#as if the author had based everyone on the most basic pop culture image of themselves

[oldtvandcomics]

How the HELL am I reading a comic where they are putting King Arthur against DRACULA of all people, AND IT IS STILL THE EXACT SAME OLD STORY?!

People should be banned from using the Grail Quest and the Arthur/Lancelot/Guinevere love triangle in their stories until, I don’t know, they have completed a quiz proving that they actually know other parts of the mythos too, or something.

[ghosthan]

what would you say are the differences between 616 Tony and MCU Tony? 🤔

Hi anon! Many people have talked about this and I'm certainly not the authority on the topic, but I’ll try my best to explain some of the major differences that I have noticed! Thank you for asking and I’m sorry it took me so long to answer you.

Important to note: neither version of Tony has had a totally consistent characterization. Depending on who you ask and which comics/movies they've consumed, they might give you a different answer here and not be wrong.

616 Tony is even harder to put into one box because his character has been around since Tales of Suspense in the 1950s. That’s a long time. Things have changed over time, under different writers, changing political atmospheres, and outside pop culture influence (including influence from the MCU, unfortunately, in recent years.) You get the picture. So I’ll be making some generalizations and try to be clear about which eras I’m speaking when I make these comparisons, but ultimately, if someone wanted to be contrarian, you could probably refute a lot of what I say here if you cherry pick canon. Which is fair enough! That’s sort of the fun of comics, there’s so much to choose from and something for everyone.

So here are some observations from me, under the ‘read more’.

1. Physical Appearance

This is sort of an easy one, but worth mentioning!

MCU Tony does not look like 616 Tony. RDJ is great, but he would not be most 616 fans’ casting choice on looks alone. MCU Tony is tan, a Malibu man, with brown hair and brown eyes, and RDJ has sort of round facial features (a funny sloped nose, big, round eyes, round forehead, not a particularly sharp or classically “superhero masculine” face.) As you may know, this lends well to certain fanworks and tropes, such as Tony having Bambi eyes.

Or Tiny Tony. He is not actually canonically small, but he's smaller in the MCU than in 616 and from what I can tell, a portion of fandom has latched onto that. He’s a grown man, but RDJ is pretty short, and of slighter build than 616 Tony. RDJ is 5′9, but they make him act in heels, and I believe his canon MCU height is 5′11. Another popular trope I’ve seen is shrinking Tony in fanfic/fanart for a dramatized height difference with Steve, making him weak or fragile; this is fine because everyone has their own taste, but for the official record, he’s a capable, strong guy! Especially in earlier stages of the MCU, in which he’s a bit younger. Tony isn’t just a brain; he carries out his plans with his own two hands! He builds his armor, he remodels his lab, he survives hand to hand combat when he doesn’t have the armor. Muscles!

616 Tony is 6′1 without armor and 6′6 in armor (making him taller than his 616 Steve counterpart in armor and very close to the same height out of armor!) 616 Tony is generally paler with black hair (sometimes the classic blue-black I love so much) and blue eyes, and it obviously depends on the artist, but he has a pretty typically ‘masculine’ face and build. Generally he is drawn with a squared jaw and a high bridged nose (such as in the Extremis storyline, or drawn by Marquez), but again, this varies from artist to artist! Here's some examples of 616 Tonys.

Wait, you might be saying, but I have seen comic panels where Tony has brown hair/brown eyes!

Yep. Due to a combination of forgetfulness, inconsistency, and the MCU bleeding into the general consciousness of the comics, sometimes Tony is randomly depicted in the image of RDJ, or if not in his image, at least visually inspired by the MCU-- hair color and style, eye color, dialogue, etc.

616 fans don’t typically love this; he’s very handsome when drawn this way, of course, (look at him!) But it isn’t really the same character.

Also, MCU Tony has (at least for some of his movies) a reactor built into his chest. While 616 Tony has, at times, been more or less physically connected/dependent to his tech, he doesn’t have the built in reactor (most generally speaking, there are times in comics when he temporarily has the tech built in, but this isn’t really the status quo.)

2. Relationship with parents/ family history

While it is definitely implied in the MCU that Howard was not a good father to Tony, (such as in Iron Man 2 when Tony says “You're talking about a man whose happiest day of his life was shipping me off to boarding school” and “He was cold, calculating, never told me he loved me, never even told me he liked me”), Tony has a different sort of attitude toward Howard in MCU than in 616. It’s kind of weird, and hard to discuss. To me, it seems implied that MCU Howard was emotionally abusive to Tony based on what Tony does say about his childhood, and yet, the films kind of randomly give Howard weird moments of “Well, he tried his best and deep down he loved me the whole time!” forgiveness. MCU has a Howard kink and I'm very cringe-face emoji about it.

For example, Iron Man 2 shows that old film reel of Howard talking about how Tony is the greatest thing he ever created, and in Endgame, when Tony goes back in time, he meets Howard and has a very weird interaction with him in which Howard declares he would do anything for his son, (to his deeply damaged son who is a new father himself.) Yet, for all his talk, it's his actions that speak, and his actions left Tony damaged, traumatized, and emotionally inept at forming healthy relationships. So.

Sorry. I’m a little bitter. I'm just uncomfortable with how they sort of set up an abuse history but then treated it kind of lightly and Howard gets off the hook as "well, he tried his best" without really acknowledging the hurt he caused.

Avengers: Endgame 2019

I won't go super in depth into the abuse stuff because it's a little touchy and could take up a lot of this post. But.

I’m not against any reconciliation and I do appreciate the fact that a lot of times, victims of abuse feel a desire to forgive and reconnect with their abuser-- my issue with the MCU depiction of Tony and Howard is that Tony never really gets the vindication of his abuse being recognized for what it was before he forgives Howard. To me, that’s not forgiveness as kind of... gaslighting himself that it wasn't as bad as he remembered his own experience being, because of a sense of nostalgia and grief. It’s not the same, and I have issues with it.

However, a lot of my opinion is based on subtext and it is just my opinion; with depictions of abuse, different people are going to react differently, and other people may have found these scenes touching and gotten something positive out of them, and that's totally fine too!

It’s also a bit difficult to talk about Tony’s relationship with Howard in 616, for a few reasons: shifting timelines, lots of canon that I have not read all of, and the fact that it really is difficult to sum up such a complicated relationship.

Right off the bat, I’ll address the basics. I used the same scene in another ask, and I think it's frequently cited in any meta regarding Howard, but in Iron Man Vol. 1, we see more into Tony’s childhood and see Howard verbally abusing his family, drunk, at the dinner table.

Iron Man Vol. 1 #285

We get this scene with adult Tony’s retrospective commentary on how his own issues that he blamed himself for were actually a cycle starting with his father, the insecurity and abuse and alcohol, and that he realizes how much this has influenced him. Both MCU Tony and 616 Tony have some form of “stop the cycle of shame” arcs, but I don’t really see how this works narratively in the MCU because Tony makes excuses for Howard and continues to blame himself for a lot of his own personal struggles, whereas I think there’s just a bit more nuance in 616.

But uh. This isn’t totally true, and in recent years, things got real weird. I choose to ignore this chapter of canon, but in the Dan Slott run, Tony Stark: Iron Man, Tony’s whole backstory gets imploded. For one thing, the little of Tony’s childhood it shows in a flashback is uh. Uh. Well, it’s certainly out of character compared with previous 616 material, depicting Tony as an overly confident poor sport.

Basically, Tony is adopted. Tony has an evil brother. Tony’s biological parents make an appearance, as do his ‘classic’ parents, Howard and Maria. It’s just weird. It’s kind of out there. I’m honestly not a huge fan of this and ignore a lot of it, but it is certainly a difference between MCU and 616.

3. Personality

I’m going to be very general. Both Tony’s have an outer self which they present to the public and an inner self, but they’re a bit different. Both Tony’s have struggled with self loathing, but I think MCU Tony’s actual self worth is a bit higher, even just at some points in time. Even if his ego is part of his facade, I think he does believe some amount of the “I’m awesome”, even if just when it applies to his own work/inventions/saving people. Not to say that these moments of fluctuating self esteem make him egotistical, but this combined with his egotistical act and snarky, non-stop sassy dialogue, he’s quite different in general personality from 616 Tony, who is much more reserved.

Some more recent iterations of 616 Tony have been adapted to reflect the snark of the MCU, but he’s not so snarky and he tends to approach things more seriously. This is not a dis on MCU Tony; I think MCU Tony uses false ego and excessive sassy jokes as a means to deflect and control, which I think is very interesting and it’s nice to see this explored more in depth in fic where you get to see the thought process behind the bravado. MCU Tony is a partier, a good times guy, especially during Iron Man 2, in which he really does disregard consequences to have fun (driving his race car, partying drunk in his suit, letting pretty  girls play with the armor, shooting off repulsor blasts for fun in a crowded room); I’m not bashing MCU Tony-- I think he had psychologically understandable reasons for behaving this way, the man was dying-- but 616 Tony really doesn’t act this way generally, and I think it’s a personality difference more than a difference of one being “better.”

616 Tony handles his stress differently, and they just have different psychological patterns, I think. I’m coming up kind of blank trying to think of a good comparable 616 arc, (sorry, I’m brain dead) but a less-than-perfect  example might be Tony’s brain delete arc; he’s “dying”, like in Iron Man 2 he  knows his expiration date, (circumstances are quite  a bit different), but he throws himself more into work, into a cause, and as he really fall apart, we  see him spiral into self doubt, remorse, fear, and insecurity, sort of falling into  himself with lots of manly tears and calling himself pathetic.

(Some things happen in this arc that a lot of people find Gross. I also find these events gross. But. I don’t count the sex in “World’s Most Wanted” as partying to cope with personal mortality, because I think both character involved are in “end of the world” mode, and it’s more seeking intimacy for comfort than partying to numb the hurt. Does this distinction make sense? No? Perfect, moving on.) 616 Tony is generally much more humble.

Whereas MCU Tony, I think, tries to outrun those feelings via parties or making dozens of new suits, or seeking comfort by comforting others! Gifting things to people, building things for people, highly personalized individual living quarters, teaching Nebula games and trying to show her a fun time when they were in peril together.

They have some traits in common, for sure! But canon being inconsistent both in the MCU and in 616, my observations aren’t the rule, because I’m kind of cherry picking and going based on limited memory. But off the top of my head, they’re both extravagant gift givers! Recall Tony gifting Pepper the giant bunny in Iron Man 3, and compare this with Tony carrying a mile high pile of Christmas gifts after shopping with Rumiko in Iron Man Vol. #3.

I would say that while both Tony Starks are considered humanitarians, this is much more fleshed out and supported by canon in 616. Some examples of his philanthropy in the MCU: Tony makes charitable donations of art and money, Tony has an organization which provides disaster relief/cleanup which is referenced in Spider-Man Homecoming, Tony has an MIT grant for students and staff members. But to be honest, a lot of his MCU philanthropy is only mentioned in passing, or is largely handled by other people on his behalf and on his dollar.

In 616, we see Tony using charity almost as a means of therapy: it’s something he does very privately, not in the public eye (at least, not always), and it’s something deeply personal to him. One example that immediately comes to mind is Tony’s home for disadvantaged girls in Iron Man Vol. 3, and we see scenes of Tony basically driving the streets at night, picking up underage prostitutes, feeding them and listening to their stories before bringing them to a home he’s established where he knows all the residents, and provides educational opportunities and protection.

Another more recent example in canon that the Tony fandom loves is that Tony canonically holds babies at an orphanage. Sorry I don’t have panels for all of this, this section got long and I have been working on answering this ask in a very scattered way for a very long time.

Both Tony’s are romantics, I literally could write a whole other post about their canon love life similarities and differences, but I will briefly say that while MCU Tony does the long on and off, and eventual ultimate commitment, to Pepper Potts, 616 Tony is a serial monogamist; he is always falling in love, and he’s definitely not a playboy, but the hero-ing, self loathing, and lifestyle make it very hard for him to keep anyone in his life, and most of his partners fuck his life up and betray him. Needless to say, 616 Tony is not married, and certainly not to Pepper Potts.

Oh, and I guess this is so obvious I almost forgot to include it, but a huge similarity between both iterations of Tony is that they both constantly use their own life as a bargaining chip, and will pretty much die for anything. Or be the bad guy for a good reason (at least, in his own mind... see Civil War, or Hickmanvengers; 616 Tony, especially, does not shy away from making the hard decisions, and this leads to a lot of guilt and tension in his  relationships-- often with Steve because 616 Steve/Tony angst fans are well fed, I guess)

Remember that time Tony had Steve’s mind wiped because Tony felt that Steve’s inflexible morality might hinder the Illuminati’s ability to save the world? And it eats Tony up inside and erupts into a homicidal fight when Steve finally gets his memory back? Me too.

Tony Stark as a character is defined by sacrifice, both of his own life but also of his own happiness and reputation and conscience, I think, in a lot of ways, and we see this in many universes. I could go on about Tony’s propensity for sacrifice in the less obvious ways, because I think in terms of heroic sacrifice, Tony has done a lot that other heroes wouldn’t be able to do because of moral inflexibility and conflicting philosophical schools of thought; Tony really is the “whatever it takes” type, and often believes the ends justify the means if he deems a threat worse than the potential wrong that could be done in preventing the threat. We see this a little bit in the MCU in the creation of Ultron, and in Civil War with the Accords. But there’s a whole lot more going on there I don’t want to get into.

4. Alcohol

MCU Tony’s alcoholism is never really explicitly explored. He is shown drinking in Iron Man 1, and in Iron Man 2 he drinks a lot and makes a fool of himself publicly, but MCU Tony doesn’t get any specific narrative arc focused on his drinking, and if I recall correctly, I don’t think he ever refers to his drinking as alcoholism in the movies? Also, while his binge drinking and embarrassing behaviors ostensibly stop after the events of Iron Man 2, he is shown drinking on screen at least one other time after that which I can remember, and it wasn’t a “falling off the wagon” moment, and an alcoholic in recovery such as 616 Tony would not take a drink casually. This article sheds a little light on some decisions made about Tony and alcohol in the MCU.

Alcoholism is a huge part of 616 Tony’s personality, which I went a bit more into depth about in this post, so I won’t repeat myself too much.

5. Their relationships with the Iron Man armor

A few points here: MCU Tony is famous for the “I am Iron Man” line being repeated throughout the franchise after he blows his own secret in the end of the first movie. MCU Tony sees himself as one with Iron Man, and the suit is the tech that enables him to be this version of himself. He sees Tony Stark and Iron Man as inextricable: you cannot separate them, and his identity is public. He, as Tony Stark, is an Avenger.

You may remember MCU Tony’s induction into the Avengers; in Iron Man 2, Nick Fury is forming the Avengers and tasks the Black Widow with going undercover to assess Tony to be a part of a hypothetical initiative. “Iron Man yes, Tony Stark no” and the comments about Tony as a narcissist may be funny, but the fact is, the snark and erratic personality of MCU Tony at the time of the formation of the Avengers in the movies is not at all like the Tony of the comics, at the time of the Avengers being formed. 

In 616, things are quite a bit different! Tony invents the Iron man armor to save himself (like in the MCU) and uses it for hero-ing, but in secret. He works very hard to protect his identity as Iron Man, and for a long time, as far as the world is concerned, Iron man is a mystery man piloting armor built by Tony, hired as Tony’s personal body guard, (hence the 616 Steve/Tony fandom’s proclivity for identity porn as a trope!) When the Avengers form, Iron Man is the Avenger, close friends with the Avengers, (particularly Steve!) and Tony Stark is just the benefactor of the Avengers, providing them with a place to live and finances with which to operate.

In the very early days, Tony did not have the “reactor” like in the MCU, but his chest plate did keep him alive, leading to some very dramatic shots of Tony charging up using a wall socket, lamenting the plight of a secret hero.

616 Tony, generally, and especially in some of these earlier comics, was quite reserved, rather serious, and very angsty, (in private of course.) He may be wealthy, but speaking generally, he’s much less ostentatious than MCU Tony, less of a show off, less into flashy things and grand gestures. Of course, this isn’t always true in the comics, and some iterations of Tony are more like this than others, but MCU Tony is showier, sillier, and more of a fun-times guy. Any MCU fan would find those panels quite contrary to the Tony Stark you know:

Iron Man 1

Iron Man 2

I think I would say that while MCU Tony sees himself and the Iron Man identity and the  armor as all being inextricably connected, we see a bit more compartmentalization with 616 Tony, who pretends that the armor is a whole separate person for years when his identity was private, and we see instances in older and newer comics, in which Tony  is uncomfortable with some aspect of himself as Iron Man (for instance, during the second drinking arc, Tony temporarily swears off being Iron Man entirely, or for another example, when Tony is in a comma and Tony AI exists during Secret Empire, Tony “lives” in the Iron Man suit, and I think this could be interpreted as a meta parallel to Steve during this arc; Steve has had some core aspect of his character inverted, Captain America becoming Captain Hydra, so Tony experiences a similar inversion-- Tony Stark and Iron Man are forcibly merged, in a way that Tony seems deeply uncomfortable with, if his digital drinking relapse is any indication. But I digress; sorry for the tangent.)

Okay this post is inexcusable long, and very, very tangential, and I don’t feel like I’ve really covered everything I wanted to. But it has been sitting in my inbox for too long and if I don’t post it now I never will, so I hope this long, rambling thing has been a little bit helpful to you! Thank you so much for asking, I had a lot of fun rambling about this.

If you want to read a similar post, but well written and organized, with other insights, this post by Sineala answers a similar question!

[xtruss]

The Other Afghan Women

In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them.

— By Anand Gopal | September 6, 2021 | The New Yorker

More than seventy per cent of Afghans do not live in cities. In rural areas, life under the U.S.-led coalition and its Afghan allies became pure hazard; even drinking tea in a sunlit field, or driving to your sister’s wedding, was a potentially deadly gamble.Photograph by Stephen Dupont / Contact Press Images

Late one afternoon this past August, Shakira heard banging on her front gate. In the Sangin Valley, which is in Helmand Province, in southern Afghanistan, women must not be seen by men who aren’t related to them, and so her nineteen-year-old son, Ahmed, went to the gate. Outside were two men in bandoliers and black turbans, carrying rifles. They were members of the Taliban, who were waging an offensive to wrest the countryside back from the Afghan National Army. One of the men warned, “If you don’t leave immediately, everyone is going to die.”

Shakira, who is in her early forties, corralled her family: her husband, an opium merchant, who was fast asleep, having succumbed to the temptations of his product, and her eight children, including her oldest, twenty-year-old Nilofar—as old as the war itself—whom Shakira called her “deputy,” because she helped care for the younger ones. The family crossed an old footbridge spanning a canal, then snaked their way through reeds and irregular plots of beans and onions, past dark and vacant houses. Their neighbors had been warned, too, and, except for wandering chickens and orphaned cattle, the village was empty.

Shakira’s family walked for hours under a blazing sun. She started to feel the rattle of distant thuds, and saw people streaming from riverside villages: men bending low beneath bundles stuffed with all that they could not bear to leave behind, women walking as quickly as their burqas allowed.

The pounding of artillery filled the air, announcing the start of a Taliban assault on an Afghan Army outpost. Shakira balanced her youngest child, a two-year-old daughter, on her hip as the sky flashed and thundered. By nightfall, they had come upon the valley’s central market. The corrugated-iron storefronts had largely been destroyed during the war. Shakira found a one-room shop with an intact roof, and her family settled in for the night. For the children, she produced a set of cloth dolls—one of a number of distractions that she’d cultivated during the years of fleeing battle. As she held the figures in the light of a match, the earth shook.

Around dawn, Shakira stepped outside, and saw that a few dozen families had taken shelter in the abandoned market. It had once been the most thriving bazaar in northern Helmand, with shopkeepers weighing saffron and cumin on scales, carts loaded with women’s gowns, and storefronts dedicated to selling opium. Now stray pillars jutted upward, and the air smelled of decaying animal remains and burning plastic.

In the distance, the earth suddenly exploded in fountains of dirt. Helicopters from the Afghan Army buzzed overhead, and the families hid behind the shops, considering their next move. There was fighting along the stone ramparts to the north and the riverbank to the west. To the east was red-sand desert as far as Shakira could see. The only option was to head south, toward the leafy city of Lashkar Gah, which remained under the control of the Afghan government.

The journey would entail cutting through a barren plain exposed to abandoned U.S. and British bases, where snipers nested, and crossing culverts potentially stuffed with explosives. A few families started off. Even if they reached Lashkar Gah, they could not be sure what they’d find there. Since the start of the Taliban’s blitz, Afghan Army soldiers had surrendered in droves, begging for safe passage home. It was clear that the Taliban would soon reach Kabul, and that the twenty years, and the trillions of dollars, devoted to defeating them had come to nothing. Shakira’s family stood in the desert, discussing the situation. The gunfire sounded closer. Shakira spotted Taliban vehicles racing toward the bazaar—and she decided to stay put. She was weary to the bone, her nerves frayed. She would face whatever came next, accept it like a judgment. “We’ve been running all our lives,” she told me. “I’m not going anywhere.”

The longest war in American history ended on August 15th, when the Taliban captured Kabul without firing a shot. Bearded, scraggly men with black turbans took control of the Presidential palace, and around the capital the austere white flags of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan went up. Panic ensued. Some women burned their school records and went into hiding, fearing a return to the nineteen-nineties, when the Taliban forbade them to venture out alone and banned girls’ education. For Americans, the very real possibility that the gains of the past two decades might be erased appeared to pose a dreadful choice: recommit to seemingly endless war, or abandon Afghan women.

This summer, I travelled to rural Afghanistan to meet women who were already living under the Taliban, to listen to what they thought about this looming dilemma. More than seventy per cent of Afghans do not live in cities, and in the past decade the insurgent group had swallowed large swaths of the countryside. Unlike in relatively liberal Kabul, visiting women in these hinterlands is not easy: even without Taliban rule, women traditionally do not speak to unrelated men. Public and private worlds are sharply divided, and when a woman leaves her home she maintains a cocoon of seclusion through the burqa, which predates the Taliban by centuries. Girls essentially disappear into their homes at puberty, emerging only as grandmothers, if ever. It was through grandmothers—finding each by referral, and speaking to many without seeing their faces—that I was able to meet dozens of women, of all ages. Many were living in desert tents or hollowed-out storefronts, like Shakira; when the Taliban came across her family hiding at the market, the fighters advised them and others not to return home until someone could sweep for mines. I first encountered her in a safe house in Helmand. “I’ve never met a foreigner before,” she said shyly. “Well, a foreigner without a gun.”

Shakira has a knack for finding humor in pathos, and in the sheer absurdity of the men in her life: in the nineties, the Taliban had offered to supply electricity to the village, and the local graybeards had initially refused, fearing black magic. “Of course, we women knew electricity was fine,” she said, chuckling. When she laughs, she pulls her shawl over her face, leaving only her eyes exposed. I told her that she shared a name with a world-renowned pop star, and her eyes widened. “Is it true?” she asked a friend who’d accompanied her to the safe house. “Could it be?”

Shakira, like the other women I met, grew up in the Sangin Valley, a gash of green between sharp mountain outcrops. The valley is watered by the Helmand River and by a canal that Americans built in the nineteen-fifties. You can walk the width of the dale in an hour, passing dozens of tiny hamlets, creaking footbridges, and mud-brick walls. As a girl, Shakira heard stories from her mother of the old days in her village, Pan Killay, which was home to about eighty families: the children swimming in the canal under the warm sun, the women pounding grain in stone mortars. In winter, smoke wafted from clay hearths; in spring, rolling fields were blanketed with poppies.

In 1979, when Shakira was an infant, Communists seized power in Kabul and tried to launch a female-literacy program in Helmand—a province the size of West Virginia, with few girls’ schools. Tribal elders and landlords refused. In the villagers’ retelling, the traditional way of life in Sangin was smashed overnight, because outsiders insisted on bringing women’s rights to the valley. “Our culture could not accept sending their girls outside to school,” Shakira recalled. “It was this way before my father’s time, before my grandfather’s time.” When the authorities began forcing girls to attend classes at gunpoint, a rebellion erupted, led by armed men calling themselves the mujahideen. In their first operation, they kidnapped all the schoolteachers in the valley, many of whom supported girls’ education, and slit their throats. The next day, the government arrested tribal elders and landlords on the suspicion that they were bankrolling the mujahideen. These community leaders were never seen again.

Tanks from the Soviet Union crossed the border to shore up the Communist government—and to liberate women. Soon, Afghanistan was basically split in two. In the countryside, where young men were willing to die fighting the imposition of new ways of life—including girls’ schools and land reform—young women remained unseen. In the cities, the Soviet-backed government banned child marriage and granted women the right to choose their partners. Girls enrolled in schools and universities in record numbers, and by the early eighties women held parliamentary seats and even the office of Vice-President.

The violence in the countryside continued to spread. Early one morning when Shakira was five, her aunt awakened her in a great hurry. The children were led by the adults of the village to a mountain cave, where they huddled for hours. At night, Shakira watched artillery streak the sky. When the family returned to Pan Killay, the wheat fields were charred, and crisscrossed with the tread marks of Soviet tanks. The cows had been mowed down with machine guns. Everywhere she looked, she saw neighbors—men she used to call “uncle”—lying bloodied. Her grandfather hadn’t hidden with her, and she couldn’t find him in the village. When she was older, she learned that he’d gone to a different cave, and had been caught and executed by the Soviets.

Nighttime evacuations became a frequent occurrence and, for Shakira, a source of excitement: the dark corners of the caves, the clamorous groups of children. “We would look for Russian helicopters,” she said. “It was like spotting strange birds.” Sometimes, those birds swooped low, the earth exploded, and the children rushed to the site to forage for iron, which could be sold for a good price. Occasionally she gathered metal shards so that she could build a doll house. Once, she showed her mother a magazine photograph of a plastic doll that exhibited the female form; her mother snatched it away, calling it inappropriate. So Shakira learned to make dolls out of cloth and sticks.

When she was eleven, she stopped going outside. Her world shrank to the three rooms of her house and the courtyard, where she learned to sew, bake bread in a tandoor, and milk cows. One day, passing jets rattled the house, and she took sanctuary in a closet. Underneath a pile of clothes, she discovered a child’s alphabet book that had belonged to her grandfather—the last person in the family to attend school. During the afternoons, while her parents napped, she began matching the Pashto words to pictures. She recalled, “I had a plan to teach myself a little every day.”

In 1989, the Soviets withdrew in defeat, but Shakira continued to hear the pounding of mortars outside the house’s mud walls. Competing mujahideen factions were now trying to carve up the country for themselves. Villages like Pan Killay were lucrative targets: there were farmers to tax, rusted Soviet tanks to salvage, opium to export. Pazaro, a woman from a nearby village, recalled, “We didn’t have a single night of peace. Our terror had a name, and it was Amir Dado.”

The first time Shakira saw Dado, through the judas of her parents’ front gate, he was in a pickup truck, trailed by a dozen armed men, parading through the village “as if he were the President.” Dado, a wealthy fruit vender turned mujahideen commander, with a jet-black beard and a prodigious belly, had begun attacking rival strongmen even before the Soviets’ defeat. He hailed from the upper Sangin Valley, where his tribe, the Alikozais, had held vast feudal plantations for centuries. The lower valley was the home of the Ishaqzais, the poor tribe to which Shakira belonged. Shakira watched as Dado’s men went from door to door, demanding a “tax” and searching homes. A few weeks later, the gunmen returned, ransacking her family’s living room while she cowered in a corner. Never before had strangers violated the sanctity of her home, and she felt as if she’d been stripped naked and thrown into the street.

By the early nineties, the Communist government of Afghanistan, now bereft of Soviet support, was crumbling. In 1992, Lashkar Gah fell to a faction of mujahideen. Shakira had an uncle living there, a Communist with little time for the mosque and a weakness for Pashtun tunes. He’d recently married a young woman, Sana, who’d escaped a forced betrothal to a man four times her age. The pair had started a new life in Little Moscow, a Lashkar Gah neighborhood that Sana called “the land where women have freedom”—but, when the mujahideen took over, they were forced to flee to Pan Killay.

Shakira was tending the cows one evening when Dado’s men surrounded her with guns. “Where’s your uncle?” one of them shouted. The fighters stormed into the house—followed by Sana’s spurned fiancé. “She’s the one!” he said. The gunmen dragged Sana away. When Shakira’s other uncles tried to intervene, they were arrested. The next day, Sana’s husband turned himself in to Dado’s forces, begging to be taken in her place. Both were sent to the strongman’s religious court and sentenced to death.

Not long afterward, the mujahideen toppled the Communists in Kabul, and they brought their countryside mores with them. In the capital, their leaders—who had received generous amounts of U.S. funding—issued a decree declaring that “women are not to leave their homes at all, unless absolutely necessary, in which case they are to cover themselves completely.” Women were likewise banned from “walking gracefully or with pride.” Religious police began roaming the city’s streets, arresting women and burning audio- and videocassettes on pyres.

Yet the new mujahideen government quickly fell apart, and the country descended into civil war. At night in Pan Killay, Shakira heard gunfire and, sometimes, the shouts of men. In the morning, while tending the cows, she’d see neighbors carrying wrapped bodies. Her family gathered in the courtyard and discussed, in low voices, how they might escape. But the roads were studded with checkpoints belonging to different mujahideen groups. South of the village, in the town of Gereshk, a militia called the Ninety-third Division maintained a particularly notorious barricade on a bridge; there were stories of men getting robbed or killed, of women and young boys being raped. Shakira’s father sometimes crossed the bridge to sell produce at the Gereshk market, and her mother started pleading with him to stay home.

The family, penned between Amir Dado to the north and the Ninety-third Division to the south, was growing desperate. Then one afternoon, when Shakira was sixteen, she heard shouts from the street: “The Taliban are here!” She saw a convoy of white Toyota Hiluxes filled with black-turbanned fighters carrying white flags. Shakira hadn’t ever heard of the Taliban, but her father explained that its members were much like the poor religious students she’d seen all her life begging for alms. Many had fought under the mujahideen’s banner but quit after the Soviets’ withdrawal; now, they said, they were remobilizing to put an end to the tumult. In short order, they had stormed the Gereshk bridge, dismantling the Ninety-third Division, and volunteers had flocked to join them as they’d descended on Sangin. Her brother came home reporting that the Taliban had also overrun Dado’s positions. The warlord had abandoned his men and fled to Pakistan. “He’s gone,” Shakira’s brother kept saying. “He really is.” The Taliban soon dissolved Dado’s religious court—freeing Sana and her husband, who were awaiting execution—and eliminated the checkpoints. After fifteen years, the Sangin Valley was finally at peace.

When I asked Shakira and other women from the valley to reflect on Taliban rule, they were unwilling to judge the movement against some universal standard—only against what had come before. “They were softer,” Pazaro, the woman who lived in a neighboring village, said. “They were dealing with us respectfully.” The women described their lives under the Taliban as identical to their lives under Dado and the mujahideen—minus the strangers barging through the doors at night, the deadly checkpoints.

Shakira recounted to me a newfound serenity: quiet mornings with steaming green tea and naan bread, summer evenings on the rooftop. Mothers and aunts and grandmothers began to discreetly inquire about her eligibility; in the village, marriage was a bond uniting two families. She was soon betrothed to a distant relative whose father had vanished, presumably at the hands of the Soviets. The first time she laid eyes on her fiancé was on their wedding day: he was sitting sheepishly, surrounded by women of the village, who were ribbing him about his plans for the wedding night. “Oh, he was a fool!” Shakira recalled, laughing. “He was so embarrassed, he tried to run away. People had to catch him and bring him back.”

Like many enterprising young men in the valley, he was employed in opium trafficking, and Shakira liked the glint of determination in his eyes. Yet she started to worry that grit alone might not be enough. As Taliban rule established itself, a conscription campaign was launched. Young men were taken to northern Afghanistan, to help fight against a gang of mujahideen warlords known as the Northern Alliance. One day, Shakira watched a helicopter alight in a field and unload the bodies of fallen conscripts. Men in the valley began hiding in friends’ houses, moving from village to village, terrified of being called up. Impoverished tenant farmers were the most at risk—the rich could buy their way out of service. “This was the true injustice of the Taliban,” Shakira told me. She grew to loathe the sight of roving Taliban patrols.

In 2000, Helmand Province experienced punishing drought. The watermelon fields lay ruined, and the bloated corpses of draft animals littered the roads. In a flash of cruelty, the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Omar, chose that moment to ban opium cultivation. The valley’s economy collapsed. Pazaro recalled, “We had nothing to eat, the land gave us nothing, and our men couldn’t provide for our children. The children were crying, they were screaming, and we felt like we’d failed.” Shakira, who was pregnant, dipped squares of stale naan into green tea to feed her nieces and nephews. Her husband left for Pakistan, to try his luck in the fields there. Shakira was stricken by the thought that her baby would emerge lifeless, that her husband would never return, that she would be alone. Every morning, she prayed for rain, for deliverance.

One day, an announcer on the radio said that there had been an attack in America. Suddenly, there was talk that soldiers from the richest country on earth were coming to overthrow the Taliban. For the first time in years, Shakira’s heart stirred with hope.

One night in 2003, Shakira was jolted awake by the voices of strange men. She rushed to cover herself. When she ran to the living room, she saw, with panic, the muzzles of rifles being pointed at her. The men were larger than she’d ever seen, and they were in uniform. These are the Americans, she realized, in awe. Some Afghans were with them, scrawny men with Kalashnikovs and checkered scarves. A man with an enormous beard was barking orders: Amir Dado.

The U.S. had swiftly toppled the Taliban following its invasion, installing in Kabul the government of Hamid Karzai. Dado, who had befriended American Special Forces, became the chief of intelligence for Helmand Province. One of his brothers was the governor of the Sangin district, and another brother became Sangin’s chief of police. In Helmand, the first year of the American occupation had been peaceful, and the fields once again burst with poppies. Shakira now had two small children, Nilofar and Ahmed. Her husband had returned from Pakistan and found work ferrying bags of opium resin to the Sangin market. But now, with Dado back in charge—rescued from exile by the Americans—life regressed to the days of civil war.

Nearly every person Shakira knew had a story about Dado. Once, his fighters demanded that two young men either pay a tax or join his private militia, which he maintained despite holding his official post. When they refused, his fighters beat them to death, stringing their bodies up from a tree. A villager recalled, “We went to cut them down, and they had been sliced open, their stomachs coming out.” In another village, Dado’s forces went from house to house, executing people suspected of being Taliban; an elderly scholar who’d never belonged to the movement was shot dead.

Shakira was bewildered by the Americans’ choice of allies. “Was this their plan?” she asked me. “Did they come to bring peace, or did they have other aims?” She insisted that her husband stop taking resin to the Sangin market, so he shifted his trade south, to Gereshk. But he returned one afternoon with the news that this, too, had become impossible. Astonishingly, the United States had resuscitated the Ninety-third Division—and made it its closest partner in the province. The Division’s gunmen again began stopping travellers on the bridge and plundering what they could. Now, however, their most profitable endeavor was collecting bounties offered by the U.S.; according to Mike Martin, a former British officer who wrote a history of Helmand, they earned up to two thousand dollars per Taliban commander captured.

This posed a challenge, though, because there were hardly any active Taliban to catch. “We knew who were the Taliban in our village,” Shakira said, and they weren’t engaged in guerrilla warfare: “They were all sitting at home, doing nothing.” A lieutenant colonel with U.S. Special Forces, Stuart Farris, who was deployed to the area at that time, told a U.S. Army historian, “There was virtually no resistance on this rotation.” So militias like the Ninety-third Division began accusing innocent people. In February, 2003, they branded Hajji Bismillah—the Karzai government’s transportation director for Gereshk, responsible for collecting tolls in the city—a terrorist, prompting the Americans to ship him to Guantánamo. With Bismillah eliminated, the Ninety-third Division monopolized the toll revenue.

Dado went even further. In March, 2003, U.S. soldiers visited Sangin’s governor—Dado’s brother—to discuss refurbishing a school and a health clinic. Upon leaving, their convoy came under fire, and Staff Sergeant Jacob Frazier and Sergeant Orlando Morales became the first American combat fatalities in Helmand. U.S. personnel suspected that the culprit was not the Taliban but Dado—a suspicion confirmed to me by one of the warlord’s former commanders, who said that his boss had engineered the attack to keep the Americans reliant on him. Nonetheless, when Dado’s forces claimed to have nabbed the true assassin—an ex-Taliban conscript named Mullah Jalil—the Americans dispatched Jalil to Guantánamo. Unaccountably, this happened despite the fact that, according to Jalil’s classified Guantánamo file, U.S. officials knew that Jalil had been fingered merely to “cover for” the fact that Dado’s forces had been “involved with the ambush.”

The incident didn’t affect Dado’s relationship with U.S. Special Forces, who deemed him too valuable in serving up “terrorists.” They were now patrolling together, and soon after the attack the joint operation searched Shakira’s village for suspected terrorists. The soldiers did not stay at her home long, but she could not get the sight of the rifle muzzles out of her mind. The next morning, she removed the rugs and scrubbed the boot marks away.

Shakira’s friends and neighbors were too terrified to speak out, but the United Nations began agitating for Dado’s removal. The U.S. repeatedly blocked the effort, and a guide for the U.S. Marine Corps argued that although Dado was “far from being a Jeffersonian Democrat” his form of rough justice was “the time-tested solution for controlling rebellious Pashtuns.”

Shakira’s husband stopped leaving the house as Helmandis continued to be taken away on flimsy pretexts. A farmer in a nearby village, Mohammed Nasim, was arrested by U.S. forces and sent to Guantánamo because, according to a classified assessment, his name was similar to that of a Taliban commander. A Karzai government official named Ehsanullah visited an American base to inform on two Taliban members; no translator was present, and, in the confusion, he was arrested himself and shipped to Guantánamo. Nasrullah, a government tax collector, was sent to Guantánamo after being randomly pulled off a bus following a skirmish between U.S. Special Forces and local tribesmen. “We were so happy with the Americans,” he said later, at a military tribunal. “I didn’t know eventually I would come to Cuba.”

Nasrullah ultimately returned home, but some detainees never made it back. Abdul Wahid, of Gereshk, was arrested by the Ninety-third Division and beaten severely; he was delivered to U.S. custody and left in a cage, where he died. U.S. military personnel noted burns on his chest and stomach, and bruising to his hips and groin. According to a declassified investigation, Special Forces soldiers reported that Wahid’s wounds were consistent with “a normal interview/interrogation method” used by the Ninety-third Division. A sergeant stated that he “could provide photographs of prior detainees with similar injuries.” Nonetheless, the U.S. continued to support the Ninety-third Division—a violation of the Leahy Law, which bars American personnel from knowingly backing units that commit flagrant human-rights abuses.

In 2004, the U.N. launched a program to disarm pro-government militias. A Ninety-third commander learned of the plan and rebranded a segment of the militia as a “private-security company” under contract with the Americans, enabling roughly a third of the Division’s fighters to remain armed. Another third kept their weapons by signing a contract with a Texas-based firm to protect road-paving crews. (When the Karzai government replaced these private guards with police, the Ninety-third’s leader engineered a hit that killed fifteen policemen, and then recovered the contract.) The remaining third of the Division, finding themselves subjected to extortion threats from their former colleagues, absconded with their weapons and joined the Taliban.

Messaging by the U.S.-led coalition tended to portray the growing rebellion as a matter of extremists battling freedom, but nato documents I obtained conceded that Ishaqzais had “no good reason” to trust the coalition forces, having suffered “oppression at the hands of Dad Mohammad Khan,” or Amir Dado. In Pan Killay, elders encouraged their sons to take up arms to protect the village, and some reached out to former Taliban members. Shakira wished that her husband would do something—help guard the village, or move them to Pakistan—but he demurred. In a nearby village, when U.S. forces raided the home of a beloved tribal elder, killing him and leaving his son with paraplegia, women shouted at their menfolk, “You people have big turbans on your heads, but what have you done? You can’t even protect us. You call yourselves men?”

It was now 2005, four years after the American invasion, and Shakira had a third child on the way. Her domestic duties consumed her—“morning to night, I was working and sweating”—but when she paused from stoking the tandoor or pruning the peach trees she realized that she’d lost the sense of promise she’d once felt. Nearly every week, she heard of another young man being spirited away by the Americans or the militias. Her husband was unemployed, and recently he’d begun smoking opium. Their marriage soured. An air of mistrust settled onto the house, matching the village’s grim mood.

So when a Taliban convoy rolled into Pan Killay, with black-turbanned men hoisting tall white flags, she considered the visitors with interest, even forgiveness. This time, she thought, things might be different.

In 2006, the U.K. joined a growing contingent of U.S. Special Operations Forces working to quell the rebellion in Sangin. Soon, Shakira recalled, “hell began.” The Taliban attacked patrols, launched raids on combat outposts, and set up roadblocks. On a hilltop in Pan Killay, the Americans commandeered a drug lord’s house, transforming it into a compound of sandbags and watchtowers and concertina wire. Before most battles, young Talibs visited houses, warning residents to leave immediately. Then the Taliban would launch their assault, the coalition would respond, and the earth would shudder.

Sometimes, even fleeing did not guarantee safety. During one battle, Abdul Salam, an uncle of Shakira’s husband, took refuge in a friend’s home. After the fighting ended, he visited a mosque to offer prayers. A few Taliban were there, too. A coalition air strike killed almost everyone inside. The next day, mourners gathered for funerals; a second strike killed a dozen more people. Among the bodies returned to Pan Killay were those of Abdul Salam, his cousin, and his three nephews, aged six to fifteen.

Not since childhood had Shakira known anyone who’d died by air strike. She was now twenty-seven, and she slept fitfully, as if at any moment she’d need to run for cover. One night, she awoke to a screeching noise so loud that she wondered if the house was being torn apart. Her husband was still snoring away, and she cursed him under her breath. She tiptoed to the front yard. Coalition military vehicles were passing by, trundling over scrap metal strewn out front. She roused the family. It was too late to evacuate, and Shakira prayed that the Taliban would not attack. She thrust the children into recessed windows—a desperate attempt to protect them in case a strike caused the roof to collapse—and covered them with heavy blankets.

Returning to the front yard, Shakira spotted one of the foreigners’ vehicles sitting motionless. A pair of antennas projected skyward. They’re going to kill us, she thought. She climbed onto the roof, and saw that the vehicle was empty: the soldiers had parked it and left on foot. She watched them march over the footbridge and disappear into the reeds.

A few fields away, the Taliban and the foreigners began firing. For hours, the family huddled indoors. The walls shook, and the children cried. Shakira brought out her cloth dolls, rocked Ahmed against her chest, and whispered stories. When the guns fell silent, around dawn, Shakira went out for another look. The vehicle remained there, unattended. She was shaking in anger. All year, roughly once a month, she had been subjected to this terror. The Taliban had launched the attack, but most of her rage was directed at the interlopers. Why did she, and her children, have to suffer?

A wild thought flashed through her head. She rushed into the house and spoke with her mother-in-law. The soldiers were still on the far side of the canal. Shakira found some matches and her mother-in-law grabbed a jerrican of diesel fuel. On the street, a neighbor glanced at the jerrican and understood, hurrying back with a second jug. Shakira’s mother-in-law doused a tire, then popped the hood and soaked the engine. Shakira struck a match, and dropped it onto the tire.

From the house, they watched the sky turn ashen from the blaze. Before long, they heard the whirring of a helicopter, approaching from the south. “It’s coming for us!” her mother-in-law shouted. Shakira’s brother-in-law, who was staying with them, frantically gathered the children, but Shakira knew that it was too late. If we’re going to die, let’s die at home, she thought.

They threw themselves into a shallow trench in the back yard, the adults on top of the children. The earth shook violently, then the helicopter flew off. When they emerged, Shakira saw that the foreigners had targeted the burning vehicle, so that none of its parts would fall into enemy hands.

The women of Pan Killay came to congratulate Shakira; she was, as one woman put it, “a hero.” But she had difficulty mustering any pride, only relief. “I was thinking that they would not come here anymore,” she said. “And we would have peace.”

In 2008, the U.S. Marines deployed to Sangin, reinforcing American Special Forces and U.K. soldiers. Britain’s forces were beleaguered—a third of its casualties in Afghanistan would occur in Sangin, leading some soldiers to dub the mission “Sangingrad.” Nilofar, now eight, could intuit the rhythms of wartime. She would ask Shakira, “When are we going to Auntie Farzana’s house?” Farzana lived in the desert.

But the chaos wasn’t always predictable: one afternoon, the foreigners again appeared before anyone could flee, and the family rushed into the back-yard trench. A few doors down, the wife and children of the late Abdul Salam did the same, but a mortar killed his fifteen-year-old daughter, Bor Jana.

Both sides of the war did make efforts to avoid civilian deaths. In addition to issuing warnings to evacuate, the Taliban kept villagers informed about which areas were seeded with improvised explosive devices, and closed roads to civilian traffic when targeting convoys. The coalition deployed laser-guided bombs, used loudspeakers to warn villagers of fighting, and dispatched helicopters ahead of battle. “They would drop leaflets saying, ‘Stay in your homes! Save yourselves!’ ” Shakira recalled. In a war waged in mud-walled warrens teeming with life, however, nowhere was truly safe, and an extraordinary number of civilians died. Sometimes, such casualties sparked widespread condemnation, as when a nato rocket struck a crowd of villagers in Sangin in 2010, killing fifty-two. But the vast majority of incidents involved one or two deaths—anonymous lives that were never reported on, never recorded by official organizations, and therefore never counted as part of the war’s civilian toll.

In this way, Shakira’s tragedies mounted. There was Muhammad, a fifteen-year-old cousin: he was killed by a buzzbuzzak, a drone, while riding his motorcycle through the village with a friend. “That sound was everywhere,” Shakira recalled. “When we heard it, the children would start to cry, and I could not console them.”

Muhammad Wali, an adult cousin: Villagers were instructed by coalition forces to stay indoors for three days as they conducted an operation, but after the second day drinking water had been depleted and Wali was forced to venture out. He was shot.

Khan Muhammad, a seven-year-old cousin: His family was fleeing a clash by car when it mistakenly neared a coalition position; the car was strafed, killing him.

Bor Agha, a twelve-year-old cousin: He was taking an evening walk when he was killed by fire from an Afghan National Police base. The next morning, his father visited the base, in shock and looking for answers, and was told that the boy had been warned before not to stray near the installation. “Their commander gave the order to target him,” his father recalled.

Amanullah, a sixteen-year-old cousin: He was working the land when he was targeted by an Afghan Army sniper. No one provided an explanation, and the family was too afraid to approach the Army base and ask.

Ahmed, an adult cousin: After a long day in the fields, he was headed home, carrying a hot plate, when he was struck down by coalition forces. The family believes that the foreigners mistook the hot plate for an I.E.D.

Niamatullah, Ahmed’s brother: He was harvesting opium when a firefight broke out nearby; as he tried to flee, he was gunned down by a buzzbuzzak.

Gul Ahmed, an uncle of Shakira’s husband: He wanted to get a head start on his day, so he asked his sons to bring his breakfast to the fields. When they arrived, they found his body. Witnesses said that he’d encountered a coalition patrol. The soldiers “left him here, like an animal,” Shakira said.

Entire branches of Shakira’s family tree, from the uncles who used to tell her stories to the cousins who played with her in the caves, vanished. In all, she lost sixteen family members. I wondered if it was the same for other families in Pan Killay. I sampled a dozen households at random in the village, and made similar inquiries in other villages, to insure that Pan Killay was no outlier. For each family, I documented the names of the dead, cross-checking cases with death certificates and eyewitness testimony. On average, I found, each family lost ten to twelve civilians in what locals call the American War.

This scale of suffering was unknown in a bustling metropolis like Kabul, where citizens enjoyed relative security. But in countryside enclaves like Sangin the ceaseless killings of civilians led many Afghans to gravitate toward the Taliban. By 2010, many households in Ishaqzai villages had sons in the Taliban, most of whom had joined simply to protect themselves or to take revenge; the movement was more thoroughly integrated into Sangin life than it had been in the nineties. Now, when Shakira and her friends discussed the Taliban, they were discussing their own friends, neighbors, and loved ones.

Some British officers on the ground grew concerned that the U.S. was killing too many civilians, and unsuccessfully lobbied to have American Special Forces removed from the area. Instead, troops from around the world poured into Helmand, including Australians, Canadians, and Danes. But villagers couldn’t tell the difference—to them, the occupiers were simply “Americans.” Pazaro, the woman from a nearby village, recalled, “There were two types of people—one with black faces and one with pink faces. When we see them, we get terrified.” The coalition portrayed locals as hungering for liberation from the Taliban, but a classified intelligence report from 2011 described community perceptions of coalition forces as “unfavorable,” with villagers warning that, if the coalition “did not leave the area, the local nationals would be forced to evacuate.”

In response, the coalition shifted to the hearts-and-minds strategy of counter-insurgency. But the foreigners’ efforts to embed among the population could be crude: they often occupied houses, only further exposing villagers to crossfire. “They were coming by force, without getting permission from us,” Pashtana, a woman from another Sangin village, told me. “They sometimes broke into our house, broke all the windows, and stayed the whole night. We would have to flee, in case the Taliban fired on them.” Marzia, a woman from Pan Killay, recalled, “The Taliban would fire a few shots, but the Americans would respond with mortars.” One mortar slammed into her mother-in-law’s house. She survived, Marzia said, but had since “lost control of herself”—always “shouting at things we can’t see, at ghosts.”

With the hearts-and-minds approach floundering, some nato officials tried to persuade Taliban commanders to flip. In 2010, a group of Sangin Taliban commanders, liaising with the British, promised to switch sides in return for assistance to local communities. But, when the Taliban leaders met to hammer out their end of the deal, U.S. Special Operations Forces—acting independently—bombed the gathering, killing the top Taliban figure behind the peace overture.

The Marines finally quit Sangin in 2014; the Afghan Army held its ground for three years, until the Taliban had brought most of the valley under its control. The U.S. airlifted Afghan Army troops out and razed many government compounds—leaving, as a nato statement described approvingly, only “rubble and dirt.” The Sangin market had been obliterated in this way. When Shakira first saw the ruined shops, she told her husband, “They left nothing for us.”

Still, a sense of optimism took hold in Pan Killay. Shakira’s husband slaughtered a sheep to celebrate the end of the war, and the family discussed renovating the garden. Her mother-in-law spoke of the days before the Russians and the Americans, when families picnicked along the canal, men stretched out in the shade of peach trees, and women dozed on rooftops under the stars.

But in 2019, as the U.S. was holding talks with Taliban leaders in Doha, Qatar, the Afghan government and American forces moved jointly on Sangin one last time. That January, they launched perhaps the most devastating assault that the valley witnessed in the entire war. Shakira and other villagers fled for the desert, but not everyone could escape. Ahmed Noor Mohammad, who owned a pay-phone business, decided to wait to evacuate, because his twin sons were ill. His family went to bed to the sound of distant artillery. That night, an American bomb slammed into the room where the twin boys were sleeping, killing them. A second bomb hit an adjacent room, killing Mohammad’s father and many others, eight of them children.

The next day, at the funeral, another air strike killed six mourners. In a nearby village, a gunship struck down three children. The following day, four more children were shot dead. Elsewhere in Sangin, an air strike hit an Islamic school, killing a child. A week later, twelve guests at a wedding were killed in an air raid.

After the bombing, Mohammad’s brother travelled to Kandahar to report the massacres to the United Nations and to the Afghan government. When no justice was forthcoming, he joined the Taliban.

On the strength of a seemingly endless supply of recruits, the Taliban had no difficulty outlasting the coalition. But, though the insurgency has finally brought peace to the Afghan countryside, it is a peace of desolation: many villages are in ruins. Reconstruction will be a challenge, but a bigger trial will be to exorcise memories of the past two decades. “My daughter wakes up screaming that the Americans are coming,” Pazaro said. “We have to keep talking to her softly, and tell her, ‘No, no, they won’t come back.’ ”

The Taliban call their domain the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and claim that, once the foreigners are gone, they will preside over an era of tranquil stability. As the Afghan government crumbled this summer, I travelled through Helmand Province—the Emirate’s de-facto capital—to see what a post-American Afghanistan might look like.

I departed from Lashkar Gah, which remained under government control. At the outskirts stood a squat cement building with an Afghan-government flag—beyond this checkpoint, Kabul’s authority vanished. A pickup idled nearby; piled into the cargo bed were half a dozen members of the sangorian, a feared militia in the pay of the Afghan intelligence agency, which was backed by the C.I.A. Two of the fighters appeared no older than twelve.

I was with two locals in a beat-up Corolla, and we slipped past the checkpoint without notice. Soon, we were in a treeless horizon of baked earth, with virtually no road beneath us. We passed abandoned outposts of the Afghan Army and Police that had been built by the Americans and the Brits. Beyond them loomed a series of circular mud fortifications, with a lone Taliban sniper splayed on his stomach. White flags fluttered behind him, announcing the gateway to the Islamic Emirate.

The most striking difference between Taliban country and the world we’d left behind was the dearth of gunmen. In Afghanistan, I’d grown accustomed to kohl-eyed policemen in baggy trousers, militiamen in balaclavas, intelligence agents inspecting cars. Yet we rarely crossed a Taliban checkpoint, and when we did the fighters desultorily examined the car. “Everyone is afraid of the Taliban,” my driver said, laughing. “The checkpoints are in our hearts.”

If people feared their new rulers, they also fraternized with them. Here and there, groups of villagers sat under roadside trellises, sipping tea with Talibs. The country opened up as we jounced along a dirt road in rural Sangin. In the canal, boys were having swimming races; village men and Taliban were dipping their feet into the turquoise water. We passed green cropland and canopies of fruit trees. Groups of women walked along a market road, and two girls skipped in rumpled frocks.

We approached Gereshk, then under government authority. Because the town was the most lucrative toll-collection point in the region, it was said that whoever held it controlled all of Helmand. The Taliban had launched an assault, and the thuds of artillery resounded across the plain. A stream of families, their donkeys laboring under the weight of giant bundles, were escaping what they said were air strikes. By the roadside, a woman in a powder-blue burqa stood with a wheelbarrow; inside was a wrapped body. Some Taliban were gathered on a hilltop, lowering a fallen comrade into a grave.

I met Wakil, a bespectacled Taliban commander. Like many fighters I’d encountered, he came from a line of farmers, had studied a few years in seminary, and had lost dozens of relatives to Amir Dado, the Ninety-third Division, and the Americans. He discussed the calamities visited on his family without rancor, as if the American War were the natural order of things. Thirty years old, he’d attained his rank after an older brother, a Taliban commander, died in battle. He’d hardly ever left Helmand, and his face lit up with wonder at the thought of capturing Gereshk, a town that he’d lived within miles of, but had not been able to visit for twenty years. “Forget your writing,” he laughed as I scribbled notes. “Come watch me take the city!” Tracking a helicopter gliding across the horizon, I declined. He raced off. An hour later, an image popped up on my phone of Wakil pulling down a poster of a government figure linked to the Ninety-third Division. Gereshk had fallen.

At the house of the Taliban district governor, a group of Talibs sat eating okra and naan, donated by the village. I asked them about their plans for when the war was over. Most said that they’d return to farming, or pursue religious education. I’d flown to Afghanistan from Iraq, a fact that impressed Hamid, a young commander. He said that he dreamed of seeing the Babylonian ruins, and asked, “Do you think, when this is over, they’ll give me a visa?”

It was clear that the Taliban are divided about what happens next. During my visit, dozens of members from different parts of Afghanistan offered strikingly contrasting visions for their Emirate. Politically minded Talibs who have lived abroad and maintain homes in Doha or Pakistan told me—perhaps with calculation—that they had a more cosmopolitan outlook than before. A scholar who’d spent much of the past two decades shuttling between Helmand and Pakistan said, “There were many mistakes we made in the nineties. Back then, we didn’t know about human rights, education, politics—we just took everything by power. But now we understand.” In the scholar’s rosy scenario, the Taliban will share ministries with former enemies, girls will attend school, and women will work “shoulder to shoulder” with men.

Yet in Helmand it was hard to find this kind of Talib. More typical was Hamdullah, a narrow-faced commander who lost a dozen family members in the American War, and has measured his life by weddings, funerals, and battles. He said that his community had suffered too grievously to ever share power, and that the maelstrom of the previous twenty years offered only one solution: the status quo ante. He told me, with pride, that he planned to join the Taliban’s march to Kabul, a city he’d never seen. He guessed that he’d arrive there in mid-August.

On the most sensitive question in village life—women’s rights—men like him have not budged. In many parts of rural Helmand, women are barred from visiting the market. When a Sangin woman recently bought cookies for her children at the bazaar, the Taliban beat her, her husband, and the shopkeeper. Taliban members told me that they planned to allow girls to attend madrassas, but only until puberty. As before, women would be prohibited from employment, except for midwifery. Pazaro said, ruefully, “They haven’t changed at all.”

Travelling through Helmand, I could hardly see any signs of the Taliban as a state. Unlike other rebel movements, the Taliban had provided practically no reconstruction, no social services beyond its harsh tribunals. It brooks no opposition: in Pan Killay, the Taliban executed a villager named Shaista Gul after learning that he’d offered bread to members of the Afghan Army. Nevertheless, many Helmandis seemed to prefer Taliban rule—including the women I interviewed. It was as if the movement had won only by default, through the abject failures of its opponents. To locals, life under the coalition forces and their Afghan allies was pure hazard; even drinking tea in a sunlit field, or driving to your sister’s wedding, was a potentially deadly gamble. What the Taliban offered over their rivals was a simple bargain: Obey us, and we will not kill you.

This grim calculus hovered over every conversation I had with villagers. In the hamlet of Yakh Chal, I came upon the ruins of an Afghan Army outpost that had recently been overrun by the Taliban. All that remained were mounds of scrap metal, cords, hot plates, gravel. The next morning, villagers descended on the outpost, scavenging for something to sell. Abdul Rahman, a farmer, was rooting through the refuse with his young son when an Afghan Army gunship appeared on the horizon. It was flying so low, he recalled, that “even Kalashnikovs could fire on it.” But there were no Taliban around, only civilians. The gunship fired, and villagers began falling right and left. It then looped back, continuing to attack. “There were many bodies on the ground, bleeding and moaning,” another witness said. “Many small children.” According to villagers, at least fifty civilians were killed.

Later, I spoke on the phone with an Afghan Army helicopter pilot who had just relieved the one who attacked the outpost. He told me, “I asked the crew why they did this, and they said, ‘We knew they were civilians, but Camp Bastion’ ”—a former British base that had been handed over to the Afghans—“ ‘gave orders to kill them all.’ ” As we spoke, Afghan Army helicopters were firing upon the crowded central market in Gereshk, killing scores of civilians. An official with an international organization based in Helmand said, “When the government forces lose an area, they are taking revenge on the civilians.” The helicopter pilot acknowledged this, adding, “We are doing it on the order of Sami Sadat.”

General Sami Sadat headed one of the seven corps of the Afghan Army. Unlike the Amir Dado generation of strongmen, who were provincial and illiterate, Sadat obtained a master’s degree in strategic management and leadership from a school in the U.K. and studied at the nato Military Academy, in Munich. He held his military position while also being the C.E.O. of Blue Sea Logistics, a Kabul-based corporation that supplied anti-Taliban forces with everything from helicopter parts to armored tactical vehicles. During my visit to Helmand, Blackhawks under his command were committing massacres almost daily: twelve Afghans were killed while scavenging scrap metal at a former base outside Sangin; forty were killed in an almost identical incident at the Army’s abandoned Camp Walid; twenty people, most of them women and children, were killed by air strikes on the Gereshk bazaar; Afghan soldiers who were being held prisoner by the Taliban at a power station were targeted and killed by their own comrades in an air strike. (Sadat declined repeated requests for comment.)

The day before the massacre at the Yakh Chal outpost, CNN aired an interview with General Sadat. “Helmand is beautiful—if it’s peaceful, tourism can come,” he said. His soldiers had high morale, he explained, and were confident of defeating the Taliban. The anchor appeared relieved. “You seem very optimistic,” she said. “That’s reassuring to hear.”

I showed the interview to Mohammed Wali, a pushcart vender in a village near Lashkar Gah. A few days after the Yakh Chal massacre, government militias in his area surrendered to the Taliban. General Sadat’s Blackhawks began attacking houses, seemingly at random. They fired on Wali’s house, and his daughter was struck in the head by shrapnel and died. His brother rushed into the yard, holding the girl’s limp body up at the helicopters, shouting, “We’re civilians!” The choppers killed him and Wali’s son. His wife lost her leg, and another daughter is in a coma. As Wali watched the CNN clip, he sobbed. “Why are they doing this?” he asked. “Are they mocking us?”

In the course of a few hours in 2006, the Taliban killed thirty-two friends and relatives of Amir Dado, including his son. Three years later, they killed the warlord himself—who by then had joined parliament—in a roadside blast. The orchestrator of the assassination hailed from Pan Killay. In one light, the attack is the mark of a fundamentalist insurgency battling an internationally recognized government; in another, a campaign of revenge by impoverished villagers against their former tormentor; or a salvo in a long-simmering tribal war; or a hit by a drug cartel against a rival enterprise. All these readings are probably true, simultaneously. What’s clear is that the U.S. did not attempt to settle such divides and build durable, inclusive institutions; instead, it intervened in a civil war, supporting one side against the other. As a result, like the Soviets, the Americans effectively created two Afghanistans: one mired in endless conflict, the other prosperous and hopeful.

It is the hopeful Afghanistan that’s now under threat, after Taliban fighters marched into Kabul in mid-August—just as Hamdullah predicted. Thousands of Afghans have spent the past few weeks desperately trying to reach the Kabul airport, sensing that the Americans’ frenzied evacuation may be their last chance at a better life. “Bro, you’ve got to help me,” the helicopter pilot I’d spoken with earlier pleaded over the phone. At the time, he was fighting crowds to get within sight of the airport gate; when the wheels of the last U.S. aircraft pulled off the runway, he was left behind. His boss, Sami Sadat, reportedly escaped to the U.K.

Until recently, the Kabul that Sadat fled often felt like a different country, even a different century, from Sangin. The capital had become a city of hillside lights, shimmering wedding halls, and neon billboards that was joyously crowded with women: mothers browsed markets, girls walked in pairs from school, police officers patrolled in hijabs, office workers carried designer handbags. The gains these women experienced during the American War—and have now lost—are staggering, and hard to fathom when considered against the austere hamlets of Helmand: the Afghan parliament had a proportion of women similar to that of the U.S. Congress, and about a quarter of university students were female. Thousands of women in Kabul are understandably terrified that the Taliban have not evolved. In late August, I spoke by phone to a dermatologist who was bunkered in her home. She has studied in multiple countries, and runs a large clinic employing a dozen women. “I’ve worked too hard to get here,” she told me. “I studied too long, I made my own business, I created my own clinic. This was my life’s dream.” She had not stepped outdoors in two weeks.

The Taliban takeover has restored order to the conservative countryside while plunging the comparatively liberal streets of Kabul into fear and hopelessness. This reversal of fates brings to light the unspoken premise of the past two decades: if U.S. troops kept battling the Taliban in the countryside, then life in the cities could blossom. This may have been a sustainable project—the Taliban were unable to capture cities in the face of U.S. airpower. But was it just? Can the rights of one community depend, in perpetuity, on the deprivation of rights in another? In Sangin, whenever I brought up the question of gender, village women reacted with derision. “They are giving rights to Kabul women, and they are killing women here,” Pazaro said. “Is this justice?” Marzia, from Pan Killay, told me, “This is not ‘women’s rights’ when you are killing us, killing our brothers, killing our fathers.” Khalida, from a nearby village, said, “The Americans did not bring us any rights. They just came, fought, killed, and left.”

The women in Helmand disagree among themselves about what rights they should have. Some yearn for the old village rules to crumble—they wish to visit the market or to picnic by the canal without sparking innuendo or worse. Others cling to more traditional interpretations. “Women and men aren’t equal,” Shakira told me. “They are each made by God, and they each have their own role, their own strengths that the other doesn’t have.” More than once, as her husband lay in an opium stupor, she fantasized about leaving him. Yet Nilofar is coming of age, and a divorce could cast shame on the family, harming her prospects. Through friends, Shakira hears stories of dissolute cities filled with broken marriages and prostitution. “Too much freedom is dangerous, because people won’t know the limits,” she said.

All the women I met in Sangin, though, seemed to agree that their rights, whatever they might entail, cannot flow from the barrel of a gun—and that Afghan communities themselves must improve the conditions of women. Some villagers believe that they possess a powerful cultural resource to wage that struggle: Islam itself. “The Taliban are saying women cannot go outside, but there is actually no Islamic rule like this,” Pazaro told me. “As long as we are covered, we should be allowed.” I asked a leading Helmandi Taliban scholar where in Islam was it stipulated that women cannot go to the market or attend school. He admitted, somewhat chagrined, that this was not an actual Islamic injunction. “It’s the culture in the village, not Islam,” he said. “The people there have these beliefs about women, and we follow them.” Just as Islam offers fairer templates for marriage, divorce, and inheritance than many tribal and village norms, these women hope to marshal their faith—the shared language across their country’s many divides—to carve out greater freedoms.

Though Shakira hardly talks about it, she harbors such dreams herself. Through the decades of war, she continued to teach herself to read, and she is now working her way through a Pashto translation of the Quran, one sura at a time. “It gives me great comfort,” she said. She is teaching her youngest daughter the alphabet, and has a bold ambition: to gather her friends and demand that the men erect a girls’ school.

Even as Shakira contemplates moving Pan Killay forward, she is determined to remember its past. The village, she told me, has a cemetery that spreads across a few hilltops. There are no plaques, no flags, just piles of stones that glow red and pink in the evening sun. A pair of blank flagstones project from each grave, one marking the head, one the feet.

Shakira’s family visits every week, and she points to the mounds where her grandfather lies, where her cousins lie, because she doesn’t want her children to forget. They tie scarves on tree branches to attract blessings, and pray to those departed. They spend hours amid a sacred geography of stones, shrubs, and streams, and Shakira feels renewed.

Shortly before the Americans left, they dynamited her house, apparently in response to the Taliban’s firing a grenade nearby. With two rooms still standing, the house is half inhabitable, half destroyed, much like Afghanistan itself. She told me that she won’t mind the missing kitchen, or the gaping hole where the pantry once stood. Instead, she chooses to see a village in rebirth. Shakira is sure that a freshly paved road will soon run past the house, the macadam sizzling hot on summer days. The only birds in the sky will be the kind with feathers. Nilofar will be married, and her children will walk along the canal to school. The girls will have plastic dolls, with hair that they can brush. Shakira will own a machine that can wash clothes. Her husband will get clean, he will acknowledge his failings, he will tell his family that he loves them more than anything. They will visit Kabul, and stand in the shadow of giant glass buildings. “I have to believe,” she said. “Otherwise, what was it all for?” ♦

— Published in the print edition of the September 13, 2021, issue.

— Anand Gopal, the author of “No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes,” is writing a book on the Arab revolutions.

[meanderfall]

//pops out from under your desk, 1 - 3 - 5 - 9 - 13 - 14 - 17 - 19 - 23 - 28 - 29 - 31 - 34 - 37 - 40 - 41 - 45 - 47 - 51 - 52 - 55 - 56 - 59 - 67 - 68 - 69 - 72 - 75 - 79 - 80 - 83 - 93 - 95 - 99 - aaaaand 100!! its a lot (even more than YOU sent ME i think) so feel free to skip some if u dont wanna do them!!

I DID IT!!!! IN YOUR FACE!!! (i love u, i dont mean that. for the most part.)

1: when you have cereal, do you have more milk than cereal or more cereal than milk?

I actually don’t mind, even like it, when my cereal gets all soggy from milk, but if you think for a single moment im going to drown my cereal in milk, you are a mad man. Besides, I fill my bowl up past the rim, so it’s basically physically impossible for there to be more milk than cereal.

3: what random objects do you use to bookmark your books?

you fool…. you underestimate my power…. i dont bookmark my page, i just remember the page number i was on

(When I was a kid, I would dog-ear the pages, but I think my brother got mad at me for doing that to his books, so i moved on to using tissues and then paperclip or magnetic bookmarks, and then keeping track of that shit was too much effort, so now i just remember the page number instead)

5: are you self-conscious of your smile?

nay, friend! But I am self-conscious about my laugh… it’s… loud, as you might have noticed by now. To the point that a lot of my classmates just knew who I was because of my laugh.

9: do you like singing/humming to yourself?

An easy way to tell if I’m in not having a good day is if I’m not singing or humming something. I grew up surrounded by people who love singing or whistling or humming, so it’s what I do. (I say people, but the main culprits were my dad and older brother.)

13: what’s something that made you smile today?

*whispers* getting a message from you…

14: if you were to live with your best friend in an old flat in a big city, what would it look like?

ummm, there would need to be a separate room with sound-proofing for her piano and bird. I’d imagine there would be bookshelves on every wall, filled with so many books like goddamn. A couch and tv would be necessary for gaming. Im sure the place would be filled with her art projects (she once built a chair out of recyclable items for the end of year project!!!). She would probably want to have houseplants, bc she’s outdoorsy like that (disgusting i know). I don’t really care about wall colours, so she would probably pick and i would just voice my opinion if i really didn’t like the colour. She would probably bring paintings too. This question is too hard, i legit do not care at all about how my apartment would look, please. you would understand if you saw my room, just how little i truly care.

17: what color do you really want to dye your hair?

A purplish-red! Like so:

19: do you keep a journal? what do you write/draw/ in it?

If you mean a journal where I keep all my thoughts and feelings in, then no, i do not. I have an app for that. If you mean a writing journal, then yes i have one, though i barely touch it tbh. I just scribble ideas and sometimes outlines, or even plan out history and culture for the fantasy worlds i create. I don’t really draw, unless im trying to create a map.

23: what’s your favorite thing to do on lazy days where you have 0 obligations?

well if today is anything to go by, it’s sleeping. I also like binge-watching comfort shows like Friends.

28: sunrise or sunset?

Sunset. They’re prettier to me and give off a different feeling than sunrises. It’s peaceful, a bit melancholy, and soft. a reminder that i’ve made it through another day and it’s time to rest.

29: what’s something really cute that one of your friends does and is totally endearing?

i have this friend that i play overwatch with who likes to shout LMAO whenever they do something cool or badass that’s also completely ridiculous (like, say, making a goal in lucioball from their own goal)

31: what is your opinion of socks? do you like wearing weird socks? do you sleep with socks? do you confine yourself to white sock hell? really, just talk about socks.

socks are socks. they keep my toesies and feetsies warm, though i usually prefer to go barefoot, bc wearing socks implies that im going to wear shoes which means im going to leave the house which ew. i literally do not give a fuck what colour they are, as long as they do their job, so i got bright colourful socks, dark socks, and just plain white socks. i only wear my socks to bed when im too lazy to take them off at the end of the day and just end up forgetting that im even wearing them, though i don’t like it too much when i do that because my feet feel dried out afterwards. i have a pair of thick wooly socks that are dark blue with patterns of white snowflakes on them that i wear during winter, especially on days when im wearing my onesie.

34: tell us about the stuffed animal you kept as a kid. what is it called? what does it look like? do you still keep it?

I didn’t have one. I mean, I had stuffed animals, but cuddling something that small when I was a kid was impossible for me to do. They just got in the way. The only thing I’ve ever shared my bed with besides blankets and pillows was my cat.

37: do you like keeping your room messy or clean?

pls go see drace’s ask im sorry i dont want to write it all again or copy and paste it.

40: think of a piece of jewelry you own: what’s it’s story? does it have any meaning to you?

my aunt on my dad’s side visited one summer. she brought me two necklaces, both that i adore. One is a choker with real gold beads that used to belong to my grandmother, my dad’s mom. I never met her, she died long before any of the kids were born, so i consider very special, beyond the fact that it’s expensive and elegant. It’s pretty much the only connection i have to her.

41: what’s the last book you remember really, really loving?

John Dies at the End!!! Along with Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, written by the same author!!! There’s so much character just from the narration, i wish i could write like that!! and it’s surprisingly deep too, i cannot recommend the two enough!!

45: do you trust your instincts a lot?

i suppose i do, considering the few times i didn’t, my instincts ended up being completely right. 

47: what food do you think should be banned from the universe?

drace’s ask pls.

51: think of a person. what song do you associate with them?

I hate the fact that I immediately started thinking of characters instead of a person. Anyway, Hush by Emeline makes me think of @anthcny-stark

52: what are your favorite memes of the year so far?

the distracted boyfriend is a definite fave. The floor is… is also pretty good. i thought roll safe and the white guy blinking was from 2016 but apparently not, and i quite enjoy them. i dont know if the reaction image of the dude saying “why would you say something so controversial yet so brave?” counts as meme, but i love a lot. all the other memes of 2017 are Bad.

55: what’s the most dramatic thing you’ve ever done to prove a point?

I don’t know if this counts… But, at some point in high school, I got sick, with a fever at around 102, and like, I guess I wanted to prove that my family doesn’t actually care about me, and so, I didn’t say a word about being sick. I wanted to see if they would notice for themselves. I also didn’t take any kind of medication for it.

They did not notice. Which either proves that they pay little attention to me or I’m just a really really good actor. Or I spend little time with them.

56: what are some things you find endearing in people?

…………………………………….. i’ll be honest, i dont pay enough attention to other people in order to answer this, i spend most of my life in my own head and i ignore everyone. It’s kind of fun though, to see what other people do while on the train? Some people are texting, or playing games on their phones or listening to music. Others are reading. Some are just staring out the window, lost in thought, and others are hard at work on their laptops. It’s interesting, it’s like getting a hint of what kind of person they are just based on what they do.

59: what’s your favorite myth?

i don’t know and i don’t care, next! (nah seriously, i used to be into mythology, by i havent read a myth in so long and i really don’t care enough to go and find one i like)

67: how do gloomy days where the sky is dark and the world is misty make you feel?

see drace’s ask

68: what’s winter like where you live?

Cold!!! and windy. And so much goddamn snow, holy shit. And it lasts for months, like the snow lasts all the way to April some times. It’s very pretty though, and peaceful and i like it.

69: what are your favorite board games?

Sorry! is probably the one i like the most. though tbh, i didnt play a lot of board games.

72: are you a person who needs to note everything down or else you’ll forget it?

see drace’s ask

75: tell us about your pets!

pls go and see my answer on drace’s ask for the love of god im not rewriting all of that

79: what’s one of the cutest things someone has ever done for you?

One time, there was only two chocolate and white chocolate chip cookies left, so i let my younger two siblings have them, and they each decided to split their cookie in half and gave me a half, so i ended up with an entire cookie.

80: what color are your bedroom walls? did you choose that color? if so, why?

Three of them are white and one of them is like crimson. I did not choose this, the room came like that, and we never painted it a different colour.

83: what’s some of your favorite album art?

I sure do like the album art for Atlas: Space 2 by Sleeping at Last and Atlas: Light.

93: what’s the hairstyle you wear the most?

Well, when I had long hair, I would usually wear it in a ponytail. My hair is too short for that now, so I just let it loose with its natural curls.

95: what are your plans for this weekend?

ummm probably play overwatch with you??? idk man, i dont have school anymore or a job, so im just stuck in this horrible in-between moment with no purpose or goals and i might lose it if i don’t find something soon.

99: list some songs that resonate to your soul whenever you hear them.

In a Big Country by Big Country, Riptide by Vance Joy, Carry Your Throne by Jon Bellion, Saturn by Sleeping at Last,  Fear by Apsley, Exorcism by Clairity, Brian Wilson by Barenaked Ladies, Which Witch by Florence + The Machine, Pinch Me by Barenaked Ladies, Pompeii by Bastille, A Chance of Rain by Bedouin Soundclash, Gems by birthday, The Kids Aren’t Alright by Fall Out Boy, My Heart’s Grave by Faouzia, 100 Years by Five for Fighting, You Found Me by The Fray, Ready Aim Fire, I’m So Sorry, Believer, Dream, and Thunder Imagine Dragons, Irresistible Force by Jane’s Addiction, Money by Mystery Skulls, Afraid by The Neighbourhood, Just to Get High by Nickelback (which is weird considering i cant relate to this song like at all)This Afternoon, How You Remind Me, and Just For by NickelbackMy Demons, and Starlight by StarsetGo To War by Nothing MoreLose It, and All We Do by Oh WonderCounting Stars, and Secrets by OneRepublicWait For ItEmperor’s New Clothes by Panic! at the DiscoSOS, and Montreal by Raine MaidaStand by Rascal FlattsWhen the Truth Hunts You Down by Sam TinneszFall by Serena RyderStitches bby Shawn MendesSecond Chance by ShinedownEverybody by StabiloPieces by Sum 41Kings by Tribe SocietyKitchen Sink by Twenty One PilotsBeautiful Day, and Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of by U2Shut Up and Dance, and Anna Sun by Walk the MoonUnsteady by X AmbassadorsEast of Eden, and 1965 by Zella DayBe Like That by 3 Doors Down

There!!! I went through every song i downloaded to pick out the songs that resonated with my soul. (I’m not touching by Spotify though lmao it would take at least five hours)

100: if you were presented with two buttons, one that allows you to go 5 years into the past, the other 5 years into the future, which one would you press? why?

Like. Going into the past would be nice because then I could redo all of the mistakes I made, and hopefully, I’d be in a better position than I am now. However, going through paths I’ve tread before sounds like it would suck a lot, and I’m much more curious about the future! What has changed? What is my life like then? Have I moved out? Do I have a job? A job I like? Did I make friends? What’s the political climate??? Going to the future would be much more interesting!!

[richmeganews]

Why we love to play the lottery when we know we won’t win

In the fall of 2018, America was infected with Mega Millions fever. The jackpot for the Mega Millions — one of the two biggest nationwide lottery games, along with Powerball — had climbed to an astonishing $1.6 billion, the highest in history, and across the country, cartoon dollar signs were popping into people’s eyes.

After weeks of breathless media speculation, it was announced: A single ticket, sold at a KC Mart in Simpsonville, South Carolina, had won the grand prize — a feat with the approximate odds of one in 302.6 million.

Yet the ticket went unclaimed for months. A winner only has 180 days to come forward with the prize ticket; otherwise, the money would be dispersed among the states based on ticket sales, and the expected windfall for South Carolina ($61 million) and even the clerk whose convenience store sold the golden ticket ($50,000) would evaporate.

Finally, on March 4, just under the cutoff, a woman came forward to claim the prize. But because South Carolina law allows lottery winners to remain anonymous, we may never know the name of the person whose stroke of luck let her walk away with a lump sum of nearly $878 million, the largest payout to a single winner in history.

Four days later, news outlets had moved on: to the story of an unemployed 54-year-old man who won $173 million off a Mega Millions ticket he bought — and mistakenly left — at a Quick Check in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, and was able to reclaim after a Good Samaritan turned in the ticket for the store to hold.

We love stories like this. Lottery wins are a staple of local news coverage, and periodically, when the jackpot climbs high enough, the national press gets in on the action too — and even people who otherwise would never think of it might find themselves shelling out for a ticket. It’s that potent combination of envy and hope; in a world where the American ethos of hard work and perseverance paying off seems increasingly like a lie, where the chips seem stacked against us anyway, why couldn’t it be me, or you, who somehow beats the odds and finds riches beyond measure at a Quick Check off the interstate?

But while the game of lightning-strike fame and fortune might seem like a product of the modern culture that birthed Instagram and the Kardashians, the roots of the lottery in America are as old as the country itself.

A brief history of the lottery

Ronshelley/Wikimedia Commons

First, a few definitions. Per the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries (NASPL) “lottery” can refer to three things:

1) An entity that operates or administers lottery games — usually a governmental or quasi-government agency or a corporation licensed by a government. 2) A game in which all plays have an equal chance of winning. 3) A game with three components for the players: a prize to be won, a chance to win and not win, and an element of consideration (such as buying a ticket) to enter the game.

Under the umbrella of lottery games are many types: number or daily games (such as Pick 3 and Pick 4), instant games (scratch-off tickets), keno (in which players pick numbers to match numbers chosen by the game from a certain quantity of numbers — 10 of 20 of 80, for instance), online games, and more. The ones that collect the biggest jackpots in North America, and thus the ones you’ve probably heard the most about, are the Mega Millions and Powerball games (more on these below).

While the ways to play have expanded over time, along with the jackpots, the basic concept of lotteries is swirled into the DNA of the country; they were first used to fund the colonies and eventually became the province of the newly formed states. As Jonathan Cohen detailed in a great piece for Vox, they served (and still do) as a sort of voluntary tax, bringing in significant sums for the government without the type of pushback that raising tax rates elicits:

Once states took control of the lottery system, they could authorize games as they saw fit in order to help specific institutions raise money. State governments owned lottery wheels, which were used for drawing tickets, and politicians would lend them to the organizations the state permitted to hold drawings.

Though conservative Protestants have opposed gambling for centuries, many of the first church buildings in the United States were built with lottery money. Many of the world’s most elite universities, too, owe their existence to lotteries. Parts of the campuses of Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton, and Dartmouth were paid for with lottery money, and the New York legislature held multiple lotteries to fund the creation of what is now Columbia University. And because lotteries were tied to specific institutions — or even specific buildings — the public had obvious evidence of their effectiveness in avoiding taxes and building the new nation.

Lotteries fell out of favor around the 1850s and were outlawed in the 1890s, and it wasn’t until the mid-20th century that the modern lotto emerged: first in 1934 with the Puerto Rico Lottery, then 30 years later with the New Hampshire Sweepstakes. Lotteries were then still illegal at the federal level, but the Department of Justice determined the New Hampshire contest would be permissible as long as tickets didn’t cross state lines (people in Rhode Island, New Jersey, and New York were arrested for being in possession of New Hampshire lottery tickets).

According to NH Magazine, it proved to be a huge draw: People flocked to the Granite State to take part in the sweepstakes, which was a horse race; names of ticket holders would be drawn and randomly assigned to one of the 11 competing horses, and dollar amounts were designated for first place ($100,000), second place ($50,000), and so on. If their horse won, so would they. By the time the race began, the state had sold $5.7 million in $3 tickets. Among that first lotto’s grand prize winners were a barber named Frank Malkus and his wife Eleanor, who won $100,000 off a stallion named Roman Brother (about $819,000 today).

Herb Scharfman/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

Alvarez Fernando, the jockey for first-place winner Roman Brother, with winners Paul Cordone and his wife, after the New Hampshire sweepstakes.

After that, the lottery began to catch on in other states. According to the NAASPL, Massachusetts pioneered the scratch-off game in 1975; the “quick pick” numbers option, which now accounts for 35 percent of all lottery sales, launched in 1982; and three years later, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont banded together for the first multi-state lottery, the Tri-State Megabucks.

These days, 44 states and the District of Columbia run their own lotteries. The six states that don’t — and where you also can’t play Powerball or Mega Millions — are Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Mississippi, Utah, and, somewhat incredibly, Nevada, home to the gambling paradise of Las Vegas. The reasons vary, per the BBC; Alabama and Utah’s absences are motivated by religious concerns; the state governments of Mississippi and Nevada, which allow gambling, already get a cut of that revenue and don’t want a competing entity to cut into the profits; and Alaska, thanks to its budget surplus from oil drilling, lacks the “fiscal urgency” that might motivate other states to adopt the lottery.

“If it seems like everyone rushes to play Powerball one month and then stocks up on Mega Millions tickets the next, that’s because it’s intentional”

So people in those states who want a crack at the multimillion-dollar jackpots regularly offered by the major multi-state lotto games, Powerball and Mega Millions, are out of luck.

And what, you might ask, is the difference between the two games, anyway? According to Slate, there’s not much. Powerball draws five balls from a lot of 69, versus five from 70 for Mega Millions. And while the two were introduced at different times (Powerball in 1988, Mega Millions in 1996), and were originally mutually exclusive — states where one game could be played couldn’t offer the other — that hasn’t been true since they merged jurisdictions in 2009. Now they’re offered everywhere that also has a state lotto, and per Slate’s Nick Greene, there’s little appreciable difference between them, which is likely intentional to motivate sales:

If it seems like everyone rushes to play Powerball one month and then stocks up on Mega Millions tickets the next, that’s because it’s intentional. The cycle of highly publicized mega-jackpots followed by a trickle of lesser winnings is by design. Powerball reduced its odds to produce bigger prizes in 2015, and Mega Millions followed suit two years later. The result is a kind of seesaw effect, in which the games’ terrible odds allow their jackpots to grow ever-bigger.

Opponents argue that the lottery preys on the already marginalized

Xinhua News Agency/Getty Images

An advertisement for the Powerball jackpot is seen in midtown Manhattan on January 11, 2016.

Lotteries may be great for states, whose coffers swell thanks to both ticket sales and winners, but that money comes from somewhere, and study after study has suggested it’s largely from low-income people, minorities, and people with gambling addiction.

Vox’s Alvin Chang looked at the data for Connecticut, which has some of the richest and poorest neighborhoods in the country, and found that lotto ticket sales are disproportionately concentrated in zip codes with more low-income and minority residents.

A Business Insider analysis of census data, which divided the total income from all the lotteries in a state by the estimated number of residents, found that Massachusetts spends the most on lottery tickets by far, an average of $767 per person in 2016. West Virginia is in second place at $594, and Rhode Island is in third at $513. All that spending adds up to tens of billions of dollars for state governments, which largely goes to education (though it still represents just a tiny fraction of overall state spending).

Among households in the lowest income bracket, 28 percent play the lottery once a week

While probably few would argue that more funding for education is a bad thing, the demographics of regular lottery players are concerning to the games’ opponents. A Bankrate survey found that among households in the lowest income bracket, 28 percent play the lottery once a week, and those seemingly insignificant ticket purchases add up to more than $400 a year — money that could go toward paying off debt or accumulating savings.

The NASPL disputes these findings. Its website links to a 2016 Gallup poll that found lower-income and less educated Americans were less likely to say they had bought a state lottery ticket in the past year — about 40 percent for people with a household income of less than $36,000 per year, versus 56 percent and 53 percent for middle- and high-income people, respectively.

Still, the lottery’s business model relies on a base of regular players. As Les Bernal, an anti-state-sponsored gambling activist, told Pew Charitable Trusts, state-sponsored lotteries rely heavily on super users, “getting up to 70 to 80 percent of their revenue from 10 percent of the people that use the lottery.” The problem is so pervasive that some state lawmakers have even put forth proposals to limit lotteries, or at least restrict new modes of play like credit card sales of tickets and online games.

And even for those rare few whose hopeful ticket purchases actually pay off, their issues might just be beginning.

The “curse” of lottery winners

Susan Watts/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images

Andrew (Jack) Whittaker (center) takes wife Jewell (right) and granddaughter Brandi Bragg, 15, to lunch at Tavern on the Green in Central Park after Whittaker won the $314.9 million Powerball jackpot on Christmas Day. Whittaker beat the 120-million-to-one odds to rope in what was then the biggest single-ticket lottery jackpot ever.

Stories of lottery winners may inspire envy, but there’s no shortage of schadenfreude either — which brings us to the cottage industry of horrific stories about “cursed” lottery winners.

While curses aren’t real (as far as I know), winning the lottery has historically seemed to precede a string of terrible luck for many otherwise ordinary people. To preface: In a majority of states, lottery winners are legally not allowed to remain anonymous. As Aditi Shrikant wrote for Vox:

Winners must sign the back of the ticket to officially claim it, then contact their state’s lottery commission, which announces the lottery is closed by saying who won. In only eight states — Delaware, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas — are winners allowed to conceal their names, but even then, they can only stay anonymous below a certain earnings threshold or for a certain time period.

It makes sense from the states’ perspective: Putting a face and a name to that big ol’ pile of money makes it easier for other people to imagine themselves in that lucky person’s shoes, and can thus drive the ticket sales that put money in the state budget. To wit, past winners’ full names, hometowns, and even photos are listed right on the Powerball and Mega Millions websites.

But this also means that winner is now low-grade famous — and a potential target for robbery, kidnapping, scam artists, and even murder.

There was Abraham Shakespeare, who won $31 million in 2006 and whose body was found in 2010 concealed under a concrete slab; and Jeffrey Dampier, who after he won $20 million was kidnapped and then shot in the head by his sister-in-law and her boyfriend; and Urooj Khan, who dropped dead the day after winning a comparatively tame $1 million and was later found to have been poisoned by cyanide.

70 percent of lottery winners end up bankrupt in just a few years

Perhaps the most widely reported tale of woe is that of Jack Whittaker, a kindly West Virginia man who became somewhat of a folk hero in his state after winning $314 million in 2002. As April Witt wrote for the Washington Post Magazine in 2005, Whittaker’s seeming stroke of good luck destroyed his life: He was robbed and sued multiple times, he got a DUI, his business and his marriage fell apart, and his granddaughter Brandi died less than two years later from a drug overdose.

And this isn’t even to touch on the more straightforward issue of financial mismanagement. Per the National Endowment for Financial Education, 70 percent of lottery winners end up bankrupt in just a few years. As Jim Shagawat, a financial adviser with Windfall Wealth Advisors, told me, this could be attributed to the fact that “a lot of lottery winners simply don’t have life experience having a lot of money. They do things like give away too much to family and friends, or have scam artists take advantage of them, or they get a feeling like this money’s unlimited and start spending it all.”

Low-income people living paycheck to paycheck — again, the people who are most likely to play the lottery regularly — may not have much experience with investment or savings. “If you’re a trust fund baby, you’re kinda taught about the team of advisers you need” to manage your money, Shagawat told me. Many of us might be able to handle smaller sums but aren’t equipped to deal with, say a windfall of $15 million. “All of a sudden, the way you did things just won’t work anymore.”

Don McNay, a financial adviser and the author of Life Lessons From the Lottery, put it even more bluntly. “The money just overwhelms them,” he told the New York Times’s Joe Nocera in 2012 of lottery winners. “It just causes them to lose their sense of values.”

Gaming the odds

Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images

A woman buys Mega Millions tickets hours before the draw of the $1.6 billion jackpot at a liquor store in Downtown Washington, DC, on October 23, 2018.

Given that the chance of winning the kind of jackpot that can turn you into an overnight millionaire is infinitesimally small — you’re statistically far more likely to be struck by lightning or guess every single team in your Sweet 16 March Madness bracket correctly — it’s perhaps not surprising that there’s a long history of people trying to hack the lottery, sometimes quite literally.

HuffPost’s Highline tells the story of a couple in their 60s who made nearly $27 million over nine years via games in their home state of Michigan because the husband noticed a flaw in the games’ rules. Their tactic: bulk-buying tickets, thousands at a time, to ensure the odds were in their favor, basically turning playing the lottery into a full-time job. They soon began traveling regularly to play a similar game in Massachusetts, where a group of MIT students had figured out the same thing simultaneously.

Stefan Mandel won not only the $27 million jackpot but also $900,000 in additional prizes by buying up every possible number combination in the Virginia lottery

The two competing parties’ large bets in the game, called Cash WinFall, eventually triggered an investigation by a Boston Globe reporter and turned into a national scandal; the state lottery commission went on to suspend the licenses of several stores that had sold tickets to the two groups and then announced it would phase out Cash WinFall entirely.

There was also a woman with a PhD in statistics from Stanford who won the Texas lottery four times in 10 years to the tune of nearly $20 million (and who, unlike the MIT and Michigan players, has not been forthcoming about her methods).

Stefan Mandel, a Romanian economist living in Australia, won not only the $27 million jackpot but also $900,000 in additional prizes by systematically buying up every possible number combination in the Virginia lottery. As Zachary Crockett wrote for the Hustle, Mandel was subject to investigation by 14 law enforcement agencies but ultimately found not guilty of wrongdoing; Crockett writes that “in his home country of Australia, he became something of a folk hero: A widely-circulated cartoon depicted him as a kangaroo hopping out of the US with a pouch full of cash.”

And in 2017, PennLive published a whole investigative series on the surprisingly high number of lottery players who’ve won multiple times — too many times to be statistically plausible (though there’s not yet hard evidence of illegal doings).

Of course, there have been some high-profile cases of straight-up cheating too. There was the infamous “Triple Six Fix” incident of 1980, in which Nick Perry, the announcer of Pennsylvania’s “Daily Number” game, cooked up a plot to weight the ping-pong balls used in the drawing to ensure his victory. Aided by the lottery’s “shockingly lax” security, Perry pulled it off, winning $1.8 million with the portentous drawing of “666” — but officials were immediately suspicious and launched an investigation that ended in a criminal conviction for Perry.

Perhaps the biggest lottery scam in the US was orchestrated by a programmer named Eddie Tipton in what’s now known as the “Hot Lotto fraud scandal.” As the New York Times explains, Tipton worked for the Multi-State Lottery Association as a security employee and figured out how to game the lottery via inserting fraudulent code into the random number generator machine to game the system in lotteries across multiple states. Across the long-running scam, he got friends and family members to collect the winning tickets, and eventually was busted after trying to collect a $16.5 million ticket in 2010. Tipton was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2017 (though he could get out on parole much earlier).

While Americans may enjoy a good grifter story, those who game the lottery don’t seem to inspire the same grudging admiration — perhaps because the odds are so long to begin with that for those who do play by the rules, it feels a lot more personal when someone profits by flouting them. HuffPost’s Jason Fagone put it well: “Even if the lottery is a shitty deal and a sucker’s bet, at least everyone who plays is getting the same shitty deal.”

Still, even the wild improbability of winning and the stories of some occasional bad actors is apparently not enough to dissuade many people with a couple of dollars in their pocket and a misty dream in their heart. After all, this weekend’s Powerball jackpot is already up again, to nearly $500 million. As the fraudster Nick Perry’s lottery catchphrase used to go, “If you’ve got it, come and get it; if not, better luck tomorrow.”

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Top 7 Teen Movies

When you grow up, your heart dies - or so they say. Here's the proof: Heathers Juno, critic of The Guardian and Observer select the 10 best movies for teenagers.  Blackboard Jungle

Under the name "Evan Hunter", also known as a crime writer Ed McBain - Blackboard Jungle the early age of the labeled teen offender - it was based on his own experience as a teacher in the Bronx. In London movie Brooks attracted crowds of Stuffed Boys, cut theater seats, danced in the aisles and actually started a riot. The reason for this so shocking behavior was not so much the content of the film, which is now a sober 12 rating, but achieved due to the use of Bill Haley and the early rock'n'roll comets, Rock Around the Clock, who played in polarization . Today is the least shocking aspect of a crime-thrusting film with a knife, drugs and even rape in the state school system, but at the time it was a touchstone for disgruntled young people, regardless of whether Haley was a white musician traveler in Its 30 years and the music has already been a year old. Almost 60 years later, he still has a hit, with Richard Dadier Glenn Ford (first called to enable students to call the Jive to talk to him "Daddy-O") struggle to control his students in the North fiction manual school. Others try and fail, such as the unfortunate Mr. Edwards, whose valuable 78s are crushed by his class consists of an act of symbolic and even disturbing rebellion, but I hope that as African Americans Gregory Miller, what eventually patriotic authority Dadier replied. But for all its war morality, Vic Morrow, the evil Artie West, is the true anti-hero of the film, dressed in leather and meets the logical heir Wild One, Marlon Brando, two years before. Superbad

With certified hits The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, the Judd Apatow Express was already rolling at full speed when Superbad, directed a comedy in the younger audience, appeared on the movie screens. Co-written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (designated the main characters to be), and produced by Apatow, he liked this movie more with a hoarse Partycrowd. The image is dominated by three young actors who were not then the stars they are now. Evan (Michael Cera), Seth (Jonah Hill) and Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) are high school graduates getting ready for a final party before college. Evan and Seth no longer see each other when the first outing to the prestigious Dartmouth while the latter attended a public university; Seth Groll scattered around the action, but now he's eyeing sex. If he offers through the object of his alcohol affection to a party held so the numbers he is sleeping with her. This is where the drippy Fogell enters: having a fake identity secured mis-adapted under the pseudonym of McLovin, is the key is to plan Seth. With its notes and 24-hour melancholy, the film takes a similar American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused terrain, but is distinguished by a Post-Porky Sensitivity Hallows celebrates simultaneously pre-PC smuttiness. Much of the humor derives from the assessments of the chauvinistic Sex by inexperienced hero. (Adult, I no longer sophisticated. A Rogen police admits that police work is nothing like the serious coroner CSI procedural having been carried out, can be expected. "When I joined the force," he laments, "I semen believed oftentimes "). Goodwill mocking the experts, the details of the accompaniment and direction of Greg Mottola exuberant makes the image almost irresistible, although the pace of broad-fashion and humor is as sexist as a hope for the production of Apatow Kids

No kids at school wisecracking here. In fact there is no mention of the school. Not that many jokes, either come to think of it. Instead, Larry Clark's raw, Drama bracing reminds us securely and artificially that most movies are teenagers. The boys were dangerous: an open honest representation of what modern teenagers actually do (those who grew up in New York, anyway). It was a heavy blow to the chops of a complacent society, who thought she had made all the rebels in the 1950s, and was convicted by demonstrators and politicians. But as The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause, the film showed a terrible chasm between generations of young and old. The last only demographic number in history. While they work, their children are drunk, they are stoned, fun, fight, steal them and more sex than they did, yet clumsy, insecure and people who do not particularly like. Worse than all this danger sign, but the general lack of concern or compassion for the characters, especially Leo Fitzpatrick's anti-hero is Telly's terrible reckless pursuit of "de-virginise" younger girls and neglected joint has its successes. With the spectrum of AIDS lurking in the shadows, a happy ending is even more in the distance. But there is nothing particularly sensational about the way children have gone through these adolescent lives. The treatment is more like a documentary: on the wall with the camera (which incidentally by the indecent sometimes), the actual sites of the road, unstructured scenes and dialogue really conversation - the latter in Harmony Korine, largely through Of the internal work of a writing, as he was 19 years old. That's the thing, do not get the kids credit for the season: it's done. It is a work of fiction, but the benefits are so little is known, is not included as an "actor", although many of the players followed the decent career, such as Fitzpatrick, Chloe Sevigny, Rosario Dawson and Korine. In short, the will of a job done a little too well. 10 Things I Hate About You

The philosophy behind this lively teen comedy looks like the Shrew the Clueless made Emma do. That is, take the skeleton of a literary classic and dressed in the threads of high school. Although the film Clueless is not, still quite blinding Bobby. Shakespeare's transplant into a youthful atmosphere of the United States in recent times is the least successful part of it: It is not something that a strident touch in the plot, in which a young man told his father that he would not allow graduation date, until the Abrasive ground older sister Kat (Julia Stiles). This sets up a system of younger brother suitors born of a legal soil, Patrick (Heath Ledger), is paid uncontrollably seduce Kat. But that's a small detail. To which we respond in 10 things are visual and verbal, energetic rhythm and charismatic performances: Stiles and the last Ledger may be known for more intense films, but it is doubtful that we do not always get more on the screen than I do here. Writer Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, keeping things bright will not character for a long time without toxic replica or a sharp zinger their lips anymore. If someone has hit a dry spot, there is always a language to see. "I know you can be overwhelmed and dominated" reflects a girl, "but can it alone" overwhelmed "? Everyone here is united and evoked by their idiosyncratic vocabulary, and the viewer is also enriched by phrases such as" (The brain area where the images are saved as desirable partner for stimulants) or a new definition for the word "backup." For the cast includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt and as the father of the Kat, the magnificent Larry Miller (who was an early contender for George Costanza's game at Seinfeld.) If the rhythm flags, still pick-me-ups like the wonderful accounting show karaoke with the zeal of Steve's early start Martin is held. Juno

Written by an ex-stripper and the issue of student pregnancy approaching - the downfall of all middle-class parents - Jason Reitman's film is a hilarious comedy, played well, that a star made night Ellen Page as the title character. Much if talked about its pro-life nuances in its release, but in reality the situation is Juno is something of a MacGuffin, a premise that a smart, wise to the world and its future can look 16 years. Juno begins with his heroine to realize that a baby will have, the result of a loose ball with his best friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera, in his own weediest). Instead of finishing, Juno decides the child for adoption to give attributes to the Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner), a couple who seem to be in tune - especially participate their love for indie rock and horror movies (although their tastes are quite Early, even by today's standards). The latter is twee and well marked, but what Juno is refreshing, without dismantling the smart edge. In the end, she is certainly older and wiser, but what Juno learns more, do, prepare for disappointment: the adult world not Disney World of complexity is what he seems to think. The use of indie rock still dark have hampered its potential as a mainstream success, but now that only its charm is given lo-fi and in a sense, it is probably useful because Juno really is not aligned world, only those who think Who knew everything grew and learned the hard way that even if they know everything, nobody likes a smartass. Clueless

"As if!" — "I totally paused!" — "Minor ducats…" — "Let's do a lap before we commit to a location!" — "I was surfing the crimson wave!" — "Did my hair get flat?"If Clueless was published in 1995, it was not just sensational and intelligent fun - carefree, the opposite of its title was. Insinuating indirect, clever and funny: writers director Amy Heckerling and seemed to have invented a new culture of the teen-pop language. It was as vivid and colorful as his remarkable movie heroine-keeper: funnier and more romantic than any romcom. In the nineties, it was the hot topics issue. This film was a disgrace to all who, a funny and gracious tribute to Emma Jane Austen with nod to Shakespeare and Wilde. In Clueless, 19, Alicia Silverstone was the role of her life, unique style and comedy display ability, but never found after the race that everything seemed to promise. She plays Cher, the pampered, but basically good-hearted Princess: rich, popular, obsessed with fashion, but lonely and looking for love. Silverstone finds laughter as a teacher, and his voice in a sort of pitchy yodel pause in perplexing tones or complaint. Cher is best friend Dionne (Stacey Trace), but somewhat aggressive with his ex-strident Josh, whose mother was married to Cher's ferocious defender Mel, played by Dan Hedaya. However, could there be a spark between these two? Josh is a college student in liberal causes and Roar Mode "Rock Complaint". It is played by 26-year-old Paul Rudd, who immediately became a brand in Hollywood and sniper. Rudd's character began to mature and youthful Clueless. Get Cher decides what bad grades you have to do with getting your teachers in love, to sneakily two of them fall to each other, and if the east coast dorky girl named Tai appears, Cher makes a personal change "project ". Tai is very well played by Brittany Murphy, an up-and-comer talent who was bleak due to complications of dying in 2009 after an overdose of prescription drugs. The teen movie references to contemporary youth culture is always complicated with irony and melancholy if you look after almost 20 years. The terrible fate of Brittany Murphy is the saddest part of it. Clueless is strange to think that once the social networks. These people are ready and ready for the Internet and the digital revolution. There is a splendid view of the gag on Cher and Dionne talking uncomfortable on his large mobile phone. The recent film by Sofia Coppola, The Ring Bling is Clueless next generation. The difference is that the lean teenager Coppola really are clueless, white and selfish. There is a nice quality and idealistic Clueless comic that makes it so appealing. Cher and Dionne are the queens at their school, but not unpleasant, and according to their lights, they always want to do the right thing. Clueless is not characterized by a sign of "Bully" noticing a comeuppance ter. Mean Girls, the 2004 satirical film written by Tina Fey and Lindsay Lohan is very different. There's nothing new about bullying, of course, but I think it's interesting that Clueless appeared briefly to introduce snarky sites and reality farce at the center of pop culture. Clueless is a true classic: handsome, innocent fun. I envy people I have not yet seen. Pretty In Pink 

The amazing ability to take advantage of John Hughes' teenage thrill, and then inexorably, pack it in a commercial way, has never been better employed here. This is empathy for his films, but also the most outrageous Eighties-tastic. A universal heart-tugger and retro bible style. It's a win-win. There is an old story - the poor Cinderella rich Prince Charming meets, and agonize all the way to the climatic ball, sorry, dance - but the full spectrum of teen angst is here: worry about what your colleagues think; Believing secretly tell your best friend and courage; They worry that you are very poor; Concern for parents; Worry that the sleeve of your vintage tuxedo has not rolled high enough. Hughes takes everything seriously and it takes time to build his characters. Andie knows where Molly Ringwald is coming from. We have to see him at home, and how embarrassing it is, we hung in his room, we saw the status of his single father (playing Harry Dean Stanton). This does not want to take the Ringwald natural wonderful power. Their blend of forward and fragility is the compelling effort. If you apply your lipstick or calls snobbery Andrew McCarthy, we are all the way with it. And Duckie John Cryer is the strangest of the male characters: the friendly and friendly clown who does not stay with the girl, although a better and better dressed society. The latter (especially the requirements of the modified screening tests) feels a bit like a cop-out, but could be read as a commentary on the bittersweet novel against pragmatism. If the story you do not start with Pretty in Pink, style it be. The film is worth looking at the costume changes alone, the respective boss Ringwald, Annie Potts, who travels from the fetish-punk in the 50's hive, Madonna-like material girl Debbie Harry New Wave. Serious art direction now makes the film look like a time capsule intentionally, filled with so many fashions, posters, records and decorative objects as they thought they could escape. And do not forget the soundtrack: Psychedelic Furs, OMD, Echo and the Bunnymen, New Order, The Smiths, uh, a cover by Nik Kershaw. Was each teen movie better?

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Download Here

Anti-fascist groups, often called “antifa,” are popping up all around the United States, and a number of people have asked us for advice on forming a group. Because antifa work is different from other forms of radical organizing, and because the antifa groups themselves are changing, we have written down some of our suggestions, based on years of experience. However, this article has been written in a very fluid political situation (February 2017), and some of these specifics may or may not be relevant in the coming months and years.

This essay covers a number of points, including: the advantages, disadvantages, and obligations of working under the anti-fascist banner; questions involving anonymity and visibility, both in person and online; self-defense and firearms; working with problematic people and dealing with infiltrators; state repression; and actions to take as anti-fascists.

WHY“ANTIFA”?

The first question is: Why are you forming an “antifa” group? The label has advantages and disadvantages, and you should consider this before adopting it. The antifa name gets you a certain level of brand recognition and built-in credibility, but it also includes certain obligations and distinct disadvantages.

If the purpose of your group is to do public organizing where your members are clearly identifiable—organizing anti-Trump rallies or supporting refugees and immigrants—using the antifa label and the traditional antifa symbols will likely lead to blowback that could be avoided by naming your organization differently. “Las Cruces United Against Racism” will not draw the attention that calling yourself “La Cruces Antifa,” and using traditional antifa symbolism, will.

DISADVANTAGES

The primary disadvantage is that fascists will try to identify members of your group and cause you physical harm.Staying as anonymous as possible is the easiest way to minimize this. Members’ pictures may appear on white power websites with any personal information they can find, and many anti-fascists have been injured, even killed, doing this work. If you are exposed, you will also be remembered by fascists for several years. (Keep in mind that anti-fascists who are not white men have been targeted more heavily by fascists: women garner greater online harassment, and people of color have been singled out in fights.)

OBLIGATIONS

If you form a local antifa group, you will be expected to do a few things:

1) Track white nationalist, Far Right, and fascist activity. Your group will be expected to document fascist groups and organizing in your area. This means gathering information on who is doing what, and knowing the makeup and key players of the various groups that are active.Once information is verified, antifa groups periodically release this information in a publicly available format. It is also crucial to alert any intended targets about specific threats you find while doing research.

2) Oppose public Far Right organizing.If the Klan or the National Socialist Movement hold a public rally, if AltRight speakers come to town, or if the Daily Stormer holds a meet up, you will be expected to organize a counter-demonstration. If they hold postering or sticker campaigns, you should not only take down their materials but also put up your own; public outreach campaigns should likewise be countered.

3) Support other anti-fascists who are targeted by fascists or arrested for antifa-related activities. This could include supporting regional groups, or organizing benefits and fundraisers for prisoners and injured comrades.

4) Build a culture of non-cooperation with law enforcement. If you have any intention of working with the police, FBI, or other agencies; or if you publically condemn anti-fascists who break the law: don’t call yourself an anti-fascist. The cops will be Trump supporters; do not collaborate with them.

VISIBILITY

Both the authorities and fascists will be interested in your group’s membership, so you should consider the question of public visibility carefully before you start. We strongly recommend against antifa groups being organized using the open, public model of most contemporary activism because of the risk of infiltration. If an emergency situation—such as responding to fascist public event—calls for public meetings and a traditional mass organizing activist model, this should be kept separate from the long-term group structure.

In fact, we recommend that you stay anonymous both while forming and until your first action. Anonymity is your best defense, and you should keep it intact as long as you can. Develop your group, get on the same page, and decide what you want to focus on. Also, note that once groups are formed, it’s very difficult to change the type of person who is in the group. Whether this is about gender, age, race, or counterculture—it will be hard to alter later on.

Use a “closed collective” model: this is a membership-based policy with no open meetings. Don’t allow new people to walk in off the street. Instead, develop a process for researching and vetting people who want to be involved.

One extreme option is to function as a group but not give yourself a name, and not tell fellow activists what you are doing. Once you have a name, fascists will try to figure out “who is in the group.” Not having a public face makes your actions even more anonymous. If people are being targeted, for example after a conflict with fascists, a publicly known group will draw attention first. If there is no public presence, or no formalized organization with a name, this will complicate the process of identification and retaliation.

Consider using a cell model whenever possible, in which one member meets with others when required. For example, you might need a public face to talk to other groups, club owners to convince them to cancel Nazi bands, to meet people to receive information they don’t want to share online, orto table at events. To limit exposure, make sure one person is designated as the semi-public face, even if they never admit they are a group member. This limits how many people can be exposed.

ONLINE PRESENCE

As part of staying anonymous, you should carefully manage your online presence. We recommend only using Twitter; it limits the amount of personal information you expose and makes tracking your connections more difficult. Facebook presents numerous, major risks for the security of your members and supporters.A recent doxxing of “antifa” was the result of information bigots culled from people who had interacted with an antifa facebook page. The targets were not even antifa, just sympathizers, but they were identified via facebook.

Websites imply that your group is more legitimate, and should be used especially if you want to doxx local fascists or put up group statements. Again, if you don’t have a group name, you may choose not to have any online presence.

Individual members, when possible, should get off social media, especially facebook, altogether. Where they don’t, they should maintain strictly separate personal and political accounts.

SELF-DEFENSE

Antifa groups engage in self-defense work. While most antifa work does not involve direct confrontation, and the amount of confrontation varies from group to group, sometimes it is necessary. Your group members and the supporters around you should be prepared.

We recommend regular martial arts training for anti-fascists, as well as for the larger radical community. It’s a good place to meet people who are serious about this.

Find out what the laws are in your city and state about a variety of self-defense weapons and make sure to practice with, and carry, everything that is legal— whether that is pepper spray, retractable clubs, or other devices.In some cases, what is legal to carry for self-defense is considered assault with a weapon if used in an offensive capacity.Laws vary community by community and ideally a lawyer should be consulted regarding this.

GUNS

A word about guns. Ask yourself: Can another weapon suffice instead of a gun? If you do choose to own guns, engage in regular practice. A gun can give you a false sense of security and if you’re not in practice, you’re more likely to be injured than if you don’t have one. Keep in mind that gun shops and range owners themselves are often connected to right-wing political groups.

If you choose to engage in firearms training, make sure everyone understands basic gun safety—as well as local laws—when it comes to owning, transporting, and potentially using firearms.

Above all, don’t front with images of guns unless you own and are ready to use them. Which is better: to pretend that you have guns and then have one pulled on you when you are unarmed, or for fascists to try to roll on you without realizing you are armed?

However, if right-wingers have been threatening people in your area with guns, or have already shot people, we recommend you arming yourselves immediately and getting concealed carry permits, where possible.For more information, see “Know Your (Gun) Rights! A Primer for Radicals.”

MANIPULATORS, BIG MOUTHS, LOOSE CANNONS, AND PROVOCATEURS

A diversity of people are joining the anti-fascist movement today, which both strengthens it and broadens its base. However, people may float into your circles who put your core goals and membership at risk, and so here are some warnings:

1) Some people use the antifa name as a way to promote their specific political views, especially members of some ideologically driven left-wing groups. If someone is more interested in recruiting people to their own group than doing anti-fascist work, get rid of them.Same with someone who seem to be interested in being publicly identified as antifa so they can gain public acclaim. Real antifa strive to remain anonymous—that’s what the masks are for!

2) Insist on mutual respect. Some people will be more interested in identity politics than others, and some people will be new to all of these discussions. This diversity is a healthy development, but establish a minimum level of respect that must be observed for all group members. Disputes over patriarchal behavior tore antifa groups apart in the 1990s. Work to create a culture of mutual respect and support that can also help bring in new people.

3) Avoid those who insist you must “follow their leadership” because of their identity, or who lay out a preset plan based on experiences from a decade or more ago.The Far Right threatens a broad range of identities. Also, this is a new situation, and nobody knows what the correct course of action is.

4) Be wary of people who just want to fight. Physically confronting and defending against fascists is a necessary part of anti-fascist work, but is not the only or even necessarily the most important part. Macho posturing and an overemphasis on picking fights and physical combat can be reckless, un-strategic, and unnecessarily dangerous for your group.

5) Drop people who have loose lips and openly talk about illegal actions around people they don’t know, or who pressure newer and younger people to engage in illegal activities. Antifa work is intense and potentially dangerous: We face threats from both the state and the fascists. If someone in your group likes to brag and talk about various illegal actions they have done or plan to do, especially when they are in public settings (including meetings or people who aren’t in the core group), quickly remove them.

Be particularly vigilant against anyone who attempts to pressure young or new members to carry out actions that might put them in unnecessary danger. This is a classic provocateur move with the potential to bring a group down.

Make good group dynamics and security culture part of your chapter’s inner dynamics and when people make mistakes, remind them in a good way that they have done so. For those that can’t get with the program, show them the door.

INFILTRATORS

Over the years, we have dealt with a variety of infiltrators. Sometimes they are random contacts. Sometimes they are fence sitters in the punk rock and skinhead scenes who are known to people in both fascist and anti-fascist circles. On one occasion, a black man tried to get involved with antifa groups, but ended up being affiliated with a neo-Nazi party and was feeding them information. AltRight supporters in particular can be from the same social demographic as many left-wing activists, and have infiltrated several meetings and demonstrations, including January 2017 planning meetings in DC before the protests at the inauguration. You will have to screen out and deal with them.

If people contact you and ask to meet, ask yourself: Do you need to meet with them? Vet them first. Consider asking them to show ID or reveal other personal information before any in-person meetings.

STATE REPRESSION

The state sees anti-fascists as an enemy. Activists will be monitored and the state will not hesitate to jail people. Until now, U.S. antifa have been spared the harsh repression that the animal rights and radical environmental direct action groups received, which included terrorism charges, long sentences, and harsh prison conditions. However, because Trump is allied with the AltRight, this has the possibility of changing soon, and antifa may face increased targeting on a federal level.

In the past, police tended to show up in large groups at public demonstrations to prevent clashes between antifa and racists. This may no longer be the case (as happened in Anaheim in February 2016), or police may start openly taking the sides of racists in public conflicts. This happened in Seattle in January 2017 when an AltRight supporter shot an activist at a demonstration; police refused to arrest the shooter.

Prepare legal support ahead of time; make sure you know a lawyer who is willing to represent anyone who is arrested.A trial lawyer, if necessary, can be found later. Get used to doing political prisoner support.Many anti-fascists are in prison around the world, and they would like our support now.Remember: It may be your turn later. Contribute to the International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund, and apply to it if members need financial help with legal, medical, or other expenses.

POLITICAL ORIENTATION

The anti-fascist movement has come from multiple theoretical currents; it is based on an agreement on tactics, not ideological uniformity. In the U.S., most activists are anarchist, although a few are Maoist or anti-state Marxists. (In other countries, the movement is predominately Marxist.)There is a general agreement to live and let live regarding political disagreements that would be divisive in other activist circles.

Other than tracking and countering fascists and white supremacists, it’s your choice what your group wants to focus on. Some antifa groups pay a varying level of attention to other radical right-wing forces, such as the anti-immigrant movement, the Patriot and militia movement, Islamophobes, Men’s Rights Activists, homophobic organizers, etc. Regarding what radical movements you actively support, it’s also your choice who you want to make your ties to.Today, this is commonly to Black Lives Matter and other activism against police oppression of the Black community, immigrant and refugee movements, work with prisoners, and Rojava solidarity work.

Working with other groups can be challenging. It is not uncommon for liberal activists to immediately smear anti-fascists as violent thugs who delegitimize their movement, and others will be willing to inform the authorities if they suspect illegal actions are being taken. However, a few will be sympathetic—and we have run into a number of people who privately have told us they were antifa in the past and understand the need for this approach.

However, in general we have found that, unless there is an existing relationship with a more mainstream organization, they will almost always reject collaboration if you approach them as an antifa group. It’s best to build relationships prior to any request for working together, or if this can’t be done, to approach them under a different name (“Las Cruces United Against Racism”). In general relationships with Black Lives Matter and immigrants rights groups have been positive. However, be sure that any conflicts with fascists are done in a way that does not draw police repression onto these activists: keep a separation in time and space.

On the national level, your group can affiliate with the Torch Network if you are in agreement with their points of unity: www.torchantifa.org.

TAKE ACTION!

Now that you have a group, what do you do?

1) Establish an online presence

If you are a public group, establish an online presence. Again, we recommend limiting this to a webpage and/or twitter. If you make a facebook group for an event, make sure you set the invite list to private: many people have been doxxed based on information from invites. For some more ideas on basic online security, see: https://itsgoingdown.org/time-beef-defense-against-far-right-doxxing.

2) Start monitoring

Find out about your local Far Right groups and collect information about them, including organizations, names, pictures, addresses, and work places. These can include AltRight activists, KKK, Nazi skinheads, neo-Nazi parties, suit-and-tie white nationalists, anti-Semites, Islamophobes, anti-immigration activists, Patriot and militia groups, and others. The SPLC’s Hate Map lists groups by state, although itwill be incomplete. You can also look at established national groups such as Identity Evropa and the Traditionalist Worker Partyand see if they have local chapters in your area. Also, reading reports by other anti-fascist groups may give insight into who is recruiting in your area.

3) Stickering and wheatpasting

If racist groups are stickering or flyering in neighborhoods, organizepatrolsto tear them down. Use a scraping tool, as there have been occasional instances of razors being placed behind the stickers. Create anti-fascist stickering, flyering, wheatpasting, and graffiti campaigns of your own.

4) Doxxing

After doing your research, present information about racist organizing in your community. The information you release should present enough information to convince an average reader that the target is clearly a racist. Information should include, if possible: a picture, home address, phone number, social media profiles, and employment information. Be sure to include organizational affiliations and screenshots showing concrete evidence of racist and fascist views. Follow up the doxx with a pressure campaign: call their work and try to get them fired, and inform their neighbors through flyering or door-to-door campaigns.

When you present your intel, you’ll have showed your hand, however, and generally it’s difficult to collect more after that. Also be aware that you will enrage your target by naming them: you might have been ignored as a public group for a year doing antifa stuff, but once you refer to a local racist by name, they will fixate on you.

Make sure your intel is correct. You will lose credibility and create unnecessary enemies if you list a home address or work place that the fascist is no longer associated with. The majority of research can be done online, but some things can only be verified in the real world.

5) Event shutdowns

Pressure venues to cancel racist or fascist events. Make sure you have your dossier on the subject prepared beforehand to present, as the first question will always be “How do you know they are a racist?” Approach venues with a friendly phone call, as often they are not informed about the politics of events at their space. However, if they don’t cancel immediately, they will almost always need to be pressured. Collect phone numbers, emails, and social media contacts and call for a shutdown. (We have found that it is helpful to make easily sharable graphics and short videos.) Threaten a boycott of the venue if they event goes on, and follow through on this. In Montreal, one racist concert was cancelled after antifa physically blocked the entrance.

6) Self-defense trainings

Set up an antifa gym or regular self-defense trainings. Some groups set up two parallel ones: one mixed gender, and one women/trans/gender non-conforming folks. In addition to providing skills, trainings are good ways to increase confidence and meet new people.(An antifa gym network exists in Europe.)

7) Events: benefits and tabling

If your group has a public presence, table at events with anti-fascist literature, stickers, buttons, patches, etc. This is particularly important in cultural scenes where fascists are recruiting, to help organize resistance to them, as well as to reach out to new participants and pressure fence sitters.

If you have a friendly political situation, throw benefits to raise funds. Concerts are a favorite, but be creative! The anti-fascist movement is going to need a lot of money, and it’s better to collect it before rather than after it’s needed. Also get in the habit of having letter writing nights and doing other support work for anti-fascist and related political prisoners. Consider donating to the International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund, which collects funds for prisoners around the world.

8) Demonstrations

If racists are having public rallies, organize mass demonstrations against them with allied groups who are willing to work with you. You can also join other demonstrations, such as Black Lives Matter or for immigrants and refugees, with antifa flags and banners—though he sure to be respectful of the organizers and not get in front of their message. Take photos with antifa banners, blur the faces, and put them on social media.

In general, antifa work should be a certain set of practices within the broader radical movement against white supremacy in particular, but hierarchy and oppression in general. Antifascism is not a stand-alone ideology; it is a piece of a whole, just as prisoner support is. Fascists, after all, don’t just threaten people of color—they also are against Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ people, immigrants and refugees, feminists, leftists, etc. Make sure that antifascism is a part of the other movements in our society towards liberation.

SECURITY CULTURE & INTERNET SAFETY

Especially if you are new to the kinds of activism where police and others may be targeting you, be sure to familiarize yourself and your comrades with security culture protocols, and to implement online security measures, from the start. It’s common for groups to be more open early on and closed in later; try to avoid this dynamic by starting out with your cards close to your chest, and keep playing them that way throughout the game.

It is best that individual members leave social media. This is a double-edged sword, but it will provide more protection if antifa avoid facebook and similar platforms.

Also keep in mind that some security measures are primarily aimed at keeping you anonymous from the fascists, but might not do much to shield you from the deeper resources of the state. The FBI has much greater surveillance resources than the local police, who in turn have more resources than your local white power crew.

Some applications that can help you with security include Signal (text and calls), KeePassX (password manager), TOR (internet browser), Pad.riseup.net (“real time collaboration of text documents”), Jitsi.org (web conferences), PGP (email & document encryption), Mailvelope (encryption for webmail),OwnCloud (alternative to dropbox and googledocs),and PowerBase (database solution). In addition, spend some time removing yourself from search directories.

An extended discussion of security culture and digital security is beyond the scope of this primer, but starting points have been included in the reading list below.

FURTHER READINGS

GENERAL SECURITY CULTURE

Security Culture: A Handbook for Activists

What is Security Culture?

Security Culture for Activists

DIGITAL SECURITY

How to Trump-Proof Your Electronic Communications

Digital Security Tips for Protesters

Security in a Box: Digital security tools and tactics

YOUR PHONE IS A COP: An OpSec/InfoSec Primer for the Dystopian Present

YOUR PHONE IS A COP 2: Getting Arrested with Your Phone

Time to Beef up Defense Against Far-Right Doxxing

Speak Up & Stay Safe(r): A Guide to Protecting Yourself From Online Harassment

How to Remove Yourself From People Search Directories

ANTIFACIST NEWS AND ANALYSIS

It’s Going Down

Anti-Fascist News

Three Way Fight

Idavox / One People’s Project

ANTIFA PRISONERS

International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund

Global Antifa Prisoner List

ORGANIZING RESOURCES

TORCH Antifascist Network

Affinity Groups: Essential Building Block of Anarchist Organization

https://itsgoingdown.org/form-affinity-group-essential-building-block-anarchist-organization

#TrumpTheRegime: Resources and Ongoing Resistance to Trump and the Far-Right

Bloc Party: How to Join the Resistance Interview & Zine

Recipes for Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook

How to set up an anti-fascist group

Resources for anti-fascist action

[tractionmagazine]

141. Elly Thomas

Elly Thomas, ‘Czar’, 2017. Papier-mâché, silicone and found objects. Image courtesy of the artist.

Elly Thomas is an emerging artist who uses sculptural forms to navigate how childhood play can inform adult creative processes. Creating a series of forms, which are then combined into various improvised assemblages, Thomas uses these impermanent structures to explore animism and autonomy of objects. Having completed a PhD in 2013 at Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, where her thesis was titled ‘Play as Evolving Process in the Work of Eduardo Paolozzi, Philip Guston and Tony Oursler’, Elly is now a leading mind on Paolozzi and Guston’s practices and will soon be releasing a book with Routledge discussing their processes and output. Here, Thomas talks with Charlotte Barnard for Traction.

You create sculpture and drawings, which use childhood play as set of paradigms to inform adult creative practice. How did you come to be so interested in this line of enquiry?

It was while I was enjoying working with children on an art project that I began noticing parallels between the way the children spoke about their work and my own ongoing concerns. Namely, at its most basic, we were concerned with transforming matter into something that seemed animate, that seemed to have a life of its own beyond one’s control, much as the way one would think about one’s toys as a child. So not representing something, but inventing - regarding a drawing or sculpture almost as a living thing, as a thing in itself.

I thought perhaps this space for play continued into adult life. I didn’t need to pretend to be a child again. How could I? It would only produce some sort of faux naivety. Instead I wondered whether I could learn from the children in a way that could be applicable to my own ongoing concerns, through a focus on animism and its expression through play methods, processes and objectives (rather than aesthetics).

Elly Thomas, ‘Kits and Building Blocks- Stage 1’, 2016. A collection of sculptures and found objects used as a kit of forms with which to improvise and experiment during a solo show at ASC Gallery. Mid-show the installation was dismantled and reconfigured. Papier-mâché, silicone and found objects. Image courtesy of the artist.

You create 'kits' of forms, which can then be assembled freely into a multitude of further configurations. What is it about this performative and non-static form of object creation that is so important to you?

This follows on directly from an animistic engagement with material. This particular form of engagement with matter had suggested that the landscape of play continues to age, evolve and develop throughout adult life. From here I asked ‘How can one treat sculpture and drawing as if they’re ‘toys’ as much as ‘art?’ So getting away from thinking in terms of a finished object or working towards a pre-visualised image, but instead finding a range of ways to experiment with these objects to see what they do, rather than the making existing as an end itself. So for me, making objects is just stage one. After this they become toys that are allowed to ‘live’ through endless reconfiguration. 

The objects you make take on biomorphic forms, and seem to me to be suggestive of the domestic. Does this reading of them ring true?

It’s less about the domestic and more about the world of mass production set against the biological world. I’m interested in confusions between the two realms. This exists in childhood (after all what is a toy if not a man-made object that is confused with the living world), and in fact the pioneering child psychologist Jean Piaget asserted that children are often unable to distinguish between the mechanical and the biological – for children where there is movement there is life.

Elly Thomas, ‘Kits and Building Blocks- Stage 1’, 2016. Papier-mâché, silicone and found objects. Image courtesy of the artist.

I explore this confusion through parallels between the biological and manmade that centre on the functional – on engineering, living systems and potentially infinite structures comprised of a simple series of building blocks. This focuses on repetition and symmetry in the world of mass production as opposed to organic repetition (where no repeated form is identical) and organic asymmetry (anything that grows will inevitably be asymmetric). 

However, I think you have hit on something about the domestic and the biomorphic, because both my parents are biologists and on the walls of my childhood home there were many reproductions of images from D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s book ‘On Growth and Form’. The landscape of childhood would seem to be re-emerging again! So, as is often the case, other people are able to see what you’re doing more clearly than you are yourself! 

Elly Thomas, ‘Kits and Building Blocks- Stage 1’, 2016. Papier-mâché, silicone and found objects. Image courtesy of the artist.

What is your approach when initially coming to make these forms? How much do traditional considerations of form, material, texture and colour influence the outcome?

Everything comes from collecting. I collect images, objects and junk with no idea how things are going to come together (play is by definition open-ended). I’m also continually sketching, but allow myself to forget the source material the images are based on. This drift allows the forms to gain an independent identity, rather than be left locked in the world of representation. When it comes to moving the forms beyond the sketchbook and into sculpture I choose materials that will force time and change to be built into the process. I want the resulting forms to have ‘grown’ through a response to gravity and changing conditions. The sculptures then exist in physical time - time as layering, stacking and etching.

Elly Thomas, ‘Kits and Building Blocks- Stage 2’, 2016. Papier-mâché, silicone and found objects. Image courtesy of the artist.

You have written extensively about the  practices of Philip Guston and Eduardo Paolozzi. You have a forthcoming book for Routledge titled, 'Play and the Artist’s Creative Process: The Work of Eduardo Paolozzi and Philip Guston'. What is it about their individual practices that so interests you? How much influence has your research into their working methods had on your own?

I was initially drawn to their work through their particular relationship with popular culture. Both artists seemed to have engaged with pop culture in a way that didn’t seem to fit into existing art historical labels (even if Eduardo Paolozzi is often described as the Father of British Pop Art, an epithet he first courted and then dismissed). 

I began making comparisons between the cultural landscape of their individual childhoods and the work they made during artistic maturity. In the case of Paolozzi one could see a striking connection to toys that would have been available to him as a child, with Guston there is obviously a connection to the comic strips he loved as a boy. But more significantly, as I dug deeper I began to discover that both artists had a recurrent interest in animism and a need for the unexpected outcome. 

From here I began to explore their studio methods and processes through the lens of play. Both artists have made a big impact on my work in terms of expanding the possibilities for play within a studio environment. Paolozzi and Guston were endlessly experimenting; they offer artists a vast tool kit of methods that allow one to reconnect with the landscape of play.

Elly Thomas, ‘Kits and Building Blocks- Stage 2’, 2016. Papier-mâché, silicone and found objects. Image courtesy of the artist.

Your sculptural work has recently been transformed into a 2D, static image for London Arts Board. It is an unexpected and intriguing departure for this facet of your output, transposing its normal mutability into something fixed, especially considering drawing seems to be such an integral element of your practice. How did this come about?

The London Arts Board is an innovative public arts project founded and run by Liberty Rowley on a notice board on Peckham Road. In the current climate with drastic cuts to arts funding and creativity and play pushed to the margins of the school curriculum, public art seems more important than ever. I think in many ways the ‘where’ is the most urgent political question for art – how one makes space to assure that access to the arts is available for everyone.

As to the static nature of my new work – I don’t see the piece as finalised, in a sense it’s on pause until the sculpture elements are reconfigured. In fact I’ve already been playing with different combinations of the elements in my studio. Philip Guston described his paintings as ‘pauses’ and imagined all his paintings as one work. I find that a very potent idea.

Elly Thomas, ‘Kits and Building Blocks- Stage 2’, 2016. Papier-mâché, silicone and found objects. Image courtesy of the artist.

What have you got coming up?

In mid-February an Eduardo Paolozzi retrospective opens at The Whitechapel Gallery. I’ve been working on the catalogue both as a contributing author and researcher. I’ll also appear in a short film discussing Paolozzi’s print suite General Dynamic F.U.N.  

Interview by Charlotte Barnard.

You can see Elly’s work for London Arts Board online at http://londonartsboard.blogspot.co.uk/

You can also see it in person at the corner of Peckham Road and Vestry Road, Camberwell, London.

To see more of Elly’s work and to keep updated with her upcoming events, please follow http://www.ellythomas.com

[biofunmy]

‘Retail Mayhem’: The Fight for Barneys Goes to Court

It’s D-Day for Barneys New York — and, potentially, the entire high fashion retail world.

On Thursday, a bankruptcy court judge in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., is expected to rule on the fate of the famed retailer. It’s a decision that could have repercussions far from the corner of 61st and Madison in Manhattan — and not just because Barneys’ flagship store may well disappear if Authentic Brands Group, which last week announced its bid had been accepted, is officially anointed the new owner.

Authentic Brands’ plan involves potentially untying the intellectual property of Barneys — its name and brands — from its assets. That means the Barneys name would be licensed to Saks Fifth Avenue and the retailer’s inventory would be handed over to B. Riley, the financial firm with a robust liquidation business. All of its stores could close.

If the $271 million bid from Authentic Brands and B. Riley is approved on Thursday, the result could be eye-popping liquidation sales of luxury goods like handbags and dresses at all seven Barneys locations, perhaps starting as soon as this weekend. That would put a surfeit of discounted merchandise in the major fashion markets of New York and Los Angeles just as the holiday shopping season arrives — and long before other stores and brands put similar goods on sale.

“It will affect everyone, even online; Net-a-Porter, Saks, Neiman Marcus,” said Robert Burke, founder of a luxury consultancy and former fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman. “It’s potential retail mayhem. The only other time we have seen a major liquidation outside of the regular sale season was after 9/11, when no one was shopping and people panicked. It was really a disaster, because the customer never really forgets. And trying to retrain them can take years.”

Whether that comes to pass depends on any selection of an alternate bidder, and the possibility that new bidders or information cause the judge to wait to make a decision.

The potential rival to Authentic Brands who has been most public about his intentions is Sam Ben-Avraham, the retail and trade show entrepreneur. He assembled a consortium of investors to offer an alternative to Authentic Brands’ plan. With a nostalgia-driven “Save Barneys” campaign and a plan to maintain the flagship stores — and jobs — in New York and Beverly Hills, the investor in Kith and creator of a number of trade shows had been trying to position himself as the creative and entrepreneurial alternative to Jamie Salter, the founder and chief executive of Authentic Brands. He had not submitted a qualified bid for Barneys as of Wednesday.

Indeed, the Barneys drama increasingly seemed like the tale of two men: on the one hand, the financial engineer, on the other, the merchant-impresario. (This week, David Jackson of the investment firm Solitaire Partners and former chief executive of Istithmar World, the Dubai-based group that owned Barneys from 2007 to 2012, said he was also planning to bid; his backers include the Saudi company Arabian Oud.)

Online and through press interviews, Mr. Ben-Avraham, 53, had cast Mr. Salter, 56, and Authentic Brands as villains looking to demolish Barneys as a cultural institution. In a petition online, Mr. Ben-Avraham said that turning Barneys into an intellectual property license operation would vanquish the store’s “unique identity, its point of view, its cutting edge agenda.”

The criticism has put a spotlight on Authentic Brands, which Mr. Salter founded in 2010, and its practice of buying the intellectual property of flailing or bankrupt brands. After a purchase, Authentic’s goal is to strike licensing deals with other companies that may want to use the brand name in new products, international collections and elsewhere. That translates to licensing fees and royalty payments for Authentic, which is typically removed from issues tied to stores, employees and inventory.

“Sam really is a merchant,” said Mr. Burke, albeit one who goes to Burning Man and works out of a SoHo loft. “He and his team are not corporate, not bankers, not strategists.”

Still, there are those who found his strategy — including a “Save Barneys” Instagram account filled with vintage ads and Barneys appearances in shows like “Sex and the City” — more romantic than realistic.

Authentic Brands says that its dozens of brands, which include Frederick’s of Hollywood, Nine West and the rights tied to celebrity names like Muhammad Ali, generate nearly $10 billion in annual retail sales. It also recently expanded into media, with the surprising acquisition of Sports Illustrated. (It licensed the publication’s operations to a separate company that cut jobs and sought to shift coverage to a network of bloggers.) The company, which is private, does not disclose how much it receives in sales or income.

“Jamie is incredibly smart, incredibly aggressive, and he rarely loses,” said Gerald L. Storch, chief executive of Storch Advisors.

Mr. Salter is from Toronto, where he still lives. He is married and has four sons, all of whom work in different roles at Authentic Brands. He started his retail career in sporting goods sales and marketing in the 1980s.

Mr. Salter earned his reputation for resurrecting brands after helping found Hilco Consumer in 2006 and serving as its chief executive. It was a division of the financial firm Hilco, which has a robust liquidation business.

Hilco Consumer aggressively bought up the intellectual property of brands like Sharper Image, Linens ‘n Things and Polaroid through bankruptcy proceedings. New products bearing the brand names, like Sharper Image garment steamers, started appearing at retailers and new websites were introduced.

Mr. Salter views himself as a brand licensing expert, according to a 2009 interview with The New York Times — one who had learned how to receive royalties for merchandise while bypassing costs like store staff and rent. The strategy has thrived in the churning retail landscape of the past 15 years.

Mr. Salter has his critics, but he also has friends in the fashion industry, including Tommy Hilfiger. Mr. Hilfiger praised the executive’s “magic” touch with brands at a conference last year, saying that when Mr. Salter bought something, “the brand basically explodes.”

“He licenses it to many different categories, he doesn’t own any inventory — he’s like the Uber of the brand business today,” Mr. Hilfiger said during a panel discussion, seated next to Mr. Salter.

One of Authentic Brands’ earliest coups was the acquisition of exclusive rights tied to Marilyn Monroe, whose likeness drew the interest of everyone from Dolce & Gabbana to Walmart. In 2013, Mr. Salter, as part of a long-running lawsuit around use of the starlet’s likeness, described his company’s success in expanding Ms. Monroe’s brand while staying true to her “DNA” through its partnerships.

“What’s really good is Marilyn Monroe is looking down from somewhere seeing that her brand is being exploited properly, to what she wanted,” Mr. Salter said in a deposition transcript.

Whether everyone will be happy with his plans to exploit the Barneys brand is another question. “The silver lining is Saks,” Mr. Burke said. “I am sure they care,” about the potential dangers of liquidation, he said.

As for Barneys stores, even if Authentic Brands keeps some of them open, the inventory will be liquidated, leading to major discounts on luxury goods, according to a person familiar with the plan who was not authorized to speak publicly. Some of the retailer’s biggest unsecured creditors include the Row, Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent, Gucci and Prada.

Mr. Storch said a liquidation sale before the holidays “would definitely have an impact on the market,” even if it’s only short term.

Sahred From Source link Fashion and Style

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[aurelliocheek]

Golden Orb: 21st Century Fairytales

Folklore, apps, Pomeranian – Golden Orb’s way of storytelling in the digital age.

This is where our journey as ­Golden Orb started: Our basic idea was to ­create ­story-driven games with a fresh take on traditional tales by combining folklore with modern-day media. By the time we came up with this plan, we had both been working as professional game developers for several years and for the most part as members of the same team. Therefore, we already knew that we work well together and that our skill sets complement each other ideally. We liked the company we were working for but had both reached a point in our careers where we wanted more than an employed position could offer: Full authority over creative and business model decisions.

We wrote down our business idea, ­calculated all sorts of scenarios, took out a bank loan, and tackled the intimidating amount of paperwork involved with founding a company. The incredible part of the whole process was that once you dare to actively pursue your dream, despite all the risks involved, and share your idea with others, you meet a lot of helpful people and opportunities that you had not even imagined. One of these chance meetings eventually led to us obtaining the Mediengründerzentrum NRW scholarship, which was a big help in our first year of business.

In the tailor shop of Siebenstreich you can find a lot of pop culture references.

Why a Pomeranian? Right from the start, we knew that we wanted to rewrite traditional tales with a modern perspective. It has been a while since they were originally written and a lot has changed in this world since then. In addition to slightly modernizing the tales, we decided that we would like to gently nudge our players towards thinking outside the box, which is why we deliberately break common stereotypes in our stories.

The first tale we picked was the well-known Cinderella story. We decided to re­create it as the digital game equivalent of a picture book. To capture this atmosphere, it features screen-filling, hand-drawn artwork reminiscent of its book counterpart with the addition that the displayed world is fully explorable. The images are not static decoration. You can even leave footprints in the snow or create ripples in the pond. To make it suitable for a very young audience, we omitted any written text and added comprehensive voice over instead. Staying true to our goal of challenging common stereotypes, our Cinderella is not your standard princess material, the castle’s watchdog is a Pomeranian rather than an all-teeth-and-muscles-breed and cross-dressing for the royal wedding is definitely an option.

Playing with clishés: Cinderella

Despite our limited funds, we decided to invest in professional voice acting. As we wanted to recreate the enchanted atmosphere of a radio play or a narrated bedtime story in our game, excellent voice acting was essential. To stay in budget, we created the sound effects ourselves using our imagination paired with our voices and whatever we could find in our homes to generate sound. We then applied our limited audio post-production skills to alter those takes to sound like the effect we were going for. Or as close to that as we could get. Judging from the gleeful squeals of our young playtesters, at the very least we have managed to produce decent animal sounds.

The idea evolves Despite the unconventional watchdog, our adjustments to the Cinderella story were still rather tame. It essentially is an interactive children’s book, and we tried to stay close to the original tale to pass it on to future generations. We just changed some parts to overcome outdated views and tried to fill at least some of the logical gaps of the Cinderella story.

For our upcoming series of adventure games, we take this idea even further. Each title will be based on traditional lore in one way or another, but we will make more liberties in reinterpreting the stories, its characters, and the world they live in. This way, we can incorporate issues and topics that are on people’s minds today, thus creating 21st-century fairytales reminiscent of their literary ancestors. And this makes it a new story even to those familiar with its fairytale blueprint.

So, now we had the idea of what kind of stories we wanted to tell and how we wanted to tell them in our own, unique way. The artistic side covered, we moved on to the business side of things: The exciting endeavor of how to sell fairytale indie games.

Playing against clishés: Siebenstreich

‘The challenge of distribution Of course, almost everyone has a smartphone these days, and most people use it to play games. Also, distribution is straightforward, even in the international field. It is just one more checkbox you have to click, and the game is available in Russia, too. So theoretically you can reach a vast mass of people with the mobile platform without really needing a publisher. That sounded great in the first place and very easy to do. So, we did.

It’s “just” digital Yet a mobile app or game is “just” ­something digital and nothing you can hold in your hands and make it a present. And that was one of our problems. The target group we wanted to reach was the parents and grandparents of small children who want to give their children “a little something.” After all, we had developed an equivalent to a bedtime book, which you discover in the shelf while strolling by and then take it with you spontaneously because it only costs a few Euros and is nicely illustrated. Just a sweet little souvenir for the kids.

Spending a few Euros on a book is standard for most people. But as soon as it is offered in an app store, the price is too high. It does not matter whether the book is read by a top-class actor and is also interactive and animated. It seems like the value of a digital app is not comparable to that of a book. It is similar to magazines and journals: At the shop, one quickly buys a copy for 2€, but almost for the same articles online, the price barrier feels too high for many ­people. The attitude to digital goods seems completely different than to physical products. Even though there is at least as much work in it if not much more, just like in our case.

From mobile fairytales with minigames to a full adventure on Switch and PC.

Long-time, no see There is, of course, also the problem of ­mobile app plethora. Since the distribution is so simple, the market is flooded with products. Even as a niche product with comparatively little competition, we simply did not stand out in the crowd. Because we sell our product for a fixed price, we are usually filtered out right from the start. So, we realized that the target group we wanted to address could not be reached this way. High-quality premium apps are hard to sell. The market thrives on disposable products that finance themselves through mini-payments and advertising.

We have seen children at the age of 2 who were already skilled in waiting for 5 seconds to let the advertising finish up and then clicking on the x to continue the game. Also, we have met parents who believe blindly that the advertising content will be appropriate for the little ones if it is shown in a children’s app. A lot of parents do not care about ads. They do not want to spend money on apps.

But it’s a safe start! Those parents, who want to give their children high-quality, ad-free entertainment, often do not even look for games or apps in the app stores. Probably those are also the parents who prefer not to give their children a device so early whatsoever. And we can fully understand that. That was exactly what we wanted to change with our apps. We still believe that it would be a better way to introduce new media to children without ads and mini-payment options. We love to offer a safe place for young children to experience the first contact with ­mobile devices. There will be a time anyway when they make their first steps with this type of media. So, why not together with their parents with the help of ad-free and ­suitable content?

Besides all the struggle, we still seem to reach a handful of customers who ­appreciate our offer and buy our game. For a premium game in the niche segment, Cinderella does sell somehow. And it still does even a year after its release and without us ever having it advertised. ­Nevertheless, it became clear to us that there had to be better possibilities then scratching money together from the app stores.

Off to new ports Half a year after our mobile release, we ported the game to the Nintendo Switch just for the experience and also to expand our portfolio. We did not hope for much, because we did not necessarily see our target group on a console. Also, our game was not designed as a console game either. But that does not keep others away from the eShop, so why us? And surprisingly we managed to sell Cinderella on the Switch within two weeks more often than on iOS and Android combined in half a year. Of course, we were happy at first, but we also knew that these numbers would decrease significantly after the first peak. Well, they did fall, but much more gently than we had feared. Switch is still our most potent sales platform.

Why is that? That is what we asked ourselves, too. Are there significantly more parents on the Switch than we thought? If you look at the statistics, you will find young players between 7 and 12 and then mostly older ­players over 30. The Switch is an optimal ­family console that is played by both ­parents and children. Also, the price of our game on the console is now suddenly a bargain. The same game at the same ­price on a different platform is rated entirely different by the buyers. 4,99€ in the app stores hardly anyone is willing to pay. But 4,99€ on the Switch? Cheap!

This is amazing, so we made a self-test, and it turned out that we also belong to those people who feel that all games under 15€ on the Switch are cheap and worth “just trying.” If it was a bad buy, then it did not cost that much. We asked ourselves: Would we spend 15€ on an app? Even if it was recommended to us quite often, had a 5-stars rating, we read a lot of positive reviews and watched videos about it? No. We would not. But a switch game without ratings and reviews in the eStore? Sure! It is just crazy.

Who is playing my game? We received some fan mails from Switch players telling us how excited they were about our game. Some of them were parents who bought it for their children, and others were adults who just played it for themselves. So, our porting attempt ­showed us that the Switch is interesting as a platform for fairy tale games regardless of the age group. With this experience, we decided us to entirely focus on this console and leave the mobile market behind us.

Cinderella was primarily designed for small children and mobile devices, now we develop directly for console and want to reach out to adults. This does not mean that we no longer develop games suitable for children, on the contrary. Our fairy tale games are and will be ideal for all children, no matter how old. Our games also will continue to address ethical and social ­topics entertainingly. We continue to ­rethink the content of fairy tales and adapt it to our times, probably way more intensive than we did in Cinderella and with a lot more humor. We want to go a few steps further, inspire and bring joy to as many people as possible. We are on our way to ­making a complex adventure with our current game “Siebenstreich” which will hopefully be even more attractive on the Nintendo Switch.

The future is crowded We wish that the possibility for a visible game release on a family console will persist for some time. More and more developers are discovering the platform for themselves, and it will not be long before this market is flooded as well. There is still the hurdle that devkits have to be purchased. But they are not so expensive, and there are a lot of providers who port games. We will see how the market will develop. But for now, the chances to be visible after ­release are much better than in the mobile market or on Steam. And as long as this market remains a premium market, we ­believe it to be a good alternative for small premium indie games.

Katharina Kühn & Sonja Hawranke Katharina Kühn and Sonja Hawranke are the founders of the indie ­studio Golden Orb. They are working together since 2008. Katharina is the team’s artist and Sonja is their software engineer. They share the role of royal scribe, creating the game design, story, and dialogs as a team.

The post Golden Orb: 21st Century Fairytales appeared first on Making Games.

Golden Orb: 21st Century Fairytales published first on https://leolarsonblog.tumblr.com/

[pauldeckerus]

Photography: AI Everywhere

There are two major trends in photography today. The first is the ever-increasing numbers of photos being made. I can’t even be bothered to look up how many billions of photos are being uploaded to Instickrbook every minute or every day or every year. It’s a lot. This is usually talked about in terms of how many photos there are, and how we are drowning in them.

This isn’t quite right. Unless you’re an Instagram addict, most of the pictures you see in a day are still mass media: ads, news, entertainment. You see maybe a few hundred of those billions of snapshots. A picture of a movie star might be seen by a billion people, whereas your picture of your cat, or even of that pretty model, might only be seen by ten. The billions don’t affect us much on the consumption side.

The billions are a reflection of how many people are now picture-makers. 50 years ago, maybe 1-2 percent of the world’s population was a picture maker. Now, it’s more like 20-80 percent and rising. Is it reasonable now to say that basically every person on earth has had their picture taken? Has almost every object, every car, every hill, every waterfall, every beach has been photographed? If not yet, soon.

It’s not really so many photographs! It’s so many photographers!

A selfie styled using an AI, duplicated by cloning

Hold that thought while we take a look at the second trend: AI, neural networks.

All the top-end phone cameras use neural networks for something, be it Apple’s Portrait Mode, or Google’s low-light photography. We’re changing from a world in which you pull pixels off the sensor and manipulate them in-place, leaving them fixed in their rigid rectangular grid except maybe for a little bit of cloning (usually). In the new world we will dump one or more grids of pixels (frames, exposures) into a neural network, and what pops out is something new.

Perhaps soon we’ll see sensors designed to be handled this way.

Perhaps sensors will have some big photosites for high sensitivity, and some small ones for detail (noisy). Perhaps the Bayer array will be replaced by something else. Perhaps it would be reasonable to skip demosaicing and let the AI sort that out. Take a couple of exposures with this crazy mass of different sized pixels, some noisy, some not, some overexposed, some underexposed, some colored, some not. Throw the whole mess into the AI that’s been trained to turn these into pictures. At no point before the AI starts working is there anything that even remotely looks like a picture, it’s twice as raw as RAW. Maybe.

But whether sensors go this way or not, AI/neural networks are with us to stay.

As a simple experiment, I used one of the online AI photo tools to uprez a photograph of some fruit, which I had first downrezzed to 100×80 pixels. The tool gave me back a 400×320 pixel picture which it created.

It looks a bit soft, but it’s not bad, and it’s much much better than the 100 pixel mess I gave it to work with. Here is the original, downrezzed to a matching 400×320 picture:

We can see that the AI was able to re-paint convincing-looking edges on the fruit, which were formerly jaggies from the downrezzing. The AI did not put the detail in the surface of the fruit back, obviously. How could it? While this is a pretty simple system, it is essentially painting a new picture based on the input (jagged) picture, and its “knowledge” of how the real world looks. Most of the little defects and splotches on the fruit are pretty much gone in the reconstructed one.

So, here’s the key point: The uprezzed picture looks pretty real, but it’s not. It’s not what the fruit looked like.

There are really two areas where AIs can do things we don’t want, and they’re really simple. One is “what if they work wrong?” and the other is “what if they work right?”

Wrong is easy, everything gets rendered as a huge pile of eyes or kittens or whatever. It’s amusing, maybe, but just wrong. What if the AI takes in a blurry picture of a toy gun, and repaints it as a real gun based on what it “knows” about guns? It’s funny, or irrelevant, right up to the moment the picture turns up in a courtroom.

What about when it’s working right? What happens when your phone’s camera insists on making women’s eyes a little bigger and their lips a little fuller and their skin a little smoother, and you can’t turn it off because the sensor literally won’t work without the neural network? Is this good or bad? It depends, right?

Apparently “Snapchat body dysmorphia” is already a thing, with people finding dissatisfaction with their own bodies arising from their self-image as seen through Snapchat. Retail portraiture often renders the subjects as a sort of plastic with worryingly intense eyes, but imagine what happens when you can’t even obtain a straight photograph of yourself unless you know someone with an old camera.

Now put these two trends together.

Five years from now, maybe, pretty much every camera will have some kind of neural network/AI technology in it. Maybe to make it work at all, maybe just for a handful of shooting modes, maybe something we haven’t even thought of. This means pretty much every picture that gets taken is going to be something that an AI painted for us, based on some inputs.

This means that in 5 years, maybe 10, not only will everything and everyone be photographed, but also every one of those photographs will be subtly distorted, wrong, untruthful. Whether we want them to be or not. Every picture of a woman or a girl will be subtly beautified by the standards of some programmer in Palo Alto. Every landscape will be a little cleaned up, a little more colorful. Every night photograph will be an interpolation based on a bunch of very noisy pixels, an interpolation that looks very very realistic, but which shows a bunch of stuff in the shadows that is just flat out made up by the AI.

We’re going to have billions of cameras, from a dozen vendors, each with a dozen software versions in the wild. If there is a plausible scenario for something that could go wrong, at this kind of scale you can be pretty sure that somewhere, sometime, it’s going to go wrong. Sometimes the AI will simply behave badly, and at other times it will behave exactly as designed, with lousy outcomes anyways.

The thing that makes a photograph a photo and not a painting is that it’s drawn, with light, from the world itself. Yes, it’s just one point of view. Yes, it’s a crop. Yes, some parts are blurry. Yes, it might have been cloned and airbrushed. But with those caveats, in its own limited way, it’s truthful. The new world, coming with the speed of a freight train, is about to throw that away. Things that look like photographs will not be, they will be photo-realistic paintings made by neural networks that look a lot like what was in front of the lens.

They’ll be close enough that we’ll tend to trust them because the programmers will make sure of that. That’s what a photograph is, right? It’s trustable, with limits. But these things won’t be trustworthy. Not quite.

These magical automatic painting machines will be trained by the young, the white, the male, the American, by whomever, for use by the old, the non-white, the global. Even if you object to “political correctness,” you will someday be using a camera that was trained to paint its pictures by someone who isn’t much very like you.

There will be consequences: social, ethical, cultural, legal. We just don’t know entirely what they will be.

About the author: Andrew Molitor writes software by day and takes pictures by night. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. Molitor is based in Norfolk, Virginia, and does his best to obsess over gear, specs, or sharpness. You can find more of his writing on his blog. This article was also published here.

Image credits: Header photo based on illustration by Mike MacKenzie via www.vpnsrus.com and licensed under CC BY 2.0

from Photography News https://petapixel.com/2018/12/05/photography-ai-everywhere/

[latestnews2018-blog]

For IGTV, Instagram needs slow to mean steady

New Post has been published on https://latestnews2018.com/for-igtv-instagram-needs-slow-to-mean-steady/

For IGTV, Instagram needs slow to mean steady

Instagram has never truly failed at anything, but judging by modest initial view counts, IGTV could get stuck with a reputation as an abandoned theater if the company isn’t careful. It’s no flop, but the long-form video hub certainly isn’t an instant hit like Instagram Stories. Two months after that launched in 2016, Instagram was happy to trumpet how its Snapchat clone had hit 100 million users. Yet two months after IGTV’s launch, the Facebook subsidiary has been silent on its traction.

“It’s a new format. It’s different. We have to wait for people to adopt it and that takes time,” Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told me. “Think of it this way: we just invested in a startup called IGTV, but it’s small, and it’s like Instagram was ‘early days.’”

It’s indeed too early for a scientific analysis, and Instagram’s feed has been around since 2010, so it’s obviously not a fair comparison, but we took a look at the IGTV view counts of some of the feature’s launch partner creators. Across six of those creators, their recent feed videos are getting roughly 6.8X as many views as their IGTV posts. If IGTV’s launch partners that benefited from early access and guidance aren’t doing so hot, it means there’s likely no free view count bonanza in store from other creators or regular users.

They, and IGTV, will have to work for their audience. That’s already proving difficult for the standalone IGTV app. Though it peaked at the #25 overall US iPhone app and has seen 2.5 million downloads across iOS and Android according to Sensor Tower, it’s since dropped to #1497 and seen a 94 percent decrease in weekly installs to just 70,000 last week.

Instagram will have to be in it for the long haul if it wants to win at long-form video. Entering the market 13 years after YouTube with a vertical format no one’s quite sure what to do with, IGTV must play the tortoise. If it can avoid getting scrapped or buried, and offer the right incentives and flexibility to creators, IGTV could deliver the spontaneous video viewing experience Instagram lacks. Otherwise, IGTV risks becoming the next Google Plus — a ghost town inside an otherwise thriving product ecosystem.

A glitzy, glitchy start

Instagram gave IGTV a red carpet premiere June 20th in hopes of making it look like the new digital hotspot. The San Francisco launch event offered attendees several types of avocado toast, spa water and ‘Gram-worthy portrait backdrops reminiscent of the Color Factory or Museum of Ice Cream. Instagram hadn’t held a flashy press event since the 2013 launch of video sharing, so it pulled out all the stops. Balloon sculptures lined the entrance to a massive warehouse packed with social media stars and ad execs shouting to each other over the din of the DJ.

But things were rocky from the start. Leaks led TechCrunch to report on the IGTV name and details in the preceding weeks. Technical difficulties with Systrom’s presentation pushed back the start, but not the rollout of IGTV’s code. Tipster Jane Manchun Wong sent TechCrunch screenshots of the new app and features a half hour before it was announced, and Instagram’s own Business Blog jumped the gun by posting details of the launch. The web already knew how IGTV would let people upload vertical videos up to an hour long and browse them through categories like “Popular” and “For You” by the time Systrom took the stage.

IGTV’s launch event featured Instagram-themed donuts and elaborate portrait backdrops. Images via Vicki’s Donuts and Mai Lanpham

“What I’m most proud of is that Instagram took a stand and tried a brand new thing that is frankly hard to pull off. Full-screen vertical video that’s mobile only. That doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Systrom tells me. It was indeed ambitious. Creators were already comfortable making short-form vertical Snapchat Stories by the time Instagram launched its own version. IGTV would have to start from scratch.

Systrom sees the steep learning curve as a differentiator, though. “One of the things I like most about the new format is that it’s actually fairly difficult to just take videos that exist online and simply repost them. That’s not true in feed. That basically forces everyone to create new stuff,” Systrom tells me. “It’s not to say that there isn’t other stuff on there but in general it incentivizes people to produce new things from scratch. And that’s really what we’re looking for. Even if the volume of that stuff at the beginning is smaller than what you might see on the popular page [of Instagram Explore].”

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom unveils IGTV at the glitzy June 20th launch event

Instagram forced creators to adopt this proprietary format. But it forget to train Stories stars how to entertain us for five or 15 minutes, not 15 seconds, or convince landscape YouTube moguls to purposefully shoot or crop their clips for the way we normally hold our phones.

IGTV’s Popular page features plenty of random viral pap, foreign language content, and poor cropping

That should have been the real purpose of the launch party — demonstrating a variety of ways to turn these format constraints or lack thereof into unique content. Vertical video frames people better than places, and the length allows sustained eye-to-lens contacts that can engender an emotional connection. But a shallow array of initial content and too much confidence that creators would figure it out on their own deprived IGTV of emergent norms that other videographers could emulate to wet their feet.

Now IGTV feels haphazard, with trashy viral videos and miscropped ports amongst its Popular section alongside a few creators trying to produce made-for-IGTV talk shows and cooking tutorials. It’s yet to have its breakout “Chewbacca Mom” or “Rubberbanded Watermelon” blockbuster like Facebook Live. Even an interview with mega celeb Kylie Jenner only had 11,000 views.

Instagram wants to put the focus on the author, not the individual works of art. “Because we don’t have full text search and you can’t just search any random thing, it’s about the creators” Systrom explains. “I think that at its base level that it’s personality driven and creator driven means that you’re going to get really unique content that you won’t find anywhere else and that’s the goal.”

Yet being unique requires extra effort that creators might not invest if they’re unsure of the payoff in either reach or revenue. Michael Sayman, formerly Facebook’s youngest employee who was hired at age 17 to build apps for teens and who now works for Google, summed it up saying: “Many times in my own career, I’ve tried to make something with a unique spin or a special twist because I felt that’s the only way I could make my product stand out from the crowd, only to realize that it was those very twists and spins that made my products feel out of place and confusing to users. Sometimes, the best product is one that doesn’t create any new twists, but rather perfects and builds on top of what has been proven to already be extremely successful.”

A fraction of feed views

The one big surprise of the launch event was where IGTV would exist. Instagram announced it’d live in a standalone IGTV app, but also as a feature in the main app accessible from an orange button atop the home screen that would occasionally call out that new content was inside. It could have had its own carousel like Stories or been integrated into Explore until it was ready for primetime.

Instead, it was ignorable. IGTV didn’t get the benefit of the home screen spotlight like Instagram Stories. Blow past that one orange button and avoid downloading the separate app, and users could go right on tapping and scrolling through Instagram without coming across IGTV’s longer videos.

View counts of the launch partners reflect that. We looked at six launch partner creators, comparing their last six feed and IGTV videos older than a week and less than six months old, or fewer videos if that’s all they’d posted.

Only one of the six, BabyAriel, saw an obvious growth trend in her IGTV videos. Her candid IGTV monologues are performing the best of the six compared to feed. She’s earning an average of 243,000 views per IGTV video, about a third as many as she gets on her feed videos. “I’m really happy with my view counts because IGTV is just starting” BabyAriel tells me. She thinks the format will be good for behind-the-scenes clips that complement her longer YouTube videos and shorter Stories. “When I record anything, It’s vertical. When I turn my phone horizontal I think of an hour-long movie.”

Lele Pons, a Latin American comedy and music star who’s one of the most popular Instagram celebrities, gets about 5.7X more feed views than on her IGTV cooking show that averages 1.9 million hits. Instagram posted some IGTV highlights from the first month, but the most popular of now has 4.3 million views — less than half of what Pons gets on her average feed video.

Fitness guides from Katie Austin averaged just 3,600 views on IGTV while she gets 7.5X more in the feed. Lauren Godwin’s colorful comedy fared 5.2X better in the feed. Bryce Xavier saw the biggest differential, earning 15.9X more views for his dance and culture videos. And in the most direct comparison, K-Pop dancer Susie Shu sometimes posts cuts from the same performance to the two destinations, like one that got 273,000 views in feed but just 27,000 on IGTV, with similar clips fairing an average of 7.8X better.

Again, this isn’t to say IGTV is a lame horse. It just isn’t roaring out of the gates. Systrom remains optimistic about inventing a new format. “The question is can we pull that off and the early signs are really good,” he tells me. “We’ve been pretty blown away by the reception and the usage upfront,” though he declined to share any specific statistics. Instagram promised to provide more insight into traction in the future.

YouTube star Casey Neistat is less bullish. He doesn’t think IGTV is working and that engagement has been weak. If IGTV views were surpassing those of YouTube, creators would flock to it, but so far view counts are uninspiring and not worth diverting creative attention, Neistat says. “YouTube offers the best sit-back consumption, and Stories offers active consumption. Where does IGTV fit in? I’m not sure” he tells me. “Why create all of this unique content if it gets lower views, it’s not monetizable, and the viewers aren’t there?”

Susie Shu averages 7.8X more video views in the Instagram feed than on IGTV

For now, the combination of an unfamiliar format, the absence of direction for how to use it and the relatively buried placement has likely tempered IGTV’s traction. Two months in, Instagram Stories was proving itself an existential threat to Snapchat — which it’s in fact become. IGTV doesn’t pose the same danger to YouTube yet, and it will need a strategy to support a more slow-burn trajectory.

The chicken and the IG problem

The first step to becoming a real YouTube challenger is to build up some tent-pole content that gives people a reason to open IGTV. Until there’s something that captures attention, any cross-promotion traffic Instagram sends it will be like pouring water into a bucket with a giant hole in the bottom. Yet until there’s enough viewers, it’s tough to persuade creators to shoot for IGTV since it won’t do a ton to boost their fan base.

Fortnite champion Ninja shares a photo of IGTV launch partners gathered backstage at the press event

Meanwhile, Instagram hasn’t committed to a monetization or revenue-sharing strategy for IGTV. Systrom said at the launch that “There’s no ads in IGTV today,” but noted it’s “obviously a very reasonable place [for ads] to end up.” Without enough views, though, ads won’t earn enough for a revenue split to incentivize creators. Perhaps Instagram will heavily integrate its in-app shopping features and sponsored content partnerships, but even those rely on having more traffic. Vine withered at Twitter in part from creators bailing due to its omission of native monetization options.

So how does IGTV solve the chicken-and-egg problem? It may need to swallow its pride and pay early adopters directly for content until it racks up enough views to offer sustainable revenue sharing. Instagram has never publicly copped to paying for content before, unlike its parent Facebook, which offered stipends ranging into the millions of dollars for publishers to shoot Live broadcasts and long-form Watch shows. Neither have led to a booming viewership, but perhaps that’s because Facebook has lost its edge with the teens who love video.

Instagram could do better if it paid the right creators to weather IGTV’s initial slim pickings. Settling on ad strategy creators can count on earning money from in the future might also get them to hang tight. Those deals could mimic the 55 percent split of mid-roll ad breaks Facebook gives creators on some videos. But again, the views must come first.

Alternatively, or additionally, it could double down on the launch strategy of luring creators with the potential to become the big fish in IGTV’s small-for-now pond. Backroom deals to trade being highlighted in its IGTV algorithm in exchange for high-quality content could win the hearts of these stars and their managers. Instagram would be wise to pair these incentives with vertical long-form video content creation workshops. It could bring its community, product and analytics leaders together with partnered stars to suss out what works best in the format and help them shoot it.

The cross-promo spigot

Once there’s something worth watching on IGTV, the company could open the cross-promo traffic spigot. At first, Instagram would send notifications about top content or IGTV posts from people you follow, and call them out with a little orange text banner atop its main app. Now it seems to understand it will need to be more coercive.

Last month, TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong spotted Instagram showing promos for individual IGTV shows in the middle of the feed, hoping to redirect eyeballs there. And today, TechCrunch researcher Matt Navarra found Instagram getting more aggressive by putting a bigger call out featuring a relevant IGTV clip with preview image above your Stories tray on the home screen. It may need to boost the frequency of these cross-promotions and stick them in-between Stories and Explore sections as well to give IGTV the limelight. These could expose users to creators they don’t follow already but might enjoy.

“It’s still early but I do think there’s a lot of potential when they figure out two things since the feature is so new,” says John Shahidi, who runs the Justin Bieber-backed Shots Studios, which produces and distributes content for Lele Pons, Rudy Mancuso and other Insta celebs. “1. Product. IGTV is not in your face so Instagram users aren’t changing behavior to consume. Timeline and Instagram Stories are in your face so those two are the most used features. 2. Discoverability. I want to see videos from people I don’t follow. Interesting stuff like cooking, product review, interesting content from brands but without following the accounts.” In the meantime, Shots Studios is launching a vertical-only channel on YouTube that Shahidi believes is the first of its kind.

Instagram will have to balance its strategic imperative to grow the long-form video hub and avoid spamming users until they hate the brand as a whole. Some think it’s already gone too far. “I think it’s super intrusive right now,” says Tiffany Zhong, once known as the world’s youngest venture capitalist who now runs Generation Z consulting firm Zebra Intelligence. “I personally find all the IGTV videos super boring and click out within seconds (and the only time I watch them are if I accidentally tapped on the icon when I tried to go to my DMs instead).” Desperately funneling traffic to the feature before there’s enough great content to power relevant recommendations for everyone could prematurely sour users on IGTV. 

Systrom remains optimistic he can iterate his way to success. “What I want to see over the next six to 12 months is a consistent drumbeat of new features that both consumers and creators are asking for, and to look at the retention curve and say ‘are people continuing to watch? Are people continuing to upload?,’” says Systrom. “So far we are seeing that all of those are healthy. But again trying to judge a very new kind of audacious format that’s never really been done before in the first months is going to be really hard.”

Differentiator or deterrent?

The biggest question remains whether IGTV will remain devout to the orthodoxy of vertical-only. Loosening up to accept landscape videos too might nullify a differentiator, but also pipe in a flood of content it could then algorithmically curate to bootstrap IGTV’s library. Reducing the friction by allowing people to easily port content to or from elsewhere might make it feel like less of a gamble for creators deciding where to put their production resources. Instagram itself expanded from square-only to portrait and landscape photos in the feed in 2015.

“My advice would be to make the videos horizontal. We’ve all come to understand vertical as ‘short form’ and horizontal as ‘long form,’” says Sayman. “It’s in the act of rotating your phone to landscape that you indicate to yourself and to your mobile device that you will not be context switching for the next few minutes, but rather intend to focus on one piece of content for an extended period of time.” This would at least give users more to watch, even if they ended up viewing landscape videos with their phones in portrait orientation.

This might be best as a last-ditch effort if it can’t get enough content flowing in through other means. But at least Instagram should offer a cropping tool that lets users manually select what vertical slice of a landscape video they want to show as they watch, rather than just grabbing the center or picking one area on the side for the whole clip. This could let creators repurpose landscape videos without things getting awkwardly half cut out of frame.

Former Facebook employee and social investor Josh Elman, who now works at Robinhood, told me he’s confident the company will experiment as much as necessary. “I think Facebook is relentless. They know that a ton of consumers watch video online. And most discover videos through influencers or their friends. (Or Netflix). Even though Watch and IGTV haven’t taken the world by storm yet, I bet Facebook won’t stop until they find the right mix.”

There’s a goldmine waiting if it does. Unlike on Facebook, there’s no Regram feature, you can’t post links, and outside of Explore you just see who you already follow on Instagram. That’s made it great at delivering friendly video and clips from your favorite stars, but leaves a gaping hole where serendipitous viewing could be. IGTV fills that gap. The hours people spend on Facebook watching random videos and their accompanying commercials have lifted the company to over $13 billion in revenue per quarter. Giving a younger audience a bottomless pit of full-screen video could produce the same behavior and profits on Instagram without polluting the feed, which can remain the purest manifestation of visual feed culture. But that’s only if IGTV can get enough content uploaded.

Puffed up by the success of besting its foe Snapchat, Instagram assumed it could take the long-form video world by storm. But the grand entrance at its debutante ball didn’t draw enough attention. Now it needs to take a different tack. Tone down the cross-promo for the moment. Concentrate on teaching creators how to find what works on the format and incentivizing them with cash and traffic. Develop some must-see IGTV and stoke a viral blockbuster. Prove the gravity of extended, personality-driven vertical video. Only then should it redirect traffic there from the feed, Stories, and Explore.

YouTube’s library wasn’t built overnight, and neither will IGTV’s. Facebook’s deep pockets and the success of Instagram’s other features give it the runway necessary to let IGTV take off. With 1 billion monthly users, and 400 million daily Stories users gathered in just two years, there are plenty of eyeballs waiting to be seduced. Systrom concludes, “Everything that is great starts small.” IGTV’s destiny will depend on Instagram’s patience.

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Instagram has never truly failed at anything, but judging by modest initial view counts, IGTV could get stuck with a reputation as an abandoned theater if the company isn’t careful. It’s no flop, but the long-form video hub certainly isn’t an instant hit like Instagram Stories. Two months after that launched in 2016, Instagram was happy to trumpet how its Snapchat clone had hit 100 million users. Yet two months after IGTV’s launch, the Facebook subsidiary has been silent on its traction.

“It’s a new format. It’s different. We have to wait for people to adopt it and that takes time,” Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told me. “Think of it this way: we just invested in a startup called IGTV, but it’s small, and it’s like Instagram was ‘early days.'”

It’s indeed too early for a scientific analysis, and Instagram’s feed has been around since 2010, so it’s obviously not a fair comparison, but we took a look at the IGTV view counts of some of the feature’s launch partner creators. Across six of those creators, their recent feed videos are getting roughly 6.8X as many views as their IGTV posts. If IGTV’s launch partners that benefited from early access and guidance aren’t doing so hot, it means there’s likely no free view count bonanza in store from other creators or regular users.

They, and IGTV, will have to work for their audience. That’s already proving difficult for the standalone IGTV app. Though it peaked at the #25 overall US iPhone app and has seen 2.5 million downloads across iOS and Android according to Sensor Tower, it’s since dropped to #1497 and seen a 94 percent decrease in weekly installs to just 70,000 last week.

Instagram will have to be in it for the long haul if it wants to win at long-form video. Entering the market 13 years after YouTube with a vertical format no one’s quite sure what to do with, IGTV must play the tortoise. If it can avoid getting scrapped or buried, and offer the right incentives and flexibility to creators, IGTV could deliver the spontaneous video viewing experience Instagram lacks. Otherwise, IGTV risks becoming the next Google Plus — a ghost town inside an otherwise thriving product ecosystem.

A glitzy, glitchy start

Instagram gave IGTV a red carpet premiere June 20th in hopes of making it look like the new digital hotspot. The San Francisco launch event offered attendees several types of avocado toast, spa water and ‘Gram-worthy portrait backdrops reminiscent of the Color Factory or Museum of Ice Cream. Instagram hadn’t held a flashy press event since the 2013 launch of video sharing, so it pulled out all the stops. Balloon sculptures lined the entrance to a massive warehouse packed with social media stars and ad execs shouting to each other over the din of the DJ.

But things were rocky from the start. Leaks led TechCrunch to report on the IGTV name and details in the preceding weeks. Technical difficulties with Systrom’s presentation pushed back the start, but not the rollout of IGTV’s code. Tipster Jane Manchun Wong sent TechCrunch screenshots of the new app and features a half hour before it was announced, and Instagram’s own Business Blog jumped the gun by posting details of the launch. The web already knew how IGTV would let people upload vertical videos up to an hour long and browse them through categories like “Popular” and “For You” by the time Systrom took the stage.

IGTV’s launch event featured Instagram-themed donuts and elaborate portrait backdrops. Images via Vicki’s Donuts and Mai Lanpham

“What I’m most proud of is that Instagram took a stand and tried a brand new thing that is frankly hard to pull off. Full-screen vertical video that’s mobile only. That doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Systrom tells me. It was indeed ambitious. Creators were already comfortable making short-form vertical Snapchat Stories by the time Instagram launched its own version. IGTV would have to start from scratch.

Systrom sees the steep learning curve as a differentiator, though. “One of the things I like most about the new format is that it’s actually fairly difficult to just take videos that exist online and simply repost them. That’s not true in feed. That basically forces everyone to create new stuff,” Systrom tells me. “It’s not to say that there isn’t other stuff on there but in general it incentivizes people to produce new things from scratch. And that’s really what we’re looking for. Even if the volume of that stuff at the beginning is smaller than what you might see on the popular page [of Instagram Explore].”

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom unveils IGTV at the glitzy June 20th launch event

Instagram forced creators to adopt this proprietary format. But it forget to train Stories stars how to entertain us for five or 15 minutes, not 15 seconds, or convince landscape YouTube moguls to purposefully shoot or crop their clips for the way we normally hold our phones.

IGTV’s Popular page features plenty of random viral pap, foreign language content, and poor cropping

That should have been the real purpose of the launch party — demonstrating a variety of ways to turn these format constraints or lack thereof into unique content. Vertical video frames people better than places, and the length allows sustained eye-to-lens contacts that can engender an emotional connection. But a shallow array of initial content and too much confidence that creators would figure it out on their own deprived IGTV of emergent norms that other videographers could emulate to wet their feet.

Now IGTV feels haphazard, with trashy viral videos and miscropped ports amongst its Popular section alongside a few creators trying to produce made-for-IGTV talk shows and cooking tutorials. It’s yet to have its breakout “Chewbacca Mom” or “Rubberbanded Watermelon” blockbuster like Facebook Live. Even an interview with mega celeb Kylie Jenner only had 11,000 views.

Instagram wants to put the focus on the author, not the individual works of art. “Because we don’t have full text search and you can’t just search any random thing, it’s about the creators” Systrom explains. “I think that at its base level that it’s personality driven and creator driven means that you’re going to get really unique content that you won’t find anywhere else and that’s the goal.”

Yet being unique requires extra effort that creators might not invest if they’re unsure of the payoff in either reach or revenue. Michael Sayman, formerly Facebook’s youngest employee who was hired at age 17 to build apps for teens and who now works for Google, summed it up saying: “Many times in my own career, I’ve tried to make something with a unique spin or a special twist because I felt that’s the only way I could make my product stand out from the crowd, only to realize that it was those very twists and spins that made my products feel out of place and confusing to users. Sometimes, the best product is one that doesn’t create any new twists, but rather perfects and builds on top of what has been proven to already be extremely successful.”

A fraction of feed views

The one big surprise of the launch event was where IGTV would exist. Instagram announced it’d live in a standalone IGTV app, but also as a feature in the main app accessible from an orange button atop the home screen that would occasionally call out that new content was inside. But in essence, it was ignorable. IGTV didn’t get the benefit of being splayed out atop Instagram like Stories did. Blow past that one button and avoid downloading the separate app, and users could go right on tapping and scrolling through Instagram without coming across IGTV’s longer videos.

View counts of the launch partners reflect that. We looked at six launch partner creators, comparing their last six feed and IGTV videos older than a week and less than six months old, or fewer videos if that’s all they’d posted.

Only one of the six, BabyAriel, saw an obvious growth trend in her IGTV videos. Her candid IGTV monologues are performing the best of the six compared to feed. She’s earning an average of 243,000 views per IGTV video, about a third as many as she gets on her feed videos. “I’m really happy with my view counts because IGTV is just starting” BabyAriel tells me. She thinks the format will be good for behind-the-scenes clips that complement her longer YouTube videos and shorter Stories. “When I record anything, It’s vertical. When I turn my phone horizontal I think of an hour-long movie.”

Lele Pons, a Latin American comedy and music star who’s one of the most popular Instagram celebrities, gets about 5.7X more feed views than on her IGTV cooking show that averages 1.9 million hits. Instagram posted some IGTV highlights from the first month, but the most popular of now has 4.3 million views — less than half of what Pons gets on her average feed video.

Fitness guides from Katie Austin averaged just 3,600 views on IGTV while she gets 7.5X more in the feed. Lauren Godwin’s colorful comedy fared 5.2X better in the feed. Bryce Xavier saw the biggest differential, earning 15.9X more views for his dance and culture videos. And in the most direct comparison, K-Pop dancer Susie Shu sometimes posts cuts from the same performance to the two destinations, like one that got 273,000 views in feed but just 27,000 on IGTV, with similar clips fairing an average of 7.8X better.

Again, this isn’t to say IGTV is a lame horse. It just isn’t roaring out of the gates. Systrom remains optimistic about inventing a new format. “The question is can we pull that off and the early signs are really good,” he tells me. “We’ve been pretty blown away by the reception and the usage upfront,” though he declined to share any specific statistics. Instagram promised to provide more insight into traction in the future.

YouTube star Casey Neistat is less bullish. He doesn’t think IGTV is working and that engagement has been weak. If IGTV views were surpassing those of YouTube, creators would flock to it, but so far view counts are uninspiring and not worth diverting creative attention, Neistat says. “YouTube offers the best sit-back consumption, and Stories offers active consumption. Where does IGTV fit in? I’m not sure” he tells me. “Why create all of this unique content if it gets lower views, it’s not monetizable, and the viewers aren’t there?”

Susie Shu averages 7.8X more video views in the Instagram feed than on IGTV

For now, the combination of an unfamiliar format, the absence of direction for how to use it and the relatively buried placement has likely tempered IGTV’s traction. Two months in, Instagram Stories was proving itself an existential threat to Snapchat — which it’s in fact become. IGTV doesn’t pose the same danger to YouTube yet, and it will need a strategy to support a more slow-burn trajectory.

The chicken and the IG problem

The first step to becoming a real YouTube challenger is to build up some tent-pole content that gives people a reason to open IGTV. Until there’s something that captures attention, any cross-promotion traffic Instagram sends it will be like pouring water into a bucket with a giant hole in the bottom. Yet until there’s enough viewers, it’s tough to persuade creators to shoot for IGTV since it won’t do a ton to boost their fan base.

Fortnite champion Ninja shares a photo of IGTV launch partners gathered backstage at the press event

Meanwhile, Instagram hasn’t committed to a monetization or revenue-sharing strategy for IGTV. Systrom said at the launch that “There’s no ads in IGTV today,” but noted it’s “obviously a very reasonable place [for ads] to end up.” Without enough views, though, ads won’t earn enough for a revenue split to incentivize creators. Perhaps Instagram will heavily integrate its in-app shopping features and sponsored content partnerships, but even those rely on having more traffic. Vine withered at Twitter in part from creators bailing due to its omission of native monetization options.

So how does IGTV solve the chicken-and-egg problem? It may need to swallow its pride and pay early adopters directly for content until it racks up enough views to offer sustainable revenue sharing. Instagram has never publicly copped to paying for content before, unlike its parent Facebook, which offered stipends ranging into the millions of dollars for publishers to shoot Live broadcasts and long-form Watch shows. Neither have led to a booming viewership, but perhaps that’s because Facebook has lost its edge with the teens who love video.

Instagram could do better if it paid the right creators to weather IGTV’s initial slim pickings. Settling on ad strategy creators can count on earning money from in the future might also get them to hang tight. Those deals could mimic the 55 percent split of mid-roll ad breaks Facebook gives creators on some videos. But again, the views must come first.

Alternatively, or additionally, it could double down on the launch strategy of luring creators with the potential to become the big fish in IGTV’s small-for-now pond. Backroom deals to trade being highlighted in its IGTV algorithm in exchange for high-quality content could win the hearts of these stars and their managers. Instagram would be wise to pair these incentives with vertical long-form video content creation workshops. It could bring its community, product and analytics leaders together with partnered stars to suss out what works best in the format and help them shoot it.

The cross-promo spigot

Once there’s something worth watching on IGTV, the company could open the cross-promo traffic spigot. At first, Instagram would send notifications about top content or IGTV posts from people you follow, and call them out with a little orange text banner atop its main app. Now it seems to understand it will need to be more coercive.

Last month, TechCrunch spotted Instagram showing promos for individual IGTV shows in the middle of the feed, hoping to redirect eyeballs there. And today, we found Instagram getting more aggressive by putting a bigger call out featuring a relevant IGTV clip with preview image above your Stories tray on the home screen. It may need to boost the frequency of these cross-promotions and stick them in-between Stories and Explore sections as well to give IGTV the limelight. These could expose users to creators they don’t follow already but might enjoy.

“It’s still early but I do think there’s a lot of potential when they figure out two things since the feature is so new,” says John Shahidi, who runs the Justin Bieber-backed Shots Studios, which produces and distributes content for Lele Pons, Rudy Mancuso and other Insta celebs. “1. Product. IGTV is not in your face so Instagram users aren’t changing behavior to consume. Timeline and Instagram Stories are in your face so those two are the most used features. 2. Discoverability. I want to see videos from people I don’t follow. Interesting stuff like cooking, product review, interesting content from brands but without following the accounts.” In the meantime, Shots Studios is launching a vertical-only channel on YouTube that Shahidi believes is the first of its kind.

Instagram will have to balance its strategic imperative to grow the long-form video hub and avoid spamming users until they hate the brand as a whole. Some think it’s already gone too far. “I think it’s super intrusive right now,” says Tiffany Zhong, once known as the world’s youngest venture capitalist who now runs Generation Z consulting firm Zebra Intelligence. “I personally find all the IGTV videos super boring and click out within seconds (and the only time I watch them are if I accidentally tapped on the icon when I tried to go to my DMs instead).” Desperately funneling traffic to the feature before there’s enough great content to power relevant recommendations for everyone could prematurely sour users on IGTV. 

Systrom remains optimistic he can iterate his way to success. “What I want to see over the next six to 12 months is a consistent drumbeat of new features that both consumers and creators are asking for, and to look at the retention curve and say ‘are people continuing to watch? Are people continuing to upload?,'” says Systrom. “So far we are seeing that all of those are healthy. But again trying to judge a very new kind of audacious format that’s never really been done before in the first months is going to be really hard.”

Differentiator or deterrent?

The biggest question remains whether IGTV will remain devout to the orthodoxy of vertical-only. Loosening up to accept landscape videos too might nullify a differentiator, but also pipe in a flood of content it could then algorithmically curate to bootstrap IGTV’s library. Reducing the friction by allowing people to easily port content to or from elsewhere might make it feel like less of a gamble for creators deciding where to put their production resources. Instagram itself expanded from square-only to portrait and landscape photos in the feed in 2015.

“My advice would be to make the videos horizontal. We’ve all come to understand vertical as ‘short form’ and horizontal as ‘long form,'” says Sayman. “It’s in the act of rotating your phone to landscape that you indicate to yourself and to your mobile device that you will not be context switching for the next few minutes, but rather intend to focus on one piece of content for an extended period of time.” This would at least give users more to watch, even if they ended up viewing landscape videos with their phones in portrait orientation.

This might be best as a last-ditch effort if it can’t get enough content flowing in through other means. But at least Instagram should offer a cropping tool that lets users manually select what vertical slice of a landscape video they want to show as they watch, rather than just grabbing the center or picking one area on the side for the whole clip. This could let creators repurpose landscape videos without things getting awkwardly half cut out of frame.

Former Facebook employee and social investor Josh Elman, who now works at Robinhood, told me he’s confident the company will experiment as much as necessary. “I think Facebook is relentless. They know that a ton of consumers watch video online. And most discover videos through influencers or their friends. (Or Netflix). Even though Watch and IGTV haven’t taken the world by storm yet, I bet Facebook won’t stop until they find the right mix.”

There’s a goldmine waiting if it does. Unlike on Facebook, there’s no Regram feature, you can’t post links, and outside of Explore you just see who you already follow on Instagram. That’s made it great at delivering friendly video and clips from your favorite stars, but leaves a gaping hole where serendipitous viewing could be. IGTV fills that gap. The hours people spend on Facebook watching random videos and their accompanying commercials have lifted the company to over $13 billion in revenue per quarter. Giving a younger audience a bottomless pit of full-screen video could produce the same behavior and profits on Instagram without polluting the feed, which can remain the purest manifestation of visual feed culture. But that’s only if IGTV can get enough content uploaded.

Puffed up by the success of besting its foe Snapchat, Instagram assumed it could take the long-form video world by storm. But the grand entrance at its debutante ball didn’t draw enough attention. Now it needs to take a different tack. Tone down the cross-promo for the moment. Concentrate on teaching creators how to find what works on the format and incentivizing them with cash and traffic. Develop some must-see IGTV and stoke a viral blockbuster. Prove the gravity of extended, personality-driven vertical video. Only then should it redirect traffic there from the feed, Stories, and Explore.

YouTube’s library wasn’t built overnight, and neither will IGTV’s. Facebook’s deep pockets and the success of Instagram’s other features give it the runway necessary to let IGTV take off. With 1 billion monthly users, and 400 million daily Stories users gathered in just two years, there are plenty of eyeballs waiting to be seduced. Systrom concludes, “Everything that is great starts small.” IGTV’s destiny will depend on Instagram’s patience.

from Mobile – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2o9VBgD ORIGINAL CONTENT FROM: https://techcrunch.com/

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For IGTV, Instagram needs slow to mean steady

Instagram has never truly failed at anything, but judging by modest initial view counts, IGTV could get stuck with a reputation as an abandoned theater if the company isn’t careful. It’s no flop, but the long-form video hub certainly isn’t an instant hit like Instagram Stories. Two months after that launched in 2016, Instagram was happy to trumpet how its Snapchat clone had hit 100 million users. Yet two months after IGTV’s launch, the Facebook subsidiary has been silent on its traction.

“It’s a new format. It’s different. We have to wait for people to adopt it and that takes time,” Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told me. “Think of it this way: we just invested in a startup called IGTV, but it’s small, and it’s like Instagram was ‘early days.'”

It’s indeed too early for a scientific analysis, and Instagram’s feed has been around since 2010, so it’s obviously not a fair comparison, but we took a look at the IGTV view counts of some of the feature’s launch partner creators. Across six of those creators, their recent feed videos are getting roughly 6.8X as many views as their IGTV posts. If IGTV’s launch partners that benefited from early access and guidance aren’t doing so hot, it means there’s likely no free view count bonanza in store from other creators or regular users.

They, and IGTV, will have to work for their audience. That’s already proving difficult for the standalone IGTV app. Though it peaked at the #25 overall US iPhone app and has seen 2.5 million downloads across iOS and Android according to Sensor Tower, it’s since dropped to #1497 and seen a 94 percent decrease in weekly installs to just 70,000 last week.

Instagram will have to be in it for the long haul if it wants to win at long-form video. Entering the market 13 years after YouTube with a vertical format no one’s quite sure what to do with, IGTV must play the tortoise. If it can avoid getting scrapped or buried, and offer the right incentives and flexibility to creators, IGTV could deliver the spontaneous video viewing experience Instagram lacks. Otherwise, IGTV risks becoming the next Google Plus — a ghost town inside an otherwise thriving product ecosystem.

A glitzy, glitchy start

Instagram gave IGTV a red carpet premiere June 20th in hopes of making it look like the new digital hotspot. The San Francisco launch event offered attendees several types of avocado toast, spa water and ‘Gram-worthy portrait backdrops reminiscent of the Color Factory or Museum of Ice Cream. Instagram hadn’t held a flashy press event since the 2013 launch of video sharing, so it pulled out all the stops. Balloon sculptures lined the entrance to a massive warehouse packed with social media stars and ad execs shouting to each other over the din of the DJ.

But things were rocky from the start. Leaks led TechCrunch to report on the IGTV name and details in the preceding weeks. Technical difficulties with Systrom’s presentation pushed back the start, but not the rollout of IGTV’s code. Tipster Jane Manchun Wong sent TechCrunch screenshots of the new app and features a half hour before it was announced, and Instagram’s own Business Blog jumped the gun by posting details of the launch. The web already knew how IGTV would let people upload vertical videos up to an hour long and browse them through categories like “Popular” and “For You” by the time Systrom took the stage.

IGTV’s launch event featured Instagram-themed donuts and elaborate portrait backdrops. Images via Vicki’s Donuts and Mai Lanpham

“What I’m most proud of is that Instagram took a stand and tried a brand new thing that is frankly hard to pull off. Full-screen vertical video that’s mobile only. That doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Systrom tells me. It was indeed ambitious. Creators were already comfortable making short-form vertical Snapchat Stories by the time Instagram launched its own version. IGTV would have to start from scratch.

Systrom sees the steep learning curve as a differentiator, though. “One of the things I like most about the new format is that it’s actually fairly difficult to just take videos that exist online and simply repost them. That’s not true in feed. That basically forces everyone to create new stuff,” Systrom tells me. “It’s not to say that there isn’t other stuff on there but in general it incentivizes people to produce new things from scratch. And that’s really what we’re looking for. Even if the volume of that stuff at the beginning is smaller than what you might see on the popular page [of Instagram Explore].”

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom unveils IGTV at the glitzy June 20th launch event

Instagram forced creators to adopt this proprietary format. But it forget to train Stories stars how to entertain us for five or 15 minutes, not 15 seconds, or convince landscape YouTube moguls to purposefully shoot or crop their clips for the way we normally hold our phones.

IGTV’s Popular page features plenty of random viral pap, foreign language content, and poor cropping

That should have been the real purpose of the launch party — demonstrating a variety of ways to turn these format constraints or lack thereof into unique content. Vertical video frames people better than places, and the length allows sustained eye-to-lens contacts that can engender an emotional connection. But a shallow array of initial content and too much confidence that creators would figure it out on their own deprived IGTV of emergent norms that other videographers could emulate to wet their feet.

Now IGTV feels haphazard, with trashy viral videos and miscropped ports amongst its Popular section alongside a few creators trying to produce made-for-IGTV talk shows and cooking tutorials. It’s yet to have its breakout “Chewbacca Mom” or “Rubberbanded Watermelon” blockbuster like Facebook Live. Even an interview with mega celeb Kylie Jenner only had 11,000 views.

Instagram wants to put the focus on the author, not the individual works of art. “Because we don’t have full text search and you can’t just search any random thing, it’s about the creators” Systrom explains. “I think that at its base level that it’s personality driven and creator driven means that you’re going to get really unique content that you won’t find anywhere else and that’s the goal.”

Yet being unique requires extra effort that creators might not invest if they’re unsure of the payoff in either reach or revenue. Michael Sayman, formerly Facebook’s youngest employee who was hired at age 17 to build apps for teens and who now works for Google, summed it up saying: “Many times in my own career, I’ve tried to make something with a unique spin or a special twist because I felt that’s the only way I could make my product stand out from the crowd, only to realize that it was those very twists and spins that made my products feel out of place and confusing to users. Sometimes, the best product is one that doesn’t create any new twists, but rather perfects and builds on top of what has been proven to already be extremely successful.”

A fraction of feed views

The one big surprise of the launch event was where IGTV would exist. Instagram announced it’d live in a standalone IGTV app, but also as a feature in the main app accessible from an orange button atop the home screen that would occasionally call out that new content was inside. But in essence, it was ignorable. IGTV didn’t get the benefit of being splayed out atop Instagram like Stories did. Blow past that one button and avoid downloading the separate app, and users could go right on tapping and scrolling through Instagram without coming across IGTV’s longer videos.

View counts of the launch partners reflect that. We looked at six launch partner creators, comparing their last six feed and IGTV videos older than a week and less than six months old, or fewer videos if that’s all they’d posted.

Only one of the six, BabyAriel, saw an obvious growth trend in her IGTV videos. Her candid IGTV monologues are performing the best of the six compared to feed. She’s earning an average of 243,000 views per IGTV video, about a third as many as she gets on her feed videos. “I’m really happy with my view counts because IGTV is just starting” BabyAriel tells me. She thinks the format will be good for behind-the-scenes clips that complement her longer YouTube videos and shorter Stories. “When I record anything, It’s vertical. When I turn my phone horizontal I think of an hour-long movie.”

Lele Pons, a Latin American comedy and music star who’s one of the most popular Instagram celebrities, gets about 5.7X more feed views than on her IGTV cooking show that averages 1.9 million hits. Instagram posted some IGTV highlights from the first month, but the most popular of now has 4.3 million views — less than half of what Pons gets on her average feed video.

Fitness guides from Katie Austin averaged just 3,600 views on IGTV while she gets 7.5X more in the feed. Lauren Godwin’s colorful comedy fared 5.2X better in the feed. Bryce Xavier saw the biggest differential, earning 15.9X more views for his dance and culture videos. And in the most direct comparison, K-Pop dancer Susie Shu sometimes posts cuts from the same performance to the two destinations, like one that got 273,000 views in feed but just 27,000 on IGTV, with similar clips fairing an average of 7.8X better.

Again, this isn’t to say IGTV is a lame horse. It just isn’t roaring out of the gates. Systrom remains optimistic about inventing a new format. “The question is can we pull that off and the early signs are really good,” he tells me. “We’ve been pretty blown away by the reception and the usage upfront,” though he declined to share any specific statistics. Instagram promised to provide more insight into traction in the future.

YouTube star Casey Neistat is less bullish. He doesn’t think IGTV is working and that engagement has been weak. If IGTV views were surpassing those of YouTube, creators would flock to it, but so far view counts are uninspiring and not worth diverting creative attention, Neistat says. “YouTube offers the best sit-back consumption, and Stories offers active consumption. Where does IGTV fit in? I’m not sure” he tells me. “Why create all of this unique content if it gets lower views, it’s not monetizable, and the viewers aren’t there?”

Susie Shu averages 7.8X more video views in the Instagram feed than on IGTV

For now, the combination of an unfamiliar format, the absence of direction for how to use it and the relatively buried placement has likely tempered IGTV’s traction. Two months in, Instagram Stories was proving itself an existential threat to Snapchat — which it’s in fact become. IGTV doesn’t pose the same danger to YouTube yet, and it will need a strategy to support a more slow-burn trajectory.

The chicken and the IG problem

The first step to becoming a real YouTube challenger is to build up some tent-pole content that gives people a reason to open IGTV. Until there’s something that captures attention, any cross-promotion traffic Instagram sends it will be like pouring water into a bucket with a giant hole in the bottom. Yet until there’s enough viewers, it’s tough to persuade creators to shoot for IGTV since it won’t do a ton to boost their fan base.

Fortnite champion Ninja shares a photo of IGTV launch partners gathered backstage at the press event

Meanwhile, Instagram hasn’t committed to a monetization or revenue-sharing strategy for IGTV. Systrom said at the launch that “There’s no ads in IGTV today,” but noted it’s “obviously a very reasonable place [for ads] to end up.” Without enough views, though, ads won’t earn enough for a revenue split to incentivize creators. Perhaps Instagram will heavily integrate its in-app shopping features and sponsored content partnerships, but even those rely on having more traffic. Vine withered at Twitter in part from creators bailing due to its omission of native monetization options.

So how does IGTV solve the chicken-and-egg problem? It may need to swallow its pride and pay early adopters directly for content until it racks up enough views to offer sustainable revenue sharing. Instagram has never publicly copped to paying for content before, unlike its parent Facebook, which offered stipends ranging into the millions of dollars for publishers to shoot Live broadcasts and long-form Watch shows. Neither have led to a booming viewership, but perhaps that’s because Facebook has lost its edge with the teens who love video.

Instagram could do better if it paid the right creators to weather IGTV’s initial slim pickings. Settling on ad strategy creators can count on earning money from in the future might also get them to hang tight. Those deals could mimic the 55 percent split of mid-roll ad breaks Facebook gives creators on some videos. But again, the views must come first.

Alternatively, or additionally, it could double down on the launch strategy of luring creators with the potential to become the big fish in IGTV’s small-for-now pond. Backroom deals to trade being highlighted in its IGTV algorithm in exchange for high-quality content could win the hearts of these stars and their managers. Instagram would be wise to pair these incentives with vertical long-form video content creation workshops. It could bring its community, product and analytics leaders together with partnered stars to suss out what works best in the format and help them shoot it.

The cross-promo spigot

Once there’s something worth watching on IGTV, the company could open the cross-promo traffic spigot. At first, Instagram would send notifications about top content or IGTV posts from people you follow, and call them out with a little orange text banner atop its main app. Now it seems to understand it will need to be more coercive.

Last month, TechCrunch spotted Instagram showing promos for individual IGTV shows in the middle of the feed, hoping to redirect eyeballs there. And today, we found Instagram getting more aggressive by putting a bigger call out featuring a relevant IGTV clip with preview image above your Stories tray on the home screen. It may need to boost the frequency of these cross-promotions and stick them in-between Stories and Explore sections as well to give IGTV the limelight. These could expose users to creators they don’t follow already but might enjoy.

“It’s still early but I do think there’s a lot of potential when they figure out two things since the feature is so new,” says John Shahidi, who runs the Justin Bieber-backed Shots Studios, which produces and distributes content for Lele Pons, Rudy Mancuso and other Insta celebs. “1. Product. IGTV is not in your face so Instagram users aren’t changing behavior to consume. Timeline and Instagram Stories are in your face so those two are the most used features. 2. Discoverability. I want to see videos from people I don’t follow. Interesting stuff like cooking, product review, interesting content from brands but without following the accounts.” In the meantime, Shots Studios is launching a vertical-only channel on YouTube that Shahidi believes is the first of its kind.

Instagram will have to balance its strategic imperative to grow the long-form video hub and avoid spamming users until they hate the brand as a whole. Some think it’s already gone too far. “I think it’s super intrusive right now,” says Tiffany Zhong, once known as the world’s youngest venture capitalist who now runs Generation Z consulting firm Zebra Intelligence. “I personally find all the IGTV videos super boring and click out within seconds (and the only time I watch them are if I accidentally tapped on the icon when I tried to go to my DMs instead).” Desperately funneling traffic to the feature before there’s enough great content to power relevant recommendations for everyone could prematurely sour users on IGTV. 

Systrom remains optimistic he can iterate his way to success. “What I want to see over the next six to 12 months is a consistent drumbeat of new features that both consumers and creators are asking for, and to look at the retention curve and say ‘are people continuing to watch? Are people continuing to upload?,'” says Systrom. “So far we are seeing that all of those are healthy. But again trying to judge a very new kind of audacious format that’s never really been done before in the first months is going to be really hard.”

Differentiator or deterrent?

The biggest question remains whether IGTV will remain devout to the orthodoxy of vertical-only. Loosening up to accept landscape videos too might nullify a differentiator, but also pipe in a flood of content it could then algorithmically curate to bootstrap IGTV’s library. Reducing the friction by allowing people to easily port content to or from elsewhere might make it feel like less of a gamble for creators deciding where to put their production resources. Instagram itself expanded from square-only to portrait and landscape photos in the feed in 2015.

“My advice would be to make the videos horizontal. We’ve all come to understand vertical as ‘short form’ and horizontal as ‘long form,'” says Sayman. “It’s in the act of rotating your phone to landscape that you indicate to yourself and to your mobile device that you will not be context switching for the next few minutes, but rather intend to focus on one piece of content for an extended period of time.” This would at least give users more to watch, even if they ended up viewing landscape videos with their phones in portrait orientation.

This might be best as a last-ditch effort if it can’t get enough content flowing in through other means. But at least Instagram should offer a cropping tool that lets users manually select what vertical slice of a landscape video they want to show as they watch, rather than just grabbing the center or picking one area on the side for the whole clip. This could let creators repurpose landscape videos without things getting awkwardly half cut out of frame.

Former Facebook employee and social investor Josh Elman, who now works at Robinhood, told me he’s confident the company will experiment as much as necessary. “I think Facebook is relentless. They know that a ton of consumers watch video online. And most discover videos through influencers or their friends. (Or Netflix). Even though Watch and IGTV haven’t taken the world by storm yet, I bet Facebook won’t stop until they find the right mix.”

There’s a goldmine waiting if it does. Unlike on Facebook, there’s no Regram feature, you can’t post links, and outside of Explore you just see who you already follow on Instagram. That’s made it great at delivering friendly video and clips from your favorite stars, but leaves a gaping hole where serendipitous viewing could be. IGTV fills that gap. The hours people spend on Facebook watching random videos and their accompanying commercials have lifted the company to over $13 billion in revenue per quarter. Giving a younger audience a bottomless pit of full-screen video could produce the same behavior and profits on Instagram without polluting the feed, which can remain the purest manifestation of visual feed culture. But that’s only if IGTV can get enough content uploaded.

Puffed up by the success of besting its foe Snapchat, Instagram assumed it could take the long-form video world by storm. But the grand entrance at its debutante ball didn’t draw enough attention. Now it needs to take a different tack. Tone down the cross-promo for the moment. Concentrate on teaching creators how to find what works on the format and incentivizing them with cash and traffic. Develop some must-see IGTV and stoke a viral blockbuster. Prove the gravity of extended, personality-driven vertical video. Only then should it redirect traffic there from the feed, Stories, and Explore.

YouTube’s library wasn’t built overnight, and neither will IGTV’s. Facebook’s deep pockets and the success of Instagram’s other features give it the runway necessary to let IGTV take off. With 1 billion monthly users, and 400 million daily Stories users gathered in just two years, there are plenty of eyeballs waiting to be seduced. Systrom concludes, “Everything that is great starts small.” IGTV’s destiny will depend on Instagram’s patience.

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2o9VBgD via IFTTT

[theinvinciblenoob]

Instagram has never truly failed at anything, but judging by modest initial view counts, IGTV could get stuck with a reputation as an abandoned theater if the company isn’t careful. It’s no flop, but the long-form video hub certainly isn’t an instant hit like Instagram Stories. Two months after that launched in 2016, Instagram was happy to trumpet how its Snapchat clone had hit 100 million users. Yet two months after IGTV’s launch, the Facebook subsidiary has been silent on its traction.

“It’s a new format. It’s different. We have to wait for people to adopt it and that takes time,” Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told me. “Think of it this way: we just invested in a startup called IGTV, but it’s small, and it’s like Instagram was ‘early days.'”

It’s indeed too early for a scientific analysis, and Instagram’s feed has been around since 2010, so it’s obviously not a fair comparison, but we took a look at the IGTV view counts of some of the feature’s launch partner creators. Across six of those creators, their recent feed videos are getting roughly 6.8X as many views as their IGTV posts. If IGTV’s launch partners that benefited from early access and guidance aren’t doing so hot, it means there’s likely no free view count bonanza in store from other creators or regular users.

They, and IGTV, will have to work for their audience. That’s already proving difficult for the standalone IGTV app. Though it peaked at the #25 overall US iPhone app and has seen 2.5 million downloads across iOS and Android according to Sensor Tower, it’s since dropped to #1497 and seen a 94 percent decrease in weekly installs to just 70,000 last week.

Instagram will have to be in it for the long haul if it wants to win at long-form video. Entering the market 13 years after YouTube with a vertical format no one’s quite sure what to do with, IGTV must play the tortoise. If it can avoid getting scrapped or buried, and offer the right incentives and flexibility to creators, IGTV could deliver the spontaneous video viewing experience Instagram lacks. Otherwise, IGTV risks becoming the next Google Plus — a ghost town inside an otherwise thriving product ecosystem.

A glitzy, glitchy start

Instagram gave IGTV a red carpet premiere June 20th in hopes of making it look like the new digital hotspot. The San Francisco launch event offered attendees several types of avocado toast, spa water and ‘Gram-worthy portrait backdrops reminiscent of the Color Factory or Museum of Ice Cream. Instagram hadn’t held a flashy press event since the 2013 launch of video sharing, so it pulled out all the stops. Balloon sculptures lined the entrance to a massive warehouse packed with social media stars and ad execs shouting to each other over the din of the DJ.

But things were rocky from the start. Leaks led TechCrunch to report on the IGTV name and details in the preceding weeks. Technical difficulties with Systrom’s presentation pushed back the start, but not the rollout of IGTV’s code. Tipster Jane Manchun Wong sent TechCrunch screenshots of the new app and features a half hour before it was announced, and Instagram’s own Business Blog jumped the gun by posting details of the launch. The web already knew how IGTV would let people upload vertical videos up to an hour long and browse them through categories like “Popular” and “For You” by the time Systrom took the stage.

IGTV’s launch event featured Instagram-themed donuts and elaborate portrait backdrops. Images via Vicki’s Donuts and Mai Lanpham

“What I’m most proud of is that Instagram took a stand and tried a brand new thing that is frankly hard to pull off. Full-screen vertical video that’s mobile only. That doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Systrom tells me. It was indeed ambitious. Creators were already comfortable making short-form vertical Snapchat Stories by the time Instagram launched its own version. IGTV would have to start from scratch.

Systrom sees the steep learning curve as a differentiator, though. “One of the things I like most about the new format is that it’s actually fairly difficult to just take videos that exist online and simply repost them. That’s not true in feed. That basically forces everyone to create new stuff,” Systrom tells me. “It’s not to say that there isn’t other stuff on there but in general it incentivizes people to produce new things from scratch. And that’s really what we’re looking for. Even if the volume of that stuff at the beginning is smaller than what you might see on the popular page [of Instagram Explore].”

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom unveils IGTV at the glitzy June 20th launch event

Instagram forced creators to adopt this proprietary format. But it forget to train Stories stars how to entertain us for five or 15 minutes, not 15 seconds, or convince landscape YouTube moguls to purposefully shoot or crop their clips for the way we normally hold our phones.

IGTV’s Popular page features plenty of random viral pap, foreign language content, and poor cropping

That should have been the real purpose of the launch party — demonstrating a variety of ways to turn these format constraints or lack thereof into unique content. Vertical video frames people better than places, and the length allows sustained eye-to-lens contacts that can engender an emotional connection. But a shallow array of initial content and too much confidence that creators would figure it out on their own deprived IGTV of emergent norms that other videographers could emulate to wet their feet.

Now IGTV feels haphazard, with trashy viral videos and miscropped ports amongst its Popular section alongside a few creators trying to produce made-for-IGTV talk shows and cooking tutorials. It’s yet to have its breakout “Chewbacca Mom” or “Rubberbanded Watermelon” blockbuster like Facebook Live. Even an interview with mega celeb Kylie Jenner only had 11,000 views.

Instagram wants to put the focus on the author, not the individual works of art. “Because we don’t have full text search and you can’t just search any random thing, it’s about the creators” Systrom explains. “I think that at its base level that it’s personality driven and creator driven means that you’re going to get really unique content that you won’t find anywhere else and that’s the goal.”

Yet being unique requires extra effort that creators might not invest if they’re unsure of the payoff in either reach or revenue. Michael Sayman, formerly Facebook’s youngest employee who was hired at age 17 to build apps for teens and who now works for Google, summed it up saying: “Many times in my own career, I’ve tried to make something with a unique spin or a special twist because I felt that’s the only way I could make my product stand out from the crowd, only to realize that it was those very twists and spins that made my products feel out of place and confusing to users. Sometimes, the best product is one that doesn’t create any new twists, but rather perfects and builds on top of what has been proven to already be extremely successful.”

A fraction of feed views

The one big surprise of the launch event was where IGTV would exist. Instagram announced it’d live in a standalone IGTV app, but also as a feature in the main app accessible from an orange button atop the home screen that would occasionally call out that new content was inside. It could have had its own carousel like Stories or been integrated into Explore until it was ready for primetime.

Instead, it was ignorable. IGTV didn’t get the benefit of the home screen spotlight like Instagram Stories. Blow past that one orange button and avoid downloading the separate app, and users could go right on tapping and scrolling through Instagram without coming across IGTV’s longer videos.

View counts of the launch partners reflect that. We looked at six launch partner creators, comparing their last six feed and IGTV videos older than a week and less than six months old, or fewer videos if that’s all they’d posted.

Only one of the six, BabyAriel, saw an obvious growth trend in her IGTV videos. Her candid IGTV monologues are performing the best of the six compared to feed. She’s earning an average of 243,000 views per IGTV video, about a third as many as she gets on her feed videos. “I’m really happy with my view counts because IGTV is just starting” BabyAriel tells me. She thinks the format will be good for behind-the-scenes clips that complement her longer YouTube videos and shorter Stories. “When I record anything, It’s vertical. When I turn my phone horizontal I think of an hour-long movie.”

Lele Pons, a Latin American comedy and music star who’s one of the most popular Instagram celebrities, gets about 5.7X more feed views than on her IGTV cooking show that averages 1.9 million hits. Instagram posted some IGTV highlights from the first month, but the most popular of now has 4.3 million views — less than half of what Pons gets on her average feed video.

Fitness guides from Katie Austin averaged just 3,600 views on IGTV while she gets 7.5X more in the feed. Lauren Godwin’s colorful comedy fared 5.2X better in the feed. Bryce Xavier saw the biggest differential, earning 15.9X more views for his dance and culture videos. And in the most direct comparison, K-Pop dancer Susie Shu sometimes posts cuts from the same performance to the two destinations, like one that got 273,000 views in feed but just 27,000 on IGTV, with similar clips fairing an average of 7.8X better.

Again, this isn’t to say IGTV is a lame horse. It just isn’t roaring out of the gates. Systrom remains optimistic about inventing a new format. “The question is can we pull that off and the early signs are really good,” he tells me. “We’ve been pretty blown away by the reception and the usage upfront,” though he declined to share any specific statistics. Instagram promised to provide more insight into traction in the future.

YouTube star Casey Neistat is less bullish. He doesn’t think IGTV is working and that engagement has been weak. If IGTV views were surpassing those of YouTube, creators would flock to it, but so far view counts are uninspiring and not worth diverting creative attention, Neistat says. “YouTube offers the best sit-back consumption, and Stories offers active consumption. Where does IGTV fit in? I’m not sure” he tells me. “Why create all of this unique content if it gets lower views, it’s not monetizable, and the viewers aren’t there?”

Susie Shu averages 7.8X more video views in the Instagram feed than on IGTV

For now, the combination of an unfamiliar format, the absence of direction for how to use it and the relatively buried placement has likely tempered IGTV’s traction. Two months in, Instagram Stories was proving itself an existential threat to Snapchat — which it’s in fact become. IGTV doesn’t pose the same danger to YouTube yet, and it will need a strategy to support a more slow-burn trajectory.

The chicken and the IG problem

The first step to becoming a real YouTube challenger is to build up some tent-pole content that gives people a reason to open IGTV. Until there’s something that captures attention, any cross-promotion traffic Instagram sends it will be like pouring water into a bucket with a giant hole in the bottom. Yet until there’s enough viewers, it’s tough to persuade creators to shoot for IGTV since it won’t do a ton to boost their fan base.

Fortnite champion Ninja shares a photo of IGTV launch partners gathered backstage at the press event

Meanwhile, Instagram hasn’t committed to a monetization or revenue-sharing strategy for IGTV. Systrom said at the launch that “There’s no ads in IGTV today,” but noted it’s “obviously a very reasonable place [for ads] to end up.” Without enough views, though, ads won’t earn enough for a revenue split to incentivize creators. Perhaps Instagram will heavily integrate its in-app shopping features and sponsored content partnerships, but even those rely on having more traffic. Vine withered at Twitter in part from creators bailing due to its omission of native monetization options.

So how does IGTV solve the chicken-and-egg problem? It may need to swallow its pride and pay early adopters directly for content until it racks up enough views to offer sustainable revenue sharing. Instagram has never publicly copped to paying for content before, unlike its parent Facebook, which offered stipends ranging into the millions of dollars for publishers to shoot Live broadcasts and long-form Watch shows. Neither have led to a booming viewership, but perhaps that’s because Facebook has lost its edge with the teens who love video.

Instagram could do better if it paid the right creators to weather IGTV’s initial slim pickings. Settling on ad strategy creators can count on earning money from in the future might also get them to hang tight. Those deals could mimic the 55 percent split of mid-roll ad breaks Facebook gives creators on some videos. But again, the views must come first.

Alternatively, or additionally, it could double down on the launch strategy of luring creators with the potential to become the big fish in IGTV’s small-for-now pond. Backroom deals to trade being highlighted in its IGTV algorithm in exchange for high-quality content could win the hearts of these stars and their managers. Instagram would be wise to pair these incentives with vertical long-form video content creation workshops. It could bring its community, product and analytics leaders together with partnered stars to suss out what works best in the format and help them shoot it.

The cross-promo spigot

Once there’s something worth watching on IGTV, the company could open the cross-promo traffic spigot. At first, Instagram would send notifications about top content or IGTV posts from people you follow, and call them out with a little orange text banner atop its main app. Now it seems to understand it will need to be more coercive.

Last month, TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong spotted Instagram showing promos for individual IGTV shows in the middle of the feed, hoping to redirect eyeballs there. And today, TechCrunch researcher Matt Navarra found Instagram getting more aggressive by putting a bigger call out featuring a relevant IGTV clip with preview image above your Stories tray on the home screen. It may need to boost the frequency of these cross-promotions and stick them in-between Stories and Explore sections as well to give IGTV the limelight. These could expose users to creators they don’t follow already but might enjoy.

“It’s still early but I do think there’s a lot of potential when they figure out two things since the feature is so new,” says John Shahidi, who runs the Justin Bieber-backed Shots Studios, which produces and distributes content for Lele Pons, Rudy Mancuso and other Insta celebs. “1. Product. IGTV is not in your face so Instagram users aren’t changing behavior to consume. Timeline and Instagram Stories are in your face so those two are the most used features. 2. Discoverability. I want to see videos from people I don’t follow. Interesting stuff like cooking, product review, interesting content from brands but without following the accounts.” In the meantime, Shots Studios is launching a vertical-only channel on YouTube that Shahidi believes is the first of its kind.

Instagram will have to balance its strategic imperative to grow the long-form video hub and avoid spamming users until they hate the brand as a whole. Some think it’s already gone too far. “I think it’s super intrusive right now,” says Tiffany Zhong, once known as the world’s youngest venture capitalist who now runs Generation Z consulting firm Zebra Intelligence. “I personally find all the IGTV videos super boring and click out within seconds (and the only time I watch them are if I accidentally tapped on the icon when I tried to go to my DMs instead).” Desperately funneling traffic to the feature before there’s enough great content to power relevant recommendations for everyone could prematurely sour users on IGTV. 

Systrom remains optimistic he can iterate his way to success. “What I want to see over the next six to 12 months is a consistent drumbeat of new features that both consumers and creators are asking for, and to look at the retention curve and say ‘are people continuing to watch? Are people continuing to upload?,'” says Systrom. “So far we are seeing that all of those are healthy. But again trying to judge a very new kind of audacious format that’s never really been done before in the first months is going to be really hard.”

Differentiator or deterrent?

The biggest question remains whether IGTV will remain devout to the orthodoxy of vertical-only. Loosening up to accept landscape videos too might nullify a differentiator, but also pipe in a flood of content it could then algorithmically curate to bootstrap IGTV’s library. Reducing the friction by allowing people to easily port content to or from elsewhere might make it feel like less of a gamble for creators deciding where to put their production resources. Instagram itself expanded from square-only to portrait and landscape photos in the feed in 2015.

“My advice would be to make the videos horizontal. We’ve all come to understand vertical as ‘short form’ and horizontal as ‘long form,'” says Sayman. “It’s in the act of rotating your phone to landscape that you indicate to yourself and to your mobile device that you will not be context switching for the next few minutes, but rather intend to focus on one piece of content for an extended period of time.” This would at least give users more to watch, even if they ended up viewing landscape videos with their phones in portrait orientation.

This might be best as a last-ditch effort if it can’t get enough content flowing in through other means. But at least Instagram should offer a cropping tool that lets users manually select what vertical slice of a landscape video they want to show as they watch, rather than just grabbing the center or picking one area on the side for the whole clip. This could let creators repurpose landscape videos without things getting awkwardly half cut out of frame.

Former Facebook employee and social investor Josh Elman, who now works at Robinhood, told me he’s confident the company will experiment as much as necessary. “I think Facebook is relentless. They know that a ton of consumers watch video online. And most discover videos through influencers or their friends. (Or Netflix). Even though Watch and IGTV haven’t taken the world by storm yet, I bet Facebook won’t stop until they find the right mix.”

There’s a goldmine waiting if it does. Unlike on Facebook, there’s no Regram feature, you can’t post links, and outside of Explore you just see who you already follow on Instagram. That’s made it great at delivering friendly video and clips from your favorite stars, but leaves a gaping hole where serendipitous viewing could be. IGTV fills that gap. The hours people spend on Facebook watching random videos and their accompanying commercials have lifted the company to over $13 billion in revenue per quarter. Giving a younger audience a bottomless pit of full-screen video could produce the same behavior and profits on Instagram without polluting the feed, which can remain the purest manifestation of visual feed culture. But that’s only if IGTV can get enough content uploaded.

Puffed up by the success of besting its foe Snapchat, Instagram assumed it could take the long-form video world by storm. But the grand entrance at its debutante ball didn’t draw enough attention. Now it needs to take a different tack. Tone down the cross-promo for the moment. Concentrate on teaching creators how to find what works on the format and incentivizing them with cash and traffic. Develop some must-see IGTV and stoke a viral blockbuster. Prove the gravity of extended, personality-driven vertical video. Only then should it redirect traffic there from the feed, Stories, and Explore.

YouTube’s library wasn’t built overnight, and neither will IGTV’s. Facebook’s deep pockets and the success of Instagram’s other features give it the runway necessary to let IGTV take off. With 1 billion monthly users, and 400 million daily Stories users gathered in just two years, there are plenty of eyeballs waiting to be seduced. Systrom concludes, “Everything that is great starts small.” IGTV’s destiny will depend on Instagram’s patience.

via TechCrunch

[fmservers]

For IGTV, Instagram needs slow to mean steady

Instagram has never truly failed at anything, but judging by modest initial view counts, IGTV could get stuck with a reputation as an abandoned theater if the company isn’t careful. It’s no flop, but the long-form video hub certainly isn’t an instant hit like Instagram Stories. Two months after that launched in 2016, Instagram was happy to trumpet how its Snapchat clone had hit 100 million users. Yet two months after IGTV’s launch, the Facebook subsidiary has been silent on its traction.

“It’s a new format. It’s different. We have to wait for people to adopt it and that takes time,” Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told me. “Think of it this way: we just invested in a startup called IGTV, but it’s small, and it’s like Instagram was ‘early days.'”

It’s indeed too early for a scientific analysis, and Instagram’s feed has been around since 2010, so it’s obviously not a fair comparison, but we took a look at the IGTV view counts of some of the feature’s launch partner creators. Across six of those creators, their recent feed videos are getting roughly 6.8X as many views as their IGTV posts. If IGTV’s launch partners that benefited from early access and guidance aren’t doing so hot, it means there’s likely no free view count bonanza in store from other creators or regular users.

They, and IGTV, will have to work for their audience. That’s already proving difficult for the standalone IGTV app. Though it peaked at the #25 overall US iPhone app and has seen 2.5 million downloads across iOS and Android according to Sensor Tower, it’s since dropped to #1497 and seen a 94 percent decrease in weekly installs to just 70,000 last week.

Instagram will have to be in it for the long haul if it wants to win at long-form video. Entering the market 13 years after YouTube with a vertical format no one’s quite sure what to do with, IGTV must play the tortoise. If it can avoid getting scrapped or buried, and offer the right incentives and flexibility to creators, IGTV could deliver the spontaneous video viewing experience Instagram lacks. Otherwise, IGTV risks becoming the next Google Plus — a ghost town inside an otherwise thriving product ecosystem.

A glitzy, glitchy start

Instagram gave IGTV a red carpet premiere June 20th in hopes of making it look like the new digital hotspot. The San Francisco launch event offered attendees several types of avocado toast, spa water and ‘Gram-worthy portrait backdrops reminiscent of the Color Factory or Museum of Ice Cream. Instagram hadn’t held a flashy press event since the 2013 launch of video sharing, so it pulled out all the stops. Balloon sculptures lined the entrance to a massive warehouse packed with social media stars and ad execs shouting to each other over the din of the DJ.

But things were rocky from the start. Leaks led TechCrunch to report on the IGTV name and details in the preceding weeks. Technical difficulties with Systrom’s presentation pushed back the start, but not the rollout of IGTV’s code. Tipster Jane Manchun Wong sent TechCrunch screenshots of the new app and features a half hour before it was announced, and Instagram’s own Business Blog jumped the gun by posting details of the launch. The web already knew how IGTV would let people upload vertical videos up to an hour long and browse them through categories like “Popular” and “For You” by the time Systrom took the stage.

IGTV’s launch event featured Instagram-themed donuts and elaborate portrait backdrops. Images via Vicki’s Donuts and Mai Lanpham

“What I’m most proud of is that Instagram took a stand and tried a brand new thing that is frankly hard to pull off. Full-screen vertical video that’s mobile only. That doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Systrom tells me. It was indeed ambitious. Creators were already comfortable making short-form vertical Snapchat Stories by the time Instagram launched its own version. IGTV would have to start from scratch.

Systrom sees the steep learning curve as a differentiator, though. “One of the things I like most about the new format is that it’s actually fairly difficult to just take videos that exist online and simply repost them. That’s not true in feed. That basically forces everyone to create new stuff,” Systrom tells me. “It’s not to say that there isn’t other stuff on there but in general it incentivizes people to produce new things from scratch. And that’s really what we’re looking for. Even if the volume of that stuff at the beginning is smaller than what you might see on the popular page [of Instagram Explore].”

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom unveils IGTV at the glitzy June 20th launch event

Instagram forced creators to adopt this proprietary format. But it forget to train Stories stars how to entertain us for five or 15 minutes, not 15 seconds, or convince landscape YouTube moguls to purposefully shoot or crop their clips for the way we normally hold our phones.

IGTV’s Popular page features plenty of random viral pap, foreign language content, and poor cropping

That should have been the real purpose of the launch party — demonstrating a variety of ways to turn these format constraints or lack thereof into unique content. Vertical video frames people better than places, and the length allows sustained eye-to-lens contacts that can engender an emotional connection. But a shallow array of initial content and too much confidence that creators would figure it out on their own deprived IGTV of emergent norms that other videographers could emulate to wet their feet.

Now IGTV feels haphazard, with trashy viral videos and miscropped ports amongst its Popular section alongside a few creators trying to produce made-for-IGTV talk shows and cooking tutorials. It’s yet to have its breakout “Chewbacca Mom” or “Rubberbanded Watermelon” blockbuster like Facebook Live. Even an interview with mega celeb Kylie Jenner only had 11,000 views.

Instagram wants to put the focus on the author, not the individual works of art. “Because we don’t have full text search and you can’t just search any random thing, it’s about the creators” Systrom explains. “I think that at its base level that it’s personality driven and creator driven means that you’re going to get really unique content that you won’t find anywhere else and that’s the goal.”

Yet being unique requires extra effort that creators might not invest if they’re unsure of the payoff in either reach or revenue. Michael Sayman, formerly Facebook’s youngest employee who was hired at age 17 to build apps for teens and who now works for Google, summed it up saying: “Many times in my own career, I’ve tried to make something with a unique spin or a special twist because I felt that’s the only way I could make my product stand out from the crowd, only to realize that it was those very twists and spins that made my products feel out of place and confusing to users. Sometimes, the best product is one that doesn’t create any new twists, but rather perfects and builds on top of what has been proven to already be extremely successful.”

A fraction of feed views

The one big surprise of the launch event was where IGTV would exist. Instagram announced it’d live in a standalone IGTV app, but also as a feature in the main app accessible from an orange button atop the home screen that would occasionally call out that new content was inside. But in essence, it was ignorable. IGTV didn’t get the benefit of being splayed out atop Instagram like Stories did. Blow past that one button and avoid downloading the separate app, and users could go right on tapping and scrolling through Instagram without coming across IGTV’s longer videos.

View counts of the launch partners reflect that. We looked at six launch partner creators, comparing their last six feed and IGTV videos older than a week and less than six months old, or fewer videos if that’s all they’d posted.

Only one of the six, BabyAriel, saw an obvious growth trend in her IGTV videos. Her candid IGTV monologues are performing the best of the six compared to feed. She’s earning an average of 243,000 views per IGTV video, about a third as many as she gets on her feed videos. “I’m really happy with my view counts because IGTV is just starting” BabyAriel tells me. She thinks the format will be good for behind-the-scenes clips that complement her longer YouTube videos and shorter Stories. “When I record anything, It’s vertical. When I turn my phone horizontal I think of an hour-long movie.”

Lele Pons, a Latin American comedy and music star who’s one of the most popular Instagram celebrities, gets about 5.7X more feed views than on her IGTV cooking show that averages 1.9 million hits. Instagram posted some IGTV highlights from the first month, but the most popular of now has 4.3 million views — less than half of what Pons gets on her average feed video.

Fitness guides from Katie Austin averaged just 3,600 views on IGTV while she gets 7.5X more in the feed. Lauren Godwin’s colorful comedy fared 5.2X better in the feed. Bryce Xavier saw the biggest differential, earning 15.9X more views for his dance and culture videos. And in the most direct comparison, K-Pop dancer Susie Shu sometimes posts cuts from the same performance to the two destinations, like one that got 273,000 views in feed but just 27,000 on IGTV, with similar clips fairing an average of 7.8X better.

Again, this isn’t to say IGTV is a lame horse. It just isn’t roaring out of the gates. Systrom remains optimistic about inventing a new format. “The question is can we pull that off and the early signs are really good,” he tells me. “We’ve been pretty blown away by the reception and the usage upfront,” though he declined to share any specific statistics. Instagram promised to provide more insight into traction in the future.

YouTube star Casey Neistat is less bullish. He doesn’t think IGTV is working and that engagement has been weak. If IGTV views were surpassing those of YouTube, creators would flock to it, but so far view counts are uninspiring and not worth diverting creative attention, Neistat says. “YouTube offers the best sit-back consumption, and Stories offers active consumption. Where does IGTV fit in? I’m not sure” he tells me. “Why create all of this unique content if it gets lower views, it’s not monetizable, and the viewers aren’t there?”

Susie Shu averages 7.8X more video views in the Instagram feed than on IGTV

For now, the combination of an unfamiliar format, the absence of direction for how to use it and the relatively buried placement has likely tempered IGTV’s traction. Two months in, Instagram Stories was proving itself an existential threat to Snapchat — which it’s in fact become. IGTV doesn’t pose the same danger to YouTube yet, and it will need a strategy to support a more slow-burn trajectory.

The chicken and the IG problem

The first step to becoming a real YouTube challenger is to build up some tent-pole content that gives people a reason to open IGTV. Until there’s something that captures attention, any cross-promotion traffic Instagram sends it will be like pouring water into a bucket with a giant hole in the bottom. Yet until there’s enough viewers, it’s tough to persuade creators to shoot for IGTV since it won’t do a ton to boost their fan base.

Fortnite champion Ninja shares a photo of IGTV launch partners gathered backstage at the press event

Meanwhile, Instagram hasn’t committed to a monetization or revenue-sharing strategy for IGTV. Systrom said at the launch that “There’s no ads in IGTV today,” but noted it’s “obviously a very reasonable place [for ads] to end up.” Without enough views, though, ads won’t earn enough for a revenue split to incentivize creators. Perhaps Instagram will heavily integrate its in-app shopping features and sponsored content partnerships, but even those rely on having more traffic. Vine withered at Twitter in part from creators bailing due to its omission of native monetization options.

So how does IGTV solve the chicken-and-egg problem? It may need to swallow its pride and pay early adopters directly for content until it racks up enough views to offer sustainable revenue sharing. Instagram has never publicly copped to paying for content before, unlike its parent Facebook, which offered stipends ranging into the millions of dollars for publishers to shoot Live broadcasts and long-form Watch shows. Neither have led to a booming viewership, but perhaps that’s because Facebook has lost its edge with the teens who love video.

Instagram could do better if it paid the right creators to weather IGTV’s initial slim pickings. Settling on ad strategy creators can count on earning money from in the future might also get them to hang tight. Those deals could mimic the 55 percent split of mid-roll ad breaks Facebook gives creators on some videos. But again, the views must come first.

Alternatively, or additionally, it could double down on the launch strategy of luring creators with the potential to become the big fish in IGTV’s small-for-now pond. Backroom deals to trade being highlighted in its IGTV algorithm in exchange for high-quality content could win the hearts of these stars and their managers. Instagram would be wise to pair these incentives with vertical long-form video content creation workshops. It could bring its community, product and analytics leaders together with partnered stars to suss out what works best in the format and help them shoot it.

The cross-promo spigot

Once there’s something worth watching on IGTV, the company could open the cross-promo traffic spigot. At first, Instagram would send notifications about top content or IGTV posts from people you follow, and call them out with a little orange text banner atop its main app. Now it seems to understand it will need to be more coercive.

Last month, TechCrunch spotted Instagram showing promos for individual IGTV shows in the middle of the feed, hoping to redirect eyeballs there. And today, we found Instagram getting more aggressive by putting a bigger call out featuring a relevant IGTV clip with preview image above your Stories tray on the home screen. It may need to boost the frequency of these cross-promotions and stick them in-between Stories and Explore sections as well to give IGTV the limelight. These could expose users to creators they don’t follow already but might enjoy.

“It’s still early but I do think there’s a lot of potential when they figure out two things since the feature is so new,” says John Shahidi, who runs the Justin Bieber-backed Shots Studios, which produces and distributes content for Lele Pons, Rudy Mancuso and other Insta celebs. “1. Product. IGTV is not in your face so Instagram users aren’t changing behavior to consume. Timeline and Instagram Stories are in your face so those two are the most used features. 2. Discoverability. I want to see videos from people I don’t follow. Interesting stuff like cooking, product review, interesting content from brands but without following the accounts.” In the meantime, Shots Studios is launching a vertical-only channel on YouTube that Shahidi believes is the first of its kind.

Instagram will have to balance its strategic imperative to grow the long-form video hub and avoid spamming users until they hate the brand as a whole. Some think it’s already gone too far. “I think it’s super intrusive right now,” says Tiffany Zhong, once known as the world’s youngest venture capitalist who now runs Generation Z consulting firm Zebra Intelligence. “I personally find all the IGTV videos super boring and click out within seconds (and the only time I watch them are if I accidentally tapped on the icon when I tried to go to my DMs instead).” Desperately funneling traffic to the feature before there’s enough great content to power relevant recommendations for everyone could prematurely sour users on IGTV. 

Systrom remains optimistic he can iterate his way to success. “What I want to see over the next six to 12 months is a consistent drumbeat of new features that both consumers and creators are asking for, and to look at the retention curve and say ‘are people continuing to watch? Are people continuing to upload?,'” says Systrom. “So far we are seeing that all of those are healthy. But again trying to judge a very new kind of audacious format that’s never really been done before in the first months is going to be really hard.”

Differentiator or deterrent?

The biggest question remains whether IGTV will remain devout to the orthodoxy of vertical-only. Loosening up to accept landscape videos too might nullify a differentiator, but also pipe in a flood of content it could then algorithmically curate to bootstrap IGTV’s library. Reducing the friction by allowing people to easily port content to or from elsewhere might make it feel like less of a gamble for creators deciding where to put their production resources. Instagram itself expanded from square-only to portrait and landscape photos in the feed in 2015.

“My advice would be to make the videos horizontal. We’ve all come to understand vertical as ‘short form’ and horizontal as ‘long form,'” says Sayman. “It’s in the act of rotating your phone to landscape that you indicate to yourself and to your mobile device that you will not be context switching for the next few minutes, but rather intend to focus on one piece of content for an extended period of time.” This would at least give users more to watch, even if they ended up viewing landscape videos with their phones in portrait orientation.

This might be best as a last-ditch effort if it can’t get enough content flowing in through other means. But at least Instagram should offer a cropping tool that lets users manually select what vertical slice of a landscape video they want to show as they watch, rather than just grabbing the center or picking one area on the side for the whole clip. This could let creators repurpose landscape videos without things getting awkwardly half cut out of frame.

Former Facebook employee and social investor Josh Elman, who now works at Robinhood, told me he’s confident the company will experiment as much as necessary. “I think Facebook is relentless. They know that a ton of consumers watch video online. And most discover videos through influencers or their friends. (Or Netflix). Even though Watch and IGTV haven’t taken the world by storm yet, I bet Facebook won’t stop until they find the right mix.”

There’s a goldmine waiting if it does. Unlike on Facebook, there’s no Regram feature, you can’t post links, and outside of Explore you just see who you already follow on Instagram. That’s made it great at delivering friendly video and clips from your favorite stars, but leaves a gaping hole where serendipitous viewing could be. IGTV fills that gap. The hours people spend on Facebook watching random videos and their accompanying commercials have lifted the company to over $13 billion in revenue per quarter. Giving a younger audience a bottomless pit of full-screen video could produce the same behavior and profits on Instagram without polluting the feed, which can remain the purest manifestation of visual feed culture. But that’s only if IGTV can get enough content uploaded.

Puffed up by the success of besting its foe Snapchat, Instagram assumed it could take the long-form video world by storm. But the grand entrance at its debutante ball didn’t draw enough attention. Now it needs to take a different tack. Tone down the cross-promo for the moment. Concentrate on teaching creators how to find what works on the format and incentivizing them with cash and traffic. Develop some must-see IGTV and stoke a viral blockbuster. Prove the gravity of extended, personality-driven vertical video. Only then should it redirect traffic there from the feed, Stories, and Explore.

YouTube’s library wasn’t built overnight, and neither will IGTV’s. Facebook’s deep pockets and the success of Instagram’s other features give it the runway necessary to let IGTV take off. With 1 billion monthly users, and 400 million daily Stories users gathered in just two years, there are plenty of eyeballs waiting to be seduced. Systrom concludes, “Everything that is great starts small.” IGTV’s destiny will depend on Instagram’s patience.

Via Josh Constine https://techcrunch.com