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innuendostudios · 3 years ago

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I was invited to give a talk on GamerGate over Zoom in early 2021. I've long been frustrated that there isn't a good timeline of GG and its origins on YouTube. When people ask "what the hell was GG anyway?" they often get referred to my or Dan Olson's videos on the subject, but both of them were made while GG was ongoing, and presumed a degree of familiarity on the part of the audience. There was just too much to say about what was already happening to spend time getting the audience up to speed, and it was safe to assume our audiences had enough context to follow along. But time moves fast on the internet, and many people who now care about such things weren't there while it was happening, and are lacking the necessary context to follow the better videos. For a long time, I've only been able to direct them to RationalWiki's timeline, which is excellent but so exhaustively comprehensive that it's likely to scare off first-timers.

I realize an hourlong lecture isn't necessarily helping matters, but the first 20-or-so minutes of this video are my attempt at streamlining the timeline such that people can be up to speed on the most important stuff fairly quickly. The rest is talking about what it all meant, how it prefigured the Alt-Right, and using it to better understand digital radicalization.

This video was made with the help of Magdalen Rose, who edited the slides to the audio while I was laid up with a back injury. Go sub to her channel! And please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

FUCKING VIDEO GAMES? FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THEY MADE DOZENS OF PEOPLE MISERABLE FOR YEARS OVER VIDEO GAMES! NOT EVEN FUCKING VIDEO GAMES, FUCKING ARTICLES ABOUT FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THIS IS WHAT PASSES FOR LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT??

Hi! My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, please like share and subscribe.

I’m here to talk to you about GamerGate, and I needed to get all that out of the way. I’m going to talk about what GamerGate was and how it prefigured The Alt-Right, and there are gonna be moments where you’re nodding along with me, going, “yeah, yeah I get it,” and then the sun’s gonna break through a crack in the wall and you’ll suddenly remember that all this is happening because some folks - mostly ladies - said some stuff - provably true stuff, I might add - about video games and a bunch of guys didn’t like it, and you’re gonna want to rip your hair out. By the end of this, you will have a better understanding of what happened, but it will never not be bullshit.

Also, oh my god, content warning. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, threats of violence, domestic abuse - I’m not going to depict or describe at length any of the worst stuff, but it’s all in the mix. So if at any point you need to switch me off or mute me, you have my blessing.

Brace yourselves.

Some quick prehistory:

In 2012, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter campaign for a YouTube series on sexist tropes in video games. And, partway through the campaign, 4chan found it and said “let’s ruin her life.” And a lot of the male general gaming public joined in. And by “ruin her life” I’m not talking 150 angry tweets including dozens of rape and death threats per week, though that was a thing. I’m talking bomb threats. I’m talking canceled speaking engagements because someone threatened to shoot up a school. I’m talking FBI investigation. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

And in 2013, Zoe Quinn released Depression Quest, a free text game about living with depression. They received harassment off and on for the next year, most pointedly from an incel forum called Wizardchan that doxxed their phone number and made harassing phone calls telling them to kill themself. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

(Also, quick note: Zoe Quinn is nonbinary and has come out since the events in question. When I call Zoe’s harassment misogynist, understand I am not calling Zoe a woman, but they were attacked by people who hate women because that’s how they were perceived. Had they been out at the time things probably would’ve gone down similarly, but on top of misogyny I’d be talking about nonbinary erasure and transphobia.)

Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.

Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.

We’re not going to litigate whether Zoe Quinn was a good partner. I don’t know or care. I don’t think anyone on this call is trying to date them so I’m not sure that’s our business. What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.

Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest. Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.

The stated aim of many on #BurgersAndFries was to convince Quinn to commit suicide.

Two regulars in the IRC, YouTubers MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, make videos about The Zoe Post. Incidentally, both these men had already made a lot of money off videos about Anita Sarkeesian. Matt’s is swiftly taken down with a DMCA claim, and he says that Quinn filed the claim themself. (For the record, in those days, YouTube didn’t tell you who filed DMCA claims against you.) Members of the IRC also reach out to YouTuber TotalBiscuit, who had been critical of Sarkeesian and dismissive of her harassment, and he tweets the story to his 350,000 followers, saying a game developer trading sex for a good review might not prove true, but was certainly plausible.

This is where GamerGate begins to get public traction.

Zoe Quinn is very swiftly doxxed, with their phone number, home address, nudes, and names and numbers of their family collected. Gjoni himself leaks their birth name. The Zoe Post, and the movement against Quinn - now dubbed “The Quinnspiracy” - make it to The Escapist and Reddit, which mods will have little luck removing. The Quinnspiracy declares war on any site that does take their threads down, most vehemently NeoGAF. People who defend Zoe against the harassment start getting doxxed themselves - Fez developer Phil Fish is doxxed so thoroughly, hackers get access to the root folder of his website.

In what I’m going to call This Should Have Been The End, Part 1, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku where Nathan Grayson worked, in response to pressure not just from The Quinnspiracy but an increasing number of angry gamers buying The Quinnspiracy’s narrative, publishes a story. In it he verifies that Quinn and Grayson did date for several months, and that not only is there no review of Depression Quest anywhere on Kotaku, not by Grayson nor anyone else, but that Grayson did not write a single word about Quinn the entire time they were dating.

In response, The Quinnspiracy declares war on Kotaku. r/KotakuinAction is formed, which will become the primary site of organization outside of chanboards. The fact that their entire “movement” is based on a review that does not exist changes next to nothing.

Some people start to see The Quinnspiracy as potentially profitable. The Fine Young Capitalists get involved, a group ostensibly working to get women into video games but who have a Byzantine plan to do so wherein they crowdfund the budget and the woman who wins a competition gets to storyboard a game, but another company will make and she will get 8% of the profits, the rest going to a charity chosen by the top donor. 4chan becomes the top donor. They like TFYC because the head of the company has a vendetta against Zoe Quinn, who had previously called them out for their transphobic submission policy, and he falsely accused Quinn of having once doxxed him. 4chan feels backing an ostensibly feminist effort will be good PR, but can’t resist selecting a colon cancer charity because, they say, feminism is cancer and they want to be the cure to butthurt. They also get to design a character for the game, and so they create Vivian James, who will become the GamerGate mascot.

Manosphere YouTubers Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini launch a Patreon campaign for their antifeminist documentary The Sarkeesian Effect and come to The Quinnspiracy looking for $15,000 a month for an indefinite period to make it, which they get.

In what will prove genuinely awful timing, Anita Sarkeesian releases the second episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and, despite not being a games journalist and having nothing to do with Quinn or Grayson, she is immediately roped into the narrative about how feminists are ruining games culture and becomes the second major target of harassment. Both she and Quinn soon have to leave their houses after having receiving dozens and dozens of death threats that include their home addresses.

After being courted by members of the IRC channel, Firefly star Adam Baldwin tweets a link to one of the Quinnspiracy videos and coins the hashtag #GamerGate. This is swiftly adopted by all involved.

In response to all this, Leigh Alexander writes a piece for Gamasutra arguing that the identity that these men are flocking to the “ethics in games journalism” narrative to defend no longer matters as a marketing demographic. Gaming and games culture is so large and so varied, and the “core gamer” audience of 18-34 white bros growing smaller and septic, that there was no reason, neither morally nor financially, to treat them as the primary audience anymore. Love of gaming is eternal, but, she declared, “gamers,” as an identity, “are over.” Eight more articles contextualizing GamerGate alongside misogyny and the gatekeeping of games culture come out across several websites in the following days. GamerGate frames these as a clear sign of [deep sigh] collusion to oppress gamers, proving that ethics in games journalism is, indeed, broken, and Leigh Alexander becomes the third major target of harassment. These become known as the “gamers are dead” articles - a phrase not one of them uses - and they make “get Leigh Alexander fired from Gamasutra” one of their primary goals.

Something I need you to understand is that it has, at this point, been two weeks.

Highlights from the next little bit: Alex Macris, a higher up at The Escapist’s parent company, expresses support for GamerGate; he will go on to write the first positive coverage at a major publication and cement The Escapist as GamerGate-friendly. Mike Cernovich, aka “Based Lawyer,” gets GamerGate’s attention by mocking Anita Sarkeesian; he will go on to hire a private investigator to stalk Zoe Quinn. GamerGate launches Operation Disrespectful Nod, an email campaign pressuring companies to pull advertising from websites that have criticized them. They leverage their POC members, getting them, any time someone points out the rampant racism and antisemitism among GamerGaters, to say “I am a person of color and I am #NotYourShield”; most of these “POC members” are fake accounts left over from a previous, racist disinformation campaign. Milo Yiannapoulos gets involved, writing positive coverage of GG despite having mocked gamers for precisely this behavior in the past, and gets so much traffic it pulls Breitbart News out of obscurity and makes it a significant player in modern conservative news media.

[Hey! Ian from the future here. This talk mostly addresses how GamerGate prefigured the Alt-Right strategically and philosophically, but if you want a more explicit, material connection: Breitbart News took its newfound notoriety to become, as its Executive Chair phrased it in 2016, "a platform for the Alt-Right." That Executive Chair was Steve Bannon, who threw the website's weight behind The Future President Who Shall Not Be Named, and, upon getting his attention, would then go on to become his campaign strategist and work in his Administration. So, if you're wondering how one of the central figures of the Alt-Right ended up in the White House, the answer is literally "GamerGate." Back to you, Ian from the past!]

In what I’m calling This Should Have Been The End, Part 2, Zoe Quinn announces that they have been lurking the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel since the beginning and releases dozens of screenshots showing harassment being planned and the selection of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover. #BurgersAndFries has a meltdown, everyone turns on each other, and the channel is abandoned. And they then start another IRC and things proceed.

It goes on like this. I’m not gonna cover everything. This is just the first month. It should be clear by now that this thing is kind of unkillable. And I worry I haven’t made it obvious that this is not just a chanboard and an IRC. Thousands of regular, every day gamers were buying the story and joining in. They were angry, and no amount of evidence that their anger was unfounded was going to change that. You could not mention or even allude to GamerGate and not get flooded with dozens, even hundreds of furious replies. These replies always included the hashtag so everyone monitoring it could join in, so all attempts at real conversation devolved into a hundred forking threads where some people expected you to talk to them while others hurled insults and slurs. And always the possibility that, if any one of them didn’t like what you said, you’d be the next target.

To combat this, some progressives offered up the hashtag #GameEthics to the people getting swept up in GamerGate, saying, “look, we get that you’re angry, and if you want to talk about ethics in games journalism, we can totally do that, but using your hashtag is literally putting us in danger; they calling the police on people saying there’s a hostage situation at their home addresses so they get sent armed SWAT teams, and if you’ll just use this other hashtag we can have the conversation you say you want to have in safety.” And I will ever stop being salty about what happened.

They refused. They wouldn’t cede any ground to what they saw as their opposition. It was so important to have the conversation on their terms that not only did they refuse to use #GameEthics, they spammed it with furry porn so no one could use it.

A few major events on the timeline before we move on: Christina Hoff Sommers, the Republican Party’s resident “feminist,” comes out criticizing Anita Sarkeesian and becomes a major GG figurehead, earning the title Based Mom. Zoe Quinn gets a restraining order against Eron Gjoni, which he repeatedly violates, to no consequence; GG will later crowdfund his legal fees. There’s this listserv called GameJournoPros where game journalists would talk about their jobs, and many are discussing their concerns over GamerGate, so Milo Yiannopoulos leaks it and this is framed as further “proof of collusion.” 4chan finally starts enforcing its “no dox” rules and shuts GamerGate threads down, so they migrate to 8chan, a site famous for hosting like a lot of child porn. Indie game developer Brianna Wu makes a passing joke about GamerGate on Twitter and they decide, seemingly on a whim, to make her one of the biggest targets in the entire movement; she soon has to leave her home as well. GamerGate gets endorsements from WikiLeaks, Infowars, white nationalist sites Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, and professional rapist RooshV. And hundreds of people get doxxed; an 8chan subforum called Baphomet is created primarily to host dox of GamerGate’s critics.

But by November, GamerGate popularity was cresting, as more and more mainstream media covered it negatively. Their last, big spike in popularity came when Anita Sarkeesian went on The Colbert Report and Stephen made fun of the movement. Their numbers never recovered after that.

Which is not to say GamerGate ended. It slowed down. The period of confusion where the mainstream world couldn’t tell whether it was a legitimate movement or not passed. But, again, most harassers faced no meaningful repercussions. Gamers who bought the lie about “ethics in games journalism” stayed mad that no one had ever taken them seriously, and harassers continued to grief their targets for years. The full timeline of GamerGate is an constant cycle of lies, harassment, operations, grift, and doxxing. Dead-enders are to this day still using the hashtag. And remember how Anita had nothing to do with ethics in games journalism or Zoe Quinn, and they just roped her in because they’d enjoyed harassing her before so why not? Every one of GamerGate’s targets knows that they may get dragged into some future harassment campaign just because. It’s already happened to several of them. They’re marked.

(sigh) Let’s take a breath.

Now that we know what GamerGate was, let’s talk about why it worked.

In the thick of GamerGate, I started compiling a list of tactics I saw them using. I wanted to make a video essay that was one part discussion of antifeminist backlash, and one part list of techniques these people use so we can better recognize and anticipate their behavior. That first part became six parts and the second part went on a back burner. It would eventually become my series, The Alt-Right Playbook. GamerGate is illustrative because most of what would become The Alt-Right Playbook was in use.

Two foundational principles of The Alt-Right Playbook are Control the Conversation and Never Play Defense. Make sure people are talking about what you want them to talk about, and take an aggressive posture so you look dominant even when you’re not making sense. For instance: once Zoe leaked the IRC chatlogs, a reasonable person could tell the average gater, “the originators of GamerGate were planning harassment from the very beginning.” But the gater would say, “you’re cherry-picking; not everyone was a harasser.”

Now, this is a bad argument - that’s not how you use “cherry-picking” - and it’s being framed as an accusation - you’re not just wrong, you’re dishonest - which makes you wanna defend yourself. But, if you do - if you tell them why that argument is crap - you’ve let the conversation move from “did the IRC plan harassment?” - a question of fact - to “are the harassers representative of the movement?” - a question of ethics. Like, yes, they are, but only within a certain moral framework. An ethics question has no provable answer, especially if people are willing to make a lot of terrible arguments. It is their goal to move any question with a definitive answer to a question of philosophy, to turn an argument they can’t win into an argument nobody can win.

The trick is to treat the question you asked like it’s already been answered and bait you into addressing the next question. By arguing about whether you’re cherry-picking, you’re accepting the premise that whether you’re cherry-picking is even relevant. Any time this happens, it’s good to pause and ask, “what did we just skip over?” Because that will tell you a lot.

What you skipped over is their admission that, yes, the IRC did plan harassment, but that’s only on them if most of the movement was in on it. Which is a load of crap - the rest of the IRC saw it happening, let it happen, it’s not like anybody warned Zoe, and shit, I’m having the cherry-picking argument! They got me! You see how tempting it is? But presumably the reason you brought the harassment up is because you want them to do something about it. At the very least, leave the movement, but ideally try and stop it. They don’t, strictly speaking, need to feel personally responsible to do that. And you might be thinking, well, maybe if I can get them take responsibility then they’ll do something, but you’d be falling for a different technique I call I Hate Mondays.

This is where people will acknowledge a terrible thing is happening, maybe even agree it’s bad, but they don’t believe anything can be done about it. They also don’t believe you believe anything can be done about it. Mondays suck, but they come around every week. This is never stated outright, but it’s why you’re arguing past each other. To them, the only reason to talk about the bad thing is to assign blame. Whose turn is it to get shit on for the unsolvable problem? Their argument about cherry-picking amounts to “1-2-3 not it.” And they are furious with you for trying to make them responsible for harassment they didn’t participate in.

The unspoken argument is that harassment is part of being on the internet. Every public figure deals with it. This ignores any concept of scale - why does one person get harassed more than another? - but you can’t argue with someone who views it as a binary: harassment either happens or it doesn’t, and, if it does, it’s a fact of life, and, if it happens to everyone, it’s not gendered. And this is not a strongly-held belief they’ve come to after years of soul-searching - this is what they’ve just decided they believe. They want to participate in GamerGate despite knowing its purpose, and this is what would need to be true for that to be ok.

Or maybe they’re just fucking with you! Maybe you can’t tell. Maybe they can’t tell, either. I call this one The Card Says Moops, where people say whatever they feel will score points in an argument and are so irony-poisoned they have no idea whether they actually believe it. A very useful trick if the thing you appear to believe is unconscionable. You can’t take what people like that say at face value; you can only intuit their beliefs from their actions. They say they believe this one minute and that another, but their behavior is always in accordance with that, not this.

In the negative space, their belief is, “The harassment of these women is okay. My anger about video games is more important. I may not be harassing them myself, but they do kind of deserve it.” They will never say this out loud in a serious conversation, though many will say it in an anonymous or irreverent space where they can later deny they meant it. But, whatever they say they believe, this is the worldview they are operating under.

Obscuring this means flipping through a lot of contradictory arguments. The harassment is being faked, or it’s not being faked but it’s being exaggerated, or it’s not being exaggerated but the target is provoking it to get attention, which means GamerGate harassers simultaneously don’t exist, exist in small numbers, and exist in such large numbers someone can build a career out of relying on them! It can be kind of fun to take all these arguments made in isolation and try to string together an actual position. Like, GamerGate would argue that Nathan Grayson having previously mentioned Zoe Quinn in an article about a canceled reality show counts as positive coverage, and since Grayson reached out to Quinn for comment it’s reasonable to assume they started dating before the article was published (which is earlier than they claim), and positive coverage did lead to greater popularity for Depression Quest. But if you untangle that, it’s like… okay, you’re saying Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist in exchange for four nonconsecutive sentences that said no more than “Zoe Quinn exists and made a game,” and the price of those four sentences was to date the journalist for months, all to get rich off a game that didn’t cost any money. That’s your movement?

And some, if cornered, would say, “yes, we believe women are just that shitty, that one would fuck a guy for months if it made them the tiniest bit more famous.” But they won’t lead with that. Because they know it won’t convince the normies, even the ones who want to be convinced. So they use a process I call The Ship of Theseus to, piece by piece, turn that sentence into “slept with a journalist in exchange for a good review” and argue that each part of the sentence is technically accurate. It’s trying to lie without lying. And, provided all the pieces of this sentence are discussed separately, and only in the context of how they justify this sentence, you can trick yourself into believing this sentence is mostly true.

So, like, why? This is clearly motivated reasoning; what’s the motivation? What was this going to accomplish?

The answer is nothing. Nothing, by design. GamerGate’s “official” channels - the subreddit and the handful of forums that didn’t shut them down - were rigidly opposed to any action more organized than an email campaign. They had a tiny handful of tangible demands - they wanted gaming websites to post public ethics policies and had a list of people they wanted fired - but their larger aim was the sea change in how games journalism operated, which nothing they were asking for could possibly give them. The kind of anger that convinces you this is a true statement is not going to be addressed by a few paragraphs about ethics and Leigh Alexander getting a new job. They wanted gaming sites to stop catering to women and “SJWs” - who were a sizable and growing source of traffic - and to get out of the pockets of companies that advertised on their websites - which was their primary source of income. So all Kotaku had to do to make them happy was solve capitalism!

Meanwhile, the unofficial channels, like 8chan and Baphomet, were planning op after op to get private information, spread lies with fake accounts, get disinformation trending, make people quit jobs, cancel gigs, and flee their homes. Concrete goals with clear results. All you had to do to feel productive was go rogue. In my video,

How to Radicalize a Normie, I describe how the Alt-Right encourages lone wolf behavior by whipping people up into a rage and then refusing to give them anything to do, while surrounding them with examples of people taking matters into their own hands. The same mechanism is in play here: the public-facing channels don’t condone harassment but also refuse to fight it, the private channels commit it under cover of anonymity, and there is a free flow of traffic between them for when the official channels’ impotence becomes unbearable.

What I hope I’m illustrating is how these techniques play off of each other, how they create a closed ecosystem that rational thought cannot enter. There’s a phrase we use on the internet that got thrown around a lot at the time:

you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.

Now, there are a few other big topics I think are relevant here, so I want to go through them one by one.

MEMEIFICATION

So a lot of interactions with GamerGate would involve a very insular knowledge base.

Like, you’d say something benign but progressive on Twitter.

A gater would show up in your mentions and say something aggressive and false.

You’d correct them. But then they’d come back and hit you with -

ah shit, sorry, this is a Loss meme.

If I were in front of a classroom I’d ask, show of hands, how many of you got that? I had to ask Twitter recently, does Gen Z know about Loss?!

If you don’t know what Loss is I’m not sure I can explain it to you. It’s this old, bad webcomic that was parodied so, so, so many times

that it was reduced to its barest essentials, to the point where any four panels with shapes in this arrangement is a Loss meme. For those of you in the know, you will recognize this anywhere, but have you ever tried to explain to someone who wasn’t in the know why this is really fuckin’ funny?

So, now… by the same process that this is a comics joke,

this is a rape joke.

I’m not gonna show the original image, but, once upon a time, someone made an animated GIF of the character Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z graphically raping Vegeta. 4chan loved it so much that it got posted daily, became known as the “daily dose,” until mods started deleting every incident of it. So they uploaded slightly edited version of it. Then they started uploading other images that had been edited with Piccolo’s color scheme. It got so abstracted that eventually any collection of purple and green pixels would be recognized as Piccolo Dick.

Apropos of nothing, GamerGate is a movement that insists it is not sexist in nature and it does not condone threats of rape against the women they don’t like. And this is their logo. This is their mascot.

If you’re familiar with the Daily Dose, the idea that GamerGate would never support Eron Gjoni if they believed he was a sexual abuser is so blatantly insincere it’s insulting… but imagine trying to explain to someone who’s not on 4chan how this sweater is a rape joke. Imagine having to explain it to a journalist. Imagine having to explain it to the judge enforcing your abuser’s restraining order.

Reactionaries use meme culture not just because they’re terminally online but also because it makes their behavior seem either benign or just confusing to outsiders. They find it hilarious that they can be really explicit and still fly under the radar. The Alt-Right did this with Pepe the Frog, the OK sign, even the milk glass emoji for a hot minute. The more inexplicable the meme, the better. You get the point where Stephen Miller is flashing Nazi signs from the White House and the Presidential re-eletion campaign is releasing 88 ads of exactly 14 words and there’s still a debate about whether the administration is racist. Because journalists aren’t going to get their heads around that. You tell them “1488 is a Nazi number,” it’s gonna seem a lot more plausible that you’re making shit up.

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

Online movements like GamerGate move at a speed and mutation rate too high for the mainstream world to keep up. And not just that they don’t understand the memes - they don’t understand the infrastructure.

In an attempt to cover GamerGate evenhandedly, George Wiedman of Super Bunnyhop interviewed a lawyer who specializes in journalistic ethics. He meant well; I really wish he hadn’t. You can see him trying to fit something like GamerGate into terms this silver-haired man who works in copyright law can understand. At one point he asks if it’s okay to fund the creative project of a potential journalistic source, to which the guy understandably says “no.”

What he’s alluding to here is the harassment of Jenn Frank. A few weeks into GamerGate, Jenn Frank writes a piece in The Guardian about sexism in tech that mentions Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn. In another case of “here’s a strongly-held belief I just decided I have,” GamerGate says this is a breach of journalistic ethics because Frank backs Quinn on Patreon. They harass her so intensely she not only has to quit her job at The Guardian, for several months she quits journalism entirely.

Off the bat, calling a public figure central to a major event in the field a “journalistic source” is flatly wrong-headed. Quinn was not interviewed or even contacted for the article, they were in no way a “source”; they were a subject. But I want to talk about this phrase, “fund a creative project.” Patreon is functionally a subscription; it’s a way of buying things. It’s technically accurate that Frank is funding Quinn’s creative project, but only in the sense that you are funding Bob Dylan’s creative project if you listen to his music. And saying Frank therefore can’t write about Quinn is like saying a music journalist can’t cover a Bob Dylan concert if they’ve ever bought his albums.

And we could talk about the ways that Patreon, as compared with other funding models, can create a greater sense of intimacy, and we also could comment that, well, that’s how an increasing number of people consume media now, so that perspective should be present in journalism. But maybe it means we should cover that perspective differently? I don’t know. It’s an interesting subject. But none of that’s going on in this conversation because this guy doesn’t know what Patreon is. It was only a year old at this point. Patreon’s been a primary source of my income for 5 years and my parents still don’t know what it is. (I think they think I’m a freelancer?) This guy hears “funding a creative project” and he’s thinking an investor, someone who makes a profit off the source’s success.

The language of straight society hasn’t caught up with what’s happening, and that works in GamerGate’s favor.

In the years since GamerGate we have dozens of stories of people trying to explain Twitter harassment to a legal system that’s never heard of Twitter. People trying to explain death threats to cops whose only relationship to the internet is checking email, confusedly asking, “Why don’t you just not go online?” Like, yeah, release your text game about depression at GameStop for the PS3 and get it reviewed in the Boston Globe, problem solved.

You see this in the slowness of mainstream journalists to condemn the harassment - hell, even games journalists at first. Because what if it is a legitimate movement? What if the harassers are just a fringe element? What if there was misconduct? The people in a position to stop GamerGate don’t have to be convinced of their legitimacy, they just have to hesitate. They just have to be unsure. Remember how much happened in just the first two weeks, how it took only a month to become unkillable.

It’s the same hesitance that makes mainstream media, online platforms, and law enforcement underestimate The Alt-Right. They’re terrified of condemning a group as white nationalist terrorists because they’re confused, and what if they’re wrong? Or, in most cases, not even afraid they’re wrong, but afraid of the PR disaster if too much of the world thinks they’re wrong.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONTROL

A thing I’ve talked about in The Alt-Right Playbook is how these decentralized, ostensibly leaderless movements insulate themselves from responsibility. Harassment is never the movement’s fault because they never told anyone to harass and you can’t prove the harassers are legitimate members of the movement. The Alt-Right does this too - one of their catchphrases is “I disavow.” Since there are no formalized rules for membership, they can redraw boundaries on the fly; they can take credit for any successes and deny responsibility for any wrongdoing. Public membership is granted or revoked based on a person’s moment-to-moment utility.

It’s almost like… they’re cherry-picking.

The flipside of this is a lack of control. Since they never officially tell anyone to do anything but write emails, they have no means of stopping anyone from behaving counterproductively. The harassment of Jenn Frank was the first time GamerGate’s originators thought, “maybe we should ease off just to avoid bad publicity,” and they found they couldn’t. GamerGate had gotten too big, and too many people were clearly there for precisely this reason.

They also couldn’t control the infighting. When your goal is to harass women and you have all these contradictory justifications for why, you end up with a lot of competing beliefs. And, you know what? Angry white men who like harassing people don’t form healthy relationships! Several prominent members of GamerGate - including Internet Aristocrat - got driven out by factionalism; they were doxxed by their own people! Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini parted ways hating each other, with Aurini releasing chatlogs of him gaslighting Owen about accepting an endorsement from Roosh, and they released two competing edits of The Sarkeesian Effect.

I say this because it’s useful to know that these are alliances of convenience. If you know where the sore spots are, you can apply pressure to them.

LEADERS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP

One way movements like GamerGate deflect responsibility is by declaring, “We are a leaderless movement! We have no means to stop harassment.”

Which… any anarchist will tell you collective action is entirely possible without leaders. But they’ll also tell you, absent a system of distributing power equitably, you’re gonna have leaders, just not ones you elected.

A few months into GamerGate, Randi Lee Harper created the ggautoblocker. Here’s what it did: it took five prominent GamerGate figures - Adam Baldwin, Mike Cernovich, Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nick Monroe, formerly known as [sigh] PressFartToContinue - and generated a block list of everyone who followed at least two of them on Twitter. Now, this became something of an arms race; once GamerGate found out about it they made secondary accounts that followed different people, and more and more prominent figures appeared and had to get added to the list. But, when it first launched, the list generated from just these five people comprised an estimated 90-95% of GamerGate.

Hate to break it to you, guys, but if 90+ percent of your movement is following at least two of the same five people, those are your leaders. The attention economy has produced them. Power pools when left on its own.

This is another case where you have to ignore what people claim and look at what they do. The Alt-Right loves to say “we disavow Richard Spencer” and “Andrew Anglin doesn’t speak for us.”

But no matter what they say, pay attention to whom they’re taking cues from.

AD CAMPAIGN

George Lakoff has observed that one way the Left fails in opposition to the Right is that most liberal politicians and campaigners have degrees in things like law and political science, where conservative campaigners more often have degrees in advertising and communications. Liberals and leftists may have a better product to sell, but conservatives know how to sell products.

GamerGate less resembles a boots-on-the-ground political movement than an ad campaign. First they decide what their messaging strategy is going to be. Then the media arm starts publicizing it. They seek out celebrity endorsements. They get their own hashtag and mascot. They donate to charity and literally call it “public relations.” You can even see the move from The Quinnspiracy to GamerGate as a rebranding effort - when one name got too closely associated with harassment, they started insisting GamerGate was an entirely separate movement from The Quinnspiracy. I learned that trick from Stringer Bell’s economics class.

Now, we could stand to learn a thing or two from this. But I also wouldn’t want us to adopt this strategy whole hog; you should view moves like these as red flags. If you’re hesitating to condemn a movement because what if it’s legitimate, take a look at whether they’re selling ideology like it’s Pepsi.

PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING

One reason to insist you’re a consumer revolt rather than a harassment campaign is most people who want to harass need someone to give them permission, and need someone to tell them it’s normal.

Bob Altemeyer has this survey he uses to study authoritarianism. He divides respondents into people with low, average, and high authoritarian sentiments, and then tells them what the survey has measured and asks, “what score do you think is best to have: low, average, or high?”

People with low authoritarian sentiments say it’s best to be low. People with average authoritarian sentiments also say it’s best to be low. But people with high authoritarian sentiments? They say it’s best to be average. Altemeyer finds, across all his research, that reactionaries want to aggress, but only if it is socially acceptable. They want to know they are the in-group and be told who the out-group is. They don’t particularly care who the out-group is, Altemeyer finds they’ll aggress against any group an authority figure points to, even, if they don’t notice it, a group that contains them. They just have to believe the in-group is the norm.

This is why they have to believe games journalism is corrupt because of a handful of feminist media critics with outsized influence. Legitimate failures of journalism cannot be systemic problems rooted in how digital media is funded and consumed; there cannot be a legitimate market for social justice-y media. It has to be manipulation by the few. Because, if these things are common, then, even if you don’t like them, they’re normal. They’re part of the in-group. Reactionary politics is rebellion against things they dislike getting normalized, because they know, if they are normalized, they will have to accept them. Because the thing they care about most is being normal.

This is why the echo chamber, this is why Fox News, this is why the Far Right insists they are the “silent majority.” This is why they artificially inflate their numbers. This is why they insist facts are “biased.” They have to maintain the image that what are, in material terms, fringe beliefs are, in fact, held by the majority. This is why getting mocked by Stephen Colbert was such a blow to GamerGate. It makes it harder to believe the world at large agrees with them.

This is why, if you’re trying to change the world for the better, it’s pointless to ask their permission. Because, if you change the world around them, they will adapt even faster than you will.

THE ARGUMENT ISN��T SUPPOSED TO END

Casey Explosion has this really great Twitter thread comparing the Alt-Right to Scary Terry from Rick and Morty. His catchphrase is “you can run but you can’t hide, bitch.” And Rick and Morty finally escape him by hiding. And Morty’s all, “but he said we can’t hide,” and Rick is like, “why are we taking his word on this? if we could hide, he certainly wouldn’t tell us.”

The reason to argue with a GamerGater is on the implied agreement that, if you can convince them they’re part of a hate mob, they will leave. But look at the incentives here: they want to be in GamerGate, and you want them not to be. But they’re already in GamerGate. They’re not waiting on the outcome of this argument to participate. They’ve already got what they want; they don’t need to convince you GamerGate isn’t a hate mob.

This is why all their logic and rationalizations are shit, because they don’t need to be good. They’re not trying to win an argument. They’re trying to keep the argument going.

This has been a precept of conservative political strategy for decades. “You haven’t convinced us climate change is real and man-made, you need to do more studies.” They’re not pausing the use of fossil fuels until the results come in. “You haven’t convinced us there are no WMDs in Iraq, you need to collect more evidence.” They’re not suspending the war until you get back to them. “You haven’t convinced us that Reaganomic tax policy causes recessions, let’s just do it for another forty years and see what happens.” And when the proof comes in, they send us out for more, and we keep going.

The biggest indicator you can’t win a debate with a reactionary is they keep telling you you can. The biggest indicator protest and deplatforming works is they keep telling you in plays into their hands. The biggest indicator that you shouldn’t compromise with Republicans is they keep saying doing otherwise is stooping to their level. They’re not going to walk into the room and say, “Hi, my one weakness is reasoned argument, let’s pick a time and place to hash this out.”

And we fall for it because we’re trying to be decent people. Because we want to believe the truth always wins. We want to bargain in good faith, and they are weaponizing our good faith against us. Always dangling the carrot that the reason they’re like this is no one’s given them the right argument not to be. It’s all just a misunderstanding, and, really, it’s on us for not trying hard enough.

But they have no motivation to agree with us. Most of the people asking for debates have staked their careers on disagreeing with us. Conceding any point to the Left could cost them their livelihood.

WHY GAMES?

Let’s close with the big question: why games? And, honestly, the short answer is:

why not games?

Games culture has always presented itself as a hobby for young, white, middle class boys. It’s always been bigger and more diverse than that, but that’s how it was marketed, and that’s who most felt they belonged. As gaming grows bigger, there is suddenly room for those marginal voices that have always been there to make themselves heard. And, as gaming becomes more mainstream, it’s having its first brushes with serious critical analysis.

This makes the people who have long felt gaming was theirs and theirs alone anxious and a little angry. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in it and they don’t want it to change.

And what the Far Right sees in a sizable collection of aggrieved young men is an untapped market. This is why sites like Stormfront and Breitbart flocked to them. These are not liberals they have to convert, these people are, up til now, not politically engaged. The Right can be their first entry to politics.

The world was changing. Nerd properties were exploding into popular culture in tandem with media representation diversifying. And we were living with the first Black President. Any time an out-group looks like it might join the in-group, there is a self-protective backlash from the existing in-group. This had been brewing for a while, and, honestly, if it hadn’t boiled over in games, it would have boiled over somewhere else.

And, in the years since GamerGate, it has. The Far Right has tapped the comics, Star Wars, and sci-fi fandoms; they tried to get in with the furry community but failed spectacularly. They’re all over YouTube and, frankly, the atheist community was already in their pocket. Basically, if you’re in community with a bunch of young white guys who think they own the place, you might wanna have some talks with them sooner than later.

Anyway, if you want to know more about any of this stuff, RationalWiki’s timeline on GamerGate is pretty thorough. You can also watch my or Dan Olson’s videos on the subject. I’ll be putting the audio of this talk on YouTube and will put as many resources as I can in the show notes. The channel, again, is Innuendo Studios.

Sorry this was such a bummer.

Thank you for your time.

#video essay #alt-right playbook #Youtube

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shiredded · 3 years ago

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Random wildfire evacuation tips from california

Fire far away, or it's just fire season

Pack your Emergency kit Important documents, water, etc. Google what you should put in yours. There's a lot of resources.

Plan where to go It's gonna SUCK if you're scrambling to figure out who can take you in when there's only a few hours to pack. A friend is ideal but hotels will work too. If they're decent places they will only have a minimal fee for fire victims. Make sure your destination is pet friendly if you have those. Some hotels will make exceptions, call them.

Microchip your pets You should do this anyway but you could lose your pet while 50 miles away from home and this will help it find you again. They'll be scared and confused in a new neighborhood.

Find a reliable source of information Check to see if your county website or fire/police department has a place for updates. You want accurate information from the source, not from a neighbor or a stranger.

Eat all the icecream Depending on the evacuation, You will want to empty your fridge and freezer, so the weeks leading up to this are perfect for clearing out those tater tots

Keep your gas tanks full You never know when you'll have to drive several miles to find an open gas station.

Fire preparedness on your property Another thing to look up in more detail, they will give you measurements on clearing brush/branches etc. Sometimes this is the difference between a kind of smoky house and literal ashes.

Safety gear This will get scarce the closer a fire comes. You need N95 masks/respirators. Your covid masks will not filter smoke. Only take as much as you need to evacuate, because other agencies (like livestock evacuators) need them more.

Evacuation Warning

This means you MIGHT get evacuation orders, but not yet Make sure you know what the terms mean for your local district. This period can last hours or weeks, depending on the fire.

ONLY trust official information sources If a stranger runs up to your house and tells you that it's a mandatory evacuation and they're here to help, don't trust them. Watch them every second if you let them help and don't turn your back. They may rob you as soon as you hand them your valuable keepsakes.

Double check your destination Call your friend/hotel/etc to make sure they still have room for you.

Start packing Grab your dirty laundry basket: its all clothes you like/have worn recently and you can wash it later. You really only need a few hours to pack and evacuation warnings can last weeks, so it's more identifying what you should pack and starting on the more time consuming bits now.

Only pack what can't be replaced heirlooms, hobby items, artwork, photographs, etc. You can buy a new TV I promise. If you have fire insurance they will help pay for that.

Find your pets and livestock Bring your pets into the house and know where their supplies/carriers are. There may be organizations in your area that specialize in evacuating your livestock, so look those up.

Lock up for looters A horrific problem, but that's the reality. You won't be around to watch your property so looters will go around trying doors so they can steal from people in crisis. This is the main reason that law enforcement will/should be in the area. Plan to take expensive equipment inside, like table saws, motor/bikes, generators etc, and lock them up. Whatever is outside is easy pickings. If you leave any vehicles, lock them, even in the woods where everyone is kind and safe. The looters are not your neighbors, they will drive in from out of town to rob and vandalize evacuated places.

Check on your neighbors Especially elderly neighbors who may not be tuned in to what's happening or not taking it seriously. Fundamentalist religious people tend to be difficult. Make a note if you think someone is going to sit on their porch with a rifle instead of leaving.

Request help Get help if you need it from neighbors or community resources. If you don't have a car, don't worry. Someone somewhere has one and they truly do want to help you. Get everyone's names and contact information so you can keep track of each other. Social media is generally where this stuff tends to happen, so dust that off and see what you can do.

Mandatory Evacuation

All that planning pays off You will likely have a few hours to pack, but depending on the fire you can have just minutes or seconds before they pull you from your house. Evacuation orders usually have a "get out by" time on them.

Children and pets Find these and get them ready to go first. Do not let them wander off because you don't want to be scrambling for them later. Cats in carriers, dogs in a room or pen. Other animals in appropriate travel gear. Keep them indoors until everyone is ready for the car, because smoke can hurt/kill them (birds are especially sensitive)

Most important stuff first This is your emergency kit. Medication is extremely important. Harddrives, photos, documents, computers, etc, all goes in first. Next is clothes and toiletries. They'll make your evacuation less chaotic. Then valuables like jewelry, cameras, stuff that would be hard to replace. At this point your car should be pretty full.

Empty the fridge If you are evacuated for weeks and the power goes out, you do not want to know what happens in there. Throw it all in a garbage bag and put it outside. It's better to discard food now than discard your whole fridge later (they cannot be saved, trust me)

Check on your neighbors again If someone refuses to leave, let law enforcement know so they can handle it. They will either convince the person or make a note of their location for firefighters to worry about if the fire gets too close.

Lock every door and window you can Bring valuable outside stuff indoors and lock it down. This will deter looters looking for an easy target. Lock your cars, sheds, barns, etc.

Do not go back Law enforcement will be controlling the road during an evacuation. They might let you go back for forgotten things, or they might stop you completely. If you left a pet, they will notify the pet rescue teams (generally trained and certified volunteers) Basically assume you can't go back until the order is over.

Evacuated

Uncertainty Hunker down and prepare for a fight. Being evacuated can last between a day and several months (if your town got half burned, etc) Know ahead of time that you won't know much.

Official sources of information may be wrong The fire map sometimes reads smoke and might tell you your house is toast when it's not. Eyewitness reports are more trustworthy at this point. But know that you might not know anything for certain for a long, long time.

Seek out resources There will be food, supplies, and housing opened up for evacuees, depending on your community. Look up your area and take advantage of what applies to you.

Looters will follow you People will stalk fire victims and break into their cars and take everything they own. This can happen a hundred miles away from the fire, so keep your car in your sights if you can. Hotel parking lots are especially dangerous, so ask if security can patrol that area extra vigilantly. Sadly, robbers will also drive through tiny rural neighborhoods looking for an unusual amount of cars and will rob those. Take your MOST valuable things into the house/hotel room etc to keep them safe.

Your mental health Everything is going to suffer during an evacuation, so make sure you're doing selfcare to keep yourself ready for new challenges. Take time to cry and scream and kick rocks. Connect with other fire victims and you can emotionally support each other.

Going home Most evacuations are precautions, and everything will be fine when you get back. It's going to be a pain to unpack all that stuff again, but it would have been worth it if you lost your home.

Do it all again next year The climate crisis is bringing drought, plant-drying heat, and dry lightning storms to places we all thought were safe. Fires are hard to control, but your evacuation isn't. You'll be alright, and eventually rain will come. It gets easier every year and it really helps you identify what you value in life.

Help others If you're in no dangers, search up where to volunteer to help fire victims. Maybe you'll train as an evacuation response team and go into fire zones to rescue animals! Maybe you'll help out at a soup kitchen. Maybe you'll open your home to strangers who need a place to stay. Be the human kindness you'll need for yourself one day.

TLDR: The more you plan, the better. Round up kids and pets first. Lock all your doors because looters will rob you, or follow your car and rob that. Connect with your community to give and receive help.

#fire #wildfire #evacuation #fire evacuation #evacuation tips #fire season #shire screams

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peachyteabuck · 4 years ago

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clear the clouds (bucky barnes x reader)

summary: after weeks of bucky feels down, natasha knows exactly who to call to make him feel better

pairing: bucky barnes x reader

words: 2,030

trigger warnings: sickening fluff, also - please don’t take kitten rearing advice from fanfiction

notes: this is a birthday present for the effervescent @m00nlightdelights, who asked for bucky barnes interacting with kittens. happy birthday babe!

ask box / masterlist / commission info / ko-fi

Natasha was the one who called you – asking something many dream for but very few get to experience. It’s hard to transport that many tiny, wriggling animals across town and very few are willing to pay the exorbitant, arbitrary amount of money you had made some intern put on the website after the twentieth call asking about the particular service.

People, apparently, really want to rent a bunch of kittens for several different types of events – finals weeks at universities and rich high schools, bat and bar mitzvahs, once even a wedding. Why those event coordinators can’t rent service animals is beyond you, and why they always expect you to do these things for free is also a mystery.

No matter why those people wanted your kittens, you closed the service except for incredibly rare cases.

One of those incredibly rare cases, per the usual path of your life, involved Natasha Romanoff.

You owed her a favor from a few years back, when she made sure an ex-boyfriend of yours…well, for legal purposes you can’t talk about it, but Natasha made sure he never bothered you or your friends ever again.

Natasha’s got enough tact not to bring the year-long ordeal up – just said she wanted to “cash in” on your side of the bargain. You sighed into the office landline when she told you she was calling for her favor, the exhale so deep it was still audible despite the barking and scratching and the menagerie of other noises.

It takes you a second to collect yourself, to shove the memories back into that little box your therapist had you build and then tuck into the back of your brain.

Despite not being able to see her face, you can tell she’s frowning and has furrowed her brow. “You good?”

You nodded, then remembered how phones work. “Yeah,” you let out a small sigh. “Yeah, I’m fine. You want the kittens at Avengers Towers this weekend for a few hours to help that friend of yours-“

“Bucky,” Natasha interrupts you. “His name is Bucky. And you should go out with him.”

Despite still knowing how phone works, you roll your eyes. “Didn’t you just say he spent the last week bedridden because of depression. It doesn’t exactly sound like he’s in the right state of mind for a relationship.”

Your friend scoffs into the phone, shutting what you think is a thick book for dramatic audial effect. “And you spend fifteen hours a day at your shelter because it gives you an excuse not to see people. I don’t need you to marry him, I’m saying maybe a coffee date would be good for you.”

There’s a pause where you search for a sarcastic response, but Natasha beats you to it.

“Actually, no,” she says, voice dripping with a lovable dryness you can’t help but admire. “It will be good for both of you.”

Another pause while you recalculate your sarcastic response cortex. After a deeply silent thirty seconds, you give up.

“Fine,” you acquiesce. “But you and Wanda are helping me and you’re buying me lunch for that day and you’re helping me during adoption day at the museum next month.”

Somehow, you can hear Natasha’s wide and triumphant smile. “You got it, kid.”

And with that, you hang up before falling back in your office chair. You swear, that woman could convince you to do anything.

Fucking spies, you think before putting the event in the shelter’s e-calendar.

The day arrives both too quickly and not quickly enough – your brain caught between something akin to “existential dread” and “oh my God my friend is trying to set me up with her friend and what if it doesn’t work but what if it does” the entire week before the planned event. During the night before you down quadruple your normal dose of melatonin to fall asleep after spending three entire hours trying on all your clothes to plan the right outfit (in the end, you chose an unusually nice pair of leggings and a plan sweater along with boots cute enough to fool a man into thinking they’re fancy while still protecting your feet from the end-stage winter air outside.

(Also, the leggings and sweater are the easiest things to lint roll kitten fur off of you for, say, a date at an upscale coffee shop you normally wouldn’t even think of going to, but that’s nobody’s business and you totally one hundred percent did not think about that when trying the outfit on.)

You meet Natasha and Wanda at the shelter the next morning, you getting there before them to gather the necessary supplies from the back. Despite them promising to help you load your car with kittens and kitten-adjacent items, you still didn’t want either of them messing with the precious organization system you’d spent years perfecting (and years training interns and vet techs how to abide by it).

Luckily, with your precautions and time management – and despite Wanda’s need to kiss every kitten (yes, every kitten) as they were loaded into crates – you arrive at the infamous Stark Tower right on time.

Set up of the whole thing doesn’t take long, Natasha successfully leading the way through the maze of which is the expansive building. You pass a few people you recognize from Natasha’s stories and the news, and a few others who you don’t but still smile as they pass (whether they were just being nice or smiling at the kittens in the crates you were holding, you refused to decide).

It takes a few elevator rides, but eventually you get to the desires floor and room – Wanda knocking on the door after setting her Ikea bag of playpen supplies on the carpeted floor.

A response is nearly immediate. “Go away!” a gruff voice calls, muffled by the thick walls.

Natasha and Wanda both roll their eyes. “Shut up and open the door!” the former replies.

There’s no verbal response, but you do hear shuffling before the door opens to reveal a figure more brick house than man. His hair is messy, sweatshirt a size too large and solid black but with jeans that fit perfectly. His boots – much thicker and blacker than yours – are dirty.

“What do you want?” he grumbles.

Natasha remains unphased by the man’s demeanor. “We have kittens. Now move out of my way so we can set all this shit up and you can pet some cute animals.”

Bucky gives her a look and rolls his eyes, but steps asides and holds the door open for the three of you nonetheless.

Twenty minutes later, Bucky found in the middle of the four-foot wide pen, bewildered. He’s done a lot of things in his life, many of which would be impossible for (nearly) anyone else to accomplish. He speaks thirty languages (plus Morse code and ten variations of sign language), he’s hunted bears with his bare hands, he’s survived Russian winters and summers in the Amazon rainforest.

Yet, somehow, the thing that stunts him beyond reproach is a small play pen filled with about forty tiny, six-week old kittens that are all their own form of chaotic. Bucky doesn’t know where to look, let alone how to grab the ones that catch his eye. He’s terrified of crushing them like bug caught under a hardcover book, of breaking their tiny ribs or tiny legs or tiny necks.

He watched you intensely when you and Natasha and Wanda pulled them out of their crates, watching how you held them and which one allowed you to give them kisses and which one chased after the strands in Natasha’s ponytail. He noticed which ones curled up in small spheres in the corners of the pen, which ones immediately bopped about, which ones immediately sought out the bottle of formula you’d prepared and which ones nibbled at the liquidy wet food that had been scooped into a neon blue bowl.

Each tiny animal was different, and it amazed him.

There was this one cat, a fluffy little white one with one ear and splotches of buttery yellow seems the boldest, eyeing Bucky as if the man was this small cat’s Everest. The floral collar (one of those break-away ones, you had told him, meant to keep the kittens from getting hurt but allowing the rescuers to identify them by name and rescue identification number) has a small nameplate – a gold one – with “Squirt” etched into the metal.

“Squirt,” Bucky repeats under his breath. “Nice to meet you, little guy.”

The cat gives him a small, pterodactyl-like scream in response, as if the small animal is too young to speak in any other tone but “loud.”

“HELLO LARGE CAT,” he imagines the cat saying. “HELLO, I AM A SMALLER CAT. DO YOU WISH TO BE CLIMBED?”

Bucky smiles at the imagined conversation, allowing the brave creature to dig its tiny claws into the leg of his jeans just above his socked feet (he took off his boots when he arrived in the room, as per your request), the start to his magnificent journey.

“I do not mind being climbed,” the man answers out loud. For once, he doesn’t take in the entire room’s emotions and reactions before he says something – he just talks, even if that freedom from paranoia is only allowing him to speak to someone (or thing) that can’t talk back.

Squirt gets to Bucky’s knee before screeching once more, just as tenacious as when he was on the floor. “THIS IS MUCH HARDER THAN I EXPECTED,” is all Squirt says.

Bucky laughs, ignoring the several other kittens who are trying to claw up Bucky’s metal arm – each unsuccessful but determined to continue to try. “I’m a lot bigger than you realized, huh?”

Squirt takes a few more wobbly steps, tail high in the air, before looking to Bucky for guidance as the tiny creature stands on his thigh. “I WOULD LIKE SOME HELP, PLEASE,” Bucky interprets from the screeches.

He laughs, not moving. Another kitten, this time an equally tiny short-haired black cat named “Foosball” attempts to follow in Squirt’s literal and metaphorical footsteps, but gives up when she gets to Bucky’s knees. This, too, makes him let out a chuckle. “Don’t worry, kid. You’re doing just fine.”

You watch Bucky’s interactions with the kittens intensely – telling yourself you just need to make sure he doesn’t hurt them accidentally. In truth, he was handling them the best you’d seen anyone outside your shelter in a long time – gentle, firm, attentive. His pseudo-conversations warm your heart, and the only thing that breaks your concentration is one of the larger kittens walking up to the barrier of the pen to scream at you from inside her prison that she was hungry. Natasha and Wanda had long left, citing some bureaucratic problem that was probably bullshit but, regardless of accuracy, left you and Bucky alone.

“What does she want?” the man asks, body still frozen as Squirt climbs his chest.

“Butterfly wants to eat,” you reply while you grab one of the syringes with formula.

“Why can’t she eat from the bowl of food?” he asks. It’s not accusatory, just curious. It’s sweet, extremely so, and makes you realize that Natasha was right – this is good for him.

“At six weeks, most kittens are weened from their mothers or,” you pick Butterfly up and hold her against you as she suckles at the plastic nozzle. “In this case, syringes. But sometimes it just takes a little longer.”

Bucky hmms, turning his attention back to the kittens before he speaks again. “Do you want to get coffee?”

You swallow, looking at him look at Squirt. “Like…with you?”

Bucky nods as he sits up, the brave kitten now on his shoulder and several others vying for his attention. “I, uh,” he swallows. “Yeah. Coffee. With me. Like a, uh, a date. With me. Where we get coffee.”

You giggle a little, both at his flustered speech and at Butterfly’s post-feeding tiredness. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

“Cool,” is all Bucky replies, the both of you now focused back on the kittens.

Dammit, you think. Natasha was right again.

#bucky barnes x reader #winter soldier x reader #bucky barnes fluff #maya tag #lukis writes stuff

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pandjseetheworld · 3 years ago

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The Lost Coast

A year ago Pearce booked a “surprise” backpacking trip for me. When we decided we were taking this long honeymoon I convinced him to tell me what the surprise trip was so we could figure out if the surprise backpacking trip was still possible. Surprise!! It’s a 4 day backpacking trek along the California Coast! I was stoked!! And thought this would be the perfect trip to get us moving along with our travels and start us off on the right foot.

Preparation

After reading up on the trail it seemed we had some preparation to take on before heading out. We had to take into account; food and water, ticks/rattlesnakes & Loki, shuttle/transportation, tides, whatever sneaker waves were, and then there is the hike itself!

Food and Water

This was pretty easy because we already had a bunch of freeze dried meals, snacks, and bagged oatmeal from previous camp trips so we just threw in what we had in a bag and called it a day. My mom and I also went to REI to buy a few extra meals and snacks so we had some for our car ride as well (just in case, easy road meals!). For water, there are a bunch of creeks along the trail so all we needed were our nalgenes and a water purifier and we were set. Well, we also needed the jet oil and food but we had already had all that from previous camp trips so food/water was simple to prepare.

Loki/ Ticks & Rattlesnakes

To make sure Loki was ready we had to buy booties because the terrain is rough on his feet. Now, I may be a crazy dog mom BUT I wouldn’t buy him shoes unless it was completely necessary. For the majority of the 24 miles, we were walking on black coarse sand. The sand is so rough that it is known to irritates in between the dog paw pads and make it hard for them to walk. There are also certain areas of the trek where you are walking on big sharp rocks that could tear a dogs feet up. So, we bought Loki booties and my gossssh they are the cutest things ever!! It took some training but he is pretty good with them and doen’t whimper when I put them on him. He definitely needed to training to get used to them so don’t go buying them and think WHOOOO I’m ready! No, it takes time! (And now that I write this post hiking, the booties gave poor Loki blisters and chaffed his dew claw. A week before hiking Loki had to get surgery to get his left dew claw removed from fracturing it somehow, I think it was from the booties but regardless Loki was a week post operation when we did this hike. He is a freaking trooper but the booties are not something I would recommend unless completely necessary or if your pup doesn’t have front dew claws).

Next, my littler sister and her husband got Loki a hiking backpack (THANK YOU) so he could feel like a true hiker. He was able to carry 2 days worth of food and some little odds and ends. Again, I had to train him up for this; first I got him comfortable with the pack and slowly added more and more weight. It took some hikes but he eventually started to like his backpack and while hiking he was super cute and knew when we got him in his pack it was time to walk. We made sure to take his pack off immediately when we got to a rest spot or our actual destination.

TICKS, yuck!!! After reading a bunch of articles, websites, and blogs on this hike everyone mentioned that the ticks were really bad. Gross! So we went above and beyond for protection. Loki got on strong ticks meds, topical tick medication, tick spray, and I even got him organic tick shampoo. Yes, it was probably overboard but it paid off. We took off like 10-20 ticks and they were all dead, so that made me feel pretty good. For us, we sprayed our shoes, hiking pants, packs, and tents with Sawyer Premium Insect Repellent. We had to spray our gear down, let it dry for 2 hour, flip the gear, and spray the other sides and wait. It was a process but Pearce and I didn’t have any ticks!! What a freaking relief!

On to my next enemy, the rattlesnake! Woof! We spoke with Pearce’s co-worker who had done the trail before and he said there were a ton of rattlesnakes!! After living in Cali for 5 years and being a hiker, I always ask more knowledgeable people what to do if a snake bites you and you ALWAYS get a different answer; turniquet, suck out the venom, get comfy while someone goes for help, elevate, use Benadryl, ice or don’t ice?! I’m still not entirely sure what we would have done if one of us got bit by a rattlesnake but thankfully the weather was on our side and we didn’t have to worry about it. It was 60 and foggy most days (Minute a few sunny hours in the afternoon) so we didn’t have to worry about snakes. If it were sunny and 70 I could imagine this have being a much bigger issue. But since it wasn’t, I’ll move on.

Shuttle/Transportation

To start the Lost Coast Hike you need to be shuttled two hours North to Matthole where you begin the hike. If you don’t book a shuttle, you can swap keys with a fellow hiker but with everything we own in the car, I wasn’t going to chance that.

There are only 3 shuttles available

1. Bills Lost Coast Shuttle (707-442-1983) This is an elderly man who runs his own company and is super friendly - he didn’t have room for us and he doesn’t take dogs

2. Lost Coast Adventures (707 -986- 9895) This is a larger company but they charge the most and they charge a fee for dogs

3. Mendo Insider Tours (707-813- 0886) A smaller company that doesn’t charge for pets and is cheaper than Lost Coast Ad.

Tides & Sneaker Waves

We had to print out a tide chart because there were certain parts of the trail that are impassible at hightide. Pearce timed out when we could/couldn’t hike and it was super easy! Not a problemmmm!

Apparently there are these sneaky waves called “sneaker waves” that you have to be careful of. These waves will randomly pop up out of no where and creep 20 feet further than all the other waves. This can be an issue if you’re walking on the wet sand (better grip than the dry sand) and then BAM a wave that wipes you out! I kept a good eye on the waves the whole trip so no sneaker waves snuck up on us!!

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thechembow · 4 years ago

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Major Changes in Our Lives, Humans Need to be Together Now!

Aug 10, 2020

OR clouds this afternoon

I am back from my July hiatus, which happens organically each year. July is a lull in weather warfare here in Southern California because we’re still far from the rainy season. In addition to the usual lull, the parasites are so debilitated by orgone energy right now, they can’t even fly through. There have been almost no planes this summer, and when there are, they are silent and have no trail or a failing trail. This year we were moving to a new home base so my energy was occupied with the transition, which was beyond the third dimension so it was the hardest move of our lives. More on that later. Now I can once again opine and also present facts, evidence and proof. We all know on some level that world as we know it is ending. Even the most indoctrinated matrix slaves know things aren’t right, even if that’s only because they have strong delusions and believe a lie. We don’t need to talk about that big lie anymore. It’s obvious and too stupid to dignify. It is also a cover for a computer virus affecting the AI and putting them out of commission, a computer virus caused by increasing orgone energy on Earth and reclaiming the mind, one human at a time.

The AI is losing its grip on humanity’s consciousness, so it is taking drastic measures to keep its hold on this world. They have thrown persistent gradualism out the window and are clamping down harshly on all of humanity, restricting people’s movement, making humans cover their faces to be around other humans as well as keeping an unnatural distance, and forcing humans to give up their enterprises and life-long work and ambition, making hard-working people poor and dependent on them. Humans can’t conduct any business they are still even allowed to conduct without wearing a mask. This is a satanic ritual, to hide one’s face from God, leading up to the Mark of the Beast (which has already been done in the mind, but the physical mark comes next).

When you can’t see the facial expression of another human, verbal communication loses a subtle but important element. Think about how you may react to a text message taken out of context because you can’t hear vocal inflection. You may get angry at something innocuous because a necessary element of communication was missing. Now think about how hard it is to make a simple question come across to a hardware store employee with a mask on. You may end up in plumbing when you wanted a mixing container for your resin (paint department, along with your mixing sticks). A major element of communication regarding emotion and the etheric is also taken away by covering the face.

The parasitic obsession with our distancing from each other physically follows the same energetic model as “distance is your friend,” does in regard to energies dangerous to us. Lloyd Burrell of Electricsense.com, a website to help people with EMF sensitivity, explained how distance is your friend with EMF and how the most important thing is to avoid it. Keeping it out of the house altogether is best. He doesn’t advocate “gadget” fixes for EMF because he thinks it should be removed from our lives completely (so do I). He doesn’t endorse orgonite for this reason, but I do because if you do the hard work of ridding yourself of EMF and others are using it, the orgonite is a great way to make your home even quieter energetically, aid in sleep and good health, and increase consciousness. Even with distance from your neighbor’s wifi, it’s still great to neutralize it. There is a lot of benefit to be gained by increasing OR. It’s not just about decreasing DOR, which is of course the most important first step. You can’t use orgonite as a band-aid, but in conjunction with eliminating deadly energy, it really changes the whole dynamic of your house and even your neighborhood. If you take this concept and invert it, you can see why the parasites may want to keep us away from each other to avoid energy deadly to them! We are strong OR generators, especially when we’re together.

For the parasites, distance from life-giving orgone energy is their friend. Orgone energy is death to them because they are inverted. They purposely have created a world of deadly energy out of a planet that is a natural OR generator. The OR is still there functioning in the minerals of the Earth, mountain peaks, oceans, and forests. It is also in us. When we are together, our energy increases and we help each other just by being together. Humans are naturally communal, and distancing takes away a vital part of our nature. When we feel depressed and scared because we’ve been isolated in our houses, listening to terrifying news about more freedoms lost (or for the believers in the lie, a horrible disease which could kill them), our OR becomes contracted. This makes us more susceptible to disease and depression because our bodies and minds are weak. This is the state that the parasites need humans in so they can feed. They suck off of the negative emotions as sustenance. They keep us away from each other by mind control, programming delusions into the mind, so that we feel even more depressed and isolated. We need each other’s support now more than ever and we have been convinced that we are not to be together.

When humans are together, it not only satisfies a social need, but it also conducts orgone energy and connects people more strongly through the psychic web which connects us all. The parasites have us connected through an electromagnetic web, but this is not our true nature. This is simply a way for them to control us, mind and body, and to keep tabs on all of our business. In reality, we can already communicate over distances without the aid of a telephone or computer. This etheric ability is suppressed through frequency control and mind control, but now they have also added the distance between us. Distance between us is also their friend. Together, our energetic fields comingle and we can sometimes even communicate without words, even if just through a facial expression. Body language also speaks volumes. Together, we feel safer and connected, so that we know we have support during this very frightening time. Separated and masked, we are afraid to even engage another human, lest they recoil in fear of our germs. We always assume everyone believes the lie because they are masked. But we are all masked so we can buy food. What a state to live in.

Our new home is far from the madness of “civilization.” We have gotten more off the grid and are trading labor for housing. We are still making orgonite and teaching, I am working on writing and plan to release another book, and we are taking care of animals and learning how to work the land. We have a place to grow food now and have reduced dependency on the dollar drastically. We feel like God is looking out for us. We have gifted great amounts of orgonite and as I was planning the summer gifting trips, we were suddenly sequestered in our new life, given by God, because who else could come up with this? It is a dream come true to get back to the land and what’s real. We also have felt very unsafe in this increasingly hostile world. Now is a great time for everyone to make and gift orgonite locally where they live, since travel has become unsafe and sometimes even impossible. There are thugs with guns and badges swarming everywhere now to generate income for the state and bring more misery to the humans, thus food for the parasites. It is time to stay near our homes and really look inside ourselves. We can’t continue in the world the way we were.

The sky is ours, so it’s time to work on cleaning up the deeper levels of parasitic infestation on Earth. If you have not yet reclaimed your sky, it’s time to do so. It is easy with orgonite. The hard part will be disconnecting from the parasitic network, which will suppress your sky-cleaning abilities and other etheric gifts. Most people are tied to this artificial network, mind, body and spirit. It is the symbiotic relationship that has to be broken, and this is painful to both parties. In this case, the parasite needs us to feed, and we have come to need them for our basic needs, like utilities and a means to trade, and now also for the energetic tether that we’ve become accustomed to. Humans have forgotten how to think for themselves and the tracker thinks for them. It creates the thoughts the parasite needs, and right now that is fear. Everyone is scared. Orgone energy is the energy of life, love, and creation. It is the energy of God, which needs to be increased to combat the energy of satan, which is death, fear, and destruction. Now that we have reclaimed the sky and weather, it’s time to destroy evil and eradicate the parasites completely. We are well underway, as can be seen by their struggles in the sky. We have to keep increasing OR and we need to say no once and for all. The breaking point will come and there will be no return, whether you are absorbed into the collective AI or you resist. Once you leave the matrix you can’t return.

#orgone #orgone energy #orgonite #emf #mind control #AI #artificial intelligence #interplanetary war #parasites #humanity #etheric war #chemtrails #ufo #sky #clouds #california

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robhorninginternalexile · 5 years ago

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producing the audience

This investigation of Facebook’s algorithms for matching ads to audiences, by Ian Bogost and Alexis Madrigal, is helpful for clearing up some general points about how advertising works generally.

It sounds obvious enough that advertising is about creating demand for products; it doesn’t simply inform people about what products are available so that they can indulge the intrinsic desire for something they already felt. In other words, people don’t come to ads with certain desires and needs; the ads capture their attention and create the needs in them. It seeks to make them into the sort of person who habitually wants certain things. Often this is overlooked from a kind of positivist viewpoint that presumes subjects know their desires and aren’t structured by society.

For this sort of manipulation to work, targets need to believe that they are autonomous and unlikely to be manipulated in that way — this lowers their conscious guard to the technique. So another major ideological thrust of advertising is to convince targets that their ad-induced desires are actually “real” and “natural,” that the needs are inherent in them, expressing their true personalities, their god-given souls. So the main thing being advertised, across all forms of advertising regardless of the specific product, is this heroic consumerist subject who is fully self-aware about what they want and is not subject to being easily influenced by external forces. From within that sort of subjectivity, of course, one is more easily influenced by external forces and less likely to scrutinize or actively participate in those processes that are shaping them.

This is cross-cut with a contradictory message in advertising that involves "social proof”: other people you admire are doing X, so you should too, then you will belong with them, you will be recognized or recognizable socially, you will have a legible place. Ads try to balance the appeals to social proof with the appeals to individualism, which masks the nature of the “society” ads promise to help you belong to. Advertising must blanket its targets’ attentional field because it is trying to make its simulacrum appear as a plausible representation of society, and make the mode of subjectivity ads inculcate seem universal.

Hence Facebook’s efficacy for advertisers. Facebook’s aspiration to re-create the world within its servers achieves much of what advertising must do as a prerequisite. It makes a phony, freely manipulatable, and quantifiable world appear as a reasonable representation of the social world. In Facebook, audiences for ads can be created instantaneously and synthetically, without reference to the desire or intention of those so grouped to actually be lumped together. Facebook makes ersatz demographics based on the demands of particular advertisers, and when the targets are exposed to the ads that result from being stereotyped in that way, they are led to believe that the ersatz demographic is a view of society to which empowered individuals like themselves belong. This works as long as Facebook is understood as a benign and neutral representation of a user’s social world that the user supposedly controls by friending certain people and so on (that is where the “empowered individual” part of the ideology is reinforced).

Bogost and Madrigal draw on a similar theory of advertising to explain why Facebook’s methods are so impactful:

In the old days, advertisers bought guaranteed placements in print publications, on outdoor displays, or in media broadcasts. They would select these placements, in part, based on the audiences those media might reach: a glossy magazine for women interested in fashion, or a billboard that thousands of downtown commuters pass daily. At the dawn of the internet, advertisers did the same thing on websites: If a business wanted to get in front of a particular audience, it could buy space adjacent to the content that brought in that audience. Eventually, it could also buy space atop search results, bidding for placement based on terms typed into Google.

This treats “content” as a proxy for a pre-existing audience, but that verges toward assuming a “subject that already knows what it wants” that ads are trying to “cater” to. But I think it is more accurate to say that the ads and content worked together to produce certain kinds of publics, with certain values, and certain induced desires. The content, in other words, produced demand (produced subjects) just like the ads would, only with slightly less overt appeals. And the content worked together with the ads, each to provide an alibi to the other: the ads seemed more obvious next to the content, the content seemed less coercive next to the ads.

Bogost and Madrigal see Facebook as a departure from this, rather than an apotheosis.

Facebook upended that. A“Facebook ad” is less an ad and more a machine for producing ads. Instead of paying to put particular media in front of a specific audience, an advertiser now pays Facebook to deliver a selected outcome from a certain stripe of people. For example, a clothing manufacturer might pay Facebook for webpage visits from women in their 30s who live in Los Angeles, or for likes by parents with college degrees whose online behavior is similar to that of users who had previously made purchases. How those ads get to which matching users is up to Facebook. Given some starting information, its system learns how to tune the delivery of the ad, in relation to all the other advertisers out there. In short, Facebook chooses which ads will be shown to whom at what price.

This utterly changes what it means to create and deploy advertising.

It’s more a perfection of the previous techniques, thanks to a better environment for capturing targets’ attention and remolding the mediascape around them based on the desired characteristics around which an advertiser would like to produce ideas of “community,” “society,” or “solidarity.”

A Facebook ad produces particular audiences organized around particular exploitable ideas of “together,” and it requires a constant reiterative barrage to sustain the plausibility of those pseudo-communities (aka “brand communities”).

As Bogost and Madrigal stress, what is especially novel about Facebook is the automation of this process of delivering ads to people to sustain these imputed affiliations — to create feedback loops that intensify the connection between the user’s experience of autonomy (I click on what I want) and the contrived demographics they are slotted into for advertising’s purposes and aims: “When those ads successfully push users to take action, those actions generate ever more data, which in turn get funneled right back into Facebook … to help target even more ads.” The key here is that ads within Facebook are directly instrumental, but not with respect to the content of the ad. (The ads aren’t mainly having the direct measurable effect of getting people to buy X or Y.) The ads become more prevalent (favored by Facebook’s algorithmic systems) to the extent that people pay attention to them in quantifiable ways on Facebook. The system is tuned to reinforce the validity of “paying attention to advertising” in general — it’s focused on the part of all ads that are about the “usefulness of advertising,” the part that conditions subjectivity in general and doesn’t promote some specific thing.

Bogost and Madrigal make this point with respect to the machine learning used to target Facebook users, and the opacity of the logic by which it proceeds.

Do the predictions make a good model of a person’s actual inner desires? Do the ads “work?” It doesn’t matter. Facebook’s ad software doesn’t try to get someone to buy a product or vote for a candidate. It merely tries to produce the results that advertisers declare they want, by serving ads to users similar to the ones who furnished those results on earlier, similar ads. Each action a user takes or doesn’t take—clicking, liking, sharing, commenting, donating, hovering, buying, filling out a form—slightly changes the complex network of predictions that form Facebook’s picture of a person, which is to say, a consumer.

Basically, it doesn’t matter why someone is targeted, just that the targeting happens over and over again — that produces the ad-receptive subjectivity, and not the effectiveness or persuasiveness of a particular message.

One implication of this is that an ad’s content doesn’t matter as much as its frequency: the ads aren’t meant to be persuasive, they are meant to be emblematic and recognizable beyond the imputations of content, beyond the need for interpretation or even interpretability. This is why Trump’s Facebook ads are just basically interchangeable pictures of him (”Each ad used one of four versions of ad copy, matched to one of six pictures of Trump, composed and cropped in three different ways to fit different ad slots across Facebook and Instagram,“ Bogost and Madrigal note). They are just about brand recognition and creating a sense that ubiquity itself produces social reality. There is no pretense that he has anything important to say other than his own ubiquity, a quantity that becomes a quality.

Trump is a nullity who desires attention for its own sake, so his "politics” perfectly suit a mechanism meant to valorize attention for its own sake, a self-reinforcing loop that puts attention at the center of subjectivity and human agency. He is governing not for television but as a television.

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alesio3jphln · 4 years ago

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What Exactly Are BigCommerce?

Instagram is opening a whole new revenue stream. Now the 130 million those who tap Instagram’s product tags on shopping posts should be able to buy those items without leaving the app, thanks to payment info that is stored.

"Checkout with Instagram" launches today in the U.S. 20 top brands, including Adidas, Kylie Cosmetics and Warby Parker, that will no longer have to direct customers to their websites to help make a purchase. An Instagram spokesperson confirms to TechCrunch, "We will introduce a selling fee to help fund programs and products which help to make checkout possible, as well as offset transaction-related expenses." Whenever we asked just how much the "selling fee" would charge merchants, the spokesperson told us, "We aren’t sharing the precise number at this time. We have been testing a selling fee with businesses during the beta that is closed. Instagram’s ad business could also get a good start as Checkout could convince brands that the social networking produces better profits on return because there are fewer steps before purchase. For now, only organic posts from the launch partner merchants will feature Checkout buttons, and ads aren’t eligible. But Checkout-equipped ads could be a gold mine for Instagram, just like Facebook’s News Feed ad business looks shaky and CEO Mark Zuckerberg declares commerce as a fixture regarding the 2019 roadmap. Checkout tags can look on feed posts, Stories and Explore content through the brands into the beta that is closed Instagram intends to eventually open to more businesses. When users tap the post to reveal product tags and open one, they’ll see a Checkout with Instagram button instead of the old "View on Website" button. Their first time through they’ll enter their payment information, which is stored for future purchases. "With their protected payment information in one place, they can shop their favorite brands without the need to log in and enter their information multiple times," Instagram explains. Saving merchants from abandoned shopping carts left by users frustrated with being forced to sign up with every brand that is different one of the keys value offered here. TechCrunch recently reported Instagram is prototyping a Fundraiser sticker for Stories that similarly saves payment info - a database Instagram clearly desires to build up. The merchant after users buy something within Instagram, they’ll be able to track it from a new "Orders" section of their profile that shows the status of an order, plus options to cancel, initiate a return or contact. They’ll also get a notification from Instagram once the order ships. Interestingly, Instagram is mixing that is n’t into its messaging product like Facebook does with Messenger. Merchants will only have the details necessary to fulfill an order, including contact info and address, not your actual payment info. Users will discover an opt-in choice to share their email address with the seller for marketing purposes. Checkout with Instagram could leave merchants with a little less data than in the event that purchase happened on their website. But Instagram says it shall provide home elevators which sales it creates for a merchant. Users can pay with PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, American Express or Discover. Instagram plans to allow merchants to integrate their Shopify, BigCommerce, ChannelAdvisor, CommerceHub along with other tools with all the Checkout feature. Meanwhile, Instagram confirms that interacting with Checkout is supposed to be used as a sign for ranking which content you see. Payments are processed by PayPal - an area of business Facebook has been content to not invade, and PayPal’s fees will probably be covered by Instagram’s selling fee. "We started product that is using to produce shopping far more convenient for the customers," writes Warby Parker co-founder and co-CEO Neil Blumenthal. "Checkout takes this experience one step further, rendering it a lot more intuitive and seamless for people who have discovered products they wish to purchase instantaneously." Here’s the list that is full of partner brands: Adidas, Anastasia Beverly Hills, Balmain, Burberry, ColourPop, Dior, Huda Beauty, H&M, KKW Beauty, Kylie Cosmetics, MAC Cosmetics, Michael Kors, NARS, Nike, NYX Cosmetics, Oscar de la Renta, Outdoor Voices, Ouai Hair, Prada, Revolve, Uniqlo, Warby Parker and Zara. There’s still no sign of an Instagram standalone shopping app that was reportedly within the works. Instead, it launched a dedicated Shopping channel in Explore and tags for Stories six months ago. We recently spotted Instagram prototyping a Pinterest-style feature that would let users make publicly visible their private Collections of Saved posts. That might be a way that is great commerce influencers to recommend Checkout-equipped products. Facebook has spent 5 years trying out different Buy buttons, but now it finally has them in a place they feel natural. Instagram has fiercely protected the right to link out of its app to be able to keep you steadily consuming its content. Now with additional than one billion users, Instagram has trapped people’s attention inside, plus it’s finally ready to sell the proper to sell there.

The Honest to Goodness Truth on BigCommerce

Do you enjoy starting your very own eCommerce business? It is a booming industry and hundreds or even thousands of people are jumping regarding the band wagon that is eCommerce. You simply need to have a good eCommerce business model if you are really serious about operating your own online store. In this article my goal is to be speaking about a good way you employ a well established online company to grow your own web store. This might be a really new concept that a lot of men and women don't know about. So get ready to develop your own eCommerce store from the ground up. The key is to use Amazon, the 20th site that is largest on the Internet. I understand what you are thinking how do you use an company that is established order to benefits your own story. Pay attention because I am going to teach you. First, you can find thousands of people that use Amazon everyday. You can basically piggyback them until you get a client that is good going. In order to do that you are planning to follow this very basic eCommerce business design. You are going to subscribe to an Amazon seller account if you don’t already have one. Just be sure you familiarize yourself with Amazon and start posting your merchandise. One trick that I have used over time would be to spy on my competitors and either sell your advantageous to the price that is same cheaper. And that means you are going to start about 4 products a day. A thing that would take you a half an hour or so to accomplish every day. Then over a period of just one you would have 28 items on there week. More if you are feeling up to it. Basically, you will start getting sales. What you're planning to do then is spend 25-30 and get yourself 1000 business cards. Be sure you place your logo, contact information, and most importantly your website address. Also, as an added bonus place your url on both the back and front of the business card. The main point is to out get your name to as many people as possible. Next, you are going to include a thank you letter. You intend to thank your visitors for buying away from you in this letter. During the very bottom with this letter you want to put some text to your web url buy it in red letters saying, "buy from us on our website and mention Amazon and obtain 10% off your whole order." What this does is gives them an incentive to purchase from your website. Over a period of 2 months (28 X 8) you have 228 order sold. Over a period of time your name will there get out and after a time you won't even need certainly to use Amazon anymore. If you're shopping for a great place to start I highly suggest that you read our BigCommerce Review and obtain your eCommerce business started off right.

17 IPOs through the Week of August 3rd, 2020

Nasdaq Welcomes BigCommerce Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: BIGC) to your Nasdaq Stock Market

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6:02 p.m. Aug. 7, 2020

Help and Support

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chavire · 4 years ago

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We answered a few questions about the band during quarantine, for the spanish fanzine Face The Lie. As we were pretty excited about the questions and thought it could have some interest, here it is in its english version.

(photo : Manon Monjaret)

Hi guys! How are you doing? Before starting maybe we should put ourselves in a situation. Who are Chaviré? In which other bands do you play or have you played? What motivates you to tour, make songs?

Hi, thank you for giving us some space to talk about CHAVIRÉ and what we put behind this band. As a presentation, we could say that the band started at the end of 2013 and that we played our first shows at the end of the next year, in 2014. We previously played — or still play — in A.S.T.R.O., COLD HEART DAYS, DÉDALE, GHOST FRIENDS, HOMESICK and WATERTANK to name some of our other bands. We started to play together as some friends, convinced by our love for the same songs and the desire to bind them with some politics we felt connected with. Six years later, it is still those three main reasons that hold us together, writing songs and play them live.

Last summer you released your new album, titled Maintenant Que Les Flammes Sont Partout ("now that flames are everywhere"). What did you wanted to express with this title? And what can you tell us about this album?

We tried to give this record a title that would be the testimony of the era that surrounded its creation. We think it's pretty clear for everyone who looked at the world around us that we couldn't possibly spend three months without seeing the people from a country rising up against their leaders and taking the streets against them. We wanted to dedicate the album to those involved in the increase of those flames all around the world and sing for their constant multiplication.

The lyrics of this album seem to me a bit more convoluted than those of your previous albums, you have to give them more readings to understand them. Did you wanted to change your way of composing the lyrics or was it an involuntary evolution?

As usual, our lyrics are very influenced by the books and authors that go with the writing process. You are right saying that maybe it is a bit different from the previous records. We always said that the lyrics were very influenced by some texts and that we stole a lot to put it in our songs. This time it's still the case but we tried to give some more space to poetry and theater. As time goes by, we were a bit scared to look like those anarchist bands that repeat slogans song after song... We are glad to hear that you noticed this change of things, it is obvious to say that there is politics everywhere but it is better to show it, by using an unexpected extract of a anthropologic book or some lines from a poem. For the first time with this record, we tried to quote most of the references so maybe it will give some ideas and things to dig in.

What is the story or background behind "Alice, 1977"?

Radio Alice is an Italian radio from the end of the 1970s located in Bologna. It's closely linked with the italian autonomous movement from the same era and more precisely the A/Traverso collective. The quotation «Le pouvoir n'est pas seulement là où se prennent des décisions horribles, mais partout où le discours enlève le corps, la rage, le hurlement, le geste de vivre» comes directly from an A/Traverso leaflet. Overall, the song was written in opposition with some of the quirks of the communities that surround us, where it is more valuable to look radical, rather than actively trying to change the world. At some point in the italian movement, there was this turning point where it didn't make sense for some of them to claim their worker identity, their women identity, mostly because all of these categories were those of the power, of this world, and these communities wanted to split up with this world and its categories.

With “Alice, 1977”, the idea was to put this era to the attention of people who perhaps don't know it, allowing them to find some inspiration in it. Most of the questions we're passing through are obviously not new, and it was in our opinion a political sequence where these questions found some interesting treatment.

What does CHAVIRÉ mean?

It could be translated in english as “capsized”, it refers to the moment right after a boat has overturned. We won't lie, this name is at first the result of a joke, more or less.

One of the things that surprised me in a good way when I first knew about you was that you didn't have Facebook, but instead you have a Tumblr page with, in addition to information about the band, a lot of political texts. Do you just don’t care about Facebook and those networks? Why did you chose Tumblr?

We “chose” to make a Tumblr page at first because it seemed to be the easiest thing to put something a bit more “personal” than just a Bandcamp page. Moreover we were so unable to manage a website by ourselves, and none of our close friends seemed able to build one that we could manage easily... In fact, the way we decided to be visible on the Internet has been very determined by our poor capacities and the fact that we decided, since the beginning of the band, that we preferred to make us visible only when we had something to say rather than just be here to be here — it is pointless to try to tackle professional rock bands in this game, doesn't it? And yet, we recently created an instagram account... We also wanted to upset some diehards from the other side!

What do you think of the term emocore? For you, when does a group cross the hardcore barrier to enter emocore? Is it a matter of lyrics, sound, attitude,...?

Well, it's just a subgenre doesn't it? The barrier is just crossed when the one who makes the poster decides to call a band this way. It has been historically a way to gather bands that were playing at the same time from the same area (for the Revolution Summer it basically works like this), but at some point, it is a way to play punk music.

It was said about you that you take music too seriously, belittling those who play only for having a good time without sending a message. Don't you conceive how someone can do it or is it simply not your thing? Do you have friend bands like that?

Well, if music obviously contains a game aspect — who would deny it? —, we would rather play it with smart people. It's not about any kind of content or attitude, it is mostly about having the feeling that we share more with some bands than some chords or shirts. We are still sorry for those who felt judged by us, we couldn't fill the lack of interest they seem to have for themselves, and at some point we still can't understand why they needed our approval so much.

Do you conceive a hardcore scene without politicizing? And a DIY without a political background?

We have to be careful with this sentence that repeats to anyone who would listen that “personal is political”: the recent history proved us that it led us to believe that we just had to buy at organic stores and not to say swear words to become a potential ally for an ongoing revolution, to simplify. But music contains this interesting idea that it can't be undone from its whole production process: its material production obviously (from gear to electricity), but mostly because its production is tied in a network (people who play, who release, who book to make it easy), under technical and aesthetically pleasing considerations (how do we want to sound? do we play well enough? does the interpretation fit to the idea?). At some point, the choices and the answers to those questions imply to get you into some positions that translate political views about the world. Depending on how they fit with others, it can create friendships and even “scenes”. In order to answer your initial question, we could say that obviously we do conceive a scene without politicizing (but it is even more than that, we'd rather say “with views about the world that are radically different from ours”), the question consequently becomes “do we have something to share together then?” and it is immediately easier to answer.

In Maintenant Que Les Flammes Sont Partout you included a song about May 68, something that lately interests me a lot. How influential is this and the situationist movement today?

There is a very tenuous link between the uprising of May 68 in French universities and the Situationist International, as you may already know it. It is hard to fully understand why, but a part of this relation seems a bit forgotten today in the official history, one of the main reason is to be found in the fact that Situationists refused to be represented as leaders, as opposed to some figures at this time. Fortunately, Kristin Ross relates this incomplete story in her fascinating book May '68 and Its Afterlives, talking about how this political sequence has been erased and captured by the freshly reshaped neoliberalism to present it as a liberal and individual revolution. As we already said for the autonomous movement that took place in Italy during the second part of the '70s, these moments are very inspiring and rich in lessons. They refer to insurrectionary times when the power could really be overthrown.

In the case of the Situationist International, it's important to understand that since the late '50s the group theorized and wrote about the reconfigurations of the post-war capitalism, and the advent of the consumer society which really arose at this moment. It was a moment of radical artistic avant-gardes: Antonin Artaud just died ten years before, the surrealist and lettrist movements were still recent experiences for the situationists, the Beat Generation was experiencing overseas and this artistic emulation gave them paths to explore and to renew the forms of art without separating it from the revolutionary horizon.

With these months that have passed since the appearance of the Mouvement des gilets jaunes, what balance do you make of it?

We lived something that could be considered as the most unsettling political event of the decade or even more, with the appearance of this gilets jaunes movement last year. Still today, it is hard to gauge the political and existential impact created by the outbreak of these yellow vests on some roundabouts in the November dawn. We're not overplaying it by saying that they helped to re-draw the lines of the political division, in that they opposed the revolutionary action to the revolutionary posture and bliss, and proved us that revolution was a question of desire instead of a rational one. For a part, they were people that never took part in radical politics as we can understand it, that never attended a demonstration or organized a strike, etc. In some areas they created what could be considered as communes, existing as a community in a world — this unbearable fiction — that had always made them existing as individuals.

It seems that in the whole world people are waking up and taking back the streets seriously. Either in Chile, Venezuela, or in France itself. Have we reached the maximum pressure point for people to explode?

We took so long answering this interview that in the meantime Lebanon went up in flames too, and while most of these countries were facing some major representation crisis with the whole institutional politics, a virus sent us back in our respective homes as separated individuals. We're insisting on the concept of “individual” because it's fundamental to understand that this category is a pretty recent one that has emerged with the modern definition of “society”. It's very clear now that both the “individual” and the “society” have emerged in order to defeat communities that were an ungovernable model for the powers, or at least less easily governable in that they were indivisible entities. We have to consider the return of this hypothesis after two hundred years of capitalism, the need of community (this is basically what communism is all about) comes back to the point, by every means, and the people go out, fight the police, and take the streets.

I read that in your first concerts you distributed sheets with the lyrics and explanations. Do you keep doing it? What was the reason, make clear parts that were open to various interpretations, expand information on the subject or try to make people really listen to what you have to say?

We distributed our lyrics for quite a long time, but to be honest we haven't done it for a while. This move was influenced by some bands before us, mostly from this first french emo wave with band that used to do so. The idea was to put the lyrics right in front of the audience, as something we could claimed but also as a starting point to talk about. One of the reason that led us to stop was also the idea that there are other ways to “talk”: gesture, music and intensity that can become languages when we start to take them seriously and make a good use of it, they can convey things that words sometimes cannot.

Do you read / do fanzines? What importance do you give them in the hardcore / anarchist scene? Lately I have heard more than one person saying that it isn’t coherent to continue to make fanzines on paper and contributing to the environmental impact having such powerful networks which reach as many people as the Internet. What do you think of this?

Some of us used to write fanzines back in the days, and we also have to recognize that after have been serious fanzine-readers we're less curious these days. Because of it, we are tempted to say that there are less issues than a few years ago, which is probably wrong and mostly influenced by the fact that we don't really dig in. We talked above of this idea of “network”, and fanzines do participate from this idea that autonomy should be earned everywhere it is possible. At some point, we could say that there is victory everytime a fanzine can bypass the traditional plan established by the music industry.

About the fact that 200 printed zines could possibly contribute to the environmental impact, well... maybe some people should try to think about how “green” their online datas are, in fact it really is a stupid accusation. Once again it mostly lies on the idea that politics is an affair of separated individuals doing their own parts more or less, which is the one of the lies of the liberalism. We can continue to pee while taking a shower and turning the lights off when leaving a room, it's pointless if we don't take seriously the idea of overthrowing economy and industries.

Related to the previous question, what is your opinion of the Internet? Does it make us better or worse?

Do you really think that four guys who have a hell of a job creating a Tumblr page could have any useful opinion on this internet thing?

A few days ago a friend told me that if one day I go to France I must go to Nantes, because it is the best city in the state. What happens in Nantes to have earned such fame? Is it really that cool? Because one of the things that you talk about on your album Interstices is about the feeling of apathy generated by living in a gentrified and clonic city, isn't it? What good things happen in your city?

With Interstices, we wanted to summarize what creates this unified feeling from one metropolis to another, from almost every gentrified city center. This is the fascinating thing with the metropolis paradox: on this captured-by-control-dispositives territory, there are at the same time desertion acts and zones that try to re-think autonomy and rooms of manoeuvre. What makes Nantes pretty specific at some point is this relation between the city center and its countryside. In fact we can't fully understand what makes this city special without talking of the well-known ZAD of Notre-Dame-Des-Landes right? Everybody knows it for the resistance against the airport that was supposed to be built there (and that will never be) but the thing is that the ZAD was, and still is, a territory fighting for its material autonomy, which tries to bind metropolitan resistances with the experience of building a form-of-life from the community: an attempt to build a commune for real.

Three of us have lived in Nantes for almost ten years now. Is the city really hype these days? It is hard to tell in our cases, we're living there and cannot really take this stance to measure the impact from elsewhere. Let's just say that this is a city with many secret stories, artistic and political ones, and since we're living in Nantes we felt connected to some of them and tried to take part of. I guess this is what holds us here. In concrete terms, we could talk about La Dérive which is a bar and a community canteen we're involved in. It's a place where you can drink, eat, attend a book presentation or a movie or just come to play chess with a friend. There are places like Les Ateliers de Bitche where you can attend nice shows, and La Commune de Dalby Football Club to play football on Sunday afternoon with some friends.

In your Tumblr you include a very interesting text about the pros and cons of the free price. It attracts me a lot, because besides allowing anyone to feel excluded based on their economy, it empowers you in the process and makes you abandon the role of passive consumer, but I share the opinion that if it becomes institutionalized and becomes something systematic it can lose the critical and anti-capitalist background. Have you set or have you considered putting your albums and merch at free price?

When we first read this text about donation in Maximum Cuvette (a french zine from Grenoble), we thought it was smart enough to practically ask the question of the economy inside a microcosm that tends to get rid of it, to examine the institutional process always contained in economy and at the same time how this “name your price” thing could bypass the rigidity always contained in standard economy. You're absolutely right and the text says so, at some point donations can feed the illusion that we got rid of the economy which is obviously a lie, it is just an attempt to manage with its rigidity but under a re-institutionalized form: this is never enough and it is important to be aware that donations are just a way to make the best of the situation.

Since we started CHAVIRÉ, our merch as always been on donation. It was at first the easiest way to manage with selling merch to us. We talk about it together from time to time, we sometimes evoke the idea to sell merch at a flexible-fixed-price, like “a record costs 10€, if you really can't afford it, well, less is fine too”. For now we keep it this way, also because it became a kind of a habit, but to be honest this donation thing is so ritualized around us that it often works as a disguised fixed price, and does not really empowers anyone at the merch table because almost everyone there can afford what you sale. To be honest, we're more and more lax with our whole merch stuff and barely see the point in having five different shirt models and buttons and patches and so on mostly because we're not really into it anymore...

Many times I feel frustrated in some way by trying to explain the operation and ethics of DIY to people who are not involved in it. How would you explain this?

Well, we would point at the fact that the ethics behind the whole DIY thing in punk community is mostly based on the increase of a practical autonomy. This is mostly about what DIY should be all about, the growth of a network that could exist by itself, for itself without depending on any power or institution. This idea of a proper existence is important, because it implies some requirements with ourselves trying to build something that is not just an “alternative”, a counter-model based on a mirror effect from the cultural institutions, because this just reinforces the legitimacy of it, putting us back to the margins. When this is said, we didn't say much, but let's keep in mind that the operation led by DIY is one of the many attempts where autonomy is experienced (we talked about the ZAD and the late '70s Italy already, there are many examples). These autonomous experiences can be sometimes hard to translate with words, most of the time they are understood when they're lived, when they overtake the words to become perceptible, incarnate. In fact, the words can't describe the mixed feelings of joy, mutual requirement, friendship of these autonomous attempts that hold people together, how can it be explained as something else than the promise of a fast-track life?

You have made some very cool ripoffs of Orchid, Embrace, Portraits Of Past, ... for stickers and merch. Do you have any more in mind?

Let's say we have already done way too much of them for just one band. So everyone knows that we have great tastes and that we're not too bad at Photoshop (s/o to our best ripoff that you did not mentioned which was a Chanel one), but it has to stop now!

In addition your flyers, covers, "logos" like the (A) made of flowers are very worked up and for me they have very good taste. Do you take care of this or do you entrust it to friends? Which graphic artists inspire you the most?

For sure this whole artwork thing is something that matters to us, we wouldn't deny it. But it is pretty clear that it has evolved a lot since the moment we started the band from things more “traditional” — not to say expected, such as the combo of typewriter font and linocut drawings which is the perfect example — to more personal artwork: since the last record, the Atelier McClane duo took care of the whole graphic thing to tie the images with the sound and the words. Some of us have an interest in visual arts and we have friends who consider that any revolutionary act will need to find its own form, which implies to think about its graphic one. Let's just mention the work of the Atelier McClane obviously but the Capital Taboulé collective from Rennes too, the Super Terrain collective from Nantes, Bonjour Grisaille and the Atelier Summercity from Brest, Marine Le Thellec from Marseille to talk about our friends and favourite ones. We couldn't end this list without also mentioning Hugues Pzzl who made the artwork of Interstices and our split with BASTOS, and who contributed a lot to renew the visual forms of the punk scene in France — a renewal that was so much needed.

Which situations, books, movies, people, actions, bands have inspired you the most, both to do things with Chaviré and to do things on your personal life?

This is always a touchy question, fortunately we left as much references as possible in the whole interview that could be used as a part of the answer. And obviously we'll be happy to develop if anyone wants to know more, our mailbox is always open!

What are you most keen on to lately? What do you like to do in your free time? What frees you from everyday boredom?

Since we are, as a large part of the world population, currently cloistered home while answering this interview, we have plenty of this free time you're talking about. Here in France, it's been a month of quarantine and we mostly spent it separated from each other but with friends and families. We tried to take advantage of the situation writing new songs, sharing playlists and movie recommendations, keeping in touch together. We don't know when the zine will be out but this moment is very decisive and we have to be really attentive, in order to act as soon as it will be possible. A few weeks ago, an absolutely incredible text entitled “Monologue du virus” has been published in the French media Lundi Matin and has since been translated in various languages (https://lundi.am/What-the-virus-said). Recently we also discovered the Leftove.rs archives (https://leftove.rs) which is an incredible database about autonomy with many leaflets, zines and books from pretty much everywhere around the world.

Future plans?

Improving dad skills.

Doing more muay thai.

Getting degrees.

So far, thank you very much for the patience of answering all this! Anything else to add? See you, hugs!

Thanks again for sending this absolutely fascinating interview, which is hands down one of the most interesting we've ever answered to. Hope we've been precise enough, feel free to write us if it's not the case in these troubled times.

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theliberaltony · 5 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

The first thing I noticed when I walked into Michael Bloomberg’s campaign headquarters in downtown Los Angeles was the wall of terrariums. For one brief second I wondered, staring at the multitude of tiny, meticulously groomed succulents clustered on a bookshelf that ran almost half the length of a cavernous, industrial-chic loft, if I had somehow misstepped and stumbled into an Anthropologie. But there was the former New York mayor — or at least, a cutout of him, propped up across from a huge white wall plastered with campaign signs.

It was still early in the morning, but the Bloomberg bus had already pulled up outside to drop off a group of gun safety advocates who had been touring the state and talking to local leaders. Staffers were setting up for a private roundtable with a local prosecutor and a LA city council member who had recently endorsed Bloomberg, placing a “Bloomberg 2020” screen in front of a giant mural of a pink-skinned woman in sunglasses with rainbow hair, spelling out “LA” with her fingers. Still stunned by the opulence of the space, I asked Lys Mendez, a spokesperson for the Bloomberg campaign, where they had found so many terrariums. “Oh, it came this way,” she said, shrugging. “We had to ramp up in California so quickly — we just took the office space we could find.”

Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

It’s hard to avoid thinking of Bloomberg’s bid as a kind of political science experiment — a test of whether an elderly, extraordinarily wealthy ex-Republican can run a competitive campaign almost entirely on the basis of his own advertising and a big, generously paid staff. That experiment will play out across the country this week, when Bloomberg will finally appear on the ballot after a bizarre campaign in which he entered the race late, skipped the four early states and focused instead on winning the trove of delegates that await on Super Tuesday.

And California is, in many ways, the maximal test of Bloomberg’s strategy. He’s invested a lot in other big Super Tuesday states like Texas, but California is the state where his dollars should carry him the furthest, because its media markets are so expensive and the state’s large, diverse population makes it hard to set up an effective ground game.

His spending spree has certainly gotten him somewhere in California. Bloomberg is now polling around 13 percent in California, according to our average, up from 4 percent in January. But Californians also love to tell you about the self-funded candidates who have tried — and failed — to spend their way into public office. Take Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, Michael Huffington or Al Checchi. After this Tuesday, we’ll know whether Bloomberg will join that inglorious pantheon or whether California’s unexpected contribution to the Democratic nomination process is the elevation of a self-funded billionaire’s candidacy.

Right now, it seems like Bloomberg will finish in third or fourth place even though he has spent tens of millions of dollars in the state. But after seeing Bloomberg’s swanky office, I wanted to find out how ordinary Californians were feeling about his campaign. After spending several days talking to voters across Los Angeles, one thing became clear: Bloomberg’s spending has bought him notoriety, but hasn’t translated into widespread enthusiasm.

It’s hard to find a Californian who’s not aware of Bloomberg’s run, thanks to his advertising blitz in the state over the past few months. Since the beginning of the year, he’s spent more than $36 million on television advertising alone. “I’d describe it as a bombardment,” said Khalid Maznavi, 39, who is supporting Sen. Elizabeth Warren. “He’s there whenever I turn on the radio or watch TV. And it’s been like that for weeks.”

Bloomberg has dominated the airwaves in California

The estimated amount of money each active Democratic presidential candidate spent on broadcast TV ads from Jan. 1 to Feb. 27, 2020, in California-based media markets, and the number of times their ads aired

Candidate Estimated Spending on TV Ads Number of Airings Michael Bloomberg $36,270,860 49,506 Bernie Sanders 5,540,490 10,246

Source: Kantar/Campaign Media Analysis Group

Fueled by Bloomberg’s bottomless fortune, the campaign has also quickly assembled an enormous outreach machine to reach California voters. According to research by FiveThirtyEight contributor and political scientist Joshua Darr, Bloomberg now has the biggest footprint in the state, with 25 field offices scattered across California — just barely topping Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has 23 field offices.1

His rapidly expanding team is well-compensated for its time. As recently as last week, his campaign was “urgently hiring” for organizers who would be paid $18 per hour, well above the state’s minimum wage. Bloomberg has also amassed a wide network of high-profile local supporters and endorsers — like San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Michael Tubbs, the millennial mayor of Stockton — even though Bloomberg is relatively new to California, having only opened his first office in the state two months ago.

But on the ground in Los Angeles, Bloomberg fans were surprisingly hard to find. Some of the glitzy events sponsored by the campaign were relatively sparsely attended, despite the lure of free food and drinks and even a live band. In many cases, the people at the events seemed to have been drawn more by curiosity than passion for Bloomberg’s message. At an event at a restaurant in Chinatown, Ed Choi, 44, told me that he had “kind of lost track” of the presidential primary after his first choice, Andrew Yang, dropped out. He was impressed that Bloomberg had taken the time to hold an event in Chinatown. “It’s the first time I’ve been to one of those, so that counts for something,” he said. But he said he was there with an open mind. “I just need to know more about where he stands on the issues.”

Paul Chen, a CPA who was schmoozing with one of the hosts of the Chinatown event, said that he hadn’t made up his mind yet either, but if he had to choose a candidate on the spot, it would be Biden. He dismissed Sanders with a sentiment that was widespread among attendees, who were largely local businesspeople. “I don’t like the way he’s all about everything being free,” Chen told me. But he added that he wasn’t yet convinced by Bloomberg either. “He’s got the financial backing, but I’m not sure he’ll be accepted by mainstream Democrats. That could be an issue.”

Each time I set off in search of Bloomberg supporters at events across Los Angeles, his press staff warned me to make sure I wasn’t talking to a campaign employee. Only volunteers were permitted to share their opinions with journalists. It was often a struggle to find someone who wasn’t paid to be there and willing to talk about their perspective on the record. Bloomberg’s campaign has recently hired hundreds of paid influencers to get out the word about his campaign on social media and via text message. And although people at candidate rallies or events are normally happy to chat with journalists, a surprising number of people refused to talk to me or let me use their names. One man nearly ran away when I said I was a reporter, saying he would never hear the end of it from his Sanders-supporting friends if word got out that he was considering Bloomberg.

By the time I did stumble upon a diehard Bloomberg fan, waiting outside a Los Angeles soccer stadium for a get-out-the-vote event, it felt like I had sighted a rare bird in the wild. Fabio Sabzevari, 25, told me with great enthusiasm that he had been volunteering in the Northridge office for two weeks. “It’s simple. I believe that he’s the moderate candidate who can win against Trump,” Sabzevari said. “And he’s got the resources to fight Trump’s multibillion-dollar disinformation machine. Who else in this race can do that?”

But Bloomberg’s ability to pour millions into his presidential bid was not a selling point for everyone. “It is mind-boggling to me that someone purporting to be acting under progressive ideals would be wasting millions and millions of dollars basically trying to force people to vote for him,” said Rhiannon Wilson, 22, a Sanders supporter. Wilson told me that her aversion to Bloomberg went well beyond his political stances. She said she was “disgusted” that he was trying to buy the nomination.

That attitude was far from unusual among the Californians I talked to. Tessie Borden, 53, who is supporting Warren, physically recoiled when I brought up Bloomberg. “I would not vote for that man. I think he’s a Republican plant,” she said. I asked her what she would do if he won the nomination. She shook her head a little and said, “I would write in Warren.”

Even if Bloomberg does overperform in California, that sentiment is one he’s likely to face in other states as the primary contest moves forward. Bloomberg is gambling that Democrats will be drawn to him because of his claim that he’s a candidate who can win. His spending spree is part of that appeal for some voters, who look at President Trump and wonder if he can only be defeated by another billionaire. But Bloomberg’s cash-fueled strategy also seems to be earning him genuine animosity in other corners of the Democratic base. And if his candidacy survives past Super Tuesday, it won’t be easy to convince those voters that he can be trusted.

Nathaniel Rakich contributed research.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

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cindylouwho-2 · 5 years ago

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RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES & STUDIES, late-January 2020

Welcome to my latest summary of recent news, resources & studies including search, analytics, content marketing, social media & ecommerce! This covers articles I came across since the mid-January report, although some may be older than that.

Right now I am trying to get at least 2 of these out each month. Is that enough? Too much? Am I missing topics you want to see covered? Please let me know! Comment here, message me through Tumblr, Twitter, or my website.

Also, I am once again working on plans to start an ecommerce business forum, where small business owners can learn and discuss topics like the ones I post about here. If you have any preferences for a suggested platform/forum space,please let me know! I will be running a survey once I narrow down my list.