the game, they’d be treated to a mini-game similar to Space Invaders. Given the breadth of Namco’s claims, there is a very strong case that its application should have been rejected as anticipated or obvious in light of Invade-a-Load.

Grab bag

There’s more patents. There’s so many more patents.

There’s Game display method, moving direction indicating method, game apparatus and drive simulating apparatus. This is Sega’s patent for an arrow that points at where the goal is, otherwise known as “a compass”.

The patent itself mostly describes the incidental math required for rendering an arrow, and the if-else logic for picking a destination to point to. But the fact that they described the math they used doesn’t give them the right to claim ownership over the idea of an arrow from one place to another! And they used it to sue Fox for using an arrow in a Simpsons game!

Of course, they didn’t even invent that. Crash Bandicoot 3’s Coco levels had the same 3D arrow system. In a racing minigame, no less!

Sega also owns Video game with spiral loop graphics for… the corkscrew loops Sonic runs across in ~~Green Hill~~ Emerald Hill Zone. Not the loops, just the spirals!

Yes, just the graphics for displaying a corkscrew. Yes, all the sprite rendering techniques are prior art and incidental development. Yes, 3D graphics were old news too. Yes, the thing they’re depicting is just emulating the corkscrew loop of a rollercoaster. But if they could get a patent for it, that’s basically just free property for Sega, so of course they got it.

EA snagged Graphical interface for interactive dialog for the Bioware radial menu, which lets you pick an option from a circular menu using your circular analog stick. They shaped the menu like the controller so you can control it. It’s good, but it’s not theirs.

Microsoft sat on Scoring based upon goals achieved and subjective elements for the last twenty years without acting on it. That’s a good thing, because it claims ownership over the idea of… awarding bonus points.

joker gambled

Nemesis System

But at least most of those have expired. (Squid jump is legal now.) There are lots that haven’t.

The canonical example of this is Warner Bros’ “Nemesis System”, something I’ve heard is neat, but I haven’t experienced because it’s locked behind a patent on a game I’m not interested in.

The Nemesis System is a system that generates dynamic “recurring enemy” NPCs in open-world games. The patent was rejected by the USPTO for six years of filing revisions before Warner Bros finally managed to slip a revision through. That’s the same patent system that granted a patent for “play a game while you” in the first shot, that’s how bad the Nemesis patent is.

Despite being a really good innovation, the Nemesis System has gone virtually untouched since it was tainted by patent. Warner Bros haven’t used it for anything else, no one has licensed it from them, and no studios are willing to risk using those same methods, for risk of a lawsuit. The patent has, demonstrably, completely destroyed a genuine innovation.

The patent, of course, doesn’t provide any useful information about the system. It doesn’t disclose anything, it doesn’t provide any value. All it does is shut down inventiveness, because it grants a monopoly on a system that, while creative, shouldn’t have been patent-eligible in the first place.

Cat Manning@catacalypto
I looked at the patent & it's so broad as to be absurd! multiple other emergent narrative systems that I have seen & worked on could be described with their language! It probably would not be legally enforceable but I & other indie devs don't have the money to find out!
Feb 6, 2021 · 6:50 AM UTC

Cat Manning@catacalypto
I have zero interest in copying the Nemesis system whole cloth! Personally there are a number of other things there I would do differently. But the patent is so broad that I'm still worried that it's a license to stop ANY similar work from being developed!
Feb 6, 2021 · 6:52 AM UTC

Speaking of haven’t-run-out patents, Sony managed to patent adaptive difficulty… last year.

Pokemon

And the big concept Nintendo “owns”, the thing they’re insisting Palworld should have to license from them in order to use, seems to be… throwing little guys.

This isn’t even pretending to publicise an invention. It’s just a description of their game, so they can sue people they view as competition. It’s Nintendo-typical thuggery, and it’s the cherry on top of the whole pile of shit that is “game patents.”

Is AI eating all the energy? Part 2/2

2024-09-09T00:00:00-05:00

Part 2: Growth, Waste, and Externalities

The AI tools are efficient according to the numbers, but unfortunately that doesn’t mean there isn’t a power problem. If we look at the overall effects in terms of power usage (as most people do), there are some major problems. But if we’ve ruled out operational inefficiency as the reason, what’s left?

The energy problems aren’t coming from inefficient technology, they’re coming from inefficient economics. For the most part, the energy issues are caused by the AI “arms race” and how irresponsibly corporations are pushing their AI products on the market. Even with operational efficiency ruled out as a cause, AI is causing two killer energy problems: waste and externalities.

Increasing costs

First, where are energy costs ballooning?

Performance demand

Previously, I said that overall energy use varies because of the volatile factors that affect it:

While it’s true that there’s no monotonic trend in any one direction, experts do project (based on assumption of increasing demand) that the overall energy use will increase in the coming years. As the demand for AI products grows, so do the power requirements. This is contributing to an increase in overall demand for electricity production.

Training growth

While there’s still a huge spread between individual models, the overall trend is that models have become increasingly complex, and so increasingly expensive to train.

This is mostly seen in global-scale “frontier” and “omni” models, like ChatGPT and Llama. There is no limit to how energy-expensive training can be made. (That’s the “frontier” frontier models are pushing: how big the models can get.) Until you run out of data you can always train on more and more data points. And the more data points you use, the more expensive training gets.

I touched on this briefly in Part 1:

Training costs are proportional to the amount of data the model is trained on. The more data points there are, the longer the training takes. This means that it’s always possible to make training more expensive by throwing more data in. …
…
In 2022, training costs for the BLOOMz model family of small LLMs were benchmarked, and the range for total training costs was 11,000 kWh to 51,586 kWh…

But it is possible to pour massive amounts of energy into training language models. The more data you use as input, the more work is required to train a satisfactory model. In more recent history, Meta’s Llama 3 large language model’s small and large sizes were trained in 2024 for 1.3 and 6.4 million 700-watt GPU hours, respectively, with a maximum theoretical power usage of 910,000 kWh and 4,480,000 kWh.

Unfortunately, marginal gains in model quality require staggering amounts of electricity.

I don’t have any data for “model quality”, so please excuse my very unscientific sketch here, but it seems to me that the pattern is something like this:

Smaller and smaller diminishing returns in quality require a non-diminishing energy cost. This makes bigger and bigger large language models (LLMs) less proportionally valuable.

And as LLMs keep getting bigger, the costs grow higher and higher.

As it says on the tin, “Training Compute of Frontier AI Models Grows by 4-5x per Year” estimates that the total complexity of training AI models (not compensating for efficiency improvements) has been 4-5x per year:

Jaime Sevilla and Edu Roldán, “Training Compute of Frontier AI Models Grows by 4-5x per Year”
…
We tentatively conclude that compute growth in recent years is currently best described as increasing by a factor of 4-5x/year. We find consistent growth between recent notable models, the running top 10 of models by compute, recent large language models, and top models released by OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Meta AI.

There are some unresolved uncertainties. We cannot rule out that the overall trend of compute might have accelerated. We also find evidence of a slowdown of growth in the frontier around 2018, which complicates the interpretation, and recent frontier growth since 2018 is better described as a 4x/year trend. We also find a significantly faster trend for notable language models overall, which have grown as fast as 9x/year between June 2017 and May 2024. However, when focusing on the frontier of language models, we see that the trend slows down to a ~5x/year pace after the largest language models catch up with the overall frontier in AI around mid-2020.

All in all, we recommend summarizing the recent trend of compute growth for notable and frontier models with the 4-5x/year figure. This should also be used as a baseline for expectations of growth in the future, before taking into account additional considerations such as possible bottlenecks or speed-ups.

For another view of the same EpochAI data, see Computation used to train notable AI systems, by affiliation of researchers, an interactive graph from Our World in Data.

Note this is measuring in floating point operations (FLOP), which is a kind of “operation”, not energy. The total energy use would also have to factor in the change in energy/operations over time, which flattens the line. In our formula, the increase in complexity measured here corresponds to an increase in operations/job:

So that increasing model complexity is a factor that we should expect will push up the net energy required to train (but not use) models.

Reduced cost per operation lowers net consumption

But to jerk you around one more time, there are yet more factors pushing costs down, so it’s not quite as bad as it looks.

Demand and efficiency (meaning lower cost per operation) push the overall power usage in opposite directions. Theoretically, if efficiency improved fast enough, it could actually outpace demand and cause overall power usage to stay steady, or even go down, even as performance demands increase.

In fact, prior to the recent data center boom, that’s exactly what’s been happening:

Goldman Sachs, “Generational growth: AI, data centers and the coming US power demand surge”, Apr 2024

Despite the increase in demand for electrical performance, the change in power demand has averaged 0% for the last ten years due to efficiency improvements outpacing increasing usage. How cool is that?

As seen in this graph from United States Data Center Energy Usage Report (2016), if energy efficiency had remained at 2010 levels, annual electricity use would have skyrocketed:

But, in reality, power consumption stayed almost level because efficiency increased alongside demand. And, as the report describes, usage could be lowered even further by implementing more efficiency measures, without ever affecting performance demand (e.g. by artificially restricting use).

Systemic limits

Training costs are growing fast. On the other hand, this growth is necessarily limited. Even if we had infinite power infrastructure and corporations could increase their power usage as much as they wanted, they’d still have to make it profitable, or they simply couldn’t afford to buy the power.

As laid out by de Vries:

de Vries, A. (2023). The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligence. Joule, 7(10), 2191–2194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2023.09.004 … However, this scenario assumes full-scale AI adoption utilizing current hardware and software, which is unlikely to happen rapidly. Even though Google Search has a global reach with billions of users, such a steep adoption curve is unlikely. Moreover, NVIDIA does not have the production capacity to promptly deliver 512,821 A100 HGX servers, and, even if it did, the total investment for these servers alone for Google would total to approximately USD 100 billion. Over 3 years, the annual depreciation costs on a USD 100 billion AI server investment would add up to USD 33.33 billion. Such hardware expenses alone would significantly impact Google’s operating margin. … For Google Search, this would translate to an operating margin of USD 42.25 billion. The hardware costs, coupled with additional billions in electricity and other costs, could rapidly reduce this operating margin to zero. In summary, while the rapid adoption of AI technology could potentially drastically increase the energy consumption of companies such as Google, there are various resource factors that are likely to prevent such worstcase scenarios from materializing.

The cost of energy consumption can’t consistently outpace profit, or the company would lose money. The amount that can feasibly be spent is always locked to how profitable that use actually is (at least, in the long run).

For a demonstration of this point, let’s look at Bitcoin and its energy use. If you compare the energy consumption of bitcoin and the price history of bitcoin, you’ll find they’re roughly the same shape:

Bitcoin energy consumption worldwide 2017-2024 | Statista

Bitcoin price history Aug 13, 2024 | Statista

It should be intuitive that the energy consumption of bitcoin tracks its value. Bitcoin miners aren’t willing to spend more on energy than the bitcoin they’d mine is worth. The net revenue creates a hard ceiling, because no one wants negative profit.

I chose bitcoin for this example because its worth is a simple number and so is easily quantifiable. (The “value of AI” is not so easily plotted.) But in the same way as bitcoin, we should expect the energy use of AI to be capped by its value. If companies don’t expect billions of revenue from training an AI, they’re not going to spend billions on power.

Quoting Kyle again,

Kyle Orland, Taking a closer look at AI’s supposed energy apocalypse | Ars Technica …there are economic limits involved in the total energy use for this kind of technology. … A similar trend [to bitcoin] will likely guide the use of generative AI as a whole, with the energy invested in AI servers tracking the economic utility society as a whole sees from the technology.

…

In the end, though, these companies are in the business of making a profit. If customers don’t respond to the hype by actually spending significant money on generative AI at some point, the tech-marketing machine will largely move on, as it did very recently with the metaverse and NFTs. And consumer AI spending will have to be quite significant indeed to justify current investment—OpenAI projected losses of $1 billion in 2023, even as annualized revenues hit $1.6 billion by the end of the year.

This is why people like Ed Zitron are convinced OpenAI is a bubble. If OpenAI has invested more money in AI than it’s worth, and they can’t make that money back — whether through generating real value or market capture — they’re going to fail, and other companies will learn not to make the same mistake.

Growth, regardless

So can we stop there? The invisible hand of the market will ensure businesses always use resources optimally, problem solved.

No. Because corporations aren’t rational actors, and we are in the middle of a Moment.

AI is a new market to capture, but it also represents an unprecedented amount of influence corporations can wield against the people who use its products. And smaller tech companies (with a lot of cumulative venture capital) are racing to integrate other AI services into their various apps. So tech companies are desperate to capture the market.

This is the land rush: tech companies scrambling for control of commercial AI. There is suddenly a valuable space to be captured, and every company is desperate to control as much of it as possible. This is a moment that rewards aggressive action and punishes cautiousness. This is what the “move fast and break things” model is built for. So rationality be damned, tech companies are all spending as much as they can on building the biggest, most expensive AI models imaginable right now. The promises of huge returns from speculative investment breaks the safety net of rationalism.

And so now, everything clicks into place. Every tech company is desperate to train the biggest and most expensive proprietary models possible, and they’re all doing it at once. Executives are throwing more and more data at training in a desperate attempt to edge over competition even as exponentially increasing costs yield diminishing returns.

Model training consumes vast amounts of energy for the sole purpose of gaining a competitive edge. The value isn’t that a better tool is created, the value is that you use tool A instead of tool B. In these cases the goal isn’t to produce something significantly more useful, it’s to shift who has what market share. Corporations are willing to place very high value — and spend vast quanties of resources on — goals that provide very low overall utility.

And since these are designed to be proprietary, even when real value is created the research isn’t shared and the knowledge is siloed. Products that should only have to be created once are being trained many times over because every company wants to own their own.

Profit is always the top priority, and companies are speculating that AI is a bottomless pit of profit. This means there is a spike of irresponsibly high demand for energy, and things have gotten weird. Bad-weird.

Ramifications and externalities

So far I’ve been talking about the easy-to-quantify energy use in kWh, but there are “costs” that companies offload onto the community at large. These are called externalities, which is the same category that includes things like pollution. An externality is when one activity directly causes a cost that is offloaded onto a party uninvolved in the original activity, often the general public. Privatized gain, socialized loss.

For example, the cost of new data centers to supply computing power is not just the electricity they consume and pay for. There are other negative consequences that affect everyone, like increased electricity prices and a higher risk of grid failure and outages.

The standard metric for measuring environmental impact is carbon emissions. I think this is misleading.

First, measuring impact in terms of carbon emissions lets you reduce your visible impact by consuming different types of energy, which masks how much power is really being used. Companies can even buy “energy credits” to count dirty power as if it were clean by switching around attribution. These are supposed to encourage renewable development, but don’t.

But in this case, it’s worse than that. Under normal circumstances, projects can be supplied with energy specifically sourced from renewable sources, which lowers the carbon impact. But in this case, the demand is actually increasing beyond the current grid capacity. When you’re talking about using all the available energy, carbon offsets are irrelevant because it just means someone else is buying the dirty energy. Using a “share” of the stock that was produced with less carbon doesn’t matter if all the carbon energy is being used somewhere.

Increased electricity demand

Reportedly, the AI boom is causing an “unprecedented demand” for power. Goldman Sachs announces “US power demand growth expanding to levels not seen in decades”, and it’s “outstripping the available power supply”.

This is true, but for a surprising reason: it’s unusual for power demand to increase at all, as I’ve previously mentioned. For the past 10 years, US power demand growth has changed by an average of 0%. Now, though, we’re seeing data center expansion cause an increase in demand of around 2.5%:

Goldman Sachs, “Generational growth: AI, data centers and the coming US power demand surge”, Apr 2024

For estimating overall growth in power consumption, including compensating for increased demand, there are much more complex prediction models whipped up by guys whose whole thing is just making money off prediction models. Assuming there’s no crash and the AI industry continues to grow, uses falling under the broad category of “AI” are expected to reach a high ~20% of that new demand (~0.5% overall):

Goldman Sachs, “Generational growth: AI, data centers and the coming US power demand surge”, Apr 2024 US power demand likely to experience growth not seen in a generation.

Not since the start of the century has US electricity demand grown 2.4% over an eight-year period, with US annual power generation over the last 20 years averaging less than 0.5% growth. We believe this is on track to change through the end of the decade, led by a surge in data center demand for power and complemented by electrification, industrial re-shoring/manufacturing activity. Growth from AI, broader data demand and a deceleration of power efficiency gains is leading to a power surge from data centers, with data center electricity use expected to more than double by 2030, pushing data centers to 8% of US power demand vs. 3% in 2022.

Exhibit 1: After being flattish for 2015-19, we see power demand from data centers more than tripling in 2030 vs. 2020, with an upside case more than double the base case depending in part on product efficiencies and AI demand Data center electricity consumption, TWh (LHS) and 3-year rolling average power efficiency gains yoy, % (RHS)
…
We assume power demand from AI rises about 200 TWh in 2024-30 (bear/bull case of 110-330 TWh), with AI representing about 20% of overall data center power demand by 2030 in our base case. We see a wide range in our bear/bull scenario driven by uncertainty over demand and power efficiency. As demand for AI training grows in the medium term and for inference longer term, we see demand growth well exceeding the efficiency improvements that are leading to meaningful reductions in high power AI server power intensity.

(The currently small AI energy footprint is also where numbers like “AI is expected to suck up 500% more energy over the next decade” come from; the slice that the predicted energy use is five times larger than is pretty small at the beginning.)

Likewise, the International Energy Agency estimates the energy demand of “dedicated AI data centres” to be negligible in 2022 but does predict an increase to ~95 TWh in 2026:

And that power has to come from somewhere.

New power infrastructure

The existing power grid cannot keep up with the projected electricity demand of AI at scale. And power infrastructure is already seeing that demand:

AI Is Already Wreaking Havoc On Global Power Systems | Bloomberg In late 2022, [Dominion Energy Inc., the power company that services Loudoun County] filed a previously unreported letter to its regulators asking for permission to build new substations and power lines to serve “unprecedented” load growth. In the letter, Dominion said it experienced 18 load relief warnings in the spring of that year. These warnings occur when the grid operator tells the company that it might need to shed load, the technical term for the controlled interruption of power to customers, which could include rotating outages.

“This is far outside of the normal, safe operating protocol,” Dominion told regulators.

The supply of energy is limited, and new data centers simply can’t be built fast enough, because the power supply isn’t there yet. New projects, including data centers, can expect to wait in queues for 4 years for the power supply they want:

Goldman Sachs, “Generational growth: AI, data centers and the coming US power demand surge”, Apr 2024 …lengthy interconnection queues remain a challenge to connecting new projects to the grid, and expediting the permitting/approval process for transmission projects will be key to alleviate it. Elsewhere, we see similar potential growth constraints from natural gas transmission infrastructure construction, specifically long-dated timelines, permitting challenges, and environmental / landowner litigation. In our view, the most top of mind constraint for natural gas is construction and permitting timelines where we see an average lag of ~4 years from the project announcement date to in-service date which means the earliest capacity additions, if announced today, would not be in-service until ~2028.

AI Is Already Wreaking Havoc On Global Power Systems | Bloomberg The almost overnight surge in electricity demand from data centers is now outstripping the available power supply in many parts of the world, according to interviews with data center operators, energy providers and tech executives. That dynamic is leading to years-long waits for businesses to access the grid as well as growing concerns of outages and price increases for those living in the densest data center markets.

…

The surge in demand is causing a backlog. Data center developers now have to wait longer to hook their projects up to the electric grid. “It could be as quick as two years, it could be four years depending on what needs to be built,” Dominion Energy Virginia president Edward Baine said in an interview.

But, because it’s land rush time, corporations are desperate not to wait. It doesn’t matter how much it costs, they demand to move at full speed right now. This means a lot of things are happening at once:

New clean energy

Since existing energy sources (namely natural gas) can’t keep up, a lot of companies are investing in research on new and alternative energy sources. Because the demand is so intense, companies are willing to spend huge amounts of money on research, including into historically neglected sources like nuclear fusion:

AI is exhausting the power grid. Tech firms are seeking a miracle solution. [Microsoft] and its partners say they expect to harness fusion by 2028, an audacious claim that bolsters their promises to transition to green energy …
In the face of this dilemma, Big Tech is going all-in on experimental clean energy projects that have long odds of success anytime soon. In addition to fusion, tech giants are hoping to generate power through such futuristic schemes as small nuclear reactors hooked to individual computing centers and machinery that taps geothermal energy by boring 10,000 feet into the Earth’s crust.
…
At the World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland, in January, Altman said at a Bloomberg event that, when it comes to finding enough energy to fuel expected AI growth, “there is no way to get there without a breakthrough.”

Altman, meanwhile, is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop small nuclear plants that could be built right on or near data center campuses. Altman’s AltC Acquisition Corp. bankrolled a company Altman now chairs called Oklo, which says it wants to build the first such plant by 2027.

Gates is the founder of his own nuclear company, called TerraPower. It has targeted a former coal mine in Wyoming to be the demonstration site of an advanced reactor that proponents claim would deliver energy more efficiently and with less waste than traditional reactors. The project has been saddled with setbacks, most recently because the type of enriched uranium needed to fuel its reactor is not available in the United States.
…
For now, Helion is building and testing prototypes at its headquarters in Everett, Wash. Scientists have been chasing the fusion dream for decades but have yet to overcome the extraordinary technical challenges. It requires capturing the energy created by fusing atoms in a magnetic chamber — or in Helion’s case, a magnetized vacuum chamber — and then channeling that energy into a usable form. And to make it commercially viable, more energy must be produced than is put in.

The appetite for so much new energy is so high that companies are really hoping to land on an energy breakthrough. This is actually kind of cool. Nuclear energy is historically underutilized in America, and a renewed push toward nuclear power could signal a major shift away from dirtier fuels like coal and gas.

There is a dangerous tendency among AI optimists to see AI as sort of a magic convergent instrumentality nexus. For someone overly optimistic, it can be easy to argue “AI will be so smart, the optimizations it provides will make up for the energy cost. We just have to pour in enough energy to get it to that point.”

Obviously, this logic is flawed. While there are some ways AI services can improve electric efficiency (like an app for finding EV charging stations that has some AI optimization) it is not at all guaranteed that the AI itself will find a miracle breakthrough. I won’t complain if that happens, but that slim possibility is not a reason to immediately dump as much power as we possibly can into AI. It seems far more likely for that to dump money in a pit than to deus ex machina the energy problem creating it caused.

Shaun (shaunvids on bsky)@shaun_vids
i always like the "it will be so smart it will solve all our problems!" part of the pitch because if we did invent AGI & it tried to do that it would start by saying "maximise renewable energy production and cut fossil fuel usage" & then an oil exec would smash it with a hammer
Sat Aug 17 01:41:26 +0000 2024

Old dirty energy

The bad news is the nuclear breakthrough hasn’t happened yet, and tech companies are still demanding enormous amounts of power as soon as they can get it. The land rush means companies are unwilling to temporarily slow growth and use the legitimate supply of energy as it becomes available.

This means sucking as much power as possible out of the existing infrastructure.

Horrifyingly, this includes coal plants that were scheduled for decommission but are now continuing to run in order to meet this immediate demand.

AI is exhausting the power grid. Tech firms are seeking a miracle solution. In the Salt Lake City region, utility executives and lawmakers scaled back plans for big investments in clean energy and doubled down on coal. The retirement of a large coal plant has been pushed back a decade, to 2042, and the closure of another has been delayed to 2036.
…
The region was supposed to be a “breakthrough” technology launchpad, with utility PacifiCorp declaring it would aim to replace coal infrastructure with next-generation small nuclear plants built by a company that Gates chairs. But that plan was put on the shelf when PacifiCorp announced in April that it will prolong coal burning, citing regulatory developments that make it viable.

“This is very quickly becoming an issue of, don’t get left behind locking down the power you need, and you can figure out the climate issues later,” said Aaron Zubaty, CEO of California-based Eolian, a major developer of clean energy projects. “Ability to find power right now will determine the winners and losers in the AI arms race. It has left us with a map bleeding with places where the retirement of fossil plants are being delayed.

A spike in tech-related energy needs in Georgia moved regulators in April to green-light an expansion of fossil fuel use, including purchasing power from Mississippi that will delay closure of a half-century-old coal plant there. In the suburbs of Milwaukee, Microsoft’s announcement in March that it is building a $3.3 billion data center campus followed the local utility pushing back by one year the retirement of coal units, and unveiling plans for a vast expansion of gas power that regional energy executives say is necessary to stabilize the grid amid soaring data center demand and other growth.

In Omaha, where Google and Meta recently set up sprawling data center operations, a coal plant that was supposed to go offline in 2022 will now be operational through at least 2026. The local utility has scrapped plans to install large batteries to store solar power.

“When massive data centers show up and start claiming the output of a nuclear plant, you basically have to replace that electricity with something else.”

I’m going to repeat that quote, because it hits the issue exactly on the head, even if the speaker hasn’t realized the ramifications:

“This is very quickly becoming an issue of, don’t get left behind locking down the power you need, and you can figure out the climate issues later,” said Aaron Zubaty, CEO of California-based Eolian, a major developer of clean energy projects. “Ability to find power right now will determine the winners and losers in the AI arms race.

And instead of being slapped down for going back on their word in the worst way possible, the energy industry is just making more money off it:

Internet data centers are fueling drive to old power source: Coal …antiquated coal-powered electricity plants that had been scheduled to go offline will need to keep running to fuel the increasing need for more power, undermining clean energy goals.
…
After [PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator] tapped [Dominion Energy] to build a 36-mile-long portion of the planned power lines for $392 million, FirstEnergy announced in February that the company is abandoning a 2030 goal to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions because the two plants are crucial to maintaining grid reliability.

The news has sent FirstEnergy’s stock price up by 4 percent, to about $37 a share this week, and was greeted with jubilation by West Virginia’s coal industry.
…
Critics say it will force residents near the coal plants to continue living with toxic pollution, ironically to help a state — Virginia — that has fully embraced clean energy. And utility ratepayers in the affected areas will be forced to pay for the plan in the form of higher bills, those critics say.

But PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator, says the plan is necessary to maintain grid reliability amid a wave of fossil fuel plant closures in recent years, prompted by the nation’s transition to cleaner power.

And companies aren’t just burning coal to fuel power-hungry data centers, they’re actively building new data farms in areas that already primarily use coal power:

AI Is Already Wreaking Havoc On Global Power Systems | Bloomberg When Rangu Salgame looks at Malaysia, he sees the next Virginia “in the making.” Johor, the southernmost state in peninsular Malaysia, has a policy to speed up clearances for data centers. Crucially, it’s also a short drive to Singapore, a longtime data center hub that imposed a moratorium for several years on new facilities to manage energy growth on the tiny island.

Once a sleepy fishing village, the suburbs of the city of Johor Bahru are now marked by vast construction sites. Microsoft and Amazon are investing in the region, as is Salgame’s company, Princeton Digital Group (PDG). At Sedenak Tech Park, a sprawling complex about 40 miles south of Johor Bahru’s city center, towering cranes dot the sky. PDG’s new 150 megawatt data center occupies one corner of the park, across from similar facilities from other providers.

But even markets eager to streamline data center buildout face constraints. What’s missing in Johor, especially for an industry like tech that is known for its climate pledges, is renewable energy. The power supply at Sedenak comes from Tenaga Nasional Berhad, which uses coal or gas-fired plants. While Malaysia has ambitious goals to bolster renewables, including plans to build a 500-megawatt solar farm in Johor, today it relies on coal for more than a third of its generation.

No longer green

In turn, this has collapsed companies’ green energy promises across the board. “Don’t get left behind locking down the power you need, and you can figure out the climate issues later.” Investing in AI is just too tempting.

Microsoft has abandoned its plan to become carbon neutral:

Microsoft’s AI Push Imperils Climate Goal as Carbon Emissions Jump 30% When Microsoft Corp. pledged four years ago to remove more carbon than it emits by the end of the decade, it was one of the most ambitious and comprehensive plans to tackle climate change. Now the software giant’s relentless push to be the global leader in artificial intelligence is putting that goal in peril. …

Microsoft’s predicament is one of the first concrete examples of how the pursuit of AI is colliding with efforts to cut emissions. Choosing to capitalize on its early lead in the new market for generative AI has made Microsoft the most valuable company in the world, but its leaders also acknowledge keeping up with demand will mean investing more heavily in polluting assets.

Google used to be carbon neutral, but now isn’t:

Google Is No Longer Claiming to Be Carbon Neutral The Alphabet Inc. unit has claimed that it’s been carbon neutral in its operations since 2007. The status was based on purchasing carbon offsets to match the volume of emissions that were generated from its buildings, data centers and business travel. But in its latest report, the company states: “Starting in 2023, we’re no longer maintaining operational carbon neutrality.” …

And Meta… well, Meta’s carbon emissions are rising, but they’re hiding it.

Justine Calma, “Are Meta’s carbon emissions shrinking? Depends on how you look at it” The company’s carbon footprint on paper differs from what’s happening on the ground.

Untangling companies’ environmental claims these days can be a head-spinning endeavor, and reading Meta’s latest sustainability report is no exception. Depending on how you look at it, the company’s greenhouse gas emissions either grew or fell last year.

[The numbers indicating growing emissions] reflect local pollution stemming from the electricity the company uses wherever it sets up shop. Data centers typically connect into the local power grid, so they run on the same mix of fossil fuels as everyone else. A majority of Meta’s data centers are located in the US, where 60 percent of electricity still comes from fossil fuels.

But Meta says it matches 100 percent of its electricity use with renewable energy purchases, which is how it’s able to show a much smaller carbon footprint on paper.

This is, of course, the nature of corporations. Since profit is the only goal, when responsible energy use doesn’t increase profit, they’ll choose profit every time.

Increased electricity prices

Regardless of the sources, power demand from a single industry is requiring power companies to build new infrastructure. And when power companies invest in new infrastructure, they spread that cost across all consumers in the form of rate increases. This is another externality. This time, it’s not a vague climate problem being offloaded; it’s a very tangible bill.

AI Is Already Wreaking Havoc On Global Power Systems | Bloomberg The surge in data center demand, combined with heavy investments from power companies like [Dominion Energy Inc., the power company that services Loudoun County] on new substations, transmission lines and other infrastructure to support it, are also increasing the likelihood customers will see their energy prices go up, experts say. The cost of some upgrades are typically allocated among electricity customers in an entire region, showing up as a line item on everyone’s monthly utility bill.

Goldman Sachs estimates that US utility companies will have to invest roughly $50 billion in new power generation capacity to support data centers. “That’s going to raise energy prices for both wholesale energy and retail rates,” said power market analyst Patrick Finn of energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

When companies make demands, you’re automatically conscripted into subsidizing them. Instead of shutting down coal plants, you get the bill for the work of building the infrastructure for more dirty energy.

Water

Another problem is water use. Producing energy in the first place requires water, but data centers themselves require significant amounts of water to run.

I think it’s important to be careful and use precise language around this, especially near phrases like “use” and “consume water”. Of course, water itself isn’t a nonrenewable resource. The concern here isn’t that we’re somehow drying out the planet. When people don’t think through this, they end up saying things like water itself is a natural resource AI depletes, which is just foolish. There is no “peak water.” There is a whole cycle about this.

The resource that data centers deplete then is available water in a region, usually called the water supply. This specifically refers to water available on-demand as part of a municipal water supply. There is often unexploited water — like atmospheric moisture, rain, and groundwater — that takes additional work to make available for distribution, but this isn’t considered part of the water supply.

Water’s primary use data centers is cooling. Because heat is a byproduct of computing, almost all of a data center’s electricity is ultimately converted to waste heat. Water cooling is significantly more energy efficient than other cooling methods like air cooling¹, so it’s overwhelmingly the choice for dedicated data centers.

A Practical Approach to Water Conservation for Commercial and Industrial Facilities

At a high level, tubing is run through areas that generate heat. Cool water treated with chemicals is pumped through these tubes and absorbs the heat energy. The heated water is then sent to evaporation towers, where evaporation removes the heat as part of the state change from liquid to vapor. The remaining cooled water is (usually) chilled, cycled back into the main network, and supplemented with new makeup water to replace the volume that evaporated. Some unevaporated “blowdown” water is also intentionally removed from the circuit as part of a filtration process to prevent mineral buildup.

This process doesn’t “destroy” any water, but it does require a continual supply of input makeup water that it does not replenish. Because of the chemical treatment, the blowdown water output is non-potable and unsuitable for human consumption or even agricultural use. So overall, data centers represent a significant consumption of the water supply.

Fortunately, the makeup water it requires doesn’t have to be potable either. Some areas, like Virginia, have access to non-potable “gray water” which can be used for cooling. This replaces at least some of the demand for vital potable water.

Google, Our commitment to climate-conscious data center cooling (2022) Last year, our global data center fleet consumed approximately 4.3 billion gallons of water. This is comparable to the water needed to irrigate and maintain 29 golf courses in the southwest U.S. each year.

Wherever we use water, we are committed to doing so responsibly. This includes using alternatives to freshwater whenever possible, like wastewater, industrial water, or even seawater. We utilize reclaimed or non-potable water at more than 25% of our data center campuses. For example, in Douglas County, Georgia, we implemented a solution to cool our data center by recycling local municipal wastewater that would otherwise be deposited in the Chattahoochee River.

(Looking at their released metrics for 2021, Douglas County was the only domestic location using water reclamation.)

Unfortunately, in practice, most water used for cooling is still potable drinking water from the municipal water supply. There are several reasons for this: unlike gray water, infrastructure to supply drinking water already exists and is usually less expensive than creating new logistics to deliver recycled water (arid environments don’t have easy access to seawater), and the consistently clean potable water is better for the tubing and circulation systems.

Data centre water consumption | npj Clean Water, 2021 Data centres consume water directly for cooling, in some cases 57% sourced from potable water, and indirectly through the water requirements of non-renewable electricity generation. Although in the USA, data centre water consumption (1.7 billion liters/day) is small compared to total water consumption (1218 billion liters/day), there are issues of transparency with less than a third of data centre operators measuring water consumption.
…
Total water consumption in the USA in 2015 was 1218 billion litres per day, of which thermoelectric power used 503 billion litres, irrigation used 446 billion litres and 147 billion litres per day went to supply 87% of the US population with potable water13.

Data centres consume water across two main categories: indirectly through electricity generation (traditionally thermoelectric power) and directly through cooling. In 2014, a total of 626 billion litres of water use was attributable to US data centres4. This is a small proportion in the context of such high national figures, however, data centres compete with other users for access to local resources. A medium-sized data centre (15 megawatts (MW)) uses as much water as three average-sized hospitals, or more than two 18-hole golf courses14. Some progress has been made with using recycled and non-potable water, but from the limited figures available15 some data centre operators are drawing more than half of their water from potable sources (fig 2).

There are several different mechanisms for data centre cooling27,28, but the general approach involves chillers reducing air temperature by cooling water—typically to 7–10 °C31—which is then used as a heat transfer mechanism. Some data centres use cooling towers where external air travels across a wet media so the water evaporates. Fans expel the hot, wet air and the cooled water is recirculated32. Other data centres use adiabatic economisers where water sprayed directly into the air flow, or onto a heat exchange surface, cools the air entering the data centre33. With both techniques, the evaporation results in water loss. A small 1 MW data centre using one of these types of traditional cooling can use around 25.5 million litres of water per year32.

But data centers’ impact on local water supplies is actually particularly significant because of where the data centers tend to be built geographically. In order to reduce issues with the electric components involved, data center operators prefer environments with dry air and naturally low humidity. This means aridity is a geographical factor² in choosing a location for a data center: arid, non-humid environments are preferable.

The problem, of course, is these arid environments are exactly the regions where the water supply is scarce. Dry, drought-prone areas like Texas and Virginia are the most stressed for water already, and taking water out of these areas’ municipal supplies is more impactful than using the same amount of water anywhere else.

graphic from Nicolas Rapp Design Studio

There’s also a Goodhart’s law side to this preference for arid climates. These areas tend to be hubs for green energy sources like wind and solar (although they lack hydroelectric power). And — in what might be a case of greenwashing — using power with that sort of green provenance makes the all-important carbon numbers go down:

Shannon Osaka, “A new front in the water wars: Your internet use” In The Dalles, Ore., a local paper fought to unearth information revealing that a Google data center uses over a quarter of the city’s water. …

According to a Virginia Tech study, data centers rank among the top 10 water-consuming commercial industries in the United States, using approximately 513 million cubic meters of water in 2018. … about a quarter [of the 513 number] is due to using water for direct cooling.

The researchers also found that a lot of data centers operate where water is scarce.

Part of the problem is that tech companies put many of these centers in areas where power is cheap and low-carbon — such as Arizona or other states with plentiful solar or wind power — to help meet their own climate targets. Water in those regions is scarce. Meanwhile, areas where water is plentiful, such as in the East, have higher-carbon sources of power.

While supply and demand would suggest that this higher marginal cost of water would be reflected in the price, because of how government-regulated utility pricing works, facilities can avoid what should be an increased cost:

Eric Olson, Anne Grau and Taylor Tipton, “Data centers are draining resources in water-stressed communities” The regulated nature of water pricing often creates a situation where tech companies, such as those operating data centers, pay the same amount for water regardless of their consumption levels. This is because water rates are often set by public authorities based on factors like the cost of water treatment, distribution and infrastructure maintenance, rather than being determined by supply and demand in a competitive market.

As a result, tech companies may be able to negotiate favorable water rates or take advantage of pricing structures that do not fully reflect the marginal cost of their water consumption. This can lead to a lack of incentives for these companies to conserve water or invest in more efficient cooling technologies, as they may not face the full economic cost of their water use.

All of this applies to data centers as a general category, of which AI use is just a subset. But AI’s increased processing demand means an increased demand for data centers, which exacerbates this problem.

When it’s bad

The tests and comparisons in Part 1 show that AI is perfectly energy efficient at performing actual tasks for people. Every test I run shows that having a computer do a task instead of a human usually saves energy overall.

But there is still a problem. Data centers are using more water and electricity than they need to. AI can be efficient at tasks, but there are still a lot of ways to deploy AI tech that are not worth it. This waste overwhelmingly comes from systemic decisions stemming from bad incentives.

Land rush

The cost of AI use at any normal human scale doesn’t waste a problematic amount of energy. The problem is the astronomical cost of creating AI systems massive enough to ensure corporate dominance. Which, as a goal, is already bad, so spending any quantity of resources in pursuit of it is at least as bad as waste.

In my estimation the biggest and most fundamental energy problem in AI is the current land rush between tech companies to capture the market by creating the biggest and best AI. Even if we assume that the result of improved AI is a good thing, the current cost of competition in this space is astronomical.

Strubell, E., Ganesh, A., & McCallum, A. (2019). Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP (Version 1). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.1906.02243 …training a state-of-the-art model now requires substantial computational resources which demand considerable energy, along with the associated financial and environmental costs. Research and development of new models multiplies these costs by thousands of times by requiring retraining to experiment with model architectures and hyperparameters.

Likewise, the data sovereignty movement is aiming to scale these costs even higher by requiring intra-national data storage, and therefore prompting retraining.

Many companies are all trying to develop the same products: an everything app, a digital assistant, a text/image/audio/video content generator, etc. And they’re all doing it in the hopes that theirs is the only one that people will ever use. They actively want their competitors investment to not pay off, to become waste.

Models are trained speculatively but never used, because by the time they’re ready, they’re obsolete. The entire development cost becomes a write-off. Or, worse, expensive-to-train models are created as a proof-of-concept to fill out some american psycho type’s pitch deck in one meeting. The only value these create is pressure in intra-company politics.

And for the frontier models that are at the front of the race, the competitive advantage is to have more data points, more training expense. It’s the diminishing returns problem.

Google search

So, let’s talk about Bradley Brownell’s “Google AI Uses Enough Electricity In 1 Second To Charge 7 Electric Cars” headline.

First, this is just terrible reporting. The first thing that should stand out is that “7 electric cars” figure. That’s an interesting unit of energy. Why did Brownell choose this? What happened to kilowatt-hours?

Well, 7 electric cars is the answer you get when you take the numbers from Lois Parshley’s “The Hidden Environmental Impact of AI”, plug them into Wolfram|Alpha, pick the roundest number, and call it a day. Brownell didn’t choose it, Wolfram just had it set as a default.

Meanwhile, the page with the Brownell article is serving — and I’m not kidding, I counted — twenty pages of ads. How much power is that wasting, do you think?

Parshley’s much better article, meanwhile, cites its figure from the de Vris study: 3 Wh/search. “7 Electric Cars” sits three hops away from the actual study it’s using to draw its conclusions, which means there are three layers of different assumptions made by different people all compounded together. That compounded error is how Brownell missed that de Vries’ thesis was that Google AI doesn’t use anywhere near that much energy. In fact, as I talked about in Systemic limits, one thesis of the paper is that energy consumption on the scale of the seven-car number can’t happen.

This is a category of error that only happens when news summation sites paraphrase each other but make different sets of assumptions and then never check whether the things they said are right or not.

Urgh.

With that out of the way, it’s true that Google AI uses enough electricity in one second to charge seven electric cars. More specifically, LLM interactions take 10 times more energy than a standard search, 3 Wh for LLMs compared to search’s 0.3 Wh:

de Vries, A. (2023). The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligence. Alphabet’s chairman indicated in February 2023 that interacting with an LLM could “likely cost 10 times more than a standard keyword search.” As a standard Google search reportedly uses 0.3 Wh of electricity, this suggests an electricity consumption of approximately 3 Wh per LLM interaction. This figure aligns with SemiAnalysis’ assessment of ChatGPT’s operating costs in early 2023, which estimated that ChatGPT responds to 195 million requests per day, requiring an estimated average electricity consumption of 564 MWh per day, or, at most, 2.9 Wh per request.

First, let’s go through the standard proportional cost thinking.

Set aside LLMs for a moment. Is being able to do a Google search valuable enough to justify the cost? I think obviously yes. It is an incredible public good that it exists at all, and the immediately valuable information it provides is worth the marginal cost it takes for the computer to run the query. 0.3 Wh per search is fine.

The next logical question is “is the AI answer 10 times as valuable?” And I think the answer is “not always.” But “not always” is exactly the part Google botched.

Giovanni Colantonio@MarioPrime
It is so fucking annoying that any time I Google something, I now have to wait an extra few seconds for an AI to generate a completely irrelevant and incorrect answer that I have to scroll through to find the actual article I am looking for.

Wed Aug 14 20:35:31 +0000 2024

At time of writing, Google is prepending the results of most searches with an LLM-generated summary of what it thinks you want to know.

This is an escalation of what I decried two years ago in You can Google it. (Yes, I’m saying I called it.) Instead of the ten blue links, Google is trying to resolve every query using an algorithm for truth, which there is not one of.

But fundamentally, Google search is not supposed to be a truth generation machine. Imagine a black-box machine that answers questions you ask it correctly. Ignoring the fact that said machine can’t ever exist and it would be bad if it did, Google search is a fundamentally different product. Google search is a search engine. It is a tool to index and catalog the world’s information and deliver relevant, high-quality results to queries.

Single-truth LLM answers like the one Google’s AI delivers are the exact opposite: a hard step away from discovery and towards… something else.

There’s a good Ars piece (coincidentally also by Kyle Orland) that hits this point really well:

Kyle Orland, “Google’s AI Overviews misunderstand why people use Google” | Ars Technica Even when the system doesn’t give obviously wrong results, condensing search results into a neat, compact, AI-generated summary seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of how people use Google in the first place.
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The value of Google has always been in pointing you to the places it thinks are likely to have good answers to those questions. But it’s still up to you, as a user, to figure out which of those sources is the most reliable and relevant to what you need at that moment.
…
One of the unseen strengths of Google’s search algorithm is that the user gets to decide which results are the best for them. As long as there’s something reliable and relevant in those first few pages of results, it doesn’t matter if the other links are “wrong” for that particular search or user.
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Reputationally, there’s a subtle but important shift from Google saying, “Here’s a bunch of potential sources on the web that might have an answer for your search,” to saying, “Here is Google’s AI-generated answer for your search.”

In shifting away from indexing and discovery, Google is losing the benefits of being an indexing and discovery service.

But I’m here to talk about waste.

The user is in the best position to decide whether they need an AI or regular search, and so should be the one making that decision. Instead, Google is forcing the most expensive option on everyone in order to promote themselves, at an astronomical energy cost.

Once or twice I have found a Google AI answer useful, but both times it was because I was searching for something that I knew could be “averaged” from search results. The AI helped because I specifically wanted AI instead of search; it would’ve been better for there to just be a dedicated button for that.

If Google AI and Google search are fundamentally different products that do entirely different categories of things, you only need one or the other. All the computation time that goes into generating AI results to show someone who expressly told Google it wanted to search the index is automatically wasted. Bing, at least for now, gets this right: while there’s a flow from search to chat, querying its AI is a separate process on a separate page.

So Google has made a design decision that’s fundamentally wasteful of energy, and they’ve deployed this across the massive scale of Google search. Both design decisions are fundamentally irresponsible, but together the amount of waste multiplies to an absurd volume. 3 Wh for a useful answer is fine. 3 Wh per answer times 100,000 searches every second is catastrophically bad.

But it’s not just search: Google has started an initiative to run LLMs seemingly as much as possible:

Melissa Heikkilä, “Google is throwing generative AI at everything” | MIT Technology Review Billions of users will soon see Google’s latest AI language mode, PaLM 2, integrated into over 25 products like Maps, Docs, Gmail, Sheets, and the company’s chatbot, Bard. …

… “…We’re finding more and more places where we can integrate [AI language models’] into our existing products, and we’re also finding real opportunities to provide value to people in a bold but responsible way,” Zoubin Ghahramani, vice president of Google DeepMind, told MIT Technology Review.

“This moment for Google is really a moment where we are seeing the power of putting AI in people’s hands,” he says.

The hope, Ghahramani says, is that people will get so used to these tools that they will become an unremarkable part of day-to-day life.

With this updated suite of AI-powered products and features, Google is targeting not only individuals but also startups, developers, and companies that might be willing to pay for access to models, coding assistance, and enterprise software, says Shah.

“It’s very important for Google to be that one-stop shop,” he says.

It’s very important to Google for Google to be that one-stop shop, certainly. But it’s so important they’re willing to waste resources on ideas that can’t be expected to work, and that’s bad.

The lesson here is that AI is wasteful when its work goes unused, and it’s wasteful when it’s pushed on more people than will use it.

Overgeneral

Another mistake companies are making with their AI rollouts is over-generalization.

Because both training and inference costs scale with model complexity, any input data that goes unused in practice represents significant waste. To maximize energy efficiency, for any given problem, you should use the smallest tool that works.

In a way, this continues the pattern from beyond AI tools: more general tools with a larger possibility space are more expensive. In the same way AI tools are more expensive than high-performance software, general-purpose omni-model AI tools are more expensive than models tailored for a specific use.

This is a point I hadn’t considered with any depth myself, but Luccioni et al. found generality to be an extremely significant factor in energy cost, with unnecessarily general models using 14 times more energy than compact ones:

Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment? …this ambition of “generality” comes at a steep cost to the environment, given the amount of energy these systems require and the amount of carbon that they emit.
…We find that multi-purpose, generative architectures are orders of magnitude more expensive than task-specific systems for a variety of tasks, even when controlling for the number of model parameters. We conclude with a discussion around the current trend of deploying multi-purpose generative ML systems, and caution that their utility should be more intentionally weighed against increased costs in terms of energy and emissions.

4.2.1 Emissions of task-specific and multi-task architectures.

…there is a clear distinction between task-specific discriminative models (in blue), which have less emissions than both multi-purpose sequence-to-sequence (in yellow) and decoder-only generative models (in green). Given that the y axis in Figure 3 is in logarithmic scale, this indicates that the difference is several orders of magnitude, with the most efficient task-specific models emiting 0.3g of CO_2_eq per 1,000 inferences for extractive question answering on a dataset like SciQ, multi-purpose models emit 10g for the same task. This result follows intuitions derived from the model structures: while a task-specific model trained on binary text classification will carry out a softmax on a two-category vector to predict a class, a multi-purpose model will generate ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, which logically requires more energy because the prediction is based on the model’s entire vocabulary.

…task-specific models have a much more constrained decision space (e.g. two classes in the case of binary text classification), whereas multi-purpose models have a large output vocabulary to choose from, and are dependent upon the prompt schema and prompting strategy used.
…
Using multi-purpose models for discriminative tasks is more energy-intensive compared to task-specific models for these same tasks. This is especially the case for text classification (on IMDB, SST 2 and Rotten Tomatoes) and question answering (on SciQ, SQuAD v1 and v2), where the gap between task-specific and zero-shot models is particularly large, and less so for summarization (for CNN-Daily Mail, SamSUM and XSum). As can be seen in Table 4, the difference between multi-purpose models and task-specific models is amplified as the length of output gets longer.

We find this last point to be the most compelling takeaway of our study, given the current paradigm shift away from smaller models finetuned for a specific task towards models that are meant to carry out a multitude of tasks at once, deployed to respond to a barrage of user queries in real time.

Unfortunately, there is indeed a paradigm shift away from finetuned models and toward giant, general-purpose AIs with incredibly vast possibility spaces.

For instance, to minimize power waste, you would never do this:

gpt-4o system card | OpenAI GPT-4o is an autoregressive omni model, which accepts as input any combination of text, audio, image, and video and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs. It’s trained end-to-end across text, vision, and audio, meaning that all inputs and outputs are processed by the same neural network.

This “omni model” design that processes and outputs many different formats, with the ability to select between them as needed, is a very impressive display of ultra-generalized AI. But ultra-generalized AI is very often going to be the wrong choice for a category of tasks, and using more specifically scoped software would cumulatively save a significant amount of energy.

Irresponsible infrastructure

Texas is in the middle of a years-long economic campaign to attract data centers by signing datacenter-friendly policies into law. This notably ramped up in 2020 with a pro-data center push specifically focused around attracting blockchain mining facilities:

Representative Tan Parker: [Texas has] now set our sights on becoming the jurisdiction of choice for investors, entrepreneurs, and enterprises to build and deploy blockchain technologies applications and other emerging tech innovations.

William Szamosszegi, Sazmining CEO: There’s less red tape around crypto and crypto mining in Texas, which means there are fewer barriers to entry and higher overall crypto acceptance, making it easier for miners to operate. … The more favorable regulatory environment in Texas makes it the ideal state to launch these kinds of operations.

Lee Bratcher, Texas Blockchain Council president: Texas is poised to become the jurisdiction of choice for bitcoin, blockchain, and digital asset innovation

Lee Bratcher, Texas Blockchain Council president: This is clearly the next race for innovation. Just as Texas played an outsized role in helping the U.S. win the space race, Texas elected officials, state agencies, business, universities and entrepreneurs are teaming up to put a man on the moon in the race for dominance in blockchain innovation and the coming internet of value.

Mike Orcutt, How Texas’s wind boom has spawned a Bitcoin mining rush Leading mining chip maker Bitmain, which is based in China, has also moved into Texas, opening a facility with 50 MW of power in a town called Rockdale in October that it says can eventually scale up to 300 MW. A third big player, a German firm called Northern data, says it plans to build the largest mining facility in the world, also in Rockdale, which it says will devote a full gigawatt (1,000 MW) to cryptocurrency prospecting. … These are just the most high-profile mining operations laying claim to the Lone Star State. A number of other firms are either planning (or rumored to be planning) to set up facilities there, all chasing inexpensive power.

Then there’s another factor, which likely appeals similarly to miners as it does to electricity producers: Texas’s electricity market is deregulated. …big electricity consumers like Bitcoin mines can negotiate power purchase agreements—contracts that stipulate that they will buy power at a certain price for a certain amount of time—directly with electricity producers, instead of having to deal with intermediaries like utilities. That can be great for businesses trying to keep their energy costs low, says Rhodes.

Unfortunately, Texas is a very bad place to do this. Texas is an arid, drought-prone environment, and it often can’t afford to spend water on industrial, non-safety-critical uses. Worse than that, though, is the impact on the power grid. Texas’s power grid is under-regulated and poorly-maintained, leading to major failures in power availability. Its independent infrastructure is also disconnected from the rest of the nation, meaning there isn’t a mechanism to import power if the grid is over-capacity. An already-strained power grid like Texas’ is the worst place to see explosive, unpredictable growth in power demand.

But Texas’ government has put all its momentum into attracting data centers, which has invited that explosive growth in demand. Now that they’re seeing the infrastructure problem, they aren’t equipped to reverse course and moderate the growth as needed.

AI could strain Texas power grid this summer | KERA News (2024) “How many are coming? That’s still TBD, but we know that they are explosively growing,” ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas told lawmakers in one of two hearings this month at the state capitol.
…
“How do we build enough infrastructure to accommodate a new city popping up in six months, with effectively no notice?” [Doug Lewin, who publishes the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter] asks.

The answer: maybe you don’t.
…
At a recent ERCOT board of directors meeting, Dan Woodfin, the group’s vice president of system operations, said the inability to forecast energy use by cryptomines and similar big power consumers was “the most worrisome thing” going into this summer.
…
Texas is no stranger to power grid anxiety. Between the heat that’s only getting hotter, an aging fleet of power plants, and the challenges of integrating renewable energy, the system is fragile.

Now, a boom in energy-hungry computer data centers is adding a new element of risk this summer. … ERCOT puts the chance of rolling blackouts at around 12% in August.

“We cannot build the grid fast enough to keep up with demand… Even before we had every damned crypto and data center … move to Texas,” Alison Silverstein, a consultant and former state and federal energy official, told KUT.

When a federal inquiry tried to probe Texas’s infrastructure policy, Texas doubled-down on their support for data businesses. These problems were anticipated, and shouldn’t have represented a sudden need to change momentum; it was the legislative anti-regulatory culture that was dangerously wrong.

I’ve focused on Texas here, but similar problems are also plaguing Arizona and Virginia.

This is a perfect example of externalizing risk. Building new data centers primarily benefits the data companies and the tax-collecting government. But putting additional strain on the power grid risks state-wide brownouts and power rationing that will harm everyone. Privatized profit, socialized risk.

Waste

We know that AI is energy-efficient at performing actual tasks. And yet we’re seeing the AI rollout come with a significant resource cost, but without any particular increases to productivity or quality of life. How did we get from that to this? Fundamentally, waste, on an unimaginable scale.

What happens when the utility goes toward zero? The proportional cost — the amount of resources spent in order to gain a benefit — approaches infinity, because there was no benefit.

Waste is the killer problem.

Even if there were more efficient methods available, the bulk of waste does not come from inefficiency, it comes from doing work that should not be done at all. If you’re seeing something useful happening at all, that’s not part of the bulk of the problem. The real body of the problem is pouring enormous amounts of resources into worthless products and failed speculation.

The subtitle for that bloomberg article is “AI’s Insatiable Need for Energy Is Straining Global Power Grids”, which bothers me the more I think about it. It’s simply not true that the technology behind AI is particularly energy-intensive. The technology isn’t insatiable, the corporations deploying it are. The thing with an insatiable appetite for growth at all cost is unregulated capitalism.

So the lesson is to only do things if they’re worthwhile, and not to be intentionally wasteful. That’s the problem. It’s not novel and it’s not unique to AI. It’s the same simple incentive problem that we see so often.

Blame shifting

Given this, it seems like there’s a lot of misplaced anger towards individual users of AI services. Individual users are — empirically — not being irresponsible or wasteful just by using AI. It is wrong to treat AI use as a categorical moral failing, especially when there are people responsible for AI waste, and they’re not the users. The blame for these problems falls squarely on the shoulders of the people responsible for managing systems at scale. Using ChatGPT doesn’t tip that scale. You can’t get mad at people who are being responsible as reaction to other people who are not.

And yet visible individuals who aren’t responsible for the problems are being blamed for the harm caused by massive corporations in the background.

In a perverse way, data companies are actually incentivized to encourage this anger about individuals using AI, because it removes moves the focus from their substantial contribution to the problem to an insubstantial one they’re not directly responsible for.

It’s the same blame-shifting propaganda we see in recycling, individual carbon footprints, etc.

Monorail!

The problem isn’t the tech, it’s the arms race. The tech isn’t inefficient at what it does. Individual consumer choices are not what’s impacting the environment.

Remember the monorail metaphor I opened part 1 with? I think that’s actually a very useful analogy.

The joke is that Springfield is wildly unsuited for a monorail. It’s a solution that doesn’t fit the problem, and it’s only being sold as a con job. But that doesn’t automatically generalize to condemning the machine itself. A monorail can be a sensible solution in appropriate cases, and the absurdity of a monorail in Springfield is not a good argument against trains in general. It works when it’s there to be useful. It breaks when it’s only there to make money.

There are a lot of people trying to sell AI as a con job right now. That doesn’t mean it’s always the wrong thing, it just means you can’t trust the salesman.

Do things that are worthwhile!

In fact, air conditioning actually uses more water than water-cooling, so just because “water” is in the name doesn’t mean that’s the cost. ↩
This is not the only geographic factor though; data centers are also best built in areas with network infrastructure and close to the population centers they serve, for instance. ↩
Li, P., Yang, J., Islam, M. A., & Ren, S. (2023). Making AI Less “Thirsty”: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models (Version 3). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2304.03271 estimates a total “water consumption footprint” of ~3.7 L/kWh. This is significantly higher than my 1 L/kWh estimate, which is because the linked study is summing the Water Usage Effectiveness (water used per operation) with the “Electricity Water Intensity”, the amount of water used in the generation of the power used. This is a worthwhile metric, but it’s not relevant here, because the costs of producing the power are included with our analysis of energy efficiency; counting both the resources used to generate the energy and the energy itself as a resource would be double-counting. ↩

Is AI eating all the energy? Part 1/2

2024-08-18T00:00:00-05:00

Recent tech trends have followed a pattern of being huge society-disrupting systems that people don’t actually want. Worse, it then turns out there’s some reason they’re not just useless, they’re actively harmful. While planned obsolescence means this applies to consumer products in general, the recent major tech fad hypes — cryptocurrency, “the metaverse”, artificial intelligence… — all seem to be comically expensive boondoggles that only really benefit the salesmen.

Monorail!

The most recent tech-fad-and-why-it’s-bad pairing seems to be AI and its energy use. This product-problem combo has hit the mainstream as an evocative illustration of waste, with headlines like Google AI Uses Enough Electricity In 1 Second To Charge 7 Electric Cars and ChatGPT requires 15 times more energy than a traditional web search.

It’s a narrative that’s very much in line with what a disillusioned tech consumer expects. There is a justified resentment boiling for big tech companies right now, and AI seems to slot in as another step in the wrong direction. The latest tech push isn’t just capital trying to control the world with a product people don’t want, it’s burning through the planet to do it.

But, when it comes to AI, is that actually the case?

What are the actual ramifications of the explosive growth of AI when it comes to power consumption? How much more expensive is it to run an AI model than to use the next-best method? Do we have the resources to switch to using AI on things we weren’t before, and is it responsible to use them for that? Is it worth it?

These are really worthwhile questions, and I don’t think the answers are as easy as “it’s enough like the last thing that we might as well hate it too.” There are proportional costs we have to weigh in order to make a well-grounded judgement, and after looking at them, I think the energy numbers are surprisingly good, compared to the discourse.

Part 1: Efficiency and Proportional Cost

Competing trends

“AI” is just a kind of program, so the “energy use of AI” is the energy used by the computers that are performing AI’s various processing tasks¹. So, first, what are the big-picture trends in computational performance as it relates to electricity use?

At a high level, these metrics are all generally positively correlated:

Power consumed
Heat emitted
Carbon emitted
Water used

This is a positive correlation, meaning they all move together in the same direction. When one goes up, the rest go up. When one goes down, the rest go down. Using more power emits more heat, which takes more water to cool. Depending on the method, power generation in aggregate emits some amount of carbon, although green energy can push that number down. (Although all thermoelectric power generation uses water too, even green tech.)

It’s also generally good to push all these numbers down. Consuming fewer resources is good and emitting less carbon and waste heat is good. When we talk about reducing energy use, we’re pushing this whole bundle of things down, which is all good.

The exact value of those properties at any given moment varies a lot because two significant factors are both changing variables:

Performance demand (performance/time) for AI is obviously increasing, as companies are selling more AI-based services. Whether it’s real “market demand” or companies operating at a loss to promote their product, there’s obviously far more AI processing happening now than there was ten years ago.

But at the same time, energy efficiency (performance/watt) is actively increasing, driven by technical improvements. Overall, energy demands are still increasing, but the efficiency improvements are reducing the impact.

Goldman Sachs, “Generational growth: AI, data centers and the coming US power demand surge”, Apr 2024

When it comes to overall energy use, those trends plug in something like this:

Demand is jobs/time, which is going up (probably).
Complexity (operations/job) varies, and is influenced by how complex the job is and whether specialized chips are being used or not.
Operation cost (energy/operation) is a chip-specific kind of power use, and going down as chips get more and more efficient.

Put together, this makes the consumption trend “wobbly”:

Because these variable factors push the overall power usage in both directions, we don’t see consistently increasing or decreasing numbers. Instead, we see a wide range of variance, depending on how the other variables moved lately. Efficiency gains push overall energy use down, increased demand pushes it up, and so we would see a sort of “wobble” as opposed to a monotonic line. The overall trend is ultimately increasing due to increasing demand and complexity in the current “rollout” period, but that’s not a requirement of the technology or industry.

you know, increasing, but wobbly

But even though their fluctation makes them hard to compare moment-to-moment, the rough numbers tell us the order of magnitude we’re working with, give us a starting point to think about the question, and let us estimate best/worst case power figures.

Units

For this article, I’m going to try to measure energy in kilowatt-hours (kWh) and watt-hours (Wh). One kilowatt-hour is the energy output of 1 kilowatt of power applied for 1 hour. (Energy (kWh) is power (kW) × time (h).) And the single watt-hour (Wh) is 1/1000 of a kWh. The other scale that comes up when talking about very large aggregates is the terrawatt-hour (TWh), which is one billion kWh.

To give you an idea of how much energy that really is here are some points of reference, in ascending order:

My phone’s battery capacity is ~0.010 kWh (10.45 Wh). Yours is probably closer to 0.015 kWh (15 Wh). (Phones have to be really energy-efficient!)
My laptop runs at 0.03 kW, or 0.03 kWh per hour.
- If I forget to turn my laptop off at night, that costs 0.57 kWh.
Elevators run at 6kW, meaning they consume 0.1 kWh per minute of operation.
Commercial GPUs can draw a maximum of 180 W to 350 W, which equals 0.18 kWh to 0.35 kWh per hour.
- PC gaming was estimated in a 2018 study to consume 75 TWh per year.
Watching one hour of Netflix consumes 0.08 kWh to 0.8 kWh, depending on the scenario.
Standard central air conditioning systems consume between 0.50 kWh and 3.75 kWh per hour.
- This summer, in my small Texas apartment, with my AC set on a timer to only ensure it’s comfortable when I’m at home and awake, my 300 W AC is cooling 45% of the time, which would be 3.24 kWh per day.
The energy produced from burning 1 gallon of gasoline is approximately 36 kWh. (At 30 MPG, this is 0.84 miles per kWh.)
The average U.S. household consumes about 10,500 kWh of electricity per year, or 28.8 kWh per day.
- 1 terawatt-hour (TWh) powers approximately 95,000 homes for one year.
Running an electronic billboard for one day consumes ~450 kWh.
Manufacturing an average (1,481 kg) vehicle consumes 17,200 kWh

Number examples

So that’s a rough outline of the question. We know the numbers are going to vary, but the data should still tell us about trends and scale. Here’s what it looks like broken down:

AI power requirements can be broken into two general categories: training and inference.

Training a model is the process of building it for the first time. This only has to be done once per-model, although models have to be retrained in order to add data.

Inference is using a model that already exists. Inference — using the AI, either for categorization² tasks or generating new text/images — takes orders of magnitude less power per operation, although the cumulative power requirements of many operations at scale still add up.

Creating a new model or releasing a new version of an AI product revision of an AI product represents a training operation. Using an existing model to generate a chat response or a diffusion image is an inference operation.

Training

Training costs are proportional to the amount of data the model is trained on. The more data points there are, the longer the training takes. This means that it’s always possible to make training more expensive by throwing more data in. There’s no strict upper bound on how expensive training can get, but we can still estimate a range based on how people are actually doing training in practice.

In 2019, the cost of training a language model on standard hardware ranged from 17 kWh to 174 kWh³:

Strubell, E., Ganesh, A., & McCallum, A. (2019). Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP

In 2022, training costs for the BLOOMz model family of small LLMs were benchmarked, and the range for total training costs was 11,000 kWh to 51,586 kWh:

Luccioni, A. S., Jernite, Y., & Strubell, E. (2023). Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment? (Truncated) Table 5: The BLOOMz models from our study with their training energy cost (from [Luccioni]), finetuning energy cost (from [Muennighoff]) …

BLOOMz-7B BLOOMz-3B BLOOMz-1B BLOOMz-560M

Training energy (kWh) 51,686 25,634 17,052 10,505

Finetuning energy (kWh) 7,571 3,242 1,081 543

	BLOOMz-7B	BLOOMz-3B	BLOOMz-1B	BLOOMz-560M
Training energy (kWh)	51,686	25,634	17,052	10,505
Finetuning energy (kWh)	7,571	3,242	1,081	543

But it is possible to pour massive amounts of energy into training language models. The more data you use as input, the more work is required to train a satisfactory model. In more recent history, Meta’s Llama 3 large language model’s small and large sizes were trained in 2024 for 1.3 and 6.4 million 700-watt GPU hours, respectively, with a maximum theoretical power usage of 910,000 kWh and 4,480,000 kWh.

Generative models go through the same process of training. The Stable Diffusion v2 model was trained on A100 PCIe 40 GB cards running for a combined 200,000 hours, which is a specialized AI GPU that can pull a maximum of 300 W. 300 W for 200,000 hours gives a total energy consumption of 60,000 kWh. This is a high bound that assumes full usage of every chip for the entire period; SD2’s own carbon emission report indicates it likely used significantly less power than this, and other research has shown it can be done for less.

So the energy consumption of model training is somewhere in the range of 11,000 kWh to 52,000 kWh for moderate-sized LLMs, 40,000 kWh to 60,000 kWh for more expensive image generators, and up to 5,000,000 kWh for global-scale LLMs like Llama and ChatGPT.

Inference

An inference operation (using an AI model that’s already been trained) takes energy proportional to the model’s complexity. Again, this is intuitive: if the dictionary is larger, it takes more time to search. A response from a model trained on vast amounts of data takes more processing time than a simple one trained on a minimal set. A chatbot that returns answers in complex language takes more energy than a tool limited to yes/no answers. A large image takes more energy to generate than a small one. In other words, we expect the computation power required will be proportional to both the domain and range of the function.

Luccioni, A. S., Jernite, Y., & Strubell, E. (2023). Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment?

The trend is that categorization² and recognition operations are less expensive than generation operations (0.002 vs. 0.007 Wh).

LLM-based text processing is slightly more expensive. Other research finds that a ChatGPT text generation operation takes 2.9Wh to 4.0 Wh, and 1000 messages would take 2.9 kWh to 4 kWh.

Google’s published estimates indicate that 3 Wh is also the energy cost of each interaction with their LLMs.

But the costs of image generation are higher. Luccioni et al. (in the table above) found that among generation operations, text generation is less expensive than image generation (0.047 vs. 2.9 Wh). The most popular generative image model that can be run on consumer GPUs is Stable Diffusion. Benchmarking with codecarbon, with 20 samples, Stable Diffusion 1.5 takes ~0.09 Wh per image. Images from diffusion models can reach a cost of 3 Wh/image as a high upper-bound, but reaching this requires a larger model, and 100+ iteration steps as opposed to the standard 20—30.

Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment? Figure 1: The tasks examined in our study and the average quantity of carbon emissions they produced (in g of CO₂eq) for 1,000 queries. N.B. The y axis is in logarithmic scale.

We can also estimate the energy costs of modern black-box services that don’t release this data by using what we do know. Midjourney runs in real time, and takes 30–60 seconds to generate a batch of four images. As a high bound, if that process is running on a top-of-the-line GPU running at a full 450W for the full 60 seconds, that represents power consumption of 7.5 Wh per image set, and 1.88 Wh per subimage.

So the energy consumption of an inference operation is somewhere in the range of 1.0 Wh to 7.0 Wh for standard operations, and to 4 Wh to 7.5 Wh for more expensive jobs like image or video generation.

7.5 Wh per shot is expensive for a single computer operation. That takes us out of the realm of normal high-performance processing like arithmetic and into the realm of things like visual effects or 3D rendering. But that makes sense when you remember that the work being done is actually visual effects and 3D rendering. Relatively complex work, relatively high cost.

Training dwarfs inference

You probably spotted that an training operation is much, much more expensive than using the model once it exists. Training — categorically — consumes orders of magnitude more energy than inference. This is intuitive: generating an index (like a dictionary) in the first place is expensive, but the purpose of the index is to make many future lookups quick and easy.

Here is the full table for the BLOOMz model families, including the interesting “cost parity” calculation:

Luccioni, A. S., Jernite, Y., & Strubell, E. (2023). Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment? Table 5: The BLOOMz models from our study with their training energy cost (from [Luccioni]), finetuning energy cost (from [Muennighoff]), inference cost (from the present study), and cost parity, as the number of inferences required to sum to the training cost.

BLOOMz-7B BLOOMz-3B BLOOMz-1B BLOOMz-560M

Training energy (kWh) 51,686 25,634 17,052 10,505

Finetuning energy (kWh) 7,571 3,242 1,081 543

Inference energy (kWh) 1.0 × 10⁻⁴ 7.3 × 10⁻⁵ 6.2 × 10⁻⁵ 5.4 × 10⁻⁵

Cost parity (# inferences) 592,570,000 395,602,740 292,467,741 204,592,592

	BLOOMz-7B	BLOOMz-3B	BLOOMz-1B	BLOOMz-560M
Training energy (kWh)	51,686	25,634	17,052	10,505
Finetuning energy (kWh)	7,571	3,242	1,081	543
Inference energy (kWh)	1.0 × 10⁻⁴	7.3 × 10⁻⁵	6.2 × 10⁻⁵	5.4 × 10⁻⁵
Cost parity (# inferences)	592,570,000	395,602,740	292,467,741	204,592,592

The amount of energy used by an inference operation is hundreds of millions of times smaller than the energy used to train its model.

Although inference costs are very small, they depend on having a trained model, which could be a hidden cost. Additionally, while it’s possible to measure and estimate the power usage of inference operations, it’s possible to refuse to disclose energy use statistics for training, which is a more blatant way to hide training costs.

Data centers

Most AI processing, whether training or inference, is done at scale in dedicated data centers. This uses a considerable amount of energy: data centers are already significant energy consumers, and increased load from AI work only exacerbates that.

If you’re not familiar, data centers are dedicated facilities for running servers. Data centers are “the cloud”: instead of running your own servers, you can rent computer power from experts who are very good at keeping computers from turning off. For the last decade, it’s been true that dedicated service — whether it’s a cloud service, chat program, or just any website — is probably running in a data center.

Data centers are what make all the good stuff go.

While different kinds of energy use aren’t individually tracked, for the purposes of analytics, “data center” is a discretely tracked category of power consumer. And data center energy use (combined) has been continually rising. From Bloomberg:

AI Is Already Wreaking Havoc On Global Power Systems | Bloomberg Altogether, data centers use more electricity than most countries
Only 16 nations, including the US and China, consume more

Sources: Bloomberg analysis of BloombergNEF and DC Byte data

Note: Data center energy consumption through Q1 2024. National energy consumption levels are actual through 2022 and projected for 2023 and 2024.

Data centers used 200 to 500 TWh in 2018, or 0.55 billion kWh per day. By 2024, that number increased to 350 TWh, or 0.95 billion kWh/day. As their graph points out, both of those numbers are higher than the total use of some countries.

AI represents a minority of data center power use

This is a key point that trips people up: not all data center processing is AI. Data centers are already responsible for almost all cloud processing and web services. AI power usage is a tiny (but growing) minority of the consumptive demand.

So how much of the total power data centers consume does the AI subset actually use?

AI has not significantly inflated the demand… yet. As Kyle Orland points out for Ars, you can actually see on the Bloomberg chart that the AI excitement that Dall-E sparked in 2022 doesn’t seem to have accelerated power growth:

Kyle Orland, Taking a closer look at AI’s supposed energy apocalypse | Ars Technica Bloomberg asks one source directly “why data centers were suddenly sucking up so much power” and gets back a blunt answer: “It’s AI… It’s 10 to 15 times the amount of electricity.”

Unfortunately for Bloomberg, that quote is followed almost immediately by a chart that heavily undercuts the AI alarmism.

The massive growth in data center power usage mostly predates the current mania for generative AI (red 2022 line added by Ars).

That chart shows worldwide data center energy usage growing at a remarkably steady pace from about 100 TWh in 2012 to around 350 TWh in 2024. The vast majority of that energy usage growth came before 2022, when the launch of tools like Dall-E and ChatGPT largely set off the industry’s current mania for generative AI. If you squint at Bloomberg’s graph, you can almost see the growth in energy usage slowing down a bit since that momentous year for generative AI.

So, within data center power use, we don’t see AI having caused a spike in power demand. But it probably will:

The International Energy Agency estimates the energy demand of “dedicated AI data centres” to be negligible in 2022, but does predict an increase to ~95 TWh in 2026:

While well-informed, these are still estimations. Real data about the inner workings of data centers (as opposed to estimations) is proprietary information, when it exists at all. Since this includes data on how much power is allotted to AI, estimating the real amount of AI demand is tricky.

One data source that is available, though, is chip sales. In The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligence, Alex de Vries estimates a theoretical upper bound for AI-specific data center use from chip sale data. The maximum power usage would be for every AI-specific chip to be running at once drawing as much power as it could, so working backward, you can estimate the maximum amount of demand:

de Vries, A. (2023). The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligence. Joule, 7(10), 2191–2194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2023.09.004 Given its estimated 95% market share in 2023, NVIDIA leads the AI servers market. The company is expected to deliver 100,000 of its AI servers in 2023. If operating at full capacity (i.e., 6.5 kW for NVIDIA’s DGX A100 servers and 10.2 kW for DGX H100 servers), these servers would have a combined power demand of 650–1,020 MW. On an annual basis, these servers could consume up to 5.7–8.9 TWh of electricity. Compared to the historical estimated annual electricity consumption of data centers, which was 205 TWh, this is almost negligible.

So, regardless of the work being done, those new servers can consume a maximum of ~9 TWh/year, because that’s how much hardware exists. These numbers are in-line with a study from Goldman Sachs which estimates the total current power demand to be ~15 TWh/year, including demand from older and non-specialized chips.

So, for the power use of AI in data centers overall, we see an approximate current annual usage of ~9 to ~15 TWh, or 4% of total data center power consumption.

Data centers are high-capacity

Not all processing done in data centers is AI, but not all AI processing is done in data centers as part of that ~15 TWh. Most of the expense is, though.

All significant training is done in data centers. Depending on the model, inference operations either run in data centers (“in the cloud”), or locally (“on-chip” AI). Data centers can run much more powerful computing operations than consumer hardware, so they can run operations that are too computationally expensive to run locally. That computational expense also means those jobs require more power, which data centers have a greater capacity to support.

This divides work into two categories. Work that requires⁴ a data center is on a completely different scale of power usage than any software that can run locally with reasonable performance. Any operation that can run locally on your computer can only take as much power as the computer does. As a rule of thumb — compared to those TWh numbers — this is usually small enough that can almost be discounted as a significant power consumption factor, compared to specialized operations that require the power capacity of a dedicated server farm. 15 minutes of local AI use will never take more energy than 1 hour of Fortnite on the same computer; the hardware can only use so much power.

Hyperscaling costs… down?

There are two⁵ major categories of data centers. Dedicated mid-tier and “hyperscale” data centers are facilities designed to be full-time data centers. But many servers aren’t run in these kinds of dedicated facilities, and are instead run ad-hoc, in a dedicated room or floor in an existing facility. This is the “server closet”.

Dedicated data centers use significantly more energy than server closets, in total. But professional design, architecture, and improved cooling systems mean these dedicated facilities are far more efficient than small server closets. Because dedicated data center facilities are designed from the ground-up to be efficient data centers, they use every trick in the book to do it well.

What makes hyperscale data centers energy-intensive is the scale part: the cumulative cost of all the servers. If that same work was simply done in a dedicated data center instead, and nothing else happened, the total energy use would go down!

So, when it comes to comparing costs, looking at total consumption is often a misleading train of thought. There’s an interesting lesson about comparing cost and worth here, which is that it’s necessary to think in terms of proportions, not in net. We must think in terms of efficiency: energy cost is only meaningful when we tie the net change in energy to the value delivered. (Foreshadowing!)

Proportional Comparison

So, given an idea of the scale of energy required for those different jobs, “how much is that”?

This is a nontrivial question. The negligent way is to just insert the numbers from AI into that “points of reference” list from before and call that Content. But to just compare these numbers directly and end there is to fall into the proportionality trap. We can’t just look at the net totals, we have to consider what value is actually being produced by the expense or else we haven’t actually compared the two things meaningfully at all.

What we should care about is proportional cost, meaning the net cost divided by the value produced, or “kWh spent per utility produced.”

(This is the inverse of efficiency, which is value/cost.)

When thinking about the energy consumption of AI, the question on the table is “is spending energy this way a waste, or is it more efficient, or is it almost the same?”

This is the task of weighing costs against the benefits they provide, rather than net values:

gio :⁾@giovan_h
When it comes to power usage, I don’t understand the “air conditioning number more bigger“ talking point. You have to weight costs against the benefits they provide. Air conditioning ranges from human comfort to inhabitability. Some of the most important goods that exist.
Mon Jun 24 17:43:11 +0000 2024

I have seen some work that does address this question, like 'depleting the global power and water supply' – @txttletale on Tumblr, and more formally Milja Moss, “LLM Water And Energy Use”:

Milja Moss, “LLM Water And Energy Use” When determining whether you should be using services like ChatGPT, the question then becomes: “Are 1600 responses from ChatGPT as useful to me as 2 hours of video games?”

I think this is a deeply important train of thought that’s generally overlooked, even though it seems to be the crux of the question. This is a mistake that happens when you directly apply the conclusions from research done on net impact to ideas of individual use, when there’s actually proportional conversion and reassessment that needs to be done.

For my pseudo-formula I’m borrowing the word “utility” here from utilitarian philosophy. If you’re not familiar, don’t let the dryness of the word scare you: utility includes everything good, including reducing human suffering. It is “that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness … [or] to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered.” In other words, goodness.

Also, even though I put utility in a formula for illustrative purposes, I don’t want to fall down the rabbit hole of quantifying utility into “points”, or something. All we need for now is to understand it as a subjective idea. This is how you sidestep the trap of quantifying “value” in dollars, which fails to capture huge categories of things that are good and ought to exist. We can make meaningful value judgements without quantifying it.

The utility value of AI is highly contested

The problem we immediately run into if we try to think about the proportional cost of AI is that there is no consensus on whether it’s ultimately useful. This matters because if it’s not useful, all energy spent on it is automatically wasted, so that’s our answer right there.

This is a deep topic, and one I plan to talk about in depth in another article (which I have a lot of notes for already). But, if you’re not familiar, here is a quick summary of the discourse.

I think it’s self-evident that AI services can be useful. If an AI service can answer a question correctly, that provides value. If one can generate usable text, or a usable graphic, that provides value. And, usually, this can all be done by AI much faster than doing it with human labor. By virtue of being a tool that sometimes works, the utility provided has to be something above zero.

I am not the first person to land on this position. Quoting from a few thoughtful people:

Kyle Orland, “Taking a closer look at AI’s supposed energy apocalypse” | Ars Technica If you cherry-pick the worst examples of AI screwups, it’s easy to see the entire sector as a misguided use of limited money and energy resources. But if you’re a programmer who’s getting twice as much done with AI coding tools or a customer service manager seeing productivity gains from employees who can consult with AI, that may seem like electricity well spent.

Nicholas Carlini, “How I use “AI”“ …the reason I think that the recent advances we’ve made aren’t just hype is that, over the past year, I have spent at least a few hours every week interacting with various large language models, and have been consistently impressed by their ability to solve increasingly difficult tasks I give them. And as a result of this, I would say I’m at least 50% faster at writing code for both my research projects and my side projects as a result of these models.
…
You might think—why would someone write an entire article justifying that language models are useful??! Isn’t that obvious?!? But there seem to be a (large?) contingent of people out there—in the academic literature, in the software engineering space, and also in the media sphere—who proclaim widely that LLMs contribute nothing, are just another hype cycle, and in a few years will die having had no impact on the world. I will be arguing these people are wrong because current LLMs are already useful.

So that’s the position to beat. But there are a number of arguments to do this:

There are moral arguments that AI is inherently unethical, not because of its efficiency, but due to problems with training methods, data sources, and intellectual property violations.

There are utilitarian arguments that AI-generated artifacts are generally harmful to public life, because they pollute the internet with well-formatted-but-wrong documents, making it harder for everyone to learn true things across the board.

There are labor arguments that AI services will allow companies to replace whole categories of human jobs with Capital they can own outright, allowing the owners of the new means of production to take a much larger share of revenue as pure profit, enriching themselves while workers go unpaid. What makes this particularly dangerous is that, from the perspective of the corporations, this might be the most efficient thing to do even if the resulting work is worse than peoples’.

For the sake of the energy question, let’s put a pin in the ethical question, since that’s really a separate topic. “Is using AI an unethical waste of electricity” is the only place these topics overlap, and whether it’s a waste of electricity or not is already the question we’re trying to answer. Otherwise, the ethical question is on a totally separate dimension.

If AI usage is inherently evil or necessary to oppose as part of a labor struggle, we don’t really care about the energy question because the answer is AI mustn’t be used no matter what. If it’s unethical it doesn’t matter how efficient it is, it shouldn’t be used at all. Energy isn’t really a factor in that case.

So for this article about energy, let’s make the middle-of-the-road assumption that AI services are useful and valuable, but not magically so. Let’s just conceptualize AI as a new tool that can be used productively, even if we’re not convinced the energy cost is low enough to make it worth using. And, at least in some cases, AI generative software can produce outputs comparable to human work in a practical sense. (Obviously this has a massive social and economic impact, but for now let’s just use it to do energy comparisons.)

So if AI is at least somewhat useful, and we know the rough ranges for the energy costs, how does that proportional cost compare to other things?

Cryptocurrency

As I mentioned earlier, the AI boom feels a lot like the blockchain cryptocurrency push of a few years ago. Like cryptocurrency, AI is a tech fad, it requires data centers, it consumes more energy than a webserver… the comparison is extremely natural.

In fact, naturally seguing from cryptocurrency to AI is what Alex de Vries (the expert I’ve already cited) did:

Alex de Vries is a PhD candidate at the VU Amsterdam School of Business and Economics and the founder of Digiconomist, a research company dedicated to exposing the unintended consequences of digital trends. His research focuses on the environmental impact of emerging technologies and has played a major role in the global discussion regarding the sustainability of blockchain technology.

So people are coming off cryptocurrency and applying that same energy to AI, and I think it makes complete sense to do that. But, while the two trends look similar from a distance, they’re really very different, for two major reasons.

Scale of energy demand

Blockchain technology is designed to be energy intensive, as prohibitive expense is actually what creates the scarcity and therefore the value. In contrast, AI tech is highly motivated to increase efficiency as much as possible. (Since, y’know, it’s a real service that does things.)

Cryptocurrency is also equally energy intensive at all times. In contrast, the major cost of AI development is the front-loaded training stage, and subsequent inference is significantly less expensive.

In practice, that means crypto outspends AI enormously. The “transactional cost” of using AI is less than cryptocurrency transactions by many orders of magnitude, which is to be expected. At time of writing, processing a single bitcoin transaction consumes 488.90 kWh, and increasing block difficulty means that number will increase over time.

For comparison, if 51,586 kWH is the high end of the range for the cost of training a model, that’s just under 106 bitcoin transactions. Except training only has to be done once, and according to its own metrics for success, bitcoin will continue to make transactions forever. So, after just a few transactions, bitcoin’s ongoing cost surpasses the one-time training cost of the AI model, and keeps increasing indefinitely:

(And this model is actually far too generous to bitcoin, whose transactional costs don’t stay fixed at 488.90 kWh, but intentionally increase over time!)

For our proportional cost, utility/expense, that’s the numerator. AI’s expense is significant, but minuscule compared to blockchain’s. So that’s a clear victory for AI on the net cost.

Productive output

So, how useful is blockchain tech? Is it turning that huge amount of energy it consumes into real value?

No. Not even a little bit.

The payment processing monopolies sit comfortably undisrupted while “crypto” devolves into a way to gull marks and commit security fraud. NFTs have not somehow made scarcity a good thing, and buying lots in a company town has not redistributed power back to the people.

Since blockchain is almost worthless, the proportional energy cost of AI is much, much lower than cryptocurrency. As the energy costs for blockchain calculations go up, and the value goes toward zero as the rugs are pulled, AI becomes infinitely better.

So maybe that was a lowball. But I still see the cryptocurrency/AI energy comparison being made all the time, and it doesn’t make sense. They’re both ways computers can use electricity, but other than that they’re in completely different leagues.

Image generation

A much closer race is AI image generation. I think this is a much better exercise, since image generators were the most expensive models to train and use.

Is using ~3 Wh to 7.5 Wh to AI-generate an image a waste of energy compared to just doing the real work yourself?

Photography

First, if you want a photograph, the answer is automatically no. If you need to go out and do a professional photoshoot, transportation alone is going to consume more (and dirtier!) energy than an image generator. At ~30 miles per gallon, a 15-mile round trip consumes the equivalent of 18 kWh, which is enough to generate 2,400 Midjourney images at 7.5 Wh a pop. And that’s not even considering the costs of running a camera and lighting. A $15 ring light runs on 10 W. That’s tiny, but leave it on for just 45 minutes and that’s another Midjourney image.

Even if you’re a stock photography company and you’re factory-farming photographs, you can’t be more energy efficient than image generators. If you minimized your energy costs by making one trip in one vehicle and taking photographs with that one ring light for 8 straight hours, spending just 18.1 kWh, you’d have to do nothing all day but take 5 photos per minute just to break even with Midjourney. And god forbid, if you heat your lunch in a 700 W microwave, that’s another Midjourney image every 38 seconds.

And, remember, Midjourney is the most expensive option on the list! There are alternatives that spend even less energy than even the cheapest photoshoot. It’s no contest.

Illustration

Other forms of art — like illustrations — are harder to compare, just because it’s inherently difficult to compare any two categories of art. It’s a hard question to compare any two artists, regardless of whether one of them is using AI or not. So the case where AI-generated art can realistically substitute for traditional illustration work is going to be less common. Whether an AI product is comparable depends on too many factors, like the subject matter, the desired style, and the skill of the prompter.

Say you’re a fiction writer, but not an artist, and you want a few illustrations to put in your novel in order to better communicate your story. Does using an image generator consume more power than commissioning an artist to make a digital illustration?

I don’t have a Photoshop license, so I can’t verify an exact benchmark myself, but let’s roughly estimate illustration software as using something in the range of 30 W (my laptop idling with no graphics programs open) to 300 W (medium-spec GPU running at 100%), depending on how powerful it is.

We’ve already estimated AI image generation as taking 3 Wh to 7.5 Wh per image, because the amount of time taken is predictable. How many Wh a traditional digital illustration takes will be 30 W to 350 W multiplied by how long the software is running, in hours.

In order for 30 W software to use less than 7.5 Wh, it will need to finish running in less than 15 minutes. If the software uses the full 300 W, in order to use less than 7.5 Wh, it has to finish in 1 minute, 30 seconds.

But in real life, a commissioned illustration takes at least 2–3 hours. That doesn’t make the AI generator the right choice, but it does mean it’s not a waste of energy.

ms. curio@reachartwork
EXTREME napkin math so take with a grain of salt, but from what i'm researching w/ benchmarks, an hour of continuous stable diffusion use is worth basically, to be generous, 3-4 hours of another typical art program in terms of energy load

Fri Jul 19 09:57:19 +0000 2024

ms. curio@reachartwork
so basically if you spend one hour of GPU time making an image in stable diffusion, as long as it would've taken you more than 2 hours of photoshop, 3-4 hours of CSP/Krita, or 2 hours of blender, using stable diffusion actually uses *less* energy. AGAIN, NAPKIN MATH
Fri Jul 19 09:58:17 +0000 2024

ms. curio@reachartwork
i think a more realistic conclusion to draw is, basically, most of these programs are roughly comparable in terms of order of magnitude of energy draw - so if you have saved time by using ai generation, you've likely saved energy as well
Fri Jul 19 09:59:04 +0000 2024

ms. curio@reachartwork
oh and if you're streaming while you draw you are absolutely, definitely using more power than stable diffusion alone, streaming is a huge energy and gpu load hog
Fri Jul 19 10:00:00 +0000 2024

In other words, Luccioni’s proportional cost calculation makes sense:

Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment? Or take AI image generation, where one estimate suggests creating 1,000 generative AI images takes as much energy as driving about four miles in a car. If those images are as good or better than the ones you’d get more slowly from a human artist, the economic case for that energy usage is obvious

Image training

But so far this has only been considering the transactional cost. There’s also the cost of building the model in the first place, which is a prerequisite for all these fast, cheap operations it enables. Is that one-time training cost high enough that it negates the benefits?

Let’s switch from Midjourney to Stable Diffusion, since we know both the inference cost (3 Wh/image) and training cost (~50,000 kWh).

Training an AI model produces a tool that can be used to reduce the effort involved in later work. Structurally, this model of a preparation phase before a tool is usable is parallel to how all tools work, and in this case particularly mirrors factory machinery. There’s a significant upfront cost, but that produces capital that can be used to make future operations faster and cheaper.

So if an AI is like equipment, how expensive is the equipment?

For image generators, we found that the training expense currently falls in the 40,000 kWh to 60,000 kWh range.

The 2020 study Sato, F. E. K., & Nakata, T. (2020). Energy Consumption Analysis for Vehicle Production through a Material Flow Approach found that manufacturing an average (1,481 kg) vehicle consumes 17,200 kWh. What’s interesting about this study is they determined that the energy required to manufacture a vehicle (including energy costs associated with acquiring material) scaled proportionally with material mass, and modern manufacturing methods produce vehicles at 11.61 kWh/kg.

Just for fun, let’s imagine an image generator as physical machinery produced at the same cost. That would be a 3,500 kg to 5,200 kg piece of equipment, or 7,600 to 11,400 lb. That’s less than half the weight of one empty dump truck, which is a pretty reasonable thing to produce one of, if it makes work that much more efficient.

But we don’t actually have to consider the training stage as a separate cost at all. If we know how many images are being generated, we can spread the training costs across the individual inferences.

And if you’re not sure what one of the numbers, you draw a graph. To find the cost in kWh/image, this gives us

— where y is the bundled cost per image, 0.003 is the inference cost, and x is the total number of images ever generated, so each image is bundled with one share of the training costs. This creates this hyperbola:

As more images are generated in total, the cost per image is decreased, because the training cost is spread across more uses.

At point A, after 50,151 images, the cost comes down to 1 kWh/image. At point B, after 1,000,000 images, the cost lowers to 0.05 kWh/image (50 Wh).

But 1,000,000 is still an absurdly low number. One single service, NovelAI, reports generating 4,800,000 diffusion images per day. The Stable Diffusion 1.5 model was downloaded 5,420,000 times from one site just in the last month, which likely represents hundreds of millions of image generations.

Given that, I’m reasonably confident in saying at least 1,000,000,000 Stable Diffusion images have been generated so far. That puts us at least past point C.

With 1,000,000,000 stable diffusions behind us, the cost per image is 0.00305 kWh, or 3.05 Wh. 3 Wh/image was already our assumed cost per image, and the cost of training the model initially has disappeared into the margin of error. In fact, this has already happened a long time ago; with just 100,000,000 (1E8) images total, the cost per image is 3.1 Wh, and the line already looks almost flat.

So, while image generation is among the more expensive AI tasks, it’s not true that it’s automatically wasteful. Compared to the alternatives, AI art is extremely efficient… provided you’re making work of value, and not just waste.

Research

We can apply this same logic to any task. First, consider the separate preparation/usage phases, then identify a comparable unit of work for each, then see how the energy usage requirements compare.

A LLM response takes 10-15x more energy than a Google search, sure. But does using a tool like ChatGPT as a research assistant consume more energy than searching for as long as it takes to get the same information? An LLM response just has to save you 10 clicks to break even, so as long as you’re really using it and not just asking something you could easily search yourself, it’s worth it.

This is something I’ve found makes ChatGPT genuinely useful: its ability to be a general conceptual index. If there’s a topic I’m not familiar with, I can describe the kind of thing I’m talking about in general terms, and ChatGPT can give me an outline of the topic to use as a launching point. To do that research with Google, I’d at least need to know what keywords to start with, which you often don’t.

For instance, here’s a question I asked back in 2023 (I don’t use ChatGPT much):

Some chocolate from a candy bar melts, but then rehardens in the refrigerator. Part of the chocolate separates into a tasteless white substance. What is the white substance?

Here I’m actually able to describe a phenomenon and work backwards to the terminology needed to do more robust research on the topic. (It was fat bloom.) With ChatGPT, I can ask a real question, get an approximate answer back that gets me on the right track, and refine from there with external research.

This ask-check-iterate loop seems extremely valuable when compared with traditional research. In order to get this information you’d normally need to be a subject-matter expert yourself or have access to one. Alternatively, with something like Wikipedia, you could find a general topic and try to browse through lists of subtopics; if what you were looking for was named clearly, you might be able to find it from there. But LLMs are able to replace that task of searching through the whole space with something much closer to an automatic, indexed lookup.

Turning a task from a search a human has to manually perform into a one-shot lookup is an incredible advancement. This enables people to do work that would otherwise take many man-hours of research and consultation to accomplish without the LLM tools. As for energy-efficiency, training and inference costs for LLMs are both less than the energy costs of image generators, and we’ve already seen how that went.

Entertainment

Taking a step back from industrial comparisons, AI use even seems fine when compared to entertainment. Thinking about how whether a use “pays for itself” is good, but using it just for fun is fine too.

As I mentioned earlier, a computer can only draw so much power.

Watching one hour of Netflix takes around 0.08 kWh to 0.8 kWh. Let’s take the conservative assumption that in your scenario, watching an hour of Netflix costs 0.08 kWh. If you instead used that hour talking with an LLM like ChatGPT for no purpose other than entertainment, you could generate a reply every two minutes and still use less power than streaming. (At 0.8 kWh, you can message every 14 seconds!)

Sitting down and doing nothing but generate Stable Diffusion nonstop for an hour with a 200 W GPU takes the same 200 Wh that playing any video game on high settings would.

Any normal consumer AI use is going to be equivalent to these medium-energy entertainment tasks that we basically consider to be free. I’ve turned on a streaming service just to have something playing in the background, and probably so have you. AI just doesn’t use enough power to be more wasteful than just normal tech use.

Software

(Nicholas Carlini, “How I use “AI”“ covers this topic in great depth, and I recommend it if this train of thought interests you.)

I was planning on writing about how the preparation/usage model was structurally similar to software development, with a clear software development stage followed by multiple usages, all of which consume energy. But that’s a challenging comparison to make, since there’s so much variance in the domain of “what software can do”. Worse, I’m not aware of any real data around either power requirements of enterprise software development, nor is it clear to me how much real work these “AI assist” tools do. In other words, quoting Wikimedia’s Chris Albon,

Chris Albon@chrisalbon
I have a hard time describing the real value of consumer AI because it’s less some grand thing around AI agents or anything and more AI saving humans a hour of work on some random task, millions of times a day.
Sat Jul 20 15:00:12 +0000 2024

I just experienced this the other day. I needed to quickly automate some clicking but I didn’t remember the exact javascript semantics and didn’t want to context-switch to reading the documentation, so I just asked

In the javascript development console, I have a NodeList returned from a query selector. Write a console snippet that calls .click() on each item in the list, but with a one-second delay between each call.

and got back exactly what I needed:

You can achieve this by using setTimeout within a loop to introduce a delay between each .click() call. Here’s a snippet that does that:
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const nodeList = document.querySelectorAll('your-selector'); // Replace with your actual selector

nodeList.forEach((node, index) => {
  setTimeout(() => {
    node.click();
  }, index * 1000); // 1000ms = 1 second
});
This code will call .click() on each item in the NodeList with a 1-second delay between each call. The index * 1000 ensures that the delay increases for each subsequent item.

This saved me a few minutes and eliminated the overhead involved in thinking through a new development problem. And yes, it probably replaced 10-page clicks too.

But, for something larger and less incidental, I was reminded of a conversation I saw. The AI service Claude is, apparently, able to build simple software tools and user interfaces just from conversational description.

That’s really cool. But that’s also a much better basis for a cost/benefit comparison.

None of the tools in that conversation thread are particularly impressive by themselves. A good text editor already has a feature to diff text, good composition software already tells you your document’s character/word/paragraph count, and a good image editor has a color-picker as a basic feature. Still, it’s useful to be able to do any of these things quickly from a browser if you don’t have the relevant program open, as evidenced by the fact that many mini websites like this exist.

Let’s take the color picker example. With access to the internet, I could probably put together something serviceable in an hour. If Claude can spend power to do that work for me, based on what I’ve seen so far, I would expect whatever additional energy cost using the AI tool involved (if any!) to be made up for in the time and energy it saved me.

But the value of Claude here isn’t that it would save me an hour, it’s that it would enable someone without as much development experience to make a tool that might otherwise take them days.

That’s a significant factor, but not one that slots cleanly in to our proportional cost calculation. That’s a benefit that’s hiding under “utility”.

Unfortunately, in the same way, there are also hidden costs. We also need to consider the impacts and implications this energy use implies, and there are significant problems under that rug. Because there are energy problems with AI; they’re just not that every time you use chatgpt they have to burn a barrel of coal. That, we can rule out.

That leads us into Part 2.

I’ve also seen the argument that the power requirements of generating the data in the first place need to be amoritized into the energy cost of training. Here is why I disagree:

“Data” is a non-rivalrous good, and can be treated as non-scarce once it exists. In the real world, all the data used for training was already created for other purposes, and so exists now as an environmental factor. This isn’t saying it’s part of the “commons”, or is all free to use for any purpose, just that it already exists and doesn’t need to be recreated to be used.

As an example, consider combustion engines: Atmospheric oxygen is extremely plentiful to the point of being essentially non-scarce, and so “oxygen used” isn’t a factor you have to take into account when thinking about costs of combustion power on earth. It’s true that it would be extremely expensive to synthesize the needed oxygen from scratch, but in a case where you had to do that, you wouldn’t be using combustion at all, because it’d be cost-prohibitive.

More obviously, it’s not true to say solar power is expensive because we’d have to create a new star to use it if we didn’t have one already. Solar power is only considered because the input resource already exists and is freely available. Our starting point is the real state of the world, which means we don’t have to (double!) count the energy used to produce all available knowledge as part of our cost to use it.

↩
Like text recognition, or recognizing subject matter in pictures. ↩↩
I’m not including the models that were designed to be trained on non-standard TPU hardware, since — as the table notes — the data isn’t available, and the real power draw for training the model may be considerably lower than the benchmarks on alternate hardware. ↩
There are a lot of traps of over-generalization here. Performance is a significant reason why a model would run in a data center: if your local machine isn’t powerful enough to run the operation locally, that’s a reason to use data centers for cloud processing. But that’s not the only reason: secrecy and restriction are also reasons a company might force you to use a cloud version of their software, so that doesn’t necessarily indicate that the model requires more energy. And the “can run locally on your computer” category isn’t limited to traditional software; there are many AI models that fall into that category too, like Stable Diffusion. ↩
The taxonomy of the different classes of data centers is more complex than this if you’re deep in the industry, but for the purpose of this essay I’m drawing the line at dedicated professional facilities, which would include both commercial colocation facilities and truly vertically-integrated hyperscale centers like AWS runs. ↩

Copyright abusers lost their claim

2024-07-14T00:00:00-05:00

or, the many people who said movies like Coyote v. Acme that were killed for a tax write-off should be forced into the public domain were right, and here’s why

Copyright is busted, now what?

A healthy system of creative rights, including a balanced form of copyright, is a reciprocal arrangement between creators, consumers, and the commons. Creators are granted some temporary exclusive rights by the government over qualifying intellectual work in order to incentivize creativity. These privileges are granted in exchange for creating valuable new information — the existence of which is a contribution to the public good — and for providing it in such a way that others will be able to build on it in the future. It’s an incentive for providing a specific social good, one which the market alone might not reward otherwise. Fortunately, this is actually how US copyright was designed; see You’ve Never Seen Copyright.

The takeaway from that, though, is not just that there’s a fair version of copyright, but that copyright must look like that fair model. The fact that such a thing as “good copyright” exists as a sound philosophy is not a broad defense of the word “copyright” itself, it’s an imperative requirement for the legitimacy of any system of power that claims to enforce copyright. The soundness of the philosophy doesn’t legitimate the system of power that shares its name, it damns it for failing its requirements.

When they invoke the philosophy of copyright to justify thuggery, it matters that they’re wrong.

The requirements for reciprocity intrinsic in copyright are how the system must work, but it’s not what actually happens today. In practice, corporations regularly violate the fundamental principles of creative rights — both in letter and in spirit — and use copyright protections to profit without showing the required reciprocity.

I can’t possibly list all the stories of what these violations look like. Seriously, just the thought of me having to give a representative sample of companies abusing IP law made me dread writing this series, it’s such a prolific problem. But I have shown a sample: Nintendo using copyright to kill new creative work, Apple using trademarks to keep competitors from conducting trade at all, book publishers trying to destroy the idea of buying and selling books… they’re all examples of how companies do everything they possibly can to get out of fulfilling their side of the bargain.

Case studies are fun, but just listing out a bunch of horrors isn’t what I set out to do; that’s just groundwork for thinking about the problem. What’s important is that they’re a representative sample of a kind of behavior. With all that established, you can read this with the knowledge that yes, they violate the purpose of the law as written and yes, violations are so regular they seem to define the practice.

So what does it all add up to?

Here’s what I say: If you want out of the deal, so be it. When someone won’t participate constructively — if they don’t work in good faith, or at least begrudgingly accept the limits the system of copyright puts on them — we stop respecting their claim to special privileges within it as legitimate, and understand it as the double-dealing overreach it is.

As self-evident as it sounds when I say it out loud, this argument is my nuclear option. This is what I would have to say if it ever got this bad; if, between the two of them, the courts and the corps ever broke the system beyond my last bit of tolerance. And I’ll be damned if they haven’t done just that.

Legitimacy

In You’ve Never Seen Copyright, I talked about how the word “copyright” can refer to two very different things: either a philosophical basis that justifies copyright as a legal doctrine, or the system of power that describes how copyright is actually enforced, what enforcement looks like, and who it benefits.

But the fact that the power structure has diverged from the original philosophical intent doesn’t just create a communication issue. Yes, it becomes increasingly unclear what people who say “copyright” are talking about, but the legitimacy of the power structure depends entirely on being an implementation of a sound legal doctrine.

If power isn’t grounded in a specific, coherent philosophy, we get the Machiavellian power scramble we see today. Instead of power being rooted in doctrine, it’s continually extended and redesigned without regard for its design, and so it diverges from the design in ways that benefit whatever parties can wield immediate political power. This is a bad thing.

But what does that divergence look like? It looks like ways the system has drifted so far that it’s flipped entirely, and now enforcement seems to directly oppose the purpose of the power in the first place.

Rights require reciprocity

Copyright is a quid pro quo arrangement. Because it serves the public good to incentivize creation, there has to be a mechanism to pay creatives for their work. While it is a social contract rather than a literal contract, the extra rights granted to creators are incentives for engaging constructively with the system. Even though the requirements to claim them are very loose,¹ the incentives for creation are a trade, not a gift.

In our system of copyright within capitalism, that incentive is a temporary monopoly. For copyright, it’s a temporary, exclusive-but-licensable right to sell new reproductions, for patents it’s a temporary, exclusive-but-licensable right to use the invention.

But that right is compensation for a specific societal good: the general creation and circulation of new art and information. Copyright’s exclusivity period is limited, after which the work must fall back into the public domain for others to freely build on. Patents are even stricter: in addition to the limited lifespan, patents require the rightsholder to publish sufficient information to enable anyone to reproduce the same invention. This lets them start competing when the patent expires, but it also lets them immediately start learning from the ideas that were published. This is the reciprocity: you have to pay into the system to earn the special benefits from it.

Holding parties responsible

When we know there’s ongoing abuse at play, we have to have some sort of mechanism for dealing with it. When corporations and other bad actors act in ways that violate the rights of others, those violations obligate them to consequences that necessarily follow.

This series is not just about how broken the current system is, but rather how individual actors within the system (namely corporate rightsholders) still bear responsibility for their actions. The abuses can be understood as a whole, but also understood individually: specific actors violating specific principles. We shouldn’t just shrug our shoulders and weather the abuse, we should hold bad actors accountable. And accountability means recompense that matches the crime: restitution for the damage done in addition to a penalty.

You can’t take both shares

In the case of creative monopolies, the quid-pro-quo agreement is that creators produce and share information with the public. Information — whether art or science — is considered a general public benefit, and producing it creates value that the market by itself might not sufficiently reword, especially if it’s easy to copy and distribute. So, for participating in a societal system that ultimately makes new art and discoveries public, we grant creators a temporary period of private monopoly, as a specific incentive.

Like all similar arrangements, violating the terms of the contract must revoke you of the special benefits it gives you.

But for powerful corporations, or in the case of any abusive behavior that’s been normalized to the public, that remediation generally just doesn’t happen. Bad actors abuse the system as a standard practice, and the regulatory agencies and courts generally fail to police them.

This is the classic problem of regulatory capture within capitalism. Profit incentives are the whole game, and while copyright is supposed to align the profit incentive with social goods, when wealthy parties get outsized political power, they use it to subvert this. Companies have found that instead of taking the deal, it’s often more profitable for them to short-circuit the incentive system, break the regulatory system, and make off as bandits. They choose, deliberately, to reject the system and profit off violating it instead.

That’s where we find ourselves now; I’ve spent this series evidencing that already. But what do we do about it?

Rejecting the sweet deal

“The System” is already a low bar

Intentionally acting outside the scope of copyright protection is particularly egregious today, because our idea of copyright is absurdly generous to rightsholders. To reject it is to be offered the sweetest deal you could imagine at the negotiating table, and then just rob the other party instead.

The baseline of the system is already eroded to the bone. To show how sweet the deal is, let’s look at just one facet of copyright: transferability beyond the lifetime of the creator.

The current baseline copyright term — which I previously capped at a theoretical maximum of the entire life of the author — is life plus 70 years². That’s a whole extra 70 years of creativity-stalling protection that cannot benefit the creator or the commons in any way; it just collects profit for whatever corporation bought the rights.

Still rejecting the sweet deal

So that’s the standing offer: an absurdly one-sided, already questionably legitimate gift from the government to rightsholders. Meet the scant requirements — tick a few boxes — and you can print money.

Now, here’s my generosity of a saint: I’m not even counting that as the violation. I’m willing to put my finger on the scale so as to call the deal reasonably balanced. Regardless of how far³ the goalposts have moved, that’s where they are now.

When I talk about copyright abuse here, I’m talking about companies who already have the best deal anyone could ask for, but for whom even that isn’t enough.

Trading their legitimacy

What I’m not doing is complaining about “companies that ultimately prioritize profit”, because that applies to all corporations, by definition. Companies don’t care about copyright, they care about profit. Copyright is just a tool they use occasionally toward that end. The culprits here are the ones who, in an effort to prioritize profit, choose to violate the terms of the agreement and attack the system instead of working within it. And it worked! They achieved regulatory capture, massively expanded their rights, and made accountability for abuse almost impossible.

But they did it at the cost of their own legitimacy. It’s a high price, and although they haven’t finished paying it, they choose to make that trade. And they’ve stayed the course.

What’s more, they are the ones who depend so entirely on this bargain. The foolishness of cutting out the floor from beneath themselves like they’ve done cannot be overstated: it’s a ludicrous mistake.

So how do you respond when someone looks at the system of creative rights and says “No, I don’t want that. I don’t want any part in a system that might not exclusively benefit me.” Case like Nintendo using copyright to kill new creative work, or Apple using trademarks to keep competitors from conducting trade at all, or book publishers trying to destroy the idea of buying and selling books?

How do we handle the case where, in an attempt to maximize personal profit beyond, someone goes beyond what the system allows in a way that violates the premise of giving them special privileges?

Well, the first step is to expect the government to work. You need the system (composed of corporations, courts, congress, regulatory agencies, etc) to self-police.

Failure of the system to self-police

It doesn’t, though. Surprise!

At this point I was going to talk about what “acceptable remediation” would look like in a functional copyright system, but there’s really no point. We already know what the system should look like; we covered that at the very start! A functional system is one that looks like that model and enforces it, and ours does neither.

We can take a page from the economics textbook and let the computing machine that is the Market give us our answer for us. We know the existing systems to discourage abuse are insufficient because companies judge abuse to be encouraged and rewarded, and find they are correct. Again, we don’t have to do a detailed analysis of the internals of the system, because companies have done the cost-benefit analysis themselves and have all independently come to the conclusion that the system is so broken they can keep on as-is without any prohibitive consequence.

The failure of remediation

Things only got this far because the systems of power are unwilling to check themselves, so I see little point in describing how they could start checking themselves now. “Do what you already know you have to do and filter all the evil behavior out of the market”, is the answer. Like I said, I’m very tempted to write out a framework for what that would look like, but there’s no point, because the existing power structures will never want to.

Remediation is the process of remedying damages. When a harm is done, even before we consider punitive punishment, the bare minimum is for the offender to remedy the harm they did to the extent possible. That could look like repairing a broken item, or returning stolen property, or anything that directly restores what was lost. A right is only a right if you have a right to remedy when it’s violated.

But because remediation in the case of overaggressive copyright abuse is broken, given the choice between copyright and indiscriminate territoriality, companies have every reason to choose the latter and reject the former, because we’re still giving them all the benefits of copyright even when they reject it.

This system is no system at all. It doesn’t run by rules or internal logic. It’s just people in power who take everything they can get away with at every turn, and spend what they take to make “what they can get away with” more, next time.

gio :⁾@giovan_h
Replying to giovan_h:
Intellectual property is a specific legal and philosophical doctrine. If your goal is "only I get any rights, and I get all the rights forever", that's not copyright, that's just thuggery. In fact, IP has an ACTIVE DUTY to ostracize those actors, not protect them.
Sat Mar 25 01:01:10 +0000 2023

Gyra Solune 🐀@Gyra_Solune
Replying to giovan_h:
@giovan_h i'm not holding my breath for corporations to relinquish a doctrine of 'only i get any rights forever - you only get the right to pay me money' or for the law to uphold anything besides those interests or for them to not call this what IP is about
Sat Mar 25 15:20:36 +0000 2023

So how do you operate when there’s a machine already in the room that was designed to solve the problem, but refuses to? The answer is usually “try to fix it”, which has failed.

So what’s next?

Voiding the rights: the fallback case

How do you deal with a bad actor dangerously using their privileged status to commit further abuse? The contractual structure of copyright gives us a natural answer: violating the deal has to revoke the special privileges it affords.

In these cases of abuse, where there are not just incidental infractions but whole business models predicated on abusing copyright, the offender’s claim to the privileges they refuse to pay for is illegitimate, and so it must ultimately be treated as such.

Here’s what that would look like: whatever rights you try to abuse, you should lose. If you try to use copyright to shut down reporting you don’t like, not only is the abuse not allowed, you also lose the rights to whatever you tried to use to perform the attack. If you try to use copyright to prevent others from publishing their own legitimate work, you lose exclusive rights over that work. If you try to file a bogus patent, that idea goes into the public domain.

Enforcement should be “infectious” in both directions. Right now, copyright is only infectious in one direction: violating copyright by including a reproduction without the rights to use it puts the whole work in legal jeopardy. But this dynamic should also apply in the other direction: violating copyright by trying to leverage a right you don’t have the right to leverage should put the basis of that claim — whatever it was — in legal jeopardy.

If you act outside of legitimacy, the privilege you tried to abuse get revoked. It’s a simple, powerful idea.

It’s appropriate

Copyright cannot be disconnected from the requirements that legitimate it without consequence. If a corporation claims copyright as the source of their authority and then violates its principles, they have made their power illegitimate by the standard they used to justify it.

They have traded away a system of claims and boundaries that benefits them and others alike in favor of an immediate profit at others expense. But now their claims to protection are gone too. They called the deal off, so the deal is off.

It’s not because corporations are rich, or big, or noisy. It’s because they took the offer and then broke it. To consistently act in ways that are willful, flagrant, bad-faith abuse is to reject the very framework offering them the incentive. That explicit rejection is what disqualifies them, not some general “badness”.

If you take on a debt and then refuse to pay it back, you’ve gone bankrupt. It doesn’t mean you get to keep the money, it means your creditors get to liquidate you.

The authority to evaluate

If we know the system is wrong (for instance, if its internal workings, as well as the outcomes it produces, are demonstrably incorrect according to its own specification) we shouldn’t let its rules taint your ethical evaluation.

If you think the system is performing within an acceptable margin of error, it’s OK to cede your judgment to it. But if you don’t, it’s not.

The failure of all the relevant institutions to self-regulate means the affected people have to take the initiative to regulate the abuse ourselves. The wrongs are still happening, they’re just not being responded to justly. This is the “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable” scenario.

We have to base our moral decisions on the real legitimacy of the thing. We should be able to rely on institutions for that, instead of having to evaluate it ourselves, but we don’t have them. There is not a safe institution to fall back on that we can trust to eventually remediate the offense. In an environment where the system is known to not work, “trusting the system” isn’t propriety, it’s suicide.

In this political moment, the propriety that “the right people” are the ones regulating the system stops mattering. “The right people” are just the representatives of the public, and now that they’ve failed, the responsibility falls back to the public.

Notions of propriety, ownership, and entitlement can’t be relied on because every institution whose purpose is to ensure them have failed. This is not a system where taking the moment-to-moment justifications for thuggery as “rule” that you should subject yourself to is a principled stand.

So while the authorities are still culpable for their failures, their corruption doesn’t make the need for remedy disappear, nor does it mean no one can address the problem. Instead, it means we all have to demand that the wrongs are remedied, or else they will not be.

Good faith

But I still say we have an obligation to operate in good faith until proven wrong. And I think a large margin of grace is appropriate here. Anything that falls within the range of reasonableness⁴ should be considered fair play, or a reasonable error. Anything that could be part of a good-faith approach shouldn’t be considered grounds for an extreme response. You’re protected by default until you actively decide to go bad.

But if you switch into an offensive mode, when bad faith actions that constitute abuse becomes your standard operating procedure, your claim then becomes illegitimate.

Companies who commit these persistent violations, who base their business models around intentionally refusing to participate in the system, have opted out of the civil system. The persistent intent matters: once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time is enemy action.

We still have to treat people as acting in good faith unless they explicitly move themselves into the “bad faith actor” category. Violating the real rights of good actors is still wrong! But when Harper-Collins or some other known delinquent comes up with some story about how piracy is wrong because they’re such strong believers in copyright, the only acceptable response is to laugh in their face and say “no”.

Further (as I often argue in many contexts) ignorance is a failing, not an excuse. If a party proves that they’re not acting in good faith, and cannot be given the benefit of the doubt, they’ve revealed they’re bad faith in nature. If we still extend them the benefit of the doubt even after that, we’re not only wrong, we’re actively at fault for enabling them.

Results of the moral framework

So, if we understand a claim as illegitimate, and only enforced through an unjust application of power, what does that actually change?

I think, most immediately, that this is a moral argument. Agreeing with this logic doesn’t change the external world, but it affects your internal world. It won’t magically negate a phony DMCA complaint, but it provides a tool you can integrate into your moral framework for evaluating what actions are just or unjust. And you apply that not only to actions you see others take, but to potential responses you can choose to take yourself.

Piracy

Yes, cases where corporations don’t have a legitimate claim to a copyright means “piracy” can be robustly justified. You don’t have to be an anarchist. There’s an ordered, structured way to evaluate legitimacy. The system should do it, but it’s failing, so the burden falls back to us.

Is all piracy automatically justified, even when artists are acting in good faith? No, it’s not. By default, you still have an obligation to pay people for their work. Unless you know you’re dealing with a bad actor, buy indie games, buy music on Bandcamp, pay people what they ask for their work.

A rule of thumb I use a lot is if people are selling the thing you want at all, you usually have a responsibility to pay them for it. Often they’re not — I don’t want a license to stream something, I want a real, ad-free copy — but if Bandcamp will sell me real mp3s, and Humble will sell me real epubs, and itch.io will sell me real games, I’m going to pay for them.

Lise 🏳️‍⚧️ 🔻@cs_deathmatch
i know the big corps would spend billions to avoid this happening, but laws seriously need to pass that say something like
"if you dont make your copyrighted material available for PURCHASE at a reasonable price, it automatically enters the public domain. streaming doesnt count"
Sat Feb 03 01:09:01 +0000 2024

There are iffy cases, where it’s not clear if someone is enough of a bad actor for the axe to drop. Is someone asserting every copyright claim they can, habitually, just to preserve their power? Are they doing things like trying to enforce copyright on things that aren’t copies, like characters or fanwork? Did they issue a takedown notice on a work without analyzing to see if it was fair use? That’s not good faith. That’s not playing by the rules to compensate you for your work, that’s trying to be a landlord. Does that behavior deserve your respect? Maybe not.

But then there are the obvious cases. If some rightsholder is trying to memory-hole it because it makes them look bad, or destroy it for a tax write-off, or whatever the hell crunchyroll is doing, that’s not good-faith participation in the system, that’s just chicanery. Theftsploitation.

Jenny Nicholson@JennyENicholson
Universal Pictures just tried to claim my Evan Hansen review & monetize it for their own profit. It's so bold-faced like in the part where they're supposed to put which timestamps belong to them they just put the entire runtime of my review. Evil stuff
Fri Jul 12 23:20:04 +0000 2024

These are gross examples of bad-faith action, people not playing by the rules. And you’re kidding yourself if you think pretending today’s set of demands is a set of rules you can play by is doing anybody any good.

I’d say shelved movies are a prime example of creative production not happening but company still being rewarded for it. To the many, many people who said those films should be required to go into the public domain, I say this: you’re right, and here’s the moral framework that agrees with that outcome.

When the question of “what are my acceptable options for sourcing this media from a corporation that hates me” comes up, the appropriate response is not “I couldn’t offend my good friend Nintendo, from Capitalism”, it’s “no, they’ve lost the right to dictate that. Once they get their shit sorted out, then they get to speak again.” Taking someone’s work without paying for it is wrong, but so is aiding a company in their pursuit to do the same.

This isn’t all that shocking a conclusion. Don’t treat false claims as legitimate, don’t reward your offenders for attacking you, but do do right by people.

Your moral evaluation matters

But who are you to make judgements for yourself? Isn’t this supposed to be the domain of The Law? Isn’t making your own decisions about what’s right and wrong crossing a line?

The answer is no, and the reason is the same as before. The law should do this. Reasonable metrics should be written into law, and remedying harm done in cases of abuse should be standard practice.

But every person still deserves to be done right by, even in the absence of a functional system. I’d rather have a good system, personally — a lack of consensus can get chaotic! — but making decisions about right and wrong for yourself is better than leaving it to a system you know returns mostly wrong answers.

If some party won’t respect your intellectual property rights, you shouldn’t have to respect theirs. It fixes the incentive problem. It prevents and remedies damages. It’s simple and fair, even if the results are radical. Violating IP must revoke your rights, and until the law recognizes this we are obligated to do the work ourselves, or else we reward the act of abuse itself.

Without merit the only right abusive corporations have to demand is force, same as any crook with a knife. And when you know they’re just a crook, you shouldn’t give them what they want.

Getting this moral concept wrong leads to individual people, not just corporations, doing real harms because their sense of right and wrong has been completely hijacked by corporate propaganda.

Reject the false ways. Keep your standards locked to the truth and hold the world to it.

Keep your heart filled with light and close to God

There’s no requirement that each individual expression is beneficial to society, for instance: we just grant that creation is constructive in general. ↩
Or, in the case of corporate authorship, 95-120 years. See copyright.gov Circular 15a, Duration of Copyright. ↩
Besides, the exact length of the period is a quantitative conflict, not a qualitative one, so it can be background for this without necessarily invalidating copyright by default. The goalpost have moved, but they’re still goalposts. ↩
…and isn’t part of a specifically unreasonable campaign. I’ve talked about this before, in how a series of actions can each be reasonable in isolation, but when understood together as part of a larger campaign have to be understood as part of the campaign, which can definitely count as evidence of abuse. ↩

Fake Twitter accounts

2024-06-19T00:00:00-05:00

Remember when Elon Musk was trying to weasel out of overpaying for Twitter? During this very specific May 2022-Jul 2022 period, there was a very artificial discourse manufactured over the problem of “fake accounts” on Twitter.

The reason it was being brought up was very stupid, but the topic stuck with me, because it’s deeply interesting in a way that the conversation at the time never really addressed.

So this is a ramble on it. I think this is all really worth thinking about, just don’t get your hopes up that it’s building to a carefully-constructed conclusion. ;)

Argument is stupid

First, to be clear, what was actually being argued at the time was exceedingly stupid. I’m not giving that any credit.

After committing to significantly overpay to purchase Twitter with no requirements that they do due diligence (yes, really!) Elon Musk tried to call off the deal.

Elon Musk@elonmusk
If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!
Thu Apr 21 18:53:55 +0000 2022

Elon Musk@elonmusk
That is why we must clear out bots, spam & scams. Is something actually public opinion or just someone operating 100k fake accounts? Right now, you can’t tell.
And algorithms must be open source, with any human intervention clearly identified.
Then, trust will be deserved.
1651594704000

Elon Musk@elonmusk
Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of usershttps://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-estimates-spam-fake-accounts-represent-less-than-5-users-filing-2022-05-02/ …
1652435078000

This was a pretty transparent attempt to get out of the purchase agreement after manipulating the price, and it was correctly and widely reported as such.

Scott Nover, “Inside Elon Musk’s legal strategy for ditching his Twitter deal”

Elon Musk has buyer’s remorse. On April 25, the billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion, but since then the stock market has tanked. Twitter agreed to sell to Musk at $54.20 per share, a 38% premium at the time; today it’s trading around $40.

That’s probably the real reason Musk is spending so much time talking about bots.

I don’t want to get too bogged down in the details of why Elon was using this tactic, but fortunately other people wrote pages and pages about it, so I don’t have to.

Twitter v. Musk Complaint, July 12 2022 In April 2022, Elon Musk entered into a binding merger agreement with Twitter, promising to use his best efforts to get the deal done. Now, less than three months later, Musk refuses to honor his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests. Having mounted a public spectacle to put Twitter in play, and having proposed and then signed a seller-friendly merger agreement, Musk apparently believes that he — unlike every other party subject to Delaware contract law — is free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away.
…
Musk’s exit strategy is a model of hypocrisy. One of the chief reasons Musk cited on March 31, 2022 for wanting to buy Twitter was to rid it of the “[c]rypto spam” he viewed as a “major blight on the user experience.” Musk said he needed to take the company private because, according to him, purging spam would otherwise be commercially impractical. In his press release announcing the deal on April 25, 2022, Musk raised a clarion call to “defeat the spam bots.” But when the market declined and the fixed-price deal became less attractive, Musk shifted his narrative, suddenly demanding “verification” that spam was not a serious problem on Twitter’s platform, and claiming a burning need to conduct “diligence” he had expressly forsworn.
…
…But Musk exhibited little interest in understanding Twitter’s process for estimating spam accounts that went into the company’s disclosures. Indeed, in a June 30 conversation with Segal, Musk acknowledged he had not read the detailed summary of Twitter’s sampling process provided back in May. Once again, Segal offered to spend time with Musk and review the detailed summary of Twitter’s sampling process as the Twitter team had done with Musk’s advisors. That meeting never occurred despite multiple attempts by Twitter.

Mike Masnick, “Musk’s Attempt To Get Out Of The Twitter Deal Proceeding Exactly As Predicted; What Happens Next?” There is no actual escape hatch… Musk made a legal agreement to pay $44 billion for the company and can’t just walk away.

As we noted back in June, [Elon] appeared to have hired some very expensive lawyers to come up with some sort of pretext for walking away, and it’s playing out exactly in the manner described. Musk had specifically waived his rights to due diligence prior to the deal, but the merger agreement did include a promise to provide Musk with necessary data to conclude the deal.

…his second attempt to come up with an excuse was to claim that Twitter publicly lied to the SEC in its filings regarding how much spam was counted among its monetizable daily active users. This also seemed ridiculous, as Twitter had been publicly reporting those numbers for quite some time, and Musk could have explored those prior to the deal itself but, again, deliberately chose to waive those rights. You can’t do a deal in which you agree not to explore the data, and then complain that you hadn’t seen the data.

On the whole, it seems fairly blatantly obvious that all of Musk’s excuses here are pretextual, and plotted out by his lawyers to try to get him out of a deal that didn’t actually have an escape hatch. The question before the court, really, is whether or not it matters that he’s obviously trying to escape a deal that he agreed to.

Only convinced the worst people in the world

Suffice it to say, this was all bullshit and transparently so. Elon’s argument in 2022 that Twitter’s value hinged on its ability to block crypto spam was never seriously believable, by anyone, then or now. It was the thinnest possible pretense for arguing he shouldn’t have to pay his bills.

So the worst people in the world all got behind it…

Texas Attorney General@TXAG
Today I’m investigating Twitter for potentially misleading Texans on the number of its “bot” users. I have a duty to protect Texans if Twitter is misrepresenting how many accounts are fake to drive up their revenue.
texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/…
Mon Jun 06 19:17:13 +0000 2022

AG Paxton Launches Investigation Against Twitter for Potentially Deceiving Texas Consumers, Texas Businesses Over Fake Bot Accounts …
On Twitter, “bots” are automated, non-human accounts that can do virtually the same things as real people: send tweets, follow other users, and like and retweet others’ posts. Spam accounts like these inflate followers and reach, and often push deceptive and annoying activity. Bot accounts can not only reduce the quality of users’ experience on the platform but may also inflate the value of the company and the costs of doing business with it, thus directly harming Texas consumers and businesses.
…
“Texans rely on Twitter’s public statements that nearly all its users are real people. It matters not only for regular Twitter users, but also Texas businesses and advertisers who use Twitter for their livelihoods,” said Attorney General Paxton. “If Twitter is misrepresenting how many accounts are fake to drive up their revenue, I have a duty to protect Texans.”

…but not really anybody else.

Elon Musk tells Twitter he wants out of his deal to buy it (CNN, Jul 9 2022) Musk has for weeks expressed concerns, without any apparent evidence, that there are a greater number of bots and spam accounts on the platform than Twitter has said publicly. Analysts have speculated that the concerns may be an attempt to create a pretext to get out of a deal he may now see as overpriced, after Twitter shares and the broader tech market have declined in recent weeks.
…
Twitter’s stock is trading around $36, down nearly 30% since its price the day Musk and Twitter announced the acquisition and well below the $54.20 per share Musk offered, suggesting deep skepticism among investors about the deal going through at the agreed upon price. The declining value may also be among the reasons Musk is no longer interested in the deal, analysts have said.
…
“The way these things usually work is that if there’s a billion-dollar breakup fee and you’re the one trying to acquire, then that is enforced against you,” Tobias said, “unless there’s some kind of material breach or some kind of reason that can be offered up that persuades a court that Twitter, for example, is not making good on the deal.”

Argument is interestingly stupid

OK, but that’s all the boring, first-level stupid context. Under all that, there’s a question being begged that’s actually interesting to contemplate: what are these “fake accounts” that are being complained about?

“Fakeness” is a weird idea

Fake means a few things: something false or misleading, or something that is inauthentic or counterfeit. So if I present something as being something it isn’t, it’s a fake [one of those].

“Fakeness” is an ontological parasite, like a hole: it only exists in relation to something else. Fakeness is only meaningful in relation to some criteria. There is no fakeness attribute. Fool’s gold isn’t somehow intrinsically fake, it’s a real substance that exists. (In fact, people are getting excited about it in its own right.) But we can call it fake gold, or fake in relation to gold, because someone might think it’s gold even though it doesn’t meet the criteria for what it means to be gold. A picture of a frog is a real image but a fake frog. The treachery of images comes from the viewer.

That “fakeness” relationship is defined by the context in which a thing is presented. A fish is not a Twitter account, but it’s not a fake Twitter account unless someone claims it’s a real one.

So in order to ascribe “fakeness” to something, we need criteria to compare it against. Simple enough. So, before we know if an account is fake or not, we need the criteria for a Twitter account to count as “real”.

“Account” is a weird idea

Serious question: what are Twitter accounts even supposed to represent?

People? No, accounts like @bbc are companies, and are even labelled as “official organizations”.

Legal entities? No, there are lots of subdivisions and topic accounts, like @verified, that correspond to an idea that doesn’t have its own legal representation.

There are a whole lot of things a Twitter account can represent. Here are a few I can think of off the top of my head:

A person
- Legal name
- Pseudonymous
A person’s thoughts on a specific topic
- Fandom accounts
- Personal/private accounts
- Art accounts
A person acting in a specific role
- Government officials often have multiple accounts, one personal and one for the role
A corporation
A brand owned by a corporation
A brand or project not owned by a corporation
A specific event or effort
A news topic
- @bbcmotd
An update log
- @elonjet
An interface to a program or automation
- Automated support chatbots
- Media downloaders

What coherent definition is there that cleanly encapsulates all these different use cases? The answer is to make the definition the same way people choose to use accounts: by functionality. An account is an organizational unit that can be discretely labelled, followed, blocked, and interacted with via any other platform features. It’s appropriate to have a separate account any time you want those functions.

Why bother?

If we put those two conclusions together naively, we end up with the statement that it’s not possible for something to be a “fake account”. Our criteria say that an account is an account if it usefully fulfills the functions of the account, and all accounts only exist if someone created them, so they’re all serving their function.

That’s doesn’t seem to be useful, though, because there are plenty of accounts I can pull up that nearly everyone will all agree are “fake”.

Andrei A Dioumaev@ADioumaev
FSB forgot to pay its AI bill 🤣🤣🤣

Tue Jun 18 08:11:16 +0000 2024

But we can again find that there’s no easy definition that captures this.

Ars Technica@arstechnica
Elon Musk says his acquisition of Twitter "cannot move forward" until the company provides data on spam accounts and that renegotiating the deal at a lower price is "not out of the question."
trib.al/cLYUuEK
Tue May 17 23:29:33 +0000 2022

It’s not automated behavior: Ars posted this story automatically, on behalf of an organization, and it’s not fake. Is it not being “real people”? No, organizations and other kinds of entities have not-fake accounts. It’s not coordinated political behavior: most sincerely political action comes in the form of people coordinating. It’s not impersonation: parody accounts aren’t “fake”, and most “fake” accounts aren’t even attempting this It’s not just lying. It’s not just scamming.

Is it alternate accounts for the same person under the same name, like Elon Musk said he didn’t have until his court deposition proved that was a lie? That feels closer, but it’s still not quite right.

If there’s no concrete definition for what a “true” account should be, is there any limiting principle on it?

Sure there is. We just have to back to the point that showed fake accounts exist in the first place: there’s a “fake” label that’s useful.

That’s an answer. The determining factor for whether it’s a “valid” account is if it’s worthwhile to have something that provides the functionality of an account. It’s not objective, and it’s not easy criteria to adjudicate at scale, but it’s a perfectly coherent one.

Note how we’ve wrapped back around to how “fakeness” has to be in relation with something else. Here, it’s in contrast to “genuine”, worthwhile social behavior.

There’s a good thread from ex-Reddit-man Yishan that makes this point about moderation. Moderation is usually not about mechanical functions, but utility, what he describes as socially desirable behavior:

Yishan@yishan
Replying to yishan:
The first thing most people get wrong is not realizing that moderation is a SIGNAL-TO-NOISE management problem, not a content problem.
Mon Oct 31 05:37:02 +0000 2022

Yishan@yishan
Replying to yishan:
Moderating spam is very interesting: it is almost universally regarded as okay to ban (i.e. CENSORSHIP) but spam is in no way illegal.
Spam actually passes the test of “allow any legal speech” with flying colors. Hell, the US Postal Service delivers spam to your mailbox.
Mon Oct 31 05:41:11 +0000 2022

Yishan@yishan
Replying to yishan:
Hereʻs the answer everyone knows: there IS no principled reason for banning spam. We ban spam for purely outcome-based reasons:
It affects the quality of experience for users we care about, and users having a good time on the platform makes it successful.
Mon Oct 31 05:42:04 +0000 2022

Yishan@yishan
Replying to yishan:
Because it is not TOPICS that are censored. It is BEHAVIOR.
(This is why people on the left and people on the right both think they are being targeted)
The problem with social networks is the SOCIAL (people) part. Not the NETWORK (company).
Fri Apr 15 12:16:07 +0000 2022

Why is it necessary to police this?

That’s a question it’s always good to ask before going in guns blazing to regulate behavior. Is that appropriate to do in the first place?

User agency

Whether or not an account is “fake” or not is poorly defined and hard-if-not-impossible to correctly measure at scale. But the “fake account” topic has a more fatal problem than that. All accounts are agents of people. For every account, fake or not, someone set the account up intentionally and is using it for their own ends.

This is always true. Digital person-like entities are user agents, agents of people that perform tasks. I have a lot to write about this subject, but I’ll touch on it briefly here. Whether someone makes a tweet from their personal account, or a side account, or if they set up some automation to do it, the tweet exists because of the will of a person.

When we’re already talking about digital entities, making a distinction between “automated” action and “real” actions is not only impossible, it’s fundamentally wrongheaded.

Every action represents a human directing a computer to perform an action, and trying to distinguish what modes of input are legitimate or not always excludes people from participation. This is the API problem. Your system is defined by its interaction with human-prompted entities. Whether it’s automatic or semi-automatic, a human is willing each interaction to happen¹.

So we have to be very hesitant to cripple any actor, because that’s crippling a person.

So let’s take another step back. Why is it important to be able to label accounts as “fake” or not. Creating the theoretical tool that identifies and blocks fake accounts is creating new power that can cripple people. A tool which, even if used in good faith, will exclude people due to false positives. What reasons are there to make this, and do they justify the danger?

Advertising

The reason most salient to Elon’s original objection is the completely pragmatic one: advertising.

Parag Agrawal@paraga
Let’s talk about spam. And let’s do so with the benefit of data, facts, and context…
Mon May 16 16:26:09 +0000 2022

Elon Musk@elonmusk
@paraga 💩
Mon May 16 17:03:11 +0000 2022

Elon Musk@elonmusk
@paraga So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.
Mon May 16 17:17:24 +0000 2022

Advertisers don’t want to buy clicks, they want to buy attention. And that attention needs to come from “real” people, people who might actually act on the advertisement and buy the product. Being able to show that real people are looking at advertisements is what gives them value, and is ultimately what gives Twitter as a whole most of its monetary value.

This really only concerns automated bots, though. And we know we want some of those!

Civics

Twitter’s real power isn’t in its advertisements, but its ability to shape public discourse. If people talk on a platform, the design of that platform is going to affect what and how they communicate, about everything.

If you use Twitter like a social space, you’re going to pick up information about the general disposition of people, just like any other social space. What ideas are liked? What ideas are hated? What politicians are supported and how strong is their mandate?

Elon Musk@elonmusk
Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of usershttps://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-estimates-spam-fake-accounts-represent-less-than-5-users-filing-2022-05-02/ …
1652435078000

Elon Musk@elonmusk
That is why we must clear out bots, spam & scams. Is something actually public opinion or just someone operating 100k fake accounts? Right now, you can’t tell.
And algorithms must be open source, with any human intervention clearly identified.
Then, trust will be deserved.
1651594704000

Elon Musk@elonmusk
Fake news purveyors would have hysterics, but a ratings system would improve quality of news greatly
1649537461000

Bots can contribute to this problem, but they’re not the only problem. Actors as banal as individual trolls or as powerful as nation-states can set up alternate accounts and flood specific topics with specific ideas to create the effect of public support where none exists. Fake accounts can misrepresent public perception — or what ideas come from what demographics.

LWA🏳️‍🌈🇺🇲@BioRecTech
What this story?pic.twitter.com/W8jurVeGld

1605046220000

What actually makes sense

So, how does all that inform how we relate to fake accounts?

Well, it turns out that moderation is hard. That much shouldn’t be a surprise.

And yes, if you have to reduce what people currently mean by fake accounts to a definition, you can.

An account is fake if it’s used by an automated system to send unwanted messages OR if it reports falsified advertising metrics that don’t correspond to human attention OR presents itself as a specific person or role that it is not for the purpose of deceiving users OR ascribes a role to a person that they do not have OR persistently posts false information.

Good luck measuring that.

But that’s not to say fake accounts aren’t a problem. There are some behaviors we do want to block, and while the human behind them is responsible, their existence in no way makes the behavior acceptable. Spam is bad. Political manipulation is a problem. Scams, especially automated scams, can be extremely harmful. So what is it about the “account” that makes these human behaviors so much worse?

I think the most obvious problem with fake accounts is they represent a power imbalance. Spam bots exert power over your viewing experience to force you into interactions you don’t want, and they do it at a scale a human could not. Botnets and astroturf campaigns aren’t dangerous because of the input method, they’re dangerous because they unduly multiply someone’s political power.

The thing you need to combat isn’t the agent, it isn’t the input method, it isn’t a measurable quality of any given profile: it’s power.

It seems like what’s really objectionable is the case where someone’s power over your life is proportional on their resources instead of your consent.

But it’s really hard to admit that.

Unless you have a user-agent (browser, app, etc) that’s not fulfilling its user-agent responsibility and performing tasks the user doesn’t want to happen. I’m counting bad design in this too. ↩

GioCities

What Happened With Homestuck? (Recap)

Hostile takeover of a fan project

Covering up the story

Weaponizing influence to blacklist

The cult environment

Articles

Recovery and non-recovery

Identity Verification is as Bad as It Can Be

Direct digital censorship

Discord

The Hunger

Related Reading

OS-Level Age Attestation is the Good One

There is room for improvement

Political pressure for “child safety” is exploitable

Taxonomy

Age Attestation

Age Verification

Identity verification is as bad as it can possibly be

What can and cannot be allowed in a solution

OS-level age attestation is the good one

Parental supervision makes self identification sufficient

Preemptive verification, not filtering

OS level

App store and browser enforcement

Preventing problems

Providing flat, low-entropy category information

Keeping the device owner as the root of trust

Legal impact

California AB 1043, Age verification signals: software applications and online services.

We need a protocol for everything, not just “apps”

Colorado SB26-051, Age Attestation on Computing Devices

Arguments against

Confusing attestation with verification

“Operating System Provider” is overbroad

The California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act

Can’t enforce a global dragnet

OS-level age verification is a hand-out to Meta, etc

Privacy

The bad ones (are worse)

New York’s Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act

TX SB2420 App Store Accountability Act

SCREEN act

KIDS act

KOSA

COPPA 2.0

This is the alternative to digital identification, let’s do this instead

Related Reading

Anthropic and The Authoritarian Ethic

Anthropic is normal

It’s not just about killer robots and mass surveillance

The authoritarian ethic

The Trump administration has actually been completely upfront about this

Nuclear retaliation over moderate behavior

Lawful conduct is a joke

Mass surveillance as lawful use of commercial data

This is widely unpopular with everyone

Open letter

Dean Ball

This tells you about the rest of the industry

Bonus: OpenAI and their exciting new tech, lying

Don’t get in bed with tyrants

Related Reading

Interloper and Artistry in Impressionistic Horror

Couldn’t “solve interloper”

Showcase of Source engine practical effects

Technical showcase, practical effects

Using familiar space

It’s not a puzzle, it’s horror and presentation

It really is horror

It’s not primarily a puzzle

The meaning is in connections as language

Short connections

Examples: read for flow, not puzzles

Okay here are a few connections that don’t seem to go anywhere

Expectations

One last thing

Related Reading

Fandom and The Freedom Motif