Drive | Brutkey

That feels pretty anti-competitive, and should draw a merger challenge. Netflix is likely going to follow the claims that Meta made in dodging a monopolization challenge: that it competes with a multitude of other claims on people’s time, from YouTube to social media. But this is ridiculous; the logical end point of that claim is that Netflix isn’t a monopoly because people can always shut their eyes and sleep. There’s clearly a market in paying a company a monthly fee to watch produced entertainment, and Netflix is consolidating it.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

The staring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey. In the center is the poop emoji from the cover of the US edition of 'Enshittification,' with angry eyebrows and a black, grawlix-scrawled bar over its mouth. The poop emoji's eyes have also been replaced with the HAL eye.

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

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

a65f59066c29c7fe.jpg A rectangular motif suggestive of the Canadian flag, flanked by red bars. In the centre is the Jailbreaking Canada logo, a complex vector illustration of a maple leaf mixed with a keyhole, buildings, and various abstract figures.

43df35dc061f3d10.jpg A hobo with a bindlestiff, walking down a lonely train track. His head has been replaced with a poop emoji with angry eyebrows whose mouth is covered with a black bar covered in grawlix.

A hobo with a bindlestiff, walking down a lonely train track. His head has been replaced with a poop emoji with angry eyebrows whose mouth is covered with a black bar covered in grawlix.

547435b772929106.jpg A red, angry mushroom cloud. Sitting atop it, surrounded by blue skies and fluffy clouds, is a smirking business-suited man reclining in an armchair. He wears a MAGA hat and reads a magazine turned to a page showing Donald Trump's face.

A red, angry mushroom cloud. Sitting atop it, surrounded by blue skies and fluffy clouds, is a smirking business-suited man reclining in an armchair. He wears a MAGA hat and reads a magazine turned to a page showing Donald Trump's face.

afcf2499a7ee79f7.jpg A red, angry mushroom cloud. Sitting atop it, surrounded by blue skies and fluffy clouds, is a smirking business-suited man reclining in an armchair. He wears a MAGA hat and reads a magazine turned to a page showing Donald Trump's face.

a2a64acec4110306.jpg the inside of a massive indigo printer

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Incidentally, none of this is new. There have always been people who fall in love with fictional characters and inanimate objects. And the internet has only made it easier for these people to find each other and commiserate over the problems this creates. And as technology has made it easier for these people to “communicate” — or at least have some passing simulacrum of communication — with these characters, it has made those people even more dependent on corporations to continue supporting that tech. A few years ago, a Japanese man named Akihiko Kondo “married” a hologram of the vocaloid pop star Hatsune Miku. He told Japanese media that he was depressed and lonely and his “relationship” with Miku helped him recover. A story you’ll see over and over again in subreddits for people dating ChatGPT. And just like those users this weekend, Kondo lost the ability to interact with the hologram of his cartoon wife when the projector he was using to view her, run by a company called Gatebox, became obsolete.

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