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thepeoplebehindsustainability · 4 years ago

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Piet Colruyt, impact investor - June 2019

“I believe the biggest problem today is our mindset: we still accept people being selfish or companies destroying nature or presidents denying climate change, on the excuse of being the natural condition of humans: we still accept people will always go for the short term benefit for their own just because “it is natural”.”

“I see myself as a social investor, which means that I want to invest in people, organisations, companies with solutions to the big societal challenges we are facing: it can be on climate change, social cohesion, inclusion, integration, poverty,… My focus is on inspiring innovations in impact investing. Which means (1) it will always be “investing” (which can be time, energy, people, money, for profit or not-for-profit) (2) where the first goal is to have positive societal impact (it can be social or environmental). (3) Innovations mean that I will not invest in existing solutions where enough money is already going to. If other people already invest in such things, I can spend my capital on other solutions. (4) And last but not least: it must be inspiring. If accountants give a certificate that the impact is great and the financial returns are ok, but it is too boring to be inspirational, I will not invest, because my ultimate goal is to change how people look at investing. Therefor it must be also fun & inspiring. People should want to change their investment strategies into impact investing not only because they have to, but because they want to.

Sustainability in my sector, the impact investing space, means a combination of positive societal impact and a fair financial return. It should be noticed that the financial return is not always for the investor: sometimes a project can have huge financial returns for the common good. These can also become sustainable if the system (the government, the foundations) provide funding because they see the return is bigger than the cost. Sustainability also means agility to react properly if the situation changes.

Coming from a family business (Colruyt, founded by my grandfather, is today in the top 3 of Belgian foodretailers) long term sustainability is in our DNA. When my grandfather started to sell coffee, wine, chocolate in the bakery of his father in 1928, he wanted to become rich (the first P of the 3P model is Profit): he had 9 children to feed and wanted a big house and a big car. The second generation added the people aspect: a company can only grow if the people grow. My uncle decided to spent 5% of the turnover in time and money in trainings. Since 1991, the third generation launched the Greenline program (the third P of the 3P’s, Planet) : as foodretailers we also have to take care about the planet to leave this in better conditions for our children. I became architect of the supermarkets in 2000 and became board member in 2001 and it was only than that we decided to diversify: we started investing in venture capital, funds and equity besides our main investment Colruyt Group. 10 years later I decided to become full time investor, after I discovered Ashoka and the world of social entrepreneurship and impact investing. We had long debates about the vision, mission, values and strategy of the family holding and I discovered the difference between social first or finance first impact investing. Although both are impact investors who want to combine doing good & doing well, the difference is in their theory of change. Finance first impact investors believe you can have the most impact if you reach market conform returns: in that case, you will find new investors, you can grow the company and the impact. Social first impact investors believe we should change our capitalistic system: if we don’t accept lower returns or higher risks, we are not able to find the new innovations needed to solve all societal challenges. To maximize the impact, they believe investors should lower their financial return expectations or increase their risk appetite. In 2010 I decided to do both: the family holding and the Colruyt Group are more finance first, but Impact Capital, my own holding, is able to promote and invest in “social first” impact investing. In 2012 I co-founded SI² Fund which was the first private social impact first fund in Belgium and merged with Shaerpa Fund in 2015 to become one of the leading social impact funds in the Benelux. SI² Fund can only survive if it is embedded in a broader ecosystem, where the right funding, coaching and network is provided at the different stages of a companies life. Therefore I started also investing in a foundation, a seed capital fund, an accelerator, a crowdfunding platform… all focused on impact. The Impact House, founded in 2018 is the materialization of this ecosystem view.

It seems that many people want change but no one wants to change. In strategy discussions on what will work best, for example, to tackle climate change, we always see the two positions: some people are convinced that awareness of the scientific facts and predictions of the consequences will people help to change habits. Other strategists are convinced that the only thing that works, is if there is a “what’s in it for me” and you’d better not talk about responsibility or negative consequences, but only positive nudging will change the mindset. Some people, arguing for the green economy, explain that we all should reduce our comfort levels and live differently, take public transport, eat less meat, pay more for fair trade, organic, local,... Others, arguing for the blue economy, are convinced that the green mantra will only convince the 10 to 15% of the people already converted, but if you want to reach the other 85%, sustainability must simply be the easiest or cheapest alternative. That’s why I am convinced that the role of the government is crucial: it is up to politics to change the rules, to raise taxes or give subsidies to steer consumption in a more sustainable, circular way. We need both sides: the green preachers who want us to change habits & the blue optimists who believe technology will finally solve most issues with no loose of comfort. I wanted to make this parallel with green or blue economy because the same discussion is going on in the impact investing space: some people strongly believe there is no trade-off between financial and social return. They look for companies with market conform returns and believe that’s the only way to grow. Others believe we should accept lower financial returns or higher risks, to discover the innovations and help them to grow before they are mature and eventually reach market conformity. We need both sides of the spectrum and that’s what I try to support since 10 years. In my opinion it is all about changing the mindset of investing, which is in essence about changing the human condition: can we be more empathic and more altruist for the common good even when in the short term it is less attractive for the person him/herself ? I strongly believe we are evolving on our planet towards a situation with polluted air, oceans full of plastic, global warming, where it is in our own personal interest to do more for the common good. We have to change mindsets and this takes time. The time we don’t have in case of the climate challenge.

I believe the biggest problem today is our mindset: we still accept people being selfish or companies destroying nature or presidents denying climate change, on the excuse of being the natural condition of humans: we still accept people will always go for the short term benefit for their own just because “it is natural”. But what is natural ? What is the nature of humans ? I dream of a world where every human being strives for the common good and no one is accepting egoism. We are the only species on earth able to fly to the moon, to use our brains and collaborate to invent treatments for diseases, to write and perform art works,… let’s become the only species in the world able to at least save the planet. Humans are the only animal species who can read and write, who can watch movies and understand literature. We are the only animal who can scientifically proof there is a climate crisis which will affect us all. We are the only species who can become angry or sad, just by reading letters in a newspaper about something terribly going wrong in the Amazone Forest. We cannot do nothing and pretend we didn’t know. We cannot keep quiet and continue our business as usual. This shift in the mindset is needed and I see my role in promoting it in the field of investing: by showing good examples of innovative social entrepreneurs who succeed in tackling a problem in a sustainable, healthy, inspiring way. Changing mindsets is a gentle evolution but the examples are often system changing or disruptive. We need both disruptions and gentle evolution, united around one common goal: positive impact for all.

In our book (“Allemaal Sociaal 3.0”) we described the interaction between exact these 3 major players. Social organisations and everyday citizens must become more entrepreneurial: everyone can become a changemaker. Corporates and companies should become more social. And we need a stronger policy level, not to solve everything on their own but to draft the boundaries, set the conditions, embody the rules with a long term vision and for the common good. Today we are in a crisis: politics seem not to work with more extremism, polarization, Brexit, populism… Governments complain, corporates complain and citizens complain. Every player in his/her corner, shooting on the others. While the only solution consists in more collaboration between those major players. And therefore we believe social entrepreneurs and inclusive businesses are best placed to show these new alliances.

I’m convinced we need to re-think the way our democracy is organized. Elections every 4 year and referenda with a simple yes/no question are not the best way to take the decisions for the long term in the common intrest. I would like to see a government of national unity where every party is represented and politicians are forced to find compromises without spindoctors, tweets or polls polarizing our society. If people see the positive effects and personal benefits of being more social and altruist, mindset will change.

Never give up when you see injustice: everyone can be a changemaker. As a consumer, you can inform yourself to vote everyday with your wallet. Choose those products and services who are better for planet & people. But inform yourself, be critical, because marketeers are smart and there is a lot of greenwashing, social washing, window dressing. And don’t be afraid to change your mind. Share what you have learnt to help people to make conscious consumption choices. And ask your bank for ethical investment products. Ask your bank about their fossil fuels policy. Choose a green energy provider. Eat less meat. But don’t blame others, but help them to change their minds. Optimism is a moral duty.

For me the urgency and dimensions of the climate crisis, explained in the alarming IPCC reports, was so obvious, that we simply cannot deny it anymore. It is about people, about ourselves, our children. Of course also about animals & nature. But the global warming above 2°C is not a problem for the planet itself. The globe will keep on turning, animals will adapt like they always did: some will die, others will come. The effects of global warming will be most extreme for the poorest people in the south, the ones who don’t have any responsibility in the current carbon levels, which were caused mainly by the Western countries. Those people in the South will migrate and look for better conditions. The current refugee numbers will only go up. It is not only our responsibility but also in our own intrest to tackle climate change. The costs of doing nothing are much higher than the investments needed to keep the warming below 2°C. We should act massively NOW: consumers, investors, companies, politicians,… Wake up !”

#impact investing #positive impact #sustainability #thepeoplebehindsustainability

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faunahudson · 4 years ago

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a walk to remember - faury

WHO: Rory Flanagan and Fauna Hudson - @switch-it-up-rory

WHEN: 26th December 2020

WHERE: Belfast, Northern Ireland

WHAT: Rory and Fauna go for a little walk and chat about their lives.

WARNINGS: Vague addiction mentions

Fauna tapped her brother on the shoulder as her mother cornered Sawyer to look at more pictures of her as a kid. “You wanna hit the road for a second Cub.” She asked, gesturing towards the door and hoping that Percy wouldn’t notice them getting them up. Truthfully she just wanted to spend a little bit of time with her twin on their own.

Rory had been zoned out for most of the evening but he smiled widely at Fauna when she tapped him for attention. "Yeah, let's fuck this ice pop stand or whatever those shitty Yanks say," He answered, slowly standing from where he had sat crossed legged on the floor. Walking to the door, he grabbed his coat from where he hung it on the bannister, its home due to how annoyed Percy got, but never moved it himself to 'teach the shite a lesson' which Rory hadn't learned his entire life. "Think we need scarves?" He asked, thinking to the lumpy knitted item Grandma had knitted him.

Fauna laughed when Rory messed up the expression, grabbing Sawyers coat from the bannister because it was a much better protection against the cold than her own little pink think. “Probably... but we’ll look more fashionable without them!” She chattered and then looped his arm through her own. “Let’s go and see what we can find Dora.” The brunette declared and then opened the door and slipped out into the cold. “You happy to be home Cub?” She asked as the cold night air hit them.

Rory just stared her down. "Fairy, you look like you lose the other two tiny children to stack on top of each other to sneak into the cinema in a coat," He said, shaking the oversized material of Yankeedoodle's coat on her. He shivered a bit when Fauna swung open the door, and he let her drag him down the drive and onto the street. "I am," He said, "I mean, like, I wasn't expecting to be working for scraps -- literal scraps, Fairy, that's all Glen got me from the Chippy and he said that with the chocolate Santa is more than enough, kids in Derry crying over getting shite all for Chrimbo -- but it's been nice, chill. Percy can suck a dick but what else is new?" He laughed, before a twinge of guilt hit him, the reminder of him always being honest to Fauna hitting him as hard as the bitter wind. "I did, uh, I did get tempted a couple of times, but I didn't...I almost sipped someone's lager, but I stopped myself and locked myself in the basement and cried." He admitted, softly, "But I just wanted you to know, because I told you I'd tell you everything."

The little brunette giggled, and shrugged. “I like wearing it, it’s warm and it feels like I’m getting a giant hug.” She explained with a little shrug, using her sleeves to give herself a little hug. “Look it’s not like Glen ever paid you properly for the hard work that you do. Honestly you probably should have started like straight robbing him years ago.” The submissive responded with a shrug. “It was really nice to see you behind the bar again though, very homey.” Fauna responded and then her face dropped a little bit when he spoke next. She was very grateful he was being honest with her but she hated to hear about him suffering. “I’m really proud of you for not.. you know slipping up. Though I wish you hadn’t been crying. Thank you, for telling me. Would it make it easier for you if we didn’t go to anymore bars? Me and you could just chill at home and drink milkshakes?” She suggested wanting to do something to help her brother if she possibly could.

Rory wrinkled his nose. "Aye, you've gone soft," He declared, flicking her forehead, "But you're right, a giant hug is nice and tha'," He shook his head at the suggestion of robbing Glen, because as many times as he considered it, he couldn't do it to the weirdo. "Nah, he means no harm. Let's save the robbing to the Monopoly Man and Daddy Warbucks, eh?" He suggested. There was an air of awkwardness when discussing his shortcomings, but he was glad to not be told off. "Sometimes the tap to the waterworks doesn't turn off properly." He teased, "Nah, I like bars. But I'll never say no to some milkshakes and chill. I just need...time, patience. A new outlook on life. It's why I like Charlie so much." He mentioned, a faint blush dusting his cheeks at bringing up the blonde.

Fauna giggled. “I haven’t gone soft, I was always soft I was just playing at being a heartless temptress.” She teased, flicking him back almost as quickly. Fauna admired Rorys loyalty to Glen no matter how badly the other man had treated him. Not because wanted Rory to be treated badly but because she saw it as something soft inside her brother. “You’re right there, we’ll leave the robbin to the capitalist pigs and then vive la revolution another day.” The brunette agreed easily, squeezing Rorys arm just a little. “You just tell me what you want or need and I’ll make it happen.” She promised him. “You wanna go home. We go home.” Fauna wanted Rory to know that there was nothing wrong with having limits and that she beyond respected his. “Ah yes Charlie and the Chocolate factory is very perky isn’t she?”

"Well you've had demon dad as great inspiration over the years." Rory commented, trying not to grumble too much in response, too petty about Percy to let him win at anything, including his emotions. He patted her shoulder, "Yes, you know the plan. When we're ready to ride at dawn, the rooster will call." He said, mysteriously, as if he knew something others didn't. A part of him felt bad that Fauna felt like she had to change aspects of her social life to fit him, but he didn't want to feel like a burden, not at Christmastime. "Very perky," He agreed, "But it's still my mission to make her a pessimist before she fully turns me optimistic." Rory teased, glad that Fauna hadn't immediately flew off the handle at him mentioning a girl, but she wouldn't would she? She paired them two together, she knew Charlie was a good egg.

“Yes, all of our suffering leads to great art don’t you know.” The brunette said knowingly. “All the candle lit diaries of my torment were just inspiration for the stage of life.” There were few things that felt more comfortable than chattering nonsense with her twin. “Of course Captain, i shall be waiting in the wings for when Dawn finally breaks.” Fauna agreed as they strolled around their hometown. “I don’t know if that’s possible Ror.. maybe you’ll just have to meet in the middle and just become realists.” She suggested with an affectionate squeeze of his arm. Hoping to quietly show her support for him and Charlie, so he felt comfortable talking about it.

"I did know that, it's all we talked about in Philosophy." Rory joked, laughing at how much Fauna sounded like that ghost from the Deverex campus, but decided against making comparisons because Yankeedoodle was friends with her, and he didn't want Fauna telling him off for his apparent bullying. "Meeting in the middle, becoming realists, sounds like a very angsty song-lyric, Fairy." He commented, a skip in his step. "I'm glad you like Charlie, you know. I was worried about bringing her up, because you're protective of me, which I like, but I also really like Charlie."

Fauna laughed easily. “Well I’m glad that all that money went on something that’s still applicable in your real life.” She teased, it was always easy to be around Rory. “Maybe so, but I think it’s a better goal than trying to make poor old Charlie a pessimist.” Fauna replied with a laugh. “You don’t have to worry about bringing her up Cub.. I know that you really like her and I want you to be happy. I’m only protective fo keep you safe and make sure that nobody is mistreating you.. and Charlie.. I think she’s good for you.” The Irishwoman admitted with a little shrug, as she dug one hand deep into Sawyers coat pocket.

Rory laughed. "And who said medicine was more important than philosophy?" He teased, elbowing his twin playfully. He felt a strange warmth surge through him when Fauna expressed her approval of Charlie, he hadn't really met anyone since Aoife he had clicked with that well, and he would have been torn if, for some reason, his sister didn't like her. "You do? She's a good egg, though admittedly another part of me is waiting for like the other, psychotic shoe to drop." He expressed his fears lightly, as if he were simply talking about the weather. Rory glanced down to where the coat had consumed Fauna's hand. "Anything interesting in Yankeedoodle's pocket?"

Fauna laughed along with him. “Some idiot who thought saving lives was more important than like.. contemplating why we were put here in the first place.” She countered easily, and nodded in agreement with his assessment. “I like to think that some of that fades over time.. though I’ll admit every once in a while I expect Sawyer to stand up and be like.. haha gotcha Slutty you didn’t really think I was into you did you?” She admitted with a huffed laugh. “Not that I think that’s actually going to happen or that Charlie would do anything even remotely like that. She is.. as you say a very good egg.” She confirmed, though her cheeks flushed slightly at the mention of Sawyers pocket. “No... there’s likely spare change that will be useless here or a mini paperback.”

Rory's grin faded a little at Fauna admitting her fear, but at the same time he felt touched, as he knew she didn't like to share things sometimes, always more focused on looking after him. "Oh Fairy...not even Yankeedoole is that unimaginative to call you just Slutty," He assured, jokingly. "But seriously, if he ever changed his mind it probably mean the suddenly had a stronk," He laughed, thinking of the old tweet he was referencing, "And really at that point you can take his yankeedoodle life insurance and fuck off to like...the Virgin Islands or some shite." He shrugged, "Aye, perfect items to chuck at pigeons?" He suggested.

The little brunette nodded, blowing out a breath that lingered in the air as though she were smoking. Fauna rarely verbalised her fears in front of Rory, it simply wasn’t the way they worked. But for some reason in their home town she felt comfortable enough to say. “It’s irrational and yet.. you’ve met him he’s a morally upstanding, handsome, book nerd. He’s got to be an MTV host in disguise.” Her nose crinkled in a true laugh when he mentioned a stronk. “I know it’s not what you want to hear because he’s an American. But I actually want to hold onto him.. and definitely not live on an Island of Virgins.” She teased. “Ah no, we don’t chuck Sawyers things at pigeons.. Do you wanna get some chips?”

Rory nodded, reaching over to squeeze Fauna's arm in a comforting way. "There's a law that MTV hosts can't be that tall so you're good," He assured her. He felt like serious words could never acually help, and he knew Fauna would appreciate him trying to find humour wherever he could. "Silly Fauna, it's not an island of Virgins, it's where all the Virgin Media signals come from. What's his face owns it, Richard Branson. Looks like a burnt version of the Deal or No Deal bloke." He mocked pouted when she told him they didn't chuck the belongings of the Yank but the mention of chips lifted his spirits. "Chips would be fab, Fairy. Onwards, to our next great, greasy adventure."

#(( adventures with rory ))

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fatehbaz · 6 years ago

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Hello there! You’ve posted quite a bit about dark ecology, which I absolutely love as a concept. However, I’ve found Tim Morton’s work can be a bit dense for folks without a philosophy background — do you have any “starter” reading recommendations for people who’d like to learn more before diving headlong into Ecology Without Nature? Thanks!

Despite how over-the-top excited I was to see this great ask, I held-off on answeringimmediately because I wanted to make sure that I chose my words very carefully.Thank you so much for reaching out. (And I’m so sorry! I’m always very grateful forquestions and try to respond much more quickly!) Regarding how inaccessible Morton’sjargon-heavy and convoluted writing can be, I deeply relate. It’s dense, andafter 10 years of reading, I still cannot fully vouch for or clearly explainobject-oriented ontology; Morton can be floofy and difficult. However, I think I’m a relatively better acolyte of dark ecologyand Morton’s more overtly ecological material; I also think that Morton is much more accessible in interviews and when speaking in-person and in recorded lectures. Pertinently, the publishers of Morton’s latest book (Being Ecological - 2018) have added a kind of goofy, informal, and marketable subtitle to the book: “A book about ecology without information dumping.”

In my experience, it seems to me that most people with any kind of passionateinterest in ecology – whether or not they had access to a formal universityeducation – already intuitively understand much of what dark ecology proposes.This would include things like the intimidating scale and vastness of systemslike a local microhabitat, “the sea”, or a regional climate itself; the complex interconnectivity and interdependency of differentspecies; the fragility of the biosphere in the face of human activity; how an hierarchical mentality that devalues ecological landscapes willalso devalue human life; etc. I think a lot of people intuitively recognizethese things, even if not everyone can describe them or explain systems ecology in the most technical terms.Dark ecology might be of interest for those looking to more clearly discuss ordefine these “realities.” First andforemost, dark ecology is arguably about defining a more ethical and comprehensive approach to ecological thinking to specifically cope with the complexity of systems ecology, the social and environmentaldegradation of the Anthropocene, the climate crisis, and the sixth massextinction event.

Before I lose anyone’s interest with a wall of text: I think that peopleinterested in the global climate/ecological crisis; the Anthropocene; weirdfiction (!); anthropology; ethnoecology; the intersection of social injusticewith environmental degradation; capitalist realism and retrofuturism; biosemioticsand animal emotion; and ecology in general would be interested in checking out darkecology.I like that the dark ecology concept tries to grapple with the “apocalyptic” feeling of the current ecological crisis, and I also like that the concept tries to bridge the apparent gap between the humanities and ecology by describing how environmental degradation relates to social injustice.

In this egregiously long post, I’ll try to offer some accessiblereading recommendations on dark ecology and I’ll try to use the question as aspringboard to define dark ecology. Unfortunately, I, myself, come across asdense and convoluted, so if you want toavoid parsing through all of my text here, I’ve numbered each of the readingrecommendations/resources below.

Art installations from the Dark Ecology Project art sites - a collaboration with Timothy Morton - in Norway. The first piece is by resident artist HC Gilje.

What is dark ecology?

- Essentially, dark ecology is a wayto update ecological thinking for the Anthropocene and for the sixth massextinction event; for an era of “climate anxiety” and loss. It’s a conceptmeant to improve ecological thought and to correct older inadequacies in Westernnaturalism, which often assumes that humans are separate or detached observers fromthe landscapes that we study. - Dark ecology also involves the humanities, and anthropology especially. Thisis because the concept implies an acknowledgment that Indigenous and non-Western cosmologies (world-views) are legitimateand helpful frameworks for building sustainable ecological communities;understanding the egalitarian ecological relationships among organismsincluding humans; and acknowledging that other living things are deserving ofethical treatment. - The concept of “weirdness” is veryimportant in dark ecology, as is anxiety. (To learn more about this aspect of weirdness, see Morton’s article in Changing Weathers, linked below.)- Another concept originally coined and defined by Morton and centrally important to dark ecology isthat of “hyperobjects”: things sobig and/or abstract that humans struggle to conceive of their magnitude,something like “climate” itself or an abstract “object” like an “interspeciesrelationship.”- In dark ecology, there is an implied (and sometimes explicit) critique of the“extractivist” mentality and its friends (industrial resource extraction;monoculture farming). Morton sometimes phrases this as a critique of “agrilogistics”: the industrial-scaleover-harvest of natural resources backed by systemic social inequality, a sharedmentality prevalent in early hydraulic civilization, empires, the European feudalera, and the current era.- There is also an implied critique of socialhierarchy; essentially, dark ecology proposes that the problem of human/industrialmismanagement of landscapes and other species is closely tied with socialhierarchy and human mistreatment of other humans. Thus, dark ecology impliesthat sexism, racism, violence, etc., stem from the same worldviews thatpropagate environmental degradation.- Where object-oriented ontology arguablycomes most into play in Morton’s writing is regarding biosemiotics and animal/plant “emotion.” Dark ecology can be readas implying that every other living thing has some kind of subjectiveexperience and agency, even if it doesn’t translate into recognizable humanemotions or doesn’t resemble the sentience of humans. OOO suggests that othernon-human things are still “real” or “alive” at some scale. (This is the aspectof dark ecology that I understand least!)- This aspect of biosemiotics also unites dark ecology with the ontological turn in anthropology, arecent and still active movement to decolonize anthropological thinking. Theacademic discussion of OOO and dark ecology around 2007-2012 was very influentialon anthropologists working to validate non-Western cosmologies that perceive the natural world as a sort of collective, with cooperation among species.- Dark ecology is also useful for evaluating urban geography and urban planning in the 21st Century (“theera of the city”), because related concepts like “hyperobjects” help to conceiveof urban areas as vast entities with sometimes invisible influences overculture and ecology planetwide.- Playfulness and joy are important in Morton’s understanding of the relationship between humans and landscapes/animals/ecology. (You can read more about this aspect in a couple of the resources listed below, including the first video resource listed and the article about “dark ecological podcasts”!)- Mark Fisher’s “capitalist realism” is now a widely recognized concept, Morton has done something similar with the very popular concept of “hyperobjects”- Thinking of landscapes like this – animals being “alive” in their own uniqueway; ecology being complex and “weird”; seeing ecology and human/social justiceas interlinked – isn’t exactly new at all, especially compared to millennia ofIndigenous cosmologies and environmental knowledge.

Resource 1 - If you don’t want tobe confronted with this long post, one of the best introductions to darkecology comes from the person who coined and popularized the term, TimothyMorton. Since Morton’s really theoretical and sometimes convoluted whenwriting, listening to him speak and answer questions directly seems (to me) tobe an easier way to hear a clear definition of dark ecology and what itentails. So, I’d recommend checking out Morton in this hour-long interview.Here, he explores environmentalism; naturalism; ethical treatment of animals;industrial resource extraction; weird fiction; and the connection between environmentaldegradation and social injustice/hierarchy.

Timothy Morton in Conversation withVerso Books – Verso Books, on YouTube~

This is a great video! However, if I could recommend just one written exploration of dark ecology, it would be this article from Morton.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180316024548/www.changingweathers.net/en/episodes/48/what-is-dark-ecology (What Is Dark Ecology? -- TimothyMorton – Changing Weathers, 2016)

Resource 2 - Here’s a shortervideo (9 minutes) where Morton briefly describes ecological thought; biosemiotics;the development of the dark ecology concept; and the concept’s relationships toenvironmentalism and natural history. ~ Beautiful Soul Syndrome: Towards aDark Ecology (YouTube) ~

Resource 3 - It seems that Morton’smost influential texts are these 4 books:

-- Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007)-- The Ecological Thought (2010)-- Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013)-- Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016)

You can read the entirety of Dark Ecology (2016) for free online,here.

Resource 4 – A good related book(with much more accessible writing!) is this: Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realismfor Turbulent Times – Adrian Ivakhiv – 2018

These are 6 “classic” books that explore dark ecology:

Resource 5 - One of the best andmost concise written explanations also comes from Morton himself. Ironically,this introductory was taken off the internet only one week ago, but you canaccess it through the Wayback Machine here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180316024548/www.changingweathers.net/en/episodes/48/what-is-dark-ecology

~ What Is Dark Ecology? -- TimothyMorton – Changing Weathers, 2016 ~

And the original URL, which you can plug into the Wayback Machine:

www.changingweathers.net/en/episodes/48/what-is-dark-ecology

Resource 6 - A fun read – and agood example of the application of dark ecology, especially involving therelationship between ecology and weirdness/playfulness – would be this article. (It’sa good read even if you’re not a fan of the multitude of “spooky” and “AmericanGothic” podcasts that have been recently popularized.)

~ At Home with the Weird: DarkEco-Discourse in Tanis and Welcome to Night Vale – Danielle Barrios-O’Neill andMichael Collins - Revenant, March 2018 ~

A quick definition of dark ecology fromArie Altena:

We have indeed borrowed the term ‘Dark Ecology’ from the work of TimothyMorton. Over the past couple of years he has written a number of booksoutlining an ‘Ecological Thought’ that has no use for the Romantic notion of‘Nature’. He begins to explain this idea in Ecology without Nature (2007) – abook which is also about art and ‘environmental aesthetics.’ In The EcologicalThought (2010) he shows that the ‘ecological thought’ is not nice and green anda celebration of all things natural, but that to really think theinterconnectedness of all forms of life and all things (the ‘mesh’), is dark.[Morton says:] ‘Dark ecology puts hesitation, uncertainty, irony, andthoughtfulness back into ecological thinking. The form of dark ecology is thatof noir film. The noir narrator begins investigating a supposedly externalsituation, from a supposedly neutral point of view, only to discover that sheor he is implicated in it. The point of view of the narrator herself becomesstained with desire. There is no metaposition from which we can make ecologicalpronouncements. Ironically, this applies in particular to the sunny,affirmative rhetoric of environmental ideology. A more honest ecological artwould linger in the shadowy world of irony and difference. …The ecologicalthought includes negativity and irony, ugliness and horror.

In Morton’s own words (from “What IsDark Ecology?” – Changing Weathers):

The ecological era we find ourselves in — whether we like it or not, andwhether we recognise it or not — makes necessary a searching revaluation ofphilosophy, politics and art. The very idea of being ‘in’ an era is inquestion. We are ‘in’ the Anthropocene, but that era is also ‘in’ a moment offar longer duration.

What is the present? How can it be thought? What is presence? Ecologicalawareness forces us to think and feel at multiple scales, scales that disorientnormative concepts such as ‘present’, ‘life’, ‘human’, ‘nature’, ‘thing’,‘thought’ and ‘logic’. I shall argue there are layers of attunement toecological reality more accurate than what is habitual in the media, in theacademy and in society at large.

These attunement structures are necessarily weird, a precise term that weshall explore in depth. Weirdness involves the hermeneutical knowingnessbelonging to the practices that the Humanities maintain. The attunement, whichI call ecognosis, implies a practical yet highly nonstandard vision of whatecological politics could be. In part ecognosis involves realising thatnonhumans are installed at profound levels of the human — not just biologicallyand socially but in the very structure of thought and logic. Coexisting withthese nonhumans is ecological thought, art, ethics and politics.

An art project by Edward Burtynsky, at National Gallery of Canada exploring the Anthropocene (pictured is a scene from a coal mine in Westphalia, Germany - 2015).

Timothy Morton is a close colleague of Graham Harman – Harman being thetheorist who is most credited with defining object-oriented ontology. BothMorton and Harman were colleagues with Mark Fisher, the now-legendary culturalcritic and theorist who popularized the concept of “capitalist realism.” Thebranch of OOO that Harman and Morton subscribe to is usually referred to as “speculativerealism.”

OOO and dark ecology are closely related - at least in Morton’s work - and tend to be mentioned together(with good reason). An important disclaimer: OOO seems to be even more overwhelming than dark ecology asa concept; I struggle to articulate OOO and really do not understand too muchabout it (so I’m not sure I can provide the best resources for learning aboutit).

From an interview with Morton at WASH magazine:

OOO deals with concepts like “hyperobject” and “mesh.” Can you give us some brief definitions of these concepts?A hyperobject is an entity that is so massively distributed in space and time that you can’t point to all of it at once. Even if you use very advanced prosthetic devices like fast supercomputers, it might still be difficult to map one. The biosphere is a hyperobject. Climate is a hyperobject.The mesh is the interconnectedness of beings in the biosphere. Nowadays I have a higher resolution image for this: I call it the symbiotic real. It’s a loose network of precarious affiliations between beings where who’s “the top” and who’s “the bottom,” who’s “the friend” and who’s “the enemy,” is always in question. It’s a whole that is always less than the sum of its parts, however weird that sounds. (End quote.)

So, I am hard-pressed to define OOO, and I can’t personally critique it wellor vouch for OOO as a “good” framework. That said, I take more of a liking tothe dark ecology concept.

Art from the cover of Morton’s 2016 book, Dark Ecology.

Moreaccessible reading resources:

(7) - One of the best applications of the hyperobject concept is this fantastic essay on how urban megaregions and big cities function as ecological forces: The Urban Hyperobject - Lisa Bremner

(8) ~ Four Questions for the Author: Timothy Morton,Being Ecological – Orion Magazine –September 2018

(9) ~ Dark Ecology InterviewsTim Morton – Lucas van der Velden and Arie Altena – Dark Ecology dot Net – 2014

(10) ~ (Video) Timothy Morton:Dark Ecological Chocolate – YouTube –2017

(11) ~ A Mutable Cloud: On “DarkEcology” and “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays” –Jennifer Peterson – LA Review of Books– 2017

(12) ~ ‘A Reckoning for our species’: The philosopher prophet of theAnthropocene – The Guardian – June 2017

(13) ~ A Polar Bear Called Susan: Interview with Lisa Doeland – De Groene Amsterdammer – 2013

(14) ~ Timothy Morton: Ecology Without Nature – We interview the philosopherTim Morton, author of “Dark Ecology”, who proposes that we rethink the way wesee ecology, anthropocentrism and art – Roc Jimenez de Cisneros – CCCB Lab -- December 2016

(15) ~ Timothy Morton regularly posts onand maintains a blog on Blogspot: EcologyWithout Nature

(16) Timothy Morton had collected a list of interviews with other ecologists, theorists, philosophers, etc. that relate to dark ecology. Available here.

Again, I think that a lot of people interested in ecology already intuitively grasp much what dark ecology entails. But, I guess it’s nice that the concept specifically tries to grapple with the Anthropocene and what is essentially an “apocalypse” of sorts. It’s a useful framework (at least, it’s been helpful for me).

OK. Yikes.

Very sorry for the ridiculous length of the post. I hope this is useful for someone.

Thanks again for reaching out!

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innuendostudios · 6 years ago

Video

vimeo

[edit: the video was false-flagged as “hatespeech” on YouTube, so I have swapped the embed with a mirror on Vimeo. I will swap them back when I get the YouTube version reinstated/replaced in a re-edited form.]

It would not be possible to continue The Alt-Right Playbook without sitting down and defining fascism, so here we are. I know I said the next one would be shorter, and I was proven a damned liar. Maybe the next one! As ever, keep this series, and all my other videos, coming out steadily by backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

"Fascism" is a term I've heard thrown around since I was a kid, but, most of the time, idiomatically. "Fascist" is what you called your Type A, passive-aggressive roommate: "Stop being such a fascist, Debra." Through osmosis, I knew its literal meaning was among a cluster of related words: Authoritarianism, totalitarianism, white supremacy, nationalism, dictatorship. But, for much of my life, if you pressed me to define any of these words, I could have only said, "You know, Nazis. Hitler, the Gestapo... you know, Nazis!"

This colloquializing of fascism, and its association with the cultural shorthand for pure evil, makes it very hard to discuss as an ideology, because even using the word, "fascism," sounds both hyperbolic and like a punch below the belt. To call a person, group, or idea "fascist" is to exaggerate for the purpose of dragging them.

Counterintuitively, this prevents us from criticizing fascist groups, even though most everyone agrees fascism is terrible, because, saying it, you sound ridiculous. You’re talking about Indiana Jones villains. So I'm going to be using the word, "fascism," kind of a lot in this video, hoping that we can semantically satiate it just enough that its connotative meanings - irreverent sarcasm and the envisioning of stormtroopers - are dulled to the point that we can talk about fascism as a system of beliefs, and as a mode of political organizing, and about who practices it today.

Our work necessitates a conversation about fascism; specifically, white fascism.

(Fascism, fascism, fascism.)

I. Fascism

Central to fascism is the belief that some people are more deserving of power than others, and that society’s appropriate structure is a hierarchy where increasingly smaller groups of betters rule over the lessers. This is not unique to fascism; this is the organizing principle of many social systems.

The difference between systems is whom each hierarchy says should be at the top. In a feudal monarchy, the top is the king and his family, and they get there by royal bloodline. In a capitalist free market (*cough*), people earn their place at the top by success in business. In fascism, the ones at the top should be “us,” whomever “us” happens to be, and they should get there by any means available.

The most succinct definition of fascism comes from Roger Griffin: “palingenetic ultranationalism,” a wonderful term because it fits a great many ideas into only two roots and a bunch of affixes, and a terrible one because both words need definitions of their own. (That’s not how efficiency works, Rog!)

So, OK: Palingenesis is the idea of rebirth, with some frankly Biblical overtones. The word “palingenesis” is used to refer to reincarnation, or the remaking of the world after Judgment Day. In terms of fascism, it is the notion that “we,” as a unified people, are ancient, that our former glory has waned, and that we are due to rise again. The implications that this rebirth will come by purging the world in fire with boiling seas and a blood-red sky are not entirely accidental. It is the granting of “us” with mythological importance.

Nationalism is, in the broadest sense, thinking of oneself through the lens of national identity. A single person holds a lot of identities: White, male, gamer, New Englander, cyclist, sports racer, and so on. Nationalism is the lens through which thinking of oneself as, for instance, American, is distinct from being Canadian, Liberian, Chilean, and that putting stock in this distinction is desirable. This can play out a lot of ways: Nationalism can be a colonized people forming an identity distinct from the ruling class and arguing that this people should have its own state, as in the American or Haitian Revolutions; Black nationalism has argued, at times, that Black Americans, while coexisting with other Americans, should maintain a distinct identity rather than be assimilated into white culture; and where Black nationalism has also sometimes argued for the repatriation of Black Americans to African nations, white nationalism typically argues that whites should have a nation of their own, not by returning to Europe, but by removing non-whites from the US (something Native Americans have opinions about). This would be an example of ultranationalism: The emphasizing of national identity as among the most, if not the most, important.

(These are not rare traits, and I want to stress that it is not the presence but the confluence of them that gives fascism its character.)

So, palingenetic ultranationalism: The belief that the nation is of the utmost importance, that the people running the nation should be a narrowly defined “us,” and that “we” should rule because it’s, more or less, our destiny.

The religiosity of this framing is intentional. Most hierarchical systems will make some case for why society should be structured a certain way: The king has been groomed for his role since birth, Steve Jobs did real good at the business factory. Fascism suspends the need for explanation: We belong at the top because we just do. Destiny. When pressed, fascists will offer pseudo-rational justifications for why they should be in charge which fall apart under the barest scrutiny, but debunking these claims is largely ineffective because, while they follow the cadences of reasoned argument, they’re operating on the level of emotion, faith, and a sense of belonging.

There’s a reason fascist regimes rely heavily on propaganda: Propaganda traffics not in arguments but in symbols. For the Nazis, it was the German soldier; for the Soviets, it was the worker. Propaganda relies on inspiring imagery that evokes cherished aspects of the culture, like the family or the countryside - “the babe in his cradle is closing his eyes, the blossom embraces the bee” - and ties those images to fascist ideals - “but soon, says a whisper, arise, arise, tomorrow belongs to me.” All of this is meant to make one swell with pride in such a way that it’s very hard to think about what is actually being said. Racist caricatures of Black and Jewish people - or whomever is “not us” in a given system - serve the same purpose by evoking hatred, or fear of what might happen to “us” if “they” were in control.

Jason Stanley calls this “affective override,” the moment where emotion shuts down critical thinking. If you’ve ever had a conversation with a conservative about, like, healthcare or something, and after a few exchanges they’re chest-beating about how “this is the nation of freedom and choice, the greatest nation that ever was, and I’m not going to let you take from me my god-given…” you’ve seen this in action. Fascism depends on this passionate fervor because it can’t convincingly pretend to be rational. The reason why one particular “us” should be at the top of the hierarchy, or why there should even be a hierarchy in the first place, is arbitrary. It’s that way because a particular “us” wants it that way.

II. Authority

We usually associate fascism with the image of state violence, be it the punishing of The Other, the policing of citizens, or the conquering of other nations, and, while this is almost always the case, fascism is not, as a rule, militant. In practice, fascists are not authoritarians or pacifists. For that matter, they're not capitalists or anti-capitalists. They're not statists or anarchists. They're not monarchists, oligarchists, or plutocrats. They are Whatever Puts Us In Power-ists.

For instance: Capitalism is a hierarchical system, and so fascists will often try to influence policy such that the capitalist hierarchy starts to resemble the desired fascist one, but only until the point that it stops suiting their needs. The “us” of fascism is always defined by essential qualities like race or heritage, qualities that don’t change. A poor person can become less poor, but a Black person can’t become less Black, so, no matter how biased and stratified capitalism becomes, so long as it is still technically possible for someone from the lower classes to rise above their station, there will come a time when fascists must leave capitalism behind in favor of a system fully without social mobility.

Similarly, if fascists have the ability to take governmental control through nonviolent means, they will often do so - remember, Mussolini took power in a coup but Hitler was elected. If democracy and nonviolence can be put to fascist ends, they will be. But instituting a system that benefits the few while the many suffer and where, by design, no one suffering is allowed to improve their situation, might as well be writing ad copy for guillotines, and that’s how you get the SS. So, yes, fascist power trends towards authoritarianism because, on a long enough timeline, it will be the only way fascism can maintain itself.

But, also, fascists and authoritarians think power, brutality, and subjugation are sexy in more or less identical ways, so, while not all authoritarians are fascists, most fascists are authoritarians. And state violence is often a way of getting people invested in a hierarchy that doesn’t directly benefit them: “You may not be at the top, but if you’re somewhere around the middle, we can employ you as military or police to keep the lower classes in line.” Many people will relinquish their rights to fascists in exchange for being “the arm of the law,” and, the more powerful the state becomes, the more vicarious power they get to wield. So long as they’re not at the bottom, they have some investment in the system continuing as is, because it authorizes them to fuck people up.

The other way fascism justifies itself to the masses is to insist that the only alternative is death. “We are a great and noble people with an illustrious history, and if we achieve our fated rebirth we will form the most glorious nation in all of history and take our rightful place as world leader, and if we fail we will be eradicated.” There is no in between. “They are coming for us, they are everywhere, we can beat them, but this is the only way.” Race war is the usual go-to, claiming Black people are savages and razing our cities to the ground is their nature, or that they want revenge for slavery (which, I mean…). Sometimes they go with a Jewish conspiracy as revenge for the Holocaust. Or both at the same time. Right now Islamophobia’s in fashion. Each depends on downplaying slavery or the Holocaust or the Crusades as the horrific acts that they were, insisting that the crimes are greatly exaggerated by history, because these are all pretty damning counterarguments to “us” being the greatest people who have ever lived.

III. Whiteness

Race is like gender and money: It’s real, but only because we make it real. But fascism necessitates the belief that whatever makes “us” us is not only extremely real, in the biological and/or spiritual sense, but that people can be ranked by it. And, when stacking the hierarchy, white fascists put themselves at the top. So: What is whiteness?

The short answer is that whiteness is whatever it needs to be. Whiteness was created to differentiate one people from the people they were oppressing. Whiteness is a means to an end. The people most fixated with the definition of whiteness are racists, but there is no anti-racist definition. Racists invented whiteness, and all white people are folded into it.

And the way white people conceive of whiteness is fundamentally different from how they conceive of other races. A common example of this phenomenon is Barack Obama: Obama had one Black parent and one white parent. But, while he can call himself the first Black President, he could never call himself a white President. (Or, well, he could call himself whatever he wanted, but white people wouldn’t agree, and no one would treat him like a white President.) White people are only white if they’re purebreeds, or if non-whiteness is far enough back in their family tree that one can pretend it isn’t there. These rules of purity don’t apply to other races: When Black and white people have children, those children are allowed to be Black, or any number of (often racist) terms for mixed-race children. But, whatever they are, they can’t be white.

This frames interracial families as an increase of one race and a decrease in whites. So, by this logic, where other races spread, whiteness has to be maintained.

White people don’t consider whiteness a race; it is the absence of race. The undiluted form of which all other races are deviations. And, if it goes, it can’t be brought back.

This is, of course, nonsense. It’s a bunch of made-up rules to justify white supremacy. There’s only so long fascists can insist, “If we don’t strike first, they’re going to kill us all,” before people start to notice that the race war they’ve been promising for a century doesn’t seem to be happening. So, then, the terms have to be updated: Now the existential threat is a generational project. Now Black people even existing near white people is the race war. They’re literally going to fuck us out of existence.

And, because whiteness is made up, it can be endlessly redefined. A tension inherent to fascism is that rather a lot of people are required to bring it into existence, but, by design, only a small number of people will run it once it exists. So, commonly, the definition of “us” is broadened while building coalitions, and gets progressively narrower the more fascist society becomes.

White fascists in the US and Europe go back and forth on whether or not Jewish people get to be white. For a while it was kiiiind of a soft yes, and now it’s tipping the other way as they gain influence. Ethnic groups formerly considered non-white, like Italians and the Irish, became white when white culture feared marginalized immigrants might ally with slaves in revolt.

Bigotry is intersectional; there aren’t a lot of single-issue bigots, people who hate Mexicans but fight for everyone else’s rights. People generally don't apply this hierarchical thinking to just one aspect of their lives. So - commonly - racism is comorbid with anti-Semitism is comorbid with misogyny is comorbid with transphobia is comorbid with homophobia is comorbid with religious intolerance. I mean, just listen to a Klansman talk about Catholics sometime, or, better yet, don’t. Any marginalized group may be inducted into the tribe to consolidate against a common enemy, but, should that enemy be defeated, the inductees become the new enemy.

We can see the history of social progress in the US as successively disenfranchised groups demanding and, sometimes, gaining their rights one by one, with reactionaries trying to beat back the tide. Transphobia is recently rampant in fascist circles and conservative politics because, with the legalization of same-sex marriage, the battle against homosexuality is thought to be lost - or, at least, at a ceasefire. This gives some cause to welcome gay transphobes into the ranks. But, should they seize enough power to strip what few protections trans people have gained recently, and the alliance is no longer useful, their gaze refocuses, and it’s last hired, first fired for the homosexuals. And then the African-Americans, and then the women, and on and on, stripping rights from social groups in the order opposite to which they were gained, like the plot of Final Destination 2.

IV. Goals

You might be thinking the endgame here is a nice, homogenous group of white men to sit at the top of the pyramid, and the white fascists would be thinking the same. But, in reality, there is no endgame. It’s not like, if the fascists get their ethnostate, they’re just gonna call it a day. It’s the flaw in obsessing over racial purity: Whiteness is defined by what it’s not. If it isn’t contrasted with something else, it ceases to be an identity. So, if the whites kick all the non-whites out of their country, suddenly the Irish and Italians aren’t white anymore. And then maybe the albinos, or the brunettes, or the Virginians, it doesn’t matter, the rules are made up. One way or another, the pyramid grows thinner.

The authoritarian mindset is one that just likes stripping rights from people. Leave authoritarians no one to strip rights from and they start stripping them from each other. (And yes, that’s what the research says.) The other outlet for this restless energy is war, invasion, colonization: Deport all the Mexicans and then follow them into Mexico. Go seeking an Other to define yourself against.

You’ve maybe noticed that these three drives - the seeking out of conflict, the need to subjugate more and more people, and the shrinking of one’s base of power - is not a recipe for success. Most hierarchical systems seek equilibrium, finding the point where the masses are just happy enough that they don’t disembowel you. But the trajectory of fascism is to make enemies, cast out allies, narrow the gene pool, and stuff your ill-gotten wealth into the military until you’re fully stocked with the kinds of weapons that ensure mutual destruction.

I’m not the first to say: white fascism is a suicide cult.

The history of fascism is one of atrocity followed by failure followed by disgrace, so modern fascists operate in a cycle of constant reinvention as they try to distance themselves from movements that came before. The ideology doesn’t change, but the rhetoric does, primarily by stealing rhetoric from the Left, because it’s, flatly, more popular. White nationalists calling themselves “identitarians” is an appropriation of progressive identity politics. The rhetoric of “white power” is an intentional bastardization of Black power movements. Even the Nazis, while installing a dictatorship, knew to call themselves socialists, and, despite German antifascism being formed predominantly by socialists and the first death camp being originally built to throw communists in, some people still believe this?

This appropriation of rhetoric is how each generation of fascists rebrands itself. “We’re not like those fascists who got hanged for what they did; we’re young, hip, and successful! Come back, baby, it’ll be different this time.”

V. The Administration

So, with all this explanation of what fascists believe and how they operate, I hope it’s clear that there is no workable definition of fascism that does not include the Alt-Right. They are, to the letter, a white fascist movement. That’s neither a diss nor an exaggeration, it’s a simple statement of fact.

So, then, to ask the trickier question: “Is the current administration fascist?” And, well, that depends on where you draw the line between “fascist” and “opportunist.”

Consider the evidence: The administration has staffed multiple fascist figureheads. It’s repeated a number of fascist slogans. It employs a nationalist thinking in which the nation should always get more out of any deal than the other participants. It holds the hierarchical belief that the President need not follow the same laws as the citizens. It relies on fear and demonization of a racial Other and portrays their mere presence in society as an invasion. It permits and makes justifications for violence against dissenters. It threatens to strip rights from opponents and members of the press. It relies on nostalgia for a mythologized past to sell a narrative of cultural rebirth. And its followers are intersectionally bigoted against women, the poor, Muslims, Black people, trans people, and queer people.

The only hesitance I feel around saying “this is fascism” centers around intent. How much of what they do and say do they believe in, and how much is just riding a wave of fascist sympathy to fuel a narcissistic lust for power and ram through policies that make them rich? But, ultimately, while there is some tactical value in this distinction - you have to deal with an opportunist differently from a true believer - in most contexts, the difference doesn’t matter.

Many will just tell you, “The correct term for ‘Nazi sympathizer’ is ‘Nazi,’” but if you won’t take that leap, consider this: Even if they have no particular plan or aptitude for creating a fascist government, any body in power that uses fascist rhetoric, lays the groundwork for future fascism, and empowers fascist movements needs to be at least viewed through the lens of fascism. Whether or not they’re fascists in their hearts is a question for historians. Whatever they are, they are, some percentage of the time, doing fascism. And, for our purposes, that's all we need to know.

#video essay #the alt-right playbook #alt-right

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theculturedmarxist · 6 years ago

Text

Randall Lane is a fucking bastard capshit shill that should shut his idiot cockholster.

I was in the library the other day and sitting on a shelf was a stack of Forbes magazines, the facing issue featuring some dickhead grinning smugly at me beneath the headline

Reimagining Capitalism: How The Greatest System Ever Conceived (And Its Billionaires) Need To Change

I knew that I was going to hate whatever I found on those pages, but I had to read it anyway. It was intriguing for two reasons: capitalists actually acknowledging the fact that systemic changes need to be made is something in itself, something which should make people extremely nervous, and it’s never a bad idea to read enemy propaganda. Of course Forbes is capprop par excellence, and I was morbidly curious in regards to what they thought needed to be changed and how. The most surprising thing about its suggestions was just how unsurprising they are in their tepidity and belief in their own perverse self-assured reaction, with the usual capitalist mythologizing mixed in.

Sitting in a modest room in New York’s immodest Peninsula Hotel, the richest person in the world for most of the past 20 years ponders an existential question suddenly in vogue among the left’s confiscatory set: Should he even exist? “It is fascinating,” says Bill Gates, “that for the first time in my life, people are saying, ‘Okay, should you have billionaires?’ ”

Dispassionately, he begins to unpack that thesis. “I’m afraid if you really implemented something like that, that the amount you would gain would be much less than the amount you would lose. Now, that sounds self-interested, so who’s the neutral witness on this one? … We need somebody who’s not wealthy to say that in some cases allowing people to be wealthy is okay.”

Allow me to raise my hand. For the past year, I’ve had one-on-one discussions with no fewer than two dozen billionaires, including face-to-face meetings with the three richest people in the world—Jeff Bezos, Gates and Warren Buffett—touching on various aspects of capitalism’s future. It comes at an urgent moment: You’d have to go back to the 1960s, or maybe even the 1930s, to find a time when the primacy of the free market system was so widely questioned.

Just 56% of Americans say they have a positive image of capitalism, according to a Gallup poll last summer, compared with 37% who said the same thing about socialism. In a Fox News poll during the same period, 36% of adults approved of a shift in the U.S. “away from capitalism and more toward socialism”—a huge increase from 2012, when just 20% said so. Among Millennials and Gen Z, free market skepticism is actually the majority view. In Gallup’s poll, 51% of those 18 to 29 had a positive view of socialism—albeit the largely fuzzy Scandinavian/Bernie Sanders version rather than the Soviet/Berlin Wall hard stuff—compared with 45% for capitalism. That finding was echoed by a Harvard survey of young adults in which 51% said they did not support capitalism and only 19% said they “identify as a capitalist.” These sentiments come amid an economy that by all traditional measures is booming, with full employment and 3% growth. So far, 2019 has offered only reinforcement of these views, as tech companies have continued to bleed credibility, Howard Schultz turned himself into a cartoon and a slew of tax-the-very-rich proposals garnered surprisingly high support. “This has been brewing for years, accelerating in the last few months and again in the last few weeks,” says Steve Case, the AOL founder who now runs an investment firm, Revolution. The hedge fund titan Paul Tudor Jones adds: “I think we need to acknowledge that we’re at a crossroads, with massive social fissures.”

And those were just some of the billionaires willing to speak on the record. Virtually everyone I talked to acknowledged the need for change. Some incremental and many systemic; some spoke in whispers, many in full-throated pleas for “reform” or “a reboot.” The rock star Bono had perhaps the most poetic suggestion: a reimagination.If such a term conjures Steve Jobs or Walt Disney, two of capitalism’s visionary saints, so be it. Entrepreneurial capitalism remains, objectively, the best system ever invented to create and distribute prosperity, and if you look at the billion-plus people in China, India and elsewhere who were lifted from extreme poverty in the past two decades, it remains easy to sing its praises. The dynamism remains true in the U.S., too. Of The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, 67% are self-made and 11% are immigrants. “America works, and it works now better than it ever worked,” Buffett says.

Since too many Americans don’t feel that way, the time is ripe to reimagine a system that addresses them. Pick the brains of some of the greatest-ever manifestations of the American Dream, and an AAA-version of capitalism emerges, one more authentic, accessible and accountable—and perhaps, in an age of uncertainty, one that’s built to last. The stakes couldn’t be higher, as forces gather to threaten the greatest prosperity engine ever built.

Reimagining Capitalism as...Authentic

The French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville’s travels across America in the 1830s coincided with the emergence of socialist theory back in Europe, a movement he presciently and stridently criticized. For Tocqueville, the balanced capitalism he witnessed compared favorably to the options back home, such as ceding power to the government or a more feudal system “managed by a few rich and powerful individuals.” “The inhabitants of the United States almost always manage to combine their own advantage with that of their fellow citizens,” he observed. Tocqueville’s musings inspired Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and filtered into the very first issue of Forbes, printed during Russia’s Revolution, when the magazine’s founder, B.C. Forbes, famously declared that “business was originated to produce happiness, not to pile up millions.”

Milton Friedman was another 20th-century admirer of Tocqueville, particularly for his focus on political equality as a driver of prosperity. But Friedman famously held that among all the constituents of business—the customer, the employees, the community—just one ultimately mattered, the shareholder. The only social responsibility of business, he declared, was to maximize profits. If shareholders wanted to spend their profits on altruistic projects, great, but that was at their sole discretion, with the assumption they were buying something of value—perhaps social approbation or the assuaging of guilt.

This maxim gave us LBOs, private equity deals and employee buyouts. And to many of the world’s most successful capitalists, it also created many of the current ills. “How wrong I was about Milton Friedman—most of us were,” says Jones, who built a $5 billion fortune exploiting market opportunities, including shorting the 1987 market crash. “It came at great cost to other corporate stakeholders and eroded the trust on which companies, and civil society, depends.”

In an era when consumers crave authenticity, the Tocqueville version, which sees profits as a by-product of business rather than its singular mission, offers a natural strain of capitalism that’s already hugely popular, especially among younger Americans. For Millennials, according to a massive Deloitte survey in 2018, the bottom three priorities for a business should be profits, efficiency and sales. The top three? Generating jobs, improving society and innovation.

Authenticity explains why Americans, while disliking Wall Street and big business, continue to love entrepreneurs (87% approval, per Gallup) and small business (96%). And why purpose-driven companies like Patagonia and Warby Parker are wreathed in halos, no matter what they’re selling or how rich the founders get.

“When we’re acquiring companies, one of the things I look at very closely is ‘Are the founders of a company missionaries or mercenaries?’ ” Jeff Bezos told me several months ago, before revealing the answer with his famous braying laugh. “It’s actually very easy to tell—missionaries make better products and services.” They also engender the one authentic trait that’s ultimately the most profitable: trust. That word, says Bezos, “is what allows you to expand the business.”

Of course, trust is a double-edged sword. As Facebook treats user data as a chit rather than a covenant, the company’s reputation—and Zuckerberg’s—has tanked. (In the realm of extremely unlikely outcomes, it’s now easier to envision him in the Big House than in the White House.) It’s also why Wall Street remains about as popular as big tobacco.

But even in finance, roots of authenticity shoot up. Impact investing, long dismissed as a niche for do-gooders, has emerged as a growth area, with some $35 billion committed in 2018 to fund businesses that carry societal benefits without sacrificing returns. “We’re talking about solving problems using innovation and entrepreneurship,” says Nancy Pfund, who founded DBL Partners and has raised $625 million in three venture funds. Her flagship, with investments in Tesla and SolarCity, has ranked in the top performance quartile across this decade. “When you just look at the super-short-term shareholder, you’re not taking advantage of innovation—and you’re cheating the future.”

The numbers are getting larger: Breakthrough Energy Ventures, backed by a consortium of billionaires such as Gates, Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson and Jack Ma, has pledged $1 billion for startups that promise radical solutions to carbon emissions. A similarly platinum-plated tycoon cohort, including Bono, Laurene Powell Jobs and Jeff Skoll, has backed the Rise Fund, an arm of private equity giant TPG that has deployed $1.8 billion in 25 investments they think will have significant impact on society. “People are rightfully asking, ‘Is the system working?’ ” says Bill McGlashan, the CEO of the Rise Fund. “We believe that capitalism is a better servant than master.”

Reimagining Capitalism as...Accessible

For those who rightly still believe in America as the land of opportunity, a Fox News survey from just a few weeks ago should offer pause: 42% of Americans do not think “the way capitalism works in the U.S. these days” gives them “a fair shot.” Even more troubling: In a country that has always held true to the premise that you could make it through hard work—or at least your children could—18% thought that the American Dream is out of reach for their family.

And there are ample stats to back up the sentiment. In the U.S. the top 1% of workers, collectively, earn vastly more than the bottom 50%. “The market system as it gets more specialized pushes more money to the top,” Buffett explains. “The natural function of a more specialized market economy is to divert more and more of the rewards to the top. That’s something I don’t think we’ve fully addressed in this country.”

But the situation is actually far worse than yawning income disparity. Americans have historically viewed the superrich as heroes, not villains, for a simple reason: “We all thought we could be like them,” Jones says. It’s the accelerating lack of upward mobility that’s fueling much of this populist anger. For all the anecdotal success stories, if you’re born in the wrong Zip code, to the wrong parents, the road to The Forbes 400 has never looked longer or narrower.

Take venture capital, the clearest starting point to a billion-dollar fortune over the past 20 years—a door the vast majority of Americans have no way of opening. Just 15% of VC money goes to women founders, 1% to black entrepreneurs and less than a quarter to anyone who lives outside California, New York and Massachusetts. Yes, a far more global, diverse pool now has access to those funding meccas, but that’s little comfort to a parent whose kid goes to a so-so public school in a city or region that’s been left behind.

“It needs to be a national priority to level the playing field,” says Case, who for the past few years has conducted a Rise of the Rest bus tour, traveling the country and putting millions into more than 100 companies that aren’t in Boston, New York or the San Francisco Bay Area. To Case, it’s both civic duty and opportunity, as brilliant minds lie fallow in low-cost areas desperate for high-growth hope.

Pfund actually counts women leaders before investing in a firm—almost two thirds of the companies in her funds have a woman at the CFO level or higher. She also pushes her portfolio to spread the opportunity, through profit-sharing plans, living-wage commitments and encouragement to hire in underserved areas.

All these efforts are on the margin, short of a commitment to create educational opportunities for those with ambition and then a track for them going forward. “We will have the resources,” Buffett says. “The question is, will we in effect pull everybody in who’s able-bodied and willing to work 40 hours a week so they can make a decent living, raise a family?”

Reimagining Capitalism as...Accountable

Something unusual happened a few hours after my sit-down with Bill Gates. Fresh off pondering the future of billionaires, he went on Stephen Colbert’s eponymous show with his wife, Melinda, to a crescendo of cheers. In accepting his new role as the world’s second-richest person, he quipped, “We’re trying to give it away faster”—and the audience swooned. From their call for higher taxes on the superrich to the obligations of the successful to the empowerment of women, the applause kept coming. By the end, Colbert was playfully goading the Gateses to run for political office.

Compare that with the Bronx cheer that echoed through New York later that week, when Amazon announced it was pulling out from its HQ2 plan in Queens. The math-challenged politicians who killed the deal took justifiable heat from pretty much everyone except their base. But Bezos was bloodied just as badly. He’s worth over $130 billion (at least until his divorce settles), and Amazon is worth $800 billion. Why extract a measly $3 billion in corporate welfare from New York? In the truest Friedman sense: because he has shareholders—and he could.

The dueling reactions underscore an American truth as timeless as Astor and Cooper and Rockefeller: Americans expect their meritocratic royalty to remain accountable to the public that helped create them.

Traditionally, that means philanthropy, an aspect of extreme success (there are now 137 deca-billionaires in the world) that no longer feels optional, albeit one that still engenders cynicism. Says Gates: “The attack that ‘Why should you even have a say in setting the agenda?’ That has a certain resonance to it.”

For Gates, who within our lifetime will likely be regarded as the greatest philanthropist ever, accountability starts with framing the role: “picking novel ideas” or “off-the-wall theories,” as he says, and then proving that the concepts work, or don’t, taking the kinds of risks that no taxpayer-funded government—or shareholder-dependent corporation—could justify.

But in this era, Gates also recognizes that motives will be questioned. “If we come and improve math class,” Gates says, “then people are like, ‘Hey, you didn’t do the band.’ ” For this reason, Gates tries to hold himself publicly accountable through transparency, including a public letter from the foundation that he and Melinda write each year. It’s also the driving reason for the Giving Pledge, in which 189 of the world’s wealthiest people have affirmed, for all to see, that they will give away at least half of their fortunes, most much more.

A Giving Pledge signatory, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff has similarly shifted from anonymous giving to putting his name on two hospitals, in part to be a role model for emerging tech billionaires and in part because “it sent a message that we’re supporting the community in a tangible way.” And he does the same thing with his company, which pioneered a “1, 1, 1” model that placed 1% of the company’s equity in a trust, along with a pledge to donate 1% of its software products and 1% of his 35,000 employees’ time to volunteer work. It’s a combination that’s generated $260 million in grants and 3.8 million hours for civic causes.

Rather than rely on such voluntary munificence, Jones, who cut his philanthropic teeth founding the innovative Robin Hood Foundation in New York, has focused for the past several years on holding corporate America directly accountable for better capitalism. He founded Just Capital, which has surveyed more than 80,000 Americans in order to get a precisely calibrated take on what makes a good corporate citizen. America’s older workers, it turns out, aren’t so different from its youngest, desiring companies to pay and treat their employees well, put out good products that have integrity, and care about the environment and the community.

Just Capital ranks every major public company across its 36 criteria, from best to worst, proffering a Good Housekeeping-like seal to the top companies, in order to spur better corporate citizenry. (Disclosure: I’m on the Just Capital board, and Forbes publishes the annual Just 100 list each fall.) “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” says Jones, who also helped Just launch a $200 million ETF in June 2018 that has so far outperformed the S&P 500.

Measurement has also been driving McGlashan at the Rise Fund, which has a hard time justifying billions in investments in social good when no one can define what “good” is. To that end, Rise incubated and then recently spun out Y Analytics, a firm devoted to measuring this impact—a key step in making capitalism still more solutions-oriented.

Such remedies are urgent. “Unless we find a market-based solution to the exponential growth in inequality, we will end up with populist legislation that creates a hammer to go after every nail,” Jones says. He’s right. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s much-touted 70% income tax bracket displays a stark lack of understanding how fortunes in this country are built—through ownership, not earnings. Elizabeth Warren’s wealth surcharge would require an army of appraisers. “Here’s the problem with all of those,” says the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. “There is international mobility.”

Virtually every billionaire I spoke with acknowledged that higher taxes on the billionaire set are inevitable; most even saw them as beneficial, if correctly applied. According to Gates, Buffett, Khosla and others, the correct way to levy taxes on the superrich is at a transaction point. Either an estate tax without the loopholes that currently render it useless or a higher capital gains tax applied only on extreme fortunes, to avoid suppressing growth.

And better yet, the tax code can be refined to encourage growth and spread it around more evenly. The launch of opportunity zones, engineered by the Facebook and Spotify billionaire Sean Parker, has already been put in motion, offering tantalizing tax breaks in needy areas of all 50 states. Adjusting corporate tax rates based on jobs created—more jobs, lower taxes—is another worthy idea.

The eternal beauty of the free market is its ability to evolve. Leave it to the most admired capitalist in the world, Warren Buffett, who has lived through more than one third of this country’s history and who bought his first stock in 1942, at a moment when it was conceivable the U.S. could lose World War II, to make a prediction: “The luckiest person that will ever be born in the world to date will be a baby being born in the United States today.” Bet against Buffett, and capitalism, at your peril.

Some socialists poo-poo periodicals like Forbes or The Economist for being bourgeois rags, and they’re right. This whole piece is trash not fit for wiping one’s ass. It’s nothing but a puff propaganda piece for capitalists to tell other capitalists about how great they are, how essential they are, how right they are by virtue of being billionaires and how the jealous little people should just bootstrap themselves into wealth and plenty like they did.

It’s thanks in part to pieces like this that make class warfare and violent revolution ultimately necessary. These cretins delude themselves in a comfortable fantasy, a narrative myth about their own greatness meant to reassure themselves that the innumerable interlocking apparatuses which produce and secure their wealth are in fact benign, that the human suffering it produces is incidental rather than inherent. Randall Lane, this stupid fucker, praises Benioff for doing nothing. Nothing! He himself doesn’t do anything for charity except give away a tiny fraction of other people’s stolen money and forces his employees to do “volunteer work.” But that’s praiseworthy in their degenerate minds. Other people do the work, and they get all the credit.

“Opportunity Zones.” Reading the words made me want to vomit. Orwell, who these bastards have the temerity to quote in the back of the magazine, sandwiched between Sappho and Ayn Rand, would have a field day.

Forbes is a valuable resource for any socialist. We should thank the capitalists for being so considerate in compiling in one place so much information on these criminals and their crimes. All in all, a tremendous compilation of evidence for each of these loathsome worms’ cases before the people’s tribunal. Masturbatory passages will be read aloud to the millionaires and billionaires and their subhuman frontmen like Randall, and will be the last thing they hear aside from the hissing sound of metal on metal before the People’s Razor delivers the results of their “market-based solutions.”

#capitalists #capitalism #jeff bezos #bill gates #randall lane #guillotine bait #propaganda

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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How EVE Online Is Changing Players’ Lives for the Better

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This article is presented by CCP.

Video games change lives.

20 years ago, people would have scoffed at, perhaps even ridiculed, the idea that a game could have a profound effect on its players. But nowadays, it would be very difficult to find a gamer who disagrees. Since its inception, gaming has been an engrossing hobby that helps build relationships, offers stress relief, and can even serve to impart lasting life skills. As games themselves have evolved and pursued more ambitious endeavors, this has only become more true.

One game that exemplifies this is EVE Online, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that is nominally about spaceships and exploring the stars. Although it might seem at first like a straightforward game about blasting away your enemies, hoarding valuable resources, and exploring the star cluster of New Eden, once you peer beneath its surface, it’s also about building relationships between players and learning skills you can take with you to the real world. It could even be argued that without delving into the metagame around EVE, it is difficult to get a real picture of why the game has survived – and thrived – for as long as it has.

EVE’s infamous depth as a role-playing sandbox has allowed its players to become warlords who rally thousands of players and form massive fleets, aggressive capitalists with the wealth to buy and sell empires, and industrial tycoons whose virtual shipyards provide arms for the largest player vs player battles in gaming history. These players often become so immersed in the game that their lives can begin to shift and change around it — often for the better.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", mediaId: "cd53c251-f7cf-4254-ac17-cf1534fa88c6" }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

EVE Online has been changing players’ lives outside of the game since very early on in its history. The game’s unique demands often encourage players to confront and improve on parts of themselves that they wouldn’t expect to. But it’s only recently that EVE’s developer CCP has coined a term for this unique aspect of the game: “The EVE Effect.” The term came about after the studio completed a study on what seems to be an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation spreading around the world in certain age groups, and how that affects players of their game. Through surveys and discussions with players at various real-world events, the CCP team found that over 60% of the players they interacted with said that they had made substantial, impactful friendships with people that they met through EVE Online. Other research by the company showed that many players also believed that EVE had helped them to develop skills that improved their real lives. This combination of friendship and skill development seems to confirm what the MMO’s thousands of players have known all along: EVE is more than just a game. EVE Online is real.

The EVE Effect is something that resonates with people that have played the game and spent any real amount of time in EVE because they can see it in their own lives. EVE Online can be a harsh, unforgiving game, where trust in another player is often viewed as the ultimate commodity. When you are forced to trust another player to help you achieve a goal and have to risk often irreplaceable in-game assets to do it, the bonds between players can grow very deep very quickly. Once a player starts receiving help from others, it’s natural for the player to then want to do the same for other newcomers — for example, by sharing their knowledge and resources or helping them with a difficult objective in the game. It’s no surprise, then, that players often end up forming vast player-driven corporations, or guilds, in the game that connects them to a web of other like-minded players, and these relationships continue to grow and often turn into real friendships.

CCP’s research showed that on top of making friends, 56% of players said that skills they learned through playing EVE had proven to be valuable in their lives outside of the game and in their careers. Somewhat unsurprisingly, given the game’s unofficial moniker as “Spreadsheets in Space,” the most common career skill referenced is the ability to successfully create and navigate complex spreadsheets, which may not sound like much on the surface until you realize how valuable this skill is to running a successful business.

One player who took his spreadsheet knowledge, among other things, into the real world and capitalized on all the life lessons learned through leading players into battle in EVE Online is Matthew Ricci. Ricci’s claim to fame within EVE Online is self-admittedly, in the grand scheme of things, relatively small. According to Ricci, he was the CEO of a mid-sized industrial-focused corporation in the game, with around 400-500 player characters under his banner.

“I ran an ore buyback,” Ricci explains. “I had to determine what a fair price was to buy from my group, and then according to my in-game skills, what could I do to make a profit.” Ricci’s in-game ventures allowed him to learn several things about real-world business concepts. “I had to understand market fluctuation, cost break down, supply chains. And on top of that, I had to convince players to sell to me at a lower cost because I could reduce their risk,” Ricci says.

Eventually, Ricci began asking himself, “If I can do all of this in-game, why can’t I do the same thing in real life?” That’s when he realized that nothing was stopping him from leveraging the skills forged in EVE to improve his real life. Ricci now runs a successful business in Canada. “We have two divisions in the company, a sales representation business to sell electronics to major retailers, and a drop shipping business where we purchase and resell products we find that we like.”

Ricci credits EVE with giving him not only the knowledge to run this style of business, but also the confidence in himself to build a real company out of nothing, just like in the game.

On the other side of the coin, there are players who use their real-life skills to further their EVE career, and through that broaden their skill set, all while networking with other players who work in the same industries. This feedback loop has led to some EVE players landing great jobs in the real world.

That’s exactly what happened to veteran EVE pilot Innominate, who asked us to use his in-game name rather than his real name for this article. In the EVE universe, Innominate is a high-level director in the Goonswarm Federation, one of the game’s most populous player-driven factions, and a member of EVE’s Council of Stellar Management (CSM). The CSM is a player-elected focus group that works with CCP on upcoming game features and provides feedback to the developer. The combination of having played EVE for so long, and being in two relatively unique positions in the game, has given Innominate a broad view of the MMO and the effects it has on players.

Start Your EVE Online Adventure Today

“You hear a lot of stories about people who ruin their lives playing [other MMORPGs], but with EVE you tend to hear more of the other way around,” Innominate says. “I started playing EVE, I started going to player meets, I’ve gotten jobs, or I’ve made friends where I’ve never had any before.”

Innominate also believes that EVE Online can be a powerful learning tool.

“Most of the things that make you good at playing EVE are real-life skills,” Innominate explains. “They’re not things you can grind. You have to learn leadership and diplomacy, and eventually you come out of the game realizing, ‘Wait a minute, this shit’s useful.’”

This “shit” that Innominate refers to are intangible skills that a person has to learn through experience rather than from studying, and the game is rife with opportunities to practice them. This is because of the high-stakes scenarios in the game, where words and communication can affect your station in the game as much as your actions.

In-game, Innominate helps run Goonswarm’s IT server infrastructure, which is how he eventually embarked on his current career in the IT industry. “After a few years, I thought ‘screw it,’ I’m going to find a job, but the only real experience on my resume was my experience running Goonswarm servers,” he says. “Fortunately, one of our other directors happened to be at a company that was looking for ‘Linux nerds.’ We spoke, and the next day I had an interview, and the day after that I had a job.”

Eventually, the company that hired him grew and needed to find more people, and Innominate turned back to EVE to fill those positions, pursuing players he thought could handle themselves. “The company had always been a remote work company and not everyone is suited for that kind of thing. But something about having a high impact role in EVE prepares people for that sort of thing.” He suggested that the company look into another of the Goonswarm server admins, and from that point, the trend continued. “We’ve hired 10 people from Goonswarm at this point I think. My boss is the Goonswarm Head Diplomat!”

The idea that a game requires a diplomat to play – much less a head diplomat assuming charge of a vast organization of diplomats – may seem crazy, but in EVE, it’s not uncommon. In many ways, EVE is best viewed as a 17-year-old collaborative science fiction storytelling experiment. Since the beginning, the narrative has been largely driven by the players, who’ve role-played themselves into massive, galaxy-altering battles, economy-shattering hostile corporate takeovers, and infamous betrayals that turned the tides of interstellar wars. So much has happened in EVE Online that the MMO even has its own unofficial historian who documents the biggest events in the game’s long history so that future generations remember the players and factions that came before.

Veteran journalist Andrew Groen has written two non-fiction historical novels covering the early days of EVE Online and still has many stories left to tell. After years of watching EVE history unfold as a reporter, Groen agrees that there really is something to the EVE Effect.

“The game is complicated, and the game is complicated in a lot of ways to teach you about real life. The most glaring way that that occurs is in people’s social skills, and their abilities to understand large groups of people,” he explains. “To be able to understand and picture other people’s lives and their needs is an incredibly useful skill set that carries into other areas of people’s lives.”

Groen’s way of interacting with the community and the game is by telling the story of the game as a neutral observer. Yet, the game has still had a large impact on his life.

“My life is completely different as a result of the fact that I started writing about EVE,” he says, adding that before EVE he was a person of mild renown in the relatively narrow field of video game journalists. After beginning his journey with EVE, “the idea that I would get a chance to have a dedicated audience that would give me years of time to focus on my work, and give me their money in advance so that I could work on something I’ve always wanted to do, non-fiction journalism — I have no idea what I would be doing without this opportunity.”

Wanting to tell the story of EVE is a calling that many people find themselves heeding at some point during their EVE career. So much so, that it has given rise to a host of blogs, podcasts, and even several virtual talk shows dedicated to the goings-on inside the game world. EVE veteran January Valentine has worked as a producer on two of the largest of these programs, “Talking in Stations” and “The Meta Show,” each reaching hundreds of viewers every week.

“They are, for lack of a better word, talk shows, sort of like you would see on ESPN, except we focus on the goings-on of EVE Online,” Valentine explains. “I try to make the news very understandable so that anyone from any point of view in EVE can understand what’s going on in any other part of EVE.” Producing these shows, and gathering all the news, information, and stories from around the game eventually translated into January creating her blog Something You Should Know, where she writes about important events in one of EVE’s biggest wars.

“In my opinion, EVE is the medium that effort translates best into results. If you’re feeling stuck in real life, you can go online, and put in some real, sincere effort in, and you can grow as a person. You can put effort towards challenges conducive to the growth in real life,” Valentine says of why she feels that EVE has changed her life.

The biggest lesson she’s learned though is “Humility. When you start trying to be active in the meta [in EVE Online], it’s very clear that you are the little fish. Wanting to talk to people like TheMittani, Headliner, or Progod, you have to develop a diplomatic persona, to move around the EVE universe to get to those kinds of people.”

Another player who spends a good deal of her time talking about EVE, either while streaming on Twitch or co-hosting a podcast with her fiance, whom she met while playing EVE Online, is Miranda Fair, who is better known as Mirandalorian. Between EVE engagements, she moonlights as a Captain in the United States Army who focuses on logistics.

As you might expect, running into active duty or veteran military players is very common in EVE. I asked Fair if she thought the game seemed to disproportionately draw that type of player to it.

“[EVE] has been really beneficial to me as a social outlet, especially while I’ve had to move all over the place with my career,” Fair says. “I’ve actually met people in many different military-centric communities in EVE, and even outside of that, a lot of people are in armies of different countries all over the world. I think what draws military-minded personnel into EVE is that the game is very tactical. When you get into these giant battles, you need to have people who are willing to step up and be leaders, and I think that attracts that military mindset.”

One theme that has come up time and again when talking to people about EVE Online is the personalities and the leaders that the game shapes.

“It helps people develop leadership and social skills,” Fair says. “Whether you’re leadership for a thousand-person alliance, or the CEO of a corporation of twenty people, or just a member of one of those corporations, it allows you to choose what you want to focus on and get good at, and follow that.”

Some players find the EVE experience so unique and engaging that sharing it with other people becomes a primary part of their gameplay loop. This is something that I personally experienced in my early days, trying to find my own place in the game. Everything I did in EVE felt so unique and different from what I’d seen in other games that I found myself constantly talking to my real-life friends about it, whether they wanted to hear it or not. I loved telling stories about my experiences in EVE so much that I decided to apply for a writing position at an EVE Online-focused news site.

Before this point, I had never really written anything that was intended for a wide audience. I had written papers for school and posted on online role-playing forums, but had never written anything that I thought tens of thousands of people would ever read. This part-time “job” I picked up to tell my stories paid out in in-game credits, which was helpful to my burgeoning career as a spaceship pilot, so it killed two birds with one stone. I was satisfied with my decision and didn’t think it would go any further than that.

Then the unexpected happened. My dedication to the game soon blossomed into a freelance writing career. I began contributing to several major video game news outlets, chronicling the grand EVE narrative from my perspective. My stories about EVE have now been read by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. I’ve even traveled to Reykjavik, Las Vegas, and Toronto, and other places in search of more stories to tell about the game. I’ve been able to hone my skills as a writer and I’ve gained more confidence, all thanks to my years playing EVE Online. As you might have guessed, I am a massive believer in the EVE Effect.

One of the most common sentiments shared among the player base, beyond the usual “spreadsheets in space” joke, is that EVE is a game that fascinates people outside that don’t even play it. If there was a list of people’s favorite games that they have never played, EVE would surely be near the top. The reason that people are drawn to EVE is, for the most part, the same reason that the EVE Effect exists. The stakes when playing EVE are very high, and because of that, the bonds that people share in the game, and the lengths that people will go to learn skills that give them an edge, are greater than in other games.

EVE Online can be a harsh and unforgiving game, where loss is real and can be very demoralizing – it is not necessarily a game for everyone. However, this unique universe drives players forward, to better themselves and to meet new people. Once a battle is won, a corporate empire is built, and goals are achieved, it’s not uncommon for players to shift their dedication to achieving something tangible in the real world with those same skills, and with the help of those same friends that made everything possible in the first place.

Start your EVE Online adventure today.

The post How EVE Online Is Changing Players’ Lives for the Better appeared first on Den of Geek.

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communistrupture · 8 years ago

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A Conversation Between Daphne Lawless and Gregory W., Pt. 1

Kicking off our project of communist reconception, we are engaging with the recent work of Daphne Lawless, a socialist from New Zealand. We are focusing on her analysis of conservative leftism, an idea adapted from Scottish socialist Sam Charles Hamad. This is the first discussion installment.

Gregory W.: In the article, Against Conservative Leftism, you suggested that "21st century revolutionary classes will not look like those of the 1840s or even the 1980s," and that "the left should seek to build on the new social forces and ways of living that neoliberal globalisation has thrown up, to create a post-neoliberal, post-capitalist future."

This part of the article jumped out at me as being particularly important. It seems that the article is peppered with references to new or emerging revolutionary subjects. But I would like for you to elaborate on this point and maybe give some examples that are shaping your thinking.

Daphne Lawless: Right. During the changes of the last 40 years - the neoliberal/globalization era, or the "post-Fordist production" era, whatever you want to call it - traditional working-class communities and institutions in the advanced capitalist countries have atrophied and dissolved. The social-democratic parties have become hollow shells and the labor unions have become increasingly "professionalized", run along the same lines as NGOs by full-time organisers. BUT: if you still find the Marxian critique of political economy useful, this does not mean there is no more proletariat in the Western countries.

You have a disorganized proletariat of service workers, or what's sometimes called "the precariat"; and then you have a more privileged layer of workers in technology-based industries. Neither of these are going to behave or see the world in the same way as a unionised auto worker of the 1950s. But by Marxist definition they are still proletarian, or in the process of being proletarianised. And you can see emerging radical and reactionary tendencies in both of these groups.

To take the tech workers for example, the "open-source" communities were one prefiguration of how communist labor relations might work. Then you had the brief flowering of Anonymous as a "meme", an idea, a method of organising among technological workers, which took off at more or less the same time as the Arab Spring, Occupy, etc. Of course after the defeat of those radical movements you had the swing to the reactionary sides of those movements - the neo-reactionaries, alt-right, 4chan /pol/ kind of thing.

But one hallmark of what I would call the "conservative left" is the assumption that the radical workers' movements of the 21st century will look like those of the past. You have this tendency towards LARPing, to try to recreate forms from the past. It simply won't work. New forms of capitalist exploitation and oppression require new forms of organisation, and a Left which doesn't keep up with the actual formations crystallising RIGHT NOW is an irrelevant circle-jerk.

Gregory W.: I find this whole aspect of your analysis very compelling.

I’m reminded of the speculative science question, “if we were confronted with alien life, would we recognize it when we see it?” It seems like there’s something similar going on when it comes to recognizing radical political breakthroughs because we’re expecting things to look a certain way.

There has been some promising stuff in the U.S. in recent years with service industry workers organizing and going on strike. That in itself is an example of working class movement, or even of a proletarian subset, which doesn’t fit the conventional mold. Still, it’s on a spectrum with labor struggles that we’re apt to recognize. But there’s stuff that’s even more alien. We may rightly bemoan the fact that there hasn’t been a general strike in the U.S. in a long time (and it’s not even clear what that indicates, given that France has them pretty often and yet things aren’t going so well over there). But in 2016 we had a historic, nation-wide prison strike with solidarity actions in some prisons internationally. What does that mean? The prison system is a huge part of the neoliberal economy in the U.S., arising with the war on drugs and the rollbacks on social guarantees. The vast majority of prisoners were workers in the outside world. In prison, many continue to do low-wage work and on top of that, they are generating value just by being housed, to the benefit of a whole web of corporate and state bureaucracies.

What does it mean that prisoners were able to coordinate such a strike? And you also have to think about the fact that most prisoners will eventually be released, and will likely be employed at low-wage jobs, and/or work in the informal economy. What does it mean if someone who was involved in a nation-wide prison strike now works at Wal-Mart? What insights and skills could that person bring to organizing outside of prison? If I were developing a revolutionary cadre organization, I might want to recruit some of these people, or else connect up with them in some way – talk to them, work in a coalition with them, or whatever.

Inmate labor at Louisiana State Penitentiary. Photo by Gerald Herbert/AP

Daphne Lawless: Oh, certainly. Of course the prison-industrial complex in the US is reasonably unique, so I'm loathe to try to talk about it in any detail, but there are similarities in New Zealand - whereas 50% of the prison population in the US is African-American, so 50% of the prison population in NZ is Māori. But from what I gather prison labor is far more widely used in the US - though I don't know in what areas of the economy it is important. The paradox is the more important prison labor becomes, the more potentially powerful labor organising in prisons becomes.

I know that some people from the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist tradition have made organising among prisoners a top priority. I don't know how close you are to that.

As to the service industry workers, yes, we've had great strides forward in this country in that. Basically, the UNITE union was founded by social-democratic political veterans who had been excluded from the neoliberalized Labour Party and their compliant trade-union apparatuses, and started with the goals of (a) rebuilding a base for social democracy; (b) bringing Seattle-era social-movement methods of organisation to unionism. They also scored a coup by recruiting organizers from young communist groups - people motivated from ideology will work harder and sometimes for less pay!

So by those means, UNITE have been effectively able to organise workers at many fast food chains, and other overlooked workers such as security guards, casino staff etc. However, the price for this is a certain institutionalisation, rapprochement with the older unions/Labour Party etc. And the problem with giving committed revolutionaries a "day job" doing labour organising is that you risk turning into an NGO-model, where it becomes all about the young educated radicals (who by virtue of being union organisers are inherently middle-class from a Marxist point of view) as the protagonists rather than the low-paid precarious workers they're organising.

So to some degree, as long as the basic economic structure remain the same, it's "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" - attempts to REPLACE the old reformist labor structures will lead to becoming SIMILAR structures. You can see this with what happened in Greece - the radical SYRIZA replaced the neoliberal PASOK, at the price of becoming neoliberal themselves. These are the limits of working for reforms within the system - you will get reforms and nothing but.

Gregory W.: First off, I am interested in learning more about organizers who are prioritizing things like prison work (also, immigration as a fault-line)...You bring up a lot of good points. It is interesting to hear about the differences and similarities between New Zealand and the U.S. What you’ve said underscores my overall feeling that we are still in a very difficult period in terms of devising radical strategy, with so many of our previous verdicts turning up short. At the same time, masses of people are on the move and we need to be in the midst of it, learning from these developing struggles.

End of Pt. 1

#service industry work #prison industrial complex #neoliberalism #the left #labor movement

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itskrusha-blog · 4 years ago

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AI for Digital marketing Course

I am coming up with a course about AI for Marketing. The link is in the description. Join the email list to get super valuable content in your inbox and also you get an early bird offer.

Ok, now let’s talk about how AI in digital marketing. In the previous video, application of AI in marketing, covered how the core concepts in AI are being used in marketing.

This video specifically talks about how AI is being applied in digital marketing.

The face of marketing is changing. Digital marketers must shift their focus from top of the funnel to full funnel marketing. Pirate Metrics — a term coined by venture capitalist Dave McClure . He categorizes the metrics, a startup needs to watch as acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral — AARRR.— gets its name from the acronym for five distinct elements of building a successful business.

These five elements don’t necessarily follow a strict order — users may refer others before they spend money, for example, or may return several times before signing up — but the list is a good framework for thinking about how a business needs to grow At each stage you need to perform a function, track relevant actionable metrics and can also apply AI at each stage if there is a clear use-case. We have identified a number of business goals that AI can help you achieve at each stage.

1. Acquisition

At the Acquisition stage the function is – Generate attention through a variety. of means, both organic and inorganic.

Relevant metrics are – Traffic, mentions, cost per click, search results, cost of acquisition, open rate A.I. Marketing Goals – content marketing, landing page testing, campaign optimization, conversion rate optimization, lead scoring, competition and trend analysis, predict sales, optimise product pricing, programmatic media buying, segmentation and clustering for targeting, personalisation.

2. Activation

At the Activation stage the function – Turn the resulting drive-by visitors into users who are somehow enrolled Relevant metrics are – Enrollments, signups, completed onboarding process, used the service at least once, subscriptions.

A.I. Marketing Goals – personalization, psychographic segmentation, behavioural segmentation

3. Retention

At the Retention stage the function is Convince users to come back repeatedly, exhibiting sticky behaviour Relevant metrics are – Engagement, time since last visit, daily and monthly active use, churns.

A.I. Marketing Goals – predict churn, customer care chatbot, sentiment analysis, visual social listening, personalization

4. Revenue

At the Revenue stage the function is Business outcomes (which vary by your business model: purchases, ad clicks, content creation, subscriptions, etc.)

Relevant metrics are – Customer lifetime value, conversion rate, shopping cart size, click-through revenue

A.I. Marketing Goals – predict and maximise customer lifetime value, recommender systems, market basket analysis

5. Referral

At the Referral stage the function is Viral and word-of-mouth invitations to other potential users Relevant metrics are – Invites sent, viral coefficient, viral cycle time.

A.I. Marketing Goals – predict will the user recommend your product

You need to build a funnel for each stage and analyse if machine learning can help you optimise your funnel for each stage.

I have prepared a diagram illustrating the data science architecture that you can build for your business. Data from each stage should go through this process so you could leverage the power of AI and make better decisions about your business.

Collect and store data

They say data is the new oil. Without data you cannot really use machine learning. The first step toward gaining insights is to collect and consolidate your data in a central location. Choose technology that helps you collect information efficiently from your most important marketing channels and data sources.

As illustrated in the diagram your different marketing channels could be Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, email campaigns, custom campaigns, data related to your app could be collected in firebase. All this data could be collected or transferred to Google Analytics or a similar tool. You will have to then transfer this data into a CRM as personally identifiable information cannot be stored in Google Analytics.

You would also like to collect data from other sources like your website CMS for order history and comments. If you run any surveys or collect customer feedback or any offline marketing campaign, all this data will be stored in your CRM.

They are plenty of CRMs available in the market like Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho etc.

The right CRM for you will depend on your budget and the functionality you need.

Note you need to assign each customer a unique identity for better tracking and data analysis. In the course, you learn how to generate a unique id for each customer and pass it in your CRM.

Transform

The next step is to transform your data for analysis, which includes cleaning and reformatting to provide consistency in big datasets. You want your analysts to be able to clean up data with little to no coding—for example, through a visual tool that can scale and run distributed transformations. Google Dataprep and IBM Data refinery can help you do just that.

Analyse

After you save your cleaned data, you can begin analysing it for insights. Data mining, predictive and prescriptive analysis can help you drive insights to take actions in real-time. These techniques can help you improve the quality and trustworthiness of the data, understand its semantics, and provide intelligent business solutions.

Tools like Amazon ML, IBM Watson ML Model Builder, Microsoft Azure ML Studio, Google Cloud AutoML

Can help you create complex machine learning models without any code. All the four companies offer full service custom modelling machine learning platforms. Soon I am coming up with a list of AI tools offered by these companies in a separate video..

Each data mining technique can perform one of the following types of data modelling or even more:

Association

Association or association rule learning is method that is used to discover unknown relationships hidden in big data. Rules refer to a set of identified frequent itemsets that represent the uncovered relationships in the dataset. The underlying idea is to identify rules that will predict the occurrence of one or more items based on the occurrence of other items in the dataset. Mostly used for Market Basket Analysis and recommender systems.

B. Classification

In data mining, classification is considered an instance of supervised learning, i.e., learning where a training set of correctly identified observations is available. Classification is the problem of identifying to which of a set of categories a new observation belongs, on the basis of a training set of data containing observations whose category membership is known. An example would be assigning a customer into “high risk” or “low risk” classes or assigning a diagnosis to a given patient.

C. Clustering

In data mining, clustering is the task of grouping a set of objects in such a way that objects in the same group (called a cluster) are more similar (in some sense or another) to each other than to those in other groups (clusters). In marketing, clustering is used for creating various kinds of the segment for better marketing.

D. Forecasting

Forecasting is the process of making predictions of the future based on past and present data and most commonly by analysis of trends. A commonplace example might be the estimation of some variables of interest at some specified future date.

E. Regression

Regression analysis is widely used for prediction and forecasting. In data mining, the regression analysis is a statistical process for estimating the relationships among variables. Most commonly, the regression analysis estimates the conditional expectation of the dependent variable given the independent variables, i.e., the average value of the dependent variable when the independent variables are fixed. In marketing regression is used to predict a number like a customer lifetime value, predict marketing mix, predict sales etc.

F. Sequence Discovery

Sequential pattern mining is a topic of data mining concerned with finding statistically relevant patterns between data examples where the values are delivered in a sequence. It is usually presumed that the values are discrete, and thus time series mining is closely related. In marketing, this could be used for predicting customer buying behaviour.

Visualize

The purpose of data visualisation is to communicate information clearly and efficiently via statistical graphics, plots and information graphics. Effective visualisation helps marketers analyse and reason about data and evidence. It makes complex data more accessible, understandable and usable. Data visualisation combines technical and artistic aspects of data analysis.

Three popular tools that can help you visualize your data are Google Data Studio, Tableau and Power BI.

This will be the end of the video hope you learned something new today. Let me know in the comment section if you liked the video. If you want to learn more about AI for marketing I reckon you join the email list this is the link, it is also in the description. Get an early bird offer and exclusive content right in your inbox.

That’ll be all see you in the next one.

Let dive deep and look at how AI and machine learning is making life easy for digital marketers. We have identified top digital marketing skills where AI will empower marketers the most. SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web Analytics, Email Marketing, Content Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Conversion Rate Optimisation, Tools Based Marketing, Lifecycle Marketing Automation. Let’s briefly discuss them. Stay tuned my next videos will cover some of the most important skills in detail. We can look at how AI is impacting SEO from two angles:- First, how Google is using AI to improve user experience Second, how digital marketers could use AI to make their sites rank higher. We are only interested in the second angle. You will find plenty of video discussing the 1st.

These are the most prominent areas in SEO where AI is helping digital marketers.

Keyword Research

Topic Discovery

On-page SEO

Off-page SEO

Technical SEO

To know more about AI, register for free webinar on given below link:

http://www.nsdmindia.com/ai-webinar

And to enroll for the AI course click on given below link:

#https://www.nsdmindia.com/courses/ai-for-marketing-course/

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nicole-price2-blog · 5 years ago

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March. 24th, 2020 // Coronavirus/COVID-19 Global Ingathering and Discussion

Prompt: Discuss what was important, how you felt, and thoughts/reflections you have.

Wow, what a tough class and discussion this was...to say the least. Seeing all of the sophomores, as well as all of the Costa Rica Center staff that I’ve missed so dearly, hop onto our Zoom call already changed up the energy of the call. In a good way. It felt like a family reunion (of sorts) with everyone logging on from all over...knowing so people and not knowing others or knowing of people. It was actually a really nice feeling.

Even though it was such a comforting feeling, when I remembered that we were discussing COVID-19 I have to admit that I audibly sighed. I think with everything going on in the world I have been trying to stay as positive as possible...which obviously can’t always be productive. So, having a whole class dedicated to discussing this really wasn’t sitting well with me. After getting more into the conversation though I did really begin to appreciate the conversation because I realized I haven’t had anyone to talk to anyone about this whole thing besides my roommates.

The main aspects of the conversation/discussion that I really appreciated were the ones about how the systems put in place in the U.S. are falling apart with this virus spreading and how it is a perfect example that capitalism doesn’t support the people of the country at all, and is not sustainable. Specifically in our talk we had a Global alum go in-depth about what health care workers in the U.S. are going through during this pandemic. Our health care system is a scam that doesn’t support anyone, especially the workers. This class, as well as everything going on, has been making me think and reflect on how we are going to read about this pandemic in our history books...what stories will be left undiscussed? And how do we make sure that we are here for our communities in the present moment? How do we support those workers that are striking? I’m left with a lot of questions.

My mom is an occupational therapist that works in a nursing home, my aunt (who lives with her) is a grocery store clerk, and my uncle (who also lives with them) is a toll booth operator...and to top it all off they are 60 and above. All people who have to keep working because they aren’t being excused of their rent for the month and they are all working “essential” jobs. This conversation really made me think about how we all have people being screwed over or put in danger by this. This is, again, a perfect example that this is a reality in the U.S. daily everyone either knows someone being screwed over or being put in danger, or they are that person. COVID-19 is just showcasing these things.

After class, my roommates and I talked about how we are long overdue for a revolution. Maybe COVID-19 is the catalyst for a revolution because corruption of the U.S. capitalist system has never been more apparent than right now.

I have many more thoughts about this class I am still needing to process and tons of questions.

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clubofinfo · 6 years ago

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Expert: The limited formal and negative generality of law under liberalism not only makes possible capitalist calculability but also guarantees a minimum of liberty since formal liberty has two aspects and makes available at least legal chances to the weak. For this reason there develops a conflict between the law and the liberties based thereon on the one side, and the requirements of a monopolistic economy on the other side. Under monopolistic capitalism private property in the means of production as the characteristic institution of the entire bourgeois epoch is preserved but general law and contract disappear and are replaced by individual measures on the part of the sovereign. — Franz Neumann, The Change in the Function of Law in Modern Society, 1937 Large Capitalist firms — banks as well as monopoly concerns — long ago ceased to depend on court proceedings to conduct their affairs with members of other social groups. — Otto Kircheimer, State Structure and Law in the Third Reich, 1935 pamphlet What is legalism? It is the ethical attitude that holds moral conduct to be a matter of rule following, and moral relationships to consist of duties and rights determined by rules. — Judith N. Shklar, Legalism: Law, Morals, and Political Trials, Harvard University Press, 1964 Do not the bourgeois assert that the present-day distribution is ‘fair’? And is it not, in fact, the only ‘fair’ distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production? Are economic relations regulated by legal conceptions or do not, on the contrary, legal relations arise from economic ones? — Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program Watching the Kavanaugh circus the last few weeks I kept thinking about the way in which the general public now views law and justice. I suspect most Americans think of law and legality in terms they have learned from Hollywood TV. Perhaps there is no other area in which the general public relies so extensively on assumptions and cliche as the judicial system. But it also raises questions about the law that I suspect even relatively well educated people never ask themselves. The entire narrative that is manufactured each time a justice is nominated to the Supreme Court is among the more overblown and hysterical versions of political theatre we are granted but also the most opaque. For the vast majority of people have no real legal knowledge, nor do they understand the intricacies of the entire appellate courts system. Like most things that pass for politics in America, the nomination is treated as a form of American Idol or a beauty pageant. But there is another issue attached to the spectacle that accompanies Supreme Court nominations and that has to do with a more philosophical set of questions about both class, and about psychology. And the most obvious and most forgotten (and intentionally obscured) truth about the rule of law is that it is not impartial or in any way democratic. Mass incarceration shows no sign of slowing down despite the very tireless and relentless work of prison critics and death penalty activists. ICE continues to round up people and separate children from their parents. All legal, of course. Children are sentenced as adults. Men are given life terms for drug offenses. The criminalization of life continues to expand. Criminal codes increase. And that increase and expansion mirrors the German criminal law system under National Socialism. The first period after the downfall of the Weimar Republic was marked by the rise of authoritarian ideology. An authoritarian criminal theory mingled with elements of the old classical school, dominated the academic field. In the criminal courts the transition was immediately reflected by the imposition of harsher punishments, and by a weakening of the status of the defendant. — Otto Kircheimer, Criminal Law in National Socialist Germany, 1939 The second shift Kircheimer notes was a shift from the objective facts of the case to the subjective. It was the Nietzschian theory being appropriated. The subjective took the form of a focus on intent, and served thereby to obscure the distinction between act and intention. I’d argue one sees a version of this logic today in the valorizing of remorse. It has become a singularly elevated component in evaluating the appropriate punishment, and more, in how to *feel* about the criminal. The unrepentant are the lowest rung on the ladder of guilt. Remorse and confession eclipse the actual commissioned criminal act. In the Germany of the thirties the law allowed for vagueness in the service of expansion. And in a sense today, victim’s rights and a new subjectivity of remorse and confession are in the service of widening the definition of crime itself. And all correctives (#metoo, for example) are quickly absorbed within a trend that strips away presumptions of innocence and the rights of the accused. For denying accusations sounds perilously close to unapologetic and lacking in the qualities of penitence. Another instance of professional attitudes may be seen in the way in which such a citadel of conservative lawyerdom as the American Bar Association addresses itself to social issues. Matters are taken up one by one, in isolation from the social context and without discussion of the basic issue. Precisely because the A.B.A. regards itself as the official spokesman of the bar it must present its views in a formal manner that gives the appearance of being supra-political and almost without concrete content. It is the independence of the judiciary, the separation of powers, the preservation of fundamental rights, or just fairness, the policy of justice-never the specific social interests or purposes of policies-that is discussed. — Judith Shklar, Legalism: Law, Morals, and Political Trials, Harvard University Press, 1964 Shklar wrote Legalism in 1964. She presciently articulated the front edges of that neo Nietzschian fascist sensibility at work in the intentional vagueness that allowed for its use in traversing any theoretical problems with mass warehousing of the poor, cruel and unusual punishments, torture, and executions. The men who reach candidacy for appointments to positions of authority in the legal apparatus are, these days certainly, uniformly guided by a belief in retaining the status quo, and a devotion to the societal direction of control and oppressive social forms. There are no radicals available even if a President, in a fit of madness, wanted to appoint one. On balance and over the span of American history, the court has, in fact, done far more to retard progress than to advance it. Most horribly, the court upheld in its decision in Dred Scott the sanctity of slavers’ property interest in other humans. The court likewise approved in its Korematsu decision the World War II–era imprisonment of Japanese Americans based on nothing more than fear and paranoia. The court recently claimed to overturn Korematsu, but in the context of the Trump v. Hawaii decision in which the court upheld the constitutionality of Trump’s Muslim travel ban. In the Citizens United case, meanwhile, the court turned back legislative efforts to rein in the corruption of our politics that follows inevitably from our First Amendment–sponsored orgy of special interest contributions. — Christopher Jon Sprigman, “The Supreme Court is a Historically Regressive and Presently Expendable Institution“, October 11, 2018 In fact, through most of its history the Supreme Court has engaged in the wildest conservative judicial activism in defense of privileged groups. Right-wing judicial activism reached a frenzy point in George W. Bush v. Al Gore. In a 5-to-4 decision, the conservatives overruled the Florida Supreme Court’s order for a recount in the 2000 presidential election. The justices argued with breathtaking contrivance that since different Florida counties might use different modes of tabulating ballots, a hand recount would violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. By preventing a recount, the Supreme Court gave the presidency to Bush. In recent years these same conservative justices have held that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause could not be used to stop violence against women, or provide a more equitable mode of property taxes, or a more equitable distribution of funds between rich and poor school districts. — Michael Parenti, “Right-wing Judicial Activism”, Democracy for the Few, 2010, p. 266 Michael Mandel pointed out that “When dealing in their writings with legality, Marx and Engels sought to discredit completely any notion of an autonomous or egalitarian legal realm capable of transcending or resolving the discord, unfulfillment and subjugation of everyday life or (most importantly) of restraining the oppressive social power of class society.” And it was Marx who formulated the concept of base/superstructure. For the total reality (base) of life is found in the total of its relations of production — on top of which a superstructure of political and legal institutions is built. Here again, however, one sees the overall dumbing down of the American public. And I’m honestly not sure how much of a journey that was. The TV staple ‘lawyer show’ is almost always prosecutorial, and rarely about defense lawyers. There was one, The Divide, but it was cancelled after one season due to low ratings. This is the culture (and here I’m speaking of the white bourgeoisie) that thrives on and embraces racist rhetoric like ‘super predator’ and who fail to see the dogged xenophobia and racism of all lawyer shows. In fact, the single most predominant theme or plot is that of white saviour; the idealistic DA (sic) working to help the “good” black or hispanic kid from the clutches of gangs and drug dealers (the vast majority of the residents of the *ghetto*). White paternalism has always been a hallmark of Hollywood drama. But I digress. These are difficulties which the man from the country has not expected to meet, the Law, he thinks, should be accessible to every man and at all times, but when he looks more closely at the doorkeeper in his furred robe, with his huge pointed nose and long, thin, Tartar beard, he decides that he had better wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at the side of the door. There he sits waiting for days and years. — Franz Kafka, “Before the Law”, from The Trial What is important to recognize is the hegemonic nature of the legal system, and of laws. There is a consensus which grows out of an atmosphere or backdrop that is society wide, and which is manufactured and presented by media and entertainment over and over again. And today these assumptions and consensus travel across various economic trans-national blocs. The paradox, if that is what it is, of a growing nationalist frenzy in Europe and the U.S. serves to mask the greater cooperation of these global economic blocs. And such blocs are also rather fluid, though not completely. And while cynical regarding Nationalistic interests, they also often fall prey themselves to such jingoism. This is the global reality and it shadows domestic institutions, and that most certainly includes the courts. For these economic blocs are immune to judicial or legal interference or sanction. The idea that the law plays a central role in the American imagination and political imagination is well- trodden ground; noticed early on by Tocqueville and today provocatively framed by some as a form of religious observance for the foundational document that is the U.S. Constitution, the idea of law looms large in the American liberal imagination. One is hard pressed to find an account of liberalism — be it by its proponents or by its critics — that does not feature the rule of law as one of its main tenets, if not as its central normative feature. — Tiphaine Dickson, “On the Poverty, Rise, and Demise of International Criminal Law“, (2016), Dissertations and Theses, Paper 2707, Portland State University The courts are reflective, on several levels, of life in the U.S. It is racist firstly. Profoundly so. In death penalty cases, 97% of DA’s were white. And not just that… [A]n investigation of all murder cases prosecuted . . . from 1973 to 1990 revealed that in cases involving the murder of a white person, prosecutors often met with the victim’s family and discussed whether to seek the death penalty. In a case involving the murder of the daughter of a prominent white contractor, the prosecutor contacted the contractor and asked him if he wanted to seek the death penalty. When the contractor replied in the affirmative, the prosecutor said that was all he needed to know. He obtained the death penalty at trial. He was rewarded with a contribution of $5,000 from the contractor when he successfully ran for judge in the next election. The contribution was the largest received by the District Attorney. There were other cases in which the District Attorney issued press releases announcing that he was seeking the death penalty after meeting with the family of a white victim. But prosecutors failed to meet with African-Americans whose family members had been murdered to determine what sentence they wanted. Most were not even notified that the case had been resolved. As a result of these practices, although African-Americans were the victims of 65% of the homicides in the Chattahoochee Judicial District, 85% of the capital cases were white victim cases. — S. Bright, Santa Clara Law Review, Death and Denial: The Tolerance of Racial Discrimination in Infliction of the Death Penalty, 1995 One could continue citing statistics for a few hundred pages. The courts express American intolerance and inequality as if under a magnifying glass. And remember that that religious adulation reserved for the *Founding Fathers* (sic) usually conveniently omits that most of them owned slaves. Judith Shklar wrote of the Supreme Court: “…this is an institution obviously irreconcilable with democracy, but results from the conjunction of the three following facts: legal traditions inherited from the colonial and Revolutionary period, distrust of any government, and a democracy which had little confidence in itself”. The courts are factories to process surplus humanity, in the eyes of the ruling class anyway. — Antonio Gramsci, The Conquest of the State So, returning to the Brett Kavanaugh circus. (side bar note: Brett boy is a Catholic, which may account for his deficiencies as a public weeper. Evangelicals are far superior at crying. See: Swaggert, Jimmy. Weber, Rep. Randy. Baker, Jim.) The fact is that Obama’s last nominee Merrick Garland was almost a cookie cutter cutout ideologically from Kavanaugh, and John Roberts seems of no interest to most liberals. And it again is a part of this ‘American Idolization’ of the political that no major media outlet ever addresses the fact that even Ginsburg, the erstwhile liberal on the court, is eons removed from William O. Douglas or Brennan. In fact, per the New York Times (circa 1997 it should be noted): A recent survey by the libertarian Institute for Justice examined Supreme Court opinions between 1993 and 1996. The survey lamented the fact that the Justices least likely to strike down laws infringing civil and economic liberties were President Clinton’s appointees, Justices Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, who voted to uphold Government power in two-thirds of the cases examined. Ginsburg is also tight with Antonin Scalia. Go figure, huh. So it is hard to muster much outrage over another uptight white guy becoming a supreme court justice. The higher courts are the expression of an illusory coherence and imaginary neutrality that it is alleged, stands above the merely political. But, in fact, it is at its core political. The courts adaptation of a rarified positivist grammar, one that carries with it a kind of scientific precision (and it is precise, if one allows it to frame itself. Precise and even beautiful) are, in fact, neither neutral nor precise. But this distance, this hermetic emotionless rationality is really in the service of removing social trauma and human suffering from the rulings, and to hide the class mediated selectivity at work. In the arena of international law, the first problem has to do with tribunals created by members of the U.N. security council. For such tribunals (The ICTY, at the Hague and the ICTR at Arusha, et al) are trying individuals whose countries of origin are not members of the security council and hence cannot create ad hoc tribunals. Nor can these individuals refuse to participate. Milosevic, who was kidnapped by the U.S. and taken to the Hague, opened his defense by declaring the tribunal illegitimate. Of course, the trial went ahead and he died in custody. A decade later he was acquitted. It is interesting to note that nobody involved in the killing of Osama bin Ladin was ever thought to be put on trial. Nor whatever drone pilot hit the sixteen year old American Anwar al-Awlaki. The father did bring a suit but it was dismissed out of hand. Or is it possible for the nation of Honduras to form an ad hoc tribunal to consider the role of the U.S. in the recent coup that unleashed massive violence. Could Venezuela form an ad hoc tribunal? No. Tiphaine Dickson, in her remarkably comprehensive examination of the evolution of international criminal law, notes, the ascendency of human rights as a foreign policy principle took place as an arm of neoliberalism, and came out of a variety of factors that included corporatism, Vietnam and American shame, and in theory the failure of political utopias — this last was really the argument of Samuel Moyn. And failure is certainly a relative term. By all accounts, human rights organizations made the conscious choice to scuttle socio-economic rights in order to streamline and mainstream their message; in today’s cynical marketing parlance, we would speak of clarifying their brand. This certainly contradicts the idea that these movements stood like deer in the headlights before an unexpected neoliberal ten-ton truck: they had already known it best to dash away to the safe-haven of the atrocity and the war crime. — Tiphaine Dickson, “On the Poverty, Rise, and Demise of International Criminal Law“, (2016), Dissertations and Theses, Paper 2707, Portland State University Moyn described the *spectacular atrocity as the organizational fulcrum* of international moral conscience. Now there was also a decided colonial flavor to this marketing parlance. And to its choices. The *dark continent* was the perfect backdrop for the association of primitive bestial violence. A violence that far exceeded what was possible in the advanced West. It is that super predator theme again. And it is again white paternalism. There was another factor in the rise of this specific human rights consciousness and that was what is termed “Holocaust Memory”. The Holocaust industry. So neoliberalism, inequality, and the Holocaust memory idea roughly came to prominence at the same time. And it is interesting, perhaps, to observe the rise of ‘victim’s rights’ in domestic criminal law and practice, a short while later. The role of American guilt, then, is tied into this, or at least the shaping of and control of how guilt is viewed and experienced. After its defeat in Vietnam, and Richard Nixon’s normalization of relations with China, the United States engaged in a major ideological shift. In the early 1970s, the United States used the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe to redefine its enemy. Under the cover of détente with Moscow, this East-West conference agreed on measures supposedly designed to promote lasting peace. The Helsinki Final Act, signed in 1975, endorsed the inviolability of frontiers, territorial integrity of states, and non-intervention in internal affairs of other states (measures designed to reassure Moscow, still fearful of German revanchism). However, that last principle was subtly challenged by Washington’s new cherished “value”: respect for human rights. While seemingly affirming the status quo, this initiated a new phase of indirect U.S. interference in the internal affairs of other nations, no longer in the name of anti-communism, but rather as defense of human rights. In 1978, the Helsinki Watch group was founded to monitor human rights in Soviet bloc countries. Ten years later, Helsinki Watch evolved into Human Rights Watch, whose watchfulness continues to focus on countries where the United States is likely to favor regime change. — Diana Johnstone, Monthly Review, 2017 I am writing an almost short hand simplified overview here of what is a complex history. But there is enough material, I think, to arrive at a few conclusions. The US court system is not going to ever do other than it always has. It is going to protect those who own the wealth and property of the country, and the Supreme Court is the final voice of the Imperialist ruling elite and its role is to tidy up matters in a way that protects the status quo. Michael Mandel (in How America Gets Away with Murder) summarizes international criminal courts thus… So here is the problem with international criminal law: it lets the Americans get away, not only with murder, but with the supreme international crime, and it punishes only the individual evils of the Americans’ enemies – even though these are but the inevitable result of this supreme crime that ‘contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.’ It does this so regularly that it cannot be regarded as some minor kink that has to be worked out of the system. Despite international criminal law’s banner commitment to ‘ending impunity,’ its operating principle is really one of ‘selective impunity. The supreme international crime is, of course, a reference to Robert Jackson’s opening speech at Nuremberg, where he described aggressive war, not in self defense, as the supreme international crime. Which, by my reckoning, means the U.S. is guilty of that crime about 7 or 8 times in just the last twenty years This is an era of massive organized disinformation, historical revisionism, and outright propaganda. Massive. One of the problems associated with pointing this out is that one is liable to be called a conspiracy theorist. It’s the definitive fear inducing appellation. And even when obvious campaigns of disinformation are being implemented, there is a reluctance on the part of many to point it out. Hollywood, let alone the media news giants and telecoms, are directly tied to the US government, to the Pentagon, CIA, and state department. In Hollywood today CIA advisors sit in on story meetings for any show or film that even indirectly touches on the subject of the military or government or law enforcement. The result has been twenty five years of direct propaganda. Most Americans learn of the court system from TV. Dick Wolf, as an example, as several hugely successful franchises that have legal and courtroom, or law enforcement backdrops and locations. In fact, his latest show is titled FBI. But there are a dozen other show runners and show creators who peddle the same kitsch versions of a cartoon legal world. Most Americans learn most everything from mass corporate entertainment and news. The normalizing of outright executions and coups is experienced as nothing out of the ordinary, and far away anyway. The public is told when to be outraged and when not to be. And they are instructed that class doesn’t exist and that military service is the most noble form or patriotism. And never ever is American exceptionalism to be questioned. In the legal system there are only ‘individual’ stories, de-linked from social reality and from history. Liberal pieties about the ‘rule of law’ and the reactionaries devotion to morality (others, not their own) again speaks to parallels with National Socialism in the thirties. Kircheimer ends his essay on law under the Third Reich this way: In effect it is difficult to see how the goal of improving public morality could be obtained by a state that not only operates at such a low level satisfaction of needs, but rests on a supervision and direction of all spheres of life by an oppressive political organization. So, I’d say the Supreme Court is actually pretty much as it’s always been. Founded by slavers and the rich colonial proprietorial class, it has served the interests of the wealthy, of business and privilege, and has done it without interruption since its inception. There is the additional psychological conditioning today that encourages agreement, encourages consensus and a valorizing of the familiar. Words such as *revolutionary* or *dissent* are considered bad, lumped into an amorphous category labeled *fake news*. *Radical* is a bad word, too. And the business of the courts, all courts, really, is too conform to, and reinforce the values of, a class system and a privileged wealthy elite. http://clubof.info/

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iuarandal95879-blog · 7 years ago

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nofomoartworld · 7 years ago

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Hyperallergic: In Search of the Authentic Selfie

Screenshot of Google Image search results for “selfie”

Editor’s note: The following excerpt is the ninth chapter of The Selfie Generation: How Our Self-Images Are Changing Our Notions of Privacy, Sex, Consent, and Culture, Alicia Eler’s new book from Skyhorse Publishing building on ideas first developed in a series of posts on Hyperallergic starting in June 2013.

* * *

The selfie is an aspirational image, but it also an integral aspect of socializing, interacting, and being seen by others online. In an attention economy of likes that demands performance and absolute connectivity, the selfie is a way to visually grab some- one’s attention, mimicking a face-to-face interaction. In order to exist, the selfie most be produced by the individual, and consumed by the network. Even though the selfie is a singular image object, it exists as a continual piece of content when posted to the network because of the people on the network who interact with it. Yet upon posting, it also becomes an archive of one’s presence on the network. The selfie that is posted to the network is always about being seen the way you want others to see you. (#putyourbestfaceforward)

Though the selfie is a millennial phenomena, there are noticeably different selfie-ing habits between older millennials such as myself, who grew up using AIM and then joined Friendster and early MySpace; younger millennials who had Facebook in high school; and members of Generation Z who, born after 1996, are teens now or in their early twenties and regularly use Instagram, Snapchat, and Tumblr. One thing that distinguishes older and younger millennials and Gen Z is the question of online privacy. Older millennials remember a time when there was such a thing as online privacy, whereas younger Gen Zs do not.

“One of the reasons I (and a lot of us ‘older millennials’ in tech) get so nostalgic for the old days is because we believed in the power of living in public and the tools we used never got in the way of that; and the tools were for the most part, super naive about the potential privacy violations they presented,” says Harlo Holmes, director of newsroom digital security at Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Infinite mirror // selfie-ing

The selfie is perpetually here and now, but where is it headed? Madison Malone Kirscher writes regularly about selfies for New York Magazine’s section Select All, which asks questions about how we live online. I was intrigued by her stories about sealfies (selfies with seals), handless selfies (selfies taken with a timer in front of the mirror while the phone is flying in the air) and ballot selfies, and figured she’d have some answers to these questions.

“Anytime anybody whips out a phone to take a photo, people will call it a selfie,” said Kirscher when we spoke by phone. “If you can put ‘selfie’ in a headline, people will click it and people will care.” The word “selfie,” as we saw in chapter 4, is buzzy, cute, and clickworthy.

“When I think about people like my parents, they know what [the selfie] is,” Kirscher said. “Suddenly, this trend that maybe they don’t give a damn about — people taking pictures in their bedroom mirrors throwing their phones in the air, which is this ridiculous teen thing — there’s a touchstone there now because everyone knows what a selfie is this side of point-and-shoot cameras circa 2003.”

The social appropriateness of the selfie is constantly in flux. It was intensely vilified during its upswing, but now it has settled in to being an accepted aspect of how we live.

The selfie is fun. When shared, it becomes a social image. Ultimately, self-imaging is enjoyable and something that most every millennial does at some point, to see how they look on-screen and to connect with friends.

Willingly returned to my high school to see this year's musical so now I'm hiding out in the bathroom because time is a flat circle. http://pic.twitter.com/IrMeGz9Twg

— Madison M. K. (@4evrmalone) March 11, 2017

“I have this series of tweets where I take a selfie every time I wear tech fleece — [the other day, I was doing it, and] I watched some person who was probably thirty to thirty-five years older look at me and then pantomime, ‘Are you kidding me?’” says Kirscher. “And that’s not even an inappropriate setting. I’m just walking up 1st Avenue, I’m not bothering anyone, I’m not impeding on anything — I’m just taking a picture of my face.”

That’s one way of selfie-ing, and it’s also specific to millennials who are in their 20s. Because selfie-ing is largely a teen phenomena, as discussed in chapter 1, what about kids who are part of Generation Z, people who were born after 1996? If we’re talking about the future, this is who will determine it.

“I don’t use Facebook because Facebook is boring,” says George Yocom, thirteen, who’s in the eighth grade and lives in Minneapolis. “That’s where all the old people go and write about weird weather and stuff. I don’t want to hear about what you are doing right now.”

I’d been on Facebook just moments before talking to George. After talking with him, I felt incredibly lame. I’d met his mom the week before when she came by the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, where I work, to give a talk to journalists about covering the trans community.

George and I talked about his social media — he really only uses Instagram, Snapchat, and Tumblr because that’s where his friends hang out, and that’s mostly who he follows on social media. He goes on every day, often first thing in the morning, and of course social media does affect his friendships and how he sees people in the world. It’s also important for him to post about the stuff he cares about and is doing.

“As a trans activist, I am more like trying to get people to support this organization, or do stuff and not just sit there and think about it — which is good, but to actually go out there and do stuff,” he says.

But really, I just wanted to talk with George about his selfies. Maybe, I wrote this whole book just so I could get to this part of it. I asked him, how often do you post selfies?

“I feel like, mainly I probably do because I don’t know what else to post and I don’t have any other pictures and like, why not?” he says. The selfies that he notices get the most likes are ones where he’s wearing really cute outfits, and doesn’t have his face in them.

“[When people see those photos they] are like, ‘Oh cute,’ and I’m like, ‘I know.’”

There’s an assumption out in the world, as mentioned in Nancy Jo Sales’ book American Girls that social media is affecting the lives of teenage girls in a negative way, and that they would leave the network if they could. Certainly, social media is changing the social behavior of teens today. When I asked George if social media has been a helpful way for him to connect with friends, he replied, “It definitely helps me connect with people because obviously I can’t be with people 24/7, but I want to know what they’re doing,” he says. “And like, sometimes it’s hard to talk to people because I have social anxiety, so it’s cool to see them online and be like, ‘Hey, you’re having a good time, that’s great!’”

Two artists of the selfie generation: RaFiA Santana & Brannon Rockwell-Charland

Selfies are a completely mainstream phenomenon. And like any pop culture phenomena, they are ripe for critique by artists of the selfie generation. Artists of the selfie generation use social media as part of building their persona or brand, and they also use themselves in their work. In this IRL-URL fluid space, artists of the selfie generation criss-cross from the digital to the physical, exploring and playing with the overlap between the two.

Artists of the selfie generation are diverse, geographically scattered about (location optional!), and connected by the Internet and social media. Artists of the selfie generation engage with intersectional feminism, a term originally coined by Black feminists to point out the unique intersection of oppression that they experience both as women and people of color. It now has come to include anyone who experiences oppression under white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal society. As the blog Intersectional Feminism 101 writes: “Those with disabilities, mental ill- ness, non-Western religious identities, nonwhite ethnic or racial identities, nonthin bodies, non-Eurocentric features, low income, those who are not alloromantic, allosexual, heterosexual, or cis-gender [specically cis male by Western standards], or those who simply do not adhere to a Western model of gender or sexuality all experience oppression due to their relative ‘disadvantage.’”

One such artist who uses the selfie as one of her many means of self-expression is Brooklyn-based artist RaFiA Santana, age twenty-six. She is a millennial who selfies as a way to both create an archive of herself, and to make sure she is seen the way she wants to be seen. On social media she has said that she has a separate account just for people of color, and one where she creates a persona that’s read more by non-POC folks. Creating such distinct personas on social media is one way to navigate fluid social media identities.

Her selfie art is also a necessity in part because of systemic racism that she experiences. Santana knows that someone who takes her photo will come to it with their own visual memory and baggage of historical images of Black people. Santana works across platforms, and often uses herself in her work. She comes from a family of artists — her mother is a photographer and archivist, and her father is a photographer and filmmaker — and she started using a camera as a teenager.

On the top of her website, she has category for “selfie,” but this wasn’t on purpose. It just happened because she tagged a lot of images with #selfie, and that created a larger tag cloud on the top of her website.

“I have a ton of images of myself, and it does stretch across photography, graphic design, and just like Instagram pictures,” says Santana. “That was a way of categorizing it and putting it into different compartments — how to show it. Somebody picked it up as a series, and I was like, ‘Oh I guess it’s kinda like that, but I was like, oh wait it’s not a self-portrait series,’ but whenever I post a picture of me that I made, I put it under ‘selfie.’”

The main draw of the selfie, especially for people who have seen results they aren’t happy with when turning over the lens to a photographer, is that we can shape our own narratives based on how we want to be seen.

“You get these narratives with photography but if somebody else is taking your picture they are seeing you through their lens, and a lot of what I have been taking issue with and just noticing with a lot of Black photography in major magazines — a lot of the photographers are white and if they shoot Black people they are not conscious about the inherent biases they have — because they’ve been seeing Black people through the white lens forever. That’s like all they’ve been seeing — they’ll still photograph Black people the same way, making them look demonic or just the standard ghetto and not lit properly, they don’t understand how Black people want to look — they don’t understand the Black aesthetic.”

For Santana, she’s often had to go back and retouch photos that were taken of her at major magazines, because the photographer didn’t know how to photograph her. With the selfie, such issues don’t come up because she’s taught herself how to shoot, she knows what looks good, and she knows how to make it so.

“The selfie has been super empowering in that way, just being able to show myself as I am,” she says. In addition, selfie-ing is a way for her to self-reflect — she sees selfie-ing and self-reflection as overlapping.

“Self-reflection is important because you need that to grow,” she says. “If you don’t know where you’re at you don’t know where you need to be. Even if you are in a bad place, you usually want to get out of that bad place. You want to think about that and break down all the things that you do like and things that you don’t like, how do I change this, enhance this, the selfie is very important to me in that respect — it’s sort of like a record.”

It’s not impossible to get an image of yourself that you like that wasn’t taken by you, but it’s definitely harder. Finding a photographer who not only gets your aesthetic, but gets the essence of you and can bring that out in an image — heighten it to ensure that you look even better than you would in everyday life — is a rarity.

“I want to show myself how I wanted to be seen and that’s not going to happen if I let someone else take over my image,” says RaFiA. “Unless we have that relationship and are close with each other, and they know what I want to look like.”

Similarly, Brannon Rockwell-Charland, twenty-four, is an artist working on her MFA in the interdisciplinary studio program at UCLA. She engages often with the selfie, and for her it is a way to connect with herself and assert a sense of power. Rather than tell you more, I asked Brannon for her thoughts on her relationship to the selfie. Here’s what she shared:

Every time I make an image of myself, whether I make it in a darkroom or on an iPhone, I feel that I am reclaiming some kind of power. Selfies give me a sense of control in the face of the always-impending fetishization of black women’s bodies.

The way I’m “read” by others visually is at the center of my work, and there’s a lot at stake for me when I render myself. I’m attempting to clear some space to be able to express my full range of humanity while engaged with whatever aspects of my history I choose but without respectability politics.

I think about history all the time — my own personal history and the contentiousness with which we tend to view images of black woman-ness throughout time. Jezebel. Mammy. Slut. Superwoman. Tragic Mulatto. The list goes on. I’m as tired of that list as I am intrigued by that list. I want to be able to be all of those women simultaneously and at will. I want to be able to be none of them.

I resist erasure by redefining, by embodying, by existing artistically in spaces that are amazing and problematic when it comes to the image of the black woman. The thing about selfies as a form of image-making that is so tied to social media is that, as we discussed in our queer Tumblr article, we are wrapped up in this paradox of self-reclamation and the social capitalist currency of the Internet. “We are subject to market logic.”

I think maybe I used to be more concerned with resisting and transcending late capitalism. But these days, having just moved to LA, having just started an MFA program, still feeling very uprooted in my art practice, wondering how I’ll afford to live in this city, I find myself wanting to engage with capitalism like I want to engage with the labels of black womanhood. I find myself wondering if I should make my Instagram public. Instagram is where I post most of my selfies; it’s the online space where I am my weirdest self. I find myself wondering how to sell my work. I am in my work. I’m sitting in this perpetually ambivalent space.

For Brannon, selfies are a continual part of her work, ever evolving and complicated in their multifacetedness. As an artist, she curates her image online as well, making her selfie collection unique to her aesthetic and sense of self. By being what she describes as her “weirdest self,” Brannon creates a type of artist persona through selfies and other content she posts to Instagram, while also recognizing that the images she is making are connected to capitalizing on one’s own body and image likeness.

In this way, there is a projected and curated vulnerability dis- played through sel es that traverses issues of privacy online. “When I talk about our ‘right to privacy,’ I usually frame it as a choice, or a positive action, rather than a defense,” says Harlo Holmes, of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “There is indeed a lot of power in creating a public self; everyone is going to share stuff, but make sure you use technology in a way that only you get to choose which version of yourself exists for public consumption.”

Genevieve Gaignard is another artist who creates work around complicated racial identities. As a self-identi ed mixed-race woman, she contends with different stereotypes and personas in her work, creating alter-egos in a way that is more Nicki Minaj and less Cindy Sherman. She also takes many, many selfies.

As I wrote in a review of her exhibition Us Only at Shulamit Nazarin Gallery in Venice, California, for CRAVE magazine, I discussed how her “high yellow femme” identity complicates her relationship to Blackness and how she is read out in the world, yet isn’t necessarily a conversation about what it’s like to “pass.” In her show she explores the multiple identities that she could embody based on the ways she is perceived.

I wrote about Gaignard’s art several times in Los Angeles. In a review of her exhibition Smell the Roses at the California African-American Museum for Hyperallergic, I was curious to think about her work as more than either selfie or self-portrait, and more like creating new mythologies that blend autobiography and fiction. I pointed to UCLA associate English professor Uri McMillian’s essay “Masquerade, Surface, and Mourning: The Performance of Memory-Work in Genevieve Gaignard: Smell the Roses,” which he wrote for the exhibition:

Gaignard’s performances can be positioned in a genealogy of feminist persona-play, including Adrian Piper’s The Mythic Being, Lorraine O’Grady’s Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, and Howardena Pindell’s Free, White, and 21, as well as Nikki S. Lee’s Projects, Eleanor Antin’s black ballerina, Eleanora Antinova, and Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight.

Because of their shared interest in characters, Gaignard’s work is often compared to Cindy Sherman. But whereas Sherman reveals nothing about herself, Gaignard reveals a lot. And instead of working with female archetypes in the media, Gaignard makes the personal explicitly political.

She’s also damn funny. So I’ll leave you with this tongue-in-cheek work of hers. It’s called “Selfie Stick,” and points to the selfie’s origins: the mirror.

No selfies allowed but plenty of rewards received at Jumbo’s Clown Room

Speaking of the production and consumption of (cis)female bodies, there are no selfies or other types of photography allowed at Jumbo’s Clown Room, a strip club on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. I had driven by it many times while cruising through Hollywood, noticing the bouncer who eyed IDs at the door. The red-brick facade reminded me of how few brick buildings there are in Los Angeles because of earthquakes. There are no windows in the facade of Jumbo’s. There are no free shows for passersby.

I initially resisted going to Jumbo’s. I had seen amateur burlesque shows in Chicago, at dimly-lit dive bars on makeshift stages, and at storefront theaters squeezed between warehouses on diagonally directional streets. I didn’t want to pay an admission fee to see women’s bodies commodified, and then throw dollar bills at them, which felt even more demoralizing. Even though I am a cis queer woman, I grapple with questions of objectifying women. Also, why go watch live when this commodification is so readily available on TV, the Internet, and in porn? With all this screened play, why would anyone go see girls, like, real human beings, simulating what we are already seeing on screens all the time already?

Jumbo’s was different from other strip clubs. Unlike the plethora of other XXX nude girl joints, which I noticed the most when I first moved to LA, this one has been around since 1970, it’s not nude, and it is burlesque. It is rumored that workers there are treated more ethically. As with any strip club though, there are still plenty of dollar bills that patrons throw onto the stage, ready to be swept up after the dance is over. It’s the business of selling bodies, sex, desire, pleasure.

Curious and open to this new experience, I decided to go — but not on my own, of course. BFF Che Landon, who you remember from previous chapters, thought it would be hilarious to take our eight-months-pregnant-and-about-to-pop friend to Jumbo’s. What funnier place to spot a pregnant woman, am I right?? And who knows, maybe the baby would decide to make an appearance that evening!

There are no photos allowed inside the red-brick facade of Jumbo’s. A packed bar and a stage with a single golden pole erected into it sandwich the available seating area. A series of chairs lined the perimeter of the stage, just beyond the rail that separated the dancer and the audience members who have decided to sit right there in front of the stage and fling bills at the dancers rather than lounge on a black leather booth or on stools at a high stooled circular table further away. The bar that wraps its way around the stage is painted red, and dotted with yellow stars. Mirrors line the back wall of the stage, the ceiling above the stage, and another side of the wall adjacent to the stage.

No matter where you are sitting in the audience, you can see the dancer from multiple angles. Or you can just look straight ahead at her. There is no screen or screened bodies. Just sit back and look into the mirror — see yourself watching her, see her reflected back in the mirror, see reflections of bodies in space.

Sitting in the front row that night at Jumbo’s, I had the overwhelming sense that I’d experienced this dynamic before — this wanting to sit in the front row and look but not be seen looking. I turned to my left, watching as one of my friends gleefully dispensed dollar bills like a blissed-out bank teller to a happily receiving customer.

That’s when it hit me. I remembered this experience. My desire to look but not be seen reminded me of being at a comedy show and making the bold choice to sit in the front row, experiencing that same sensation — hoping that the comedian would make eye contact with me and single me out, put me on the spot with eye contact, but not actually acknowledge my presence. I was there to listen and be an objectified voyeur, but not to be seen.

There’s another important element of Jumbo’s that I mentioned earlier, but I want to reinforce. There are no phones allowed. No one can photograph the girls. They cannot photograph themselves, either. In essence, they are protected against the threat of social media and the Internet. Their bodies will not exist in data form. Their essence will never leave that room. The memories of their bodies will exist only in the minds of visitors that evening, hundreds of eyes gazing in, skin-deep, on the surface. They can only be seen directly, never in a meta-way or through a third-party app. They can only ever be performers and reflections in mirrors, various angles, ass, face, right here, right now.

Anyone seen with their phone out is reprimanded. I took mine out at one point just to check an app quick, and immediately a bouncer noticed and approached me, yelling: “No phones!” I was putting the phone away when the dancer on stage who donned an obviously sexy Halloween costume that included a fake bloodied sword moved toward me. I played along with her slashing roleplay motion. Then she slunk off, dropping to the floor where she gyrated awhile, then wrapped her legs around a pole, sliding up and down it until the song ended and she exited.

While she did this, I watched the mirrors. They created multiple reflected versions of her in this physical space that replicated the infinite reflection of a sexualized selfie put out on the Internet, available for anyone to see through the smartphone in their hands, a face appearing in the palm of your hand. Except instead of direct gazes and dollar bills landing on her as she moved across the stage, such a selfie would garner likes and retweets and comments, shares and often creepy @ messages. Every click is feedback, a like, a reward. Every dollar dropped on-stage is a monetary reward.

“The human reward system tends to be responsive to a variety of things that lead to a subjective pleasurable response,” says Dr. Mauricio Delgado, associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University. “This includes the most basic of rewards such as food or money. This also includes more social rewards; things such as a simple smile, receiving compliments, or feeling accepted by peers.”

I was thinking about this effect of the body and face as a woman’s first and last weapon in the digital age and IRL, online as a selfie-er versus in-person as a body. In both spaces, the body becomes not just a brand or a means of gaining social capital, but a literal commodity.

I tell this story not to take issue with strip clubs, burlesque/ erotic dancers, or the act of voyeurism. My experience at Jumbo’s made me think more deeply about some of the recurring critiques of selfie culture, particularly those aimed at young women who find the act of selfie-ing to be empowering, experimenting with their bodies and sexuality in the way that they want to, being seen in the way that they want to be seen. It is empowering as a way to capture attention and to connect quickly, but it comes with the reality of literally releasing one’s selfie as data to the network.

Often, the young women who are purveyors of selfie culture replicate the same types of sexual submissiveness that wouldn’t be seen as “strong” or empowering at all. Women’s bodies are always sexualized. This becomes even more complicated within the realm of selfie culture, because while the image is of her and for her, it becomes something that is also consumed by others who see her as a sexualized object. It’s impossible to escape the gaze or the commodification of bodies under patriarchy.

Can the selfie ever be radical?

I’m a millennial who voted and then selfie-d about voting. I felt conflicted about this. Why did I need to share something I did? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, did it really fall? (#picsoritdidnthappen) Similarly, if I voted and didn’t take a selfie of that instance, did I ever vote? (#ballotselfieoritneverhappened) The answer is obviously yes, but considering that it’s only 2017 and women only gained the right to vote in 1920, not even one hundred years ago, I decided that I wanted to be part of the voting selfie moment on social media. This begs the question: Are selfies tools of empowerment for women in the digital age, or for other people and bodies that are usually othered? Is it meaningful to post a photo like this?

Professor Derek Conrad Murphy makes a case for selfies as a “means to resist the male-dominated media culture’s obsession with and oppressive hold over their lives and bodies.” Murray pulls out the ways that selfie-ing and self-imaging for women on and for the Internet do feel revolutionary, like a sea of faces all rallying together, even if there is no political motivation behind the selfie-ing. “Even if there is no overt political intent, they are indeed contending with the manner in which capitalism is enacted upon their lives,” writes Murray in his paper, Notes to self: the visual culture of selfies in the age of social media.

Murray is self-aware of this generous read on selfie culture, a seemingly ostentatious remark against the blanket accusations of narcissism. Despite the view that your dad might give about “the kids these days being such narcissists,” Murray disagrees, instead taking a more positive approach to the phenomena on the whole, noting the ways that it can be used to dismantle the repression and control of female sexuality.

“Teaching a lot of young women, I see them struggling with societal expectation around how they should behave and look, which often grates against their own desires,” Murray said to me, when we emailed about these questions. “For many women, pornography is very liberating, while others feel demeaned by it, and that’s OK. Antiporn stances, however, often exert just another form of moralistic control and shaming — and often strip women who participate in and consume it of their agency. In terms of the selfie, seeing young women in control of their own image and expressing an unapologetically bold form of sexuality, simply grates against a very repressive social role that women are meant to perform.”

In an attention economy on and offline that demands performance and absolute connectivity, a young woman must continue defining herself. At the end of the day, the selfie is a way to visually grab someone’s attention, mimicking a face-to-face interaction. It is a way to hold space.

The approval of others is not meaningless. I’ve long since wondered if taking and posting a selfie connotes anything beyond surface likes. Self-imaging ultimately comes down to a desire, perhaps even a need, to see oneself — not for someone else’s enjoyment, but just for oneself, to be seen. It is a mechanism for survival, a truly stark negation against invisibility, an action against erasure.

Get selfie-aware

On social media, narratives are fragmented and stories drift off, consumed by the network. Facebook was originally conceived as a way to “tell your life story online,” which seems laughable at this point in time. Who except the people closest to you give a shit about what you ate today? (As I write this, the friend who sits next to me at this café is taking a picture of the cupcake she is about to eat. But she’s a foodie, so . . .) Yet the networks demand content, and everyone has their niche online.

To cast a social media narrative like a screenplay, reality TV show, memoir-like narrative, or series of jokes at a standup comedy show requires constant checking and posting. Plus, the narrative flow is much harder to accomplish on social media. Doing so would mean constantly anticipating reactions. Not everyone has time or interest to strategize that, unless there is a monetary incentive. Think back to chapter 5, the women in China who earn money live-streaming themselves on one ore more of the two hundred livestream platforms. But in the United States, this is less common. Becoming a believable character on social media is to create oneself as a character that is consumable for an audience of social media onlookers, and it is work. Plus, on social media there is an expectation of giving away content for free.

For those who do put time and energy into their social media realms, the article “Social Media Got You Down? Be More Like Beyoncé” by Jenna Wortham for New York Times Magazine rings true. Wortham takes a more optimistic approach to creating a persona or character for yourself online, especially if the rawness of just posting your life to the Internet is bumming you out. (#truth) Taking the time to figure out how to craft your own image, how you want to be seen, is also decidedly individualistic in nature.

Things got more live on social media in 2016, upping the possibilities for content creation. In Spring 2016, Facebook introduced Facebook Live, which allows anyone anywhere to broadcast anything they want to their network. Similarly, in August 2016, Instagram introduced Stories, which are like public versions of snaps, varying in length, but created throughout the day and logged as tiny videos to see and perhaps direct message someone about. Instagram described Stories as a way to “share all the moments of your day, not just the ones you want to keep.” By November 2016, Instagram introduced live videos on their Stories feature. Facebook owns Instagram, but no matter — this is always more content for the network. (There is also an archival feature.)

In Wortham’s article, she argues that this ability to share practically further toes the line of what is socially acceptable. In other words, what’s something to talk about and work out with people IRL, and what’s something to post about as part of one’s online brand?

“There’s nothing necessarily wrong with either example — but they each clearly underline the ways that social media has stripped away our ability to tell what is OK to share and what is not,” writes Wortham. “It’s not just that watching people vie for your attention can feel gross. It’s also that there’s a fine line between appearing savvy online and appearing desperate.”

Wortham suggests that actually, if people thought more about creating a persona for themselves online — in other words, more showing and less telling — audiences could spend more time just enjoying projecting a fantasy. She cites various examples of ways that Beyoncé has quelled rumors about her sister Solange and her marriage to rapper Jay Z through either playing into the drama or creating more of it for the sake of wonderment. In short, Beyoncé has found a way to create a fantasy, holographic selfie through her creative work and Internet presence that leaves people guessing based on what she shows them rather than what she tells them.

“Most people treat social media like the stage for their own reality show, but Beyoncé treats her public persona more like a Barbie — she offers up images and little more, allowing people to project their own ideas, fantasies, and narratives about her life onto it,” writes Wortham.

This is one way to go about creating the selfie, one that will get you the attention you want. It’s Creative Writing 101, to show the story, not tell it. Let the joke unfurl on its own — don’t give away the punchline up front. When it comes to just easily learning how to “be more like Beyoncé,” as Wortham suggests, making it seem like a casual, easy, fun-filled adventure for a leisure class that has time to even think about this, the joke is actually on anyone who thinks that it could be this easy to be like Beyoncé. She’s a celeb. You better believe that she’s got a PR team that guides her through the treacherous swamps, nooks, and crannies of the Internet’s social media landscape.

Despite the controversial nature of presenting any personal information online through social media, we keep doing it. The social media companies that house our selfies and accounts are using our personal data in ways we are not entirely aware of.

“So, while selfie-taking can be a powerful, radical means for expressing and championing forms of identity that have been historically rejected by a racist/patriarchal mainstream culture (think, queer selfies, selfies at BLM protests, hijab selfies, fourth wave soft nude selfies) all selfies shared on social networks are inadvertently participating in capitalism — the same structures that are marginalizing their identities in the first place,” says Alexis Avedisian, Communications Manager at the NYC Media Lab. “Digital formats of activism (like radical selfies) allow for inclusivity within that user’s network, but fully honoring inclusivity is made difficult due to the often apolitical, commercial goals specific to the social media platforms which host the activist action.”

The selfie is the most easily accessible and powerful image for asserting a sense of personhood and connecting with others in a fragmented, networked, and hyperconnected world. It is done without any cost other than the agreement that your image becomes quantifiable data, demonstrative of complacency within techno-capitalism. Yet we cling to the selfie: It is one of the last modes of self-expression and immediacy, an opportunity to create space online, and to connect for (the illusion of) free in a digital age that will transform our personalized interests, purchases, browsing history, and social relations into currency for them. The only social requirement is you.

The post In Search of the Authentic Selfie appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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americ4npsycho-blog · 7 years ago

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Shiller Pe Adjusted For Interest Rates

Shiller Pe Emerging Markets

My point below isn't really to inform you the marketplace economicals or costly. It's to advise you that cyclically-adjusted PEs might be a helpful tool, however I do not think they're the silver bullet they're often promoted as.

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Despite that leading history, there's considerable argument over the performance of this appraisal procedure. Some planners warn the P/E10 ratio shouldn't be utilized as a single evaluation device and also advise it isn't effective when aiming to time the marketplace.

Standard methods to gauge the marketplace usage "pathing" or "forward" price-to-earnings proportions. A tracking P/E takes the S&P's earnings from the past 12 months as well as splits that number by the index's present price. A forward P/E is the collective estimate of exactly what Wall Street experts predict the 500 greatest U.S. business will certainly make any kind of provided year, split by the S&P's rate.

Composing some numbers for a fictitious market for picture: I wouldn't sweat it if a market was on a PE10 of say 20 versus its historical average PE10 level of 15. However if its PE10 obtained in the direction of 25 for any type of extended time in this illustrative circumstances, I would certainly think about that reasonable caution.

He's referring to cyclical business like Caterpillar CAT, +0.29% and Deere DE, +0.31% whose earnings over the past years have been fed by China's financial boom as well as solid need for a variety of assets.

Structure on this story, low rates of interest, which have been low for an extremely extended period of time, combined with abnormally reduced levels of volatility, have actually offered the best kindling for property bubbles in supplies, bonds, as well as in alternative possessions.

Appraisal is an essential part of the discussion, which has actually accentuated one gauge that measures how heated the stock market is. It's called the CAPE proportion (but additionally goes by Shiller P/E and P/E10).

Capitalists who argue that valuations are more affordable today, commonly factor to the Shiller Cyclically Adjusted P/E ((NYSEARCA: CAPE)) Ratio, which, while still historically pricey, is materially listed below its 1999 height level.

On the various other hand, probably earnings over the previous 10 years were illusory, having been sustained by credit scores expansion in the first half of the decade that led to unsustainable consumer costs and bankruptcy. If so, after that to exactly what level we still need to function off the extra stays to be seen.

Shiller Pe Nasdaq

Doug Short of Advisor Perspectives collected an interesting information factor. He sought comparable historic durations when the CAPE proportion was over 20 and also the 10-year U.S. Treasury bond produced in the ultra low 2% range.

The vast diffusion of returns in 2017 has actually created a 2nd chance opportunity, in my opinion, and I am reviewing this prospective opportunity at the upcoming DIY Investor Summit. If you are interested in hearing a portion of my thoughts along with 8 various other respected market experts, please check out the DIY Investor Summit.

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Ways to Use Shiller Pe

For those who do want maths to inform them just what the market will do in the future, the exceptional Moneychimp supplies a basic calculator that makes use of PE10 to approximate future returns for the United States market, as well as to change for dividends Scott Carter.

"Only when CAPE is really high, claim, CAPE is in the top half of the tenth decile (CAPE greater than 27.6), future 10-year supply returns, generally, are below those on 10-year U.S. Treasurys," Valentin Dimitrov and also Prem C. Jain wrote in paper entitled "Shiller's CAPE: Market Timing and also Risk" on Nov. 17.

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To counter that point consequently, several of one of the most indebted companies failed or were substantially devalued in the slump (property business, for circumstances). Probably ongoing incomes will be of a higher and also a lot more lasting high quality, validating a greater PE10 ratio?

What Is The Shiller Pe Ratio Today

The provided assessment proportions are market-capitalization-weighted. "Weight" offers the actual nation weight. PE (Price-Earnings-Ratio), COMPUTER (Price-Cashflow-Ratio), PS (Price-Sales-Ratio) and also DY (Dividend-Yield) are based upon pathing 12 month worths. PB (Price-Book-Ratio) is based on one of the most current company financal declarations. The rounded RS(Relative-Strength)-Indicators (complying with Levy) divide the present market cost by the average rate of the previous 26/52 weeks. To make certain comparability throughout nations, the RS-Indicators. With comprehensive experience in the rare-earth elements market, PM Capital is the premier source for purchasing gold and silver in the United States. We market and distribute a variety of special products ranging from gold and silver bars and rounds to rare numismatic coins. The objective of our whole service operation is dedicated to supplying these valuable products directly to your doorstep. Our primary office is situated in the Salt Lake Valley, where the surroundings is unbelievable and the organisation environment is primed for massive development. Lots of major corporations from around the world are expanding or opening offices in Utah, taking benefit of the distinct environment and the remarkable quality of a young and dynamic workforce. As strong as the Granite Mountains that surround PM Capital, our Client Care combined with our dedication to customized service makes PM Capital your top relied on source for obtaining rare-earth elements. The quality of our items is our leading goal and we achieve that mission with a staff devoted to serving you. Integrating our service with the industry's finest wholesale network guarantees that every brand-new coin, round or bar meets or goes beyond present quality standards developed by the NGC and PCGS. Building your precious metals portfolio can be a difficulty and that's why PM Capital is committed to streamlining the task every step of the way.are determined in EUR. The StarCapital-Score is originated from essential valuation as well as relative-strength indicators and gauges the relative good looks of a nation (blue=attractively valued, red=pricey). In the above table, empty cells stand for adverse or inaccessible worths. We exclusively analyze companies for which data is provided by at the very least two independent companies. Outliers are assessed qualitatively and eliminated where essential. The nation option is based on the Datastream Global Equity Universe (66 nations). Just the 40 crucial as well as most liquid nations are revealed in the table, only for them StarCapital Scores are calculated. The released information does not constitute investment guidance or suggestions. No obligation is considered the correctness of this information. Resource: StarCapital, Thomson Reuters Datastream (Worldscope/ IBES), company details et al. Note: As of April 2015, we have actually extended the underyling equity cosmos by 2,400 business to achieve a broader market coverage. The prolonged equity universe additionally consists of 800 companies from 27 brand-new arising markets disappointed in the table above: Argentina, Bahrain, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Egypt, Estonia, Jordan, Kuwait, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Marocco, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Peru, Qatar, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sri Lanka, United Arab Emirates and also Venezuela.

PE10 is also dubbed the Shiller PE, in honour of the US scholastic Robert Shiller, that maded popular PE10 when he used it to predict the stock market collision of 2000 on the basis of a raised P/E ratio versus ten-year incomes.

Shiller Pe By Sector

To close, the investment landscape is changing, and if you are interested in signing up with a distinct area of contrarian, worth investors, and also would love to see every one of the historic professions as well as current positioning of the "Bet The Farm" and the "Best Ideas" Portfolios, please take into consideration enrolling in my costs research solution, "The Contrarian." This solution has actually been well examined by its participants, and also I believe we are as soon as again at a distinct inflection factor the monetary markets, for the 3rd time in the previous twenty years.

Shiller Pe Ratio For The S & p 500

Added disclosure: Every capitalist's circumstance is different. Settings can transform at any moment without caution. Please do your own due diligence and also consult with your financial consultant, if you have one, prior to making any financial investment decisions. The author is not acting in an investment adviser ability. The writer's opinions shared here address just choose aspects of potential financial investment in protections of the business stated as well as could not be an alternative to thorough investment evaluation. The writer recommends that possibility as well as existing capitalists perform comprehensive investment study of their own, consisting of in-depth review of the business' SEC filings. Any type of point of views or estimates comprise the author's finest judgment since the day of magazine, and also go through alter without notice.

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