#Profitable Commodity Market

[g-g-freak]

I'm gonna go ahead and do a personal ramble here because I've had a grudge against Disney and Marvel for their assimilations of culture since I was 8. I've got memories of railing against Thor in the Marvel comics being tall, blond, and cleanshaven when I'd always known him to be ginger, stocky, and hairy. I'd always disliked Disney's little mermaid for utterly subsuming Hans Christian Andersen's work with the little mermaid now having red hair, a name, and multiple quippy sidekicks, with the witch actively sabotaging the little mermaid instead of just, being a witch granting wishes with a heavy cost. It felt like Disney/marvel were constantly asserting their versions of the characters as the only true version of them, and I hated that, especially when they merged and upped the marketing even harder. Disney attempting to patent Dia de muertos was unsurprising to me mostly because I've already been a fuming little mythology kid, and it's good to see that people are noticing the same things I've railed about for nearly two decades.

[lifewithaview]

A corner in wheat (1909) Short

A Corner in Wheat is a 1909 American short silent film which tells of a greedy tycoon who tries to cornering the market on wheat, destroying the lives of the people who can no longer afford to buy bread. It was directed by David Wark Griffith and adapted by Griffith and Frank E. Woods from the novel The Pit (Norris novel) (1903) by Frank Norris. Intercutting (cross-cutting) between still tableau vivant of the poor in the bread line and the lavish, active parties of the wealthy speculator somewhat anticipates the Film editing which became a hallmark of the politically charged Cinema of the Soviet Union a decade or so later. In 1994, A Corner in Wheat was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The film was also released on 8mm in the 1960s.

*One of the first films in which D.W. Griffith used the technique of parallel editing (a technique he pioneered). It was used to create the effects in the wheat suffocating scene.

[signode-blog]

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[saccharinecoffee]

Single albums and single releases are a pet peeve of mine bc unless you're a small indie artist, it just feels easy and like a cash grab, even if it isn't.

[communistkenobi]

I’m watching FD Signifier’s new video about edgelord white guy movies. He spends a decent amount of time talking about how creators have responded to their edgelord fanbases, using The Joker and The Boys as two examples, where these creators feel uncomfortable with how their art has been received and taken up by “angry white men,” and that in response to this, they have followed up these artistic products with sequels or new seasons of television that are incredibly blunt and obvious about how you shouldn’t think of Homelander as a based chad or Arthur Fleck as a motivational figure in your life. And like he ends the video saying this is insufficient because these audiences won’t care about the messages in these follow-ups (largely bc these are downstream of larger social issues), but his framing of it in terms of “the death of media literacy” is still really frustrating and annoying because it’s buying into the idea that the main problem with people “not getting” art is literacy/education. And its not just his video, this framing is a popular memetic phrase across social media, and he does a better job than most people in talking about it

But like I just straight up do not accept that the audience of these edgelord movies “didn’t get” that they are portraying bad people, that audiences of mass media are “taking the wrong message” of “very obvious” pieces of art. Not because I think they do secretly get what these films are ‘actually saying,’ I don’t care about what’s in their hearts, but because this concern with people ‘not getting it’ feels wildly off-topic. I think it has been demonstrated over and over again that mass media is not an educational tool where people go to “learn lessons” or “take away a particular message.” I think the very fact that we have a consumptive marketised relationship to these artistic products structures and produces a specific set of responses, which is, above all else, “getting my money’s worth.” Who gives a shit what the movie is ‘really’ trying to say! That’s unimportant when faced with the question of did I get what I paid for? And I don’t mean this in an annoying lib “consumerism is making us all stupider” way I mean the economic structure of artistic production is the primary determinant of how commodities on a market are received. The idea that, under these conditions, we can purchase a piece of art that will “teach us” something about the world is laughable, that art-by-itself contains the authority to impart political knowledge. The idea that we can purchase our way into good values, good politics, that we can buy a movie ticket and see the error of our ways is buying into this same exact consumptive framing.

“The death of media literacy” implies a point in recent history where this economic relationship to art was unimportant, that we used to be able to participate in mass standardised artistic production and be unaffected by this arrangement. I think about Adorno & Horkheimer’s argument in The Culture Industry, that the profit motive is itself an object of consumption under capitalism, that advertisements are themselves products & as a result, all mass standardised artistic products are advertisements for their own capitalist production processes and logics. 

I think when people “don’t get” that Starship Troopers is depicting a fascist society, when people “don’t get” that Travis Bickle is a bad, un-admirable person, they aren’t stricken by a sudden deficit of education or literacy, they are responding to the conditions under which these things get made. Being able to get art’s ��true message,” no matter how supposedly clear or compellingly-articulated, is to argue that ‘message’ and ‘meaning’ can be made independent of the conditions under which those things are created and presented to people. The industrial capitalist machinery outputting standardised artistic products is itself an authority telling you how to interpret its own products, much the same way a cathedral is presented as evidence of god. There is a material & physical authority in their presence and social arrangement that are themselves arguments. Adorno talks about this with the radio - that this vast industrial infrastructure of radio towers, broadcast stations, systems of wires and cables, and the production of standardised radio receivers (available for purchase, of course) is utterly incomprehensible to most people and amounts to hearing the voice of god when you turn on the radio. The arrangement of artistic production & presentation is itself the structure through which you experience art, and that structure is an authority you can neither comprehend nor alter. And again as A&H say in The Culture Industry, the techniques, narratives, and genres of the culture industry become standardised themselves, cookie-cutters on a production line, and therefore dictate meaning above and beyond any particular semantic meaning injected into an individual film or story. “Romcoms” are a cultural authority above and beyond the sum total of every romcom film ever made, and it is these genres and techniques that transmit the justification for their own continued reproduction. Under this arrangement, the meaning of this film or that television show are rendered marginal - not unnoticeable or irrelevant, certainly, but secondary to the cookie-cutters they were produced from 

Now does this lead to a widespread ignorant, impoverished, reactionary view of art? Of course, but that is not because the guy who likes wearing V for Vendetta masks is illiterate. To place the blame on individual education, discipline, or literacy is to take Hollywood for granted as a natural eternal entity, to take it as just another church. It’s a goofy fucking argument! 

[determinate-negation]

“This raises the question: if industrial production is necessary to meet decent-living standards today, then perhaps capitalism—notwithstanding its negative impact on social indicators over the past five hundred years—is necessary to develop the industrial capacity to meet these higher-order goals. This has been the dominant assumption in development economics for the past half century. But it does not withstand empirical scrutiny. For the majority of the world, capitalism has historically constrained, rather than enabled, technological development—and this dynamic remains a major problem today.

It has long been recognized by liberals and Marxists alike that the rise of capitalism in the core economies was associated with rapid industrial expansion, on a scale with no precedent under feudalism or other precapitalist class structures. What is less widely understood is that this very same system produced the opposite effect in the periphery and semi-periphery. Indeed, the forced integration of peripheral regions into the capitalist world-system during the period circa 1492 to 1914 was characterized by widespread deindustrialization and agrarianization, with countries compelled to specialize in agricultural and other primary commodities, often under “pre-modern” and ostensibly “feudal” conditions.

In Eastern Europe, for instance, the number of people living in cities declined by almost one-third during the seventeenth century, as the region became an agrarian serf-economy exporting cheap grain and timber to Western Europe. At the same time, Spanish and Portuguese colonizers were transforming the American continents into suppliers of precious metals and agricultural goods, with urban manufacturing suppressed by the state. When the capitalist world-system expanded into Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, imports of British cloth and steel destroyed Indigenous textile production and iron smelting, while Africans were instead made to specialize in palm oil, peanuts, and other cheap cash crops produced with enslaved labor. India—once the great manufacturing hub of the world—suffered a similar fate after colonization by Britain in 1757. By 1840, British colonizers boasted that they had “succeeded in converting India from a manufacturing country into a country exporting raw produce.” Much the same story unfolded in China after it was forced to open its domestic economy to capitalist trade during the British invasion of 1839–42. According to historians, the influx of European textiles, soap, and other manufactured goods “destroyed rural handicraft industries in the villages, causing unemployment and hardship for the Chinese peasantry.”

The great deindustrialization of the periphery was achieved in part through policy interventions by the core states, such as through the imposition of colonial prohibitions on manufacturing and through “unequal treaties,” which were intended to destroy industrial competition from Southern producers, establish captive markets for Western industrial output, and position Southern economies as providers of cheap labor and resources. But these dynamics were also reinforced by structural features of profit-oriented markets. Capitalists only employ new technologies to the extent that it is profitable for them to do so. This can present an obstacle to economic development if there is little demand for domestic industrial production (due to low incomes, foreign competition, etc.), or if the costs of innovation are high.

Capitalists in the Global North overcame these problems because the state intervened extensively in the economy by setting high tariffs, providing public subsidies, assuming the costs of research and development, and ensuring adequate consumer demand through government spending. But in the Global South, where state support for industry was foreclosed by centuries of formal and informal colonialism, it has been more profitable for capitalists to export cheap agricultural goods than to invest in high-technology manufacturing. The profitability of new technologies also depends on the cost of labor. In the North, where wages are comparatively high, capitalists have historically found it profitable to employ labor-saving technologies. But in the peripheral economies, where wages have been heavily compressed, it has often been cheaper to use labor-intensive production techniques than to pay for expensive machinery.

Of course, the global division of labor has changed since the late nineteenth century. Many of the leading industries of that time, including textiles, steel, and assembly line processes, have now been outsourced to low-wage peripheral economies like India and China, while the core states have moved to innovation activities, high-technology aerospace and biotech engineering, information technology, and capital-intensive agriculture. Yet still the basic problem remains. Under neoliberal globalization (structural adjustment programs and WTO rules), governments in the periphery are generally precluded from using tariffs, subsidies, and other forms of industrial policy to achieve meaningful development and economic sovereignty, while labor market deregulation and global labor arbitrage have kept wages extremely low. In this context, the drive to maximize profit leads Southern capitalists and foreign investors to pour resources into relatively low-technology export sectors, at the expense of more modern lines of industry.

Moreover, for those parts of the periphery that occupy the lowest rungs in global commodity chains, production continues to be organized along so-called pre-modern lines, even under the new division of labor. In the Congo, for instance, workers are sent into dangerous mineshafts without any modern safety equipment, tunneling deep into the ground with nothing but shovels, often coerced at gunpoint by U.S.-backed militias, so that Microsoft and Apple can secure cheap coltan for their electronics devices. Pre-modern production processes predicated on the “technology” of labor coercion are also found in the cocoa plantations of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, where enslaved children labor in brutal conditions for corporations like Cadbury, or Colombia’s banana export sector, where a hyper-exploited peasantry is kept in line by a regime of rural terror and extrajudicial killings overseen by private death squads.

Uneven global development, including the endurance of ostensibly “feudal” relations of production, is not inevitable. It is an effect of capitalist dynamics. Capitalists in the periphery find it more profitable to employ cheap labor subject to conditions of slavery or other forms of coercion than they do to invest in modern industry.”

Capitalism, Global Poverty, and the Case for Democratic Socialism by Jason Hickle and Dylan Sullivan

[beatingtheouijaboardallegations]

forever tired of our voices being turned into commodity.

forever tired of thorough medaocrity in the AAC business. how that is rewarded. How it fails us as users. how not robust and only robust by small small amount communication systems always chosen by speech therapists and funded by insurance.

forever tired of profit over people.

forever tired of how companies collect data on every word we’ve ever said and sell to people.

forever tired of paying to communicate. of how uninsured disabled people just don’t get a voice many of the time. or have to rely on how AAC is brought into classrooms — which usually is managed to do in every possible wrong way.

forever tired of the branding and rebranding of how we communicate. Of this being amazing revealation over and over that nonspeakers are “in there” and should be able to say things. of how every single time this revelation comes with pre condition of leaving the rest behind, who can’t spell or type their way out of the cage of ableist oppression. or are not given chance & resources to. Of the branding being seen as revolution so many times and of these companies & practitioners making money off this “revolution.” of immersion weeks and CRP trainings that are thousands of dollars and wildly overpriced letterboards, and of that one nightmare Facebook group g-d damm it. How this all is put in language of communication freedom. 26 letters is infinite possibilities they say - but only for the richest of families and disabled people. The rest of us will have to live with fewer possibilities.

forever tired of engineer dads of AAC users who think they can revolutionize whole field of AAC with new terrible designed apps that you can’t say anything with them. of minimally useful AI features that invade every AAC app to cash in on the new moment and not as tool that if used ethically could actually help us, but as way of fixing our grammar our language our cultural syntax we built up to sound “proper” to sound normal. for a machine, a large language model to model a small language for us, turn our inhuman voices human enough.

forever tired of how that brand and marketing is never for us, never for the people who actually use it to communicate. it is always for everyone around us, our parents and teachers paras and SLPs and BCBAs and practitioners and doctors and everyone except the person who ends up stuck stuck with a bad organized bad implemented bad taught profit motivated way to talk. of it being called behavior problems low ability incompetence noncompliance when we don’t use these systems.

you all need to do better. We need to democritize our communication, put it in our own hands. (My friend & communication partner who was in Occupy Wall Street suggested phrase “Occupy AAC” and think that is perfect.) And not talking about badly made non-robust open source apps either. Yes a robust system needs money and recources to make it well. One person or community alone cannot turn a robotic voice into a human one. But our human voice should not be in hands of companies at all.

(this is about the Tobii Dynavox subscription thing. But also exploitive and capitalism practices and just lazy practices in AAC world overall. Both in high tech “ mainstream “ AAC and methods that are like ones I use in sense that are both super stigmatized and also super branded and marketed, Like RPM and S2C and spellers method. )

[probablyasocialecologist]

Think here of the intern who works for the promise of pay at some later date; the unpaid research assistant; or the online influencer who sacrifices a wage for the prospect of exposure. Freely employed, labour ceases to be a commodity and becomes decommodified – labour without a price which continues to produce profit. Usually, decommodification describes government bringing goods or services outside of market exchange and providing them for free, so that workers can secure their basic needs without having to work – the NHS being a prime example. But now there is a grim inversion of this utopian impulse, where the wage relation itself is brought out of exchange, so that the worker receives precisely nothing, while the employer enjoys labour for free. Decommodified labour is thus neither employed nor unemployed, neither inside nor outside the wage – the relation par excellence for a moment of rising surpluses, when the wage is increasingly missing but still structures our lives.

Phil Jones, Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism

[sgiandubh]

Dinna fash, Sassenach

Ashley Hearn's arrival aboard the HMS Sassenach...

... has immediately been met with an expert smirk across the street:

I was not really surprised. The blogger could not help herself (she rarely does). She had to weigh in, with that insinuating tone that seems to be part of her personal brand. And, in line with what she consistently posted, the idea is that S, a highly functioning alcoholic in her book, thoughtlessly hired another highly functioning alcoholic, with NO credentials to boot. Plus a profiteer of sorts, right?

Perhaps that blogger wanted to be their new marketing manager and there she is, instead, somewhere farfarfar away from Walhalla. An unsung, compliment deprived and undiscovered hero without a cape? For I have no other elegant & merciful explanation for what could be logically construed as an outburst of hurt ego (we KNOW she has PROPER CREDENTIALS, she shouted it REPEATEDLY across the UNIVERSE), coupled with the usual pettiness, every single time things seem to challenge her view of reality.

Let's unpack:

Ashley has decent education credentials. I am writing this because I bet the farm many casual readers of that legit calumny ended up thinking that she had NO education at all:

A BA in Mathematics, at a good public university in Maryland. And a Master's Degree in Teacher Education and Professional Development at Walden University, a for-profit education institution based in Minnesota, most likely online.

A word about Walden University, though, simply because of the recent controversy related to it. While it is true that Walden has been forced to settle a class action outside of court ( it cost them 28.5 million dollars to do so), that lawsuit was strictly related to African-American students denouncing the lack of transparency related to the university's DBA (Doctor of Business Administration) program.

[More on the lawsuit: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2024/03/29/walden-agrees-285-million-settlement-class-action-suit]

Anyways, here are her real professional credentials, carefully hidden by the blogger:

Eight years and a half consistent work experience for the US subsidiary of Mast-Jägermeister, one of the most prestigious German liquor companies, founded in 1878 (https://www.mast-jaegermeister.de/). Would anyone be such a fool as to think she'd be constantly promoted by those people just for her eyes only, especially as a complete outsider to the very closed world of spirits business?

I see a hard-working woman, with good professional skills and obvious qualities (brand loyalty, for example), given a new career opportunity she clearly thought interesting enough to make her jump onboard. And I very much prefer an honest underdog, ballsy enough to take her passion and make it happen (thanks, Flashdance!) in a cutthroat, male dominated business environment, to the many lukewarm and half-hearted executives still lingering around in so many companies around the world just for the sake of commodity, predictability and mortgage.

And I honestly wish her every success. She does not deserve this. Nobody does. Luckily for her, she couldn't care less that a Nobody with a blog tried to rain on her parade.

Interestingly enough, Norouzi was the only SS bigwig NOT to congratulate her on Insta. He didn't relay the news, he didn't even like the post, even if they mutually follow eachother (their interaction always seemed to be minimal, though). But that is another story and it is way too early to speculate.

[qqueenofhades]

In light of OceangateGate, by show of hands, who still wants Elon Musk to send them to Mars?

I mean, this whole thing (like I kept saying in tags) is both grimly fascinating and utterly predictable. Because there's this whole culture that you could and should do absolutely anything anywhere on earth, if you're able to pay for it, and at the same time that the companies offering these experiences can do absolutely everything to cut corners and make profits while placing people in incredibly dangerous situations. Whether it's the mountain adventure companies who take tens of thousands of dollars to shunt total novices up Mount Everest, or this, it's just like... MAYBE YOU SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO MAKE EVERYTHING INTO A HYPER-CAPITALIST COMMODITY JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE RICH AND/OR WANT TO TAKE MORE MONEY FROM RICH PEOPLE! MAYBE!

Within 48 hours of this story breaking, we have learned that:

The sub is not tested or certified by literally any regulatory agency, because "innovation can't wait for rules"

The sub is built of fucking camping store gear and a video game joystick, they did not pay for appropriately certified parts for the depths they wanted to go, and the company fired the guy who pointed it out, rather than dealing with any of the issues he raised

The CEO (one of those now missing on the sub) gave an interview talking about how "at some point, safety is just waste"

In 2018, a literal group of esteemed submersible experts wrote to this guy about how his plans were bad and he should feel bad; he ignored it

The sub does not have basic safety equipment, a readily available backup vehicle, an acoustic beacon, etc, and has gone missing several times before; it is only luck that they found it those times

You can't get out of the fucking thing by yourself even if it is on the surface

It used Elon Musk's Starlink satellites for communication and cited SpaceX as a private adventure tourism model (as noted, you know, the rockets that keep literally blowing up)

You have to sign an enormous waiver (after paying $250,000 a head) acknowledging this entire thing is completely unregulated and you may very well die

Which it looks like these poor schmucks either have or are soon going to, either by imploding instantly at great depth (the merciful option) or slowly suffocating in a freezing coffin in the dark (the absolute hell option)

Like?!?! How was this not COMPLETELY predictable?

And this happened WHILE THEY WERE GOING TO THE TITANIC

You know, the most famous case of Man vs. Nature technological hubris in history

I mean. This is the ultimate outcome and perfect encapsulation of the "no rules no regulations ever, everything including the most dangerous things are crassly commodified for money, everyone is an expert and/or experience is irrelevant, safety rules only exist to hamper innovation and disrupt The Free Market, costs should be cut on everything for more profits, and this should all continue regardless of the consequences or the impact on the other people then required to endanger themselves to rescue them" late-stage capitalist hellscape we are living in. And maybe I shouldn't have laughed, but uh, I laughed:

[bioethicists]

hm i really hope that someone has said this better than me but the betterhelp ads (specifically the video ones, as the podcast ones tend to be less scripted) are such poignant examples of alienation + the role of 'go to therapy' in perpetuating that alienation. keep in mind that, if you personally found a therapist who is genuinely healing for you + that therapist happens to be through betterhelp- i'm genuinely happy for you + that experience does not invalidate anything i have to say below! (but jsyk they're trying to sell your shit to facebook lol)

starting strong w/ the fact that betterhelp is essentially the uber of therapy (aka using an independent contractor model which is harmful + predatory towards its providers), rushing in to fill the market on largely uninsured and/or uninformed ppl who want the ease of a concierge system without the cost + lacks a meaningful supervision system (which led to one gay man being recommended a conversion therapist when he asked for someone to help with his identity struggles, btw!). smarter people than me have written about the ways in which these trendy independent contractor apps strip people of labor rights, fail to provide adequate wages, + in the case of healthcare apps, increase digital surveillance + decrease accountability demanded from providers while exploiting the failure of the US healthcare system in order to churn a profit w/o actually creating sustainable, equitable change.

the betterhelp video ads all circle around a theme- a millennial starts talking about some form of emotional pain or worry, usually relatively standard existential worries ("do you ever think nothing has meaning?") or life worries ("i hate my job" "i think i'm gay"). their friends or the ppl around them respond blankly + coldly, looking at them like they're crazy. while i understand these ads are supposed to be tongue in cheek, they demonstrate the crushing reality of our alienation from one another- the solution to your friends responding to your evident pain with confusion + apathy is to confine that pain to a therapy session! nobody wants to hear your struggles or understands them- come generate profits for us by facetiming a newly graduated 24 year old who can barely make rent!

this theme fits well with what already put me off about betterhelp's marketing- their goal has never been to provide access to therapy for those who want it or to altruistically fill in some healthcare gap. their goal, bolstered by the rise in emotional suffering following, you know, the worldwide pandemic, is to generate + increase demand for therapy as a commodity. their earlier podcast ads focused on convincing others that therapy "isn't just for crazy ppl" + "everyone should be in therapy". regardless of if you personally agree with that statement, it should be evident that this is a blatant marketing tactic in which therapy is a commodity to be peddled, not an offer of support or healing. in fact, they're probably actively shying away from treating "crazy people", bcuz their flimsy support systems could not possibly handle an influx of ppl regularly in crisis or experiencing breaks with a common reality. their target audience is your average millennial under late capitalism + post COVID - anxious, lonely, vaguely depressed, unhappy with their jobs, worried + hopeless about their futures.

i'm not here to tell anyone not to get therapy. that's a personal decision + is none of my fucking business. it's about questioning the total alienation we feel from one another, such that pouring our heart our unexpectedly to a friend + being met with a blank stare is framed as "haha you need therapy" + not "it's crushing that this is how distant we are from one another". it's about a company noticing that (unfortunately very real) distance + fear of vulnerability + using that to direct our emotions into the confines of a business transaction under abusive labor conditions. it's about a world in which we are not engaging with one another emotionally (despite, or i guess bcuz of: widespread suffering, recent mass death, class warfare/untenable working conditions, increased pressure of fascist politics, generational trauma + abuse, etc etc). commodifying therapy isn't going to make that loneliness go away- it's going to normalize it.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Truthout:

Rural La Paz County, Arizona, positioned on the Colorado River across from California, is at the center of a growing fight over water in the American Southwest. At the heart of the battle is a question: Should water be treated as a human right, to be allocated by governments with the priority of sustaining life? Or is it a commodity to be bought, sold and invested in for the greatest profits?

As the West suffers its worst megadrought in 1,200 years, investors have increasingly eyed water as a valuable asset and a resource to be exploited. For years, investment firms have bought up farmland throughout the Southwest, drilling to new depths for their water-hungry crops and causing nearby wells to run dry. Now, new players have entered the scene: “Water management companies” are purchasing up thousands of acres of farmland, with the intention of selling the water rights at a profit to cities and suburbs elsewhere in the state. Some argue that treating water as a commodity can efficiently get it where it is needed most. But others fear that water markets open the door to profiteering and hoarding, leaving poorer communities in the dust.

In 2013 and 2014, GSC Farm, a subsidiary of a water management company called Greenstone Resource Partners, which is backed by MassMutual, bought nearly 500 acres of farmland in Cibola, a tiny town in Arizona’s La Paz County, for just under $10 million. The farmland comes with the rights to more than 2,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water a year. (An acre-foot is the amount of water it takes to cover one acre with one foot of water.) Then in 2018, Greenstone sold the water rights, in perpetuity, to Queen Creek, a rapidly growing suburb of Phoenix nearly 200 miles away, for $24 million.

The transfer marked the first time a water management company sold Colorado River water rights. La Paz and two other counties sued to block the transfer, arguing that the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that oversees water resource management, had conducted an insufficient environmental review before signing off. The counties’ request for a preliminary injunction was denied in April 2023 by a federal judge, and three months later the water began flowing down the Central Arizona Project, a 336-mile canal. Then, the judge seemingly backtracked in February 2024, ordering a more thorough environmental review.

“In the meantime, they’re still allowing for the water to flow, which we argued should have been stopped completely until the complete environmental studies have been done,” Holly Irwin, a La Paz County supervisor, told Truthout. “It’s really frustrating, not only for myself, but for the other leaders and elected officials in what we refer to as the river communities.”

The ultimate results of the lawsuit could affect how easily water management companies are able to transfer river water rights for profit in the future.

“I’ve had people already contacting me, asking, ‘Hey, look, I’m looking to buy this piece of property. It’s got water rights. Can it be transferred off the Colorado River?’” said Irwin. “Which is what we knew was going to happen. They just opened up Pandora’s box.”

Companies like Greenstone are betting that the price of water will increase. Western states generally allocate water through a “prior appropriation” policy of “first in time, first in right.” In times of shortage, those with the most senior water claims — often farmers and ranchers whose ancestors claimed Native land — are allotted their full share of water first. Now, companies like Greenstone are lining up to buy those increasingly valuable water rights.

The Colorado River provides drinking water to 40 million people across seven U.S. states, two Mexican states, and multiple tribal lands. Since 1922, its water has been allocated among the states through a framework created by the Colorado River Compact. But river volume has decreased 20 percent since the beginning of the century, leading to tense renegotiations, with the three “lower basin” states — California, Arizona and Nevada — agreeing to reduce their water shares.

Compared to Colorado River water, groundwater tends to be less regulated. Major investment banks have spent hundreds of millions buying up farms with claims to the groundwater beneath them — part of a larger movement by investors into physical assets like lumber, buildings and infrastructure.

Once pumped, groundwater aquifers in warm, dry places can take thousands of years to replenish. In an effort to conserve water basins, Arizona passed the 1980 Groundwater Management Act, heavily restricting groundwater pumping in several urban “active-management areas” (AMAs), including the Phoenix and Tucson areas. It also mandated that developers obtain a state Certificate of Assured Water Supply, demonstrating their new projects have enough water for 100 years. The law is credited as a success for protecting water levels in urban areas. But its lack of restrictions on groundwater removal from rural basins has become a concern as the state population swells and rural wells run dry.

[wen-kexing-apologist]

A Pause for Reflection: Part 2- Only Friends, Racism, and the Commodification of Queer Asians

Hello! It is me, your friendly neighborhood wen-kexing-apologist. Before Only Friends aired, knowing how sex heavy this show was setting up to be, I decided it might be kinda funny if instead of posting my initial reactions to the episodes, which I knew were going to be something akin to an incomprehensible key smash, if I instead committed to a bit where I wrote very dry, academic essays on sex and sex imperatives in Only Friends.

Well, I wrote an essay on Boston, his cruising habits, and my speculations around him being an embodiment of older queer culture expecting like…three people maybe to make it through legitimately 13 written pages with block text citations. But it did surprisingly well, and so now I have decided to full send. 

In my first Taking Pause post, I wrote about respectable promiscuity and the way I felt that concept impacted perceptions of queer people and queer culture, especially as it relates to engagement with Only Friends. This time, I want to dampen the mood a bit further, and discuss racism and its impact on perceptions of queer Asian characters in the BL industry. This was spurred by Only Friends and especially inspired by the posts I have seen going around that project false purity on flawed characters, but will cover Asian BL engagement more broadly as well.  

Disclaimer: I am a white Westerner, addressing this post primarily to white Westerners, and using Western sources. 

The Commodification of Queer Asian Men

Racism is a complex subject, and while people of color are not absolved of white supremacy mindsets through colorism, this invitation for conversation is mostly geared towards my fellow white Westerners. Racism is persistent, pervasive, and insidious in part because we do not always know when and how our own personal biases and learned racism impacts how we interact with the world, or in this case media. 

With the increasing mainstream acceptance of gays and lesbians, and the increasing visibility of LGBT folks more generally, gay space and straight space, gay sociality and straight sociality, are increasingly blended (Dean, 2014). The commodification of gayness is only one example of this. (Ahlm, 2017)

We are frequently spoiled by BL because of how much exposure to queer people in stories we are allowed to see. These stories are not primarily or inherently made for queer people, but what this massive index of gay shows gives the general public is large amounts of exposure to the concept of gay people (about queers), and growing popularity allows for a rapid commodification of queer Asian experience.  

I want to take a second to show the definitions of commodification, so anyone reading this is aware of what lenses I am working from.

Commodification:  to turn (something, such as an intrinsic value or a work of art) into a commodity (Miriam-Webster) 

Commodity: 

an economic good: such as…c. a mass-produced unspecialized product

a. something useful or valued; b. convenience, advantage

a good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (such as brand name) other than price

one that is subject to ready exchange or exploitation within a market (Miriam-Webster) 

Personally, I think it is reasonable to argue that BL and BL branded pairs are exploited by and are an exploitation of the market. We have seen the number of in-universe ads in our standard Thai BLs, the number of BLs being created every year is increasing with the understanding that these shows can be profitable, sell products, sell concert tickets, sell out theaters, make money on fan events, etc.. I think many of us have begun to love when Oishi Green Tea, Nivea Micellar Water, or Canon printers show up in our BLs, but it cannot be denied or ignored that those are commercials for products being sold to us through the images of queer characters and within queer stories. Meaning, the queer stories we are able to interact with en masse are there to sell us a product as well as a story. 

How does this relate to racism? By making queer characters of color sell products within the stories they exist in, we establish a relationship to queer characters of color that extends the commodification of queer men of color themselves beyond what already exists by nature of racism and white supremacy within queer spaces: 

It’s almost as if no gay men of color exist outside of fantasy cruises to Jamaica, Puerto Rico, or the ‘Orient’. And even then, they exist only to fulfill the sexual fantasies of gay white men. ‘Exotic’ vacations to far away places are marketed to rich white men and [low income] colored bodies are only another consumable product easily purchased with western dollars. As such, gay men of color, whether found within western borders or conveniently waiting for white arrival in the far off corners of the globe, are nothing more than commodities for consumption. (Chong-suk Han, 2007)

How many shows have we gotten out of GMMTV in recent years that are absent, or near-absent of in-universe ads? Three? The Eclipse, The Warp Effect, and Only Friends? What themes are at the center of these shows that may make them distasteful to corporations trying to sell their products? 

Now, I entered the BL scene after The Eclipse aired, so I don’t know what its reception was like at the time. But I am pretty certain it was a popular show. Yet, I have personally witnessed the adverse and negative reactions to, especially Ayan, when Our Skyy 2 x The Eclipse aired and we saw Ayan keeping a secret that was hurting Akk’s feelings. I saw the sheer amount of posts coming out of tumblr about how Akk and Ayan were characterized so wrong in this show. And, I am trying to be polite here, but there were just grossly misrepresentative takes on tumblr about the characters we got on screen in OS2, who were extremely in character based on the source material, and not the idea of the characters we have built up in our heads as the lines between Ayan and Khaotung or Akk and First blurred over time. 

The Warp Effect is a show I have constantly been asking people to watch as Only Friends approached and continue to market as required viewing while we are still in the early stages of Only Friends, but it was not widely watched as far as I could tell from the activity on my own tumblr feed and from the number of people I saw reblogging my Case for Watching TWE post who said they had yet to see it. And I get it, it was marketed more as a heterosexual show rather than a BL, but I will go down swinging to defend my position on that show as The Queerest Show of 2023 (so far). 

I think about all the ways people on tumblr have re-written certain characters in their minds to be purer, less morally dubious, more babygirl in order for them to justify loving and supporting a character that is either objectively a terrible person or who has made any number of mistakes that have gotten themselves or others hurt. Listen, my most beloved gay boys are Wen Kexing and Akk but I will be the first to tell you both those men are war criminals. That is not a joke. I love Akk to death as a character, and he let a car roll into a crowd of protestors.

Which is to say, that I am personally made to feel very uncomfortable when I see people twisting the realities of who queer Asian characters are in order to create a false, more pure and innocent version of who they want queer Asian characters to be. Why? Because it treats queer Asian male characters like dolls, like objects to manipulate and control, rather than as the people they are written and intended to be, and the fanservice that is expected of the actors that portray them is not much different: 

At the same time that they are invisible, gay Asian men are also seen as being exotic, submissive fantasies for white men. However, being seen as exotic and submissive is yet another form of subtle racism where gay Asian men are not seen as individuals but as a consumable product for white male fantasy (Ayres, 1999). (Chong-suk Han, 2007)

And yeah, I know some of you may try to deflect this by saying or thinking “wka this quote is about white men and thus does not apply to me” it does. It does apply.

On the Subject of Fan Service 

These production companies make a lot of money off of selling the fanbase the idea that these actors are romantically involved outside of their acting careers. GMMTV and Idolfactory are perhaps the most committed studios to fanservice that I have seen, often to the detriment of the health and safety of their talent and potentially their own financial interests. He’s Coming to Me was delayed, and had it’s distribution fucked with because fans protested Singto being separated from Krist and paired up with Ohm for one show. Freen was recorded and blackmailed with a video that showed she was in a romantic relationship with Seng. Articles were published making it seem like it was a truly wild concept that Man Trisanu and Ben Bunyapol were acting to create the chemistry they get on screen. These companies know they can make money off of the fictions they create, both the ones we see as television shows, and the ones we see in fan meet ups. These people are actors, some may date, some may not, some may be really good friends, some may hate each other’s guts, but the fact of the matter is we will never know for sure. Everything we see on camera is a performance. 

How Objectification of Queer Asian Men Relates to Only Friends

I mean…

I don’t know about you all, but I have seen post after post of people projecting images of purity and perfection on to Mew, twisting themselves forward and backward to justify a character’s objectively terrible decisions, or finding scapegoats to blame for their blorbo’s actions. I have seen people truly, legitimately struggle with seeing their favorite acting pair engaging in intimate scenes with different scene partners. And, to me it reads like some audience members are physically unable to separate the actor from their character, or to accurately identify reality from fiction. These are actors, they are playing characters, we know how good of actors they are. We are all aware of how much of a chameleon First is with his roles, how powerful Khao is at portraying grief on screen, how expressive Book is, etc. 

Force and Book are not fucking, Book is not stringing Force along, Force is not fucking Neo and potentially breaking Book’s heart. Top and Mew are fucking (or will). Mew is stringing Top along. Top is fucking Boston and potentially breaking Mew’s heart. Khaotung is not ditching First to go rescue Book, First is not trying and failing to maintain boundaries with Khaotung. Ray is ditching Sand to go rescue Mew, Sand is trying and failing to maintain boundaries with Ray. 

Harkening back to fanservice. Personally, I believe that only ever marketing “love pairs” (aka Force and Book’s characters as a romantic couple or First and Khao’s characters as a romantic couple on screen) severely severely limits the acting potential for any and all of the performers involved in those couplings. Can you imagine what Only Friends would be like with Neo and Louis, rather than Neo and Mark? Louis is great, but I’m not sure that he could do pining simp, or angry revenge the same way Mark can. You can see how good of a match up Fluke Pusit was with Thor in The Warp Effect and you can see how good Fluke Pusit was with Ohm Thipakorn in A Boss and a Babe. 

As I mentioned in Part One, Jojo has said there is going to be sex in every episode. We know these boys have already hurt each other and will continue to hurt each other. We know these boys have already slept around and will continue to do so. There is no need to vilify a character for being a flawed human being. There is absolutely no need to vilify an actor for portraying a character who is a flawed human being. We don’t need to uplift the characters that are withholding their sexuality from others as inherently good, moral, victims of the inherently bad, immoral, predators ruining their lives with their high sex drives. 

…popular culture is permeated with ideas that erotic variety is dangerous, unhealthy, depraved, and a menace to everything from small children to national security. Popular sexual ideology is a noxious stew made up of ideas of sexual sin, concepts of psychological inferiority… and xenophobia. The mass media nourish these attitudes with relentless propaganda…

All these hierarchies of sexual value- religious, psychiatric, and popular- function in much the same way as do ideological systems of racism, ethnocentrism, and religious chauvinism. They rationalize the well-being of the sexually privileged and the adversity of the sexual rabble…this kind of sexual morality has more in common with ideologies of racism than with true ethics. (Rubin, 1984)

I am begging people who are having difficulty seeing their favorite actor be shitty on screen to take a pause, take a breath, remember that they are actors, playing a fictional character in a fictional role. Fictional characters performing fictional actions has not, does not, and will not ever be a true and definitive indicator of that actor’s own personality, morals, or beliefs. Boston being an asshole does not mean Neo is an asshole. Ray being an asshole does not mean that Khao is an asshole just as Gaipa being kind does not mean that Khao is kind. Jojo and co are not monsters for creating a manipulative character(s), or including physical fist fights, drug use, promiscuity, cheating, sexual assault, abortion, kink, fatshaming etc. etc in to their works. You are not a bad person for liking imperfect characters who engage in bad actions, and you don’t need to create scenarios that place blame for those actions on others in order to justify liking a character.  Everyone on that set appeared to have a great time, and Jojo stated very clearly that all scenes were run by the actors in those scenes and anything the actors were not comfortable with being shown to a broader audience were immediately deleted. The actors were granted agency and autonomy that is not usually seen and we are seeing the performance they want to share with us, the performance they liked. That does not mean they themselves approve outside of fiction of the behaviors their characters may portray. 

Conclusion

We all need to, but white Westerners especially, be extremely careful and introspective with the ways we are engaging with queer Asian media. We need to be careful and introspective with the ways we are engaging with queer Asian characters. Asian BLs, Thai BLs especially lean heavily in to the commodification of queer Asian stories and characters. GMMTV sells products, and uses their talent as the salespeople, which I personally believe makes their talent, and the characters in their stories far more susceptible to objectification than, say, Japanese BLs that do not distribute their work as easily, or cater as readily to international audiences. 

As @bengiyo said in his post, it is totally totally fine if you do not like something. Only Friends could not be your style, there could be themes that are triggering for you, etc. that’s fine. But if you are refusing to engage with this Only Friends because Force as Top acted like he was fucking Neo as Boston, or squirming about whether or not you can watch other shows these actors are in going forward because their performances as dumb, horny college students in Only Friends made you question the actor’s morality, then I truly, deeply, and fully beg you to pause, take a step back, and reflect upon what it is about witnessing these behaviors that is causing your reaction. 

I want to end with the following quote: 

Thus, white men can choose when they want to be objectified, but men of color are simply objects. As discussed above, existing only as props for white male consumption represents another subtle form of racism. As Tony Ayres notes: First, there is overt belligerence…The second response is the exact opposite of this racist antagonism. It is an attraction to me because of my Asianness, my otherness ... This has nothing to do with my individual qualities as a person ... It is the fact that I conveniently fit into someone else’s fantasy (1999, p. 89) (Chong-suk Han, 2007)

As a reminder that we as fans, need to take a step back and consider if, when, and how we are objectifying queer Asian men. We are seeing a huge period of growth in the Asian BL industry, which means we are very likely to get more shows where we are going to see more stories like Only Friends that center realistic depictions of gay Asians as written and directed by gay Asians. And we have to check our privilege, homophobia, and racism at the door.

Sources

Ahlm, Jody (2017) Respectable promiscuity: Digital cruising in an era of queer liberalism, Sexualities, DOI: 10.1177/1363460716665783

Chong-suk Han (2007) They Don't Want To Cruise Your Type: Gay

Men of Color and the Racial Politics of Exclusion, Social Identities, 13:1, 51-67, DOI:

10.1080/13504630601163379 Rubin, Gayle (1984) The Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality- Chapter 9: The Sex Wars.

(thank you to @bengiyo, @lurkingshan, @neuroticbookworm, @so-much-yet-to-learn, and @waitmyturtles for your beta readings!)

[maaarine]

Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (Yanis Varoufakis, 2023)

"What we need, then, is a new story that explains not what we wish would happen but what is actually happening, and that is the story of how rent – the defining economic trait of feudalism – staged its remarkable comeback.

Under feudalism, rent was easy enough to grasp.

Courtesy of some accident of birth, or royal decree, the feudal lord obtained the deeds to a plot of land which empowered him to extract part of the harvest produced by the peasants who had been born and raised on that land.

Under capitalism, grasping the meaning of rent, and distinguishing it from profit, is much harder – a difficulty I witnessed first-hand when as a university teacher I would struggle to help my students spot the difference between the two.

Arithmetically, there is no difference: both rent and profit amount to money left over once costs are paid for.

The difference is subtler, qualitative, almost abstract: profit is vulnerable to market competition, rent is not.

The reason is their different origins.

Rent flows from privileged access to things in fixed supply, like fertile soil or land containing fossil fuels; you cannot produce more of these resources, however much money you might invest in them.

Profit, in contrast, flows into the pockets of entrepreneurial people who have invested in things that would not have otherwise existed – things like Edison’s light bulb or Jobs’s iPhone.

It is this fact – that these commodities were invented and created and so can be invented and created again but better by someone else – that renders profit vulnerable to competition. (…)

Capitalism prevailed when profit overwhelmed rent, a historic triumph coinciding with the transformation of productive work and property rights into commodities to be sold via labour and share markets respectively.

It was not just an economic victory.

Whereas rent reeked of vulgar exploitation, profit claimed moral superiority as a just reward to brave entrepreneurs risking everything to navigate the treacherous currents of stormy markets. (…)

Why didn’t Nokia, Sony or Blackberry build their own store?

Because it was too late: with so many people signed up to Apple, the thousands of third-party developers were not going to spend their time and effort developing apps for other platforms.

To be competitive, Apple’s unwaged third-party developers, mainly partnerships or small capitalist firms, had no choice but to operate via the Apple Store.

The price? A 30 per cent ground rent, paid to Apple on all their revenues.

Thus a vassal capitalist class grew from the fertile soil of the first cloud fief: the Apple Store."

[metanoias-substack]

Modern capitalism needs men who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority or principle or conscience — yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction; who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without aim — except the one to make good, to be on the move, to function, to go ahead.

What is the outcome? Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions. Human relations are those of alienated automatons, each basing his security on staying close to the herd, and not being different in thought, feeling or action. While everybody tries to be as close as possible to the rest, everybody remains utterly alone, pervaded by the deep sense of insecurity, anxiety and guilt which always results when human separateness cannot be overcome.

Our civilization offers many palliatives which help people to be consciously unaware of this aloneness: first of all the strict routine of bureaucratized, mechanical work, which helps people to remain unaware of their most fundamental human desires, of the longing for transcendence and unity. Inasmuch the routine alone does not succeed in this, man overcomes his unconscious despair by the routine of amusement, the passive consumption of sounds and sights offered by the amusement industry; furthermore by the satisfaction of buying ever new things, and soon exchanging them for others.

Modern man is actually close to the picture Huxley describes in his Brave New World: well fed, well clad, satisfied sexually, yet without self, without any except the most superficial contact with his fellow man […].

Man's happiness today consists in "having fun". Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and "taking in" commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies — all are consumed, swallowed. The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones — and the eternally disappointed ones. Our character is geared to exchange and to receive, to barter and to consume; everything, spiritual as well as material objects, becomes an object of exchange and of consumption.

— Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956)

[tenpintsof-sundrop]

Don't panic!! Everyone please calm the fuck down and stop spreading blatant misinformation. Please.

Project 2025 is not even close to be enacted yet (if it will be enacted at all) and a lot of people are spreading blatant misinformation about what will happen if it goes into effect.

Your fanfiction is not in danger. AO3 is not being shut down just because the cheeto man is back in office. Smut is not legally porn, and even if there was a porn ban, it would be supremely difficult to enforce - as we have seen with Tumblr's porn ban, where porn blogs are still quite common.

Yes, in the era of streaming services, it is a great idea to buy a DVD player and collect your favourite movies and shows in physical form - but more because of economic sense in not paying for digital copies that you might not get to keep (due to the stupidity of streaming rights), not because the American government is going to somehow make all copies of that media disappear overnight.

Book bans are always about schools and government institutions (like public libraries) far more than they are about taking certain books out of the hands out of consumers. A lot of people making these posts seem to blatantly misunderstand this part. And it is sad that certain books might be taken away from those institutions, but it doesn't mean that those books will be made illegal entirely.

America loves capitalism, they love money, and they will always do whatever is in the best interest of making more money. They won't push tyrannical religious book bans onto independent book stores and corporations because it is bad business. Especially when the material being banned then just becomes a hot commodity that they could be making money off of via tax instead of seeing that money gone from them in a black market. (Because if a large list of books were banned, there would be a black market for those books.)

(Weed and alcohol legalization is deeply against a lot of people's religion and morals, but the government keeps it legal anyway because they make money off taxing it. It makes good business sense.)

Also, a book ban that aims to get rid of all queer and NSFW content would not effect AO3 because AO3 is not a commercial company or a government entity. They are a non-profit. And if - big IF - for some reason, AO3 was forced to ban all queer and NSFW material (which is the last thing the OTW wants and the exact opposite of their primary founding goal) someone would have to go through each of the millions of posts one at a time to read through them and determine if they have content in them that needs to be "banned". This still leaves a lot of room for posts to slip through the cracks - as we have seen with the Tumblr NSFW ban.

But AO3 won't even be affected, so it's completely theoretical.

If something sounds too illogical and horrible to be true - it probably is. As I said on another post: change doesn't happen overnight, negative or positive. AO3 isn't going to disappear tomorrow. The world isn't going to end and take away all your favourite things with it.