#If he doesn't engage with any form of media where he doesn't have control

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

Can't believe this got 89k likes. Harry getting accused of being straight again because he put on a trench coat. Its got to be so frustrating for him to keep getting accused of queerbaiting. Or I don't know how he feels about being so misunderstood but it's frustrating to watch.

https://twitter.com/newgamertag/status/1759467672276816254?t=xC2TkifCVjKLL4nlr213AQ&s=19

Obviously I disagree with this from every single angle (starting with the fact that he's there with Rob Stringer - of course he's selling something).

But the fact that a significant number of people are this wrong (and I do think they're wrong, factually, politically and culture) - is a reality that Harry is going to have to navigate. For me the question of what the options are and what he's going to do is one of the most interesting questions of the moment.

One of the reasons that it feels particularly unknown - is that Harry hasn't really presented himself to the public since BRITS last year. He's been seen - but it's been show outfits (which were continuity of the previous show outfits) and street clothes.

And a lot has happened. The idea that there's something wrong with how he dresses and talks about his sexuality has been brewing for a while - and was already at the point where interviewers were really pushing the line when he released Harry's House and it's only grown since then. Then there's the movie/relationship drama that peaked in September of 2023.

We haven't really seen how Harry is going to present himself post all that (the Brits looks were clearly a a continuity of what he had done previously).

I think the most immediate question (and the soonest answered) is is there still space for him to wear really interesting and iconic looks in an album release campaign. And if there's not what impact will it have on his image and his stardom? I really do think that the iconic looks and their implications, are part of his value proposition

[signalburst]

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

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

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

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

Why are we drawn to the samurai?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here we come to authenticity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'This time, Shōgun is authentic!*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[absolutely-esme]

Venting about a trope I hate and a fic that passed me off

I really, really hate it when a character decides to make whoever they're interested in jealous. The rant is under the cut so you can decide whether or not to expose yourself to it.

This plot line is annoying, and I hate it. I'm going to list some things that bother me about it in ascending order.

First off, let's talk about how stupid it is. It seems to me that engaging with other potential suitors and not them is a very clear way way to convince someone that you are not interested in them. If they are a decent respectful person, they will decide not to try and pursue someone who clearly doesn't want that kind of relationship with them.

Second, it's manipulative and awful. Instead of talking about their feelings and sorting things out with their desired love interest like reasonable people, the character decides to pull some ridiculous mind games to try and manipulate someone they allegedly view with fondness into altering their behavior. They claim to value this person, and yet they try to control them through underhanded means instead of sorting things out between them like equals.

Third, it's fucking cruel. The character that pulls this bullshit is deliberately making someone they claim to care about feel hurt and upset for their own purposes. That's not okay. On top of that, they're involving other people in this bullshit. What if one of the people they flirted with actually liked them and was happy for the attention only to then be crushed when it turns out that the interest was fake?

Fourth, stories that utilize this trope frequently do not acknowledge just how fucked up the behavior is. Even the ones that treat it as bad, tend to gloss over just how awful it actually is. You can't trust someone who pulls shit like this. You can't feel secure in a relationship with them. This isn't a "be annoyed but forgive them quickly," type of offense. This is fucking toxic and a massive red flag. If someone pulls this BS on you, you need to get out.

Fifth, it perpetuates the incredibly harmful idea of playing hard to get. The first thing annoys me, the rest make me want to punch someone, but this is the one that burns in my gut like a hot coal. The concept of playing hard to get needs to die. There is a disturbing trend in media to portray very clear and unambiguous refusals and signs of disinterest as signs of interest or calls for the rejected suitor to try a little harder. It needs to be a truth universally acknowledged that no means no.

...

Now I'm going to rant a bit a bit about the fanfic that pissed me off. I'm not going to name it because I don't want to aim hate at someone's work just because I don't like it. I do understand the etiquette of simply not engaging with fanfictions I don't like. Just because a fanfic isn't my cup of tea, doesn't mean the author deserves to be blasted with negativity. In addition, fanfic has different standards and expectations than other forms of media, so I don't think it's wrong to put this trope in fanfiction, the same way that I don't think it's wrong to put a lot of things in fanfiction that I wouldn't want to see in professional works. I do not fault any fanfiction writer for writing whatever the fuck they want.

I just need to get this off my chest.

I thought I was reading a cutesy little story about two oblivious idiots getting together. It was a JayTim fic. Jason and Tim were roommates. Tim was happy that they had come so far from where they started and got along so well now. Then Jason starts looking for someone to date. Tim tries his best to be a helpful and supportive friend because he wants Jason to be happy. He gives advice on date outfits when asked, helps him find good places to meet people, and even plays wingman.

Eventually, it becomes uncomfortable for Tim because he's starting to realize he might have feelings for Jason, but Tim tries his best to keep the jealousy under control and not be a jerk about it. After all, he wants Jason to be happy, and it seems pretty clear by this point that Jason isn't interested in him. He's been actively looking for a partner and has even gone on a few dates. Surely if he had any interest in Tim as a potential partner, he would have said something, right?

Then, Jason suddenly blows up at Tim out of the blue. Tim doesn't understand why Jason is so angry with him all of a sudden and asks why he's mad. Then Jason gets even angrier about and tells Tim that he's cutting him out of his life and storms out of the apartment. His parting shot on the way out the door involved telling Tim that he loved him for the first time in the same breath that he told him he didn't want anything to do with him any more, and it's all Tim's fault for not reading his mind.

I was upset for a lot of reasons.

I thought, up until that point, that I was reading a cute story about two oblivious idiots coming to realize that the love they were looking for was right beside them all along, only to realize in the next to last chapter that it was one oblivious idiot and one asshole playing cruel mind games.

(I want to emphasize that I do not believe the author was wrong to write the story they wrote. People have the right to write whatever kind of fanfiction they want. My misunderstandings are on me for misinterpreting the earlier chapters. My emotional response to a work is not the end all be all. This is just me venting feelings that needed an outlet so they could quit bugging me.)

Additionally, the fact that Jason wasn't willing to tell Tim he loved him to start a relationship or just make someone he loves feel loved but was willing to say it as part of a verbal barb on his way out the door was infuriating. Just abominable behavior. That would have pissed me off no matter which characters were involved.

Beyond that, it felt so unfair to Jason to portray him this way. Jason Todd has done fucked up shit, but I don't think he would be a cruel and manipulative lover.

(Again, I want to reiterate that I fully understand that fanfiction writers can write what they want. Fic writers can make characters do whatever they want because they are writing for fun. I am not saying they shouldn't. This was just a quick vent for emotional regulation purposes. I was describing feelings I had, not thoughts on what should or shouldn't be allowed.)

The last chapter wasn't up yet. I don't know if Jason will apologize, or if that really was the end, or, worse, if they'll have Tim apologize for not responding to the manipulation tactics in the way that Jason wanted.

Maybe it's my fault for misinterpreting something, but I was so disappointed to have a fun read suddenly turn into something unpleasant.

[bopinion]

2021 / 37

Aperçu of the Week:

"We value people who speak their minds freshly and frankly - provided they mean the same thing we do."

Mark Twain

Bad and Good News of the Week:

Voltaire and I are actually against any form of censorship and in favor of unrestricted freedom of speech and expression. Actually. Because then came the Internet. I like the thesis that Johannes Gutenberg realized an achievement for democracy with the invention of printing by making knowledge universally available. A similar argument could be made for the Internet; after all, it empowers the general public to publish. Unfortunately, the Internet is proving to be rather ambivalent in its social role as a medium. It's like a knife. A very practical tool in the kitchen. But also a deadly weapon in the hands of a murderer.

An example from the other day: my son's mother writes me that the local police are warning about a pedophile hanging around in front of an elementary school. We would have to remind our son not to get in the car with strangers, etc. I grab the iPad and spend fifteen minutes researching. I go through all the official police reports - nothing. I go through everything "current" from the elementary school, including the parents' council, etc. - nothing. I go through the local press releases - nothing. Then I write back: "I can't find anything official. Where did you get that?". The answer came promptly: "My hairdresser posted it on Facebook". No comment needed here...

The magic word is media literacy. My generation grew up with the postulate of "It's there in black and white." What was in the newspaper or on the news was true. Because responsible editors worked there, everything was checked, the counterstatement was the exception. But this assumption no longer has any value compared to unregulated opinion forums on the Internet or deliberately misleading media like Fox News. Study of sources is propagated in school these days; it wasn't in the past. Therefore, the mother is more at risk of being taken in by fake news than her son - who is 13 years old.

It becomes dangerous when interest groups intentionally exploit the lack of media competence of many in order to achieve their own (political) goals through deliberate manipulation. It doesn't matter whether Russia wants to influence voter behavior or whoever is blathering about microchips that Bill Gates is planting in our arms with the Corona vaccination. Keyword Bubble: if I react often enough to "information" about the earth being flat, every algorithm sorts me more and more of these messages and I feel confirmed in my self-created echo chamber. Everyone may spin as he wants. And everyone is welcome to do so publicly. But when this escalates into calls for violence, into hate speech against innocent people, into radicalizing opinion-making, that's when it has to stop.

On Thursday evening, Facebook removed numerous accounts, groups and pages associated with the controversial "lateral thinking" movement. It is the first targeted action worldwide against a group that causes "coordinated social harm," according to the official statement. One can evaluate this just as differently as the blocking of Donald J. Trump: of course, no one may dictate to a privately run medium which positions it takes or whom it offers which platform. But of course, a forum that is largely freely accessible may not engage in censorship that follows particular interests. The public discussion has begun. The political positioning will really start after our federal election next Sunday. Legal battles will follow.

That's the bad thing about it: to date, governments have failed to clearly and unambiguously point out what is covered by freedom of speech in the digital space and what is not (anymore). After all, the state has not only the sole power to regulate, but also a duty of care to its population. Which it sometimes also has to protect from itself. The separation of powers exists to ensure this happening on a democratic basis. It is sad that politics is once again lagging behind a real development. This must change. Until then, we have to accept the decisions of the media themselves in this regard.

That's the good thing about it: the issue is now on the table. That's where it belongs. The sheer existence of a Tucker Carlson points to the need to clarify what form of opinion-making must remain protected in a democracy and where limits are needed vis-à-vis dangerous propaganda. Neither should the purchase of a butter knife depend on background checks and a clean criminal record, nor should there be a switchblade at handle height in the toy department. It is up to the state - as the representative body of the people on behalf of society - to create a binding framework here. Until then, we have to accept the decisions of the media themselves in this regard.

Personal happy moment of the week:

Yesterday evening we quickly went to Lake Tegernsee for the "Long Night of Museums". In front of the regional history museum, the amateur male choir "Liederkreis" (Song circle) performed a potpourri of local folk songs, some of them hundreds of years old. In the local dialect, of course. In traditional costumes, of course. It makes me happy that we Bavarians keep traditions alive and pass it on to future generations and incoming residents.

I couldn't care less...

...that the UK is turning its back on the metric system. Even if in this case the Brexiteers' "take back control" mania is being played out on the backs of the students. Every man is the architect of his own fortune.

As I write this...

...my son once again prefers to play virtual games with friends than to play basketball or ride his bike with them in real life. Not to mention the overdue cleaning of his room or the preparation of his school stuff for the first normal week of classes. I guess I have to put the foot down. Sigh...

[whimperwoods]

What are your favorite whump tropes?

Do you prefer illness whump or injury whump?

Do you prefer whump in the form of writing or visual media?

Do you prefer physical whump or emotional/psychological whump?

Who is your favorite whumpee?

What are the traits of your ideal whumpee?

What are the traits of your ideal whumper?

What are the traits of your ideal caregiver?

Fave tropes: I already answered fave tropes, and trying to answer again seems stressful? The thing is I could give a different answer this time and not even be lying, but I'm not going to

Illness or injury:

Writing or visual media: Depends on my mood? But as far as like... engaging with whump stuff just as like... its own category on tumblr where it's labelled, writing for sure. Also gotta give a shout out to audio media, because emotionally whumpy audio is also my jam. If you're a podcast, I dare you to make me cry, but actually also I don't, because I will put off listening to any episode I'm too afraid will give me the feels. The saddest part of a musical/opera is also great. "When Somebody Loved Me" from Toy Story 2 was extremely my jam but also very upsetting and I sure DID have to go cuddle my stuffed animals afterward.

Physical or emotional/psychological: OH NO I ALREADY USED THE BOTH GIF and doing it again seems like a cheap shot. Honestly, though, like... I have a literal anxiety disorder and multiple friends with chronic physical illnesses, so in my mind they're always connected? So both, but at the same time. Physical pain/illness has emotional/psychological consequences and emotional/psychological experiences have physical effects/consequences. I really enjoy things where both parts are in play at once in one way or another.

Favorite whumpee: Ooooh, tricky! It's Ed. Every time you give him an inch, he uses it to become a nuisance, whether that benefits him or not. A son.

Traits of my ideal whumpee: Honestly, also depends on mood? I'm gonna go with "deep-seated desire to be loved, onto which I can project at will." Because that one's pretty much universally the mood I'm in. Oswin's kind of not that, but tbh the deal with writing Oswin is/was more wanting to scare myself, in the same way sometimes you just wanna watch a horror movie and get a good clean manageable scare on, but you're in charge of it because you picked the movie and have the remote, so joke's on the scare, it has no power here. But yeah, mostly it's a deep and hidden or deep and not-hidden desire for affection and support and cuddles.

Traits of my ideal whumper: I honestly haven't done a ton with whumpers? Hmm. I think it's the Power. I tend to like one who's in control and intentional, rather than the kind who's petty and lashing out. So yeah, I think self-control and intentionality. Just like... ones that are real intimidating and scary. But scary because of how intimidating they are, not just scary because they're big or strong or whatever.

Traits of my ideal caregiver:

But like... in all honesty, yeah. It's about the heart. Big emotions they act on as part of a guiding principle of compassion for others. (Which maybe does not have a ton to do with being really good at football like in Friday Night Lights, but look, it's a great slogan.) It doesn't have to be a person who can't control their emotions, and generally I prefer that it not be a fully emotionally uncontrolled person, but it does have to be a person whose compassion has enough gravity to shape the world around them.

[fapangel]

Hi, that's a mighty wall of text, and very informative, thank you. A couple of issues which seem to me to undermine the point that you're trying to make. One, that sarin gas is difficult to manufacture doesn't seem to be a strong argument against a hypothetical 'deep state' false flag - one would assume such an entity would have the resources necessary to produce it. (1/3)

Two, while chemical weapons may produce an immediate tactical benefit, the fact that using them is a massive strategic mistake on Assad’s part is quite obvious - there is no more effective way to ensure the active, continuous presence of America and her allies in Syria than the use of CW. Unless one thinks Assad wants America to stick around longterm for some reason, or he is stupid enough to trade dead children for airstrikes 1/1, the thought that it wasn’t him is quite natural. (2/3)

Three, your tone of outrage seems inappropriate considering that the American government has conducted false flag operations in the past - Gulf of Tonkin and Project Ajax are two of the better known examples. It’s not ‘America would never!’, it’s ‘It wasn’t America this time, and here’s why.’ Thanks again for taking the time to put this together. (3/3)

I can answer these in order.

1.) At the moment most people - like Sargon, specifically - are suggesting that either no attack occurred at all, or any attack was launched by rebels gassing themselves, and the media and “deep state” are lying about it extensively to form a casus belli to war. People who suggest that we created Sarin just to drop it on civilians in Damascus to create a causus belli are so far around the fucking bend that Alex Fucking Jones would be worried in their company, as Alex Jones doesn’t actually believe any of the shit he says. It’s not hard to find a casus belli to take out Assad; the civil war has driven a massive immigration wave of refugees into Europe, further destabilizing Western societies (a situation Putin has deliberately and gleefully exacerbated) and Assad’s heinous war crimes against his own people are beyond the pale. To suggest that the United States needs to engage in elaborate conspiracy to justify intervention is a fantasy. We’ve outright killed people for much less. 

2.) Like hell it is. To date, Assad’s use of chemical weapons has cost him some older warplanes (by no means his entire fleet, or his most effective aircraft) and most recently… his CW capability itself. In over SEVEN YEARS of more or less regularly conducted chemical weapon attacks, he has suffered very little damage to his conventional warfighting capabilities. Also, he knows damn well that the United States does not want to stay in the country, and moreover, they don’t want to depose him, either, as the power vacuum will simply be filled by Iran and Russia might take extreme measures to keep their strategic gains (a military port in the Med.) In my own pre-strike analysis I predicted the US would target non-military governmental targets and important infrastructure or resources to punish Assad for using chemical weapons, to discourage others from doing the same, but that they’d have to carefully calibrate it not to weaken Assad too much. 

Instead, the US focused purely on taking out the chemical weapons themselves; which was a rather weaker statement but a much safer option from the power-balance perspective; making it clear that the US doesn’t give a shit about Assad killing his civilians with shells or machine guns, but only about keeping the WMD genie in the bottle so it doesn’t impact US interests in the future in other parts of the world. 

And you are telling me - after TWO military strikes by the US that actively focused on deterring or preventing chemical weapon attacks by Assad, without changing the strategic balance on the ground - that Assad would never have used CW? Losing chemical weapons capacity itself equals a wash, and if you weigh 20% of the SAAF’s oldest, least-capable airframes against the repeated battlefield gains he’s made by using CW, Assad has gained FAR more than he’s lost by using Chemical Weapons. 

Assad knows damn well that US and allied presence isn’t going to change one way or another no matter what he does, because even if “America” leaves; the Kurds certainly aren’t. Assad knows this because Trump stated his strategy bluntly during the Presidential debates and again the day after he was sworn in as President:

“If we kept the oil, you probably wouldn’t have ISIS because that’s where they made their money in the first place, so we should have kept the oil, but, OK, maybe we’ll have another chance,” he said.

The Kurds are currently sitting along the Euphrates river, where they control a good portion of Syria’s oil fields. By Trump’s own long-standing statements it is squarely in America’s strategic interests that the Kurds stay there - especially after the Iranian-puppeted Iraqi government drove the Kurds out of oil-rich Kirkuk. It is far preferable for that oil money to stabilize a de-facto Kurdistan than to be up for grabs by jihadists or Iranian jihadist proxies (which at this point, includes Syria.) The United States was never going to pack up and make the Kurds give that all back to Syria before Assad’s latest gas attack. It is clearly and demonstrably Trump’s long-standing policy. 

So, in short, if Assad would “never use gas” because of all the horrible consequences, where are the FUCKING consequences? Because he has suffered very, very little. And there’s no shortage of people making that observation. 

3.) “False flag” operations in the past were justified by the need to prevail in an existential conflict with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union, and current “commentators” see the Syrian situation through the same lens - witness Sargon of Akkad specifically mentioning Syria’s status as a “Russian ally.” However, the Russians are nowhere near as powerful as the Soviet Union was, militarily, diplomatically or economically, as Putin’s penchant for “hybrid warfare” and opportunistic shit-stirring demonstrates. 

We’ve returned to an era of “great powers conflict” but Russia is not the Soviet Union and the old Cold War era strategies are both ineffective and demonstrably not US policy. The Gulf of Tonkin incident is laughably overblown, as involvement in Vietnam was essentially an extension of our involvement in Korea - a policy of keeping Communism from spreading to new countries. The US had the demonstrated interest, the incident was just the PR excuse. Much the same could be said of the Iraq war - WMD was simply the casus belli; the Bush Administration was pursuing a much grander strategy involving nation-building in the Middle East. 

In Trump’s case, interventionism and foreign entanglement is anathema to the man and everything he’s ever advocated (witness his insistence on “keeping the oil” and even that mostly with Kurdish allies and not US troops) and the only evidence for his administration wanting “regime change” anyone can point to is by invoking ~the Deep State~ and left-wing outlets crowing about the statements of people who’ve since been fired out of a cannon by the Administration. Paying lip service to the idea of ousting Assad does not equal a fucking policy of regime change, especially as Assad and Assad’s regime are not the same thing. Assad’s Alawite sect is Assad’s regime, not Assad. (Americans, being members of the first nation really founded on a secular government, tend to forget that in most of the world for most of its history, politics and religion have been one and the same thing.) That Assad himself will have to step down from power to satisfy any lasting political settlement to divide Syria is not a great surprise; he’s presided over horrific amounts of bloodshed, slaughter, and brutality against his own civilians. But that simply means he’ll be replaced by another high-ranking member of his own government, another general, another strongman. 

In conclusion; these pro-Syrian conspiracy theories stem from an almost complete ignorance of the situation in Syria. In fact, they are calibrated to appeal specifically to those ignorant; ordinary folk with no in-depth knowledge of the military or politics, who simply fear a repeat of Iraq. The narratives are short, sweet, easy to remember and repeat, play on existing fears and fit what very limited information the average guy on the street is likely to know about a confusing conflict in a far-off land. In short it is classic propaganda, and you needn’t look further than RT.com and Sputnuk to see who fucking packaged it. 

[sneaksite]

‘America’s weirdest state’ offers an extreme case of the country’s broader failure to take the pandemic seriouslyI have spent the past three months in my home state of Florida, during which time I’ve watched it become the hottest of coronavirus hotspots on the planet. This week began with the announcement that the state registered over 15,000 new infections in a single day, which was almost 3,000 more daily cases than any state previously had recorded since the pandemic began. If Florida was a country, according to Reuters, it would have the world’s fourth-highest tally of new Covid-19 cases over that 24-hour span, trailing only the US, Brazil and India.Florida has a well-deserved reputation as America’s weirdest state, so perhaps the pandemic punishment being meted out to us right now shouldn’t come as a shock. A 1948 Fortune magazine study observed: “Florida is a study in abnormal psychology, useful in signaling the … hidden derangements of the national mood.” A lot of bad trends in American life find their most bizarre and refined forms in the Sunshine state, which is why “Florida Man” has become shorthand for the bad behavior of too many state residents. As far as the present pandemic is concerned, the simplest and most convincing explanation for why Florida is experiencing an explosion of Covid-19 cases it that it is an extreme case of the broader American failure to take the pandemic seriously.Considerable blame rests with the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. A former member of the House Freedom Caucus, the most slavishly pro-Trump faction in Congress, he won election as governor in 2018 largely on the strength of the president’s endorsement as well as campaign ads that showed him teaching his children how to build walls and recite “Make America Great Again”.Unsurprisingly, he followed Trump’s lead in minimizing the seriousness of the pandemic. Florida was one of the last states to impose a stay-at-home order, in early April, and began reopening little more than a month later. A state data scientist responsible for tracking the spread of the virus was fired when, she claimed, she wouldn’t manipulate the data to show sufficient recovery from the pandemic to justify further easing of restrictions.Even now, DeSantis is aggressively pushing for schools to reopen next month, on the grounds that if big-box stores like Walmart and Home Depot can resume operations successfully, then so can schools. Teachers object that schools are smaller and more crowded spaces, and that few customers spend eight hours a day in the stores. But perhaps DeSantis is channeling the dystopian future vision of the film Idiocracy, in which higher education has been taken over by stores like Costco.DeSantis, to his credit, allowed some of the hardest-hit cities and counties to delay reopening and require masks in some public settings – unlike the Republican governors of Texas and Arizona, who blocked any pandemic restrictions more stringent than those imposed by the state (both governors have backtracked). He also seems, in hindsight, to have been unfairly pilloried by the media for allowing beaches to stay open, in view of current opinions on the lower risk of outdoor transmission.> Florida’s subtropical climate is an irresistible inducement to hedonismIt’s also clear that Florida, like the country as a whole, failed to shut down to the extent and duration necessary to contain the spread of the virus, or to wear masks and practice social distancing to the extent that was routine in most societies where the virus was successfully brought under control. During the first two months I was down here, I rarely saw as many as half of the customers (and in some cases staff) in supermarkets and drugstores wearing masks. Groups of teenagers thronged the shopping malls as if the pandemic was a thing of the past.Bars, nightclubs, movie theaters, gyms, massage parlors, nail salons and a host of other transmission-friendly environments reopened in early June, with distancing restrictions more or less ignored. Floridians who chafed at weeks of restrictions made up for lost time by partying down with a kind of feral intensity, to judge by local social media, at any rate. Florida’s subtropical climate is an irresistible inducement to hedonism, and many of the young people who crowded into bars and nightclubs believed that they had nothing to fear from the virus. Health officials have linked more than 150 Covid-19 cases to a single bar in Orlando. (DeSantis subsequently banned on-premise alcohol consumption at establishments that derive more than half of their income from alcohol sales.)There could be some other factors peculiar to Florida that explain the virulence of the pandemic’s spread here. Partisanship is hard-edged here, and not wearing a mask has become a mark of Republican tribal identity. Many conservatives I know (particularly men) consider mask-wearing to be an infringement upon their constitutional freedom. Skepticism of science and experts, along with ingrained contrarianism – some otherwise sane Floridians I know resolutely maintain that the virus is a hoax, or no worse than seasonal flu – surely plays a role in some cases as well.The state government’s handling of the pandemic has proved shockingly inadequate, largely because the previous Republican administration sabotaged its institutional capacities. It took weeks and even months for laid-off Floridians to get unemployment relief, largely because the online system was designed to make it harder for workers to receive benefits so that the previous governor (now a senator), Rick Scott, could claim lower jobless numbers.Floridians historically have shown a ferocious individualism and an unwillingness to abide by state government restrictions. In addition, the severe economic damage inflicted by the shutdown surely has made people more willing to engage in magical thinking about how the dangers of the virus have been inflated by the media and the establishment, including the mistaken belief that hot weather prevents virus spread.> The inability of too many Floridians to distinguish between reality and fantasy is part of what’s frustrating about this placeTwo-thirds of Florida’s residents (and nearly all of its tourists) come here from somewhere else, which may cut against the collective sense of social responsibility that’s more widespread in more settled communities and societies. And masks are indeed uncomfortable in Florida’s heat and humidity, as visitors to a reopened Disney World are finding out.The pandemic laid bare the incompetence of the Trump administration, which took much too long to put widespread testing in place and has yet to implement contact tracing on the scale that’s needed. But the pandemic has also shown the weakness of America’s federal structure and its insufficient state capacity relative to other developed countries, where governments have implemented more uniform and effective national responses. Perhaps one of the pandemic’s legacies will be greater citizen insistence on competent government.I’ve spent most of my adult life outside Florida, but I share the affectionate exasperation that many Floridians feel for their state. It’s not like anywhere else, for both good and ill. The New York Times recently interviewed a couple who visited the reopened Disney World and shared their belief that the park’s reopening “was the first thing that made us feel like we could leave our house and still feel safe”. Why? Because “it’s Disney”. The inability of too many Floridians to distinguish between reality and fantasy is part of what’s frustrating about this place, but their irrepressible optimism makes me hope we will get through this pandemic without losing too many more of them.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://news.yahoo.com/im-florida-coronavirus-crisis-doesnt-103748520.html

[xtruss]

Researchers have found that virtual reality (VR) headsets can cause cybersickness, which manifests as dizziness and nausea akin to motion sickness. As engagement with digital devices from laptops to smartphones increases, some users are now reporting cybersickness outside a VR headset. ILLUSTRATION BY VICTOR DE SCHWANBERG, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Endless Scrolling Through Social Media Can Literally Make You Sick

Once mainly a scourge of VR headsets, cybersickness seems to be on the rise as the pandemic pushes our bodies to their digital limits.

— By Julia Sklar | MAY 17, 2021 | National Geographic

When a dark ashy cloud born from wildfires settled over the Seattle metropolitan area, Jack Riewe was among the millions of people suddenly trapped indoors. It was September 2020, and without access to the outdoors during a pandemic, it became even more difficult for the 27-year-old writer to see other people. He could only fill his days switching between working remotely on his computer, watching TV, or scrolling through endless fire updates on his phone.

“I was forced to stay inside in my hot apartment without any escape except the craziness happening on Twitter,” he says.

For a week he scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled, until he felt “weighed down, dizzy, [and] nauseous.” At the time, he attributed these symptoms to the air quality, or even wondered if he had contracted the coronavirus. The cause was something more insidious: the physical toll of living almost entirely in a virtual world.

The pandemic has forced most of us online at incomparable rates. It’s where we’ve worked, taken classes, attended parties, and gotten lost in 2020’s voracious news cycles. But our bodies were not designed to primarily exist in virtual space like this, and as our collective digital time creeps upward, something called cybersickness seems to be leaking into the general population.

Characterized by dizziness and nausea, cybersickness has mostly been studied in the context of aggressively submersive niche technologies, such as virtual reality headsets. In 2011, 30 to 80 percent of virtual reality users were likely to experience cybersickness, though improved headset hardware brought the range down to 25 to 60 percent by 2016.

Now, it seems the scrolling movement in a Netflix queue or a social media newsfeed also has the power to cause cybersickness when used under exceptional circumstances: all day, every day. (Also find out how video calls can tax the brain, leading to the phenomenon called Zoom fatigue.)

“Any kind of perceived motion is going to cause cybersickness,” says Kay Stanney, CEO and founder of Design Interactive, a small company researching human systems integration. “Virtual reality or augmented reality cybersickness is just a kind of a cousin to other forms of sickness related to perceived motion, and scrolling would be another form.”

What’s Old is New Again

Cybersickness is really just the latest neologism to describe the ongoing tussle between the human body and a world we continuously transform with technology. Cybersickness is space sickness is car sickness is sea sickness.

Reports of illness brought on by mismatched perception go back as far as 800 B.C., when the ancient Greeks wrote about a “plague at sea.” Despite their important role in trade, war, and migration, ships could be so intolerable for some passengers that nausea wasn’t merely a symptom of seasickness but the only word for it. The English word “nausea” actually comes from the Greek word for ship: naus.

By A.D. 300, the ancient Chinese began documenting nausea from all kinds of sources, with specific words to describe each distinct experience: Traveling in a cart inspired zhuche, or cart-influence, while a ship caused zhuchuan, or ship-influence.

As scientists now understand it, the key to all forms of motion sickness is your vestibular system: the combination of sensory organs in the inner ear and brain that controls balance and spatial orientation. If it perceives motion when your visual system doesn’t, the dissonance can make you hurl or, at the very least, feel dizzy and unsteady.

“The English word “nausea” actually comes from the Greek word for ship: naus.”

The 21st-century twist is that this is all flipped in virtual space. Rather than moving while perceiving being still—as you might feel on a boat, while looking at the immovable horizon—this time you’re still but perceiving motion. And that creates a similar conundrum for the body.

“Clinically there is absolutely no difference between the two conditions,” says Eugene Nalivaiko, an associate professor at the University of Newcastle in Australia who has studied both general motion sickness and cybersickness extensively “They have the same symptoms, same sensations, same everything.”

Time is Not on Your Side

Sarah Colley, a 30-year-old content marketer in Asheville, North Carolina, noticed the worst of her cybersickness symptoms in March 2021. Her screen time surged during a cumbersome work deadline, when for several days she spent 10 to 12 hours in a row on her computer. In addition to dizziness and nausea, she says that the screen itself appeared to jump around, making it difficult to focus, and a sense of anxiety settled over her.

“If I'm staring at the same screen, and it's not really moving, that doesn't bother me. But if things are scrolling, that's when it really becomes a problem,” she says. “Even when I close my eyes, I feel like I’m spinning.” After the incident in March, she had to take four days off from work to fully recalibrate—a luxury she couldn’t have afforded at a prior job that didn’t offer her benefits.

For Colley, the rise in remote living exacerbated mild cybersickness symptoms she had experienced periodically prior to the pandemic. But for most people it’s a totally new facet of spending more time online, so there isn’t much targeted research available yet. Most of our understanding has to be borrowed from virtual reality research.

One trigger for cybersickness seems to be the amount of time spent immersed in a digital world, which Stanney says tracks with her research into virtual reality headsets, as well as prisms, 3-D displays, and 2-D displays. Oddly, this rule may not hold true for augmented reality. The day before we spoke, Stanney had just finished sifting through data from a new study she’s leading that has not yet been published, and she uncovered a surprising pattern.

“Before this current study, I would have said an absolute definitive yes: The longer you're in the situation, the more perturbed you are. But augmented reality is acting differently than virtual reality: The longer you were in there, the better you felt, which is so strange,” she says. “I’m still trying to uncover exactly what that means.”

Typically, though, Stanney says time is not your friend in digital space. A few minutes of scrolling through Instagram, switching between open windows on a laptop, or visiting Netflix to watch one specific show might be benign, but when these activities drag on for hours, as they have under quasi-lockdowns, the persistent motion on the screen can make you queasy.

Stanney is also willing to bet that it’s not just increased screen time that’s causing the phenomenon with everyday devices. Before the pandemic, humans more regularly experienced motion in many directions, as we flew in airplanes and took regular rides in cars and subway trains. But for the last year, many people have really dialed it back: we walk, we stand, we sit, and we lie down.

That shift could be making some people less resilient to a type of digital motion they once tolerated without realizing it was actually a strain on their systems. “When we see this discord between visual movement and rest—where we are most of the time [now]—maybe it's a more profound discord,” Stanney says.

For instance, you may think you’re at peace lying in bed at night in the serene darkness, totally still but for a finger scrolling through Twitter. But Stanney says, “in fact, lying in bed could probably be one of the worst things to be doing.” Since it’s the most “chilled out” your vestibular system can possibly be, prolonged motion on a screen becomes extra difficult to reconcile.

One factor is a lack of what augmented reality research refers to as “rest frames,” the real walls or floors around you that act as stabilizing signals to the brain. Holding a phone inches from your face in the dark mimics the environmental conditions of virtual reality—when your rest frames are stripped away—and so may be similarly difficult to tolerate at length. Scientists don’t yet have empirical evidence that rest frames help users tolerate augmented reality for more time than virtual reality, but Stanney speculates that may be the case, and she recommends trying to tweak phone use accordingly.

“If the phone [were] a little further away, or if they were in a lit room, it might help to diminish some of those adverse events,” she advises.

If you can’t log off, Nalivaiko agrees that changing your field of view by holding your phone differently could help, as well as scrolling more slowly to take control of the frame rate, another nausea-inducing factor of digital motion. His research in animal models also suggests that staying cool can prevent motion sickness. For Riewe, being trapped in a hot apartment without respite may have spurred his peak symptoms.

“If you think about what people feel during motion sickness, it's sweating, it's feeling hot, it’s a desire to get to cool, open air,” Nalivaiko says.

Toxic Devices

While motion sickness and cybersickness are both incredibly well documented, what continues to stump researchers is why a disconnect between the vestibular and visual systems would provoke nausea in the first place.

“We have two aversive sensations: We have pain, and we have nausea,” says Nalivaiko. “Both are present when Mother Nature wants us not to repeat what we're doing, but what nausea is designed to prevent, we don’t know.”

Pain sends a straight forward message: Hate that feeling? Well then do not ever hold your hand over a flame again. But nausea is more gradual, nuanced, and unpredictable, especially when tied to an activity that doesn’t seem overtly dangerous, like going for a sail or scrolling through a smartphone.

The leading hypothesis is that it’s a misfire of a reflex that evolved to keep us safe from toxins. Alcohol, for example, when drunk too quickly or abundantly, can make a room seem like it’s spinning, even while you could swear your feet were firmly planted on the ground. Alcohol can also kill you. So the human body evolved to connect this dizzying effect with a threat, and to induce nausea to help purge the toxin and keep you alive.

Now, when we experience the same vestibular and visual mismatch brought on by non-threatening forces, like smartphones, our body thinks we’re in grave danger. It’s an apt metaphor for the emotional toxicity overdoing it online can ignite, and in the end, cybersickness may turn out to be as effective as warding off actual poison.

When Riewe did finally learn about cybersickness, “it was such an ‘aha moment,’” he says. “I immediately put my phone down and started reading my book. I went from needing to throw up to falling asleep happily."