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deltaponline · 5 years ago

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Δ p report: “Habermann is back”

Stefan Leuchtenberger (left) and Thomas Schäfer When a pump specialist, like Stefan Leuchtenberger, becomes a pump manufacturer, then he exactly knows what he is doing. Since the middle of this year, he has been responsible for Technology, Production and Services at Habermann Aurum Pumpen GmbH in Bochum, Germany, and underlines his ambitions with a clear message: “Habermann is back”. We have managed to clarify what he means by this in an interview with him and his management partner, Thomas Schäfer, responsible for Sales and Operational Activities at Habermann Aurum Pumpen GmbH. Leuchtenberger describes himself as 'fanatic about pumps'. Those who know him personally know that he is certainly one of the most experienced pump experts in Europe. He has been responsible for all of the pumps in a large chemical company for more than a decade. Following that he worked for almost another decade repairing pumps. Leuchtenberger has recently become a pump manufacturer. As was the case in his entire working life, he did not choose the easy path for this step. Since 1 May 2019 he has been a member of the management board at Habermann Aurum Pumpen GmbH in Bochum. “It was the chemical industry, where I designed, purchased and operated pumps, that laid the foundation for my pump craziness. I was also a Habermann customer. Once I took the next step and became involved in maintenance, from my wealth of experience, the only thing lacking was one pump manufacturer. I am now looking forward, in the next few years, to bringing my experience to Habermann Aurum Pumpen and of course being able to leave an impression.” Schäfer on him: “Habermann has always been focused on understanding and offering solutions from a user’s point of view. Stefan and I have known each other for a long time and the fact that he has added his wealth of experience to Habermann Aurum Pumpen’s focus on the user’s point of view, fits perfectly well. We talk to pump operators and look closely at what's going on both in front of and behind the pump. The search for a solution is always the search for a suitable solution for the user, without having to operate from a standard. That's why Stefan fits in well with our team. Thanks to his experience, now more than ever, we are speaking the language of pump operators. Nowadays, we have a deep understanding of the needs of pump operators and have therefore focussed our in-house processes accordingly.”

The new facility of Habermann Aurum Pumpen GmbH in Bochum, Germany Leuchtenberger on his ambitions: “The exciting thing about this assignment is that we have a lot of freedom here to set a young and very dynamic company, with a world-renowned, long-standing reputation as experts for liquid-solid production, on a future-oriented way. The main challenge is to form a real team and to take everyone on that journey in order to be able to grasp completely new things. Thomas and I have known each other for so long that we do not demarcate our fields of responsibility, but approach them cooperatively. We solve the problems of our customers together and pull together. I am sure that sets us apart from other companies, because in our current 50-strong team, we set no limits to our competence.” Schäfer adds: “This type of cooperation runs through the entire company. All our employees think and act as a team so that we are able to quickly develop solutions for our customers.” Leuchtenberger adds: “We are shaping this company into a very modern medium-sized company. So we are currently in the process of establishing a suggestion system. In addition, one of our employees has just started his apprenticeship as a pump specialist engineer.”

“Also, we are expanding technologically speaking,” says Schäfer. “We complement our existing polyurethane and rubber qualities with polymer casting to coat our pumps. This lining variant, consists of a more than 80% silicon carbide filler mixed in a vinyl ester resin and expands our solution options. This liner is mixed under vacuum and placed in our existing cast housings to ensure a firm connection of the housing and liner. A key benefit of this new liner is that it can be used as an option in all of our existing HPK series pumps. This gives operators the opportunity to replace a Habermann pump in an existing system 1: 1 with the polymer cast variant. At the same time, this optimises our solution options, because in the future we will be able to better protect highly-stressed components against wear and ensure less-stressed components with more cost-effective linings. This will provide us with even more opportunities to optimally solve operational challenges.” “We can therefore also offer completely new solutions,” says Leuchtenberger, “by analysing which component of the pump is exposed to particularly high demands and then providing this specific component with an optimised coating. It makes sense to look at each individual case and ask yourself which component fails first. This is exactly where we start with our solutions. It takes a lot of experience to recognise this, but that is our strength.” A quick look at our history and our future In 2015, Aurum Pumpen GmbH, the long-standing sales partner of Arthur Habermann GmbH & Co. KG, seized the opportunity to take over Habermann’s division of solid matter pumps. This began with a small core team of former Habermann employees. In the last 4 years, the company has grown significantly. The foundations were laid by former Habermann employees, who brought their experience from all areas to the new company. Therefore, almost nothing of Habermann's competence in solid and sludge production, which has been world-famous since 1927, has been lost. Schäfer on this: “We were, and still are a real niche supplier. It is very important that we can, on the one hand, draw on the know-how of experienced specialists, and, on the other hand, that we have an entrepreneurial framework today that is clearly oriented towards new and further developments. Today, we are fully capable of providing solutions for all existing pumps, including the supply of spare parts, using all of Habermann's expertise. And at the same time, on this basis, we are working on further developments and also on material modifications to make our pumps future-proof.” Leuchtenberger: “Habermann pumps have always been a niche product for complicated solutions. Today, we are working on alternative, much more resistant materials or digitalisation solutions, to enable predictive maintenance. We also optimise and streamline our product range by broadening standards. Individual solutions based on these standards are our top priority and reflect our customers´opinion: if Habermann develops a solution, then we will buy this solution. Conversely, if a customer comes to us with a specific problem, then we will solve it.” Schäfer gives a recent example: “In 2017 we received a development order from an international construction company, which told us that they had been looking for a solution partner for a long time, but - so they said - you are the only one - providing both the right expertise and a real technological advantage. We implemented this task by constructing and delivering four prototypes just-in-time, which we now continue to support during their trial operation. “This is exactly how anyone can approach us with their solids recovery problems. We are looking for solutions for abrasive and chemically aggressive challenges, which may also include high delivery pressures for suspensions,” adds Leuchtenberger. “We look forward to assignments from all sectors of industry - from chemistry, pigment chemistry, mineral raw material extraction and processing, to infrastructure projects with tunnelling or mining. Goodies include, for example, solid matter pumps with extreme operating depths of more than 200 metres of liquid coverage. Such solutions require comprehensive know-how. A tunnel pump is not just a pump, it must fit exactly into the assembly conditions and the specific operating conditions of the machine. This brings us back to our claim at the beginning that we speak the language of our customers and understand their problems.” Another of Leuchtenberger’s areas of responsibility is the expansion of service offerings: “The biggest challenge for sure, is that our pumps are used worldwide. If one fails, this is usually associated with high costs for the plant operators. So we have to be able to react very quickly and act competently. In all instances, our customers receive original parts so that they can be sure that their pump will look the same after repair and have the same performance as when new. At Habermann Aurum Pumpen, service means much more. In the future, we also want to help users to optimise their repair process, their spare parts warehouse or even the process itself.” Success speaks for itself: In 2018, in the solid matter pumps division, Habermann Aurum Pumpen generated a turnover of over EUR 10 million, and subsequently almost reached the volume that the former Arthur Habermann GmbH & Co. KG achieved with twice as many employees. Read the full article

#abrasive #Aurum #Deltap #Habermann #mineralcast #mining #resistant #wear

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raysondetre · 8 years ago

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Yep -and that's why I didn't go to Radiohead’s concert this year. And Thom can rag on artists who didn't approve or public opprobrium on twitter all he wants (which my impression of was it was negligible, certainly I only tweeted twice on the matter), -all he's showing that is he might be stuck in the identikit straightjacket enough he's incapable of suffering a disagreement over a major issue. The last time I had to suffer thru that was when Billy Corgan was a Global Warming denier -and he couldn't suffer a debate or disagreement, and I threw him one. I'm not sure I give a flying flip if Thom proves himself intolerant on a left side issue he doesn't agree with, where the faux pas might prove just as bad in terms of prospects for the end of the world. (Israel incentivizing the collapse of the ME for its own benefit in collusion with Saudi Arabia/Turkey is the best recipe for WWIII the planet has ever witnessed.) He can complain, but he certainly doesn't get to deny me my personal right to exercise my consumer choice to not attend the concert of an artist who chooses to play in Israel in its current climate, which is like a violent black hole sucking up the Middle East, thanks purely to its utter political impunity globally. They don't feel a pinch anywhere. BDS is literally the only form of social sanction left, and he tells us to stuff it because he doesn't like to get lectured? What a ponce. He feels embedded because Jonny is married to an Israeli Jew of Arab extraction? Good for him. You could have left it at that. Saying that through her they know Palestinians is about as meaningless as saying she has black friends. (As if knowing Palestinians who live on the Israeli side who are discriminated against but not under Occupation somehow changes or justifies anything that’s happening.) Anyone embedded at this point has to balance things out by actively engaging in the Occupied Territories, -figure out a way to balance things out somehow. I bet he/she's never lived in the Occupied Territories, and as far as I'm concerned that's still having utterly no clue. I did. I lived on both sides, and until I’d lived in the West Bank, even though it was in eyeshot, I had no clue. I'm informed, and Radiohead's decision was a heartbreaker. That is all. Roger goes there.

Thom has a disturbing proximity to Louise Mensch thanks to her hubby being Flea's manager (-he manages RHCP -the connection is Thom’s and Flea’s longstanding band collaboration as Atoms for Peace). They're already on mental crack and off the map in neo-McCarthyland if absorbing this (which seems likely given their proximity to a ground zero source). Parading his superior intellect is laughable while he's apparently already falling for the neoliberal f***tard #resistance (if you dare to use retard, Thom, I’ll go one better) -along with all of his elite/professional class liberals. (It was a tweet. He fell for it initially and I’ve paid no attention since, but a cursory examination shows he’s on board.) When your entire class has just demonstrably proven that you'd sooner invert McCarthyism rather than come to terms with the failures of the prevailing orthodoxy, or you're incapable of recognizing this machination for what it is, well, that’s not too keen of an intellect at this point. Neoliberalism is just the 'smooth' version of denialism bent on giving us the kinder face of fascism along with a dead planet. -So Radiohead don't live in the US where they could get pwned by the Russian tool trope just for exhibiting rational thought, eh? It doesn't threaten them. Just like they've in no way suffered a threat from the Occupation and never will. Suffice to say they’ll in no way be threatened as participants in BDS, when legislation has been attempted in places as far flung as Canada to stamp out a boycott campaign by criminalizing campaigners (our present neoliberal Prime Minister supports this in spirit if not in legislation). Jonny Greenwood’s wife has her Israeli citizenship and Jewish national privilege as a Jewish emigre from an Arab country ( actually it was her parent or her grandparent who immigrated on this basis). Her family is one of foreigners automatically granted Israeli citizenship because they were Jewish while Palestinians are forcibly removed from their own land elsewhere in Israel and the Occupied Territories to accommodate this foreign influx, purely by virtue of the fact that they are not Jewish. If this is through her grandmother (Jewish lineage is determined matrilineally) -then the grandmother was part of the diaspora following the Nabka and this woman’s family would have been among the Palestinians never permitted to return, -if not for her Jewish heritage. -Pretty much sums it up. Jonny Greenwood’s wife’s very citizenship is the fulcrum of this religion as exclusionary privilege dependent on birth exercised under the pretension of behaving like a functioning democracy. She is literally the one benefitting at the Palestinian’s collective expense. If she can make her peace with that reality by having Palestinian friends, good for her. But it in no way ameliorates the situation itself. This may grant her the self-regard of being both Arab and Jewish, but that integration only works in one direction. I met Palestinians claiming heritage to the place as long running as she claims for her father in Iraq; they have no rights on their own land. The displacement surrounding them is a constant unremitting social holocaust, and that’s if that family even exists anymore. They claimed to have been Jews who converted at the time of Christ. The claim of her heritage as Jewish pre-empts his claim to the right to live in Bethlehem, though it may be just as long. His family’s claim only exists under an exercise of prolonged gradual erasure and constant annihilation exacted by the State of Israel, -for not being Jewish. PS: The division inflicted by the right is nothing compared to those on the Left, as they were designed to shatter the left. The right generates fracture, the left’s fractures are internal. The right is fine, the left is shattered. And a mass sell out of our greatest artists (considering what they could be) was no flaming help at all. What a flame out to watch.

Disillusionment all 'round, Thom. Actually it flaming hurts. And Thom here, if he really believes in not causing division, could make an effort rather than dolloping out than this trolloping piece of condescension, especially since he’s already apparently falling for the latest division sent to destroy the real left (the Russians did it, not the flaming neoliberal subversion of the left that made this whole election an exercise of differentiation between levels of sadism one must expect, replicated from one western nation to the next). The Russian ploy exists to buttress the failure of neoliberal hegemony (hence, denial), whose only raison d’être in the first place was to destroy the left by creation of a facsimile with a gloss over of identity politics. Maybe Thom Yorke could take a hot tip from Noam on that one instead of falling for this little number. He certainly missed Noam’s hot tip that neoliberalism is by definition fascist. PPS: As for Mr. Godrich: when my kid doesn’t do any homework and his classes are in jeopardy, I withdraw his PS3. On a national scale, the cultural boycott is no different. I think people who are already in disagreement within that country can understand the need for a little withdrawal of privilege from the majority of the culture who have no problem denying the Palestinians everything to the point of extirpation and Cabinet posts are casually allotted to ideologues who get their compass bearings from Meir Kahane (an American Rabbi who participated in a terrorist organization and who advocated Palestinian genocide is experiencing a popular resurgence) with hardly any protest by the domestic population. No, for Jerusalem Day, 2017, they were singing for Palestinians to be wiped out. Not to mention Harvard’s entry into #BDS was incentivized by an Israeli minister taking control of the Al Aqsa Mosque in the company of 1000 Israeli police officers. This reaction is so first world it hurts. I can’t have my concerts! What a travesty! The bulk of humanity in the meantime is far too poor to do any concerts, and the Palestinians can’t hardly at all. I have hardly been able to go to concerts for decades now, so here’s to getting a clue. Read Part III and IV if you want to have any clue just how milquetoast the environmentalists Thom adheres to are, seeing as they’re funded by some of the bigger ecocide-al profiting billionaires the planet has to offer. PPPS: WE DIDN’T WANT THIS. It’s the ONLY FORM OF POSSIBLE SOCIAL SANCTION left when all world government has failed. And if we didn’t publicly engage in economic sanctions en masse to correct institutionalized social evils that won’t correct internally and are being supported by international governments, the planet would still be blessed with South Africa. And if you want to be ingratiated intellectually with the world and involved intellectually, you quit putting xenophobic racists as your Minister of Defense (Avigdor Leiberman), because the two don’t mesh. For the world to withdraw is corrective. It must be asserted that those traits don’t belong to governance nor civilization, and cannot be sanctioned as such. Brian Eno knows this (along with 1200 other artists). When Thom reached for Noam Chomsky, he lied in the sense that he misrepresented Noam’s views, which can be summed up as basically the broader public are too deluded effectively participate (when is this an excuse), -plus relativism, as in the US is so bad why aren’t we boycotting Harvard first off (-fine, -let’s go for it until they correct their globalized blood bath), and thirdly, that it becomes the subject of focus in debate when Israel opposes BDS, rather than the issues themselves, effectively sidelining them. Noam took the position of opposing BDS on these grounds while acknowledging simultaneously that Israel’s condition is far worse than South Africa’s. Tom Yorke treats Noam’s position as if it’s moral. It is not (and that “sideline” hyperlink dismantles it in depth). Noam doesn’t oppose BDS on principle. He actually supports BDS within limits (quoting from the link above), i.e., “BDS should be limited to opposing Israel’s “occupation” of Palestinian territory conquered in the June, 1967 war, which he emphasized after 2002. In his July, 2014 article, he cited approvingly the ﬁrst goal of the BDS movement, “Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantling the Wall,” Israel’s “separation barrier,” which effectively annexes to Israel parts of the West Bank.13 This “makes good sense: it has a clear objective and is readily understood by its target audience in the West.”14 Chomsky found “the case” for advocating the second BDS goal, “Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality,” to be “ambiguous.” He acknowledged that Israel’s oppression of its Palestinian citizens violates international law, but found such criticism hypocritical. The call for equal rights for all Israeli citizens “at once opens the door to the ‘glass house’ reaction: for example, if we boycott Tel Aviv University because Israel violates human rights at home, then why not boycott Harvard because of the far greater violations of the United States?”14″ Noam Chomsky disagrees with the third BDS platform as well, support of the right for forcibly expelled Palestinians to return to Israel and the Occupied Territories. In short, as well summarized by one Gregory Smith: “Chomsky supports BDS targeted at Israeli institutions in the Occupied Territories, or Israeli institutions directly linked to the occupation. But he does not support BDS measures targeted at non-occupation-linked institutions inside Israel.” So Thom took it upon himself to reach for a BDS supporter, -claiming to be in alignment with this individual when there is no way to know as Thom gives no position other than to imply one that’s divergent by aspersion, claiming by his usage that this intellectual was against BDS, when Noam’s position was more for than against. Score one for Thom for a patent falsehood.

As for Thom declaring that his position is also shared by J.K. Rowling, her point of reference includes blithely falling for twitter feeds out of Syria, parading this exchange as emotionally authentic when both parties are signed to the same talent agency. Based on the position of that twitter feed, (which has inevitably been rewarded the requisite attention since it cries for Western/US military intervention), Thom’s basically buttressing his position by reaching for imperial lite.

AND THAT FOLKS, IS ALL HE’S GOT. If he wants to participate with the minority against BDS, he has to have a position. Thom has no clue that 80% of Canadians support BDS, whereas the reigning neoliberal Prime Minister has accosted BDS as anti-semetic, an accusation he has the audacity to launch against the vast majority of his constituents who disagree with him. If this is the position Thom has chosen to align with (neoliberalism’s very existence is in order to attenuate and terminate social justice sought by the broader public by defanging the left, -see ‘spectrum shift’’s comments in the above hyperlink for how it decimated the Canadian left), he represented their position rather sorely.

Our Prime Minister is now on record as lying about every liberal platform he appealed to his constituents to vote for him for, -from electoral reform to marijuana legalization to aboriginal reconciliation (we got the Federal forcing of the Trans Mountain pipeline (which has 19 aboriginal cases against it) and the Site C dam instead, (when the Site C is on Treaty 8 land). He was at least honest about his continued support for unwarranted spying against Canadian citizens under the guise of Bill C-51. When he completed the largest arms deal to Saudi Arabia in Canadian history, ranking us among the top five of their arms producers, he said his hands were tied. That’s a neoliberal for you. Thom has also misled the general public in his only public response that makes an effort to buttress his position. His response relies on practically nothing beyond this falsehood as per identifying with an intellectual and a purely petulant emotional response.

The politicians, BTW, that Thom lists on his wall of shame in order to shame BDS, equating them as being equally divisive, are all vehemently against BDS and extreme Israel supporters, and are even responsible for bringing terrorism home domestically, a position which, had Thom Yorke been a voting American, he would have apparently voted for in his fear and loathing of Trump, feeling decidedly righteous about his alignment with these wartime legacies resulting in waves of refugees to Europe, -providing they were the fruition of neoliberals. Not that I looked, but I highly doubt Thom Yorke ever complained about Obama’s bombing of seven Muslim nations, let alone Libya.

Odd how he shames BDS participants by equivocating them with a right wing they are the very opposite of, BDS’s strongest opponents. The point he attempts is leavened in equal measure with the extremity of the insult. Beyond that, he spent the bulk of response wailing about HIS and the BAND’s EMOTIONAL DISCOMFORT at having been confronted by BDS, complaining that any advocate was deeply patronizing. This is literally the sum of his complaint, ignoring the entire backdrop and context as so much graffiti splattered on a wall, asserting that of course they know it all and they of course are so much smarter than that. Yet apparently he didn’t know the situation enough to reference it in his official comeback, we’re just supposed to accept his assertion that he does know based on his oh so superior grounding and mental faculty. We weren’t worth a response, -when Thom’s is problematic to begin with since relying on Jonny Greenwood’s Israeli connection is purely personal anecdote. I’m grounded in this situation purely by my individual personal connection (and that’s more than sufficient) passes the smell test of intellectual rigour nowhere on this planet ever. Worse yet, framing a response almost purely on his and his band’s own personal discomfort to the situation is beyond first world pathetic. His response is all about himself. He can’t even frame a position based on the reality of the situation. In short, he has no argument, and is flaunting the implication that he may have had these arguments in private but to even air his position is far too beneath him, though being massively insulting to everyone who took the opposing position is not, and every one of the artists who appealed to Radiohead not to perform in Tel Aviv falls under his blanket condemnation of having been overwhelmingly patronizing, -based on the laughable repudiation that Thom exists in first person anecdotal “evidence” that makes him “fully grounded”. This doesn’t just reek of condescension. It’s flaming condescension that has nothing backing it up because none of the public opposition is worth active thought. His complaint is that those in opposition didn’t approach the band personally but approached the situation publicly, -notwithstanding that virtually everyone in opposition to Radiohead performing in Tel Aviv has no ability to access Thom Yorke other than publicly, and that is literally how boycott campaigns must operate, by highlighting those who refuse to participate and endorsing those that do. Furthermore, however this was conducted by individual artists, whether there were several instances of personal effrontery involved, which only the band would know, the nature of such exchanges has LITERALLY NO BEARING on the rational debate of whether or not the band should or should not perform in Israel. Yet that is virtually the sum of Thom’s complaint, upset at personal individual treatment of himself and his bandmates, when it is he who has categorized every individual in opposition not on the virtue or failure of their position, but by claiming they were all failures interpersonally. This is not a rejection of their position, but a blanket rejection of them as people (identity politics wins the day in the total evacuation of substance, and on this basis I reject all of you). Because it’s all about how we feel and interact in the debate that matters, and how we feel is the verdict, -effectively erasing the entire substance of the debate. That isn’t a rational reaction. It’s functionally absurd, and Thom parades this as if he’s too intellectual to respond with anything else. Quite priceless when it appears he needs a tap on the shoulder to remind him that feelies never figure in debate?

-At least he tried, right? Which I’m sure is more than can be said for others such as Depeche Mode and RHCP.

I take too long, so thankfully, someone commented at Variety and nailed it PERFECTLY: “Very interesting — he talks about everyone and everything except palestinians. he is in fact erasing them. just because his bandmate is married to an israeli arab means nothing. what does she think? we’re not told. and she is a citizen of israel, not a palestinian who is subject to the brutal and oppressive practices of a half century long israeli occupation that even israelis increasingly describe as apartheid. nor does yorke address the fact that by playing there he is in fact normalizing the occupation and going against the express with wish of the vast majority of palestinian civil society organizations, who have determined this is the best way for them to fight nonviolently against the occupation. instead he gets angry at roger waters for pressing the issue and making him uncomfortable with his friends. perhaps he should consider what it means to live as a palestinian. then complain about how bad he feels. his defense of playing israel reflects both a complete ignorance of the realities of the occupation and the goals of BDS, and the arrogance of someone who is too privileged to actually consider that sometimes you need to take a principled and difficult stand.” -Thank you, Mark LeVine. And yea, everyone at this point who supports BDS is now faced with a personal question. If a band actively refuses to participate in BDS as Radiohead has just done, is it your moral obligation to boycott them for profiting off a performance in Israel? Those profits aren’t small. Let your basis for arriving at this decision be known loud and clear. As for the response below by deathistardy: Isn’t it astonishing how an individual can equivocate the decision not to buy a single concert ticket with advocating death of Israel as if their reaction is rational? The first hyperlink presented in this essay delineates the crippling logical fallacy that gets him there (”identikit straightjacket”). This was the peace process he alludes to. It is redundant that it failed because the failure serves Israel in perpetuity, and is what they desire, because illegal settlements on Palestinian occupied territory have never been halted and the perpetual failure of the peace process allows this travesty to continue. The parity instituted in these negotiations by the US is a paradigm that is completely false. And this, this and this is Ehud Barak. Do not enter here unless you know of what you speak. My dream is Israel’s true integration which might mean it truly inherits its place as God’s nation by embracing a one state solution that embraces their greater heritage and in one fell swoop manages to reverse the crippling tide of colonialism with the purest act of reversing the travesty against them by integrating the indigenous population, -graduating from the most polarized of war time situations by virtue of love and peacemaking. They alone in this world might be capable of such transcendence. We can hope. They could be well capable rectifying the sum of history if they just embraced forgiveness and self-recognition. I believe both sides are fully capable if they just rejected the epic failure that is their leadership.

#thom yorke #rollingstone #israel #bds

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sempiternalsandpitturtle · 6 years ago

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Why avoiding unethical marketing is in your best interests

Marketing is the job that’s never done. There are always new campaigns to plan and launch. New tactics to master and roll out. And new targets to chase down and beat.

The pressure that comes with delivering a return on your marketing spend can be intense. So it’s no wonder that some marketers succumb to the temptation and venture to the dark side in search of more leads, an advantage over the competition or a shortcut to success.

Ethics are rarely black and white. There’s a spectrum. A fair bit of grey. What’s unethical to one marketer might be accepted practice to another.

Niles Crane got a nose bleed whenever he betrayed his ethics. But if you don’t have a similar physical response to help keep you in line, hopefully this post will help.

via GIPHY

We’ve pulled together some great examples of unethical marketing. The idea here is to highlight some of the different ways marketers can slide right through the grey and into the black when it comes to ethics. We’ll also look at the potential consequences and takeaways.

Unethical Marketing Example #1: Engaging in blackhat SEO

Blackhat SEO is a broad term used to describe tactics designed to trick Google’s search algorithm. The aim is to get pages returned higher in search results than they deserve. Here are some common blackhat SEO tactics from the wild west years of search:

Hiding spammy text stuffed full of keywords so only search engines see it

Paying for links to important pages on your site

Using blog comments or forums to plant links back to your site

Jamming keywords into title tags, alt tags and other bits of the page Google looks at

Using clickbait headlines that bear no relation to the content on your page

For the most part, Google’s algorithm is too smart for these tactics nowadays. But it’s not surprising that marketers dabble in ethically-questionable SEO activities. Google’s search algorithm is a black box. Sure, there are plenty of guidelines and lots of free advice about best practice. But every marketer will have experienced their share of head-scratching moments when sites breaking all the rules rank #1. Or sites doing everything right rank nowhere. And it’s not as if you can call customer support.

So, what are the consequences of engaging in blackhat SEO?

It could be ranking #1 for your target keywords. But usually success with blackhat tactics is short-lived and comes at a price. If you get a manual penalty you could find your pages pushed so far down the search results that nobody will see them. If you rely on Google for a significant share of your traffic that could be catastrophic.

One famous example occurred back in 2006, when Google gave BMW what some called a “death penalty” by completely removing the car giant’s German site from it’s index. BMW.de had been using redirects to send users to different pages to the ones Google had indexed and returned in search results. This is what Google’s then head of anti-spam, Matt Cutts, had to say about it.

And where is blackhat SEO on the unethical marketing scale?

We’ve put each of our examples on an unethical marketing scale. One devil is a minor ethical breach. Five is the worst kind of unethical behaviour.

Unethical Marketing Example #2: Posting fake reviews

Ranking #1 for your target keywords is an excellent way to get relevant traffic on to your website. But when it comes to closing deals nothing beats 5-star reviews. If your existing customers like your product or service enough to review it, then it can provide the social proof new customers need to part with their money.

The problem with reviews is that they are often anonymous. How do you know these reviews are legitimate? Did dragonslayer1992 really just have the best spa experience of her life or did a desperate marketer take an ethics holiday?

So, what are the consequences of posting fake reviews?

There are plenty of examples of brands – or over-enthusiastic employees – resorting to creating their own positive reviews in a bid to boost sales. Facebook recently had to respond to news stories suggesting its employees had been posting 5-star Amazon reviews for its connected home offering, Portal.

When it comes to convincing people to install a voice-activated smart camera in their homes, Facebook probably has bigger issues than fabricated reviews. But it’s still embarrassing and undoubtedly an ethical failure on the part of the reviewers and whoever sanctioned it.

And, where are fake reviews on the unethical marketing scale?

Unethical Marketing Example #3: Nobbling the competition

Some marketers avoid blackhat SEO and posting fake reviews because of their ethics. Others just don’t like the idea of getting caught.

Among that second group are a particularly nefarious bunch that use their mastery of underhand marketing tactics to damage a competitor.

Henry Ford said the competitor to fear was the one who spent all their time improving their business and never worried about what you were doing. If only everyone took that approach. The reality is that for some businesses, killing – or at least slowing down – the competition is a KPI.

And if you have unethical marketers at your disposal they can help. They can run blackhat SEO tactics on your competitor’s website and then report them to Google. They can create profiles on popular review sites and pepper your competitor’s business with negative reviews. Or they can post reviews so gushingly positive that they have to be fake. Maybe they even use the same names as some of your target company’s employees so the breadcrumbs are impossible to miss.

So, what are the consequences of nobbling the competition?

Blackhat SEO can damage your website. Posting fake reviews can damage your reputation. But a systematic campaign designed to hurt a competitor goes beyond unethical marketing. The fallout if you got caught wouldn’t just be potentially irreparable harm to your character (that’s the brand and the individuals involved), but it could land you in court.

And where is nobbling the competition on the unethical marketing scale?

Unethical Marketing Example #4: Trivialising issues people care about

One of the biggest marketing success stories of 2018 and one we’ve written about on this blog was Nike’s decision to use Colin Kaepernick – former NFL star and social activist – to front its Dream Crazy campaign.

Embracing Kaepernick and aligning itself with his values was a risk for Nike. It could have faced a more serious backlash from people who interpreted his national anthem protests as unpatriotic. Perhaps a bigger risk was that the progressive young people who supported Kaepernick could have objected to a global apparel brand hijacking issues they care about. Nike afterall is a major sponsor of the NFL, the organisation with which Kaepernick is still locked in a legal dispute.

Some brands only saw the upside and none of the risk from Dream Crazy. That’s at least one explanation for this:

youtube

So much has been written about this disaster that it was tempting to leave it out. But this wasn’t just a gaffe. This was an ethical failure. Making light of issues that are literally life and death for some people isn’t just clumsy and inappropriate. It’s wrong.

But Pepsi is not alone when it comes to putting opportunism ahead of ethics. This is how AT&T, the US phone company, marked the anniversary of 9/11 in 2013:

So, what are the consequences of trivialising issues people care about?

When marketing campaigns go wrong, brands have to hope that the damage stops at a bit of embarrassment, some social media firefighting and an awkward apology.

Here’s an example. In 2015, Starbucks spilled latte on its freshly-pressed white trousers when it tried to “create a conversation” about race. The Race Together campaign encouraged Starbucks baristas to discuss race with their customers. You can read the internal memo Starbucks distributed to staff here, courtesy of Gawker. The whole thing was pretty cringeworthy and opened the company and CEO Howard Schulz to ridicule on social media.

But when brands steam right through hamfisted into unethical then they don’t just have people laughing at them on the internet. They make people really angry. Pepsi attracted a torrent of criticism on social media for its Kendall Jenner ad. When Martin Luther King Jr’s daughter is calling you out on Twitter you know you’ve got real problems.

If only Daddy would have known about the power of #Pepsi. pic.twitter.com/FA6JPrY72V

— Be A King (@BerniceKing) April 5, 2017

Where is trivialising issues people care about on the unethical marketing scale?

Unethical Marketing Example #5: Making stuff up

Marketing is a creative profession but there are limits when it comes to using artistic license to jazz up your campaigns. Last year, Spotify, the music streaming platform, ran a much-talked-about marketing campaign driven by its users’ data.

So @Spotify’s ‘2018 Goals’ campaign is also advertising goals. pic.twitter.com/2KXouokL1O

— Nathalie Gordon (@awlilnatty) November 30, 2017

Using your customer’s data for marketing purposes can be risky. But Spotify’s campaign was widely praised as innovative and funny. Unsurprisingly it inspired some copycat campaigns. The most notable – largely due to the subsequent controversy – was from fintech start-up, Revolut.

Earlier this year, Revolut took Spotify’s idea and ran a marketing campaign using its own customer data. But it turns out people are a bit more sensitive when it comes to their spending habits. Revolut got plenty of attention but not the kind its marketing team wanted. This dressing down from The Guardian columnist Christina Patterson is a good example.

Sorry @piersmorgan, but we couldn't resist. cc @GreggsOfficial pic.twitter.com/v0hmdvxtYG

— Revolut (@RevolutApp) January 31, 2019

The controversy surrounding the campaign didn’t stop there. Where Spotify had mined the data of its 90 million subscribers to drive the creative for its ads, Revolut had taken a different approach. Its numbers were made up.

Canny observers pointed out that a digital banking app might know how much money its 3 million users had spent at the local baker. But not what they spent it on. So, when Revolut’s marketing team said 11,867 people bought a vegan sausage roll last month, they were getting creative with their creative.

So, what are the consequences of making stuff up?

You might be forgiven for thinking Revolut’s marketing campaign was pretty harmless. Spotify laughed off the idea that it was a rip-off. And the made up numbers feel like relatively minor ethical infractions.

But finance companies – even sexy start-ups – are tightly regulated. So when the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the UK’s advertising watchdog, received complaints about the campaign, it referred Revolut to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the industry regulator.

And where is making stuff up on the unethical marketing scale?

Unethical Marketing Example #6: Undercutting official sponsors

We do content marketing at Castleford, so we wanted to include an ethical conundrum that a lot of content marketers run into. If you have an agile content marketing team you can respond to spikes in interest around certain events.

So, for example, during the Australian Open more people search of tennis-related keywords on Google. You don’t need Google Trends to tell you that. But since we bothered to check, here’s the graph:

If you can relate tennis to your business, products or services, January is a good time to create some tennis-related content. It gives you the opportunity to tap into this increased demand, not just in search but on social media and in your email campaigns. And creating tennis-themed content is probably a lot cheaper than sponsoring the Australian Open.

So, what are the consequences of undercutting official sponsors?

Content marketers have to be careful here. Major sporting events are big business and a lot of the money comes from sponsors and those sponsors expect their investment to be protected.

Take the football World Cup, for example, which took place last summer in Russia. FIFA, the organising body, has no fewer than 16 official partners. If you outbid your main competitor to be a FIFA sponsor, you wouldn’t be too happy if that same competitor produced so much football content during the tournament that it looked like they were the official partner, not you.

That’s why organisations like FIFA take a tough line on brands trying to attach themselves to their tournaments without paying the cover charge. Content marketers planning to hijack the next World Cup might like to start reading FIFA’s brand marketing guidelines now.

And where is undercutting official sponsors on the unethical marketing scale?

Unethical Marketing Takeaways

Thank you for reading this far. To wrap things up we’ve pulled together some handy unethical marketing takeaways:

Blackhat SEO tactics can get you a short-term gain but a ranking penalty can have a devastating impact on your website

Reviews are an important source of social proof and can help close deals. But if you get caught posting fake reviews you’re likely to face serious embarrassment

Using blackhat SEO and fake reviews against your competitors is not only unethical but also could be illegal

Tapping into trending topics has great potential for connecting with your audience. But get this wrong and people will laugh at you, get mad at you and question your ethics

Marketing is all about creativity but making stuff up is always a bad idea. If you’re in a highly-regulated industry the consequences could be more serious than some negative headlines and withering tweets

Major sporting events are excellent marketing opportunities. Remember that some brands pay to be official sponsors. Even if you’re okay ethically hijacking the event, you might find yourself on the organising body’s radar

from http://bit.ly/2WdmWNW

#content marketing

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iprayunceasingly-blog · 6 years ago

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The Siena Option: What one saint did in the face of a troubled Church

New Post has been published on https://pray-unceasingly.com/catholic-living/catholic-news/the-siena-option-what-one-saint-did-in-the-face-of-a-troubled-church-2/

The Siena Option: What one saint did in the face of a troubled Church

Siena, Italy, Dec 26, 2018 / 05:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- When St. Catherine of Siena was alive in 14th century in what is now Italy, it looked like it was the end of the world.

The Bubonic plague was sweeping through Europe in waves, which would ultimately wipe out 60 percent of the population. The Papal States were divided and at war. Rich churchmen were buying their positions; bishops were making sure their family members would succeed them. The pope had been living in France for 70 years, and though he would return to Rome, the Western Schism happened shortly after, with three claimants to the See of Peter.

“She lived in really terrible times,” Fr. Thomas McDermott, O.P., a St. Catherine of Siena scholar, told CNA. “And people really did think it was the end of the world.”

The state of the world, and the Church today, is different, though in some ways no less troubled. The new wave of sex abuse scandals and their alleged cover-ups have rocked anew the Church throughout the world.

When St. Catherine talked about the Church, she often referred to it as the Body of Christ, in the tradition of St. Paul, McDermott noted.

“She says the face of the Church is a beautiful face, but we’re pelting it with filth,” he said. “It has a beautiful face, that’s the divine side of the Church, but we human beings are pelting it; we’re disfiguring the body of Christ through our sins.”

While the current abuse crisis and related scandals have left many lay Catholics wondering how to respond, some Catholics have suggested looking to the saints – like Catherine of Siena – for guidance.

Who was Catherine?

Catherine was born March 25, 1347, the 25th child born to middle-class parents in Siena; about half of her siblings did not survive childhood.

At a young age, she became very devout, and resisted her parents when they attempted to have her marry the husband of one of her sisters who had died. Instead, she chose to fast and cut off her hair to make herself less desirable. She would ultimately vow her virginity to Christ, and experienced a mystical marriage to him around the age of 21.

Instead of entering a convent, however, Catherine chose to live a life of prayer and penance at home as a tertiary, or third order, Dominican. She spent several years in near-seclusion, in a cell-like room under the steps in her parents' house, spending her days in dialogue with Christ.

After several years of this at-home novitiate of sorts, while in her mid-20s, she heard Christ telling her to lead a more public life.

“He said now you have to go out and share the fruits of your contemplation with others,” McDermott said. “That’s very Dominican, it’s from the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas.”

Catherine obeyed, and rejoined her family in their daily activities. She also began to serve the poor, and soon became renowned for her charitable works. She gathered a following of young men and women – many of them from rich families of high social status – because they enjoyed her warm personality and her holiness.

Catherine goes public – and gets political

Once she stepped back into a more public life, she became more connected and in tune with the happenings in the Church.

At the time, Gregory XI was living in Avignon and was at war with the Republic of Florence. He placed it under interdict; essentially the equivalent of excommunicating a city – they were cut off from receiving the sacraments, among other sanctions.

Through her life of prayer and her consultation with her spiritual directors, Catherine began corresponding with papal representatives and the pope himself, attempting to broker peace in Florence and advocating for reform where she saw corruption.

“The papal nuncio to Florence in Catherine’s time is grossly hated by the powerful families in Florence, and he’s hated because the powerful families feel that they’ve been mistreated by the Pope,” said Catherine Pakaluk, an associate professor of economics at Catholic University of America and a devotee of St. Catherine.

“She’s writing to the nuncios, she’s writing to the pope, and she’s trying to prevent this internal Catholic war between these parts of the Papal States,” she said. “And this is before the Great Schism when things get really bad.”

Tempers and tensions were so high that the papal nuncio of Florence was eventually skinned alive in the streets.

“So when we think about things today and how shocking and horrifying (they are), you know, things were pretty bad then,” Pakaluk noted. “The nature of the particular crimes is different, but the tensions were really high and these folks were quite violent.”

Catherine was drawn into the Church politics of her time not because of a misplaced sense of ambition, McDermott said, but because she loved the Church as she loved God.

“It wasn’t her motive to be involved in the politics of the Church, but what was best for everyone and for the church led her into politics,” he said. “But it’s not like she was interested in politics itself.”

As part of her attempts at solving the problems of the Church, Catherine joined the call of many other Catholics of the time for the Pope to return to Rome.

After some correspondence, Catherine set out on foot with her followers to go meet with the pope in person.

“It was a remarkable thing for Catherine who was a homebody to take off on foot for France with her disciples, but she was prepared to do anything for the Church because the Church was the Body of Christ,” McDermott said.

After scores of people pleading with the pope to return to Rome between 1309 and 1377, St. Catherine seemed to prove most persuasive.

During her visit, Catherine referenced parts of the pope’s dream, about which he had told no one.

“It was astounding to him (that she knew about the dream) and he took that as a clear sign from God that he was speaking to him through this woman,” McDermott said. So after decades of exile, within a few weeks of Catherine’s visit, the pope packed up his things and headed back to Rome.

“She’s a great example of a laywoman who had strong convictions about the Church and was not timid about expressing them,” said Dr. Karen Scott, an associate professor of Catholic Studies and History at DePaul University in Chicago.

“It was a very different situation from today, so it would be a mistake to think that it’s an automatic equivalent” to the problems of the current Church, Scott told CNA.

“She was living a long time ago and it was a different time and a different Church and different historical set of circumstances…but she was aware of all sorts of problems with the clergy and she believed they ought to be reformed.”

The legend of the opinionated laywoman

What Catherine excelled at in her correspondence with the pope and other clergy was her ability to balance her no-punches-pulled critiques with her profound respect for the Church and the papacy, Scott said.

“There’s a beautiful balance between clear thinking and the ability to see the flaws…but at the same time to be enormously respectful of the Church and the papacy in particular and to base all of this on her deep spiritual life, a life of deep prayer,” Scott said.

“She’s a laywoman who had strong opinions and views on (Church matters) and took action, and amazingly they paid attention,” Scott added. Amazingly, because she was an uneducated lay woman from a modest background who wasn’t particularly well-known.

“They listened to her because what she was saying was so obviously right and sincere and coming out of her prayer and the Gospel,” Scott said.

In total, Catherine wrote at least 381 letters in her lifetime. Three years before her death, she also began dictating “Il Libro” (“The Book”), a collection of her spiritual teachings and conversations with God that became known as “The Dialogue”.

A significant portion of her Dialogue, chapters 110-134, gives insight into her thoughts on the Church reforms needed at the time. Catherine relayed that the “Eternal Father” (how she frequently refers to God the Father) had told her that the biggest problem facing the secular priests of her time was money, while the biggest problem facing priests in religious orders was homosexuality.

Her frank critiques were considered so indelicate that they were excised from many of the English translations of her book, McDermott said.

“She was writing this in the 1300s, she believes it was dictated to her by the Eternal Father, and she’s always a direct hitter, she doesn’t hold anything back,” McDermott said.

But while her dialogues contain punchy critiques of the clergy, she also urged respect for them at the same time, as they are “Christs” on earth who bring Jesus to the world through the Eucharist.

“You should love them (priests) therefore by reason of the virtue and dignity of the Sacrament, and by reason of that very virtue and dignity you should hate the defects of those who live miserably in sin, but not on that account appoint yourselves their judges, which I forbid, because they are My Christs, and you ought to love and reverence the authority which I have given them,” the Eternal Father told Catherine, as recalled in her Dialogue.

While Catherine was successful at bringing the papacy back to Rome and brokering peace between Florence and the Eternal City, the period known as the Great Schism, or the Western Schism, would begin just two years before her death.

“It wasn’t crystal clear who the real pope was,” McDermott said, noting that even some saints who are now canonized had sided with opposing claimants at the time. “So that must have also seemed like the end of the world.”

“St. Catherine was totally horrified,” Scott said, “because for her, Church unity was really essential.”

During this time, French cardinals had elected a leader as the Pope, and later on, the Council of Pisa also elected a claimant. St. Catherine sided with the claimant residing in Rome, Urban VI, and moved there in the last few years of her life to advocate for him and offer intense prayer and penance for the Church.

When she died in 1380, a result of illness brought on by her extreme penances, the western Church was still in schism, and would remain that way until the conclusion of the Council of Constance in 1418.

“Some historians, I think specifically less faithful ones or who don’t have a life of faith…will say well Catherine really failed, because her goal was to bring the Pope back to Rome to heal the divisions in the Church, but how could she have succeeded if the greatest schism of the Western Church occurs after she dies?” Pakalu said.

“I don’t know that’s quite the right view. We never know the hypothetical of history, we never know what would have happened without Catherine’s influence, and she does at least initially bring the Holy Father back to Rome before she died and that was pretty important,” she said.

“My guess is that the Church was able to survive the Great Schism because she got certain things lined up before she died.”

Catherine’s lessons for Catholics today

“What would she say today? I think that’s a dangerous question,” Scott said, “because we can’t say how she would relate to the current issues and complex questions, except that she would know very well what the moral stance is, that bishops and priests and lay people should all follow.”

Catherine would set the highest of standards for honesty and integrity and pastoral concern for the laity, Scott said, as well as the highest standards “for avoiding schism and being close to the papacy.”

“Beyond that I think she would advise people to take the time to pray and discern and not have knee-jerk reactions to things,” she added.

Pakaluk said that she thinks there are three lessons to be learned from Catherine’s life and example, with the first being that any activist role in Church politics must be rooted in deep prayer and love for the Church.

“I wouldn’t say don’t get involved until you’re as holy as Catherine … but to do activism or public ministry without that deep commitment to prayer would be completely absurd and would not be faithful to her life or her example,” she said.

The second lesson, she said, would be to take the long view of history. The Church has survived hard times and scandal before, and she can survive them again.

“I am horrified at outraged at what I’m seeing and hearing about” regarding the current scandals, Pakaluk said.

“But I’m not personally disturbed, my faith isn’t challenged, because I’m so familiar with (ages) in the Church’s past, particularly and especially the one that Catherine lived through, in which there was so much corruption and so much disappointment on the part of the faithful with respect to the hierarchy and some members of the clergy,” she said.

“So it doesn’t disturb me because I think well, why would it be different? Why would we think we’re better? Why do we think we’re completely immune to some of the things that have occurred in the past?”

The third thing Catholics can learn from St. Catherine is that it is possible to be a saint even in the most trying times in the Church, Pakaluk said.

“She’s there in Heaven, she ran the race, she made it,” she said. “We can look at her not only like ‘we can do it too’, but she’s our older sister, and we can follow her and ask her to intercede for us.”

McDermott said that Catholics should be heartened by St. Catherine’s witness because even while she prolifically wrote about the problems of the Church, she never once hinted that she was thinking about leaving.

“She would’ve said don’t leave the Church, this is the human, sinful side of the Church that is being reflected. And the good of the church – stay and purify it,” he said.

“Our love for Christ and the Church – the two are inseparable – is shown in hard times when it doesn’t feel very good to be a Catholic, that we keep on walking with Christ and the Church.”

This article was originally published on CNA Sept. 16, 2018.

CNA Daily News – Europe

#church #face #Option #Saint #Siena #troubled #Catholic News

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memoryinsufficient · 7 years ago

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Since Donald Trump won the US presidential election one year ago, the games sector has tried to work out how to use our medium to resist the rise of the far right. In March, Resistjam brought game developers together around the world to create consciousness-raising works of political art. Rami Ismail is one developer who has used his platform as a respected public speaker at games conferences to speak out against Trump’s discriminatory travel ban and elevate the voices of developers whose work has been affected. Games criticism outlet Waypoint’s remarkable first year included a week-long special feature on the prison-industrial complex.

Videogames and neoliberalism

Class politics of digital media

Art as political response

How to use games politically

References

One year on, it may now be a good time to evaluate the cultures of resistance that are growing in games. What does it mean to resist fascism with games and tech? How can the videogames and technology industries confront our role in fostering cultures of isolated young men who become radicalised? Does it still make sense to focus on videogames at a time like this?

Videogames and neoliberalism

“Duke Nukem’s Dystopian Fantasies” appeared on Jacobin on April 20th, marking a debut post for writer and artist Liz Ryerson on the leftist commentary site. In it, she makes the affirmative case for looking at videogames as historical and cultural artefacts while judging them on their own merits, and makes the connection between the male power fantasy the game embraces, the alienation people feel under late capitalism, and how that can translate into reaction without a coherent understanding of history.

“This is the power of the fantasy Duke Nukem as a cultural figure represents: that through raw machismo, the series of oppressive neoliberal forces that form the framework of our society can be conquered and transcended. Duke cannot exist in a rational world. He can only exist in a one filled with internal contradictions, crossed wires, and broken down buildings.

“His world is never stable. It can only ever be dominated by irrational fears of the unknown and one-dimensional, cartoonish archetypes. His world never resolves any of its cognitive dissonances, and sometimes even seems to be aware of its own self-destructiveness.”

Liz Ryerson (2017) “Duke Nukem’s Dystopian Fantasies”, Jacobin

For the most part, Ryerson’s piece received praise from leftist partisans whether or not they were particularly committed to videogames as a craft. But not everyone felt it was appropriate for a socialist journal like Jacobin to have published a close reading of something like Duke Nukem 3D.

https://twitter.com/garliccorgi/status/855241007692210177

It’s not as if they’d ever previously published pieces on the art, culture and business of games or tech, to relatively little backlash:

Les Simerables, Eva Koffman “SimCity isn’t a sandbox. Its rules reflect the neoliberal common sense of today’s urban planning.”

Empire Down, Sam Kriss “The player in Age of Empires II doesn’t take on the role of a monarch or a national spirit, but the feudal mode of production itself.”

“You can sleep here all night”: Video Games and Labour, Ian Williams “Exploitation in the video game industry provides a glimpse at how many of us may be working in years to come.”

In my own experience occupying the art fringe of the videogame industry–which is admittedly a highly reactionary space–I’ve learned that while there are a lot of young people pouring a lot of energy into their craft, it’s easy to feel lonely and beholden to a lost cause. I’ve worked as a writer and small-time artist and developer for almost a decade, focusing primarily on indie and alternative development communities and agitating in my limited capacity for more of a spotlight on them, their histories, and the labour involved in them. My political activity outside of my work consists largely of anti-fascist organizing in my city–that means participating in teach-ins, free food events, as well as protests and counter-demonstrations against the far-right. This work is voluntary, but can sometimes feel much more fulfilling than my actual profession. It’s easy to feel like no one really cares about fringe technical arts because, well, most people don’t. If the industry’s flagship mainstream titles give us very little to seriously engage with, then why bother digging any deeper?

[bctt tweet=”Political critique of AAA games is a lot of work, for something juvenile at worst, and culturally peripheral at best.” via=”no”]

As the Jekyll that is liberalism has once again fallen into crisis and gives way to its Mr. Hyde that is fascist reaction, I’ve felt increasingly insecure about the nature of my work and why I chose it. I laugh nervously and tell people what I do is bullshit before going any further. Luckily, most of the people I’ve encountered while organizing, or even just through having had a political affinity online, have expressed genuine interest in the medium, the inner workings of our opaque and cloistered industry, and its potential as an expressive and communicative tool. Still, I have met those who think of things like social media as “inappropriate technology”, who automatically assume that anyone who has any interest in videogames is a pepe nazi, or who think of any engagement with new media as a cultural and political dead end.

That said, some of the most personally influential leftist thinkers I’ve come across are also writers, artists and academics in this incredibly weird field. More often than not we organize and march together. This is not an attempt to scapegoat anyone specific or to do as so many desperate thinkpieces did after the election and try to reaffirm the dubious political importance of games as an artform through headlines such as “Trump as Gamer-in-Chief”.

I don’t think that making videogames, no matter how fringe or alt, should be conflated with tried and true forms of street activism. Game jams about the immigration ban are not a form of direct action in the way shutting down a consulate or doing an hours-long sit-in at an airport are. Your app is not saving the world.

ResistJam was an online game jam about resisting authoritarianism. Over 200 games were made by participants.

The dominant ideological expression of late capitalism is liberalism, or more specifically, neoliberalism. Liberalism prefers to try to diversify the middle class of the currently existing system, rather than try imagining something that might liberate greater masses of people. According to this view, capitalism fundamentally works, only needing a slight tweak here or there to make it more “accessible” to those who are deserving. A major way it seeks to accomplish this is by centering symbolic representation of various marginalized identities while also depoliticizing things like technological progress, framing them as inherently good and proof of societal advancement. All actual material concerns and real struggle can then be ironed away in favour of simply trying to optimize the level of participation for marginalized groups, as one would fiddle with a dial. This isn’t to say symbolic representation doesn’t matter, but to fixate on it strips us of the ability to think in terms of collective political power, and cultivate a real political program that fights for material improvements to people’s lived conditions.

Class politics of digital media

Media consumption doesn’t determine political outcomes, at least not in a direct sense, but it does help shape people’s political imaginations. Taking the time to unpack the media we consume can tell us a lot about the conditions of production–that is to say, the ways in which labour power is exploited in order to produce entertainment commodities. This may include the mining of cobalt to make computer hardware, or the manufacturing of consoles and other devices at Foxconn plants, or developers coerced into overwork in order to meet production quotas. There is a potentially international struggle of exploited workers even just when it comes to videogames, yet hardly a labour movement to speak of. That there’s hardly a union presence in the technical arts or in tech work broadly, and that these industries tend toward meritocratic, libertarian or even fascist thinking that tends to be expressed ideologically via their major cultural properties, is not an accident.

Conversely, if politics are the “art of the possible”, then media creation allows us to expand the conceptual scope for what’s possible. Most of the art we consume is conservative in character–even works we consider liberal or progressive are often deeply reactionary in their base assumptions. For example, David Grossman explains why diverse Brooklyn Nine-Nine can’t avoid being apologia for the NYPD, and why using progressive representation to paper over the faults of repressive institutions is indefensible.

Earlier this year, the Vera Institute of Justice polled young people in high-crime areas of New York, and found that only four in ten respondents would feel comfortable seeking help from the police if they were in trouble, and eighty-eight percent of young people surveyed didn’t believe that their neighborhoods trusted the police. Forty-six percent of young people said they had experienced physical force beyond being frisked by a police officer.

“Brooklyn Nine-Nine” tries to get around this problem by pretending the actual Brooklyn doesn’t exist.

David Grossman (2013) “If you think the NYPD is like Dunder Mifflin, you’ll love ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine'”, New Republic

Videogames in particular have their own sordid history of using diversity rhetoric as a way to deflect criticism of unwieldy, increasingly shoddy games produced under highly exploitative conditions, and reflect profoundly disturbing ideological tendencies (sometimes with the help of the arms industry or the U.S. military.) This has led some leftists to believe that the interactive arts as a craft are inherently reactionary and devoid of creative potential. I sympathize to an extent with this position, but having spent significant time in tech and games spaces, I believe these problems arise from the same historical conditions that render most art conservative, as well as specific ones owing to the opaqueness of the industry itself. I think these are things that can be overcome, not without some effort, and part of what keeps me interested in games is its creative fringe, where artists are finding ways to use the medium to capture as well as suggest alternatives to our current predicament.

[bctt tweet=”Videogames have matured entirely within the context of late capitalism and neoliberalism.” via=”yes”]

Videogames have barely a labour movement to speak of, and are an appendage of the tech-libertarian culture of Silicon Valley. An important aspect of their heritage resides in engineers meddling with MIT military computers. They have never, in their production or conception, been entirely separate from the state or the military-industrial complex or from corporate interest, and as a result often exist as an ideological expression of these institutions.

Maybe this was unavoidable, the forces underlying the technical arts world too strong to ever be meaningfully opposed by a few dissenting voices, but I struggle to think of anything in the modern world for which this is not true. Maybe a game jam, or a book fair, or a block party should not be the centerpieces of our activism. These things have their place, but should not be confused for things like street actions (protests, counter-demonstrations against the far-right), grassroots electoral activism, coalition-building between social and economic justice groups, public disobedience (like the destruction of hostile architecture), accessibility and anti-poverty efforts, workplace organizing and so on. This work can be thankless and grueling, but it’s absolutely vital. Still, engaging with media and culture in a way that actually resonates with alienated people is a good way to let them know there’s something else available to them than resigned helplessness. Perhaps it seems like too much effort for too small and marginal a community, but going to any independent games site will bring up literally thousands of entries, much of it being made by people under the age of 30. Many of these people work multiple jobs while making their art for free or almost free, or work under precarious conditions (employment instability, contract work, etc,) and scrape by on crowdfunding, and many–as I’ve experienced both by playing their works and by actually building relationships with them–lean acutely left and hunger for more robust progressive spaces that reward creative experimentation, but often lack the time, energy or organizational guidance that would help them achieve those goals.

But even more broadly, more people play games than identify strictly as “gamers.” Plenty of people who do work in the industry recognize this term as a corporate invention, and don’t actually resemble the stereotype of the socially-awkward, emotionally stunted, self-pitying bourgeois recluses that so much of the industry has historically built its marketing around. While mainstream ideologies in the subculture tend to range from milquetoast liberalism to right-wing libertarianism to cryptofascism, quite a lot more people consume media like games, comics and even anime than are intimately involved with the worst elements of these subcultures. Snobbishly refusing to make any use of these “deviant” or “degenerate” new forms and reacting with hostility at anyone who tries to strikes me as missing an opportunity, and as needlessly ceding cultural ground to people we seek to oppose at every level.

Art as political response

Though GamerGate is nearly incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t been following it closely, it’s unusual in that it captured the attention of people who have nothing all to do with video games when it’s ostensibly preoccupied with whether certain online blogs have properly disclosed their writers’ ties to indie game developers. A recent post at Breitbart, however, helps to explain GamerGate’s appeal: It’s an accessible front for a new kind of culture warrior to push back against the perceived authoritarianism of the social-justice left.

Vlad Chituc (2015) “Gamergate: A culture war for people who don’t play video games”, New Republic

Reactionaries–from bog standard republicans to the fractured jumble of fascoid revanchists that make up the so-called “alt-right”–have for a long time viewed nerd culture as part of the broader culture war. This is why Gamergate attracted conservative figures like Christina Hoff Sommers, Todd Kincannon and Milo Yiannopoulos (both disgraced), Paul Joseph Watson, Mike Cernovich and so on. I don’t think gaming or memes really impacted, say, the election, and I tend to think the way we talk about Gamergate–as though it’s the cause of, rather than a product of, the resurgence of the far-right–misses the forest for the trees. I don’t think leftist and labour activists ought to go out of their way to address these hard-identified gamers either. There’s no reason for us not to remain critical of the industry and the ideologies it reproduces.

But it’s obvious that this is a group that gets really anxious when they start to feel like they don’t have control over “nerd culture” anymore, and who have in many ways acted as shock troops to dissuade people from asking too many questions about the industry’s inner practices. In retrospect, there was an opportunity with Gamergate for those in and around the industry to really interrogate the relationship between its issues with labour and its issues with incubating angry reactionary nerds, and for the most part that didn’t happen. It couldn’t, because those who were most likely to suffer professional and personal attack weren’t organized, and still aren’t. It’s no wonder so many YouTube celebrities turn out to be fascists. Actually embracing those who work in or around these fields and who are desperately trying to inject a little grace and intelligence into the medium may help weaken that stranglehold. Not such a terrible idea considering how many kids are watching the likes of PewDiePie and JonTron.

https://twitter.com/liberalism_txt/status/894978105021956096

We’ve seen this work to an extent: bots that tweet out liberal self-owns and dank communist memes can help bring together people who feel their concerns aren’t otherwise being articulated and addressed, and find if nothing else in this a bond with other like-minded souls. I don’t think these things are necessarily directly persuasive, but they do allow us to give voice to that which both invigorates us and that which causes us to despair.

https://twitter.com/ra/status/828686383623593985

Tim Mulkerin (2017) Nazi-punching videogames are flooding the internet, thanks to Richard Spencer

They’re also a natural consequence of a diverse mass of people all feeling the same disillusionment and disgust in their everyday lives, needing solidarity but also craving catharsis. Taking a second look at these commodities we mindlessly consume may not in itself be movement building, but it can help put things in perspective. (And if these things are in your estimation not meaningful, why waste time getting angry at the people who do find value in them, especially if those people are your comrades in every way that does matter? Don’t we value a diversity of skills and tactics?)

We know this can work with podcasts, publications, flyers, banners, zines, comics, and music, despite the problems endemic to all creative industries. Not only can these things let people know that in fact they aren’t alone, but they also give us an opportunity to craft a compelling alternative vision. Unfortunate though it is that the most visible videogames tend to express the vilest characteristics of the industry, certain indie critical darling games have proven that the same tools can be used to vividly illustrate the daily grind of making ends meet while working a minimum wage job, the dehumanizing procedure of immigration bureaucracy, or the desperate, soul-crushing banality of office work.

Games of labour and the avant-garde

Richard Hofmeier Cart Life

Lucas Pope Papers, Please

Molleindustria Everyday The Same Dream

The Tiniest Shark Redshirt

Jake Clover Nuign Spectre

micha cárdenas Redshift and Portalmetal

Paloma Dawkins, Gardenarium

Colestia Crisis Theory

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Even more avant-garde works like Nuign Spectre or Redshift and Portalmetal use mixed media aesthetics to illustrate the grotesqueness of prevailing ideologies and conditions, while the dreamy work of an artist like Paloma Dawkins allows us to envision worlds which are seemingly impossible but nonetheless worthy of imagining. Colestia’s Crisis Theory subverts the tech world’s own obsession with Taylorism and systems, specifically using flow chart representation of capitalism to lay bare its inherent instability.

This isn’t to repeat the canard about games being more inherently capable of producing empathy than other art forms, or that we ought to focus on one art form to the exclusion of others. But I do think the exercise of ranking different art forms according to how sophisticated they are is inherently reactionary, arbitrarily limits the scope of expression, and constrains our ability to cultivate the new and different when it’s staring us right in the face.

As film critic Shannon Strucci pointed out in her video “why you should care about VIDEO GAMES”–which was made in response to the very attitude I’m describing–no conservative holdout in the history of the arts has ever been vindicated by a wholesale dismissal of a new form or movement as delinquent and therefore not worth engagement.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system.

Walter Benjamin (1936) The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

But this is just regular old art criticism. Not all art is or should be explicitly used toward political ends, and games are no different. Walter Benjamin famously warned about confounding aesthetic with politics, and how doing so creates space for fascism. Grossman’s piece mentioned above ultimately links the dopey neoliberalism of Brooklyn Nine-Nine to an underlying apologia for a racist police state; this sort of prioritization of representation and aesthetics is commonplace in liberal bourgeois rhetoric (the fixation, for example, liberal pundits have with condemning bigotry as being a “bad look” rather than being actively harmful in calculable ways). The tech world, too, is remarkably consumed with style over substance–it’s a world where rainbow capitalism and tokenism reign supreme while the oligarchs who run it not only would be too happy to work on behalf of fascist governments, but have in the past and are in the present.

make this into a footer link

rainbow capitalism

tokenism

“IBM ‘dealt directly with Holocaust organisers'”, The Guardian

“Peter Thiel, Trump’s tech pal, explains himself”, The New York Times

In Ways of Seeing, art critic John Berger tracks the history of the reification of dominant ideologies through art, from colonialism to sexism to capitalism. Berger describes the nostalgic yearning for more “legitimate” forms of art displaced by newer technology as fundamentally reactionary and regressive, writing:

“The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value, has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible. Its function is nostalgic. It is the final empty claim for the continuing values of an oligarchic, undemocratic culture.”

How to use games politically

Suffice it to say, there is little in the history of games or the arts generally that should stop them from expressing reactionary tendencies. It can’t really be helped, after all, if art is to be a reflection of current and historical conditions. By extension, the most regressive elements of gaming culture tend to value only those games that functionally and aesthetically resemble classic games, and classical forms of art. If games are a reflection of an industry full of people who literally want to suck the blood of the young and think unions are a trick of the devil, that’s at least in part true because art forms that preceded them, like oil painting, are a reflection of an inbred aristocracy that believed in the divine right of the propertied classes to rule and thought that they were justified in pillaging entire peoples because of their superior skull shape. That doesn’t mean we ought to deny subversive art where it exists, and it’s a piss poor reason for refusing to support its cultivation in new forms which are as-yet barely understood.

I want socialist, feminist, anti-racist, anti-fascist art to exist anywhere art is being produced, even if it’s with computers, and especially if its core demographic is young people and kids.

Supporting bold, avant-garde and subversive art is a much bigger social project than simply using what exists toward political ends, but I think if we are going to use what exists for political ends it’s useful to think about how what we create can reconfirm our reality. It’s also worth pointing out that plenty of political art is embarrassing, ineffectual or just plain preachy. The same has been true for lots of “serious” games (maybe even some of the ones I listed above), which may be accused of being boring, simplistic, or worse at conveying their overall point than a book or article on the same subject. (I would counter that games should not try to be like articles or books, but more like paintings, where being simple and straightforward isn’t such a big deal. I would also caution that it’s possible to engage serious subject matter while maintaining a sense of humour.) Conversely, when political operatives try to make use of games–rather than game developers trying to portray current events–this also runs the risk of coming off as condescending, tin-eared and trite. For example, the Clinton campaign made use of a “game-style app” called Hillary 2016 that Teen Vogue described as like “FarmVille but for politics”.

https://twitter.com/emily_uhlmann/status/757570149490761728

But I don’t think this is a bad way to approach politics because they used a game–it’s a bad way to approach politics because it avoids addressing constituents and answering simple policy questions. It betrayed a valuing of data over people that so many find bloodlessly reptilian about tech evangelism. Also, Christ does it sound boring.

A politically meaningful use of interactive art could mean the creation of workshops for marginalized communities, similar to the Skins Workshop for indigenous kids run by AbTec, a research network based in Montreal. Or, it could mean the kind of partnerships like the one Subaltern Games had with Jacobin to promote their game No Pineapple Left Behind, thereby using games as yet another way to engage people about issues like colonialism and capitalism in the global south. I’ve personally recently become involved with the Montreal collective behind Game Curious, an independent annual gaming showcase and workshop that seeks to bridge the gap between the medium, non-gamers, and radical activist groups organizing around real-world political struggles.

Initiative for Indigenous Futures | Workshops: Bringing Aboriginal Storytelling to Experimental Digital Media The Skins workshops aim to empower Native youth to be more than just consumers of new technologies by showing them how to be producers of new technologies.

Subaltern Games | Jacobin sponsorship “We are proud to announce that we will be collaborating with Jacobin Magazine to help promote our upcoming game, No Pineapple Left Behind. […] Jacobin will tell all of the leftists about our upcoming Kickstarter campaign (even YOU). They are also providing copies of their book Class Action: An Activist Teacher’s Handbook as backer rewards.”

Game Curious | Are you game curious? “Game Curious Montréal is a free, 6-week long program all about games, for people who don’t necessarily identify as “gamers.” Sessions are two hours long and will provide an introduction to a wide variety of games, as well as open discussions and group activities, in a zero-pressure, beginner-friendly environment.”

Likewise, mainstream gaming symbolism can be subverted toward leftist messaging–the appropriation of famous imagery or characters for “bootleg” leftist art could be a means for engaging youth culture and kids. Even having something like a YouTube channel or Twitch stream to engage young people on their interests from a left perspective could help shape healthier, more progressive perspectives. And, although the use of incubators and game jams are not inherently radical, and in many ways benefit the industry by training new exploitable workforces, there’s still no reason we can’t sometimes use some version of them for social and teaching events in the future.

[bctt tweet=”Why should we use games to engage and give voice to people, when other art forms exist?” username=”meminsf”]

There remains the question of why we should use games when we can use any other art form–and especially literature–to engage people on ideas and give exploited or marginalized communities more tools for making themselves heard. My answer may not be satisfying, but it’s this: why not?

I want to use all of these tools and more. I want to use whatever’s available to me and whatever works. I want to go wherever there’s movement and culture, and especially where there’s a mass of alienated, unorganized young people looking for an alternative. I see no reason to leave that on the table, or to throw fledgling modes of expression to people who post videos of themselves drinking a gallon of milk to prove their manhood and long for the Fatherland to cleanse itself in the blood of the degenerate races, or the corporations that love them.

Of course it means more to me because it’s my regrettable industry and subculture, and I don’t blame anyone if they read this and still can’t find it in themselves to give a shit. Still, these cultural properties aren’t going away, so we might as well engage with them. More than that, we can make good on the promise of so many oleaginous tech disruptors that Gaming is revolutionary in how it makes possible different and exciting new worlds. Isn’t a new world what we want?

References

ResistJam brings game devs together against authoritarianism

Your app isn’t helping the people of Saudi Arabia

George Monbiot on neoliberalism (a fantastic article that both introduces neoliberalism to those unsure what the word means, and gives those who have been using the word for years an enriched perspective)

Eleanor Robertson (2016) Get Mad and Get Even, Meanjin Quarterly

Jonathan Ore (2017) “Viewer discretion advised? Your child’s favourite YouTuber may be posting offensive content”, CBC News

Laura Stampler (2016) “Hillary Clinton campaign launches ‘Hillary 2016) game app”, Teen Vogue

The Gamer Trump Trope

Patrick Klepek (2017) “The power of video games in the age of Trump”, Vice

Christopher J. Ferguson (2017) “How will video games fare in the age of Trump?”, Huffington Post

Asi Burak (2017) “Trump as Gamer-in-Chief”, Polygon

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Labour issue examples

Children as young as seven mining cobalt used in smartphones, The Guardian

Chinese university students forced to manufacture PS4 in Foxconn plant, Forbes

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Otto von Bismarck, Wikiquote

Prince Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg (1 April 1815 – 30 July 1898), was a German aristocrat and statesman; he was Prime Minister of Prussia (1862–1890), and the first Chancellor of Germany (1871–1890).

Die Politik ist die Lehre vom Möglichen. Politics is the art of the possible.

Interview (11 August 1867) with Friedrich Meyer von Waldeck of the St. Petersburgische Zeitung: Aus den Erinnerungen eines russischen Publicisten. 2. Ein Stündchen beim Kanzler des norddeutschen Bundes. In: Die Gartenlaube (1876) p. 858 de.wikisource. Back to text

Politically meaningful games under neoliberalism Since Donald Trump won the US presidential election one year ago, the games sector has tried to work out how to use our medium to resist the rise of the far right.

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nofomoartworld · 8 years ago

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The Ascent: dynamics and geometries of the workplace

Ilona Gaynor, The Ascent. Exhibition view at the International Biennial of Design in Saint Etienne. Photo: Ilona Gaynor

Corporations and other large firms, especially U.S. ones, routinely send their employees on team-building survival courses. Most of these one or two-day experiences teach participants how to light a fire, build a shelter, find edible plants and otherwise ‘survive in the jungle.’

For some companies, however, a survival experience is not enough. They want to see how individuals within their team can handle extreme situations, how much it takes for them to ‘hit their threshold’. That’s how white-collar workers find themselves in fake aircraft cabins, real indoor pools and inflatable raft, learning how to survive plane crashes, fires, war scenarios and other catastrophes.

Organizations that had so far instructed people working for the police, the army or security firms are now adapting their equipment, training and simulations to coach these new, usually desk-bound workers.

A preliminary exercise in learning to escape from a submerged cockpit. Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times

When Olivier Peyricot, Scientific Director of the International Biennial of Design in Saint Etienne, invited Ilona Gaynor to reflect on the main theme of the biennale, work, its shifting paradigms and future, she didn’t come up with an object, didn’t propose any near-future scenario nor speculated on the impact that AI, 3D printing or climate change will have on jobs.

Instead, she found inspiration in an article about plane crash simulation for office employees, reflected on the dynamics of social mobility, wrote a 4 act play and designed a set for a theater performance that might never take place.

Ilona Gaynor, The Ascent. Photo: Ilona Gaynor

The play is called The Ascent. It centers around a law firm that goes on a morale boosting training day. The exercise takes place inside a plane designed specifically to simulate a plane crash and teach people how to escape the mayhem that ensues. However, there’s a (real) technical problem and things quickly get out of hands inside the fake plane. Everything goes terribly terribly wrong for the characters of this fiction inside a fiction. Not that you care for any of them. They are rude, catty and supremely unpleasant.

In their daily life, these people scramble for a promotion. On the plane, they compete as ruthlessly for sheer survival.

The Ascent is an intriguing parable about the ecosystems of power, about people who have lost any illusion they might have had about their job but still fight for it, even if that means hitting their colleagues below the belt or submitting themselves to some inane team-building activity.

Ilona Gaynor, The Ascent. Exhibition view at the International Biennial of Design in Saint Etienne. Photo: Ilona Gaynor

The work attempts to examine the discrete nature of class politics; paralleling contemporary workplace geometries from multiple vantage points; subtly questioning the assumption that all progress in life or in the workplace is purely vertical. It’s as much about finding escape routes as it is about ‘climbing a ladder’.

I asked Ilona Gaynor to tell us more about her participation to the Design Biennale in Saint-Etienne:

Hi Ilona! The Ascent seems to push the boundaries of design, the discipline itself but also the way it is exhibited and experienced. Visually, the work is very seductive but to experience it, the visitors have to properly sit down, read the full play, imagine the protagonists, perform the interactions in his or her head and form their own conclusions and associations with what work culture means to them. Why did you choose a setting that resists so many of the usual codes of design and design exhibitions?

It was a commission from Olivier Peyricot for the 10th edition of the St Etienne Biennale and it seemed somewhat important for him that the constraints of the previous editions be addressed, in wanting to make it a more conceptually challenging design exhibition. As opposed to somewhere like the Milan, Salone del Mobile – which is very market oriented and relies heavily on expensive spectacle and brand association. Olivier asked a team of writers, curators and researchers from backgrounds in philosophy and art criticism (rather than designers) to search for writers, artists and designers that worked in contrary to this and I suppose this was myself, amongst others.

Designers for a while now have been describing their work as “narrative” or “fiction” without really pertaining to what that might entail and how to utilize fiction within design as tool for exploring language, sequence, chronologies and so on (and of course there are exceptions.) But it’s become a fairly benign turn of phrase: ‘design fiction’, ‘fiction futures’, ‘speculative fictions’, ‘virtual fictions’ and so on; for the justification of making work that needn’t exist or be imagined within the critical constraints, complexities or nuances of our reality. It’s become a confusing and lost space that has somehow separated itself too far apart from both: its original critical intent and the opposite end of the spectrum; in so much that I wonder where the motivations for making all this work lies… I’m fairly certain that it no longer lies in the nature of criticism, but elsewhere… design has begun to reposition itself as a sort of stubbed, depoliticized science fiction; rather than shaping and regulating the contemporary critical imagination.

As such I wanted to stay away from the conventions of design; particularly speculative design. The Ascent is an experiment. Whilst I’m not suggesting at all that this work comes close to resolving my own thoughts about the broader issues of design… it is an attempt to relate design, language and image in a way that is more than simply suggestive of fiction, but a written work of fiction. An affirmed allegory; grounded in its criticism (in its most traditional semantic sense) that examines a particular aspect of the contemporary working condition – presented as a four act play and its accompanying set. It was also important for me to exhibit something that wasn’t burdened with the reliance of an object as its only voice with which to speak.

So I wrote a play that uses design to reinforce its spatial and political narrative; as opposed to the reverse.

Ilona Gaynor, The Ascent. Exhibition view at the International Biennial of Design in Saint Etienne. Photo: Ilona Gaynor

How do you manage to make visitors of the biennale engage with a theater play that is never performed?

I’ve always thought the magic of an experience was in never experiencing it. In that designing and writing in anticipation was far more interesting, more imaginative somehow… I loved the book designed by M/M Paris Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made. It’s a curated collection of the research materials for Kubrick’s unrealised film Napoleon. A pantheon of a project in that it was all the preparatory material for a film that would only ever come to exist as a dense collection pre-production notes. Depicted through: 15,000 locations that were scouted and documented, Napoleonic images, sketches, architectural drawings, costumes, typographic title studies and dialogues between film studios and historians. It’s a beautiful collection of research materials that I imagine would have been disappointing if eventually realized, in contrast to the vast and acute details of his proposal. I often think that most events and films were probably more imaginative and compelling on paper then in their final realization.

In contrary to this, it would have been very difficult to keep up a performance of longevity throughout the course of an exhibition with thousands of visitors. It was hard to tell how many engaged with the work… and it’s never been something that’s really concerned me; but it is a question that always comes up and I think it’s a question that’s highly unique to design. But my primary attempt to engage with the audience was in the design of the set itself. Minimal in its geometry; the planes structure is formed in tubular steel and designed to be a reduced three dimensional line drawing, that could be seen in plan section from above as printed in the play manuscript. The structure; rendered in white; details the fuselage, wing span, tail fin and pointed nose of the cockpit. The interior is divided into four sections: First Class, Business Class, Economy Class and Pilots Quarters and in each of these sections sits rows of folding chairs that are proportionally spaced in correspondence to the class they are located in; some having more leg room then others. As written in the play, the characters are separated amongst the three class sections according to their position within the law firm they all work at: junior staff, administrative and secretarial staff were sat in economy, the partners in first class and the senior staff within business class. Positioned on selected back rests of the seats are signs labelling character seat assignments; freezing them in position for the audience to imagine them sitting in position; undisturbed after boarding. Insert United Airlines joke here

I chose the location of a plane for The Ascent for a variety of reasons… but one aspect that was particularly important is the pre-existing connotations that relate to class and the tensions that surface when thinking about air travel.

The visual and spatial divide of wealth, status and political standing that occurs within such an acute space is always really striking to me upon boarding. Of course, the ironic overbearance being that if it were to crash, we’d probably all die just as equally. In act four however; entitled “Dying,” the plane tips backwards, submerging economy class in water, forcing the passengers to ascend; climbing up the seats to reach first class – which ultimately sets on fire. Those whom have managed survive that sequence of disasters, are either forcibly drowned by other co-workers (other lawyers) or are electrocuted when a powerline falls into the water.

Ilona Gaynor, The Ascent. Photo: Ilona Gaynor

Ilona Gaynor, The Ascent. Exhibition view at the International Biennial of Design in Saint Etienne. Photo: Ilona Gaynor

If you had the money, would you consider having it performed? or turned into a video?

There will be several readings of it with each of the characters being read by actors, separate from the set. But no performance in any kind of a spatial way, although I’d certainly change my mind if the appropriate opportunity presented itself.

The work evokes a TV series (you mention House of Cards for example in your essay) and also Hollywood disaster movies. So why did you choose to communicate your idea through a theatre play?

I don’t remember mentioning Hollywood disaster films.

You didn’t. I’m the one who thought about disaster movies…

Historically, theatre existed as a political tool to enhance the popularity of leaders needing support. Funded by the rich and powerful through taxation; with the hopes that the success of the plays they had sponsored would provide them with a way into politics. But it soon evolved… becoming a medium with which to critically investigate the world they lived in and what it meant to be human through three strands of dramatization: comedy, tragedy and satyr. I chose theatre, rather than television as a way to refer back to these traditions of political theatre; whereby the subjects of contention were always class related and often dealt with ideas of labor, abuse of power and man’s relationship with the gods.

When I think of “work” I’m immediately drawn into an aesthetic of air conditioned office spaces, with shitty stained carpets and suffocating plants gasping for fresh air; amongst the smell of cheap percolated coffee and the sound of photocopiers. It’s a rich behavioral and acutely aesthetic environment; rife with cynicism. I’ve been captivated by it for years and was something I was keen to take a closer look at. I love the original British TV series The Office (2001) and Chris Morris’s Jam (2000) and I somehow wanted to captivate and exaggerate the criticisms that could be drawn out through amplifying what might happen in the event of putting a clash of archetypes in a pressured, but perilous environment or situation.

The play is set on an airplane simulator that is used as a training environment for coping with extreme scenario situations. These types of simulation experiences are used by organisations; such as investment banking and law firms as away-day experiences for training their staff; the implied implication being that it would improve team work under pressure and a boost staff morale. I came across this phenomenon upon reading an article published in the New York Times titled “Need a better morale boost in the workplace? Simulate a plane crash.” It was a title I imagined would have been read aloud by a character from Beetlejuice. The article detailed the nature of simulating plane crashes, whereby the fuselage crashes into water and you and your colleagues are all trapped under water and must escape before drowning. There’s a lovely quote that reads “There are specific types of groups that like high-risk activities,” he said, citing lawyers and people in sales, public relations or marketing. Those in social work, nursing, finance or engineering, he said, might not be as keen to face the fear of drowning.” Quite simply I thought that this was it… this is enough material here to shape a comedy; a unique situation that would escalate the typical work place tensions in a pressured environment; where politics, bias, life and death was all conflated to margins of time.

Trainees brace before entering the water in the simulator. Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times

Students help one another board an inflatable raft. Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times

Participants learn to swim as a group. Credit George Etheredge for The New York Times

The Ascent is part of a biennale that explores the work practices of the future. Your vision on the theme is bleak. The employees of the company are rude and selfish, there is still a lot of sexism, the plane staff advertise coca cola and starbucks as the only way to appease nervous passengers, etc. Does this scenario echo the direction that work culture is taking?

I think I was the only designer that didn’t position my work within the future. I never do; optimists belong in the future and I’m certainly not an optimist. We already live in a dystopia and any attempt to imagine it in the future would be a facile endeavor somehow. As such I imagine (the western and middle class) working environment is already this way… although, much subtler in its ruthlessness. I’m not sure my framing is all that bleak but rather an outwardly cynical view. The play was actually written as a black comedy and I was told when it was translated into French became a much, much darker read.

The characters were highly exaggerated, so much so that they were written as paired archetypes; notated as (One and Two) that were designed to reflect one another’s selfish, uncompromising and draconian nature. As previously mentioned all the characters were organised and positioned by class within the corresponding sections of the plane. Among them: The Pricks are located in First Class, The Passives in Business Class and The Nobodies and numbered seats were located in Economy Class. Female characters have no personal identification and were simply labeled as Woman One and Two. I felt it was important to heighten the sexist and abusive nature directed at the female characters, whilst at the same time making light of it…

The essay “Our Attempts to Ascend. Escape Routes and Cosmic Trapdoors” was written for the exhibition catalogue and puts forth a repositioning of the current definitions of work, as a form of contemporary escapology. A spatial practice that is navigated between those that move horizontally– adopting moves, conflicts and entanglements; as a reckoning material force with which to escape their shrinking space, whilst afterwards recover their expansiveness (the Frank Underwoods). And those that attempt to move vertically– but either through mental exhaustion and exploitation; fail to fully discern the required amount of complexity in relations, impulses and directives… resulting in compelled attempts to escape in an effort to save themselves, rather than being able to successfully maneuver.

The Ascent attempts to reflect a moment in time, when these two definitions collide.

Ilona Gaynor, The Ascent. EExhibition view at the International Biennial of Design in Saint Etienne. Photo: Ilona Gaynor

Thanks Ilona!

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thecosydragon · 8 years ago

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My latest blog post from the cosy dragon: Interview with Frank Diadone

An Interview with Frank Diadone, author of Life’s Equation

For those who haven’t read it yet, can you give us a quick summary of what Life’s Equation is all about?

It’s really about asking ourselves ‘What is my purpose?” More specifically, questioning whether or not we’re on the right path. As far back as I can remember, I’ve attempted to make sense of my own purpose in life, sometimes accepting only what seemed realistic while disregarding pretty much anything else. Most of us subconsciously go through this same exercise throughout multiple stages of our lives, while others constantly surrender to the critical voice in their head, replacing the possibility and creativity with resistance and doubt.

We all have the tendency to set unfulfilling goals for ourselves, which restricts our personal potential and makes us miss valuable opportunities because of our own struggle with self-doubt.

That’s how Life’s Equation came together. I wanted to share my own stories about people I’ve met along the way who influenced me in inspiring ways while also elaborating further on some basic, but unexpected truths and life lessons that I hope, in turn, will inspire readers of the book. I hope readers will celebrate their experiences through logically discovering their true purpose, all while helping to make the world a better place in the process.

You are accomplished in so many parts of your life. What inspired you to take the plunge into authoring a book?

I’ve always had a unique, and I believe, acute perspective on reality. I also almost always apply logic to projects, challenges and truly any issue I’m dealt with, working to eliminate and/or reduce any emotional barriers that can cloud judgment and clarity. Throughout my life, I’ve had the ability to see my life and experiences both internally and externally. In other words, while I’m experiencing situations in the moment whether mundane or extraordinary, I’m collecting the information, almost as an observer, to be able to apply it in a scientific manner to gain a clearer perspective and understanding. I began putting a pen to paper to create a formula that made sense of one’s experiences and how information gained from those experiences is constituted through exploring a common energy in all living things twenty years ago. The reflection of my life’s experiences through this process is what inspired me to be a writer.

Memoirs are such a delicate craft – it’s really a balance between personal and the universal. Was it difficult to balance the two?

Not really, when you have the connection of the personal to the universal, clarity and balance of the two become more accessible. The process itself was transformational and certainly there were certain roadblocks as it was almost like working in real time. Different from most people, I don’t have a problem putting myself out there, in fact I needed to check in to make sure it wasn’t too much and wanted to keep my stories relevant and with empathy for the readers.

What do you consider to be the most essential elements of a well-written memoir?

I strongly believe that when one chooses to write such a personal exposé, it’s essential to go “all in.” In other words, if you’re not going to put everything out there from the beginning to the end, even being remotely tentative, you might want to choose another route. It’s just my personal opinion, but I believe writing in a relatable manner including honest stories, both humorous and heartbreaking is essential to a good memoir.

Each chapter provides incredible insight and an overall lesson. Do you have a favorite from the book?

That’s a hard question because I believe the lessons in all of the chapters are pertinent to the message. However, if I were to answer the question honestly, I do have a few; Chapter four on perspective is one of the individually empowering concepts that the reader can actually have control over. I also like the final chapter on “purpose” because it incorporates imagination in order to help craft one’s future.

Your book has been impacting people across all ages and stages of their life. What’s the biggest lesson you hope they take away from reading Life’s Equation?

The feedback both verbally and through written reviews has been extraordinary. I’ve had people both young and old thank me in very emotional manners for writing the book and have expressed to me how much the message impacted them personally and often times helped with healing. I hope that the readers gain an understanding that while we are all unique in our own way, there really is a common energy in all of us. I hope that message is clarified and inspires them to want to help make the world a better place, not just for themselves, but for all.

A percentage your book sales goes toward United Cerebral Palsy. Can you tell us a bit more about how and why you got involved with the organization?

As children, alongside my family, my sister and I were both volunteers for UCP as a result of my brother having Cerebral Palsy. In dedicating my book to my brother, I felt it necessary to get involved with a related organization to help in any way I could and formed a relationship with the Director of Institutional Support and donate $1 of every book sale to UCP.

That’s truly incredible! Can you tell us a bit about your brother Anthony, and how his CP impacted your family dynamic growing up? How did it affect you?

Anthony was and still is my true hero and my inspiration for practically every charge in my life. While we never exchanged words verbally to each other we had a very special connection. His joy of life despite his extraordinary inhibiting circumstances far surpassed any level of contentment I have ever witnessed in any human being. While our family growing up was restricted to doing practically any normal family activities, outings or vacations together, Anthony’s existence enriched the dynamic in our family and shaped who we all are today.

What’s on the horizon for you as an author? Can we expect to see more writing from you in 2017 and beyond?

I am currently working on book number two as we speak. It is a continuation of Life’s Equation by taking the ideas and concepts to a new level attempting to address issues we all face as a society. I have a vision of a brighter more peaceful existence for all living things and I see a clear path on how we can get there. My next book will be a roadmap for peace.

from http://ift.tt/2nfPaJu

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The Siena Option: What one saint did in the face of a troubled Church

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The Siena Option: What one saint did in the face of a troubled Church

Siena, Italy, Sep 16, 2018 / 03:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- When St. Catherine of Siena was alive in 14th century in what is now Italy, it looked like it was the end of the world.