#Culture Media Market Report

[evermoredeluxe]

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Grand Total: A Record $2 Billion

By Ben Sisario

For the last 21 months, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has been the biggest thing in music — a phenomenon that has engulfed pop culture, dominated news coverage and boosted local economies around the world.

Now we know exactly how big.

Through its 149th and final show, which took place in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Sunday, Swift’s tour sold a total of $2,077,618,725 in tickets. That’s two billion and change — double the gross ticket sales of any other concert tour in history and an extraordinary new benchmark for a white-hot international concert business.

Those figures were confirmed to The New York Times for the first time by Taylor Swift Touring, the singer’s production company. While the financial details of the Eras Tour have been a subject of constant industry speculation since tickets were first offered more than two years ago — through a presale so in-demand it crashed Ticketmaster’s system — Swift has never authorized disclosure of the tour’s numbers until now.

The official results are not far from the estimates that trade journalists and industry analysts have been crunching for months. But they solidify the enormous scale of Swift’s accomplishment. Just a few months ago, Billboard magazine reported that Coldplay had set an industry record with $1 billion in ticket sales for its 156-date Music of the Spheres World Tour — a figure that is just half of Swift’s total for a similar stretch of shows in stadiums and arenas.

Every date on the Eras Tour was sold out, and spare tickets were scalped at eye-popping prices — or traded within the protective Swiftie fan community, often at face value.

According to Swift’s touring company, a total of 10,168,008 people attended the concerts, which means that, on average, each seat went for about $204. That is well above the industry average of $131 for the top 100 tours around the world in 2023, according to Pollstar, a trade publication.

The biggest single night’s attendance was in Melbourne, Australia, on Feb. 16, 2024, with 96,006. And Swift’s eight nights at Wembley Stadium in London, which she played more than any other venue, drew 753,112 people — about as many as live in Seattle.

As gigantic as they are, the figures revealed by Swift’s company are only part of the overall business that has surrounded the tour. They exclude her extraordinary merchandise sales, for example, a product line so in demand that Swift opened stadium sales booths a day early in some markets to sell T-shirts, hoodies and Christmas ornaments to fans, ticketed or not.

And they do not count the secondary market of online ticket resellers. According to StubHub, the Eras Tour was the biggest-selling tour in the platform’s two-decade history, and last year it outsold Beyoncé’s shows by a factor of five. Another ticketing company, Victory Live, said the average price for resold tickets to the Eras Tour’s three Vancouver dates was $2,952. (Swift earned nothing from resold tickets.)

Beyond its numbers, the Eras Tour has been a mega-event that elevated the already-super-famous Swift to a new level, making her an epochal symbol of cultural saturation on the level of the Beatles in the 1960s or Michael Jackson in his ’80s prime. Swift’s every onstage utterance, outfit swap or offstage sighting was thoroughly documented, on social media and in the mainstream press, with news outlets big and small rushing to capture Swifties’ clicks. Online, fans tracked every tweak to the three-hour-plus set lists.

As the story of Swift’s tour took shape, it seemed to contain its own eras within it. First, in November 2022, came the ticket fiasco, when Ticketmaster was overwhelmed by what it said were 3.5 billion online requests for tickets, many from scalpers’ bots. The furor over those problems led to a Senate Judiciary hearing in January 2023, at which lawmakers from both parties openly called Ticketmaster’s corporate parent, Live Nation, a monopoly. (This year, the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against Live Nation, calling for a breakup of the company.)

Then came the tour and the folkways that developed around it, like fans trading hand-assembled friendship bracelets. After the tour’s stop in Kansas City, Mo., a public flirtation between Swift and Travis Kelce, the star tight end of the Kansas City Chiefs, developed into a full-on romance, with the pop star and the football hunk sharing a field-level smooch after the Chiefs defeated the San Francisco 49ers at Super Bowl LVIII in February. The photographers definitely did not miss it.

In October 2023, she released “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” a nearly three-hour concert film, released through a direct distribution deal with AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest theater operator. It sold about $93 million in tickets during its opening weekend, and ended up with $261 million in worldwide grosses, according to Box Office Mojo. The next step was a streaming deal with Disney+. A 256-page hardcover tour book, released last month through Target stores, sold 814,000 print copies in its first two days on sale.

As the tour moved to Europe in 2024, it narrowly avoided what could have been a major catastrophe when a terrorist bomb plot was uncovered before three planned shows in Vienna. Those events were canceled and never rescheduled.

Although Swift has largely avoided the news media during the tour, over time she has pulled back the curtain a bit to reveal some of how it came together. To prepare herself for the physical demands of the show, she trained for six months, with a cardio regimen that included singing the entire set list while running on a treadmill, she told Time magazine.

“I knew this tour was harder than anything I’d ever done before by a long shot,” the magazine quoted her as saying. “I finally, for the very first time, physically prepared correctly.”

The music video for “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” from her latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department” — her third release over the course of the tour, including two rerecorded versions of older albums — has behind-the-scenes clips confirming some of the stagecraft mechanics that fans have carefully cataloged on social media, like how she “dives” each night through a “hole” in the stage (onto a soft cushion held by crew members) and how she is ferried backstage in a dummy janitor’s cart.

The tour concludes just as Swift celebrates yet another win: “Tortured Poets” has returned to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart for a 16th week, with help from vinyl and CD sales of the 35-track “Anthology” edition of the album, which Swift released on Black Friday, also through Target. “Tortured Poets” is by far the biggest-selling album of the year so far.

Swift is up for six awards at the Grammys in February, including album of the year for “Tortured Poets” and both record and song of the year for one of its singles, “Fortnight.”

At a recent tour stop in Toronto, as the tour neared its end, Swift teared up as she delivered valedictory remarks to fans.

“My band, my crew, all my fellow performers,” she said, “we have put so much of our lives into this, and you put so much of your lives into being with us tonight and to giving us that moment that we will never forget.”

[kenyatta]

https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology

There is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. We have called this orthodoxy `the Californian Ideology' in honour of the state where it originated. By naturalising and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian Ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless.  The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as WIRED and MONDO 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others. The new faith P has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete. On superficial reading, the writings of the Californian ideologists are an amusing cocktail of Bay Area cultural wackiness and in-depth analysis of the latest developments in the hi-tech arts, entertainment and media industries. Their politics appear to be impeccably libertarian - they want information technologies to be used to create a new `Jeffersonian democracy' in cyberspace in its certainties, the Californian ideology offers a fatalistic vision of the natural and inevitable triumph of the hi-tech free market.

from "The Californian Ideology" by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, 1 September 1995

[signalburst]

Shōgun Historical Shallow-Dive: the Final Part - The Samurai Were Assholes, When 'Accuracy' Isn't Accurate, Beautiful Art, and Where to From Here

Final part. There is an enormous cancer attached to the samurai mythos and James Clavell's orientalism that I need to address. Well, I want to, anyway. In acknowledging how great the 2024 adaptation of Shōgun is, it's important to engage with the fact that it's fiction, and that much of its marketed authenticity is fake. That doesn't take away from it being an excellent work of fiction, but it is a very important distinction to me.

If you want to engage with the cool 'honourable men with swords' trope without thinking any deeper, navigate away now. Beyond here, there are monsters - literal and figurative. If you're interested in how different forms of media are used to manufacture consent and shape national identity, please bear with me.

I think the makers of 2024's Shōgun have done a fantastic job. But there is one underlying problem they never fully wrestled with. It's one that Hiroyuki Sanada, the leading man and face of the production team, is enthusiastically supportive of. And with the recent announcement of Season 2, it's likely to return. You may disagree, but to me, ignoring this dishonours the millions of people who were killed or brutalised by either the samurai class, or people in the 20th century inspired by a constructed idea of them.

Why are we drawn to the samurai?

A pretty badly sourced, but wildly popular history podcast contends that 'The Japanese are just like everybody else, only more so.' I saw a post on here that tried to make the assertion that the show's John Blackthorne would have been exposed to as much violence as he saw in Japan, and wouldn't have found it abnormal.

This is incorrect. Obviously 16th and 17th century Europe were violent places, but they contained violence familiar to Europeans through their cultural lens. Why am I confidently asserting this? We have hundreds of letters, journals and reports from Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch and English expressing absolute horror about what they encountered. Testing swords on peasants was becoming so common that it would eventually become the law of the land. Crucifixion was enacted as a punishment for Christians - first by the Taiko, then by the Tokugawa shogunate - for irony's sake.

Before the end of the feudal period, battles would end with the taking of heads for washing and display. Depending on who was viewing them, this was either to honour them, or to gloat: 'I'm alive, you're dead.' These things were ritualised to the point of being codified when real-life Toranaga took control. Seppuku started as a cultural meme and ended up being the enforced punishment for any minor mistake for the 260 years the ruling samurai class acted as the nation's bureaucracy. It got more and more ritualised and flowery the more it got divorced from its origin: men being ordered by other men to kill themselves during a period of chaotic warfare. I've read accounts of samurai 'warriors' during the Edo period committing seppuku for being late for work. Not life-and-death warrior work - after Sekigahara, they were just book-keepers. They had desk jobs.

Since Europe's contact with Japan, the samurai myth has fascinated and appalled in equal measure. As time has gone on, the fascination has gone up and the horror has been dialled down. This is not an accident. This isn't just a change in the rest of the world's perception of the samurai. This is the result of approximately 120 years of Japanese government policies. Successive governments - nationalist, military authoritarian, and post-war democratic - began to lionize the samurai as the perfect warrior ideal, and sanitize the history of their origin and their heydey (the period Shōgun covers). It erases the fact that almost all of the fighting of the glorious samurai Sengoku Jidai was done by peasant ashigaru (levies), who had no choice.

It is important to never forget why this was done initially: to form an imagined-historical ideal of a fighting culture. An imagined fighting culture that Japanese invasion forces could emulate to take colonies and subdue foreign populations in WWI, and, much more brutally, in WWII. James Clavell came into contact with it as a Japanese Prisoner of War.

He just didn't have access to the long view, or he didn't care.

The Original Novel - How One Ayn Rand Fan Introduced Japan to America

There's a reason why 1975's Shogun novel contains so many historical anachronisms. James Clavell bought into a bunch of state-sanctioned lies, unachored in history, about the warring states period, the concept of bushido (manufactured after the samurai had stopped fighting), and the samurai class's role in Japanese history.

For the novel, I could go into great depth, but there are three things that stand out.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. He's a novelist, and he did what he liked. But Clavell's novel was groundbreaking in the 70's because it was sold as a lightly-fictionalised history of Japan. The unfortunate fact is the official version that was being taught at the time (and now) is horseshit, and used for far-right wing authoritarian/nationalist political projects. The Three Unifiers and the 'honour of the samurai' magnates at the time is a neat package to tell kids and adults, but it was manufactured by an early-20th century Japanese Imperial Government trying to harness nationalism for building up a war-ready population. Any slightly critical reading of the primary sources shows the samurai to be just like any ruling class - brutal, venal, self-interested, and horrifically cruel. Even to their contemporary warrior elites in Korea and China.

Fake history as propraganda. Clavell swallowed and regurgitated the 'death before dishonour', 'loyalty to the cause above all else', 'it's all for the Realm' messages that were deployed to justify Imperial Japanese Army Class-A war crimes during the war in the Pacific and the Creation of the Greater East Asian Co-Properity Sphere. This retroactive samurai ethos was used in the late Meiji restoration and early 20th century nationalist-military governments to radicalise young Japanese men into being willing to die for nothing, and kill without restraint. The best book on this is An Introduction to Japanese Society by Sugimoto Yoshio, but there is a vast corpus of scholarship to back it up.

Clavell's orientalism strays into outright racism. Despite the novel Shōgun undercutting John Blackthorne as a white savior in its final pages - showing him as just a pawn in the game - Clavell's politics come into play in every Asia Saga novel. A white man dominates an Asian culture through the power of capitalism. This is orthagonal to points 1 and 2, but Clavell was a devotee of Ayn Rand. There's a reason his protagonists all appear cut from the same cloth. They thrust their way into an unfamiliar society, they use their knowledge of trade and mercantilism to heroically save the day, they are remarked upon by the Asian characters as braver and stronger, and they are irresistible to the - mostly simpering, extremely submissive - caricatures of Asian women in his novels. Call it a product of its times or a product of Clavell's beliefs, I still find it repulsive. Clavell invents (nearly from whole cloth, actually) the idea that samurai find money repulsive and distasteful, and his Blackthorne shows them the power of commerce and markets. Plus there are numerous other stereotypes (Blackthorne's massive dick! Japanese men have tiny penises! Everyone gets naked and bathes together because they're so sexually free! White guys are automatically cool over there!) that have fuelled the fantasies of generations of non-Japanese men, usually white: Clavell's primary audience of 'dad history' buffs.

2024's Shōgun, as a television adaptation, did a far better job in almost every respect

But the show did much better, right? Yes. Unquestionably. It was an incredible achievement in bringing forward a tired, stereotypical story to add new themes of cultural encounter, questioning one's place in the broader world, and killing your ego. In many ways, the show was the antithesis to Clavell's thesis.

It drastically reigned in the anachronistic, ahistorical referencees to 'bushido' and 'samurai honor', and showed the ruling class of Japan in 1600 much more accurately. John Blackthorne (William Adams) was shown to be an extraordinary person, but he wasn't central to the outcome of the Eastern Army-Western Army civil war. There aren't scenes of him being the best lover every woman he encounters in Japan has ever had (if you haven't read the book, this is not an exaggeration). He doesn't teach Japanese warriors how to use matchlock rifles, which they had been doing for two hundred years. He doesn't change the outcome of enormous events with his thrusting, self-confident individualism. In 2024's Shōgun, Blackthorne is much like his historical counterpart. He was there for fascinating events, but not central. He wasn't teaching Japanese people basic concepts like how to make money or how to make war.

On fake history - the manufactured samurai mythos - it improved on the novel, but didn't overcome the central problems. In many ways, I can't blame the showrunners. Many of the central lies (and they are deliberate lies) constructed around the concept of samurai are hallmarks of the genre. But it's still important to me to notice when it's happening - even while enjoying some of the tropes - without passively accepting it.

'Authenticity' to a precisely manufactured story, not to history

There's a core problem surrounding the promotion and manufactured discussion surrounding 2024's Shōgun. I think it's a disconnect between the creative and marketing teams, but it came up again and again in advertising and promotion for the show: 'It's authentic. It's as real as possible.'

I've only seen this brought up in one article, Shōgun Has a Japanese-Superiority Complex, by Ryu Spaeth:

'The show also valorizes a supreme military power that is tempered by the pursuit of beauty and the highest of cultures, as if that might be a formula for peace. Shōgun displays these two extremes of the Japanese self, the savagery and the refinement, but seems wholly unaware that there may be a connection between them, that the exquisite sensibility Japan is famous for may flow from, and be a mask for, its many uses of atrocious domination.'

Here we come to authenticity.

'The publicity surrounding the series has focused on its fidelity to authenticity: multiple rounds of translation to give the dialogue a “classical” feel; fastidious attention to how katana swords should be slung, how women of the nobility should fold their knees when they sit, how kimonos should be colored and styled; and, crucially, a decentralization of the narrative so that it’s not dominated by the character John Blackthorne.'

It's undeniable that the 2024 production spent enormous amounts of energy on authenticity. But authenticity to what? To traditional depictions of samurai in Japanese media, not to history itself. The experts hired for gestures, movement, costumes, buildings, and every other aspect of the show were experts with decades in experience making Japanese historical dramas 'look right', not experts in Japanese history. But this appeal to 'Japanese authenticity' was made in almost every piece of promotional material.

The show had only one historical advisor on staff, and he was Dutch. The numerous Japanese consultants, experts and specialists brought on board (talked about at length in the show's marketing and behind the scenes) were there to assist with making an accurate Japanese jidaigeki. It's the difference between hiring an experienced BBC period drama consultant, and a historian specialising in the Regency. One knows how to make things look 'right' to a British audience. The other knows what actually happened.

That's fine, but a critical viewing of the show needs to engage with this. It's a stylistically accurate Japanese period drama. It is not an accurate telling of Japanese history around the unification of Japan. If it was, the horses would be the size of ponies, there would be far more malnourished and brutalised peasants, the word samurai would have far less importance as it wasn't yet a rigidly enforced caste, seppuku wouldn't yet be ritualised and performed with as much frequency, and Toranaga - Tokugawa - would be a famously corpulently obese man, pounding the saddle of his horse in frustration at minor setbacks, as he was in history.

The noble picture of restraint, patience, refinement and honour presented by Hiroyuki Sanada as Toranaga/Tokugawa is historical sanitation at its most extreme. Despite being Sanada's personal hero, Tokugawa Ieyasu was a brutal warlord (even for the standards of the time), and he committed acts of horrific cruelty. He ordered many more after gaining ultimate power. Think a miniseries about the Founding Fathers of the United States that doesn't touch upon slavery - I'm sure there have been plenty.

The final myth that 2024's Shōgun leaves us with is that it took a man like Toranaga - Tokugawa Ieyasu - to bring peace to a land ripped assunder by chaos. This plays into 19th century notions of Great Man History, and is a neat story, but the consensus amongst historians is if it wasn't Tokugawa, it would have been some other cunt. In many cases, it very nearly was. His success was historical contingency, not 5D chess.

So how did this image get manufactured, to the point where the Japanese populace - by and large - believes it to be true? Very long story short: after a period of rapid modernisation, Japan embraced nationalism in the late 19th century. It was all the rage. Nationalism depends on a glorified past. The samurai (recently the pariahs of Japanese history) were repurposed as Japan's unique warrior heroes, and woven into state education. This was especially heated in the 1920s and 30s in the lead up to the invasion of Manchuria and Japan's war of aggression in the Pacific. Nationalism + militarism = the modern Japanese samurai myth, to prepare men to obey orders unquestioningly from a military dictatorship.

This persists in the postwar period. Every year since 1963, Japan's state broadcaster NHK commissions a historical drama - a Taiga Drama, where many of this show's actors got their starts - that manufactures and re-enforces the idea of samurai as noble, artful, honourable people. Read a book - read a Wikipedia article! - and you'll see that most of it stems from Tokugawa-shogunate era self-propaganda. It's much like the European re-interpretation of chivalry. In Europe's case, chivalry in actual history was a set of guidelines that allowed for the sanctioned mass-rape and murder of civilians, with a side of rules regarding the ransoming of nobles in scorched-earth military campaigns. In Japan's case, historical figures that regularly backstabbed each other, tortured rival warriors and their lessers, and inflicted horrific casualties on the peasants that they owned (we have a term for that) are cast as noble, honourable, dedicated servants of the Empire.

Why does this matter to me? Samurai movies and TV shows are just media, after all. The issue, for me, is that the actors, the producers - including Hiroyuki Sanada - passionately extoll 'accuracy' as if they genuinely believe they're telling history. They talk emotionally about bushido and its special place in Japanese society.

But the entire concept of bushido is a retroactive, post-conflict, samurai construction. Bushio is bullshit. Despite being spoken of as the central tenet of 2024's Shōgun by actors like Hiroyuki Sanada, Tadanobu Asano, and Tokuma Nishioka, it simply didn't exist at the time. It was made up after the advent of modern nationalism.

It was used to justify horrendous acts during the late Edo period, the Meiji restoration, and the years leading up to the conclusion of Japan's war of aggression in the Pacific. It's still used now by Japan's primarily right-wing government to deny war crimes and justify the horrors unleashed on Asia and the Pacific during World War II as some kind of noble warrior crusade. If you ever want your stomach turned, visit the museum attached to Yasukuni Shrine. It's a theme park dedicated to war crimes denial, linked intimately to Japan's imagined warrior past. Whether or not the production staff, cast, and marketing team of 2024's Shōgun knew they were engaging with a long line of ahistorical bullshit is unknown, but it is important.

It's also important to acknowledge that, having listened to many interviews with Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks, they were acutely aware that they weren't Japanese, to claim to be telling an authentically Japanese story would be wrong, and that all they could do was do their best to make an engaging work that plays on ideas of cultural encounter and letting go. I think the 'authenticity!' thing is mostly marketing, and judicious editing of what the creators and writers actually said in interviews.

So... you hate the show, then? What the hell is this all about?

No, I love the show. It's beautiful. But it's a beautiful artwork.

Just as the noh theatre in the show was a twisting of events within the show, so are all works of fiction that take inspiration from history. Some do it better than others. And on balance, in the show, Shōgun did it better than most. But so much of the marketing and the discussion of this adaptation has been on its accuracy. This has been by design - it was the strategy Disney adopted to market the show and give it a unique viewing proposition.

'This time, Shōgun is authentic!*

*an authentic Japanese period drama, but we won't mention that part.

And audiences have conflated that with what actually happened, as opposed to accuracy to a particular form of Japanese propaganda that has been honed over a century. This difference is crucial.

It doesn't detract from my enjoyment of it. Where I view James Clavell's novel as a horrid remnant of an orientalist, racist past, I believe the showrunners of 2024's Shōgun have updated that story to put Japanese characters front and centre, to decentralise the white protagonist to a more accurate place of observation and interest, and do their best to make a compelling subversion of the 'stranger in a strange land' tale.

But I don't want anyone who reads my words or has followed this series to think that the samurai were better than the armed thugs of any society. They weren't more noble, they weren't more honourable, they weren't more restrained. They just had 260 years in which they worked desk-jobs while wearing two swords to write stories about how glorious the good old days were, and how great people were.

Well... that's a bleak note to end on. Where to from here?

There are beautiful works of fiction that engage much closer with the actual truth of the samurai class that I'd recommend. One even stars Hiroyuki Sanada, and is (I think) his finest role.

I'd really encourage anyone who enjoyed Shōgun to check out The Twilight Samurai. That was the reality for the vast majority of post-Sekigahara samurai

For something closer to the period that Shogun is set, the best film is Seppuku (Hara-Kiri in English releases). It is a post-war Japanese film that engages both with the reality of samurai rule, and, through its central themes, how that created mythos was used to radicalise millions of Japanese into senseless death during the war. It is the best possible response to a romanticisation of a brutal, hateful period of history, dominated by cruel men who put power first, every single time.

I want to end this series, if I can, with hope. I hope that reading the novel or watching the 1980 show or the 2024 show has ignited in people an interest in Japanese culture, or society, or history. But don't let that be an end. Go further. There are so many things that aren't whitewashed warlords nobly killing - the social history of Japan is amazing, as is the women's history. A great book for getting an introduction to this is The Japanese: A History in 20 Lives.

And outside of that, there are so many beautiful Japanese movies and shows that don't deal with glorified violence and death. In fact, it makes up the vast majority of Japanese media! Who would have thought! Your Name was the first major work of art to bridge some of the cultural animosity between China and Japan stemming from WW2, and is a goofy time travel love story. Perfect Days is a beautiful movie about the simple joy of living, and it's about the most Tokyo story you can get.

Please go out, read more, watch more. If you can, try and find your way to Japan. It's one of the most beautiful places on earth. The people are kind, the food is delicious, and the culture is very welcoming to foreigners.

2024's Shōgun was great, but please don't let that be the end. Let it be the beginning, and I hope it serves as a gateway for you.

And I hope our little fandom on here remembers this show as a special time, where we came together to talk about something we loved. I'll miss you all.

[probablyasocialecologist]

“The ‘war on drugs’ may be understood to a significant extent as a war on people. Its impact has been greatest on those who live in poverty, and it frequently overlaps with discrimination directed at marginalised groups, minoritiesand Indigenous Peoples. In our reporting and experience, we have found that such discriminatory impact is a common element across drug policies with regard to the widest range of human rights, including the right to personal liberty; freedom from torture, ill-treatment and forced labour; fair trial rights; the right to health, including access to essential medicines, palliative care, comprehensive drug prevention and education, drug treatment, and harm reduction; the right to adequate housing; freedom from discrimination and the right to equal treatment before the law; right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment; cultural rights and freedoms of expression, religion, assembly and association. Globally, drug control has had massive costs for the dignity, humanity and freedom of people of African descent, with reports showing that people of African descent face disproportionate and unjust law enforcement interventions, arrests and incarceration for drug-related offences. In various countries, the ‘war on drugs’ has been more effective as a system of racial control than as a tool to reduce drug markets. Policing interventions based on racial profiling remain widespread, whilst access to evidence-based treatment and harm reduction for people of African descent remains critically low. Around the world, women who use drugs face significant stigma and discrimination in accessing harm reduction programmes, drug dependence treatment and basic health care. Although one in three people who use drugs are women, women constitute only one in five people in treatment. Women are also disproportionately affected by criminalisation and incarceration, with 35% of women in prison worldwide having been convicted of a drug-related offence compared to 19% of men. The causes of women’s interaction with the criminal justice system in relation to drugs are complex, often linked to other factors such as poverty and coercion, and may reflect systemic gender inequality in society more broadly. Of note, most women in prison for drug related offences have little education. Under international law, States that have not yet abolished the death penalty may only impose capital punishment for the ‘most serious crimes’, meaning crimes of extreme gravity involving intentional killing. Drug offences clearly do not meet this threshold. However, drug-related offences are still punishable by death in over 30 countries, and human rights experts have raised concerns about evidence of its discriminatory impact on individuals belonging to minorities. Everyone without exception has the right to life-saving harm reduction interventions, which are essential for the protection of the right to health of people who use drugs. However, according to UN data, only 1 in 8 people with drug dependence have access to appropriate treatment, and the coverage of harm reduction services remains very low. The situation is particularly critical for women, LGBTIQ+ persons, and other marginalised groups, for whom harm reduction and treatment services may not be adapted or respond to their specific needs. Women and LGBTIQ+ persons also face even higher levels of stigma, including self-stigma, and discrimination than men who use drugs.

As the world grows older, drug use among people over 65 has also increased. The COVID-19 pandemic had a negative impact on the health and well-being of older persons, and studies show an increased use of pain relievers, tranquillizers, and sedatives among this age group. Older drug users are also more often using the dark web, social media, and online forums to obtain illicit substances resulting in a rise of drug-related deaths among older populations. The criminalisation of substances traditionally used by Indigenous Peoples such as the coca leaf can also result in the suppression, undermining and marginalization of traditional and indigenous knowledge systems and medicine, which has wide-ranging health impacts and is rooted in discriminatory hierarchies and conceptions. Forced eradication of crops, including through the aerial spraying of highly hazardous pesticides, can cause serious harm to the environment and clean water, as well as to the health and welfare of Indigenous communities. Indigenous Peoples that might be affected by these and other drug control operations must be meaningfully consulted, and guarantees should be given that their lives, cultural practices, lands and natural resources are not violated. Criminal laws and the punitive use of administrative and other sanctions stigmatise already marginalised populations. Criminalisation results in significant barriers to access to health services (including those for HIV and palliative care) and in other human rights violations. As called for by the UN system Common Position on drug-related matters, drug use and possession for personal use should be decriminalised as a matter of urgency. Drug use or dependence are never a sufficient justification for detaining a person. Compulsory drug detention and rehabilitation centres need to be closed and replaced with voluntary, evidence-informed, and rights-based health and social services in the community.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 5, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 06, 2024

Yesterday a gunman assassinated the chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, as he arrived at a meeting of investors in New York City. While authorities are still investigating, officials have released the information that the casings of the bullets that killed Thompson bore the words “deny,” “defend,” “depose,” all words associated with companies’ denial of health insurance, taken from the longer phrases “deny the claim,” “defend the lawsuit,” “depose the patient.”

While those clues could simply be a red herring, posters on social media have cheered what they seem to see as revenge against an abusive system in which people’s lives are at the mercy of executives who prioritize profits.

Health insurance companies have long been under scrutiny for their practices. For the past two years, ProPublica has run a long series exploring the different ways in which companies have developed systems to deny healthcare coverage to their policyholders.

UnitedHealthcare has been no exception either to such practices or to scrutiny. Its parent group UnitedHealth has a market valuation of $560 billion and was the eighth largest corporation in the world last year as measured by revenue. This year, UnitedHealthcare—Thompson’s unit—is expected to bring in $280 billion in revenue.

UnitedHealth is embroiled in a number of lawsuits. Andrew Stanton of Newsweek reported that on November 14, 2023, families of two now-deceased patients sued UnitedHealthcare over denial of coverage for Medicare Advantage patients for nursing home stays prescribed by their doctors. Medicare Advantage is the private insurance alternative to Medicare that receives a flat fee from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It’s an enormously profitable industry, and UnitedHealth controls almost a third of it.

The lawsuit alleges that UnitedHealthcare uses artificial intelligence to deny claims from Medicare Advantage policyholders. The lawsuit claims that the company knowingly uses an algorithm that makes errors 90% of the time because it also knows that only about 0.2% of policy holders will appeal the decision to deny their claims. Last month the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hammered UnitedHealth for dramatic increases in their denial rates for post-acute care between 2019 and 2022 as it switched to AI authorizations.

On the same day as the shooting, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance covering Connecticut, New York, and Missouri announced it would cover anesthesia during surgery or procedures only for a specific time period in order to make insurance more affordable by reducing overbilling.

After an outcry both from anesthesiologists and the public, the company today retracted its policy change, saying it had never intended to avoid “medically necessary anesthesia,” but meant simply to “clarify the appropriateness of anesthesia consistent with well-established clinical guidelines.” Their explanation might have calmed the news cycle, but its suggestion that the insurance officials rather than doctors should determine what anesthesia is appropriate for a patient during surgery echoed the argument in the UnitedHealthcare lawsuit.

Thompson’s murder seems to be a cultural moment in which popular fury over the power big business has over ordinary Americans’ lives exploded. Maureen Tkacik of The American Prospect noted, “Only about 50 million customers of America’s reigning medical monopoly might have a motive to exact revenge upon the UnitedHealthcare CEO.” The shooter, whose actual motive remains unknown, is fast becoming a folk hero.

Social media has exploded with users writing things like “[t]his claim for sympathy has been denied”; songs featuring the words “deny, “defend,” and “depose”; and recorded commentary condemning the healthcare insurance industry. UnitedHealth Group posted its sadness about Thompson’s death on Facebook yesterday about 1:00 p.m.; 36 hours later the post had 65,000 laughing emojis under it.

Security expert Charlie Carroll expressed surprise to Josh Fiallo of the Daily Beast that Thompson did not have a security detail. “We’re living in a world where people are extremely disgruntled,” Carroll said. “When people lose trust in the system, you start seeing more kidnappings and assassinations because they feel like they have to take matters into their own hands.”

In the wake of the shooting, UnitedHealthcare and several other insurance companies took down from their websites the names and photographs of their officials.

Billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy were on Capitol Hill today where they met with lawmakers to explain their vision for the Department of Government Efficiency, the group designed to cut the U.S. budget. Neither they nor the lawmakers shared much with the press, although Fox Business played a video of Representative Ralph Norman (R-SC) saying that that “nothing is sacrosanct,” and that “they're going to put everything on the table,” including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Representative Tom Tiffany (R-WI) told Just The News that cuts to the budget “don’t have to be just the discretionary spending. We can get at some of the mandatory spending also…food stamps, some of those things.” He continued: “There may be more bang for the buck in terms of growing our economy…making regulatory changes, get the impediments out of the way, let those job creators and entrepreneurs really be able to go to work.”

In view of today’s news about healthcare, it’s probably worth remembering that Musk has called for the elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and that Project 2025 has called for making Medicare Advantage—the privatized Medicare in which UnitedHealth specializes—the default enrollment option for Medicare. This would essentially privatize Medicare for the 66 million people who use it, but since Medicare Advantage costs taxpayers about 6% more than Medicare, this would not create the savings Musk is supposed to be finding.

Andrew Perez of RollingStone reported today that election financial disclosures filed yesterday revealed that Elon Musk was the secret funder of the “RBG PAC,” a Super PAC created just before the election that claimed Trump had the same position on abortion as the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Although Trump has bragged about overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion and the 2024 Republican platform supported the far-right idea of “fetal personhood”—which would apply all the rights protected by the Fourteenth Amendment from the moment a human egg is fertilized—the RBG PAC ran ads promising that Trump would not support a national abortion ban.

Ginsburg’s granddaughter called the comparison of Trump and her grandmother “nothing short of appalling.”

The super PAC was created so late that it avoided disclosure before November 5. It was funded entirely by Musk with an injection of $20.5 million.

Bridget Bowman, Ben Kamisar, and Scott Bland of NBC News reported tonight that Musk spent at least $250 million to get Trump elected. In addition to the $20.5 million to the RBG PAC, he put $238 million into the America PAC. Musk also supported Trump through free advertising and commentary on his social media platform X.

Today provided a snapshot of American society that echoed a similar moment on January 6, 1872, when Edward D. Stokes shot railroad baron James Fisk Jr. as he descended the staircase of New York’s Grand Central Hotel. The quarrel was over Fisk’s mistress, Josie, who had taken up with the handsome Stokes, but the murder instantly provoked a popular condemnation of the ties between big business and government.

Fisk was a rich, flamboyant, and unscrupulous man-about-town, who was deeply entwined both with railroad barons like Jay Gould, Daniel Drew, and Cornelius Vanderbilt and with New York’s Tammany Hall political machine and its infamous leader, William Marcy Tweed. Tweed made sure the laws benefited the railroads and, the papers noted, snuck into the hotel to say goodbye to his friend in the hours it took for him to perish.

After the Civil War, most Americans applauded the nation’s businessmen for the support their growing industries had provided to the Union, but by 1872 the enormous fortunes the railroad men had amassed had tarnished their reputation. At the same time, big operators were starting to squeeze smaller enterprises out of business in order to control the markets, and popular anger simmered over their increasing control of the economy.

Stokes’s shooting was the event that sparked a popular rebellion. Newspapers covered every minute of the event and Fisk’s demise, while sensational books about the murder rolled off the presses.

Together, they redefined late nineteenth-century industrialists, with one painting Fisk as a representative businessman who with just “an hour’s effort,” could “gather into his clutches a score of millions of other people’s property, impoverish a thousand wealthy men, or derange the values and the traffic of a vast empire.”

Both those covering the murder and those reading about it rejoiced in Fisk’s misfortune.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[theburialofstrawberries]

"1987’s Fatal Attraction is generally credited with kicking off the erotic thriller craze proper, though the format had been germinating in mainstream cinema since the start of the decade via Brian de Palma’s Hitchcockian 1980 thriller Dressed to Kill and Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 steamfest Body Heat. In her 2008 memoir Send Yourself Roses, Body Heat star Kathleen Turner argues that it was precisely because they were working in an old-Hollywood framework that they were able to get away with the sexual explicitness that would set the tone for the ensuing decade: “Film noir has a formality and shape to it. Its very familiar form allowed people to accept more readily the daring content that we were presenting.”

Williams writes that erotic thrillers “operate with a constant awareness of masturbation as a prime audience response and index of the film’s success,” and it only follows that they thrived on home video. A 1993 USA Today article called the erotic thriller “one of the fastest-growing genres in video stores,” reporting that these “dressed-up and sexed-up B-movies,” could be made cheaply and quickly. But while the direct-to-video market was an important part of the overall narrative of the erotic thriller, I’m much more interested in what Hollywood got away with in the light of day (which is to say, the glow of the multiplex’s silver screen).

“The best thing to me about the erotic thriller is it takes everything that is usually sort of treated in ellipses and film and just looks at it directly for as long as it takes,” Dr. Veronica Fitzpatrick told me recently by phone. Fitzpatrick is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in modern culture and media at Brown University, an erotic thrillers enthusiast, and a contributor to the online magazine Bright Wall/Dark Room, whose July issue focuses on the erotic thriller. Fitzpatrick recalled being “blown away” by the camera lingering on the sex between Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke during a recent viewing of 9 1/2 Weeks. “It just goes on so much past the duration of what it takes for you to understand, OK, they’re having sex now,” she said."

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Michelangelo Signorile at The Signorile Report:

There have been many postmortems on the outcome of the election for Democrats, looking at how certain minority groups voted—and how they supposedly shifted their vote—but there’s been very little written about one particular minority group: LGBTQ voters. And yet, in context, LGBTQ voters displayed the kind of influence as a bloc that politicians should be paying attention to moving forward. I suspect part of the reason they’ve not been focused on is because these voters don’t fit an overwhelming corporate media narrative that positions Donald Trump as having broadened and diversified his coalition—because LGBTQ people actually went the other way. According to the NBC News Exit Poll, LGBTQ people doubled their share of the electorate, from 4% in 2020 to 8% in 2024, which is nothing to sneeze at. (Researchers have shown the percentage of the LGBTQ population appears to be roughly equal in all of the states.) And 86% of LGBTQ people voted for Kamala Harris—well over 10 million voters—a big increase from the 71% who voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Donald Trump saw a sharp decline in support from LGBTQ voters, from 25% in 2020 to just 14% in 2024.

[...]

But regarding LGBTQ voters, the shift in the national exit polling is big enough—and the growth in the percentage of the electorate is large enough—to assume that something happened. While many other groups moved toward Trump a bit—or saw less turnout in some places—LGBTQ people went in the opposite direction. I believe a few things came into play. The toxic masculinity that marked the Trump campaign was as threatening to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as it is to many women. (Harris overwhelmingly won Black women, and, though Trump won white women, Harris did better with white women than Biden did in 2020). The Trump campaign’s bro culture on steroids, exemplified by the white supremacist elements of Trump’s base as well as among the many young right-wing and even independent male podcasters Trump courted, often telegraphed homophobia and transphobia. Even when it wasn’t overt, it sent a message that you’re not included if you’re queer. And the blatant anti-trans messaging from Trump and the GOP—and the vicious ads they aired in media markets—horrified almost the entire LGBTQ community.

[...]

First off, as far as many in Trump’s base are concerned—including the aggressively anti-LGBTQ Christian right—there is no “normal” gay anything. They believe we’re all abnormal—freaks and sinners. Secondly, the idea that some great majority of queer people—or the “normal gay guys”—would vote for Trump because they were eager to throw trans people under the bus is clearly false. I’m not saying all cisgender gay, lesbian, and bisexual people support all trans people—there are fissures, as there are in any movement—but I believe most do, understanding the clear connections we have about our bodies and our privacy and about how those who hate us view us.

Beyond that, Trump and the justices he put on the Supreme Court are a threat to marriage equality and anti-discrimination laws protecting gay, bi and lesbian people, especially in public accommodations. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, was marrying gay couples going back to 2004 as a district attorney in San Francisco—before being shut down by the California Supreme Court—and enforced protections as California attorney general while being outspoken as a U.S. senator. The other thing I would say is that queer people know a fascist when they see one. They know what it’s like to be scapegoated. And, if they know their history, they know the brutality and violence LGBTQ people experienced in the past at the hands of strongmen. So do Jews, of course, who also voted overwhelmingly for Harris—by 79%—which must have angered Trump, who demanded their vote at rallies and even berated them, claiming they owed it to him for his support of Israel.

While most demographics moved to the right this election to varying degrees, this key demographic swung left: the LGBTQ+ community.

This is due to the fact that LGBTQ+ issues got more attention this election, thanks to the GOP’s hate-fueled anti-LGBTQ+ (and especially anti-trans) campaigning.

[amageish]

Unpacking Kitty Pryde's Sexuality

Okay, I've done a couple posts like this before... Let's take on a big one, shall we?

In Maruaders #12, released in 2020, Kate "Kitty" Pryde kissed a woman.

This was reported on fairly widely as Kitty Pryde's coming-out moment. Many people across fandom and outside of it were celebrating the queerness of one Katherine Anne Pryde. After decades upon decades of queer-coding, it was official! Kitty Pryde is a bisexual woman! Let's all celebrate!

(I personally would not call queercoding "queerbaiting" when it was done at a time when sodomy laws were still being enforced in America, but whatever.)

And then... uh... nothing really changed?

Since then, she has returned to her usual status quo in terms of queerness and queer-coding. She has had plenty of cheeky moments, wink-nods towards her queer identity, but nothing as explicit as a kiss - and no explicitly romantic relationships of any kind.

Now, this headline-making kiss was, narratively, a foil to an earlier kiss - she got a tattoo and kissed her male tattoo artist, died, came back to life, and then got a new tattoo and kissed her female tattoo artist. The woman didn't really have a purpose in the story beyond tattooing Pryde, being kissed by her, and having a design which is strikingly similar to that of Magik, one of Pryde's gal pals... All that said, it wasn't exactly the type of thing that needed to be followed up on... but it is still odd that Pryde kissed a woman, was hailed as bisexual, and then Marvel corporate went silent on the matter.

For some backstory, Pryde has been queercoded more or less since her debut. She's had three roommate situationships which are widely discussed as her queer encounters, plus a handful of other ones - notably a period where she was manipulated by the seduction of Saturnyne.

One of these relationships, Pryde with Rachel Summers, was confirmed by Pryde's creator Chris Claremont via interview in 2016, which increased discussion of her potential queerness - though that discussion has been going on for a looooong time before then.

Now, personally, when I see queer subtext vanish suddenly, my assumption is typically that corporate got involved... which seemed more likely when she was teased as a potential new character in X-Men 97. Perhaps corporate doesn't want her to be queer in that show and so they don't want her to be queer in the comic books either. Corporations are weird like that sometimes.

HOWEVER. Everything is suddenly changing in June 2024? Four years after Kate Pryde smooched a tattoo artist, Marvel mobile games are suddenly really keen to remind us that Kate Pryde is, in fact, queer???

And look. This probably means nothing. It is likely that the marketing people who worked on these events had heard Pryde was queer and tossed her into their events... but it still feels notable to me!

With these mobile game promotions, the idea of Kate Pryde being a queer character is being put in more people's feeds and in more people's minds then ever before... While the kiss was viral, it was mostly viral in queer spaces (as well as the types of spaces vigilantly opposed to queerness in nerd culture media), while this is putting it in the hands of standard mobile game users... Plus it is using Marvel's marketing budget to promote them - Marvel isn't sponsoring posts to put screenshots of Pryde checking out Dazzler's ass in X-Terminators in people's feeds, but they are to let us know that we should log into Puzzle Quest to claim a gaudy outfit...

So I am happy to see this development happen... It does feel like a (however atypical) step forward and I hope it isn't too long before Pryde can get explicitly queer stories told about her on a regular basis... I mean, her name is Pryde, for crying out loud...

[syrena-del-mar]

People forget that actors don't owe anybody the knowledge of their sexuality. Whether that be lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, demisexual, asexual, or any other sexuality. That includes their dating history or who they're currently dating. Actors only owe the public one thing: that they do their job and that they do it well.

If that job consists of partaking in CP/ship culture, consume their media knowing that what they show you in public is curated for you as a fan. If they're dating someone who is not their partner, they're not cheating you; they're not making a mockery out of you or of queer relationships. With ship work, they're simply doing their job how their culture expects them to.

Ship work is not queerbaiting. Living, breathing humans do not queerbait. Queerbaiting comes from a marketing tactic for fictional entertainment work to ensure that they don't alienate their straight audience while also ensuring queer interest. You're consuming BLs and GLs, where the shows deliver in the promised relationships. If you're consuming BL/GL, you should know that fanservice generally follows.

Fanservice works because it's understood to be common practice. It's acting, an extension of whatever series they're promoting. Also, realize that fans often find themselves so invested in a couple that a hug or even a tiny brush of their hands will be considered 'evidence' of a relationship. Friends can flirt, 'lovingly' touch each other, and mess around without it meaning anything.

That's still not queerbaiting.

Because of how advanced technology has become, we have so much access to these actors/actresses. Accessibility does not equal entitlement to know how they identify. Claiming an individual is 'queerbaiting' only causes harm in the long term because you might unknowingly force someone to come out of the closet before they were ever ready to be. This only pushes media/reporters to continuously ask for information that isn't anyone's business to drum up engagement, potentially exploiting them for clicks. There's no need to inquire about their personal life, relationships, or sexuality.

But what if they take cryptic 'couple' photos with someone other than their work partner? Stop searching. Take their social media posts at face value. Stop trying to come up with some 'gotcha' moment, whether that be actually dating their work partner or some other individual. It's their personal life (curated, but still their life); you're overstepping, and if what you find out upsets you, then it's time to pull away.

It's really that simple.

Just because you buy into the fantasy a little too much and invest yourself in the pseudo-relationship does not mean the actors are queerbaiters. At the end of the day, fanservice is just that—a service provided for the fans. In other words, it's a job. Finding out that an actor/actress is dating someone of the opposite sex does not make them queerbaiters. (Also, realize that dating someone of the opposite sex does not signify that they're straight; whether they are or not, it's none of your business.)

If an actor/actress's personal relationships make you so mentally unwell because they're not with the onscreen partner, it just means you've genuinely detached yourself from reality. I mean this sincerely, if you're at this point, find help. Try to learn and understand more about why you're putting so much of yourself into a parasocial relationship. It's unhealthy for you to get so worked up that you feel sick because two coworkers aren't together.

If you find out that you're not a fan of CP work because you feel lied to or cheated, just don't consume it. Simply watch the show, look up their artist profile to see what other works they've been in, and log off. Don't follow them on social media, don't look up their fan meets, or watch video compilations that fans have made for shipping.

You're the master curator of your online consumption.

Curate it.

[cruyffista]

Injury is everywhere in sport. Its ubiquity is evident in the lives and bodies of athletes who regularly experience bruises, torn ligaments, broken bones, aches, lacerations and muscle tears. “Injury reports” appear daily in local newspapers and in the analyses of television and radio commentators. Sports Illustrated markets its subscription campaign by giving new subscribers videotaped highlights of football players smashing one another’s bodies. Injury is presented as entertainment, as spectacle. Television cameras regularly frame injured players and slow motion replays are used to allow viewers to see how an injury occurred and commentators to estimate the location or extent of the injury. Commentators sometimes comment on cuts and bleeding as a verbal supplement to depictions of bloodied athletes on the screen. Players who are shown being taped up on the sidelines or led into the locker room to be checked by the team doctor at half time are often praised by commentators upon returning to the action with words such “brave,” “determined,” “courageous,” and “tough.” (...) Sports media valorize the athletes who surmount injury, endure pain, and return to the field of hierarchical endeavor. Ironically, as the athlete’s body is “built up” in order to “move up” the competitive hierarchy, it is increasingly worn down. Many athletes are thus embroiled in a larger set of power relations inside and outside sport that are often exploitative and lead to physical entropy. Within the context of the competitive hierarchies that comprise late twentieth century gender regimes, athletes may be cultural prototypes modeling the behavior of (and for) the toughminded, success-striving but increasingly expendable middle-managers of the post-Fordian economy who drive themselves day after day, only to be “benched” by stress-related illness or corporate downsizing or replaced by cybersystems. These portrayals may also be modeling stoicism and resilience for factory and service workers who must do more for less because they are “lucky enough” to have jobs in an economy that thrives on impermanence and liquidity. In short, we suspect that the media representations of pain and injury among athletes, particularly in televised productions, are ritualized expressions of more subtle relations of power that tap the Pain Principle and hegemonic masculinity for cultural and political legitimacy.

Don Sabo & Sue Curry Jansen, Prometheus Unbound: Constructions of Masculinity in the Sports Media

[healthcaremarketanalysis]

Cell Culture Media Market worth $13.0 billion by 2028

The global cell culture media market in terms of revenue was estimated to be worth $6.2 billion in 2023 and is poised to reach $13.0 billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 16.0% from 2023 to 2028. 

Download an Illustrative overview:

Browse in-depth TOC on "Cell Culture Media Market"

359 - Tables

42 - Figures

315 – Pages

In 2022, the serum-free media segment accounted for the largest share of the type segment in the cell culture media market.

On the basis of type, the cell culture media market is divided into serum-free media, classical media & salts, stem cell culture media, specialty media, chemically defined media, and other cell culture media. In 2022, the serum-free media segment holds for the bigest share of the market. Factors responsible for the growth of this segment includes various advantages or benefits of serum-free media over other types of cell culture media.

In 2022, the biopharmaceutical production segment accounted for the largest share of the application segment in the cell culture media market.

On the basis of application, the cell culture media market is categorized into biopharmaceutical production, diagnostics, drug discovery & development, tissue engineering & regenerative medicine, and other applications. The biopharmaceutical production segment is estimated to grow at the highest growth rate during the forecast period. Factors responsible for the growth include, the growing production of cell culture-based vaccines, and expansion of pharmaceutical industry. The biopharmaceutical production applications of cell culture media include the manufacturing of biologic-based products such as vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, and other therapeutic proteins (such as anticoagulants, enzymes, blood factors, hormones, interferons, growth factors, interleukins, engineered proteins, and thrombolytics, among others).

In 2022, the Asia Pacific region is the fastest-growing region of the cell culture media market.

On the basis of the region, the global cell culture media market has been segmented into North America, Europe, the Asia Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East and Africa. During the forecast period, the Asia Pacific market is estimated to register the highest CAGR during the forecast period. Increased focus of key market players on geographical expansion in emerging markets, favorable government policies and support for cell-based vaccines in the region and less manufacturing cost are some of the major factors anticipated to have positive impact on the market growth of Asia Pacific region.

Request Sample Pages:

Key Market Players:

Key players in the cell culture media market include Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc. (US), Merck KGaA (Germany), Danaher Corporation (US), Sartorius AG (Germany), Corning Incorporated (US), FUJIFILM Irvine Scientific, Inc. (Japan), Lonza Group AG (Switzerland), Becton, Dickinson and Company (US), Miltenyi Biotec (Germany), and among others.

Recent Developments:

In June 2023, Thermo fisher launched Tumoroid Culture Medium to accelerate development of novel cancer therapies.

In April 2023, FUJIFILM Irvine Scientific launched BalanCD CHO Media Platform Portfolio for Bioprocessing.

In March 2022, FUJIFILM Irvine Scientific acquired Shenandoah Biotechnology. The deal would help the company to provide customers with a single point of access for their life science research, discovery, and cell and gene therapy needs.

In January 2022, Cytiva and Nucleus Biologics LLC collaborated to enhance custom cell media development for cell and gene therapies.

Cell Culture Media Market Advantages:

Versatility: Cell culture media provide a versatile platform for the growth and maintenance of various types of cells, including primary cells, stem cells, and cell lines derived from different tissues and species. This versatility allows researchers to study and manipulate diverse cell populations, facilitating a wide range of applications in basic research, drug discovery, and regenerative medicine.

Reproducibility: High-quality cell culture media formulations are standardized and extensively tested, ensuring consistent and reproducible results across different experiments and laboratories. This reliability is essential for generating meaningful and reliable data, which is critical for the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Customizability: The cell culture media market offers customizable formulations to cater to specific cell types and experimental requirements. Researchers can optimize media components to suit the unique needs of their cells, enhancing cell growth, proliferation, and differentiation, ultimately leading to more accurate and reliable experimental outcomes.

Scalability: Cell culture media have been developed to support large-scale production of cells, making them integral to biopharmaceutical manufacturing. With the increasing demand for cell-based therapies and biologics, scalable media solutions play a vital role in ensuring the efficient and cost-effective production of therapeutic cells and products.

Safety and Purity: High-quality cell culture media are manufactured under stringent quality control standards to ensure the absence of contaminants that may compromise cell viability or introduce experimental artifacts. These safety measures are essential to maintain the integrity of research findings and the safety of biopharmaceutical products.

Reduced Dependency on Animal Models: Advanced cell culture media formulations have contributed to reducing reliance on animal models in research, as they allow scientists to conduct more relevant experiments using human or cell-based models. This ethical advantage aligns with the growing focus on reducing animal testing while still advancing scientific progress.

Technological Advancements: The cell culture media market continually evolves, incorporating technological advancements, such as serum-free or xeno-free formulations, to improve cell culture systems' efficiency and reproducibility. These innovations empower researchers to work with more physiologically relevant and defined conditions, yielding results that better translate to clinical applications.

Accelerated Drug Discovery: Robust cell culture media accelerate drug discovery processes by enabling high-throughput screening of potential drug candidates on various cell models. This expedites the identification of promising compounds, shortens development timelines, and reduces drug development costs.

Overall, the cell culture media market's advantages have revolutionized modern biomedical research, playing a pivotal role in advancing scientific knowledge, drug development, and regenerative medicine, while contributing to the growth of the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries.

[beatmyfeet]

Are Women the New Dominant Sex?

Investigating the Impact of Feminism on Masculine

Roles and Identity Lauren Boothby

Women are becoming the new dominant sex. Pursuing feminist equality reform results in a trend toward extremes. The trajectory of women’s rights needs to be examined in light of its causal effects on men. The decline of Western patriarchy ironically leads to the progression of matriarchy. This is being achieved through women’s educational advancements, feminist ideological dominance in political and academic discourse, and defamation of men to the benefit of women. This essay is based around these ideas, and more specifically on the following assertions:

I will argue that the end goal of feminism is not equality: it is matriarchy. Women have stepped into the power vacuum created by removing men from positions of privilege, and are now in the process of achieving ideological dominance through victim status. Attempts at creating equality for women lead to inequalities for men who become the weaker sex. Domination is perpetuated by media portrayals of idiotic men which justifies masculine oppression. Oppression is socially approved by politically correct feminist agenda. As a result, men experience identity crises when old masculinities are destroyed, but no socially and politically acceptable alternatives are provided. Men and women should work together, not against each other, to establish true equality. The contributions of both sexes need to be seen as valuable and beneficial to society.

From Oppressed to Oppressor

The beginning of the end of the Western male-dominated era is perhaps most apparent in job losses in previously male-dominated sectors. Postmodern society has shifted away from manufacturing and factory jobs created during the modern and industrial periods. These sectors were hard-hit in the recession of the late 2000s, and a large majority of the six million cutbacks were men (Rosin, 2010). The recession revealed an economic pattern in creation for decades (Rosin, 2010). Male trade jobs are being phased out (Rosin, 2010). On the other hand, careers that are projected to grow in the next ten years are sectors dominated primarily by women (Rosin, 2010). These jobs are not necessarily the most sought-after, but this trend suggests that men who previously earned a living in one sector, now do not possess the marketable skills necessary for available jobs.

Sociologist Kathryn Edin argues that matriarchies are replacing patriarchies (Rosin, 2010). In her interview for The Atlantic, she states that the power of the Western male was destroyed in the 1990s recession (Rosin, 2010). Men have no social power; it is now in the hands of women (Rosin, 2010). Additionally, the historical desire for sons is being replaced with a desire for daughters in much of America, and even South Korea (Rosin, 2010).

Data from a Statistics Canada report (2012) showed that Canadian women earn more undergraduate and master’s degrees than men, and the disparity has been increasing since 1992. While both men and women are earning more degrees than in the past, the growing number of educated women is symptomatic of a power transition in society. In both the lower and middle classes, women are dominant. At the present time, the majority of politicians and high-ranking business officials continue to be men, but the number of women is increasing. In the lower and middle classes, however, it is clear that the result of feminism is not equality. Where feminism has taken the greatest hold, women have replaced men as the dominant sex. First attempts at equality have overreaching effects where men become the ones that are socially disadvantaged.

The Idiot Man

Popular media reflects these trends. Several sitcoms, whether intentionally or satirically, reinforce cultural stereotypes that devalue masculinity. Intellectually inferior men plague television sitcoms. The idiot man generally holds all or most of the following characteristics. He has a low I.Q., is a borderline alcoholic, and an avid sports lover. He is sexist, clumsy, physically useless, socially awkward, an uninvolved father, and a sincere idiot. Where the idiot man lacks intelligence and general domestic and social usefulness, his wife satisfies the deficit. The intelligent woman has specific characteristics in stark contrast to the idiot man. She has a high I.Q. and is educated. She is either a housewife, or she works part-time while simultaneously managing her home. Additionally, she has high social intelligence, engages with her children, and is brilliant when compared to her husband.

While I acknowledge that the wives discussed below are far from ideal portrayals of women, these issues are beyond the scope of this paper. The present essay examines the neglected stereotype of intellectually inferior men in relation to their female counterparts, and I have chosen three recent, popular sitcoms that display this negative male stereotype.

Home Improvement was the first television show I considered. Tim Allen’s character is amusing, although quite stupid. If the reader performs but a quick video search of virtually any episode of this show, she should not be surprised to find an instance of Tim playing a fool. His character is inept at correctly performing virtually any task without failing miserably. He is clumsy, arrogant, and sexist. Tim’s wife Jill works in addition to performing most of the housework. She often speaks to Tim in a condescending manner and displays her superior intelligence when she corrects his foolish mistakes. In one of the later seasons, Jill leaves her job to pursue a Master’s degree in psychology. Tim is the primary breadwinner, but he exemplifies all the characteristics of the idiot man. Jill juggles home and work responsibilities, has good social skills, and is tolerant of Tim’s idiocy and blatant sexism. While I acknowledge she is not devoid of female stereotypes, she exemplifies the intelligent woman character, and overall she displays superior intelligence in both practical and academic matters. Any sexism on Tim’s behalf is understood by the audience to be unjustified.

Family Guy and The Simpsons are two animated television programs presently airing. The husbands in both series – Peter Griffin and Homer Simpson, respectively – exemplify the idiot man character. Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin share the following endearing qualities; they are: middle-aged, fat, borderline alcoholics, blue-collar workers, stupid, violent, often sexist, clumsy, childish, naïve, generally terrible fathers, and absolutely hilarious idiots. Marge Simpson is a housewife, and although not always a moral compass, she is generally the voice of reason among chaos. Homer’s daughter Lisa Simpson is by far the most intelligent member of the family. She demonstrates competence in the areas Marge neglects. In this series, Homer is the idiot man, and together Marge and Lisa play the character of the intelligent woman. Lois Griffin has less moral integrity than the Simpsons women. Her character is far from the image of an ‘ideal’ wife and mother, as she cheats on her husband, is often emotionally unavailable, but is importantly far more intelligent than her husband Peter. This interestingly defies normative stereotypes of women and housewives, but establishes Lois’ intelligence as one of her consistent qualities. Therefore, although neither portrayal is wholly flattering to women, Lois Griffin is consistently portrayed as the intelligent woman with Peter, her incompetent husband, playing the idiot man.

This section included three examples of popular television programs that demonstrate negative male stereotypes. While I do not deny the presence of irony and sexist undertones toward women, the prevalence of idiotic male characters demands attention. As women have begun to attain positions of power, many sitcoms contrast the high intelligence of women with the idiocy of men. In each of these programs, women are justified in believing men to be sexist pigs and fools that are hopeless without their brilliant wives.

New Masculinity

Feminist movements have created new work and social opportunities for women. When women joined the workforce and increased their education, normative social roles were destroyed, and new acceptable roles created. Western women are no longer confined to the home, and it is now acceptable to be a highly educated career woman with or without children, married or unmarried. Many men are supportive of women’s achievements, including those of their girlfriends, wives, daughters, sisters, and friends. This change in women’s roles constitutes an enormous social shift that is not without an effect on men. Feminism clearly defined new roles available to women, but fails to address roles for men. The subversion of ‘traditional’ gender roles altered the nuclear family structure. The men who previously benefited from this arrangement now ask themselves, “What is my role?” No comprehensive answer is given. The changing nature of masculine roles is in need of further sociological examination.

[cleoenfaserum]

DUST (2016) (1106)

A SCI-FI SHORT FILM (25 MINUTES)

Dust is a short SciFi fantasy film with stunning cinematography and a worthy message, inspired by classic anime and horror. It is set in a harsh and unpredictable natural environment where people have isolated themselves in an ancient city behind a massive wall. A socially marginalized tracker teams up with a black-market merchant to save the society that has rejected his way of life. Dust: Short SciFi With Stunning Cinematography & Worthy Message (singularityweblog.com)

LISTEN AND / OR READ

SOURCE: It took 9 years to make this 25-minute sci-fi film. It was worth the wait. - Vox

Dust follows the search for a cure for a strange disease, a thick dust carrying toxins that have decimated populations throughout the countryside. Now, the dust has come to the great city whose walls have, until now, shut out the effects of war and environmental devastation.

The film explains ...

THE SHORT FILM...

LINK: https://vimeo.com/183239997

SOURCE: It took 9 years to make this 25-minute sci-fi film. It was worth the wait. - Vox

In 2007, filmmakers Jason Gallaty, Josh Grier, and Mike Grier embarked on a nine-year process to shoot and produce the film. The journey included $100,000 in crowdfunding, the founding of one visual effects production company, and a successful film festival circuit run before the film’s final release in 2016.

NOTES:

Must Watch: Ember Lab's Outstanding Sci-Fi Fantasy Short Film 'Dust' | FirstShowing.net

Dust by Mike Grier | Sci-Fi Short Film (shortoftheweek.com)

Must Watch: Ember Lab's Outstanding Sci-Fi Fantasy Short Film 'Dust' | FirstShowing.net

Aja Romano Profile and Activity - Vox

Aja Romano is a culture reporter for Vox, focusing on the ethics of culture, as well as criticism and commentary on internet culture, movies, TV, theater, and other media. After starting out in local news, they spent many years as a theater reviewer and freelancer. They joined the Daily Dot in 2012 as a staff reporter, where they were one of the first journalists to cover Gamergate and many adjacent aspects of internet culture, and the alt-right’s convergence with mainstream US politics. Since joining Vox in 2016, they’ve also become known as an authority on “cancel culture” after several definitive pieces outlining the origins and evolution of the concept.

Aja is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association and a 2019 fellow of the National Critics Institute. They’re a frequent guest on podcasts, panels, and news media, speaking to a broad range of topics, including internet and pop culture, fandom, online extremism, and probably whatever you’re arguing about on social media this week. Find them on Twitter @ajaromano.

[mariacallous]

Editor's note: As schools across the United States and around the world face persistently high levels of student disengagement and chronic absenteeism, Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson offer parents a new way of assessing their children’s engagement in school and highlight the importance of children having agency in their own learning.

Erin Thomas: Rebecca, you’ve worked for a number of years, both nationally and internationally, on education and child development issues. As senior fellow and director of the Center for Universal Education, you lead both the center and (along with fellow Emily Morris) the Family, School, and Community Engagement initiative. Additionally, you are a seasoned researcher and leader and a mom to two middle schoolers. Can you share a bit about what drew you to this work?

Rebecca Winthrop: My focus on the role of families and communities grew out of my work on education innovations. For years, I had been working with policymakers and practitioners to encourage the take-up of education innovations that help all young people develop the skills they need to thrive in today’s fast-changing world. I found in this journey that we in the education sector often overlook the important role of families as partners in transforming education. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this issue hit me in a much more personal way. When my two boys’ schools switched to home-based learning, I realized I had misjudged which of my children were deeply engaged in their learning. My oldest son, who had always gotten top grades and liked school, lost all motivation when his school went online and moved to “pass/fail” grading. Meanwhile, my youngest son, who had struggled in school because of his dyslexia, blossomed and was deeply engaged in learning on his own. I realized that if I wasn’t able to tell which of my kids was deeply engaged in school as a global education expert, it would be very difficult for most parents and caregivers too. I know grades only tell part of the story of how well our children are doing in school. I also know that in the U.S. parents and caregivers frequently resist and challenge education reforms. But this isn’t their fault. We in the education community don’t do enough to help parents and caregivers understand what good learning looks like. I was interested in helping fill this gap and I knew to do that storytelling would have to be an important part of the process.

ET: Jenny, you were a finance journalist for years and then shifted to education. Why did you make the change?

Jenny Anderson: My interests shifted after I had my first child in 2008. After spending more than 10 years immersed in financial reporting, I suddenly became curious about how learning happens—what is developmental, what is environmental, what is experience? I was immediately struck by how little the mainstream media covered these topics. There were good “mommy bloggers” gaining traction and a few trailblazing parenting journalists (Anna Quindlen and Lisa Belkin come to mind). But how kids learn and develop was not considered a beat worthy of an editorial desk staffed with seasoned reporters and editors. Is how humans grow and learn and thrive really less important or sophisticated than the stock market, or culture? A generous explanation might be that learning and development are so core to what it is to be human that we don’t think too much about how we, or our children, do it. A more realistic one is that care and nurturing of kids has long been deemed women’s work, so not serious enough to warrant the resources to cover it well.

I became more interested in finding new and creative ways to understand how humans learn and change. It’s hardly new: We had to adapt from farming to factories and factories to offices, to a second machine age and then a fourth industrial revolution. Now we have Generative AI. I was consumed with the question: If humans are born and wired to learn, how can we help our kids to do this well?

ET: You collaborated on a new book, “The Disengaged Teen: How to Help Kids Learn better, Feel Better, and Live Better,” out on January 7. Why is this the moment for this book? 

RW:More than ever before, what kids need now is to become better at learning. Generative AI is accelerating rapidly, and everyone agrees that the pace of change will continue to be dizzying. Uncertainty is the new norm. No one knows exactly what shifts in jobs and society are in store. What can best protect and prepare our children is to help them become excellent at learning and adapting. This is incredibly hard to do if you are coasting through school, bored and checked out. According to the U.S. Census, only 1 in 3 students are engaged in school. CUE’s research with the nonprofit Transcend found that less than 10% of students had school experiences that regularly let them explore their ideas and interests and practice building their independent learning skills. Resilient learners are not strong; they are flexible. Learning well is also closely tied to feeling well. When children are deeply engaged in their learning, they not only perform better but have better mental health outcomes.

ET: Jenny, how does the book help parents and educators address the major challenges adolescents face today?

JA: Teens are deeply disengaged in learning and are reporting alarmingly high mental health challenges, as Rebecca mentioned. A lot of this is pinned on social media, but kids have been disengaged from learning far longer than smartphones have been hijacking our kids’ attention.

Adolescence is a period of staggering change, a period when brains are fundamentally reconstructed. It is a window of unique opportunity and vulnerability, when the stories young people tell themselves can become embedded in useful, and sometimes less useful, ways. How kids think about themselves as learners shapes the stories they tell, and as parents and educators we have influence to narrate and model one about growth, malleability, and possibility. During adolescence, parents can nudge their teens toward experiences and opportunities to help them understand who they are and who they hope to be. Grades and achieving are part of this; nurturing a robust learner identity—that is, developing what we call “Explorer muscles”—is both essential and overlooked. Becoming better learners will help kids accelerate toward goals they care about, unstoppable where they so often now seem stuck. 

If COVID-19 showed us that kids need to be well to learn well, our research— and that of others—shows that kids also need to learn well to be well. The key to this is staying emotionally connected to teens, but then having better language to understand and talk about their learning.

ET: In the book, you develop the Four Modes of Engagement framework, which is intended to help parents and educators identify how students engage in school. Can you talk a bit about the framework and how it provides a new perspective on students’ learning and engagement?

RW: How deeply children engage in their learning shapes not only how they do in school but also the learning skills that they develop. When students are more engaged, they are more likely to attend school, have good grades, master content, graduate, and have prosocial behavior. The problem is that it can be quite hard for adults to accurately assess how deeply engaged their children are. Adults are good at understanding the behavioral dimensions of engagement in school, like attending class, not being disruptive, and turning in homework. They aren’t as good at assessing the emotional and cognitive dimensions of engagement, like being interested in what they are doing, feeling like they belong in school, and thinking deeply about what they are learning. In our research, we found that a student’s grades do not always reflect how engaged they are in their learning. Many students are disengaged but able to get good grades usually because the material is not sufficiently challenging.

It is hard to address a problem you cannot fully see. This is why we developed the four modes of engagement, to help parents and caregivers but also educators better assess and address their children’s level of engagement. Our research showed that young people engage in four main ways with school and learning:

Resister mode. When kids resist, they struggle silently with profound feelings of inadequacy or invisibility, which they communicate by ignoring homework, playing sick, skipping class, or acting out.

Passenger mode.When kids coast along, consistently doing the bare minimum and complaining that classes are pointless. They need help connecting school to their skills, interests, or learning needs.

Achiever mode. When kids show up, do the work, and get consistently high grades, their self-worth can become tied to high performance. Their disengagement is invisible, fueling a fear of failure and putting them at risk for mental health challenges.

Explorer mode. When kids are driven by internal curiosity rather than just external expectations, they investigate the questions they care about and persist to achieve their goals.

Students can move between all these modes in the course of a day, depending on their teachers, classes, or peers. Often, however, kids are in one mode in school but in another one after school.

ET: Jenny, how can parents and educators use this framework to help improve student engagement?

JA: They can use this framework in three ways. First, the modes can be used to identify where kids are, which enables adults to offer better support. Kids in Passenger mode often need more autonomy whereas kids in Resister mode might need us in the trenches with them problem solving. Kids in Achiever mode may look like they are hitting it out of the park, but they need more opportunities to take risks on behalf of their learning. The modes help us understand their learning and in time can be used by young people themselves to understand the choices they make on behalf of their learning.

Second, the framework can help adults support kids who get stuck in Resister, Passenger, or even Achiever mode to get out. These modes are dynamic and fluid, but when kids become entrenched in one, it can become an identity. Our goal is to help young people build self-awareness and regulation strategies. The modes are one way to understand what’s happening and to better identify when things are going off the rails. Disengagement does not happen overnight—it is gradual. We want to intervene earlier in the engagement continuum, before we hit a crisis point.

We hope parents and educators help kids spend as much time in Explorer mode as possible. The research with Transcend showed that only 33% of 10th graders report that they get to develop their own ideas in school. This can lead to real disengagement.

ET: Rebecca, one of the center’s workstreams is focused on youth agency. Can you define that and explain how it relates to the book?

RW: Agency is the ability to set meaningful goals and marshal resources to meet them. It isn’t just having a plan, it’s being able to design and execute that plan, even if it means overcoming barriers along the way. It requires tapping into internal resources, like effort, but also asking for help from external ones like teachers, parents, neighbors, pastors, peers, or a chatbot.

We know young people need agency, particularly to navigate the world that is to come. With generative AI able to synthesize knowledge to answer questions, students need to develop skills to ask the questions that matter to them, come up with creative new solutions, and harness resources, be they technological or human, to help them deliver on their vision.

When students are in Explorer mode, they are “agentically engaged” in their learning. This means they are constructively influencing the flow of instruction to be more supportive and interesting to them. They are proactive, asking to work on topics that interest them, suggesting different ways to learn, and taking opportunities to reflect on what they’re interested in. In school, too few students get the chance to regularly be in Explorer mode. But they should. After all, school is one of the important places where young people can learn to develop agency over their learning, an essential skill for all stages of life.

This is what we are working toward at CUE, and it’s also how we hope our book can help. We want to help parents, caregivers, and educators today support their children to have more Explorer moments at home and in class. We also want to invite families into the movement to change the design of the schools of tomorrow and make Explorer mode the default, not the exception.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Author: CrimethInc. Topic: technology

“The future is already here,” Cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson once said; “it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Over the intervening decades, many people have repurposed that quote to suit their needs. Today, in that tradition, we might refine it thus: War is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.

Never again will the battlefield be just state versus state; it hasn’t been for some time. Nor are we seeing simple conflicts that pit a state versus a unitary insurgent that aspires to statehood. Today’s wars feature belligerents of all shapes and sizes: states (allied and non-allied), religious zealots (with or without a state), local and expatriate insurgents, loyalists to former or failing or neighboring regimes, individuals with a political mission or personal agenda, and agents of chaos who benefit from the instability of war itself. Anyone or any group of any size can go to war.

The increased accessibility of the technology of disruption and war[1] means the barrier to entry is getting lower all the time. The structure of future wars will sometimes feel familiar, as men with guns murder children and bombs level entire neighborhoods—but it will take new forms, too. Combatants will manipulate markets and devalue currencies. Websites will be subject to DDoS attacks and disabling—both by adversaries and by ruling governments. Infrastructure and services like hospitals, banks, transit systems, and HVAC systems will all be vulnerable to attacks and interruptions.

In this chaotic world, in which new and increasing threats ceaselessly menace our freedom, technology has become an essential battlefield. Here at the CrimethInc. technology desk, we will intervene in the discourse and distribution of technological know-how in hopes of enabling readers like you to defend and expand your autonomy. Let’s take a glance at the terrain.

Privacy

The NSA listens to, reads, and records everything that happens on the internet.

Amazon, Google, and Apple are always listening[2] and sending some amount[3] of what they hear back to their corporate data centers[4]. Cops want that data. Uber, Lyft, Waze, Tesla, Apple, Google, and Facebook know your whereabouts and your movements all of the time. Employees spy on users.

Police[5] want access to the contents of your phone, computer, and social media accounts—whether you’re a suspected criminal, a dissident on a watch list, or an ex-wife.

The business model of most tech companies is surveillance capitalism. Companies learn everything possible about you when you use their free app or website, then sell your data to governments, police, and advertisers. There’s even a company named Palantir, after the crystal ball in The Lord of the Rings that the wizard Saruman used to gaze upon Mordor—through which Mordor gazed into Saruman and corrupted him.[6] Nietzsche’s famous quote, “When you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you,” now sounds like a double transcription error: surely he didn’t mean abyss, but app.

Security

Self-replicating malware spreads across Internet of Things (IoT) devices like “smart” light bulbs and nanny cams, conscripting them into massive botnets. The people who remotely control the malware then use these light bulbs and security cameras to launch debilitating DDoS[7] attacks against DNS providers, reporters, and entire countries.

Hackers use ransomware to hold colleges, hospitals, and transit systems hostage. Everything leaks, from nude photos on celebrities’ phones to the emails of US political parties.

Capital

Eight billionaires combined own as much wealth as the poorest 50% of the world’s population. Four of those eight billionaires are tech company founders.[8] Recently, the President of the United States gathered a group of executives to increase collaboration between the tech industry and the government.[9]

The tech industry in general, and the Silicon Valley in particular, has a disproportionately large cultural influence. The tech industry is fundamentally tied to liberalism and therefore to capitalism. Even the most left-leaning technologists aren’t interested in addressing the drawbacks of the social order that has concentrated so much power in their hands.[10]

War

Nation states are already engaging in cyber warfare. Someone somewhere[11] has been learning how to take down the internet.

Tech companies are best positioned to create a registry of Muslims and other targeted groups. Even if George W. Bush and Barack Obama hadn’t already created such lists and deported millions of people, if Donald Trump (or any president) wanted to create a registry for roundups and deportations, all he’d have to do is go to Facebook. Facebook knows everything about you.

The Obama administration built the largest surveillance infrastructure ever—Donald Trump’s administration just inherited it. Liberal democracies and fascist autocracies share the same love affair with surveillance. As liberalism collapses, the rise of autocracy coincides with the greatest technical capacity for spying in history, with the least cost or effort. It’s a perfect storm.

This brief overview doesn’t even mention artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), robots, the venture capital system, or tech billionaires who think they can live forever with transfusions of the blood of young people.

Here at the tech desk, we’ll examine technology and its effects from an anarchist perspective. We’ll publish accessible guides and overviews on topics like encryption, operational security, and how to strengthen your defenses for everyday life and street battles. We’ll zoom out to explore the relation between technology, the state, and capitalism—and a whole lot more. Stay tuned.

Footnotes

[1] A surplus of AK-47s. Tanks left behind by U.S. military. Malware infected networked computer transformed into DDoS botnets. Off the shelf ready to execute scripts to attack servers.

[2] Amazon Echo / Alexa. Google with Google Home. Apple with Siri. Hey Siri, start playing music.

[3] What, how much, stored for how long, and accessible by whom are all unknown to the people using those services.

[4] Unless you are a very large company, “data center” means someone else’s computer sitting in someone else’s building.

[5] Local beat cops and police chiefs, TSA, Border Patrol, FBI… all the fuckers.

[6] Expect to read more about Palantir and others in a forthcoming article about surveillance capitalism.

[7] Distributed Denial of Service. More on this in a later article, as well.

[8] Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison. In fact, if you count Michael Bloomberg as a technology company, that makes five.

[9] In attendance: Eric Trump. Brad Smith, Microsoft president and chief legal officer. Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. Larry Page, Google founder and Alphabet CEO. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO. Mike Pence. Donald Trump. Peter Thiel, venture capitalist. Tim Cook, Apple CEO. Safra Catz, Oracle CEO. Elon Musk, Tesla CEO. Gary Cohn, Goldman Sachs president and Trump’s chief economic adviser. Wilbur Ross, Trump’s commerce secretary pick. Stephen Miller, senior policy adviser. Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO. Ginni Rometty, IBM CEO. Chuck Robbins, Cisco CEO. Jared Kushner, investor and Trump’s son-in-law. Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee and White House chief of staff. Steve Bannon, chief strategist to Trump. Eric Schmidt, Alphabet president. Alex Karp, Palantir CEO. Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO.

[10] We’ll explore this more in a later article about “The California Ideology.”

[11] Probably a state-level actor such as Russia or China.

[hyenabeanz]

immediate thoughts on new PWHL MN GM are:

someone has a modicrum of sense and realized they needed to be sure to hire a) a woman and b) someone from Minnesota or there would have been zero chance of acceptance.

I notice they picked someone with what looks like no coaching or playing experience. Spit balling here, but that reads to me as someone who will defer to coaching staff for things like draft picks and actual hockey vs. administrative stuff. I imagine that was on purpose and am annoyed, because Ken Klee (and kcs of the reporting was accurate but who knows) getting their way on that is kind of icky. On the other hand, I do wonder if we had the opposite with Darwitz where she did all the hockey stuff and the admin lagged (Darwitz clearly did an amazing job leveraging her connections to get Tria Rink and the Xcel and things like good medical staff, but I feel marketing things like MN's social media has lagged hard compared to other teams. I guess it's possible our team just has zero personality to draw from, but the existence of Maggie Flaherty, Amanda Leveille, and Taylor Heise says otherwise. And that stuff is important too for success.)

I do notice though she's from St. Paul, her actual Minnesota hockey connections seem light (Minnesota doesn't have an AHL team; the Wild's AHL affiliate is in Iowa.) I would bet this is also on purpose/they couldn't get anyone, and may hamstring the team a bit. If Sydney Brodt isn't re-signed (which I think is certainly fair and possible; I don't think she's *that* good; not bad but this league is so cutthroat,) their connections to longstanding Minnesota hockey royalty will be largely gone. Stecklein and Pannek are still there, but those names don't have the weight/legacy/history of Darwitz and Brodt.

A lot of this is idle speculation based on what I know of my state culturally and contextually. It's not fact. Is also possible there's other things about Caruso that make this analysis off.

Either way, I truly wish her luck cuz I like when hockey is fun and not filled with shitty drama. I just wanna watch hot awesome women chase a stupid rubber thing on ice while shoving each other brutally onto boards. 😤