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buzzworddotie · 7 years ago

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The 8th Amendment Referendum in Ireland

And how history is being rewritten one step at a time

It's been a long time coming but on May 25th 2018 the people of Ireland were asked if they would like to amend the Constitution to decriminalise abortion in Ireland.

What's it all about?

Up until now, an Irish women who seeked out an abortion for personal reasons or medical ones was a criminal under Irish law. A woman would have to either travel to the UK or attempt to dangerously take abortion pills acquired illegally at home under zero medical supervision.

Or the alternative, for years, decades, Ireland and the stronghold held over her by the Catholic Church, would force girls and women into homes to have the baby. Often these babies wound up dead, buried away, hidden. Bones have been found in septic tanks.

Girls and women were treated brutally.

Secret pregnancies were also a thing, who knows how many women and girls suffered in silence?

Right up until May 25th 2018.

That's when we finally got to be heard.

Enough is Enough

I can't take a single piece of credit for getting this vote to happen but there are countless women who can. Women who have been banging on doors, demanding bodily autonomy, demanding rights, demanding choice. Finally the demand was heard, finally the government agreed to allow the people to make a decision.

The Campaigns

As soon as the vote was announced, I knew this was not going to be a particularly nice campaign. That's putting it lightly. In 2015 Ireland held the Marriage Referendum. An opportunity to change the Constitution to recognise and allow same sex marriage in Ireland. It passed, of course, but the campaign was filled with some uneducated, hateful rhetoric fuelled by the Catholic Church. Regardless of how much they wanted to deny it, hardcore religious groups and their followers were against that law with vigor and venom.

And I knew that hate would amplify for this one. I already knew what way I wanted to vote, I didn't need anyone to convince me either way, much like the Marriage Ref. But unlike then when I did tune into radio debates and absorbed the arguments, this time I made the conscious decision to avoid it as much as possible.

Marketing

Despite that it was tough to avoid, every pole, every surface available was covered with Yes and No posters. The Yes posters usually said something like "Yes for choice" "Together for Yes" or a simple "Repeal"...

Murals went up by artists like Maser, badges were made, Repeal jumpers and through the help of crowd sourcing the Yes campaign managed to gain more support for their message.

Our message.

On the No side there were an abundance of posters, I have seen images of feotus in the womb telling me babies will be murdered. Billboards across towns, rural and otherwise.

The whole thing turned into a massive marketing campaign. To a degree, on both sides. Paid ads on social media, Google and streaming services, posters... So... Many... Posters.

Social media attacks, hashags... I just didn't want to hear it. I know burying your head in the sand isn't a solution but I personally don't believe that an issue as important as this should boil down to who has the most money to promote a post or buy a billboard.

One thing I will say is that, at least where I have travelled, there was far more "No" campaign imagery than "Yes". Those were the ones with the billboards, the video ads that interrupted my viewing and I had to wonder, where was all this money coming from?

In the end Google and Facebook to the best of my knowledge pulled paid advertising on their platforms but there were other means.

Attacks on People, places and things

Another side of the campaign was the inevitable attacks. Digital rows blazed up as the concept of reasoned debate flew out the window. Some of the words I have witnessed being used against women on social media were beyond appalling, disgusting, shameful.

Were there bot accounts? Yes, there were. It doesn't take too much probing to see that and that minor exercise in investigation proved that really the "No" side was in the minority. It was clear but you could never be certain.

And by no means would I ever suggest the "Yes" side were entirely innocent, I just didn't catch the trolling by them.

"No" campaigners also attacked places, apparently in one constituency very graphic posters were hung very close to a school, causing uproar.

They also stood outside maternity hospitals.

Let me reiterate that, MATERNITY HOSPITALS.

They stood outside them holding graphic posters, other establishments too, but that one made me sick to my stomach.

Then on the stunning Benbulben, in my home county, a place I adore, they stuck a massive "NO" sign. For some reason this triggered me. Using the landscape of this country, which throughout history has been defined with feminine pronouns, to announce that women's rights were not of value was disgusting.

Photo: https://garethwray.com/product/classiebawn-benbulben-sligos-iconic-duo/

Not more disgusting than standing outside a hospital or plastering graphic and insensitive imagery around a school but a different kind of insult. As if they were claiming this land shared their voice.

What was even weirder was the fact the people who did it were practically a parody of themselves, announcing on radio that the men had put up the sign as the women made them tea and sanwiches.

This had to be a joke, right?

It's not funny

Truthfully though, this issue wasn't a joke, not to me or to anyone involved. This vote could actually be the difference between life and death for so many women.

By night, reports were coming out saying that the turnout to vote had been exceptional, people had been travelling back home from all around the country to take part.

Many popular Irish female voices had been so loud in their messages to push this cause, many Irish men got involved too stressing the importance of men getting behind women, taking a stand with them, recognising this is their issue too. Women should not be alone in this.

Soon we began to hear the results from the Exit Polls. First the Irish Times showing a landslide in favour of Repealing. It was something like 68% in favour, an insane number.

RTE Uses Us

The "main" Irish broadcaster, the state owned one, decided to announce their Exit Polls on what I think is supposed to be a late night chat show, The Late Late Show.

I found this disgusting and I didn't watch, because I never watch, because it's utter fucking drivel. But what RTE did was decide to use this campaign for their own ratings gain. They knew people would tune in and so they decided to, as far as I know, discuss how "Toxic Masculinity is a Myth", very fucking timely decision lads. As well as this they had some gobshite on NATIONAL TV talking about how she speaks to fairies.

Because heaven forbid we take a step forward as a nation.

Now, I don't know at what stage they announced the results but I do know that it wasn't before any of that other shite. Again, that was a calculated move and they will point to those viewing figures to justify the ridiculous wages that we fund for that show and it's (wooden) presenter. I'll pause that one right there.

History is Rewritten

In a move that has the potential to shock anyone not clued into who most modern Irish people actually are, the "Yes" side achieved a mammoth victory with over 1.4 million people deciding to Vote Yes, over 66% of voters.

And the 8th Amendment has been Repealed. I am so proud of all of us.

Photo: Maser, https://deandublin.ie/events/maser-exhibition/

What Now?

So where do we go from here?

I can never shake a Bell X1 lyric from my head in times like this. Fitting, given they are an Irish band:

"...History is written by the winners. And I want my say."

If we want to continue to create an Ireland that is just, inclusive, fair and reasonable we have to keep banding together and becoming the winners. The people on the reasoned side do not always need to feel like they are being walked all over.

That's how things have felt for so long, I won't even say in the past because it is still happening. This moment was monumental and something that, just like the Marriage Referendum, should be really allowed to sink into the minds of every single person who voted, the real power of what was achieved this day is epic.

We didn't just pop an X next to a box. We have literally changed the Constitution of this nation twice. We have asked to please get a chance to update this nation to reflect who we are and not to be bound to the decisions of the past, which maybe were the right decisions back then or maybe the alternative was too alternative. We had to crawl for a while, but we started to walk and now we have the chance to run.

I don't want our interest in matters like this to start and stop with things that are so clearly emotive. There is so much more to do to keep pushing forward.

And the further we move ahead the more resistance will be out against us but we can't turn a blind eye.

OK the 8th is Repealed, what can we put in place now to ensure any womelan who require ls a clinic is not harassed with hate on entry and exit as is the case in other countries?

And there are more issues outside of this.

We need to really strive to separate Church from state, the stranglehold the Church has over schools is poisonous. There are laws that exist that people are not even aware of, did you know that if you work as a teacher in one of the many, many Church affiliated schools and you do something outside of the Catholic ethos like sleep with someone outside of marraige, they can fire you?! Can you believe this shit!?

Then there are the other social issues including housing, homelessness, classism which are still very active and we need to fight back against those structures too.

We have to keep saying when enough is enough.

We have to keep looking out for each other, from all walks of life.

Sure, An Taoisach gave some really character defining moments during this debate but he and his party need to be just as active in helping people out elsewhere. Maybe it won't get them as much PR but it should and if they make the best decisions it will.

Simon Harris has been charming people during these debates. Is that enough? Is that all it takes? He is Minister for Health of a system that is simply disasterous. A system where hospitals are under funded, where women are being improperly diagnosed with ceverical cancer, where patients are left on trolleys, where I don't know if my own father is getting the best treatment he can be getting right now because I simply do not trust the HSE.

The rich are getting richer, you can barely afford a basic, single bedroom roof over your head. People, families are homeless. Maybe the few are doing well but I'd argue the majority are struggling still.

Prospects are few and far between.

Really heinous crimes have been committed, some very recently, against women and girls. A lot of them. These are issues too that need to be examined, there is an underlying problem to this that needs to be addressed.

Mental Health needs to be treated as a real issue with real, available and affordable treatment. People should be able to get counselling or therapy as easily as they can get the flu shot.

That barely scratches the surface.

Yes, we achieved something outstanding and worth celebrating but this should be the fire in our belly to ignite us to realise we can do so much more.

We don't have to sit back and take our lot. We need to keep demanding better from our leaders and our services from the extreme examples to the basics of decent roads, schools and water.

The water in my own home been undrinkable for nearly 6 months that we are aware of. And it could have been longer.

Honestly the Irish rail service Iarnrod Eireann's slogan sums us up perfectly, "We're not there yet. But we're getting there."

This country is moving forward but we can't stop demanding true equality, for everyone.

A chairde, comhghairdeas, rinneamar stair le chéile. Ligeann an treocht seo a choinneáil.

Is féidir linn é a dhéanamh.

#repealthe8th #repeal the eighth #repeal #ireland #eight #8thammendment #irish #vote #history #constitution #yes #politics #voting #church #simon harris #leo varadkar #may #change #marraige equality

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aggresivelyfriendly · 7 years ago

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~Meet Me In The Hallway~ Chapter 11- Red Eye

I am red.

I'm wearing red and feeling that way too.

I feel foolish and ignored.

I've painted my Lips crimson, and borrowed shoes with soles to match.

I feel like I'm screaming "look at me! Look at me! Damn it, please look at me."

And the people are. Michael about screamed when I walked out to go to this tour gathering.

"What's that?" He'd pointed at me, gesticulating a bit wildly around.

"What is what exactly?" I tried for nonchalance as I reached down to pull the heel I was stepping into, like someone else's skin, over the back of my foot. I was well aware that I did not look like I usually did and that my big brother would not like what he saw when I suited up.

That's what it felt like to, like I was Superman ducking into a phone booth and putting on a part of me, a secret identity. One that I didn't share, hadn't really wanted to. But, tonight I slid the slinky red dress over the body I usually covered with days-old jeans and pilfered t shirts like it was a spandex scarlet speedo. I wanted to rock like I had a capital S on my chest that stood for sexy. Hester prynne and me wearing the badge like a brand.

"What the fuck are you wearing?" He trailed after me as I breezed by him to the mini br already helpfully supplied with the alcohol I had decided I would imbibe tonight.

I desperately needed the social lubricant I usually scorned. Harry had told me ages ago I could let go with him. It had been months, months ago, that we had gotten close. It wasn't close enough. I wanted more than his secrets inside of me. I had tried my best to be his best friend, but I was sick of that role and tonight I was determined to play another.

I poured the whisky already open over the last melting ice cube I had fished out of the bucket. It was brown grained leather on the outside, but the inside was just as inadequate as every ice holder at any level of hotel ever. I stared at it for a second before I decided I was projecting. I pulled the skirt of my sheath down a little and ignored the accompanying shift in the neckline while I answered Michael.

"A dress," I took a big sip of the brown fluid and coughed. My brother pulled the tumbler from my hand and sat it down harshly.

"I'm not sure that counts as a dress." He scoffed md shot the rest of my drink. He grimaced, "and since when do you drink whiskey straight?"

"Since now?" I poured the last of the bottle into my cup and took a gulp. Forcing myself not to react.

Michael blinked at me. "Listen, I knew you were upset when you came in earlier, and I was an asshole and decided I'd ignore it figuring it was some girl shit and you'd b fine by tonight." He looked me up mr down. "But, your current game of dress up makes me think I should have stopped you to talk then. What's up?"

"Nothing, I'm fi—"

"Fine," he finished for me. "But I'm calling bullshit, because you just used the words nothing and fine within seconds of each other. Where were you last night?"

I laughed. That was a question he probably shou have asked before we left the UK, the carecwas yo little to late. His concern was also the source of my irritation in about a million ways.

Harry and I had been cirque de soleil level acrobats lately based on the skill with which we had been walking the tightrope of friendship over the abyss of more. I wanted to dive in and trust that a blanket of feelings would rise up to catch me, and that he would follow me down. I'm not sure what he wanted; so I walked the line.

I caught him at times. Well, daily, really. He of the lingering stare and the constant touch.

There must have been opposing magnets in his palm and my sacrum. He loved to touch me there, I deduced. The sway of my back a desktop pendulum he carelessly set in motion when in need of a fidgety distraction. The regularity with which he pulled me in and wrapped me up in his spider arms would be alarming if I didn't want to live in his web.

So here I was, ready to ruin the friendship and making every effort to do so.

"I slept over with a friend last night, brother. How about you?" I grinned and took a tentative sip, not ready to brave a full mouthful while I tried to talk tough and declare my independence and outfit determination.

He had the good grace to look chagrined. "That's not the point." He carefully took my glass away and I let him because of the tender look in his eyes. "I think maybe I haven't been looking after you properly. 'Ve been distracted with all the—"

"Perks." I helpfully supplied with air quotes.

We shared a conspiratorial grin before his face pulled a 180. "Have you been enjoying 'perks'?" He didn't like the thought of that.

So I took pity on him and dropped my persona for a minute as told him my unfortunate truth. "No. I haven't." I held up crossed fingers. "But, it's not your business if I had been, Michael." I said it tenderly but meant it with all of my heart.

"Look, I know you are a grown up," he looked around helplessly., at me and then at the ground. "But, I promised mum I'd look out for you, and I think she'd have objections to this get u—"

"And I'd tell her what I'm gonna tell you." I took my drink back, thinking it funny that we're essentially sharing the whiskey. It had loosened our tongues and the reins on our feelings. "I'm a big girl, I'll wear what I like. Lou had the dress and I like the way I look. The way I feel." I put my hand on his forearm. "Let me try this version of me on tonight, when it's safe, and you can keep an eye on me?" I said it like a question, my neville chamberlain attempt at appeasement.

I would give him an inch, but I wasn't changing.

"You look really beautiful," he grinned but it didn't reach his eyes. "Though it pains me to admit it." He looked me over again, "yeah, I really don't like it."

"Luckily, you don't have to like it, mate," I handed him back the tumbler and he finished it. "Ready?"

"Ugh." He shivered with the final gulp. "Yeah, let's go." He offered his arm and I decided to go with the silly mood he was setting.

That crisis was averted, but the current situation has me much madder than my brother's overprotective-ness could evoke.

I'm not sure what I had been expecting that night, I think I had spent so much time ruminating over my feelings and planning my appearance, that I just expected- more.

I knew how I felt about Harry, well I had sight of the iceberg at least. I may not have been sure about the submarine expanse, but I knew. Fuck being best friends.

But, his best friend had been a recent declaration up til that point. Only a month had passed since he had put a label on us. A label that felt like the sweater a rich auntie gives you. Beautiful and special, maybe even rich, but I'll fitting. It felt much to small to contain what I was sure we had.

Those were all of my feelings though. I had not asked Harry directly about his feelings. I only knew about the inadequate vestment he had put upon us. Even now, I'm not sure where he was in those early days.

We mourn expectations more than anything I guess.

My expectations were sky high. Maybe I thought I would walk in, looking like a million possibilities, and bucks, and he would fall at my feet; Fawn over me the way I restricted myself from doing on a daily basis. Far away from prying eyes. Why I thought he would out us, when there was no us, I don't know. He was not as private as he continually became, but we had mutually and silently agreed to be a secret.

I hate comfortable silence.

I especially hate uncomfortable silence. And that is what I encountered. Besides a widening of the eyes when I walked in, there was no acknowledgement of my presence, let alone the moth to flame scenario I had imagined. All of the conversations I had rehearsed as I painted my lips red in preparation for painting the town the same hue, went unused.

Maybe he was not uncomfortable. Maybe the chafe of my dress and the chap of my hide had more to do with how totally at ease he seemed.

He was not fawning over me. There was most certainly fawning however. And Harry, rather than falling at my feet was occupied entirely with the girl at his feet.

She was actually on his lap. And she was perfect. She was not the lady in red and I thought her dress was a size too small. It still fit her better than mine did.

They weren't kidding, but it seemed a matter of time to me.

I couldn't stand the thought of his lips on hers. I had decided earlier, when I chose the lip stain rather than the stick, where I wanted his mouth painted at the end of this night. More expectations unmet.

I was doing my best not to notice how much she was laughing. I wanted to pretend that it was a put upon giggle. His harmony of snort and sneeze was undeniable though. I knew that laugh intimately. Half of the lines I had crafted while curling my hair carefully had been dedicated to drawing it out.

My stomach hurt.

I realized that I didn't remember when I had last eaten. I walked away from the crew member who had shown me the attention I was seeking. He was sweet and attentive, and lacking. His eyes weren't even green.

I don't recall if I said a word in excuse when I walked away.

I found Niall, predictably, by the food. When I took a plate, he looked up in happy surprise.

"Mel, you look cracking!" He exclaimed and hugged me. I loved the exuberance of Niall in theory. In practice, it overwhelmed me. But I wasn't me today, and I was just begging for worthy attention. Niall would do. He was at least answering my call for attention.

"Thank, Niall!" I tried to match his volume If not his enthusiasm. "What's good eating here."

He finished chewing the bite he had taken of the hunk of brown bread taking up most of his plate.

"Well, my Irish heart is currently full because Sarah made me this," he pointed to the piece of loaf.

"Bread?"

"No, dear silly Australian girl! Irish brown bread. Best bread in the world." His expansive gesture nearly sent his precious to the floor. "It's rich and yeasty and fillin. Here try it." He plonked some onto my plate.

"That description sounds like it requires a trip to the doctor, mate. It's less compelling than you think," I looked at the slab as he buttered it dubiously.

"Nah, you'll see, just try it," he assured.

"Bottoms up," I raise it to my mouth.

"That's for Guinness lover, that comes next, but try this first." Niall nodded as I chewed.

"Ummmm," I commented while taking another bite. The bread was wntirely satisfying and was soaking up the sourness in my belly caused by whiskey and emotion.

"Right!" Niall loaded me with another piece and some roast meat and gave me a one second gesture while he ran off. He returned with a beer and I found that I wanted to stay in his warm presence. His warm amber glow has dulled the green of my envy and red of my rage.

I found myself laughing and accepted the beers Niall fetched me, maintaining the buzz in my veins and ignoring the one in my brain.

I knew that Niall was pleasant company. On the few days when everybody was out and about, or bound inside, together he was hard to miss. Often the center of attention, with a guitar on his lap, a song in his throat and a smile on his lips. He was easy to be around. Being the center of his attention was flattering. I also appreciated that he didn't seem to care who saw us.

We had caught a fair few eyes. Lou looked delighted for instance. I'd seen Lottie lean in conspiratorially several times to her ear. It was nice to be part of their clique. They eVen seemed to have enjoyed my distracted behavior at the mall and liked me anyway. I'd also seen Louis nudge Liam not so nonchalantly.

My boys had also noticed. Ashton has even called Niall out for it. But Niall has only raised a glass to him. The cheer that came up as a result warmed my cheeks, but I was surprised how happy I was to stay on the cozy couch even with the focus of the room shifting to us with regularity.

There were two pairs of eyes not as enthused by the boisterous laughs and innocent touches my Irish friend gave and evoked.

Occasionally I could feel the burn of familiar mossy eyes on me. They were not the only pair trained on the way I was tucked under Niall's shoulder giggling. Michael looked particularly sour, his mouth downturned and I wondered when he would come over with some excuse to butt into my lively conversation.

I basked in it. It was not the attention I wanted paid to me, from Harry or Niall, and especially not Michael. I didn't really want anybody else's attention at all, but I could ignore it. Michael was also impressing me. He respected my earlier statements for longer than I expected. My display was being respected, however upsetting my brother found it.

It was effective though. My intended target was thoroughly distracted from the manicured hand currently plowing rivulets through his curly head.

This incarnation of me is unfamiliar. She is useful though, and I for a moment appreciate why so many artist have a persona they take on when they need to be something they are not, or grander than they feel.

I feel as powerful as the color I am wearing and as noticeable. But, the best part?

I'm not the only who is red.

Unbeta-ed as @nocontrolforlouis had better be on a surfboard and I left it to long to ask @emulateharry. Forgive the mistakes, I loathe editing.

#harry styles #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles fanfic #harry styles imagine #meet me in the hallway #mmith #chapter 11 #anybody got blue balls

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tgr489 · 4 years ago

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Race to Big Yellow

A break at the servo. A needed rest, for both me and my rental car. I was tired from the long journey and the emotional drain of the past couple of months. I knew the road ahead would be empty so grabbed some time to collect myself before I took it on. I’d spent the day in Berlin looking at a vacant building with Kristof, a friend, and its possibilities for development. He wants me to come in on this project with him. I’m not so sure. He has a vision which I don’t think he’s totally thought through, despite voicing my concerns. I thought about it on the flight back and wrote him a pretty comprehensive deluge of thoughts. He now has it in writing so he can pour over it for a while, and I can get some headspace away.

The flight was half full of weary travellers and uneventful, so I got to spread out across three sets, get me. I wrote Emily and told her briefly of my brief visit, letting her know I’d to call her the next morning and fill in the details. There’s something there between us, well for me anyway. Our rally of conversation has increased enough that she’s now in my thoughts often. I mentally collated my wardrobe change for colder climes in a fly-by visit to my flat. The two days in Berlin was tagged on to three glorious weeks in Ibiza, with the same Kristof, plus others. I’ll come back to that at some point.

Even with flights half full, we were delayed, and passport control was as expected, full of pissed off vacationers itching to get through the check. I pondered on what airports may be like, post-Brexit, and whether there will be a UK nationals queue as well as an EU and RoW sections, or will the EU one disappear. I’m sure no one has thought of this eventuality. Or they have and maybe decided to do away with all sections a free-for-all scramble type set-up.

Convinced I had a wait ahead of me for the train, I was ambling along buried in my phone when I heard the beepers signalling the doors were closing. Realising I may not have to wait however long the next train would be, I ran like an idiot towards the closing doors, only to face plant into side of the train with one arm halfway through the door. Thankfully there was no one in the carriage or on the platform to complete my humiliation. I’m sure the station staff had a good laugh when reviewing the CCTV footage. I pryed my arm free and stood back from the now departing train and watched the passengers, longing to have been one of them, and then I saw the girl. It was her, the girl with the long blonde hair who plagues my dreams. I jogged along with the train, banging on the window, and she turned to look out, but the train was already going too fast. I stood there for a minute, shocked and astounded, trying to play the whole scene back, capture the details. I wandered back to my bags and got a telling off from a guard for my ‘antics’. I grumbled some half apology as he slopped off totally uninterested.

I was pretty wired for the remainder of my journey, calmed a little by eating most of the Baumkuchen I’d bought at this great patisserie on the way to the airport. All I wanted was a smoke and some Percocet. To try and speed up time I started a convo with the cabbie about the football, which was a mistake, as he slowly revealed himself a fascist and total nut-job. However, because of his anger fuelled driving prowess the journey was short-lived. As I was passing the cash through the glass I caught his iD badge, and his name ‘Dave’. I found this quite ironic, laughing, as I mentioned the ‘Book of Dave’ to him; If you’ve not read it it’s about a London cabbie who’s journaling forms the basis of a future religious order in life. It’s very funny. I told him he should read it as it may give him some perspective in life. He looked confused as I turned to my front door.

There were two pairs of sneakers in the hallway as I came into the flat, a girls and a guys, not mine. I crept in, prepping myself for a conscientious burglar, but the flat was dark and silent. I crept to my bedroom, looking for other anomalies along the way, but nothing. I quickly found my gear, skinned up and mellowed it out amongst the detritus of clothes on my armchair. Was the girl on the train the same one I saw all those years ago, and from my now nightmares? Because that’s what they are now. I don’t know what it’s about and it’s confusing the hell out of me. Is it her, or is it me projecting my dream onto anyone looking vaguely similar…. Maybe this is how dementia starts.

By the time I finished the banger I’d decided I didn’t wanna hang around until daylight, so packed the clothes I would need for the next month, plus some other stuff like cameras and my stash, leaving some for the girls just in case. Like a ninja, I exited as quietly as I’d entered. I came to the conclusion that the shoes were Lexi’s, they had to be. The guy’s…. I don’t know. A friend, a date… it would be quick work on her part if it were, we only parted ways a week ago. I felt a bit pissed at this eventuality as I hit the street, but I rationalised it that our lives carry on. It was indeed a mutual parting, for all three of us, and we are all still good friends.

The whole multi-love thing was mental fun, but eventually, it checked into my head and trashed it, like a hotel room. The more we continued, the more the thought of it ending hurt. And it would end at some point, a relationship like that only works in Utah. Also, I sensed an element of jealousy between us, usually when we’d been apart like we had FOMO of each other. When we were together it was bliss, as were the bedroom activities, but we couldn’t be together long term.

With a head full of herb, a tank full of gas and a belly full of coke, I pulled out of the servo and took on the A303 to Exeter. Google laid down the gauntlet, indicating it was gonna be 2 hours 15mins. My aim was 1hr45, which is totally achievable at 4am-ish when the roads are totally empty. If you are ever travelling to the West Country from London, this is the better, more fun route to take, but you only do it late, because in places it’s only one lane and you don’t wanna be stuck behind some muppet with a trailer. But the road is straight and long, so the horses under the bonnet can be unleashed.

My Focus ST did me proud, with 1hr38. No traffic, no wildlife, just me and the tunes on my pod. The storage facility was a nondescript concrete edifice, devoid of any features whatsoever. The carpark was empty and probably wouldn’t have another occupant until 8 when it opened. I killed the time catching some long overdue Zzzs, parked up on the fringe facing the main door. I slept past the opening time, but only just, and was awoken by a truck pulling in.

Hurriedly I grabbed my bag and made for the doors. I wanted this to be quick and painless, knowing it would be neither. The dude at the desk was organising himself, somewhat protractedly, as I waited for him to be ready. I understood his torment. Sometimes precious alone time is needed once work has started before you actually do anything, and no matter how trivial or minor that first request is, it will be painful to action. All I needed to know from him was the location of my storage room, a simple request one would think. I stood there, half asleep as his computer finally booted up, smelling his instant coffee, wishing I had one of my own, but something more refined. My iD matched his records and with the log signed, my entry, the first ever to the facility, was confirmed. The short distance to the lock-up was taken with some trepidation. The cavernous elevator crawled up the shaft two floors, prolonging the feeling of unease. When I arrived in front of the doors I stood there nervous, with my heart thumping like a kick drum. It felt stupid and scared. The journey to the doors in front of me had been protracted and taken the best part of 10 years. I’d purposely put it off so I didn’t have to deal with the anticipated pain of resolving my earlier life. I unlocked the door, took a deep breath and walked through it to face the music.

#big yellow #focus #ipod #memories #opportunities #past life #history #salsbury plain #long nights #bangers and mash

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lit--bitch · 5 years ago

Text

On Tom Bland, ‘The Death of a Clown’ (2018) (NSFW, if you’re at work).

(Disclosure: I’m good friends with Tom Bland. We came to know each other after he published some of my work in his former online zine, Blue of Noon. I read parts of this collection in some of its earliest drafts. Whilst it might seem nepotistic (and a bit late in the day to talk about The Death of a Clown), I thought it would be good to kick off with a positive review about someone’s writing I really love. As for Bad Betty Press, it is ran by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall, both of whom I’ve met on a few occasions but don’t know them v well).

Tom told me in a text he sent me last summer: “I stole ‘the death of a clown’ from The Kinks, do love that song”. You can read the lyrics here. It also ought to be noted that Tom did actually practice as a clown for a while. As for the publishers, Bad Betty Press is small, new, and fantastic. I think they’re a breath of fresh air for contemporary literature in the UK, with a clear, unique identity and a really strong focus for what they’re looking for. They’ve published some amazing writers.

This is a book of moodswings and contradictions. It’s a glimpse of humanity in all its filth, and it deserves recognition for the unflinching honesty with which it is written.

The Death of a Clown oscillates between serious and unserious. It can be funny, and then perturbing, yet all the while in possession of a certain solemnity. To me, the book’s cover (designed by Amy Acre) is synonymous with the writing in that it embodies similar contradictions: there’s the comical illustration of a clown face with its clown-smile on a gravestone engraved ‘RIP’. Then there’s the title—this juxtaposition of death and clown—an explicit introduction to death of something born to be funny (supposedly). All of this is pegged by Bad Betty Press’s (current) statement livery: black background, white font(s). All these visual elements counteract each other, which is a cornerstone to this collection’s literary thematics. You wouldn’t think it when you pick up the book, but after you’ve read it, you find that contradiction is all part of the book’s nature; a performance which self-negates and wildy flagellates itself, over and over. The cover is a clue, a graphic segue for what you’ve not yet read, which is, (and I’m going to try and commit to the following description) a series of undulating, anecdotal thoughts as opposed to “poems”. And they waterfall as one great stream of consciousness.

Amy told me masturbating was not the same as meditating. But the cult of masturbation had already found its way into … no one can make you come like yourself … a manifesto of poetic intent. Millions of potential lives wiped away in a tissue down the toilet drain.

There’s no other titles within this work but the book title. Or so I think. Tom doesn’t entitle; he emboldens the first lines, or sometimes the first couple of words in an opening sentence. The book’s pagination is the only indication of a separation, apart from that, I can’t always tell if this is indicating the start of a new thought or the end of an old one. But I guess that’s the point, Tom’s writing is in essence, thinking, and thoughts resist titles, of course they do. So to embolden is an intriguing choice, because it gives the great effect of writing eating itself from page to page. The title becomes indiscernible from the actual first line of the thought itself.

Perhaps I’ve read into this too deeply but honestly, in any artistic practice, it is so difficult to articulate a body of work under a single header. Even ‘The Death of a Clown’ is both so vague and specific a title. Every thought in this collection considers and recalls so much, so Tom just doesn’t do the thing of entitling every piece. I found that refreshing; we live in a world where everything yearns after a name, and a lot of the time we’re compelled to entitle our work, ourselves, our things, as if that would somehow give us clarity or meaning. But as you’ll read, Tom intimates that a lot of the time, there is little clarity to our thoughts, our perceptions, to anything. It’s only when dragged to the most severe and deafening of human experiences do we then, occasionally, achieve the briefest moment of mental clarity.

my adrenaline induced out of body looking back at my pulsating limbs; that self-aware speck

jittering or jumping between the two, like being dead/born once again.

Ranting so fast all my words blurred into rapid hand gestures, the very shapes of my early tongue-tied jabbering.

Something I love about The Death of a Clown is the self-awareness of the writing, which I think is inherent in “writing which appears as stream of consciousness”. I think it’s further developed by the scrupulously researched references to things which have indelibly influenced or affected the ‘I’ here. It’s so telling of a person in what they choose to reference, it intimates what piques their interest, their attention. The thing I find interesting about Tom’s references however is the way they’re presented as odd dualisms. There’s Sufism and then The Satanic Bible. Then there’s Jesus and Ted Bundy. There’s Taylor Swift, Edward Erdinger and the disintegrating self, then there’s Fuz Sxx (a sex shop in London) and the act of public masturbation. You would think these figures, beliefs and concepts oppose each other, but when they collide within the same piece, it seems that they elicit the same emotional responses and memories. These things don’t really so much oppose each other, but rather they’re of each other.

Bob Rogers always began the Sufi circle with, ‘The goal here is to create and destroy the idols of the self,’ then he glared at me,  ‘but this is not an apocalyptic vision.’ At first, this unnerved me, but quickly, it started to annoy me, so much so, I had printed on pink badges, a feminine figure and the words, LIFE IS DEATH. I gave the badges out to the group to their discomfort and/or amusement. He asked me to leave. He said, ‘Sufism isn’t about death but a new beginning.’

I also think these references signal personal perceptions and therefore, options. The array of religions, religious figures, celebrities and serial killers, mentioned in The Death of a Clown, is demonstrative of the many lifestyle choices, beliefs, idols, values we have to choose from. As we investigate through this pile, we eventually come to identify with a select few, most of which resonate in our personal experiences. In one piece, Tom writes: ‘Michelle called pain (her pain) the sun god Ra. / Ra equalled pathos. [...] I remained still, outside on my steps, looking up at the moon. / Sometimes I call my pain Hekate.’ Lines like these underpin the core of this work, which is that everybody’s perception is their own perception. Their choice in what to experience, believe and feel is entirely their responsibility. It’s a bit of a tangent but I’m reminded of that scene in Rick and Morty, the ‘Pickle Rick’ episode from Season 3 where the therapist says to Rick, ‘You are the master of your own universe [...] Each of us gets to choose.’

Living is in essence a kind of performance. Our choreography is sculpted by what we read, believe, consider and feel. It can be a laugh, but ultimately, we’re all still fools. Hence the impetus for the clown’s presence in this collection, or the part of us which acts the clown. In The Death of a Clown, choreography comes through performing in drag, bending sexualities, bending observations, defining fetishisms, reading religion and murder, thinking about religion and murder. The fact that all these things are being mentioned in the work, suggests the profound impact and lasting effects they imprint upon the ‘I’ of this work, the clown’s psychology, who laughs more than ever, and less than ever.

[...] I

waxed my body, splattering body paints, wearing faux- leather corsets, see-through knickers, and PVC cowboy boots. It was and wasn’t fetishism; it was and wasn’t sexuality; it was and wasn’t perversion; first was the vision, the one in my head, the one I saw across my body, my body morphing into my androgynous Satanic self.

The collection is ravaged by sex, the frenzy of drug-stuffed London, the English sort of realism found in onion sauce, or ‘Hertfordshire surrounded by trees and red noses’ (not red roses), and more pertinently, the exhaustive performance of inhabiting these things, being these things. For me, I feel like these references function as both containers and artefacts to this ‘human-ness’ Tom is unpacking and reconstituting, and how they’re instrumental in self-alienation but also help with self-identity. It’s a bit, “the school of life” thing; whether it’s erotic asphyxiation, or racking up lines of ketamine before doing a live performance, it seems that these various extremities are an education in what it means to be truly vulnerable, and therefore in being able to call ourselves human.

And yet at the crux of each “poem” lies the ultimate therapy to all of this, which is the safe insecurity in knowing that we are all dying. And what is more human than our conscious attempt in knowing and embracing that?

[…] ‘Some  people think the clown is a performance I put on and take off, but no, I must be a clown  at all times. I can’t stand slipping back   into that thing...’

HUMAN.

I read a beautiful review from R J Dent on The Death of a Clown where he noted, ‘Tom Bland lists some of the stimulants and depressants that humans use to dull their awareness of their own mortality: acid, coke, speed, ketamine, cigs, Weston’s Old Rosie cider, and brandy.’ This was the only point I felt inclined to disagree. I don’t think this is 100% what Tom is doing, I don’t agree that it’s a form of listing per se, and I don’t think that we should necessarily believe that the mere function of these substances, in the collection’s case, is a human’s way of dulling the knowing surrounding the inevitability of death. Rather, they’re chunks of detail, which amplify and exaggerate that knowing, rendering the user as used… I mean this as in, it’s not that they’re taking drugs. Perhaps, it’s the drugs are taking them. And in these delicious, and often arduous experiences, a delightful indifference about life and death occurs, where user and substance are locked in mutual indulgence. Or at least, that’s my interpretation of it. I’m just not convinced the clown is resisting death here. I think the clown, or the part of us which acts the clown, has already died and sometimes I find the writing works not just as thought, but as a strange eulogy, sometimes even self-inflicted therapy. I’m still guessing.

About a year ago, I found myself snorting lines of coke, but I hated doing it with other people, only alone. Blue in the face. Breathing blue. Heart racing. Near heart attack. Was this orgasm? Was I even hard?

I loved the intensity of being on my own—

It is easier to attribute this writing, as I’ve already stated, as being a series of ‘thoughts’. Where The Death of a Clown may, in form, resemble poetry, ultimately this isn’t poetry. It defies category. Since I started this review, I’ve felt increasingly perplexed, in that the more I attempt to ascertain what kind of writing this is, the more indecipherable it becomes.

It’s for this reason that The Death of a Clown is unabashedly weird and it kind of leaves you feeling disoriented. To me, this work is like an endless cycle of waking up with a hangover/comedown and going to the next party. It sticks to the skin like a latex suit. It’s the endless fixing and wiping away of makeup. It ruminates on itself and begs not to enquire further, and then does it anyway. It has both sharp and curved edges. It is literal, it doesn’t sugarcoat or tease, it doesn’t fuck with unnecessary, flowery metaphor or imagery (unlike this review lol). It doesn’t cater to you or pander. It is a deeply cutting exchange with oneself—which makes it all the more deliciously complicated. And I’ll leave you with one of my fav bits:

[…] I stood perfectly still, announcing the words I imagined scribbling onto an A3 cardboard sheet,

‘Do they really see (in the white of the eye) the unveiling of the whole history of a life?’

If you’d like to buy The Death of a Clown, you can buy it here. In addition to this, you can find out more about Tom through his zine, Spontaneous Poetics.

#tombland #thedeathofaclown #badbettypress #review #writing #contemporaryliterature #litbitch #newpublications #newpresses #firstpost #goodfriday #bookreview #currentreads #books #bookstagram #poetry #ukpoetry #smallpress #ukpresses

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kassandra-lorelei · 8 years ago

Note

“Help me set this fucking thing on fire.” For Niles/C.C.

Here you are, my friend. Sorry it took a while, I had to move out of my dorm yesterday in preparation for my journey back to the UK, so I was busy getting stuff sorted. Enjoy!

@holomoriarty and @missbabcocks1

Niles couldn’t help but be annoyed. Extremely so, as a matter of fact. Just when he thought he’d done all his duties for the day, Mr Sheffield had come into his room and asked him if he’d mind completing just one more little thing. Namely run all the way across town to deliver a case full of contracts to Miss Babcock, who was supposedly to finish her day at the theatre. Yes, of course she’d be allowed to relax after a long day of screaming at actors, and arguing with set designers. It was always best to allow the beast to go back in their cage, after exercise.Oh, that one was rather poetic. He thought maybe he’d trim it down and save that one for when he saw her.The theatre was in sight, too. Just a little way further, and he’d have dropped off the contracts, be completely done for the day, and be allowed to go back to resting, after having walked so far at a time in the afternoon when most people were going home, not going out.Except, just before he made it to the theatre doors, some sound of a commotion caught his ears. “Son of a bitch!”Babcock’s familiar screeching. Followed by a loud thudding, and a crash. “I’ll teach you to do this to me!” Was she fighting someone? A strange sense of concern and dread washed over him. She’d been in altercations before, but this one sounded particularly ferocious, and he started to look for the source of the noise.He found it, in an alleyway, just off to one side of the theatre. His jaw dropped open as he took in the scene.She wasn’t yelling at or threatening or hitting a person.She was hitting a car, with what appeared to be an old plank of wood taken from one of the garbage piles. She’d obviously been at this for some time – there were dents all over the thing, and the windows were all smashed. But she also seemed nowhere near done, if her face was anything to go by on the matter.“What the hell are you doing?!” he cried out, rushing towards her as she continued to assault the vehicle in front of her.She looked up at him briefly, her glare for once not directed at him, and she ceased her attacks for the time being, catching her breath and leaning on the plank of wood as though it were a cane.“This car, if you must know, happens to belong to a man who agreed to go with me to the last awards show I went to-”Niles raised an eyebrow, “This is what you do to people who go with you? No wonder you never get a second date.”He relented when the glare was suddenly directed at him, as he felt the plank of wood might soon follow.

“For your information, he stood me up. At the last minute, he said there was an emergency at work which was completely unavoidable,” she explained, giving the driver’s side door another beating for good measure. “So, I went by myself and decided to take a nightcap at a little place a couple of blocks away. And who should I find there? Only Mr Sleazeball himself, who’s “completely unavoidable” emergency at work seemed to consist of pouring margaritas down some stupid bimbo’s throat.”She heaved the wood over her head, and brought it down heavily on the wing mirror, which broke off, before looking up at Niles again.“So, I’m just leaving him a little message,” she smiled at him in a saccharine fashion, pointing at the car. “It reads “Come near me again, and I’ll do the same thing to your body”.”She was about to swing the plank again, aiming for the windshield, but Niles grabbed her elbow and she dropped it.“You do realise this is completely amoral and totally illegal?” he asked seriously.C.C. rolled her eyes.“Well, duh! If I wanted a legal way of doing something like this, I would’ve settled for screaming at him in the bar!” she cried, turning a little to go through her purse and eventually pulling out a lighter. “Now, help me set this fucking thing on fire.”“What?!” Niles screwed his face up in confusion and no small amount of shock or horror. “No!”“Oh, come on, Niles,” she said, holding out her lighter towards him. “This car belongs to a rich man with all the money, power, and status that life could dish out to one person. He’s got women hanging from every arm and men from all over the world want to hear his opinion. He’s the complete and total opposite of you, and he hurt your friend very deeply. Do I need to give any more reasons?”She thrust the lighter in his direction.Niles reached out tentatively, as though he was going to take it.It would be nice, to get one over on someone who had everything, while he had nothing…especially one who had been something of a cad and had clearly hurt Miss Babcock by doing so…That was when something occurred to him. And not something to do with the criminal nature of the activity, either.“You consider us friends?” he blinked, his hand falling away from the lighter.Before C.C. could reply, there came a shout from the end of the alley.“Hey, you!”The producer’s eyes widened and she stuffed the lighter in her pocket, “Crap, we’ve been spotted!”Niles spun to look at the silhouette in the mouth of the alley, which was starting to come closer. In the last little glint of sunlight before coming into the shadow, he thought he saw the glint of a badge.A police officer.He barely registered a hand tightening around his own. He only truly felt it when Miss Babcock began to pull him away.“Run, God damn it!” she hissed, tugging him away towards the other end of the alley. “You understand? It means pick up your feet and move!”He didn’t need to be told again, once he’d come out of his strange reverie. It had been almost like he was stuck in place. Perhaps by fear.But Miss Babcock wasn’t afraid, and together they ran for the other side, the cover of the shadows in the alley helping them no end as the policeman yelled, his footfalls growing quieter as they picked up their own pace and, amazingly, left him behind. They probably wouldn’t be recognised, even if that officer saw them again.He’d probably put it down to youths – it was the kind of crime you could expect from a juvenile delinquent.They ran, and they kept on running, until they were out of the alley and a good few blocks away, ducking into a little, empty corner park to catch their breath.It was then that Niles realised that they’d never let go of each other’s hands.They were both looking down at them now, hands clasped together…almost as if they belonged right where they were.They stared at each other, blue eyes meeting blue, for what seemed a really long time. And they didn’t know if it was the adrenaline, the relief at not being caught, or a strange surge of emotion from the fact that she had basically admitted that she liked him enough to call him a friend, but suddenly, they found themselves locked in a passionate kiss.Hands and tongues wandered and explored, throats surrendering groans of pleasure, and teeth dragged over lips as she pulled herself away from him, slipping her arms away from his shoulders, down his upper arms. Still panting, although for a different reason now.“Well,” he breathed, resting his hands on the small of her back (making sure the folder stayed firmly in his grip) and clearing his throat. “Nothing like a little vandalism to make you feel alive.”She let out a breathless laugh in reply, which quickly became a smirk, “Nothing like it indeed, Butler Boy…although some things feel even better.”He returned her look with a smirk of his own, “Getting one up on the man who snubbed you? Running away from the police and not being caught?”She pressed herself against him, purring, “All of those things, Hazel. And one more that you left out.”“What could that be?” he murmured, his arms tightening around her securely.She slipped her hand back up his arm, across his chest and cupped his cheek, planting her lips on his once more. It soon deepened again, and Niles began to feel the familiar sensation that made his hands want to wander further, preferably touching skin, not just clothes…That was when C.C. pulled away, laughing lightly. Not that he saw anything funny. If anything, he was confused. Had they simply both been caught up in the moment? Was she finished with it? With him? Because that little shot of adrenaline had given him more than a little courage, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to go back to their usual routine if that’s where it was heading.“What is it?” he asked, worried for whatever her answer could possibly be.“The last thing which feels even better is getting my reward,” she answered, grinning and keeping hold of his hand. “Well, our reward, seeing as by running with me, you have made yourself my partner in crime.”And relief went through him; she was still in a playful mood. She started to pull him back in the direction of the theatre, though via a different street. Probably in case there were still police in the area.“Where are we going?” he couldn’t help but be curious as to what she had in mind. She turned to look at him, and then he saw it in her sapphire eyes. Desire. “We are going to my car, and then back to my penthouse,” she told him straightforwardly. “Nothing like a little criminal activity to make a girl understand what she’s been missing out on. Do you have anything else to do today?”Even if he did he would have lied, but he shook his head in what was probably an overly eager fashion, but he didn’t care, “No.”C.C. didn’t much seem to care that he was eager either, and she grinned, pulling on his hand some more.“Well, come on then, Clyde. Your Bonnie wants to go back to the hideout.”And he followed her willingly, not really caring about the fact that she’d just wrecked somebody else’s car. If the man was so rich, he could buy himself a new one, or get it repaired.What was happening right there, between the two of them, was something money could never truly buy.

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girlsagainst-archive · 8 years ago

Text

Black Honey Interview

Two of our lovely reps Alice and Gerogia met up with Black Honey before their Manchester gig on their UK tour in October 2016. We talked feminism, their current and future plans and changes they want to see within the music industry:

What have you been up to over the summer? Any particular highlights?

All: Truck Festival!

Izzy: Japan. Japan was massive.

Tommy: I feel like we’ve been doing festivals for months and months and months, it’s been really fun. We’ve been to Japan for the first time.

Izzy: We did Vienna last week and that was wicked. We’ve had so many highlights so you can’t really pick one cause everything feels like a highlight, every shows there’s just like more and more kids coming and screaming along.

Does it feel good to be back touring the UK or do you prefer it overseas?

Chris: I like both.

Izzy: Yeah! It’s a good mixture. We’re at a time now where we’ve done so many festivals that we’re really excited to be doing our October tour.

Chris: I think it’s always really nice to play your own shows because you’re playing to your own fans and they’re way more intense, which is always good fun.

What do you guys have in store for 2017?

Izzy: We hope to get our heads down in an album in 2017. We haven’t got an official booked-in date or anything yet. We’ve got a lot more touring to do.

In terms of feminism, who do you look up to within the music industry?

Izzy: In terms of women in music, I really like St. Vincent. I think she’s a really good example of a woman that’s doing really interesting things at the moment.

Tommy: Courtney Barnett!

Izzy: Yeah, she’s really got something to say! ‘Give me all your money and I’ll make some origami honey’, so good! Patti Smith- classic, all-time hero; PJ Harvey, I’ve seen her twice this summer, I can’t get my head round her still, she blows my mind.

Is there anyone who you gets it right politically or morally within the music industry?

Tommy: It’s a tough one when bands get political. When it works for them it’s amazing but I find that it can be forced. What the Fat White’s do is pretty cool. We’ve played with so many different people over the summer and you know when you remember seeing loads of good stuff but it all sort of blurs into one?

Do you feel like as a band, fronted by a female, that you’ve ever experienced misogyny? Do you ever feel like you’ve been at a disadvantage or do you think its worked as a selling point for you?

Izzy: I don’t think it’s a disadvantage or a selling point. It’s sad that it’s seen as a selling point and we definitely don’t condone that as a thing. To us I’m the same as these guys. They don’t see me differently, I don’t see me differently. But I think I definitely feel I’ve seen misogyny but it’s not been anything that I can’t really handle yet. Everyone seems to have been quite respectable at the moment anyway. Obviously there’s been some funny ones; I’ve been kicked out of gigs before for not having my pass on because they thought I was a groupie.

We saw something you guys tweeted the other day and there were a lot of creepy men prying. A pair of underwear with a badge on it and they were like, ‘I’d love to see you in these’.

Izzy: Oh my god, yeah yeah!

Tommy: That was probably one of the worst things we’ve ever had actually.

Izzy: Then the next guy was like, ‘I’ll buy them after she wears them’ and we were like dude… We just got all our friends to tweet them and be like ‘Creepy!’

Chris: I think the Internet makes it harder in a way because people just write so much stupid shit. They can hide behind the Internet.

How do you think young girls and women in general can be encouraged to become involved to join indie-rock bands when the genre is and has been largely dominated by males?

Izzy: I don’t know, it’s a weird one cause I just feel like I got into music just cause I liked it. If people come and see us and they pick up guitars and want to write songs, whether they’re a boy or a girl, that is amazing. And our mosh pits, we’re really strict with it being a love only scenario so if it’s a circle pit you can run at someone but then go and hug them, like you can’t push each other, that’s not a thing. We’re sort of stressing on the non-violence and I think that makes it more welcoming for girls but we get loads of girls on the front row!

Chris: Mainly girls, isn’t it?

Tommy: I think, although it’s a bit of a cliché now, you’ve seen the festival posters where they cross out all the acts that don’t have women in. So I guess that’s a thing now.

Who do you think is to blame for that? Do you think it’s the festival bookers themselves or just the industry?

Chris: That’s the thing, it’s a weird circle isn’t it. Because you think it’s the festival bookers fault but then if there’s not enough women in music then it’s gonna be difficult.

Izzy: If there’s positive sexism, ‘Oh we’re just hiring that band because they’ve got girls in to even it out’, it’s like what? I know that when I was a kid, I definitely was very intimidated by the prospect of playing music with boys. And when I was really young I never thought I could be in a band with them because I thought they’d be like ‘Ha ha ha! Why do you wanna do it?’ I was brought up in a world where my mum was a massive tomboy, she was a sailor, and so I can imagine for young girls who are looking in and trying to get in to it, it must be pretty terrifying. For me it took some balls to be like ‘Hey do you wanna be in a band?’ when I was like 10 or 12. It should be less intimidating and we hope to sort of break that.

What other issues do you think there are in music? Not just related to feminism but any changes that you’d like to see.

Izzy: I think small bands should get payed more.

Tommy: Yeah there’s a weird like pay-gap, it sounds a bit weird, within music. But you get these superstar artists like Calvin Harris or whoever, who get paid millions and millions and it just gets ridiculous. Which is fair enough, nothing against him. Then you get bands who are like mid-level, like that band ‘Augustines’, they broke up because they couldn’t afford to do it anymore. And they were a pretty big band.

Izzy: Yeah like so many bands that would have done so well can’t because they don’t have the money and record labels don’t invest the time and energy into smaller bands that need the development because money is a big thing. We definitely have seen it, we all work jobs at the same time as doing this.

So the pay is based on genre?

Tommy: I mean obviously our experience is just within this kind of style but I think it’s probably something similar in every genre.

Izzy: I guess like dance music’s trendy at the moment so that’s in the Radio 1 Charts and that’s where people are buying records I guess.

Chris: Record labels are more into investing into dance music because they know it will sell.

Tommy: At the same time we could sit here for ages moaning about not getting paid enough and stuff but it’s just the way you do it.

Izzy: It’s a balancing act isn’t it. We’re quite lucky because we’re quite business-minded so we can just about keep ourselves afloat.

So when you started the band was it with the mind set that this is what you wanted to do or was it just as a hobby?

Izzy: Yeah we were quite determined from the start, whether the music matched our determination is another question but yeah we’ve always been quite driven.

Onto the subject of sexual assault at gigs, did you know about it before our campaign?

Izzy: No! Literally I had no idea what it was. An interviewer asked us about it and I was like I had no idea that it was even a thing that girls got sexually assaulted at gigs because I was quite like daring when I was a kid, I was quite fearless and I would just throw myself into any mosh pit. But I always found that if I got knocked over or whatever, I’d get picked up. Or if someone for whatever reason tried it on with me, they’d fucking know about it, like everyone around me would fucking know about it.

Tommy: I never really noticed it specifically but if you think about it happens everywhere else so…

Izzy: And, just like a word out there, if we ever ever see anything like that or anyone at our gigs ever sees anything like that just tell us and we’ll get them taken out the gig. It really deeply upsets us that this is a thing. I can’t imagine what it must be like for these girls. Cause we can do more than bouncers. We’ll just yeah, fucking knock them out.

What would you say to the victims of sexual assault at gigs?

Izzy: I’d say don’t be afraid and don’t be scared to report it. It should be reported.

Tommy: Don’t be afraid to talk about it.

Izzy: Yeah, talk about it and tell us and vocalize it because I know that a lot of people get so scared about it and they don’t want to confront the issue. Because it’s so complex and intricate that these girls go through these things, like they don’t want to be in court and have to look at that person again or whatever. It needs to be spoken about definitely and if we ever see anything like that…

Chris: Yeah, as a band we fully 100% support what you’re doing.

And what would you say to the perpetrators?

Izzy: Just fucking grow up! Get out of here! Fuck off, get out of our gig!

#black honey #interviews

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endenogatai · 6 years ago

Text

The facts about Facebook

This is a critical reading of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s article in the WSJ on Thursday, also entitled The Facts About Facebook.

Yes Mark, you’re right; Facebook turns 15 next month. What a long time you’ve been in the social media business! We’re curious as to whether you’ve also been keeping count of how many times you’ve been forced to apologize for breaching people’s trust or, well, otherwise royally messing up over the years.

It’s also true you weren’t setting out to build “a global company”. The predecessor to Facebook was a ‘hot or not’ game called ‘FaceMash’ that you hacked together while drinking beer in your Harvard dormroom. Your late night brainwave was to get fellow students to rate each others’ attractiveness — and you weren’t at all put off by not being in possession of the necessary photo data to do this. You just took it; hacking into the college’s online facebooks and grabbing people’s selfies without permission.

Blogging about what you were doing as you did it, you wrote: “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.” Just in case there was any doubt as to the ugly nature of your intention.

The seeds of Facebook’s global business were thus sewn in a crude and consentless game of clickbait whose idea titillated you so much you thought nothing of breaching security, privacy, copyright and decency norms just to grab a few eyeballs.

So while you may not have instantly understood how potent this ‘outrageous and divisive’ eyeball-grabbing content tactic would turn out to be — oh hai future global scale! — the core DNA of Facebook’s business sits in that frat boy discovery where your eureka Internet moment was finding you could win the attention jackpot by pitting people against each other.

Pretty quickly you also realized you could exploit and commercialize human one-upmanship — gotta catch em all friend lists! popularity poke wars! — and stick a badge on the resulting activity, dubbing it ‘social’.

FaceMash was antisocial, though. And the unpleasant flipside that can clearly flow from ‘social’ platforms is something you continue not being nearly honest nor open enough about. Whether it’s political disinformation, hate speech or bullying, the individual and societal impacts of maliciously minded content shared and amplified using massively mainstream tools you control is now impossible to ignore.

Yet you prefer to play down these human impacts; as a “crazy idea”, or by implying that ‘a little’ amplified human nastiness is the necessary cost of being in the big multinational business of connecting everyone and ‘socializing’ everything.

But did you ask the father of 14-year-old Molly Russell, a British schoolgirl who took her own life in 2017, whether he’s okay with your growth vs controls trade-off? “I have no doubt that Instagram helped kill my daughter,” said Russell in an interview with the BBC this week.

After her death, Molly’s parents found she had been following accounts on Instagram that were sharing graphic material related to self-harming and suicide, including some accounts that actively encourage people to cut themselves. “We didn’t know that anything like that could possibly exist on a platform like Instagram,” said Russell.

Without a human editor in the mix, your algorithmic recommendations are blind to risk and suffering. Built for global scale, they get on with the expansionist goal of maximizing clicks and views by serving more of the same sticky stuff. And more extreme versions of things users show an interest in to keep the eyeballs engaged.

So when you write about making services that “billions” of “people around the world love and use” forgive us for thinking that sounds horribly glib. The scales of suffering don’t sum like that. If your entertainment product has whipped up genocide anywhere in the world — as the UN said Facebook did in Myanmar — it’s failing regardless of the proportion of users who are having their time pleasantly wasted on and by Facebook.

And if your algorithms can’t incorporate basic checks and safeguards so they don’t accidentally encourage vulnerable teens to commit suicide you really don’t deserve to be in any consumer-facing business at all.

Yet your article shows no sign you’ve been reflecting on the kinds of human tragedies that don’t just play out on your platform but can be an emergent property of your targeting algorithms.

You focus instead on what you call “clear benefits to this business model”.

The benefits to Facebook’s business are certainly clear. You have the billions in quarterly revenue to stand that up. But what about the costs to the rest of us? Human costs are harder to quantify but you don’t even sound like you’re trying.

You do write that you’ve heard “many questions” about Facebook’s business model. Which is most certainly true but once again you’re playing down the level of political and societal concern about how your platform operates (and how you operate your platform) — deflecting and reframing what Facebook is to cast your ad business a form of quasi philanthropy; a comfortable discussion topic and self-serving idea you’d much prefer we were all sold on.

It’s also hard to shake the feeling that your phrasing at this point is intended as a bit of an in-joke for Facebook staffers — to smirk at the ‘dumb politicians’ who don’t even know how Facebook makes money.

Y’know, like you smirked…

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Then you write that you want to explain how Facebook operates. But, thing is, you don’t explain — you distract, deflect, equivocate and mislead, which has been your business’ strategy through many months of scandal (that and worst tactics — such as paying a PR firm that used oppo research tactics to discredit Facebook critics with smears).

Dodging is another special power; such as how you dodged repeat requests from international parliamentarians to be held accountable for major data misuse and security breaches.

The Zuckerberg ‘open letter’ mansplain, which typically runs to thousands of blame-shifting words, is another standard issue production from the Facebook reputation crisis management toolbox.

And here you are again, ironically enough, mansplaining in a newspaper; an industry that your platform has worked keenly to gut and usurp, hungry to supplant editorially guided journalism with the moral vacuum of algorithmically geared space-filler which, left unchecked, has been shown, time and again, lifting divisive and damaging content into public view.

The latest Zuckerberg screed has nothing new to say. It’s pure spin. We’ve read scores of self-serving Facebook apologias over the years and can confirm Facebook’s founder has made a very tedious art of selling abject failure as some kind of heroic lack of perfection.

But the spin has been going on for far, far too long. Fifteen years, as you remind us. Yet given that hefty record it’s little wonder you’re moved to pen again — imagining that another word blast is all it’ll take for the silly politicians to fall in line.

Thing is, no one is asking Facebook for perfection, Mark. We’re looking for signs that you and your company have a moral compass. Because the opposite appears to be true. (Or as one UK parliamentarian put it to your CTO last year: “I remain to be convinced that your company has integrity”.)

Facebook has scaled to such an unprecedented, global size exactly because it has no editorial values. And you say again now you want to be all things to all men. Put another way that means there’s a moral vacuum sucking away at your platform’s core; a supermassive ethical blackhole that scales ad dollars by the billions because you won’t tie the kind of process knots necessary to treat humans like people, not pairs of eyeballs.

You don’t design against negative consequences or to pro-actively avoid terrible impacts — you let stuff happen and then send in the ‘trust & safety’ team once the damage has been done.

You might call designing against negative consequences a ‘growth bottleneck’; others would say it’s having a conscience.

Everything standing in the way of scaling Facebook’s usage is, under the Zuckerberg regime, collateral damage — hence the old mantra of ‘move fast and break things’ — whether it’s social cohesion, civic values or vulnerable individuals.

This is why it takes a celebrity defamation lawsuit to force your company to dribble a little more resource into doing something about scores of professional scammers paying you to pop their fraudulent schemes in a Facebook “ads” wrapper. (Albeit, you’re only taking some action in the UK in this particular case.)

Funnily enough — though it’s not at all funny and it doesn’t surprise us — Facebook is far slower and patchier when it comes to fixing things it broke.

Of course there will always be people who thrive with a digital megaphone like Facebook thrust in their hand. Scammers being a pertinent example. But the measure of a civilized society is how it protects those who can’t defend themselves from targeted attacks or scams because they lack the protective wrap of privilege. Which means people who aren’t famous. Not public figures like Martin Lewis, the consumer champion who has his own platform and enough financial resources to file a lawsuit to try to make Facebook do something about how its platform supercharges scammers.

Zuckerberg’s slippery call to ‘fight bad content with more content’ — or to fight Facebook-fuelled societal division by shifting even more of the apparatus of civic society onto Facebook — fails entirely to recognize this asymmetry.

And even in the Lewis case, Facebook remains a winner; Lewis dropped his suit and Facebook got to make a big show of signing over £500k worth of ad credit coupons to a consumer charity that will end up giving them right back to Facebook.

The company’s response to problems its platform creates is to look the other way until a trigger point of enough bad publicity gets reached. At which critical point it flips the usual crisis PR switch and sends in a few token clean up teams — who scrub a tiny proportion of terrible content; or take down a tiny number of fake accounts; or indeed make a few token and heavily publicized gestures — before leaning heavily on civil society (and on users) to take the real strain.

You might think Facebook reaching out to respected external institutions is a positive step. A sign of a maturing mindset and a shift towards taking greater responsibility for platform impacts. (And in the case of scam ads in the UK it’s donating £3M in cash and ad credits to a bona fide consumer advice charity.)

But this is still Facebook dumping problems of its making on an already under-resourced and over-worked civic sector at the same time as its platform supersizes their workload.

In recent years the company has also made a big show of getting involved with third party fact checking organizations across various markets — using these independents to stencil in a PR strategy for ‘fighting fake news’ that also entails Facebook offloading the lion’s share of the work. (It’s not paying fact checkers anything, given the clear conflict that would represent it obviously can’t).

So again external organizations are being looped into Facebook’s mess — in this case to try to drain the swamp of fakes being fenced and amplified on its platform — even as the scale of the task remains hopeless, and all sorts of junk continues to flood into and pollute the public sphere.

What’s clear is that none of these organizations has the scale or the resources to fix problems Facebook’s platform creates. Yet it serves Facebook’s purposes to be able to point to them trying.

And all the while Zuckerberg is hard at work fighting to fend off regulation that could force his company to take far more care and spend far more of its own resources (and profits) monitoring the content it monetizes by putting it in front of eyeballs.

The Facebook founder is fighting because he knows his platform is a targeted attack; On individual attention, via privacy-hostile behaviorally targeted ads (his euphemism for this is “relevant ads”); on social cohesion, via divisive algorithms that drive outrage in order to maximize platform engagement; and on democratic institutions and norms, by systematically eroding consensus and the potential for compromise between the different groups that every society is comprised of.

In his WSJ post Zuckerberg can only claim Facebook doesn’t “leave harmful or divisive content up”. He has no defence against Facebook having put it up and enabled it to spread in the first place.

Sociopaths relish having a soapbox so unsurprisingly these people find a wonderful home on Facebook. But where does empathy fit into the antisocial media equation?

As for Facebook being a ‘free’ service — a point Zuckerberg is most keen to impress in his WSJ post — it’s of course a cliché to point out that ‘if it’s free you’re the product’. (Or as the even older saying goes: ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’).

But for the avoidance of doubt, “free” access does not mean cost-free access. And in Facebook’s case the cost is both individual (to your attention and your privacy); and collective (to the public’s attention and to social cohesion).

The much bigger question is who actually benefits if “everyone” is on Facebook, as Zuckerberg would prefer. Facebook isn’t the Internet. Facebook doesn’t offer the sole means of communication, digital or otherwise. People can, and do, ‘connect’ (if you want to use such a transactional word for human relations) just fine without Facebook.

So beware the hard and self-serving sell in which Facebook’s 15-year founder seeks yet again to recast privacy as an unaffordable luxury.

Actually, Mark, it’s a fundamental human right.

The best argument Zuckerberg can muster for his goal of universal Facebook usage being good for anything other than his own business’ bottom line is to suggest small businesses could use that kind of absolute reach to drive extra growth of their own.

Though he only provides a few general data-points to support the claim; saying there are “more than 90M small businesses on Facebook” which “make up a large part of our business” (how large?) — and claiming “most” (51%?) couldn’t afford TV ads or billboards (might they be able to afford other online or newspaper ads though?); he also cites a “global survey” (how many businesses surveyed?), presumably run by Facebook itself, which he says found “half the businesses on Facebook say they’ve hired more people since they joined” (but how did you ask the question, Mark?; we’re concerned it might have been rather leading), and from there he leaps to the implied conclusion that “millions�� of jobs have essentially been created by Facebook.

But did you control for common causes Mark? Or are you just trying to take credit for others’ hard work because, well, it’s politically advantageous for you to do so?

Whether Facebook’s claims about being great for small business stand up to scrutiny or not, if people’s fundamental rights are being wholesale flipped for SMEs to make a few extra bucks that’s an unacceptable trade off.

“Millions” of jobs suggestively linked to Facebook sure sounds great — but you can’t and shouldn’t overlook disproportionate individual and societal costs, as Zuckerberg is urging policymakers to here.

Let’s also not forget that some of the small business ‘jobs’ that Facebook’s platform can take definitive and major credit for creating include the Macedonia teens who became hyper-adept at seeding Facebook with fake U.S. political news, around the 2016 presidential election. But presumably those aren’t the kind of jobs Zuckerberg is advocating for.

He also repeats the spurious claim that Facebook gives users “complete control” over what it does with personal information collected for advertising.

We’ve heard this time and time again from Zuckerberg and yet it remains pure BS.

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 10: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg concludes his testimony before a combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill April 10, 2018 in Washington, DC. Zuckerberg, 33, was called to testify after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Yo Mark! First up we’re still waiting for your much trumpeted ‘Clear History’ tool. You know, the one you claimed you thought of under questioning in Congress last year (and later used to fend off follow up questions in the European Parliament).

Reportedly the tool is due this Spring. But even when it does finally drop it represents another classic piece of gaslighting by Facebook, given how it seeks to normalize (and so enable) the platform’s pervasive abuse of its users’ data.

Truth is, there is no master ‘off’ switch for Facebook’s ongoing surveillance. Such a switch — were it to exist — would represent a genuine control for users. But Zuckerberg isn’t offering it.

Instead his company continues to groom users into accepting being creeped on by offering pantomime settings that boil down to little more than privacy theatre — if they even realize they’re there.

‘Hit the button! Reset cookies! Delete browsing history! Keep playing Facebook!’

An interstitial reset is clearly also a dilute decoy. It’s not the same as being able to erase all extracted insights Facebook’s infrastructure continuously mines from users, using these derivatives to target people with behavioral ads; tracking and profiling on an ongoing basis by creeping on browsing activity (on and off Facebook), and also by buying third party data on its users from brokers.

Multiple signals and inferences are used to flesh out individual ad profiles on an ongoing basis, meaning the files are never static. And there’s simply no way to tell Facebook to burn your digital ad mannequin. Not even if you delete your Facebook account.

Nor, indeed, is there a way to get a complete read out from Facebook on all the data it’s attached to your identity. Even in Europe, where companies are subject to strict privacy laws that place a legal requirement on data controllers to disclose all personal data they hold on a person on request, as well as who they’re sharing it with, for what purposes, under what legal grounds.

Last year Paul-Olivier Dehaye, the founder of PersonalData.IO, a startup that aims to help people control how their personal data is accessed by companies, recounted in the UK parliament how he’d spent years trying to obtain all his personal information from Facebook — with the company resorting to legal arguments to block his subject access request.

Dehaye said he had succeeded in extracting a bit more of his data from Facebook than it initially handed over. But it was still just a “snapshot”, not an exhaustive list, of all the advertisers who Facebook had shared his data with. This glimpsed tip implies a staggeringly massive personal data iceberg lurking beneath the surface of each and every one of the 2.2BN+ Facebook users. (Though the figure is likely even more massive because it tracks non-users too.)

Zuckerberg’s “complete control” wording is therefore at best self-serving and at worst an outright lie. Facebook’s business has complete control of users by offering only a superficial layer of confusing and fiddly, ever-shifting controls that demand continued presence on the platform to use them, and ongoing effort to keep on top of settings changes (which are always, to a fault, privacy hostile), making managing your personal data a life-long chore.

Facebook’s power dynamic puts the onus squarely on the user to keep finding and hitting reset button.

But this too is a distraction. Resetting anything on its platform is largely futile, given Facebook retains whatever behavioral insights it already stripped off of your data (and fed to its profiling machinery). And its omnipresent background snooping carries on unchecked, amassing fresh insights you also can’t clear.

Nor does Clear History offer any control for the non-users Facebook tracks via the pixels and social plug-ins it’s larded around the mainstream web. Zuckerberg was asked about so-called shadow profiles in Congress last year — which led to this awkward exchange where he claimed not to know what the phrase refers to.

EU MEPs also seized on the issue, pushing him to respond. He did so by attempting to conflate surveillance and security — by claiming it’s necessary for Facebook to hold this data to keep “bad content out”. Which seems a bit of an ill-advised argument to make given how badly that mission is generally going for Facebook.

Still, Zuckerberg repeats the claim in the WSJ post, saying information collected for ads is “generally important for security and operating our services” — using this to address what he couches as “the important question of whether the advertising model encourages companies like ours to use and store more information than we otherwise would”.

So, essentially, Facebook’s founder is saying that the price for Facebook’s existence is pervasive surveillance of everyone, everywhere, with or without your permission.

Though he doesn’t express that ‘fact’ as a cost of his “free” platform. RIP privacy indeed.

Another pertinent example of Zuckerberg simply not telling the truth when he wrongly claims Facebook users can control their information vis-a-vis his ad business — an example which also happens to underline how pernicious his attempts to use “security” to justify eroding privacy really are — bubbled into view last fall, when Facebook finally confessed that mobile phone numbers users had provided for the specific purpose of enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) to increase the security of their accounts were also used by Facebook for ad targeting.

A company spokesperson told us that if a user wanted to opt out of the ad-based repurposing of their mobile phone data they could use non-phone number based 2FA — though Facebook only added the ability to use an app for 2FA in May last year.

What Facebook is doing on the security front is especially disingenuous BS in that it risks undermining security practice by bundling a respected tool (2FA) with ads that creep on people.

And there’s plenty more of this kind of disingenuous nonsense in Zuckerberg’s WSJ post — where he repeats a claim we first heard him utter last May, at a conference in Paris, when he suggested that following changes made to Facebook’s consent flow, ahead of updated privacy rules coming into force in Europe, the fact European users had (mostly) swallowed the new terms, rather than deleting their accounts en masse, was a sign people were majority approving of “more relevant” (i.e more creepy) Facebook ads.

Au contraire, it shows nothing of the sort. It simply underlines the fact Facebook still does not offer users a free and fair choice when it comes to consenting to their personal data being processed for behaviorally targeted ads — despite free choice being a requirement under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

If Facebook users are forced to ‘choose’ between being creeped on or deleting their account on the dominant social service where all their friends are it’s hardly a free choice. (And GDPR complaints have been filed over this exact issue of ‘forced consent‘.)

Add to that, as we said at the time, Facebook’s GDPR tweaks were lousy with manipulative, dark pattern design. So again the company is leaning on users to get the outcomes it wants.

It’s not a fair fight, any which way you look at it. But here we have Zuckerberg, the BS salesman, trying to claim his platform’s ongoing manipulation of people already enmeshed in the network is evidence for people wanting creepy ads.

The truth is that most Facebook users remain unaware of how extensively the company creeps on them (per this recent Pew research). And fiddly controls are of course even harder to get a handle on if you’re sitting in the dark.

Zuckerberg appears to concede a little ground on the transparency and control point when he writes that: “Ultimately, I believe the most important principles around data are transparency, choice and control.” But all the privacy-hostile choices he’s made; and the faux controls he’s offered; and the data mountain he simply won’t ‘fess up to sitting on shows, beyond reasonable doubt, the company cannot and will not self-regulate.

If Facebook is allowed to continue setting its own parameters and choosing its own definitions (for “transparency, choice and control”) users won’t have even one of the three principles, let alone the full house, as well they should. Facebook will just keep moving the goalposts and marking its own homework.

You can see this in the way Zuckerberg fuzzes and elides what his company really does with people’s data; and how he muddies and muddles uses for the data — such as by saying he doesn’t know what shadow profiles are; or claiming users can download ‘all their data’; or that ad profiles are somehow essential for security; or by repurposing 2FA digits to personalize ads too.

How do you try to prevent the purpose limitation principle being applied to regulate your surveillance-reliant big data ad business? Why by mixing the data streams of course! And then trying to sew confusion among regulators and policymakers by forcing them to unpick your mess.

Much like Facebook is forcing civic society to clean up its messy antisocial impacts.

Europe’s GDPR is focusing the conversation, though, and targeted complaints filed under the bloc’s new privacy regime have shown they can have teeth and so bite back against rights incursions.

But before we put another self-serving Zuckerberg screed to rest, let’s take a final look at his description of how Facebook’s ad business works. Because this is also seriously misleading. And cuts to the very heart of the “transparency, choice and control” issue he’s quite right is central to the personal data debate. (He just wants to get to define what each of those words means.)

In the article, Zuckerberg claims “people consistently tell us that if they’re going to see ads, they want them to be relevant”. But who are these “people” of which he speaks? If he’s referring to the aforementioned European Facebook users, who accepted updated terms with the same horribly creepy ads because he didn’t offer them any alternative, we would suggest that’s not a very affirmative signal.

Now if it were true that a generic group of ‘Internet people’ were consistently saying anything about online ads the loudest message would most likely be that they don’t like them. Click through rates are fantastically small. And hence also lots of people using ad blocking tools. (Growth in usage of ad blockers has also occurred in parallel with the increasing incursions of the adtech industrial surveillance complex.)

So Zuckerberg’s logical leap to claim users of free services want to be shown only the most creepy ads is really a very odd one.

Let’s now turn to Zuckerberg’s use of the word “relevant”. As we noted above, this is a euphemism. It conflates many concepts but principally it’s used by Facebook as a cloak to shield and obscure the reality of what it’s actually doing (i.e. privacy-hostile people profiling to power intrusive, behaviourally microtargeted ads) in order to avoid scrutiny of exactly those creepy and intrusive Facebook practices.

Yet the real sleight of hand is how Zuckerberg glosses over the fact that ads can be relevant without being creepy. Because ads can be contextual. They don’t have to be behaviorally targeted.

Ads can be based on — for example — a real-time search/action plus a user’s general location. Without needing to operate a vast, all-pervasive privacy-busting tracking infrastructure to feed open-ended surveillance dossiers on what everyone does online, as Facebook chooses to.

And here Zuckerberg gets really disingenuous because he uses a benign-sounding example of a contextual ad (the example he chooses contains an interest and a general location) to gloss over a detail-light explanation of how Facebook’s people tracking and profiling apparatus works.

“Based on what pages people like, what they click on, and other signals, we create categories — for example, people who like pages about gardening and live in Spain — and then charge advertisers to show ads to that category,” he writes, with that slipped in reference to “other signals” doing some careful shielding work there.

Other categories that Facebook’s algorithms have been found ready and willing to accept payment to run ads against in recent years include “jew-hater”, “How to burn Jews” and “Hitler did nothing wrong”.

Funnily enough Zuckerberg doesn’t mention those actual Facebook microtargeting categories in his glossy explainer of how its “relevant” ads business works. But they offer a far truer glimpse of the kinds of labels Facebook’s business sticks on people.

As we wrote last week, the case against behavioral ads is stacking up. Zuckerberg’s attempt to spin the same self-serving lines should really fool no one at this point.

Nor should regulators be derailed by the lie that Facebook’s creepy business model is the only version of adtech possible. It’s not even the only version of profitable adtech currently available. (Contextual ads have made Google alternative search engine DuckDuckGo profitable since 2014, for example.)

Simply put, adtech doesn’t have to be creepy to work. And ads that don’t creep on people would give publishers greater ammunition to sell ad block using readers on whitelisting their websites. A new generation of people-sensitive startups are also busy working on new forms of ad targeting that bake in privacy by design.

And with legal and regulatory risk rising, intrusive and creepy adtech that demands the equivalent of ongoing strip searches of every Internet user on the planet really look to be on borrowed time.

Facebook’s problem is it scrambled for big data and, finding it easy to suck up tonnes of the personal stuff on the unregulated Internet, built an antisocial surveillance business that needs to capture both sides of its market — eyeballs and advertisers — and keep them buying to an exploitative and even abusive relationship for its business to keep minting money.

Pivoting that tanker would certainly be tough, and in any case who’d trust a Zuckerberg who suddenly proclaimed himself the privacy messiah?

But it sure is a long way from ‘move fast and break things’ to trying to claim there’s only one business model to rule them all.

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sheminecrafts · 6 years ago