#also a lot of this view of him comes from me lurking on political Twitter and watching normie AND schizo british men mope about their empire | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

greatfay · 4 years ago

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since ur answering asks and shit can u explain what u meant by generational differences in communication

Damn it’s like 2015 tumblr when my inbox used to be WET. So if you’re talking about the controversial opinions post, YES, like I totally understand where people are coming from when they say that generational divides aren’t real (because they aren’t, they’re arbitrary) and distract us from real problems and yes they paint past generations as collectively bigoted when Civil Rights protestors in the 60s (who are in their 70s and 80s now) are mirrors to BLM protestors today, who could be of any age, but the most vocal and famous (at least online, especially irt to the founders, like Patrisse Cullors who is 37.

But how we communicate is sooooo different. I really point to the Internet and Social Media as a major influence in how younger millennials (more Tom Hollands and less Seth Rogans—see even there, I feel like there are two different types of Millennials) and Gen Zrs/Zoomers and even Generation Alpha behave and communicate. We live in a world where we grew up either knowing right out the gate or discovering the hard way that what we say and do has permanence, the kind of permanence that prior generations have never experienced until today. The dumb things kids have been saying since forever can now follow them... forever. We have an inherent understanding of how online spaces work. Compare that to, idk, let’s say you posted on your Facebook (for the first time in 18 months) “All these big and bad grown ass Senators going after actual child Greta Gerwig lol ok, you’re so brave for attacking a CHILD over climate change” and then your aunt, who’s turning “forty-fifteen” in May replies to your post with “So happy to see my passionate niece! Much love from us, hope you’re doing well. Paul is doing great, waiting on his screening results. Tell your mom I said we miss her, we need to get together, we forgive her for last Christmas.”

Like... ok there’s a lot going on there, but your hypothetical aunt is oversharing on a publicly accessible post. And even with the most strict of privacy settings, she’s oversharing where your other Facebook friends (which may include classmates, coworkers, etc.) can see. But she’s saying things that would only be appropriate in a 1-on-1 conversation. This Aunt doesn’t have an understanding of such boundaries, she’s not as technologically literate and hasn’t grown up in a world of Virtual Space, she still gets most of her news from TV, she trusts what a reporter on Channel 4 will read off a script more than what actual video footage of an incident might reveal on Twitter, and she has no clue that she’s been sharing her location data with every post she makes.

There’s such a huge difference. I think it even affects how we experience and express stress and frustration. I think growing up partially in online spaces has made me more accustomed to conflict and consequence-free arguing than someone who never had to worry about that. I’ve been exposed so much to harassment and bullying, triangulating and echo chambers in forums and threads, and vastly opposing point of views at such an early age that it’s had an effect on how I see the world. Compare this to a customer I helped two weeks ago who was looking for a specific type of supplement for children. I found it for her, I handed her exactly what she was looking for, even though her description of the product actually matched several different products; to make sure I’d done my job thoroughly and that she leaves happy and satisfied and doesn’t bother me again, I then show her more products that match her description so that she knows she has options. And she proceeds to freak out, saying “NO, NO, I’M LOOKING FOR [X] AND IT HAS TO BE [XYZ]” and when I say freak out, she looked stressed and PANICKED. And being a retail employee wears you down bit by bit, and add COVID on top of it and little shit like this makes you snap, sometimes. So I have to cut her off like “Why are you screaming and freaking out, jfc you’re holding what you said you wanted. It’s in your hands. I gave you what you wanted, I’m just showing you more things.”

That customer is not an exception, she’s not a unique case. She’s representative of a frightening percentage of her generation, the kids who watched Grease and The Breakfast Club and Ghost in theaters when they were originally released. This is how they communicate and process information. She could not, for some reason, register that her need had been fulfilled, and defaulted to an extreme emotional response when given new and different information.

I’ve yet to deal with someone younger than 35 act the same way, the exceptions being the kids of very wealthy people at my new job who reek of privilege I gag when they walk in—but even they are like *shrugs* “ok whatever” and understanding when there’s something I can’t do for them.

Me: “sorry, we are totally out of that one in your size, but I can order it for you, it’s 2-3 day shipping at no cost to you and we ship it straight to your house”

A rich, white, attractive 22-year-old who’s had access to organic food, a rigorous dermatologist, and financial security since she was born: “mmm... sure, I’ll order it”

A 47-year-old of any socioeconomic background, of any race, in the same situation: “AHHHHHHHHHHH”

I just think it’s crazy how three generations of kids and young adults raised in a world where everything moves so much faster, where knowledge and entertainment and communication can be gathered so much faster, are often so much more polite and patient and understanding. Yesterday I told an older man (mid-50s) whose native tongue is the same as mine, as clearly and succinct as possible, that what he’s looking for is “in aisle 4.” He proceeded to repeat back, “Aisle 7?” four time before I dropped everything to show him what he needed in aisle 4, despite his insistence that he didn’t need me to walk him there. 4 and 7 sound nothing alike in English. There’s just something going on up there 🧠 that’s different.

Oh, other generational divides!!! We have different approaches to labor and working. Totally different! I’m a “young” millennial where I’m almost Gen Z, and I’ve noticed an awful trend among my demographic where people actually brag about working 90 hour work weeks. Or brag about how they skip breaks and live on-call to get the job done for “the hustle” like this “hustle, become a millionaire by 30″ culture that’s dominated these kids, idk where tf that came from. Like why are you proud of being a wage slave, getting taken advantage of by your millionaire/billionaire overlords. Compare this to my mother’s generation (she’s a borderline Genius X’er, she and her best friend were a year too young to watch Grease when it came out and had a random older woman buy tickets for her; she went to Prince concerts, took photos of him, then sold the photos on buttons at school, that’s her culture and teenage experience), where she’s insistent on her rights and entitlements as an employee, and these things she instilled me: “whatchu mean they didn’t schedule a break for you and you’re working 12 hrs today? oh no, you’re off, don’t answer your phone cuz you are NOT available!” There are Gen X’ers who entered the workforce at a time that America was drifting toward this corporate world, with more strictly defined regulations, roles, and understandings of labor rights (and also, let’s talk about how the 80s there was so much more attention on workplace harassment, misogyny and gender divides in wage gaps, etc. etc... not that much has changed, but at least it was talked about!). There are young people today who are taken advantage of because they aren’t as informed or don’t feel as secure and valuable enough to claim what belongs to them.

At the same time, those generations (Gen X and older) have a different viewpoint of hierarchies in the workplace and respect irt our direct supervisors. That’s how you get this blurring of boundaries between Work Life and one’s Personal Life that leads to common tropes in media written by their generations, where oh no! I’m having my boss over for dinner and the roast beef is still defrosting :O is such a “relatable thing” for them... meanwhile us younger generations are like I don’t even like that you know where I live, and if I see your 2017 Honda Civic pass my place one day, we’re going to have a problem. I think older generations have a different relationship with the word “Respect” than we do. Like, my grandma, who’s turning 87 (?) this year, and the other seniors in my area, they have a different concept of honor and an expectation of professional boundaries that I, and my mom and her generation, just don’t see (so then there’s something in common with Gen X’ers and the rest of us.) My dad grew up in a world where talking and acting like George Bailey and knocking on someone’s door with a big smile could get you a job, a job that could pay for college and rent no problem. My mom grew up in a world that demanded more prestige, where cover letters and references could get you into some cushy jobs if you’re persistent and ballsy enough. And I grew up in a world where potential employers literally don’t see your face when you apply unless they lurk on any social media profiles you have publicly available and they hold all the cards, and you need all those CVs and reference letters just to make minimum wage... so I feel like I am powerless in the face of such employers.

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bakagamieru · 8 years ago

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Rolling Stone Breakdown

I read part of the article earlier today before work and I could already tell BS was simmering even before I got home and found out about all the over the top het stuff. Knowing this ahead of time, I’m going to go ahead and take notes / rant back at the article as I read it.

BS 101: Intro to BS

paragraph 1: wow this person really wanted to be a bad fanfic writer, but they got stuck at Rolling Stone instead

I’m being petty with this, but just use “One Direction” fully if you’re going to go to the trouble of typing out “One D” instead of “1D”

“he became a canvas onto which many of fans pitched their hopes and dreams” because all fans of boybands (i.e. girls) dream about is romance and that’s the only reason they’re fans, ALSO media like Rolling Stone had nothing to do with Harry being a blank canvas for people to project their image of him onto (*sarcasm)

every mention of After, even a vague one, is -5000 points, every time it’s mentioned normally and not as the dangerous misrepresentation of abuse it is, is -5,000,000 points, every time someone crosses the line by a light-year and talks about it directly to Harry is -5,000,000,000 points, I don’t make the rules, I just enforce them

“a song cycle about women and relationships”, *cough*womanizer BS*cough, ALSO the first single Sign of the Times is clear social commentary with no real (read: not forced to fit that interpretation) hint of romance in sight, so...?

“more of a rock sound”, still pretending that 1D’s last 3 albums never existed

Harry wants his music to be “honest”, now where have we heard that before? Niall, Louis, Zayn with Liam probably soon to follow. It’s almost like they’ve been held forcibly quiet under a gag order...

I’m trying to figure out how I’m supposed to take the comment that Harry “runs every yellow light” and apply it to his persona, I’m stumped (also, you can’t run a yellow btw)

“the album no one has heard is burning a hole in his iPhone”, chill the fuck out with the italics, I know everyone else has talked about that, but you haven’t even mentioned the secrecy around his album in your article so you have no reason to randomly italicize things

Hiatus

“there was another One D member to vector questions into a charmingly evasive display of band camaraderie”, fuck you and your ever so sly implications that the boys’ closeness was manufactured and that the boys never answering anything interesting had to do with the band rather than interviewers incessantly asking the same vapid questions

“It was in a London studio in late 2014 that Styles first brought up the idea of One Direction taking a break”, as @paynoisbatman already pointed out, this timeline of the hiatus makes no sense with the timing of Zayn “quitting”, also it’s inconsistent with the way the boys denied the first round of hiatus articles in June 2015

just to be clear, they probably DID know about the hiatus ahead of time and they WERE lying when they denied the upcoming hiatus in June, and that also means that there’s no reason Zayn should have jumped the gun so close to the finish line (yay mixed metaphors!), I’m just pointing out the story is inconsistent, so all of these things can’t be true

“If you’re shortsighted, you can think, 'Let’s just keep touring,’ but we all thought too much of the group than to let that happen. You realize you’re exhausted and you don’t want to drain people’s belief in you.” <- This is pure 100% lovely, insightful, well spoken Harry

I’d also like to point out that them first discussing it in 2014 means that Harry’s comment about “we all thought too much of the group” applies to all 5

“I love the band, and would never rule out anything in the future. The band changed my life, gave me everything.” I’d like to point out that they always phrase these quotes to sound like past tense, like the band is broken up as of now, when in reality he’s saying that not only will they come back after the hiatus but that he’s in this band for life

“and not just have it be ‘Here’s a demo I wrote.’” you have that chance Harry! Release the finished version of Don’t Let Me Go Harry!

“Every decision I’ve made since I was 16 was made in a democracy.” I feel like someone misspelled “was a rebellion under Simon Cowell and Co’s dictatorship”

Pretentious Character Work or Work on Building Pretentious Character? Ah, got it: Pretentious Work on Building Pretentious Character

“As one of the most well-known 23-year-olds in the world, Styles himself is still largely unknown” not if you’ve actually paid attention over the last 6 years? I mean yes, always to some extent, but it’s not like this insightful, loving dork is a dark mystery

“He looks at my digital recorder like a barely invited guest.” learn to choose useful metaphors and stop being pretentious

dude, I know you did this on purpose, but you said that “Behind the effervescent stage persona, there is more lore than fact. He likes it that way.” and then put the quote about Prince’s artist draw being his mystery right after, making it seem like he that was his reason for wanting to be mysterious, then you quoted “It’s not about trying to make my career longer, like I’m trying to be this 'mysterious character,’ because I’m not.” which directly contradicts the connection you drew with your words, AKA you knew it was BS and made it seem connected anyway

“The pool cleaner looks perplexed, not quite sharing Styles’ existential joy.” there’s nothing existential about it, it’s just a smile, he’s just being nice to people he passes like a good human being, I’m sorry if you don’t know what that looks like

“It’s obvious that the band has a well-worn frat-house dynamic”, do you actually know what you’re talking about or are you going off of stereotypes? if you’re calling it a “frat” and were in a fraternity, your frat was probably stereotypical anyway

“Styles is, to all, ‘H.’” It’s a fricking nickname that his fricking boybandmates also use, not a commentary on his position as the benign and worshipped leader of the Jamaican band cult frat you apparently think formed

“Pomegranate-scented candles flicker around the room.” this I definitely believe, but did you recognize the pomegranate smell right away or specifically look at a candle to find out what it was?

“It was Styles’ first full immersion into the land of musos” I need that staring into the camera Office gif

Music Ideology

“Most of the stuff that hurts me about what’s going on at the moment is not politics, it’s fundamentals,” Styles says. “Equal rights. For everyone, all races, sexes, everything. …” this is a very interesting thing to randomly bring into a conversation without asking, unlike the rest of the article, this bit aligns with Harry’s rainbows in the pics, at SNL, and out and about with fans

“The song is written from a point of view as if a mother was giving birth to a child and there’s a complication.” No, uh-uh, I like the idea personally , but Harry has said ever since MITAM and maybe before that he likes people to be able to have their own interpretation, he said it in interviews about SOTT recently too, I’m not at all convinced Harry wanted to actually share the official story of what the song means, it flies in the face of his philosophy about song interpretation

“The lyrics are full of details and references – secrets whispered between friends, doomed declarations of love, empty swimming pools – sure to set fans scrambling for the facts behind the mystery.” the fact that you put this right after Ever Since New York is laughable, that is a solid contender for the vaguest lyrics that couldn’t possibly be accurately paired up with details of Harry’s life, but you want people to think it’s about Haylor, don’t you

“I’m happy I found this band and these musicians, where you can be vulnerable enough to put yourself out there.” this one is hard because I can see Harry being grateful for a good group of people to write with, but I also don’t believe the implications that he’s never been vulnerable in his writing before or that he couldn’t be vulnerable with his boyband, both are BS, I’m going to say it’s probably a real quote but with suggestive framing

“The album is a distinct departure from the dance pop that permeates the airwaves.” can people please stop pretending that music hasn’t sounded vaguely 70′s and 80′s-ish for the last 4-5 years?

“It’s different from what you’d expect,” Bhasker says. “It made me realize the Harry [in One D] was kind of the digitized Harry. Almost like a character. I don’t think people know a lot of the sides of him that are on this album.” such. utter. BS. Fans know Harry. the general public only doesn’t know him because MEDIA LIKE ROLLING STONE created that “digitized Harry” that’s “like a character”

“Asked if he spends pressure-filled evenings worried about proving credibility to an older crowd, Styles grows animated.” of course he does, sweet child of man that he is, he jumps at the chance to educate heathens like you about the wonderful world of being a decent human being rather than a sexist prick

1D and Zayn

“He’s not a heavy drinker, he says, maybe some tequila on ice or wine with friends after a show, but by the band’s last tour there wasn’t much time even for that.” Oh, ok, we’re still pretending that TMH wasn’t the craziest scheduled tour

“Styles and his phone have a bittersweet, mature relationship – they spend a lot of time apart. He doesn’t Google himself, and checks Twitter infrequently.” ah, but you forgot his lurking on Tumblr

“I mention a few of the verbal Molotov cocktails Zayn Malik has tossed at the band in recent interviews.” print interviews, all print interviews, because you put words in his mouth just like you're doing with Harry

“threading the needle of diplomacy” yeahhhh.... this is all BS, it’s made to sound neutral to make it seem like Harry is only being polite, whether Harry said these words or not, they’re not HIS words

More Pretentiousness

“Styles, born two months before Cobain exited Earth, doesn’t feel tied to any particular genre or era” funny since his 70′s image is being amped up to 11 for his solo debut

“In the car, he’ll just as easily crank up the country music of Keith Whitley as the esoteric blues-and-soul of Shuggie Otis” and now I know where the country bits of MITAM came from, I was wondering

“It’s like – that’s not how it works. I don’t even remember what the question was.” having “It’s quite small” flashbacks

“ ‘Could I get a selfie?’ Styles obliges, and leans over the counter. Click. We exit into the Laurel Canyon evening.” I’m sorry, I can’t stop laughing, but was the onomatopoeia really that necessary?

“River Phoenix,” the man announces, a little sadly. “You ever heard of him? If he hadn’t have passed, I would have said that was you. Talented guy.” sadness, River Phoenix really was such a talented young man, a very worthwhile person based on the roots of his problems too

The Obligatory Origin Story

They share a silent moment, before Styles walks to his car. He hands me the bag filled with English snacks. “This is for you,” he says. “This was my youth …” “Harry Edward Styles was born in Worcestershire, England” great transition dude, I’m sure that was completely organic

“But in fact, all was not perfection, scored to a cool, retro soundtrack.” but I thought it was!

“His eyes moisten a little, but unlike the young man who wept over an early bout with Internet criticism, a powerful moment in the early One Direction documentary A Year in the Making, Styles tonight knocks back the sentiment.” “look, he’s repressing his emotions, this is progress!” I wouldn’t make fun of this if he had phrased it as Harry being stronger or no longer caring about what other people think, but saying he “knock[ed] back the sentiment”?

“I’d gone because my mum told me I was good from singing in the car … but your mum tells you things to make you feel good, so you take it with a pinch of salt.” um... first of all, X-Factor flashbacks, second of all, Harry said that he’d always wanted to audition but had always been too young, so...

“and united the members of One D in a musical shotgun marriage” I’m keeping this imagery, it’s mine, no one can take it away from me now, no takebacksies

Ben Winston Earns His Tag On My Blog

“ ‘Family,’ answers Ben Winston.” who is not Harry’s family

look, I actually think Harry and Niall and maybe the others actually have a friendship with Ben, I can’t understand why, though, when he always participates in BS like this, I will never forgive him for the Livestream of Doom/FOUR Hangout

“There is more chance of me going to Mars next week than there is of Harry having some sort of addiction.” Why are we so focused on Harry not being a drug addict? He’s not, there aren’t even rumors he is, ok, don’t need to talk about it, moving on.

Styles had just moved out of his family home in Cheshire, an inconvenient three hours north of London. He found a home he liked near the Winstons in Hampstead Heath. wtf? revisionist history much? forgetting all 5 boys lived in the same complex right after moving to London much?

“ He became a friendly mentor to Styles, though the friendship was soon tested... Styles asked if he could briefly move in with Winston and his wife, Meredith. She agreed,” Winston says, “but only for two weeks.”... For the next 20 months, one of the most desired stars on the planet slept on a small mattress in an attic.” this is not Harry, Harry would not move in for 20 months after asking for 2 weeks, if he did he would make sure it was ok, if he made sure it was ok, you shouldn’t be talking about it and essentially badmouthing him to the press

also, can we talk about “one of the world’s most desired stars” because as we’ve all talked about before, Harry was 17/18 and being hypersexualized in the press and this is not ok

Winston continues the tales from the attic. “So we had this joke. Meri and I would like to see the girls that you would come back with to the house. That was always what we enjoyed, because we’d be in bed like an old couple. We’d have our spot cream on our faces and we’d be in our pajamas and the door would go off. The stairwell was right outside our door, so we’d wait to see if Harry was coming home alone or with people... He wasn’t always alone,” corrects Winston, “but it was exciting seeing the array of A-listers that would come up and sleep in the attic. het BS *yawn* *snore*

The subject today is relationships. While Styles says he still feels like a newcomer to all that, a handful of love affairs have deeply affected him. The images and stolen moments tumble extravagantly through the new songs: And promises are broken like a stitch is … I got splinters in my knuckles crawling 'cross the floor/Couldn’t take you home to mother in a skirt that short/But I think that’s what I like about it … I see you gave him my old T-shirt, more of what was once mine … That black notebook, you sense, is filled with this stuff. het BS *yawn* *snore*, I’m really going to need to hear these songs for myself, they better not have fucked with his material, the consolation about Zayn’s album was that at least the music and lyrics were unquestionably his

More Specific Het!Harry BS

The relationship is a subject he’s famously avoided discussing. “I gotta pee first. This might be a long one,” he says. He rises to head to the bathroom, then adds, “Actually, you can say, 'He went for a pee and never came back.' ” you think he was being funny, but he really really wasn’t, are you sure he came back? I don’t think he did, I think everything after the bathroom was utter BS

“When I see photos from that day,” he says, “I think: Relationships are hard, at any age. And adding in that you don’t really understand exactly how it works when you’re 18, trying to navigate all that stuff didn’t make it easier. I mean, you’re a little bit awkward to begin with. You’re on a date with someone you really like. It should be that simple, right? It was a learning experience for sure. But at the heart of it – I just wanted it to be a normal date.” ok, maybe not such BS since he’s as vague and general as you can get in the vast majority of this quote, so he’s saying that when he looks at pictures of himself with Taylor, he thinks how he wanted it to be a normal date with Louis, got it

yada yada yada, Harry being way nicer than he should have to be about his name being used by someone who abused his reputation for her own gain, par for the course

I like tipping a hat to the time together. You’re celebrating the fact it was powerful and made you feel something, rather than 'this didn’t work out, and that’s bad.’ huh, this seems like subtle shade to me since one of my biggest complaints is how nearly all her songs are negative, put the blame on the guy, and don’t have her taking any responsibility (even if they are fake relationships)

He notes a more recent relationship, possibly over now, but significant for the past few years. (Styles has often been spotted with Kendall Jenner, but he won’t confirm that’s who he’s talking about.) it was made abundantly clear that even if you believe the narrative, Harry and Kendall are not currently together, yeesh!

“She’s a huge part of the album,” says Styles. “Sometimes you want to tip the hat, and sometimes you just want to give them the whole cap … and hope they know it’s just for them.” mm, nope, still BS, alternatively a quote taken out of context and not about Kendall or even romance at all

Actual Solo Stuff

“Some of the stuff they’re doing in this movie is insane. And it was hard, man, physically really tough, but I love acting. I love playing someone else. I’d sleep really well at night, then get up and continue drowning.” ok, that was clever, good on you Harry

It was the perfect rite of passage for a musician looking to explode the past and launch a future. I thought we agreed that Harry has no issue with his past in a boyband? can you please remember what you already wrote in your own article

He didn’t feel stifled in One D, he says, as much as interrupted. you bet your ass he did, him and Zayn and Niall, interrupting clueless and/or asshole interviewers all day long (I’m sure Louis and Liam have/will do too, just haven’t had the chance yet)

There are songs from that period he loves, he says, like “Olivia” and “Stockholm Syndrome,” along with the earlier song “Happily.” #confirmed

“But I think it was tough to really delve in and find out who you are as a writer when you’re just kind of dipping your toe each time. We didn’t get the six months to see what kind of shit you can work with. To have time to live with a song, see what you love as a fan, chip at it, hone it and go for that” funny that, sounds like someone forced them into a breakneck schedule and then later made big noises about how their hiatus was because they were so overworked and acted like he had nothing to do with that

Ending

To wind down in Jamaica, Styles and Rowland, the guitarist, began a daily Netflix obsession with sugary romantic comedies. Houseworkers would sometimes leave at night and return the next morning to see Styles blearily removing himself from a long string of rom-coms. He declares himself an expert on Nicholas Sparks, whom he now calls “Nicky Spee.” sounds about right for the guy whose favorite movie is Love Actually

Like the time Styles ended up drunk and wet from the ocean, toasting everybody, wearing a dress he’d traded with someone’s girlfriend. yep, sounds about right

oops, fanfic writer made a full return for this paragraph all in present tense, written by someone else as if Harry’s a fictional character

“I think, as a parent, especially with the band stuff, it was such a roller coaster,” he says. “I feel like they were always thinking, 'OK, this ride could stop at any point and we’re going to have to be there when it does.’ this is the second time he’s brought up roller coasters in his solo interviews, it’s a good description for the thing he’s talking about, but I can’t help but think of Zayn’s old Twitter bio and Anne tweeting that bio not long after March 25th

He grabs his black notebook and turns back for a moment before disappearing down the hallway, into the future. I need the Office gif again

“How am I going to be mysterious,” he asks, only half-joking, “when I’ve been this honest with you?” *sarcasm

#one direction #1d #harry styles #solo harry #rolling stone #bakagamieru #speculation #more of an interpretation really #bearding #media #ben winston is an ass

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jpechacek · 8 years ago

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Eldritch Princesses: Rapunzel

Previous design posts here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Ooh, an easy one: Rapunzel is locked in a tower, tons of unspeakable horrors from beyond space and time are locked away also, the connection is obvious. And because tower by itself isn’t like incredibly evocative, I thought it would be cool to head into overt reference territory and bring in some allusions to one of my favorite cosmic horror stories: At The Mountains of Madness, by our old problematic fave, H.P. Lovecraft.

I don’t think I’ve talked an awful lot about ol’ Howie Phil, at least not here, since insofar as this project has a goal or ethos, it’s “make cosmic horror safe from people like him”. Even people who haven’t encountered the genre have probably heard about what a grotesque racist and misogynist he was. And liking cosmic horror practically requires you to come to grips with how you feel about artists like him—what you’ll excuse, and what you absolutely won’t tolerate.

In stories like “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” he preaches against the dangers of miscegenation. In “The Dreams in the Witch House” and “The Thing on the Doorstep” (and with the creation of the goddess-monster Shub-Niggurath) he plays upon male fears of female power. In nearly all his stories there is a pervasive fear of non-Christian religion, specifically anything originating with people of color. And in At The Mountains of Madness, he delivers a sermon on the decadence of “advanced” civilizations, and the dangers of letting your slaves get too intelligent.

Yeah, I don’t really read Lovecraft anymore.

I discovered him when I was in college, and I was silly and thought overt racism was the only racism. The possibility of symbolism, even unconscious symbolism, in horror hadn’t occurred to me. And it didn’t help that nearly every critical work I read on Lovecraft at the time focused on his craft (lol) and devoted, at most, a few sentences to the repellent views driving it. Thus “Innsmouth” can be written about in terms of how well he sustains an action sequence. Or you can look at the experience of fear and write 1,000 words about the romantic tradition and its notion of the sublime. Or you can write about the limits of human knowledge. Anything to ensure that he’s treated more as a wacky uncle than a person perpetuating dangerous, harmful views. It wasn’t until I upped my reading comprehension skills and read criticism by anyone but straight white men that I realized just how terrible a person he was, and the extent to which that influenced his work.

If you remove At The Mountains of Madness just slightly from its context, it could be read as a quasi-Marxist warning: the Elder Things, masters of a great civilization and creators of life on Earth, are overthrown after generations of mistreating their labor class. Which, indeed, is how younger me initially saw it. But Lovecraft wasn’t thinking like that. He looked back with fondness to the days when Black people were uneducated property (significantly, the Elder Things’ mindless workers, or shoggoths, are pitch-black). He gives all his sympathy to the Elder Things but none at all to the shoggoths whom they oppressed. Masters must keep a tight leash on their slaves, and they must not educate them at all.

So what’s good about Mountains and why did I choose to reference it here? The setting. The setting is incredible: a ruined city in Antarctica, once tropical, inhabited by a vaguely crinoid race. (And, until you get to the horrible racial politics in the back half, it’s a truly creepy and gripping horror story.) That’s literally it.

Now, I’m not here to tell anyone what to read. We all consume problematic media, because all media are problematic. But it pays to think about what you’re reading, and what it’s telling you. Who does it want you to be afraid of, and why? If the answer is “entire cultural groups, whom you can easily discern by these negative traits”, maybe find somewhere else to spend your money.

OKAY, art time. As I said above, I liked the setting of Mountains, and the whole “ancient evil lurks beyond the ken of Man” thing, so I thought “let’s put Rapunzel in a ruined tower in Antarctica”.

This early direction is more @70sscifiart, but I quickly discovered I wasn’t comfortable working in that style. It’s just a little outside my range; visually, I might be too literal a thinker to go so stylized.

In Mountains, the Elder Things are heavily aquatic; Lovecraft is known for his marine-inspired monsters. And with good reason: the ocean is a horrific hellscape. So I started looking there, specifically at corals and brittle stars, for a visual guide.

Now we’ve got a city. And two tiny little explorers there at the bottom. The setting is more fully realized: mountains (yay) and snow (yay) and huge organic structures (eek). At this point I’d also started putting more thought into Rapunzel Herself. What is She? Why is She there? Is She imprisoned, or what? It felt right to have Her tentacles not only extending down into the city, but also up off the page toward the sky. The brittle star design also recalls, if vaguely, the starry motifs in Tangled, and Her swirling tentacles sorta kinda match the lanterns spiraling into the sky. I wasn’t pushing that too hard, though, because this isn’t so much Disney’s Rapunzel as it is a distillation of all Rapunzels I’ve seen.

Finito!

You can see that I’m playing with atmosphere perspective here by using a very fine pen for the more distant structures, a heavier one for the midground, and a brush pen to give the foreground more visual weight. I like the city itself here: the lack of differentiation in the structures is an intentional choice to give it a more alien feel (again, drawing inspiration from coral here). I also like the impression that the entire city would sing in the wind like so many organ pipes. I tried to give a sense of age and ruin by having the snow drifting through those canyons, and burying some stelae near the explorers. There’s a lot more detail than is visible here, like rows of openings on Rapunzel’s tower that allow more of Her tentacles to seep through, or Her body itself, which has a ton of fine structures that you can’t really see.

And that’s Eldritch Rapunzel! I’ve already started on Snow White; as always, follow me on Instagram and Twitter for more regular process stuff. After Snow White, there’s just Tiana, and I might do Elsa just for the heck of it, but I promise nothing. See you around, and thanks for your attention and patience!

If you’re interested in reading some solid Lovecraft stuff, Tor.com is a great starting place, and the multiplicity of authors means you can chase a lot of rabbits. It’s also a good resource for Lovecraft-inspired fiction that interrogates or recasts the more disturbing aspects of his work.

#eldritch princesses #process #rapunzel #tangled #disney princesses

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theliberaltony · 5 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Graphics by Yutong Yuan

A couple of months ago, I found myself in the curious position of examining Joe Biden’s head.

On television, the former vice president comes across as perpetually tanned and coiffed — always with the aviator glasses and the crisp shirtsleeves. He still works out every morning, often lifting weights and riding a Peloton bike, and his face is still golden, his brow remarkably unfurrowed for a man of his 76 years. Up close — like, six inches up close — Biden is slighter than you might imagine. From my aft position in a press gaggle in Dearborn, Michigan, I could see the baby-pink of his scalp peeking through wisps of gleaming white hair and the faint mottling near his ears. They caught me off guard, all those fragile little human details you miss on television.

And it was a very human summer for Biden, if you’re going by “to err is human” standards. On June 18, speaking at a New York City fundraiser at the Carlyle Hotel (a swank spot on the Upper East Side where Woody Allen has a standing gig to play jazz clarinet), Biden began talking about the need for consensus-building. According to the pool report, he broke into a southern drawl as he brought up a segregationist senator from Mississippi: “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Biden said. “He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’” Herman Talmadge — “one of the meanest guys I ever knew” — was another southern segregationist Democrat who Biden worked with. “Well guess what? At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished.”

The outrage was swift. The following day, fellow White House hopeful Sen. Cory Booker put out a statement. “You don’t joke about calling black men ‘boys,’” it began, adding, “He is wrong for using his relationships with Eastland and Talmadge as examples of how to bring our country together.” Biden responded by saying Booker should apologize. “There’s not a racist bone in my body,” he said. “I’ve been involved in civil rights my whole career.”

So a month later, when a reporter in the sweaty Dearborn gaggle started by asking what Biden made of Booker calling him “the architect of mass incarceration” — a reference to his involvement with the passage of the 1994 crime bill — Biden let out a little gust of a sigh before answering. “Cory knows that’s not true.” He seemed weary of the question, and aware that it wasn’t going away.

Biden has largely led in the polls since entering the Democratic primary. Yet his front-runner status is complex: a cornerstone of his primary support is the black community — a recent poll from YouGov and The Economist showed Biden with as much as 65 percent of black support — even as his decades-long record on racial issues has transmuted into something deeply troubling to some Democratic voters. Though Sen. Elizabeth Warren has nipped at his heels in recent polls, Biden remains a peculiar front-runner — numerically indisputable yet, perhaps, fatally flawed.

Biden has a number of swirling factors to thank for his strength with black Democrats. He was President Obama’s vice president and has staked out a spot in the primary’s relatively uncrowded moderate lane — one that ideologically suits many black voters just fine. He’s also hit on a lurking note of pessimism among some black voters about what sort of person they think might be “electable” in a country that made Donald Trump president after the first black man had the job. Biden’s general election proposition, after all, involves winning over white Trump voters who some Democrats have spent the past three years accusing of racism and xenophobia.

Something about the man himself seems to be resonating with black voters, too. Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, a Democratic power broker, told me that Biden’s greatest asset with black voters might well be his own life story, which is strewn with personal tragedy. “We can be no more noble than what our experiences allow us to be. And black voters, by and large, see so much of their experiences in Joe Biden.”

The cornerstone of Biden’s candidacy is support from the black community and his long-standing relationships in it. In June, he attended Rep. James Clyburn’s “World Famous Fish Fry” and spoke to Rev. Al Sharpton.

WIN MCNAMEE / SEAN RAYFORD / GETTY IMAGES

But while Joseph Robinette Biden, the Irish-American speaker of self-conscious Scrantonese, is black voters’ current choice in a Democratic primary featuring two viable black candidates, there’s a sense that the winds could shift at any moment. He spent the better part of the summer relitigating his decades-long voting record. His opponents have pressed him on what they say is an antiquated outlook on race relations in America, all in an effort to chip away at his support among people of color. Prominent Democrats openly fret that he might be too old for the job. The supposed ephemera has accumulated against him even as the numbers check out nicely on paper.

The oddity for present-day Joe Biden is that he was sure America already knew him and what he was all about. But the politics of 2019’s Democratic Party can be slipshod and capricious. Its candidates are viewed more often than not through a kaleidoscopic refraction of peoples’ frustrations with the system or their anger at the president. Biden isn’t really “Uncle Joe” these days, but he presents a pretty enough picture; squint and you’ll see the halcyon Democratic era of the Obamas. If things stay that way — for black voters most especially — Biden might yet win a presidential nomination. But one or two ticks off the mark and the colors and patterns all change. Suddenly Biden could look like a wholly different man.

Biden’s current resonance with black voters is perhaps chiefly owed to Obama, a man he once called “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

In one sense it’s ironic that Biden’s Achilles heel is the past, since a central argument of his campaign is that he can turn back the clock — but not too far back. He wants voters to remember him from the placid (by comparison) days of the Obama administration. Further back in Biden’s past, things get iffier. To that end, it is Obama’s name that Biden seems to mention most on the campaign trail — so much so that at the recent NAACP national convention, moderator April Ryan asked Biden if he used the former president as a “crutch.” (The answer was no. He then went on to talk about Obama some more.) Obama, it should be noted, is wildly popular among Democrats these days — a Gallup post-presidency poll found that he had a 95 percent favorability rating.

The continued Obama name-dropping might have seemed cringeworthy following Biden’s opponents’ critiques — verging on an I-have-black-friends line of defense — but it was also powerful. Many black voters buy the idea that if Biden was good enough for Obama, Biden’s good enough for them. Sheila Hill, an NAACP convention attendee from Arlington, Texas, was emblematic of many voters when she put her fondness of Biden in familial terms: “Joe came up like he’s a member of the family, like he might sit down and have a bite to eat, pull him up a plate, let him get some greens and cornbread. And you know how everyone was introduced? He didn’t need to introduce himself because he’s part of the family.”

A lynchpin of the Biden campaign’s strategy is embracing President Obama’s legacy whenever possible.

SAUL LOEB / AFP / GETTY IMAGES

A couple of days later, in the midst of the Booker vs. Biden news cycle, I was sitting in the Indianapolis Airport when I spotted Rev. Al Sharpton across the terminal. I was coming home from the National Urban League Conference, where I had squished myself into an uncomfortable chair to watch the crowd titter as Rep. Tim Ryan walked on stage to Johnny Cash. I had spent the morning with one ear on the speeches and one eye on Twitter, where Biden acolytes were touting a general election head-to-head poll that put him several points up on Trump in Ohio, the only Democrat ahead of the president. Sharpton had been there too, addressing the assembled members of the civil rights group.

“I think that he certainly enjoys a lot from the Obama connection,” Sharpton said, wearing a beautifully tailored suit and reclining in his seat just in front of the gate. “That’s what I think Biden’s hidden advantage is, deservedly or not: he gets associated credit for Obama dealing with Trayvon [Martin] and Obama dealing with policing commissions.”

(Despite numerous requests for this story on black voters, the campaign did not make Biden available for an interview with FiveThirtyEight.)

Sharpton, for one, seemed unsurprised by Biden’s lead over Sens. Kamala Harris and Booker. “You can’t now take the black vote for granted, and Joe has relationships,” he said. “And they’re long-standing relationships. You need a Jim Clyburn in South Carolina, I don’t care who you are.” By his estimation, Harris and Booker still had a chance to win over black voters, but their paths were far from assured. “I think that racial politics has changed — not dramatically, but to some degree — post-Obama because the novelty is no longer there.”

Sharpton, who expertly fielded the handshakes of a stream of strangers as we spoke, has himself entertained white candidates like Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg at Sylvia’s soul food restaurant in Harlem. He was judging the 2020 Democrats, he told me, on the strength of their platforms. For what it was worth, he liked Buttigieg’s Douglass Plan, a framework to solve fiscal and societal inequities that affect the black community.

The quiet stirring of businessmen near the gate told me it would soon be boarding time. I asked Sharpton how much time Harris and Booker had until it was too late. The end of September, he answered. “Unless of course, Joe does something absolutely off the wall,” he said, chuckling. “Which is not beyond the possible — we are talking about Joe.”

Biden has caught heat from activists for unpopular policies of the Obama administration, like deportations.

BASTIAAN SLABBERS / NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES

There’s a bookstore near my office that I sometimes browse on my lunch hour, a happy way to avoid the harsh fluorescence of office life. Over the summer, a book caught my eye: “Hope Rides Again: An Obama Biden Mystery.” The cover featured a cartoon Obama dangling from the end of a rope ladder — which itself was dangling from an airborne helicopter — while grasping for Biden, trying to pull him up. A few shelves away was the title, “Hugs from Obama: A Photographic Look Back at the Warmth and Wisdom of President Barack Obama.” While bookstores on Manhattan’s Upper West Side cater to a specific subset of America, the books’ mere existence tells a person something: a lot of Democrats still really like Barack Obama and his moderate-in-2019 policies. That’s why the lynchpin of the Biden strategy is embracing the former president’s legacy and coalition whenever possible.

Sometimes, though, that strategy can catch Biden heat. At the second Democratic debate at the end of July, he said that illegal immigrants should “get in line” and wait to enter the country legally. Julián Castro, Obama’s former Housing and Urban Development Secretary, skewered the administration’s deportation policy. “It looks like one of us has learned the lessons of the past and one of us hasn’t,” Castro told Biden in a heated exchange.

Biden faced fallout from this exchange. Activists said that he had been echoing conservative talking points, so he met with Latino leaders in person to smooth things over.

“To me that was surprising because I had written that line for Barack Obama multiple times in every immigration speech we ever did,” former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau told me. “Even language that was, in the Obama years, approved and fine and culturally sensitive — it’s suddenly not.” (A former senior Obama White House advisor said of the debate, “On the Obama side we’re not defensive. The party and the country are in different places than we were in 2008. It would be silly to run on the exact same policies and ideas that we implemented.”)

That’s in part because of the conversation happening online. A favorite line of the Biden campaign is that Twitter isn’t real life, a nod to the fact that young, progressive, vociferously anti-Biden voices seem most amplified on the social networking site but are less representative of the broader base of the party. “We’re not going to let Twitter dictate this primary process for us,” said Symone Sanders, a senior advisor to the Biden campaign. “If we did, frankly, I think we’d spend all our time talking about 1994,” a reference to the 1994 crime bill, Biden’s support of which has helped label him as almost-Republican in certain circles.

The campaign operation has been focused instead on messaging Biden’s moderation and his close ties to Obama. On the morning of the third debate in mid-September, the campaign tweeted out a video with the caption, “Barack Obama was a great president. We don’t say that enough.” Greg Schultz, Biden’s campaign manager, wrote, “Barely a week goes by where some Democratic presidential candidate doesn’t directly or indirectly criticize Pres. Obama. The attacks are out of touch with the majority view of the Democratic Party voters.”

In order to win the nomination in a crowded race, Biden needs to cultivate support across demographic groups, to at least feint at his ability to win back the Obama coalition in the general election. His bedrock of support is black voters. Black voters made up around one-quarter of the 2016 Democratic primary electorate and are a crucial demographic group for any candidate. According to Gallup, 63 percent of non-Hispanic black Democratic voters self-identify as moderate or conservative. This, even as the Democratic Party overall has gotten more liberal — 2018 was the first year that over half of Democrats (51 percent) identified as liberal (in 1994, that number was only 25 percent.)

But while black voters have remained more moderate or conservative, white voters have become increasingly likely to identify as liberal — 65 percent of non-Hispanic white Democrats called themselves liberal and have become rapidly more liberal on issues of race over the past 10 years. With white liberals comprising a key demographic not just in the first two primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, but also in the media, it’s no wonder that Biden’s campaign has felt the pile-on of Twitter chatter.

Yet Biden has given his progressive critics ample opportunity to say he’s carelessly retrograde when he talks about race. In early August, for example, he said “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” While he immediately tried to correct himself, Biden has a long-time reputation for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Favreau told me there was “an anxiety that lasted throughout the White House [years] — ‘will Biden say something sort of off?’ Biden’s reputation before he became vice president wasn’t ‘middle-class Uncle Joe’ and it also wasn’t too old and out of touch — it was that he was a blowhard,” he said.

While a summer of attacks hasn’t shaken Biden’s black support overall, younger black voters don’t seem to like what they see as much as older black voters. CNN polling analysis from this summer showed that Biden’s overall support from black voters is 44 percent, but his support with black Americans under the age of 50 is lower, at 36 percent. CNN modeling suggested that his support is likely less than 30 percent among black voters under the age of 30. A recent poll suggested that Warren might be making inroads with black voters. She has also gained overall on Biden in key states like Iowa and in some national polls.

Younger voters, black ones included, are concerned about issues of race and justice — things like fixing the school-to prison-pipeline, lowering incarceration rates for black men and curbing police violence. Which is why Biden’s vote on the 1994 crime bill has become such a problem and a fixation for the campaign. It might be that younger voters, who previously only knew Biden as the friendly older man next to Obama, are perturbed when they see the crime bill through 2019 eyes: mandatory life sentences after “three strikes” for federal crimes and incentivizing states to pursue harsher sentencing.

Biden, January 1990

LAURA PATTERSON / CQ ROLL CALL VIA GETTY IMAGES

Obama has reportedly expressed worry that Biden World advisors are too old school for the candidate’s good. Some of his advisors, like Sen. Ted Kaufman and Mike Donilon, have been with Biden for decades.

But younger advisors have come on board, too — Schultz and his deputy, Kate Bedingfield, are of a newer generation — and Sanders, a high-profile hire who served on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, is 29 years old. I asked Sanders, who is black, what if any advice she had given to Biden about talking to younger black voters. “I’m not going to divulge the particulars of the conversations that I have with Vice President Biden, but what I’ll say is that he and I have a good rapport, we have a good relationship and the nature of our relationship is that Joe Biden is a frank guy, he’s authentic and he speaks his mind and he empowers the people around him to do the same.”

The polls, Sanders said, bore out that Biden’s approach was working. “Anyone who purports that we don’t understand this moment or our campaign doesn’t get it — I think we uniquely understand this moment because this has been our argument from day one.”

But the crime bill remains a vulnerability for the campaign, something that engenders defensiveness from the candidate. In June, while answering a question about prison reform he brought up the crime bill, “which you’ve been conditioned to say is a bad bill,” he told the audience.

Biden has spent a lot of time in a defensive crouch about the legislation. His proposed criminal justice reform plan outlines ways to reduce incarceration, a pointed policy rebuke to the effects of the 1994 bill. But at events, he goes to lengths to defend what he calls the good parts of the bill — including the Violence Against Women Act — and his surrogates are quick to say that people are purposefully leaving out the historical context of what America was like when the legislation was passed. Clyburn — who has not yet endorsed a candidate — recalled for me a town hall meeting he had back in the 1990s in a mostly black town in South Carolina. “I spoke out against mandatory minimums, I spoke out against the crack cocaine policy. I almost got physically attacked in that place. There wasn’t a white person in the room,” he said. “To them, crack cocaine was a scourge in the African American community and they supported this crackdown.”

Biden’s grappling with his pre-Obama history is fraught, in part, because before being Obama’s vice president, he wasn’t much of a known figure in black communities. When Biden briefly ran for president in the 1988 election — a June to September endeavor that ended in a plagiarism scandal — he had little apparent appeal in the black community. A pre-scandal poll from that summer shows that he didn’t even register with black voters — he was at 0 percent while Jesse Jackson, one of the first major black Democratic candidates, had 48 percent of the black vote.

Still, hopes for Biden were high, particularly in the political media. One Los Angeles Times story from that June called Biden “the white Jesse Jackson” and noted that his opposition to federally mandated busing was savvy, “a sign of both his keen political instinct and a social imagination — a sense of the real-life consequences of government action that is rare in Washington.” Biden opposed busing because it threatened to destroy “the consensus on civil rights within the white middle class that permitted progress’ for blacks,” the story surmised. Even on hot-button issues like race, Biden was proud of his ability to foster compromise and centrism. It’s a legacy that hasn’t aged as well in a Democratic Party which is more apt to burn its one-time idols than study their historiography.

The day after the second debate, Jonathan Kinloch, a black Democratic Party official in Detroit, sat with me at a local cafe eating forkfuls of something sweet while saying something bitter: “Based on where we’ve come over these past three years and looking at the person, that Tasmanian Devil in the White House, it’s going to take another same sort of type of white man to go toe-to-toe with him.”

Kinloch doesn’t think America is going to elect a black candidate, not right now. “I’ve come to only one conclusion: Trump was elected out of eight years of repudiation for having a black man in the office. I think right now, where this country is, the flames that have been fanned by Donald Trump, we have to take a measured approach to this upcoming election.”

Biden faced blowback in July’s Democratic primary debate for his comments about fostering compromise with segregationist senators and for his stance on federally mandated busing.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP / GETTY IMAGES

This is the sort of electability argument that the Biden campaign can’t quite say out loud, but to which some black voters seem at least partially resigned. They might not love Biden’s semi-frequent verbal washouts but Trump in the White House grates on them more. It’s this logic, as bright and shining as their candidate’s teeth, that Biden allies allude to. Whatever his sins, whatever his prior stances, Biden’s 2020 intentions are pure — certainly purer than Trump’s. And, the theory goes, he’s got the sort of mass appeal that will talk sense into Obama voters who defected to Trump the last go-round. (Recently, a whistleblower complaint surfaced claiming that Trump leaned on the Ukrainian president to find damaging information on Biden and his son Hunter. In response to the news, Biden said that Trump was going to such extremes only because “he knows I’ll beat him like a drum.”)

There’s a risk, of course, that in trying to appeal to everyone, in refusing to play too woke, Biden risks flagging enthusiasm from black voters come the general election. The black vote disastrously didn’t surface for Hillary Clinton in 2016. There’s also some serious doubt that any candidate besides the singular first black president could inspire high turnout in the black community. In a Detroit press gaggle, I asked Biden how he planned to get Obama-era levels of votes in the black community in key general election states. I got a typically-rambling response in return. “They want to know someone — first of all, are they telling them the truth, are they laying out straight exactly what they’re going to do? No double talk. What are you going to do. And then secondly, ‘Do I believe you understand me? Do I believe you know my heart?’ I’m not a black man, to state the obvious, but I’ve gone out of my way to understand the best I possibly can what the concerns are.”

Some of the weirdness of the 2020 primary, including Biden’s leading it, is that for a party professing to be fighting for the soul of America — like, for real for real this time — there isn’t much soaring idealism afoot. It’s a contest about pragmatism. As Jill Biden put it, “You may like another candidate better but you have to look at who’s going to win … Joe is that person.”

“People are not excited, they’re not inspired,” said Anton Gunn, Obama’s former South Carolina political director. “Young people want to be inspired, everyone wants to be inspired. I don’t think we have a sense from anyone in the field that’s inspiring.”

When I spoke with Jackson, I asked what he thought about black voters’ support for Biden, his old rival. “The absence of Trump is not the presence of justice,” he said. “In the days to come I’m sure those who put forth the most hope for tomorrow and plans will gain the most traction in time. That may be Biden, but the question is wide open.”

The morning of the second debate, I met Rep. Cedric Richmond, the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and a co-chair of the Biden campaign, in the lounge of a downtown Detroit hotel. Various suits wandered the halls and a forlorn offering of pasta salad stood sentinel in one corner. I asked Richmond about the same thing I asked Sanders: had the campaign done any additional preparation with the candidate to ready for a new racial discourse?

“I didn’t know we had a new language on race,” Richmond answered wryly. Millennials, he went on, “are the beneficiaries of things that they don’t know they’re beneficiaries of — for example, murder was at an all time high in the early ‘90s. The streets were violent. You had children, mothers, fathers, brothers, sons being killed in the streets, you had rampant carjackings, you had drug dealing everywhere. The African American community was up in arms asking people to do stuff.”

For black voters, Richmond said, the stakes of the 2020 election were clear: “Donald Trump could be a one man end of Reconstruction.” Beating him is what matters. Dwelling on Biden’s vocabulary is just frippery by comparison.

Biden supporters cheer during the South Carolina Democratic Party Convention in June. South Carolina, with its predominantly black electorate, is crucial to Biden’s success in the primary.

LEAH MILLIS / REUTERS

Richmond told me the campaign sees a path to victory through the South, a region packed with black votes. Dave Wasserman, editor at The Cook Political Report, agreed. “I think his strengths lie on Super Tuesday,” he said of the slate of March 3 primaries a month after the very first contest in Iowa. Candidates like Warren are more likely to do well in Iowa and New Hampshire, Wasserman said. Biden campaign officials have told reporters they don’t think he needs to win Iowa, where liberal white activist voters hold sway. “But when you’re talking about a massive one-day clearance sale on Super Tuesday where it’s all about mass appeal and name recognition and strength — particularly black voters in the south, that’s where Biden really needs to hold on,” Wasserman said.

South Carolina’s Feb. 29 primary is a bellwether for Biden’s Southern strategy with a primary electorate that’s almost two-thirds black. Biden was at 43 percent in a recent CBS News/YouGov poll of the state, and it is a must-win for him. But strategists there hardly seem to think that things are sewn up for Biden. “I don’t believe polls because the same polls at this time in 2007 would show Obama was losing to Hillary Clinton by 18 points,” Gunn said. Obama would go on to win South Carolina. ”We kept organizing. Organizing is about touching people and knowing how many voters you’ve identified.” Booker’s field organization looked pretty good to Gunn, though he said it wasn’t as robust as Obama’s had been in the 2008 primary. “Definitely don’t write off Booker,” said a senior South Carolina Democrat who asked for anonymity to more freely discuss the campaign. “He has the best operation.”

I headed to South Carolina in late August, just as my inbox was signaling crunchtime of the presidential campaign slog: Buttigieg in L.A., Warren in Washington state, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Biden in South Carolina.

As a rule, Biden campaign events — which take place less often than other 2020 candidates’ — tend to be large affairs. His late August town hall in Spartanburg was no exception. Massive rollup American flag displays were stretched taut at either end of an echoing room. The campaign’s “Biden President” logo was slapped up everywhere. The omission of the word “for” was a not-so-subliminal message about the job he wants. A large contingent of media typed in back; a brawny blonde reporter joked with a brawny salt-and-pepper reporter about some home state sports thing.

Basically every Biden event — every 2020 campaign event for that matter — is a chance for a secular revival. And Biden is good at being churchy; he knows what to give a crowd. He can be folksy and familiar — the ghost of Uncle Joe — as well as discursive on issues of morality. When talking about guns or abortion he is most eloquent; you get the sense that Biden has devoted a whole lot of time inside his head to those topics. He starts every town hall or speech by setting the stakes with a mention of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017: “It shocked the whole world.”

Biden’s speech is riddled with “I’m being serious” and “seriously, folks” and “no kidding, folks,” to the point where it’s become a running joke in the press corps. I spoke with a former speechwriter of his who thinks that the “folks” tics might be something Biden has developed over time to deal with the stutter he had in childhood. “It’s how he handles transitions,” he told me.

Biden has struggled to gain ground with younger voters despite his strong showing in the polls overall.

SEAN RAYFORD / GETTY IMAGES

The childhood stutter is one of many personal details that voters have learned about Biden over the years — people have a relationship with him. Those I spoke with who know Biden all tended to say the same thing: he actually is an earnest guy. The care is real. But there’s also a carefully refined rubric of folksiness at work, all mixed with a 76-year-old’s out-of-date sensibilities. Those things can rub some people the wrong way, but both might be political strengths in the general election. “Above all else, it’s just human, it’s a storytelling voice,” Biden’s former speechwriter told me about the candidate’s preferred public voice. “It actively tries to connect with the people who are literally in front of him. Not with some kind of abstract, ethereal voter demographic or anything like that. It’s personal.” In Spartanburg, for instance, Biden talked about women deserving equal pay, but framed the problem through the lens of blue-collar men wanting their wives to be paid more. It wasn’t exactly a politically correct formulation of the issue, but its practicality rang true.

There is a gentle affect about Biden, too. When telling stories about his adult children, he refers to them as “honey” — the doting dad. Stories about his parents start with “Joey …” and suddenly he’s the adoring son. He apologizes for blocking the sign language interpreter. When he shakes hands with people, he stares deeply into their eyes — the kind of eye contact that some have called creepy but others find intoxicating coming from a very famous person. Biden has an ability to make people feel as if he has really listened. One voter I talked to in Spartanburg, Vanessa Logan, emailed me later to say that she’d asked Biden a detailed question; he had made sure his aides got her contact info so they could send her his book for a more in-depth explanation.

This attentiveness coupled with the routine vulnerability Biden shows is partially why people can’t help but be a little fond of him. “He’s down to earth, has a lot of warmth,” Sheran Littlejohn, a middle-aged black voter who came out to see Biden during his South Carolina swing, told me. “At first I thought about Kamala Harris, but then she started coming down on her own party. She went after Biden.” Somehow, even as Biden is running to protect America from Trump, he’s made voters feel like they want to protect him.

A few hours after the Spartanburg event I was at Limestone College in Gaffney, South Carolina, where it was sweltering hot even a little after 5 p.m. The only breeze came from the pep band flag twirlers entertaining a waiting crowd and the ladies in it who sat fanning themselves. Biden was running late, so I dipped into the library for a few minutes of A/C, then strolled through the crowd. I found Rosa Webber, 64, under the shade of a Magnolia tree, waiting for the event to begin with her friends from the Gaffney Women’s Democratic Club.

Webber had already made up her mind about who she’ll be voting for, come February’s primary. “If he was good enough for Obama, he’s good enough to be my president,” she said of Biden. But Anita Chambers was still candidate shopping. She liked Biden and Harris, but, “also, what’s her name? Elizabeth Warren. I like her. She’s very outspoken, very direct.”

Webber didn’t think any of the women could win, though. I asked why and before she could answer, Annette Byers, 75, interrupted: “Because the men, they’re going to do females just the way they did Hillary.” Webber agreed. “Yeah, the men are not going to vote for women. I don’t think it’s time for the women to step up.” Chambers tried to say something positive about the promise of a reinvigorated women’s movement. Byers wasn’t moved. “They will cheat her out of the election just like they did with Hillary. They will lie, lie, lie.” The conversation ended soon after, as a man with a honey-soaked accent got on the microphone and commenced proceedings.

Biden’s long career in the public eye means that voters have formed a long-standing relationship with him. This familiarity has helped him weather blunders and flare-ups throughout the campaign that might have endangered lesser-known candidates.

SEAN RAYFORD / GETTY IMAGES

Jalon Roberson, a 22-year-old senior at Limestone, said that when he and other black students talked 2020, he found most of them were still on the fence about whom to support. Roberson liked both Biden and Harris, but saw issues with both. “I like that she’s devoted to law, but a lot of her past doesn’t line up with the angle she’s taking now,” he said of Harris. “A lot of black males are going to jail, getting put away, but now she comes out and she’s like, ‘Hey, I’m for black people, I eat pork chops, blah blah blah.’ I feel like she’s trying too hard to appeal to black people. I feel like there is a way to try and come across as sincere but you have to first acknowledge that you’re an outsider and say, ‘Hey, I want to appeal to you guys.’”

Biden, Roberston said, seemed like a moral guy, a good person. But, “he was in Iowa and he slipped up and he said poor kids are just as talented and bright as white kids. And I know that’s not what he meant and that’s not how he meant it to come across, but you can tell that there is an unconscious bias.” Roberson wanted to ask Biden about how to tackle that bias.

Roberson did get a question in, just not that one. As the beginning of golden hour set in over the crowd and the hottest part of the day came to an end, Biden was taking questions from the crowd in blue-and-white shirtsleeves. “A lot of young people my age, my race, we are trying to find the incentive to vote Democratic. Why should we trust the party, and how would your administration go about holding the party accountable?” Roberson asked him.

A good question, a fair question, Biden said. He began to weave his way through the folding chairs, a meandering walk to make eye contact with students seated a little further back on the lawn. One young black man stood on a short brick retaining wall in sunglasses, a pink button-down and a hoodie. Biden made his way toward the young man while he answered, hoping to drink up some eye contact. Just as Biden approached, almost standing in front of him, the young man flipped his hood up defiantly and Biden skillfully pivoted away. A confrontational moment avoided.

The answer continued for another few minutes, and the young man kept his eyes on Biden throughout. Biden mentioned the number of incarcerated black men and the crime bill — how most black people had supported it at the time. He talked about racial profiling in Newark, New Jersey — his favorite dig at Booker. Then, “We have systemic racism in the United States of America and it’s a white man’s problem. White men are responsible for it, not black men.” The young man on the wall said, “I agree,” to that, and clapped. It was a good answer for Biden, overall. He got applause for lines about teaching prisoners how to read, positioning prisoners to get proper housing after their time served. But Jalon Roberson and the young man in the hoodie are college kids, not prisoners. It struck me that Biden’s answer wholly ignored most of the issues that the black students at Limestone and elsewhere told me they were most worried about: student debt, raising the minimum wage, the environment. Biden’s defensiveness of his past had dominated the answer. Though he did throw in a sentence or two at the end about the American Dream — “that’s why we have to rebuild the middle class and this time, we bring everybody along” — he didn’t offer any specifics.

Biden had wanted desperately to prove himself worthy to the audience of students, but a vast gulf of age and experience separated him from Roberson and the young man in the hoodie. “Let’s hear it one more time for the next president of the United States, Joe Biden!” the MC intoned over the microphone. Everyone clapped. That was that.

If Biden wins the nomination — his third attempt to do so — he will be 77 years old. The party he leads has changed rapidly during his time in public life, becoming more liberal and diverse.

JUSTIN SULLIVAN / GETTY IMAGES

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what Clyburn said about Biden’s tragedies. How the way he dealt with them had raised Biden in the esteem of many black voters, given the systemic hardships inflicted on them and their families over a couple of centuries in this country. Biden repurposed his suffering so it could be something more — a blessed experience, Clyburn said.

I’ve also spent a lot of time wondering why Biden ran for president this time around. He says publicly it has a lot to do with the wishes of his son Beau, who died in 2015, that he stay involved in public life. There’s ego at work, of course — it takes a massive one for a person to ever even consider running for president. But why after running for president twice, and losing soundly each time, would you do so again at age 76?

Biden might feel some sense of vocation this time around. Being a Catholic, he would recognize the Sunday school-ness of it all: what are you called to do? The way he gets fierce when he talks about winning back the Midwest, the bluster he spits when speaking about Trump’s misdeeds — it makes you think that there’s something twinging inside Biden that says, without a hint of irony, “I alone can fix this.” He wants to give people enough time to come to terms with a new American paradigm, while offering the familiar visage of an older white man standing guard. Biden sees himself as a singular salve and so do many black voters, pragmatic about the ability of America to readily accept change.

Biden isn’t alone, of course. There’s a moral imperative for each of the top three primary contenders, all in their 70s. Bernie Sanders and Warren proffer a promise of a golden, hopeful new system; Biden the restoration of one that was pretty good, if not perfect. If anything, the Democratic primary is something of a paean to old age, to lifelong ambitions and vocations yet to be fulfilled. It’s a monthslong slog as a trio of older white people bid to lead a country more black and brown than it’s ever been. I can see them — with more years behind them than ahead, in a world so different from the one they were born into — lingering longer than the rest of us over the most hashed-out lines of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”:

“You and I are old / Old age hath yet his honour and his toil / Death closes all: but something ere the end / Some work of noble note, may yet be done.”

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Clare Malone

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cryptobully-blog · 7 years ago

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Can The Blockchain Turn Pepe The Frog Into Modern Art?

http://cryptobully.com/can-the-blockchain-turn-pepe-the-frog-into-modern-art/

Can The Blockchain Turn Pepe The Frog Into Modern Art?

Illustration by Kelsey Dake

Editor’s note: This article includes depictions of a cartoon character that many deem offensive due to its association with white supremacist groups. Some links in this story lead to offensive material.

Pepe the Frog started as just a chilled-out amphibian with a chilled-out catchphrase: “Feels good man.” That was back in 2005, when he first appeared in a comic series called “Boy’s Club.” When the comic debuted, Pepe and his cartoon roommates dabbled in “laconic psychedelia, childlike enchantment, drug-fueled hedonism, and impish mischief,” according the publisher of a book compiling the strip.

But even cartoon amphibians can go through a metamorphosis. Pepe soon took on a life of his own, and his mischief became much less impish. The image board 4chan.org — a sort of twisted, anarchic incubator for memes ranging from wholesome to hateful — adopted Pepe and relentlessly remixed and repurposed him for far different purposes than the character’s creator, Matt Furie, had intended. Users depicted Pepe as a crudely drawn, bright-green frog with enormous eyes and a wide mouth, often shown looking vaguely sad or slightly sly. He became so broadly popular that he even started showing up in celebrities’ Twitter feeds.

But soon those remixes included hateful messages. Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, the frog was co-opted by the so-called alt-right, a loose collection of conservative, populist, white supremacist, neo-fascist and neo-Nazi groups. Pepe became an unofficial mascot of a racist and anti-Semitic campaign in support of the candidacy of Donald Trump. The frog had long since lost its aura of childlike enchantment and had donned MAGA hats and SS insignia. Pepe is now listed as a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League. Furie lawyered up, trying to wrench his creation back to its original status, but the alt-right fought back. When Richard Spencer, the white supremacist and alt-right figurehead, was famously punched in the face on a D.C. street on President Trump’s Inauguration Day, Spencer was explaining his frog lapel pin, saying, “It’s Pepe. He’s become kind of a symbol —” before being cut off as the punch landed.

Now one group of people wants to make Pepe symbolize something else: the future. Artists and speculators are building a new way to make and sell art, trying to repurpose a cartoon popularized by a message board so lawless that it scared away advertisers and turn it into a viable commercial enterprise.

Gathering in a digital bazaar for Pepe-related images, they’re trying to use the blockchain to create a new kind of art market, one that uses crypto technology and allows anyone to submit their work to be bought, sold and traded. The people involved hope to prove that crypto can be used to shift the art world’s balance of power, putting control into the hands of artists, rather than galleries or commercial third parties. The art that they’re selling, though, depicts that same frog that was featured in so many racist and anti-Semitic memes. But that hasn’t deterred the artists, many of whom believe they’re returning Pepe to his original, chilled-out roots. And they’ve sold over $1.2 million worth of his image in the process. That’s about 100 million in Pepe Cash. Yes, Pepe Cash.

DANK PEPENo. issued: 420

Most of this Pepe buying and selling happens through a website called Rare Pepe Wallet. The site features about 1,600 “Rare Pepes,” with more added regularly. They depict Pepe in all manner of memetic mashups and aesthetic forms. Many, but not all, look like trading cards. There’s smiling blonde Trump Pepe. There’s Pepe as Super Mario. Pepe as the Pope on the cover of Time. Warhol Pepe. Dalí Pepe. Kardashian Pepe. “Futurama” Pepe. Run-DMC Pepe. The Pepe Sistine Chapel. And on and on and on.

The absurdity of this project is not lost on its participants. “We’re using the most secure financial computer application ever known to man to swap cartoon frog pics,” Steffen Cope, a Web developer who creates and trades Rare Pepes, told me.

There’s such a thing as a Rare Pepe market only because of what the blockchain can do: It makes digital assets that are provably scarce. The blockchain’s decentralized record of transactions — a digital ledger — can’t be altered without leaving a public record. That allows for a more reliable accounting of who really owns digital art. Each Rare Pepe carries a finite number of digital tokens, and these tokens are what you really buy or sell when you buy a Rare Pepe. The blockchain guarantees, for example, that there are precisely 420 tokens associated with the image “Dank Pepe” — never more, never less.

This is the same technology that drives cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, and, in fact, the Rare Pepe tokens live on the Bitcoin blockchain, making the frog meme tokens as provably rare and as secure as Bitcoin itself.

Rare Pepes are even purchased with a cryptocurrency named after the frog — Pepe Cash — a unit of which is, as of Monday afternoon, trading for about 5 cents. Pepe Cash, which has been around since 2016, is, itself, a Rare Pepe — though there are 701,884,009 units of Pepe Cash in circulation. The currency has a market cap of roughly $37 million.

That’s a lot of money that could potentially be spent on something that doesn’t tangibly exist. So why in the world would anyone buy a Rare Pepe? After all, the only thing you really own when you buy a Rare Pepe is a digital token; the images themselves are freely available and infinitely reproducible. You can copy them, paste them, email them or tweet them for nothing. So why part with your hard-earned Pepe Cash?

“I think the image isn’t the most important thing,” Joe Looney, the co-founder of the Rare Pepe Foundation and a developer of Rare Pepe Wallet, told me. “It’s not the image so much as it’s the whole legend of it.”

By “legend,” Looney meant not the frog’s fraught past but the origin story of the each card’s creation — its artist, its creation date, its ineffable memetic appeal. Sure, the image associated with the token you buy may float around the Web or find its way onto FiveThirtyEight, but you and provably few others are its owners, for whatever that’s worth. (Right now, it appears to be worth a lot — more than 75 individual Pepes have sold for over $1,000, and over 25,000 in all have changed hands.)

RARE PEPENo. issued: 300

But, of course, that legend doesn’t necessarily undo Pepe’s legacy. While the Rare Pepe project is exploiting the blockchain for its digital immutability, it’s also attempting to overcome the nature of the internet itself, which can preserve posts for decades, serving as a kind of fossil record for what would once have been cultural ephemera. Regardless of what the cartoon comes to mean in the coming years, the internet is and likely always will be rife with references to the racist Pepe, the Nazi Pepe, and the Pepe lapel decorations of cold-cocked white supremacists.

The people who trade Rare Pepes are familiar with that tension, though they don’t see it as a reason they should stay away from the frog. I recently found them on Telegram, a messaging app and favorite hangout of the crypto set. I was lurking in a channel called Rare Pepe Blockchain Trading, which at the time had more than 1,500 participants, and I had private chats with about 20 members of the Rare Pepe community. I asked them about what they thought they were creating — and its politics.

One user I spoke with, Steve from Los Angeles, who goes by CryptoChainer, refused to share his full real name. He explained, “Having the first search result of my name come up with Rare Pepe isn’t entirely exciting, but I wish it was.” He added: “Most Americans still probably associate it with alt-right or some crap — 4chan, Nazis, what have you.” But for Steve and other Rare Pepe enthusiasts, Pepe’s appeal lies in part in his versatility — it’s a recognizable meme that allows endless artistic expression while also serving as a rallying point for their crypto community.

Like Steve, many in the Rare Pepe world — including a sizable percentage of the community who don’t live in the U.S. — aren’t very concerned about the frog’s popular connotations. They rejected its racist associations, or were barely aware of them, or were sick of being asked about them, viewing the troubling link as either passé or irrelevant — the artifact of a specific and fleeting moment in U.S. political history. But even when Pepe isn’t partisan, it can still have politics of a certain kind. “I think Pepe best represents the world’s pivot from P.C. and identity politics back to a more inclusive politics and open exchange of ideas,” someone with the username BuddhaNeedPepecash72 said.

JESUSPEPENo. issued: 10

Indeed, most in the Rare Pepe community see the frog as the future of art and art commerce. One Pepe enthusiast said he hoped to create “the first eternal digital open museum.” Jason Rosenstein told me that he’s able to pay his New York City rent with the money he’s made from Rare Pepes. Christine Lewis, who, at almost 60, jokingly called herself “crypto grandma,” came to the community because her friend told her that Pepe Cash was a good investment and that “it’s supposed to be a big deal … in five years, lol.” Another user, PimpingKek, claimed to be the world’s only Rare Pepe agent, identifying hot talent around the globe, getting them set up on the blockchain, and advising them on how to price their work and roll it out to the market. (Kek, of course, is the Egyptian god of darkness of whom Pepe is said to be a present-day avatar.)

Sometimes Pepe’s darkness creeps into the submissions to Rare Pepe Wallet. Anyone can create a Rare Pepe, which means that anything can be submitted as a Rare Pepe. Which is why the Rare Pepe Foundation — whose website tagline is “Blockchain Revolution” — says it takes pains to filter out offensive Rare Pepe submissions before they make it to the Rare Pepe Wallet gallery. (“Trying to be keep it light for now,” the site says in its submission guidelines. “Pepe has alot of bad press.”) Looney said that organizers have blocked the submission of offensive Pepes before, but that they hadn’t needed to recently. “That probably coincided with when it was more in the media as a Nazi frog,” he said.

Even among the Rare Pepes approved for display in the online gallery, it’s difficult to judge how many people might find them offensive, or even whether they’re intended to offend. One work, titled “Trump Wall,” depicts a crude Mexican frog caricature, but Looney said it was created by a Mexican artist, and it has a description that reads, “Pepe not impressed by Trump Wall.” Many others explicitly address politics. There is one titled “Killary Pepe” that features the caption “circumvent any law” under an image of a Hillary Clinton frog sending an email. There is an entire series of Putin-themed Pepes. There are a handful of Trump-themed ones. There is a Pepe take on Clinton’s “I’m With Her” campaign slogan. But many Rare Pepes are so tongue-in-cheek, so caked with alternating layers of irony and truth and absurdity that it’s hard to hear any definite political signal through the noise. “There isn’t a ‘no political Pepes’ rule, so you’ll certainly find them if you’re looking through the directory,” Looney said. “Some definitely toe the line.”

MODERN PEPENo. issued: 100

Art is often political, and good art nearly always provokes. But the specter of Pepe’s past remains. Can the project navigate the tightrope between the perfect memory of the blockchain and the long memory of the internet? The topic comes up in the Rare Pepe Blockchain Trading group from time to time. A representative exchange: “Pepe is a symbol for Nazis,” someone said. “Lol no,” came a response. “Did you know that since racists drive cars that cars are racist?” someone else added sarcastically.

Rare Pepes are now catching the eyes of the art world’s old guard, as well. In January, a digital art festival in New York City hosted an in-person auction of a one-of-a-kind Rare Pepe called “Homer Pepe.” It sold for $39,200. Vice reported that, during the auction, “staff from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Sotheby’s Institute of Art sat silently.”

But for how long?

Coming this later week: How crypto-art and the blockchain could shape the future of art.

Blockchain

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megadarkbouquettidalwavethings · 7 years ago

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Here Come the Fake Videos, Too

The scene opened on a room with a red sofa, a potted plant and the kind of bland modern art you’d see on a therapist’s wall.

In the room was Michelle Obama, or someone who looked exactly like her. Wearing a low-cut top with a black bra visible underneath, she writhed lustily for the camera and flashed her unmistakable smile.

Then, the former first lady’s doppelgänger began to strip.

The video, which appeared on the online forum Reddit, was what’s known as a “deepfake” — an ultrarealistic fake video made with artificial intelligence software. It was created using a program called FakeApp, which superimposed Mrs. Obama’s face onto the body of a pornographic film actress. The hybrid was uncanny — if you didn’t know better, you might have thought it was really her.

Until recently, realistic computer-generated video was a laborious pursuit available only to big-budget Hollywood productions or cutting-edge researchers. Social media apps like Snapchat include some rudimentary face-morphing technology.

But in recent months, a community of hobbyists has begun experimenting with more powerful tools, including FakeApp — a program that was built by an anonymous developer using open-source software written by Google. FakeApp makes it free and relatively easy to create realistic face swaps and leave few traces of manipulation. Since a version of the app appeared on Reddit in January, it has been downloaded more than 120,000 times, according to its creator.

Deepfakes are one of the newest forms of digital media manipulation, and one of the most obviously mischief-prone. It’s not hard to imagine this technology’s being used to smear politicians, create counterfeit revenge porn or frame people for crimes. Lawmakers have already begun to worry about how deepfakes could be used for political sabotage and propaganda.

Even on morally lax sites like Reddit, deepfakes have raised eyebrows. Recently, FakeApp set off a panic after Motherboard, the technology site, reported that people were using it to create pornographic deepfakes of celebrities. Pornhub, Twitter and other sites quickly banned the videos, and Reddit closed a handful of deepfake groups, including one with nearly 100,000 members.

Before the Reddit deepfake groups were closed, they hosted a mixture of users trading video-editing tips and showing off their latest forgeries. A post titled “3D face reconstruction for additional angles” sat next to videos with titles like “(Not) Olivia Wilde playing with herself.”

Some users on Reddit defended deepfakes and blamed the media for overhyping their potential for harm. Others moved their videos to alternative platforms, rightly anticipating that Reddit would crack down under its rules against nonconsensual pornography. And a few expressed moral qualms about putting the technology into the world.

Then, they kept making more.

The deepfake creator community is now in the internet’s shadows. But while out in the open, it gave an unsettling peek into the future.

“This is turning into an episode of Black Mirror,” wrote one Reddit user. The post raised the ontological questions at the heart of the deepfake debate: Does a naked image of Person A become a naked image of Person B if Person B’s face is superimposed in a seamless and untraceable way? In a broader sense, on the internet, what is the difference between representation and reality?

The user then signed off with a shrug: “Godspeed rebels.”

Making Deepfakes

After lurking for several weeks in Reddit’s deepfake community, I decided to see how easy it was to create a (safe for work, nonpornographic) deepfake using my own face.

I started by downloading FakeApp and enlisting two technical experts to help me. The first was Mark McKeague, a colleague in The New York Times’s research and development department. The second was a deepfake creator I found through Reddit, who goes by the nickname Derpfakes.

Because of the controversial nature of deepfakes, Derpfakes would not give his or her real name. Derpfakes started posting deepfake videos on YouTube a few weeks ago, specializing in humorous offerings like Nicolas Cage playing Superman. The account has also posted some how-to videos on deepfake creation.

What I learned is that making a deepfake isn’t simple. But it’s not rocket science, either.

The first step is to find, or rent, a moderately powerful computer. FakeApp uses a suite of machine learning tools called TensorFlow, which was developed by Google’s A.I. division and released to the public in 2015. The software teaches itself to perform image-recognition tasks through trial and error. The more processing power on hand, the faster it works.

To get more speed, Mark and I used a remote server rented through Google Cloud Platform. It provided enough processing power to cut the time frame down to hours, rather than the days or weeks it might take on my laptop.

Once Mark set up the remote server and loaded FakeApp on it, we were on to the next step: data collection.

Picking the right source data is crucial. Short video clips are easier to manipulate than long clips, and scenes shot at a single angle produce better results than scenes with multiple angles. Genetics also help. The more the faces resemble each other, the better.

I’m a brown-haired white man with a short beard, so Mark and I decided to try several other brown-haired, stubbled white guys. We started with Ryan Gosling. (Aim high, right?) I also sent Derpfakes, my outsourced Reddit expert, several video options to choose from.

Next, we took several hundred photos of my face, and gathered images of Mr. Gosling’s face using a clip from a recent TV appearance. FakeApp uses these images to train the deep learning model and teach it to emulate our facial expressions.

To get the broadest photo set possible, I twisted my head at different angles, making as many different faces as I could.

Mark then used a program to crop those images down, isolating just our faces, and manually deleted any blurred or badly cropped photos. He then fed the frames into FakeApp. In all, we used 417 photos of me, and 1,113 of Mr. Gosling.

When the images were ready, Mark pressed “start” on FakeApp, and the training began. His computer screen filled with images of my face and Mr. Gosling’s face, as the program tried to identify patterns and similarities.

About eight hours later, after our model had been sufficiently trained, Mark used FakeApp to finish putting my face on Mr. Gosling’s body. The video was blurry and bizarre, and Mr. Gosling’s face occasionally flickered into view. Only the legally blind would mistake the person in the video for me.

We did better with a clip of Chris Pratt, the scruffy star of “Jurassic World,” whose face shape is a little more similar to mine. For this test, Mark used a bigger data set — 1,861 photos of me, 1,023 of him — and let the model run overnight.

A few days later, Derpfakes, who had also been training a model, sent me a finished deepfake made using the footage I had sent and a video of the actor Jake Gyllenhaal. This one was much more lifelike, a true hybrid that mixed my facial features with his hair, beard and body.

Derpfakes repeated the process with videos of Jimmy Kimmel and Liev Schreiber, both of which turned out well. As an experienced deepfake creator, Derpfakes had a more intuitive sense of which source videos would produce a clean result, and more experience with the subtle blending and tweaking that takes place at the end of the deepfake process.

In all, our deepfake experiment took three days and cost $85.96 in Google Cloud Platform credits. That seemed like a small price to pay for stardom.

What the App’s Creator Says

After the experiment, I reached out to the anonymous creator of FakeApp through an email address on its website. I wanted to know how it felt to create a cutting-edge A.I. tool, only to have it gleefully co-opted by ethically challenged pornographers.

A man wrote back, identifying himself as a software developer in Maryland. Like Derpfakes, the man would not give me his full name, and instead went by his first initial, N. He said he had created FakeApp as a creative experiment and was chagrined to see Reddit’s deepfake community use it for ill.

“I joined the community based around these algorithms when it was very small (less than 500 people),” he wrote, “and as soon as I saw the results I knew this was brilliant tech that should be accessible to anyone who wants to play around with it. I figured I’d take a shot at putting together an easy-to-use package to accomplish that.”

N. said he didn’t support the use of FakeApp to create nonconsensual pornography or other abusive content. And he said he agreed with Reddit’s decision to ban explicit deepfakes. But he defended the product.

“I’ve given it a lot of thought,” he said, “and ultimately I’ve decided I don’t think it’s right to condemn the technology itself — which can of course be used for many purposes, good and bad.”

FakeApp is somewhat finicky and hard to use, but it’s easy to imagine it improving quickly. N. said that in the future, FakeApp could be used by all kinds of people to bring high-budget special effects to their personal projects.

Deep learning algorithms, he added, were going to be important in the future, not only as stand-alone apps but as powerful components of many tech products.

“It’s precisely the things that make them so powerful and useful that make them so scary,” he said. “There’s really no limit to what you can apply it to with a little imagination.”

‘Next Form of Communication’

On the day of the school shooting last month in Parkland, Fla., a screenshot of a BuzzFeed News article, “Why We Need to Take Away White People’s Guns Now More Than Ever,” written by a reporter named Richie Horowitz, began making the rounds on social media.

The whole thing was fake. No BuzzFeed employee named Richie Horowitz exists, and no article with that title was ever published on the site. But the doctored image pulsed through right-wing outrage channels and was boosted by activists on Twitter. It wasn’t an A.I.-generated deepfake, or even a particularly sophisticated Photoshop job, but it did the trick.

Online misinformation, no matter how sleekly produced, spreads through a familiar process once it enters our social distribution channels. The hoax gets 50,000 shares, and the debunking an hour later gets 200. The carnival barker gets an algorithmic boost on services like Facebook and YouTube, while the expert screams into the void.

There’s no reason to believe that deepfake videos will operate any differently. People will share them when they’re ideologically convenient and dismiss them when they’re not. The dupes who fall for satirical stories from The Onion will be fooled by deepfakes, and the scrupulous people who care about the truth will find ways to detect and debunk them.

“There’s no choice,” said Hao Li, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Southern California. Mr. Li, who is also the founder of Pinscreen, a company that uses artificial intelligence to create lifelike 3-D avatars, said the weaponization of A.I. was inevitable and would require a sudden shift in public awareness.

“I see this as the next form of communication,” he said. “I worry that people will use it to blackmail others, or do bad things. You have to educate people that this is possible.”

So, O.K. Here I am, telling you this: An A.I. program powerful enough to turn Michelle Obama into a pornography star, or transform a schlubby newspaper columnist into Jake Gyllenhaal, is in our midst. Manipulated video will soon become far more commonplace.

And there’s probably nothing we can do except try to bat the fakes down as they happen, pressure social media companies to fight misinformation aggressively, and trust our eyes a little less every day.

Godspeed, rebels.

Kevin Roose is a columnist for Business Day and a writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine. His column, “The Shift,” examines the intersection of technology, business, and culture. @kevinrooseFacebook

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: It Was Only a Matter of Time: Here Comes an App for Fake Videos. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

KEVIN ROOSE

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bpellerin · 7 years ago

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True blue nightmare

How could good people with good ideas and principles end up like this? How can so many, right here in Canada, still support Donald Trump and what he represents? How can so many support (morally and financially) Ezra Levant’s Rebel Media after the Charlottesville events and the accompanying alt-right fracas?

I don’t understand it. It’s not what I thought conservatism (with which I’ve been associated for years) was all about.

It was one thing to get a chuckle out of the 2016 presidential circus. You could take a certain kind of pleasure in seeing everyone getting so upset. It’s not like the political establishment doesn’t need a good shakeup every now and then. But that wasn’t serious, was it? Sooner or later people would have to come to their senses, step away from the TV, drink some strong coffee and get back to sober, mature reality.

Alas.

Every time Mr. Trump said something outrageous (which wasn’t rare), his popularity increased. It was like being stuck in a political version of Opposite Day. What should have gone up went down, and what should have disappeared in a cloud of infamy, was loudly cheered and repeated by disturbingly large crowds.

I was never a fan of this kind of politics, and of this particular politician. I find him boorish, vulgar, and dangerously self-centred. But when so many millions of people vote for someone, you have to keep a certain tiny door open because hey, democracy is how we do things.

Yeah, well. I can no longer keep that door open. For me the last Twitter straw came in late June when, in a pair of tweets, the president managed to display crazy behaviour along with extreme meanness and vulgarity. Put together, they read: “I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came.. to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”

It’s not OK to stand behind a man who, as POTUS, tweets like that. Especially after all the other offensive things he’s said and done against just about everyone. A man who makes a mockery of his office and the constitution he swore to uphold by making policy on the fly and who shows contempt for the two other branches of government.

Especially after the events of Charlottesville, when he started by blaming both sides for the violence before condemning white supremacists specifically only to revert to blaming both sides the next day, well, now there’s no excuse.[1] In my book, if you still support him, and defend him, you are like him.

And you are part of the problem.

____

In Canada, Trump supporters also tend to be ardent fans of The Rebel. I’ve known Ezra Levant for a long time. I’ve worked with him at Sun News Network (not particularly closely, but he had me on his show several times). My husband, John Robson, contributed historical video vignettes for The Rebel from day one. Nobody will make me believe that Ezra is a racist or a bigot. I know he’s not. But some of the stuff he runs appeals to a lot of them. I believe it’s a mistake for Ezra to stir that pot of festering anger for clicks, YouTube views, and financial contributions.

That’s not something I’ve just recently discovered. I had been discussing these things with my husband for many long months before he finally announced he was stepping back from contributing to the site, and I do think he waited too long. He has explained himself elsewhere and I don’t need to add to that.

Charlottesville was the last straw for a lot of people, including my old friend Brian Lilley and National Post columnist Barbara Kay. If Charlottesville had been a one-off thing, many people might have opted to forgive Ezra and his crew, but it wasn’t. The tone of The Rebel had long been one of anger, sometimes paranoia, with a remarkable blind spot when it came to the company it kept. Trying to distance yourself from the alt-right was a step in the right direction, but it was too little, too late. Better than nothing, but not by much.

I know many people who still support The Rebel, post-Charlottesville, many of them financially. It makes me sad. Because I know these people are not stupid, or evil, or racist, or any more bigoted than the average person (oh, come on; we all have some of that in us). But what they are is angry, frustrated, and genuinely scared for the future of their country.

These are people who think Canada – as the West generally – may have lost its way. They worry that the values that made Canada what it is today are not, well, valued anymore. They think the people in charge are worried about the wrong stuff (in no particular order: climate change, multiculturalism, transgender rights, inclusiveness, safe spaces, organic meat) at the expense of the right stuff (traditional family values, cultural assimilation of immigrants, national security, military preparedness, law and order, property rights and free speech).

Do me a favour and hold the scorn for a minute. Forget that you disagree with these people, and try this thought experiment. Imagine that the roles are reversed. Imagine yourself – a fine, reasonable, upstanding citizen who works hard to do the best he can every day of his life – having serious concerns about the path your country has taken and being not only ignored but ridiculed for having those fears.

Keep holding that scorn. You can do it.

Imagine that your concerns are ignored and ridiculed, for years on end. That no matter how hard you try you can’t seem to get your message across. Year after year you see things deteriorate some more, and no politician speaks to your concerns. Until one day this bizarre orange person shows up and says, without fear or embarrassment, some of the things you’ve been saying for so long. Oh sure, he’s also saying things you don’t agree with – even things you find offensive. But there he is again talking about one of your biggest worries and pledging to do something to make it better!

You’re doing awesome on the scorn-holding front. You’re almost there. Keep it up!

You are so desperate and angry after being ignored and ridiculed for so many years that you are willing to ignore a lot of unpleasant facts about this weird orange person and cheer for him anyway. Because he’s the only one among all those politicians who’s not ignoring or ridiculing you. Better yet, the weird orange person gets ridiculed just like you and yet he keeps saying those things you’re so desperate to hear, and offers no apologies for his behaviour.

OK. Breathe, the thought experiment is over. Back to being you.

I know what you’re thinking. There’s a reason no serious politician speaks the way our long-frustrated angry voter does. That’s because that kind of talk is guaranteed to get anyone laughed out of the serious crowd. That’s not because everyone in the media is a liberal idiot. You’d be amazed how many conservatives and middle-of-the-road types lurk in newsrooms. I’m not prepared to say there’s no such thing as biased journalists, but as I’ve been saying to conservatives for years, if you believe in a media conspiracy to silence conservatives I’ve got a big shiny new bridge to sell you.

Also? I have news. Journalists can’t even organize pub night without 16 rounds of reply-all emails – and even then half the people typically fail to show up. Journalists couldn’t conspire to silence conservatives if they tried. They can’t even organize their own desk drawers.

Ryan Holiday, in his wonderful Ego is the Enemy, quotes Seneca that “He who indulges in empty fears earns himself real fears,” and adds that what paranoia usually does is create “the persecution it seeks to avoid, making the owner a prisoner of its own delusions and chaos.”

The reason our angry, frustrated and long-despised conservatives get ignored is because a lot of their opinions are often 1) very unpopular with normal people who are not themselves journalists; and 2) expressed in spectacularly sub-optimal ways.

I can count of the fingers of one hand the number of conservatives in this country who can express a conservative opinion without tangling themselves up in their own rhetorical ineptitude. I’m married to one of them (I disagree with him on a lot of things, but he’s one hell of a debater). It doesn’t help your cause when you look angry and clumsy while trying to make an unpopular point. It just reinforces people’s opinion of you as someone who doesn’t need to be taken all that seriously. Which angers our already frustrated conservative some more until one day he shows up at a rally wearing that red baseball cap and starts filling up his feed with #MAGA retweets.

___

Nobody wins when all sides are shouting at each other when forced to interact and muttering darkly to themselves otherwise. We need to start talking to each other, not screaming at each other. And we need to start listening to one another.

We need a dialogue.

In practice, that means conservatives need to quit sounding so paranoid. That’s a big one. They also really ought to avoid whining about being ignored and/or persecuted. That just makes them sound petulant and entitled. I would also counsel evangelicals to really make an effort to refrain from using Biblical language when talking to non-Christians. It really grates on the ear, and that’s not helpful.

Fears about society going to hell in a handbasket may or may not be entirely justified. Personally I think it’s not quite as bad as all that. Human beings have been through worse, and somehow we’re still all here.

Regardless of what I think, if you’re trying to convince other people that current policies or ideas or ideologies are destructive, it helps a lot not to start the conversation with “YOU’RE TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY!!!” I’m pretty sure there are no reasonable Canadians who are deliberately trying to do that, not even Gerald Butts. Being accused like that does not make anyone receptive to your points.

Explain your concerns gently. Acknowledge that you don’t see eye to eye with your interlocutors. Further acknowledge that there is some good in your opponents’ positions (really; do try to find something, even if it’s just good intentions). But then calmly and patiently walk them through your concerns. Help them understand something they might not even have thought about. Try to make your opponents into allies, if only for a tiny bit. That’s your beachhead. You need a beachhead. Because right now you’re out at sea.

Oh, and please – try to stay away from making people who don’t believe traditional heteronormative values are the entire point of civilized society not feel like unrepentant sinners. It’s a big, varied world with all kinds of funky people in it, and most of us are doing our best every day to be as good as we can. Gay parents aren’t worse than straight parents. In fact, I’ve met plenty of gay parents who were much better than the traditional, straight parents I had growing up. Granted, anecdotes don’t make for good policy. But do try to keep an open mind and an open heart. I strongly suggest keeping your focus on making sure children are well taken care of – because everyone agrees with that goal. And work very gently from there.

Lefties and other non-conservatives: Please stop calling people names because they hold views you consider retrograde. I get that a lot of Christians are annoying when they talk about people indulging in a gay “lifestyle”, as though being queer was a passing fad, like some kind of metaphysical fidget spinner. They make me cringe, too. But that doesn’t necessarily make them obnoxious bigots. Even in the cases where it does, there’s not much to be gained by shutting down a conversation with someone just because they take the Bible literally. Do try to engage them. Smile as you point them to statistics showing children raised in non-traditional homes do as well (if not, in certain cases, better) than their peers. Remind them – gently – that divorce does a lot more damage to children than having two mommies, and that divorce is, at the moment at least, an overwhelmingly heterosexual issue. That maybe we could all try to work to strengthen all families, for the benefit of the children who never asked to be there.

Engage conservatives on immigration and Western values. It’s to the benefit of everyone to make sure we don’t unwittingly allow tolerance to ding our cherished values of equality and inclusiveness. Agree that it would be OK to discriminate against a group that wanted to throw homosexuals off a cliff, or that anyone who demands the right to perform clitorectomies should be told to get in line or get out. Agree to some lines in the sand. Give conservatives something they can work with you to improve.

Show some sympathy for the crowds of people who – for one reason or another – find themselves bypassed by technological evolution. People whose skills are no longer in demand and who are too old to retrain. People who feel helpless and out-of-date with the world. You don’t have to remind them that their best-before date is fast approaching. They’re painfully conscious of it. The fact that some of them blame cheap labour and “job-stealing immigrants” for their troubles is unhelpful, I get it. But try to have some room in your heart for the thought that very often it’s anger and fear you hear talking, not real sentiment.

And if all of that fails, and you’re up against a wall of obtuseness in human form, keep in mind this splendid advice from The Power of No’s authors James and Claudia Altucher: 1) Don't argue; it's pointless. You will never change their mind. 2) Let them state their opinion. Try to learn something from it. Try to respect one angle of their point of view. 3) Everyone just wants to be heard. 4) Listen.

If we could all make an effort to listen to each other more, and yell insults less, we’d bring back much-needed sanity to our public square.

____

[1] Lots of good people make a convincing case that there was indeed violence on all sides in Charlottesville. That some counter-protesters showed up to disrupt a rally that had been allowed by the authorities, armed with all kinds of weapons, clearly anticipating violence. Other counter-protesters were peaceful. As were some of the folks who showed up to protest the plan to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee. Fine. Nothing is 100% black-and-white, as it were. But when one person from one side (the side that associates with the KKK and neo-Nazis, as far as we know) rams his car into a crowd of people, the president has a solemn moral duty to come down hard on that side. Not to deny that there were bad people elsewhere. But to emphasize that deliberately killing people in the name of a racist ideology is unmistakably un-American.

#politics #anger #hate #conservatism #Donald Trump #Rebel

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