#guys who had no industry connections and were exploited from a young age for their looks and talent

[toadsartblog]

y'all canNOT convince me he hasn't been through it. on the verge.

[tes-trash-blog]

🌙 hmm... an age old question but opinion on the whole Imperials Vs Stormcloaks fiasco Skyrim tried to feed us?

*cracks neck*

Goodbye follower count, I’m going in!

I’m going to preface this with a confession: In my first ever playthrough of Skyrim (2014), I did side with the Imperials. On my second, I sided with the Stormcloaks. Since then, I have done three more playthroughs on the Stormcloak side, and three more on the Imperial side. In four more still my Dragonborn was neutral, slaying Alduin without ever taking a side. In my playthroughs, especially the ones after 2016, I’ve developed my own opinions about the Imperials and Stormcloaks alike.

In order to better articulate my opinion, we must first briefly examine four factors: the American landscape in which Skyrim was conceived, Skyrim itself and its portrayal of the Imperials and Stormcloaks (and the Thalmor), and Umberto Eco, the usage of terms like “fascism” and especially “Nazism” in American popular culture, and how this all relates to the Imperial/Stormcloak fiasco.

So let’s get started.

Part 1: Thanks, Obama.

In 2008, Barack Obama was elected as the 44th President of the United States. It was a landslide victory against Republican runner John McCain, a conserative who frequently brought up his service in the Vietnam War (and his time as a prisoner of war) during his campaign, as well as his years of service in political office. In a move to make his (very white, very male) campaign seem more inclusive in the face of the frontrunners of the Democratic campaign (Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama), he appointed Sarah Palin as his VP. She was the only conservative woman who agreed to be his running mate, as all three  conservative women in the Senate already said no, and the Republicans couldn’t find a black conservative.

(I’m not making this up.)

Anyway, come 2008, the conservatives lose their goddamn minds because Bush’s reign of actual terror was over, a Black man is now President and Whiteness is in peril. This was before the term “triggered” became a popular sneer in the conservative dictionary, but “snowflake” was used a lot. Come 2009, the Tea Party emerges. And now we get to the crux of my, uh, observation.

For the young, uninitiated, or non-Americans who are thinking “What the fuck is wrong with America”, the Tea Party Movement was/is a rash of hardline rightwingers who, still licking their wounds from a sound beating by the Democrats in the 2008 election, sought to rebrand themselves. With some bootstrap lifting and millions of dollars in funding from media tycoons such as the Koch brothers, the Tea Party made its official debut in 2010 after the signing of the Affordable Healthcare Act. Their message was simple: It’s time to take America back from the lazy, the entitled, and the “uppity”. What was really just a rehash of a song and dance that’s been turning its ugly white head since at least 1964 gained something of a stranglehold on America, in spite of its relatively small size of active members. It hit all the notes: a populist movement rooted in the perceived threats to their faith, their culture, and their social and economic capital.

They also believed shit like this:

For instance, Tea Partiers are more likely than other conservatives to agree with statements such as “If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites,” and are more likely to disagree with statements like “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.” (Williamson, 34)

Like I said. Since 1964.

What made the Tea Party different from the other conservative temper tantrums was one thing: Internet access. All of a sudden, these angry white men had an outlet for voicing their rages, and an open recruiting forum for other malcontents and disaffected youths. I’m not implying the Tea Party had anything to do with Gamergate, nor that Gamergate had anything to do with the rise of the alt-right or whatever these tennybopper neo-Nazis are calling themselves now, but I am saying those circles at least touch in a Venn diagram.

“But tes-trash-blog! What do the machinations of American politics have to do with Elves?” you may ask. Well dear reader, this leads me to..

Part 2: Hey, you! You’re finally awake!

Skyrim was an overnight hit. On release, The Elder Scrolls 5 generated 450 million dollars on its opening weekend alone. This game sold for around 20 million copies, not including Special Edition, VR, or Switch, and continues to see an average of around 10,000 players a week 9 years later (Steamcharts).

And 20 million people see one thing first: A strong, noble Nord in captivity, telling you that you’re on your way to be executed by the Imperials, who are in bed with a scary, sneering bunch of High Elves dressed in black.  20 million people already were told who was the clear bad guy in this game, and it wasn’t the strong, noble Nord in captivity. I’ll be going into this more into Part 3, but suffice to say, the Imperials were already coded as Bad Guy by association. The Imperials decided to execute you, the player. They shot a man in the back because he ran from his own execution. He stole a horse, which was a crime punishable by death in those days. The game doesn’t tell you that part, and is content to say that Lokir was killed because he was in the same cart as the Stormcloaks.

Speaking of Imperials, the Third Empire is written as obtuse, corrupt, uncaring, and cruel. The Septim Dynasty is wrought with scandal and intrigue, plagued by conflict, and powerless to do anything about the Oblivion Crisis that almost ended the world. They flat out abandoned Morrowind and Summerset to better protect their own, offered no help during the Void Nights that destabilized the Khajiit, and worst of all, signed a treaty outlawing Talos worship. That is the crux on which the Stormcloak/Imperial conflict lies. These damned outsiders telling these humble Nords what to do and what not to do. They’re corrupt, lazy, and know nothing of the hardships these people endure, and now the nanny state Empire is telling them they don’t have the freedom to worship what they want? How dare they!

Going further, in the seat of Imperial power in Skyrim is none other than Jarl Elisif, a young widow who relies heavily on the advice of her (overwhelmingly male) thanes, stewards, and generals. She’s weak, thinks mostly of her dead husband, and is written as someone who overreacts to scenarios; the “legion of troops” to Wolfskull Cave over a farmer reporting strange noises, banning the Burning of King Olaf in the wake of her husband’s murder via Shout come to mind. Compare and contrast that to the seat of Stormcloak power, Windhelm. Ulfric spends his time pouring over the map of troop movements and discussing strategy when he’s not delivering his big damn “Why I Fight” speech. Elisif is weak, Ulfric is strong. The Jarl of Solitude is even told to tone it down during the armistice negotiations in Season Unending. She’s chastised by her own general. The first thing you see in Solitude is a man being executed for opening a gate. The first thing you see in Windhelm is two Nords harassing a Dark Elf woman and accusing her of being an Imperial spy.

Both are portrayed as horrific, but only one has bystanders decrying the acts of the offender. Only one has a relative in the crowd proclaim, “That’s my brother [they’re executing]!” The best you get with Suvaris is her confronting you about whether or not you “hate her kind”. Even a mouth breathing racist would be disinclined to say “yes” when confronted with the question of whether or not they’re racist, but that’s how the writers of Skyrim think racism works.

I acknowledge that this was an attempt at bothsidesism, but the handling was.. clumsy.

Part 3: Ur-Fascism, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Bash The Stormcloaks

And now we move on to Umberto Eco, fiction writer, essayist, and writer of the famous essay Ur-Fascism. In short, Eco summarizes 14 separate properties of a fascist movement; it’s important to stress that this should not be treated as a checklist if a piece of media is fascist, or if a person is actually a Nazi, or to say “X is Bad Because Checklist”. It’s frankly impossible to even organize these points into a coherent system, as fascism is an ideology that is, by its nature, incoherent.

With that in mind, let’s run down the points:

1. “The Cult of Tradition”, characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by Tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.

2. “The Rejection of Modernism”, which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.

3. “The Cult of Action for Action’s Sake”, which dictates that action is of value in itself, and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.

4. “Disagreement Is Treason” – Fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.

5. “Fear of Difference", which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.

6. “Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class”, fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.

7. “Obsession with a Plot” and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society (such as the German elite’s ‘fear’ of the 1930s Jewish populace’s businesses and well-doings, or any anti-Semitic conspiracy ever).

8. Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak.” On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.

9. “Pacifism is Trafficking with the Enemy” because “Life is Permanent Warfare” – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to NOT build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.

10. “Contempt for the Weak”, which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate Leader who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.

11. “Everybody is Educated to Become a Hero”, which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, “[t]he Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.”

12. “Machismo”, which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold “both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”

13. “Selective Populism” – The People, conceived monolithically, have a Common Will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the Leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of “no longer represent[ing] the Voice of the People.”

14. “Newspeak” – Fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.

I did copy and paste the list from Wikipedia, but you can read the full essay here. It’s 9 pages long. You can do it, I have faith in you.

You may notice that you can’t really shorthand these concepts, or at least not in an aesthetically pleasing way. However, you can point to the most infamous of fascist regimes and take their aesthetic instead. You see it in Star Wars with the Empire (hmm) and the First Order, in Star Trek with the Mirrorverse and the Cardassian Dominion (hmm), and in the.. Oh, it’s on the tip of my tongue..

Oh, yeah. The Thalmor. They dress in dark colors, are a foreign power trying to exert their influence on the downtrodden Nord, enact purges, and scream about Elven superiority. The Thalmor express every surface level perception of a Nazi in American popular culture. TVTropes has already pretty well covered this ground in their Video Games section of A Nazi By Any Other Name, so I won’t go too much into here seeing as I’m already at the 2000 word mark. Suffice to say, it’s hard to think Bethesda wasn’t trying to make the player associate the 4th Era Altmer with the 1930’s German.

And in doing so, they accidentally created a group that is.. Well, you’ve read the essay or at least the 14 points. Try and tell me how many of them don’t apply to Nordic culture. What grabs me the most are points 9, 11, and 13: life is a perpetual struggle in which you must emerge victorious, a culture of Heroes impatient to die in a glorious fashion, and the Common Will that is enacted and reinforced by one strongman leader. You see these elements in play in Nord culture, in Stormcloak ideology especially. I, for one, hear what Galmar really means when he says “We will make Skyrim beautiful again”. I hear the echoes in George W Bush’s speeches and McCain’s campaign when Ulfric talks of duty and service, of “fighting because Skyrim needs heroes, and there’s no one else but us.”

It’s less of a dog whistle and more of a foghorn if you ask me. And to go back to part 2, this is a message that 20 million played. Not all of them are Stormcloak stans, but that compelling message was still present. Americans love being a strongman hero in their media; we eat that shit up. The setup was enough: you’re a lone hero about to be executed by milquetoast Imperials and Nazi-coded Thalmor. The story was enough: a strong man rebels against a system gone awry, one that seeks to destroy his way of life. 

It was enough to compel a “fashwave” artist to take on the monkier Stormcloak(Hann). It was enough that Skyrim was lauded as a “real” game instead of say, Depression Quest, and to justify ruining a game developer’s life over it.

It was enough that when Skyrim came out in 2011, the game did not do so well in Germany because of these elements, because the game was written for you to be sympathetic towards these very white, very blond and Ayran-coded Nords. I can’t speak for the popularity of the game now in Germany, but when I lived there, there were a few raised eyebrows among my age group about the message of the game.

I think about that a lot, especially when the tesblr discourse heats up about the Stormcloaks. I see how visibly upset people get when someone throws shade at Ulfric. The talk of “it’s just a video game” and “lul get triggered” starts to look less like passive dismissal and shoddy trolling and more a kind of funhouse mirror to how they really think.

I can’t lie, it reminds me so much of 2009, of these angry people screaming racial slurs on the Internet because there’s a Black president or posting sexist screeds because Michelle Obama wanted kids to have access to healthy meals. It reminds me of the kid in my sophomore class who said he was going to “take out” Obama on his inauguration day. He was 15 years old then. He’s a father now.

Hell, it reminds me of right now, of Republican Senators demanding civility and tone policing as they kowtow to an actual fascist. The Stormcloak in the Reach camp “had to do something” about the Empire telling him and his what to do, and the neighbor I used to dogsit for had to do something too. I don’t watch his dogs anymore. When I told him I wouldn’t, he tried to make himself the victim and say I was getting political about dog sitting. It’s just two dogs. It’s just a video game. All political messages are just imaginary, snowflake.

But it’s really not, is it now?

TL;DR and Sources

TL;DR: The imperials are portrayed as weak and effectual, as the bootlicker to the Thalmor, and the writers were so busy trying to make one side look bad and weak they inadvertently made actual fascists.

Even though this is pretty long, this really only scratches the surface of the.. Well, everything. In all honesty this is just a very condensed version of my opinion. Big shockeroo, there.

Do keep in mind that this isn’t a condemnation of Skyrim. Lord knows I love that game, or I wouldn’t have this blog. This also isn’t a damning of people who play the game and side with the Stormcloaks, or think Ulfric is hot, or don’t like the Thalmor or what have you. You do you, fam. You do you. This is my observation and opinion on one aspect of the game, just with some tasty sources to better paint a picture of where I personally formed my opinion.

This also isn’t to say that I’m trying to draw a 1:1 comparison between The Elder Scrolls and reality, or that Ulfric is obviously a McCain/Trump/Hitler expy, but Skyrim is, like all things, a product of the minds that created it. Skyrim didn’t happen in an apolitical vacuum, and apolitical stories about war simply do not exist. Anyone who tells you otherwise is simply reinforcing the status quo, and it is our responsibility as people who consume this media to question it, and that status quo they so dearly wish to hang on to.

Also, Elisif hot.

Sources:

Eco, Umberto. “Ur-Fascism”. The New York Review of Books. 1995. https://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf>

Williamson, Venssa, Skocpol, Theda and Coggin, John. “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism”. Perspectives on Politics, Volume 9. March 2011. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/williamson/files/tea_party_pop_0.pdf>

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Steamcharts.com https://steamcharts.com/app/72850>

Schreier, Jason. “Bethesda Ships 7M Skyrim, Earns About $450M”. Wired. November 16, 2011. https://www.wired.com/2011/11/skyrim-sales/>

Hann, Michael. “‘Fashwave” - synth music co-opted by the far right”. The Guardian. December 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/dec/14/fashwave-synth-music-co-opted-by-the-far-right>

[slcters]

 「 avan jogia. cismale. he/him. 」i hope that #lexsquad member「 SLATER MALIH SAVALIA 」adds me to the squad ! the 「 TWENTY THREE 」year old 「 LAW 」 major has been apart of the squad since 「 OCTOBER 2018」and seems to be the 「 DELPHIC 」of the group.「 SLATER」is a「 SENIOR」 and seems to enjoy 「 WRITING & PLAYING MUSIC 」but you can always find them at a squad party , too !

TW:  CHEATING, ABANDONMENT, PORN MENTION, DEATH, DRUGS

Anyways lemme give you some info about my man and try to keep it as short ( I lied ) as possible I’ll have some wanted connections at the end so hit me up to plot cause I live for that :) 

NAME: SLATER MALIH SAVALIA AGE: 23 MAJOR: PRE- LAW SENIOR @ LEX POSITION: A DADDY HOBBIES: givin 0 Fucks, living life to the full, writing, being an PI on his dad, spiting his family n causing problems as a FUCK U. BORN: LONDON, ENGLAND. SEXUALITY: A truE WILD BISEXUAL :”)

BACKGROUND: 

So Slater was born in London, England however when he was younger he moved around a lot with his parents until they settled in LA. Mainly for his dads business and his mum had previously lived there too.

His mum was a travel writer which explains why they traveled a lot, his father runs a few escort agencies + brothels ( nevada only we do it legal here )  and also started up his own pornographic production company / film studio in LA. it would probably now be one of the biggest in the world.  ( think vivid entertainment meets brazzers ) u know FILTHY RICH SHIT.

Both his parents were obviously away quite a lot, his dad ran so many businesses and hmm was hands-on lets say but the household was pretty calm when he was fairly young. his mum was super attentive and loving and just such an amazing role model and always wanted to take him with her to show him the world when she had to leave. i think he definitely was a mummas boy.

at about 8/9 however would’ve been when things kind of came crashing down for him. he really caught his dad cheating on his mum w/ one of the porn stars he hired from the studio. His dad would’ve really asked him NOT to tell him mum because it would break their family up. obviously, slater was like terrified of the chance of losing his family so he just pretended nothing ever happened.

he was so conflicted because he was keeping this huge secret and he had so much guilt but he didn’t wanna be the one to ruin things. Like his dad basically used him as a cover like expecting him to lie for him for a long time. it would’ve really eaten away at him. like it would’ve not been a one-time thing, but slater was in denial for sure.

i think one day slater would’ve slipped up in one of his lies for his dad and his mum ended up fighting out what happened and it was such a mess. it would've led to their divorce and god that was.. SOO messy. they defs didnt have a prenup and like the custody.

I think lowkey he was miserable being with his dad, he had so much resentment and sadness there. he would’ve been okay being with his mum the whole time.

His dad was really the type of parent that would use his kids against each his ex wife like they would use slater to pass on messages and being like no u can’t have him for that day etc etc And not taken slater into consideration.

his dad though really tried his absolute best to bring his mum down which was sooo sad to see, like watching her get put through the ringer by his dad and she just became a bit of a shell of who she was, because he obviously had more than enough money to do it and didn’t want her to see a dime of it even tho he.. RLLY BE LIVING THE HIGH LIFE.

slater would’ve just been back and forth between them both up until he was about 15 when his mum, unfortunately, passed away due to drugs. which was SO UNEXPECTED.  i think there was definitely a lot more to it, like she definitely was self-medicating to help go through the still pending divorce. which would’ve lasted years. 

anyways losing his mum devastated slater because truly she was like a best friend to him, she was. he always enjoyed the weeks at his mums more than his dad and now he knew he’d be stuck there.

he fights a lot with his dad still about everything that happened and what he did, he blames him for it and putting a LITERAL KID in the middle.

anyways though since the separation his dad had like a myriad of “ girlfriends” around who were probably all young enough to be like a step sibling tbh. he never took to any of them until his stepmom. who shockingly he actually really likes. shes one thing keeping his family together atm.

 Anyways as you can imagine slaters dads business was huge and his dad is truly raking in the money but slater has always felt uncomfortable spending or even benefiting off it which is why he’s extremely secretive considering he knows where it comes from and he doesn’t exactly support his dad let alone he doesn’t want to have to explain that to people and get them looking into his family.

his father has really tried and put up this front though as if he’s a huge family man now and is conservative and super religious and smh that pissed off slater to the max. he’s like that dont make no fucking sense..

 when he high school hit though they were going to country clubs all that shit slater hated basically. he truly didn’t mind acting out just to spite his dad knowing hey your a family man what are you gonna do about it??

this drove his dad so crazy and only meant more rules were put on him, it was about the only attention his dad gave him.

when hey fight though its really wild, you know slater throws it in his dads face basically just some fucking pimp and exploits people and he’s never gonna do that and he’d rather have nothing than follow in his footsteps

i think his dad has been fined multiple times for some shady shit going on in his businesses. plus its been common knowledge in the depths of the industry they heavily provide them w/ alcohol drugs etc. probably has had an issue with the treatment of the people hes hired. lawsuits.  there's more under the surface that even slater doesnt know.

there would’ve been a bit of a scandal where his dad employed one of his dumbass country club friends daughters aka someone even slater knew to star in one of his adult films

 but regardless like he knew he really was fortunate he lived an extremely privileged life, like he would be set for life, could sit do nothing and its good. he just never had a huge interest in it unlike his father who really always said that he would take over everything someday and it would turn into a huge family business. and he was like yikes someone come tell him.. no thanks. 

 His dad and him definitely had a rocky relationship after his moms death, he  didn’t parent very much and just left his stepmom in so many uncomfortable situations but honestly

 He saw her more as a friend though then a mum but she was the best parental figure he’s ever even had. She’d genuinely try so hard to make sure his dad was acting like one like telling him he’s going to his sons gigs or else even though slater knew his dad would come for 2 seconds to appease his wife then leave.

But growing up he’s always been super careful of who’s around him and who he lets into his life probably as a result of how secretive his family has always instilled in him to be.

 Like his dad keeps saying we’re family we come first, and he never wanted slater to be sharing that with people about what they did.

 But he has such a resentment to his dad, like he thinks he’s a mess he has a wife he doesn’t give a fuck about a son he doesn’t see, he does god knows what he just is so convinced he can’t turn out like him ever. 

I think people genuinely think he must not come from money because the amount of people who have ever met his parents or seen his house is a handful if that. 

Like he’s always hanging out at other people’s places and just he’s never been really extravagant unless its to purposely spite his dad yikes. that comes from anger.

Like he really got himself a job even though his dad said he could come work for him just cause he was like yeah I don’t want to run ur dumb company and make money off it u pos? 

His dad has definitely been investigated a few times for shady practices. slater definitely started looking into law for that reason, like he genuinely thought he wants to actually be able to put guys who screw the system and own huge corporations and think they can pay outta anything in jail.

meanwhile his dad thought great a lawyer who can defend our family business smh so he supports him He has no clue slater would rather take him down.

hes on the dl investigating his dad himself. who wanna help.

PERSONALITY

losing his mom AND one his best friends showed him that he needs to really do everything he wants to and in that moment which does make him selfish at times 

i think he has abandonment issues, i think like when  his best friend who was kinda the reason he came to lex, happened to pass away also triggered that again ( TBD WHY im leaving this open for plots ) and that really shook him all over.

he really almost feels cursed at this stage.

he was pretty sheltered tbh because his dad wasn’t trusting AT ALL and at first was homeschooled until High school so he didn’t exactly grow up outgoing or being able to have many people at his place or tell them about his life.

i think theres not many people who know he’s related to his dad business, even tho his dad business iS HUGE and legit is his last name. and hes like yeah ha coincidence right??? not my dad at all.

He’s super fucking blunt though like he may be secretive with his personal life but his ass does not hold back which has gotten him into way too many problems. 

He just feels like he grew up lying about so much, his dad was like we don't want people taking advantage of you if they find out who you are and use things against me.

 he hated that and all the secrets about his dad he kept so don’t expect him to hold back on feelings or thoughts back at all 

LOVES to spite and piss his dad off even if that means 30+ students at his dads place during a business meeting lets do it.

He acts a lot without thinking like he sucks at planning anything and a lot of time he seems a little flighty and that he doesn’t take things serious enough esp his relationships

.He’d really go above and beyond though for anyone who’s proven to him that they can be trusted like he’s been known to be all in he either gives it everything or nothing so he goes extravagant

will try everything once.

wild child tm.

 his ass was kinda like living it up. he’s like on the brink of i dont want to just use my dads money but he’s like if i am though i wanna use it to actually do something decent, like get a law degree and be something, travel like his mum did. hes obsessed with the thought of like following in her footsteps BUT HE. NEVER ADMITS IT.

feelings who are u?

 He’s definitely a realist and a little bit cynical too, like he’s seen way too much shit to really have some ideal look on life. 

He doesn’t believe in some fairytale or things just happen for a reason or really in fate or anything like that. 

Like he doesn’t think love fixes everything and someone can be your happiness at all . hes like clearly its only problems so.

He’s only ever really had one serious relationship and a bunch of other casual things but that was just nothing to him

 He’s not closed off to them but he picks and chooses what he gives, but he’s just doubtful how someone’s gonna mix well into his life 

He definitely seems aloof and a bit cold but I mean after a drink and 5 minutes he’ll be picking your brain on just about anything 

loves writing in general, usually lyrics and music though.

secretly Loves a good midnight dnm overlooking the water with a trusted friend

 Awesome at getting himself out of situations he can be pretty convincing lbr

lowkey has abandonment issues. 

connections: donnt say im trash i know.

extra drama - his STEP sibling. aka child of his step mom. 

his best friends sibling, aka the one who passed away :”(

someone whose mum dated his dad WILD.

A TABOO FLING OR CRUSH, basically he got with someone he shouldn’t of, we can decide reasons HOWEVER I’D LOVE if the other chara was the ex of his friend who passed away. HED FEEL LIKE SHIT for having feelings. the angst. and the we cant do this its wrong.

I mean... someone who actually WORKS FOR HIS DAD. i would die, could be an escort, a sex worker, someone who is signed to his dads production company, can be a pornstar or more like a cam star too.

someone who is a huge tease and rlly makes his ass beg to be with them. make him work for it honey.

ooo a really GOOOOD friend and they’ve always been “ platonic” but theres this weird sexual tension and they both know it, but like ooo it could risk the frienndship n makee it weird and like ugh.

like someone whose parents hates them hanging around w/ slater bc of his family, maybe bc they ran in the same circles from back home but they just.. cant stay away from each other.

someone hes kinda dated but they realised we’d be better off as friends even tho weve seenn each other naked, it was fun.

One of the people from back home that found out all about his entire family when the scandal was exposed. They could’ve been friends or enemies.

AN ex!! pls he defs has broken some hearts or THE ONE WHO BROKE HIS :) IF U DO THIS U WILL GET SO MUCH LOVE

An enemy Maybe someone against his family or someone he just can’t stand!

THE damn girl his fucking dad tried to employ to be in his damn movie! My ass would do wild shit for this one wild WILD SHIT.

unrequited love, someone's heart he broke without even realising it

A confidant someone he can really confide in tell-all his dumbass shit too, like his protective ass would really care for this person

Someone who’s into music as much as him pLS!! like someone who can just jam with him late nights

He needs that dnm kinda friend 😂

A fwb that’s self explanatory:)

RIDE OR DIES etc

CHILDHOOD FRIENDS.

ANYTHING IM SOOO OPEN FOR PLOTTING

[grindskull]

Shit that fucks me up #1 - Toxic Masculinity and being a “man”

Gotta have some way to organize my random thoughts here. I’m going with the obvious thing - Shit that fucks me up (STFMU). This is about me and my experiences. It is not my intention to discredit or question other human experiences. Sharing in the hopes of connecting with others who may have feel similar in their own skin. There are things here that others may define as triggers so read at your own risk (rape, abuse, and this fucking world). ---

Here is me being vulnerable.  I am putting myself out there by discussing masculinity and how I often do not identify with the larger concept of “being a man” in any positive way. You can call it toxic masculinity if you prefer. It’s acceptable shorthand for something that is just as nuanced and difficult to wade through as anything gender related.  I read this article on The Atlantic yesterday and there were some things that really resonated with me and my experience as a man/male (he/his/him). You can read it here (sorry there is a pay wall if you read more than 4 articles a month) but I will also be quoting some of the article below.  If you have time to read the article I’ll wait. It’s a bit long (many articles on The Atlantic are) and kind of academic at times. It’s okay if you don’t agree with everything in the article. Just read it.  Done? Okay let me set the stage a bit for how this shit fucks me up. ---

I’m male. I have always identified as a male/boy/man in my life. Unfortunately my experience with other males/boys/men has been mostly negative. It started at an early age when I had a hard time connecting with other boys my age. I was not interested in typical “male” interests like sports, violence, competition, and achievement. I had few (usually 1 or 2) friends at any one time and they typically had some kind of unhealthy power dynamic over me where I was subservient to my “friend” in some way.  I have some thoughts on reasons why this happened. The short version is I lived in poverty (often extreme) and I was searching for help and support in order to survive. At home I had abuse (mental, physical, verbal), drugs, addiction, and neglect. It was not a safe place to be so I did whatever I could to not be there. It was not unusual for me to eat maybe one meal during the day (typically what I could get from others at school or their home). Winter was the worst as we often did not have heat. Some of my “friends” used this as a way to hold power over me and make demands of my personality, time, and attention. Imagine finding yourself in this situation - you have to actively work to not be yourself in order to appease others for your very survival. Of course as a youth I didn’t identify it this way - my “friends” were just bossy or demanding. All of my male role models were basically assholes who did not give a fuck about anyone except themselves. This was a huge part of the 80′s zeitgeist in popular culture at the time as well. In some ways nothing has really changed. “... when asked to describe the attributes of “the ideal guy,” those same boys appeared to be harking back to 1955. Dominance. Aggression. Rugged good looks (with an emphasis on height). Sexual prowess. Stoicism. Athleticism. Wealth (at least some day).“ Under this common definition of “masculinity” I do not see myself. I am loyal, honest, caring, and sweet (to those I love). I love my body though I am non-athletic and have been most of my life. I am an attentive and talented lover but I have had very few sexual partners in my life and never saw them as moments of “conquest”. I was dirt poor most of my life but now live comfortably in my own home with my long term partner. So while not “wealthy” it is far beyond anything I could have imagined I would have in my life as a boy. Stoicism I have down. That one was easy. For me it’s just a nice way of saying “I have completely disconnected from my emotions and not having feelings or emotions is the best way to be a man”. I believed that for a very long time - it’s only in the past 2-3 years I have begun the work of breaking that down and reconnecting with my own emotions. It’s all tied up in trauma, depression, and anxiety so it takes a bit of fucking work but it’s very much worth it. If you are a man/male who thinks it is normal to not have emotions (or that emotions make you feminine/weak) please listen to me - THAT IS BULLSHIT. YOU OWE IT TO YOURSELF TO HAVE EMOTIONS.

“... young men described just one narrow route to successful masculinity. One-third said they felt compelled to suppress their feelings, to “suck it up” or “be a man” when they were sad or scared, and more than 40 percent said that when they were angry, society expected them to be combative.“

Emotions are not weakness. You are not weak for having them, feeling them, or connecting with them. There is great strength in connecting with yourself and understanding your emotions. Don’t let anyone tell you different. They are delusional at best and actively trying to harm you at worst.

“While following the conventional script may still bring social and professional rewards to boys and men, research shows that those who rigidly adhere to certain masculine norms are not only more likely to harass and bully others but to themselves be victims of verbal or physical violence. They’re more prone to binge-drinking, risky sexual behavior, and getting in car accidents. They are also less happy than other guys, with higher depression rates and fewer friends in whom they can confide.”

---

How did we get here!? Have men always been this way? What about the good ole masculinity of ye olden times? It was a simple time where men were men right? A man’s man? “According to Andrew Smiler, a psychologist who has studied the history of Western masculinity, the ideal late-19th-century man was compassionate, a caretaker, but such qualities lost favor as paid labor moved from homes to factories during industrialization. In fact, the Boy Scouts, whose creed urges its members to be loyal, friendly, courteous, and kind, was founded in 1910 in part to counter that dehumanizing trend. Smiler attributes further distortions in masculinity to a century-long backlash against women’s rights. During World War I, women proved that they could keep the economy humming on their own, and soon afterward they secured the vote. Instead of embracing gender equality, he says, the country’s leaders “doubled down” on the inalienable male right to power, emphasizing men’s supposedly more logical and less emotional nature as a prerequisite for leadership.”

Take a minute to read that and really take it in. Like many things in the US (and the world) the effects of industrialization and war shaped our current version of accepted masculinity. More specifically the leaders of this country (and leaders in other countries) used their positions of power to strengthen men and this new masculinity in our institutions. Then we were taught that this was the “right way” to “be a man”. FUCK. THIS. SHIT.

“Today many parents are unsure of how to raise a boy, what sort of masculinity to encourage in their sons. But as I learned from talking with boys themselves, the culture of adolescence, which fuses hyper-rationality with domination, sexual conquest, and a glorification of male violence, fills the void.“

Here we have the core of what I experience as a man when it comes to the current socially accepted version of masculinity and why it fucks me up. I don’t identify with any of this shit! It does not feed me. It does not make me feel fulfilled and happy. It doesn’t make the world better for anyone it simply dehumanizes us all. 

“In a classic study, adults shown a video of an infant startled by a jack-in-the-box were more likely to presume the baby was “angry” if they were first told the child was male. Mothers of young children have repeatedly been found to talk more to their girls and to employ a broader, richer emotional vocabulary with them; with their sons, again, they tend to linger on anger. As for fathers, they speak with less emotional nuance than mothers regardless of their child’s sex. Despite that, according to Judy Y. Chu, a human-biology lecturer at Stanford who conducted a study of boys from pre-K through first grade, little boys have a keen understanding of emotions and a desire for close relationships. But by age 5 or 6, they’ve learned to knock that stuff off, at least in public: to disconnect from feelings of weakness, reject friendships with girls (or take them underground, outside of school), and become more hierarchical in their behavior.“

I’m not going to get into the topic of my own father (that’s another post in this series for sure) too deeply but I will say I completely identify with these ideas. Emotional distance, only expressing anger, telling me having emotions was weak. This was reinforced societal norms throughout my youth through today. Don’t talk about your problems or feelings. Ball them up inside. Wall yourself off from the world. Connections = weakness that others will exploit. You must control every situation and hold power over others. FUCK. THIS. SHIT.

---

So when did I wake up? When did I start to see through this shit in some way? When my younger sister was born. It was really obvious to me that she was treated in a different way and expectations of her as a girl/woman were not the same as the expectations others had for me. Mostly I just saw the negatives in this. It took me time (and lots of communication and experiences with my partner and others) to recognize the root of this was more fucked up socialization. 

“Girlfriends, mothers, and in some cases sisters were the most common confidants of the boys I met. While it’s wonderful to know they have someone to talk to—and I’m sure mothers, in particular, savor the role—teaching boys that women are responsible for emotional labor, for processing men’s emotional lives in ways that would be emasculating for them to do themselves, comes at a price for both sexes. Among other things, that dependence can leave men unable to identify or express their own emotions, and ill-equipped to form caring, lasting adult relationships.”

Read this carefully. Nobody is responsible for your emotional well being but you. If you are a male/man this is especially true - females/women are not responsible for managing your emotions and your reliance on them to take care of this is a form of abuse. They are not responsible for your emotions. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN EMOTIONS.

It can be really hard to see this. It was a blind spot for me for way too long. Don’t let it be one for you. Connecting with and taking responsibility for your emotions is one of the biggest things you can do to improve yourself as a human being. If you are sad you can cry. If you are happy you can laugh. You have a wide range of emotions and they don’t all lead to frustration or anger.

“As someone who, by virtue of my sex, has always had permission to weep, I didn’t initially understand this. Only after multiple interviews did I realize that when boys confided in me about crying—or, even more so, when they teared up right in front of me—they were taking a risk, trusting me with something private and precious: evidence of vulnerability, or a desire for it.“

---

Okay so putting aside all of the reinforcement we get from our parents and institutions and our lack of emotional vulnerability why do we all buy into this dumb shit? Who convinced us all this is what masculinity is? And why do we listen?

“What the longtime sportswriter Robert Lipsyte calls “jock culture” (or what the boys I talked with more often referred to as “bro culture”) is the dark underbelly of male-dominated enclaves, whether or not they formally involve athletics: all-boys’ schools, fraternity houses, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the military. Even as such groups promote bonding, even as they preach honor, pride, and integrity, they tend to condition young men to treat anyone who is not “on the team” as the enemy (the only women who ordinarily make the cut are blood relatives— bros before hos!), justifying any hostility toward them. Loyalty is paramount, and masculinity is habitually established through misogynist language and homophobia.”

Sounds familiar right guys? Don’t kid yourself. This is what being a man looks like in almost all situations in which we feel “safe” to express our self right? You are either with us or against us. Anything different or anyone questioning this behavior must be “othered” as they are clearly not “on the team”. FUCK. THIS. SHIT.

This was my entire experience as a youth. As someone who did not fit into this group (nor wanted to) I was immediately “othered” and deemed a “pussy” or “fag” or “homo” or “weirdo”. My friend group reflected this - mostly others who also were “not on the team” like women, gays and lesbians, and men who also did not identify with this version of masculinity. Which just made it easier to group us all together and identify us as the enemy. 

“Just because some young men now draw the line at referring to someone who is openly gay as a fag doesn’t mean, by the way, that gay men (or men with traits that read as gay) are suddenly safe. If anything, the gay guys I met were more conscious of the rules of manhood than their straight peers were. They had to be—and because of that, they were like spies in the house of hypermasculinity.” Without the ability to connect with and express my emotions I often reacted in anger. I started fights. I got violent (with words and writing mostly). I returned this “othering” and treated them all as the enemy. I had other reasons for this (being abused by men as a boy) but at the crux of the issue I had no trust for men. This helped me connect with women and my gay friends as they also experienced this distrust in similar (and different) ways. 

Years later I found myself in a job where I managed a group of men (100 or more at any time) working as a team (video game industry) and totally unable to connect with any of them as a human let alone a man. It was at this time that I realized this was a problem beyond my own experiences and when I started to understand my own participation in this system. 

I tried to question things as they came up. I tried to hear my teammates and help them navigate this murky sea of masculinity to find their own place in it. Most people didn’t want to participate. They learned to keep their mouth shut if I was within earshot of their typical “bro talk”. They learned to act differently around me so as not to incur my wrath (using my anger and position of power to punish them for being sexist, racist, or intolerant). I felt powerful and I tricked myself into thinking I was making a difference. I was wrong. 

---

“Recently, Pascoe turned her attention to no homo, a phrase that gained traction in the 1990s. She sifted through more than 1,000 tweets, primarily by young men, that included the phrase. Most were expressing a positive emotion, sometimes as innocuous as “I love chocolate ice cream, #nohomo” or “I loved the movie The Day After Tomorrow, #nohomo.” “A lot of times they were saying things like ‘I miss you’ to a friend or ‘We should hang out soon,’ ” she said. “Just normal expressions of joy or connection.” No homo is a form of inoculation against insults from other guys, Pascoe concluded, a “shield that allows boys to be fully human.”

It wasn’t long before my “making a difference” spread into our hiring, training, and management of the team. I brought in women who wanted to work in the game industry. I tried to shut down any of the bro culture bullshit that came up and used it as an opportunity to teach other men why it was fucked up. It worked for some (maybe 5-6 people out of hundreds) but the majority either quit or tried to get me fired. Most did not change their behavior in any way. 

The women said they knew what they were getting into. I don’t believe they knew what it was like to actually be in the middle of the situation. I assume women in the military probably have a lot of experience like this. In short - it’s fucking toxic and disgusting. Like other males/men they too have to fall in line and “become one of the boys” or risk being antagonized and ostracized for being “different”. It’s Lord of the Flies. It’s fucking mob mentality. It’s masculinity at it’s absolute worst. And this was in a “progressive” creative city working for a small company with a woman CEO. Men simply don’t give a fuck and it’s almost always easier to go with the flow. FUCK. THIS. SHIT.

My first experience with a trans individual in a work setting occurred was while I was managing this team. One of our long term employees made the transition and I had to watch how they were treated by the “bros’. Jokes were made, memes were shared, snickering and fucked up behavior was rampant. I had to talk to, discipline, and fire many individuals. These were men I thought were “on the team” and working to be good examples of masculinity. I should have known that was just part of the act - their way of surviving and showing subservience to me as a man in a position of power over them. My trust was further eroded in masculinity. 

Putting yourself over others is not power. It is dehumanization and it stems from hate. We can be different without being better or worse than someone else regardless of who they are. Not everything has to be a competition. It took me way too long to undo the damage done to me by these ideal of toxic masculinity. You can do it too - you just have to start today. 

---

Beyond the negative effects this version of masculinity has on us as males/men it also fucks up our interaction with women and sexual partners and it’s certainly done so to me. I’m actively working on unfucking my fucking and aware that many of my heterosexual ideals of sex stem from the same shit I have been actively fighting against most of my life. Connecting emotionally with your sexual partner takes things to a completely different level.

“It’s not like I imagined boys would gush about making sweet, sweet love to the ladies, but why was their language so weaponized ? The answer, I came to believe, was that locker-room talk isn’t about sex at all, which is why guys were ashamed to discuss it openly with me. The (often clearly exaggerated) stories boys tell are really about power: using aggression toward women to connect and to validate one another as heterosexual, or to claim top spots in the adolescent sexual hierarchy. Dismissing that as “banter” denies the ways that language can desensitize—abrade boys’ ability to see girls as people deserving of respect and dignity in sexual encounters.”  

This is the first thing that comes to my mind when I hear the term “rape culture”. As men we are taught that to be masculine is to claim “wins” in sexual conquest. Sex is property and we can collect it. Even if it’s with our long term partners or spouses. Ever tried talking to men about this? Ever questioned others on how it’s fucked up? You probably heard about how it’s all in jest. Just a joke! I’m just joking!  “When called out, boys typically claim that they thought they were just being “funny.” And in a way that makes sense—when left unexamined, such “humor” may seem like an extension of the gross-out comedy of childhood. Little boys are famous for their fart jokes, booger jokes, poop jokes. It’s how they test boundaries, understand the human body, gain a little cred among their peers. But, as can happen with sports, their glee in that can both enable and camouflage sexism. The boy who, at age 10, asks his friends the difference between a dead baby and a bowling ball may or may not find it equally uproarious, at 16, to share what a woman and a bowling ball have in common (you can Google it). He may or may not post ever-escalating “jokes” about women, or African Americans, or homosexuals, or disabled people on a group Snapchat. He may or may not send “funny” texts to friends about “girls who need to be raped,” or think it’s hysterical to surprise a buddy with a meme in which a woman is being gagged by a penis, her mascara mixed with her tears. He may or may not, at 18, scrawl the names of his hookups on a wall in his all-male dorm, as part of a year-long competition to see who can “pull” the most. Perfectly nice, bright, polite boys I interviewed had done one or another of these things.”

Let me be clear in case you are confused. This shit isn’t funny. Laughing at other people’s misfortune is a long standing human tradition yes - and it still dehumanizes everyone involved. That doesn’t make me laugh but maybe you are still amused? Why?

“At the most disturbing end of the continuum, “funny” and “hilarious” become a defense against charges of sexual harassment or assault. To cite just one example, a boy from Steubenville, Ohio, was captured on video joking about the repeated violation of an unconscious girl at a party by a couple of high-school football players. “She is so raped,” he said, laughing. “They raped her quicker than Mike Tyson.” When someone off camera suggested that rape wasn’t funny, he retorted, “It isn’t funny—it’s hilarious!”

The classic toxic masculinity force field present in my life has been the “just joking” phrase with the ultimate no consequence phrase “it’s hilarious!”. Say something you don’t want to manage the consequences for? Just a joke! People still question you or your morals after saying some heinous shit? No.. it’s cool... it’s hilarious! You just gotta laugh! FUCK. THIS. SHIT.

“Hilarious” is another way, under the pretext of horseplay or group bonding, that boys learn to disregard others’ feelings as well as their own. “Hilarious” is a haven, offering distance when something is inappropriate, confusing, depressing, unnerving, or horrifying; when something defies boys’ ethics. It allows them to subvert a more compassionate response that could be read as unmasculine—and makes sexism and misogyny feel transgressive rather than supportive of an age-old status quo. Boys may know when something is wrong; they may even know that true manhood—or maybe just common decency—compels them to speak up. Yet, too often, they fear that if they do, they’ll be marginalized or, worse, themselves become the target of derision from other boys. Masculinity, then, becomes not only about what boys do say, but about what they don’t—or won’t, or can’t—say, even when they wish they could. The psychologists Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, the authors of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, have pointed out that silence in the face of cruelty or sexism is how too many boys become men. 

I feel like I may have already gone too far into this dark hole of shit that fucks me up around toxic masculinity. I hope I didn’t lose you. I hope you have questions and thoughts about how this impacts your life. Perhaps ways that you make a change today to fight against this bullshit. You may be asking yourself “what can we do!?” At the end of the day its up to males/men to change this culture. It’s not about self-hate or self-abuse. We gotta name this and own it. We need more men to step up and say ‘It doesn’t have to be like this”. Our collective mental health requires us to be more flexible and connected to ourselves and emotions. We need to find ways to deal with our anger, frustration, and desires in ways that don’t hurt ourselves and others. We need to teach ourselves (especially youth) that it isn’t enough to only talk about things we shouldn’t (and hopefully won’t) do. 

If this shit fucks you too you can do something about it. Start with yourself. Question these things when they come up. And not only when you feel “safe” to do so. Do it consistently in ways that are non-confrontational (they will probably lead to confrontations with most men anyway - sorry). Be okay with not always “winning’ in these situations. You’ll be surprised who you might connect with in the process. Hopefully one of those people will be yourself. 

[idontgiveaflyinggrayson69]

You Have A Connection

Author: Nat / @idontgiveaflyinggrayson69

Requested: Yes – @celinafuan

Tagging: @thisismysecrethappyplace @phoenix-fire-fangirl @aw-hawkeye @caswinchester2000 @starryrevelations

Fandom: Titans

Relationship: Pre-Established; Gar Logan x Reader

Summary: The Reader joins the Titans and Gar has feelings for her.

Word Count: 1.5k

Warnings: Mentions of torture.

Disclaimer: So, like the whole season of Titans takes place in like a week, but I’m stretching it out to be a few months so it makes more sense. xx

Comments: A changed the request a bit to make more sense.

The world we live in is dangerous and cruel. It’s a place where people exploit other people and beings for money. And since it’s the age of miracles and heroes, those with abilities, the meta-humans, were exploited and abused by those without abilities for money and other things. It was a cruel and unfair cycle.

And you, you were on the unfortunate side of the cycle.

There was a huge meta-human trafficking industry in the world that preyed on kids. Kids would be abducted and experimented on in an attempt to activate their meta-gene. And you were one of those kids.

You were walking home from a friend’s house one night when a bag was thrown over your head and you were thrown into a van. You never saw your past life again.

They locked you up, poked, prodded and abused you in an attempt to activate your meta-gene. And it worked. They were submerging you into water, filling your lungs with the liquid, making your body burn before pulling you out and giving you just enough time to be able to breathe before they threw you back in.

Your meta-gene activated.

You screamed and the water from the tub in front of you shot upwards. You could control liquid.

After that, they never tortured you with water again and they were always very careful with the liquids they had around you. They had learned that it wasn’t just water you could control, it was all liquids, included the blood in people’s veins if you had enough concentration.

And it was the fact that you could control the blood in people’s veins that made you especially useful to the meta-human traffickers. They used you to torture and kill people. You could stop their blood from flowing, killing them very painfully, and you could pull the blood from their body, making it spill from their skin and eyes and nose.

It was hell. Your own personal living hell.

You spent years locked in that hell hole, only allowed out when they needed you; but, after a string of happy accidents for you, you were able to escape and you went on the run. You were on the run for weeks before you ran into a group of people who were also on the run.

They were a group, a team, of heroes that included Robin, the Boy Wonder himself. You watched them fight and you watch as the boy with the green hair got stabbed. He was stabbed in the side and you knew the damage it could have caused.

You watched as Robin and the girl with the bright hair took down the rest of the bad guys before you ran over to them, ran over to the boy with the green hair who was being cradled by the young girl with dark hair. The young girl had pressed her hands into his wound and was sobbing; but, you knew she couldn’t help. You pushed her hands to the side and pressed your own hands into his stab wound, your hands becoming red with his blood.

You had been trained to control your abilities.

You could pull the blood from people’s bodies, but you could also stop it. You knew that you would be able to stop the bleeding. That he wouldn’t bleed out in that parking lot.

“Let me.” You whispered softly. “I can help him.”

You felt your hands get tingly and your veins and eyes glowed a soft blue as you stopped the bleeding. You focused intensely on only stopping the bleeding on the injury and not stopping the blood flowing in his body. You were there to help not kill. And the boy opened his eyes with a gasp. You pulled your hands back and sighed, it had worked, before becoming acutely aware of all the eyes on you.

After that, the four of them questioned you, your abilities and your motives, and after talking to you, you were asked to join their “team.”

That was a couple months ago.

Since then, you had grown closer with Gar and with Rachel. Gar brought light and happiness back into your life and made you feel like you were valued and important, which was refreshing after the years of being beat. And you helped Rachel with her powers and understand healing, which helped you feel like you mattered.

Of course, all of your problems weren’t magically solved in those few months. You wished it was that simply; but, it wasn’t. It never was.

If someone walked too heavily or made a sudden sound, you flinched. You only spoke when spoken to and were careful to be as quiet as possible, not wanting to disturb anyone or bring any more attention to yourself. And you always felt as if you had to volunteer yourself for everything, which you did… and that always left you exhausted.

And Gar, sweet Gar, always kept an eye on you. He knew that you were emotionally vulnerable and over working yourself and he wanted to help you. He always wanted to help.

Gar helped you to rediscover yourself and the things you liked. You always wanted to say that Gar’s favourite was your favourite, or Rachel’s favourite was your favourite, etc. but it wasn’t true, and, with time, Gar helped you to be able to say that you had your own favourite, be that favourite food, drink, movie or song.

Gar helped you to heal emotionally and show you that you’re a person whose opinion is valid and who’s allowed to be whoever you wanted.

And through helping you discover who you were, Gar fell in love with you and the person you were becoming.

And now Dick was gone and Rachel had rescued her mom and you, Gar, Rachel, her mom and Kory were all on a train headed to Rachel’s mom’s house to be safe.

You were seated near Rachel and her mom and you fell asleep quite quickly, so Kory and Gar didn’t want to wake you when they moved to the dining car to give Rachel and her mom some space.

In the dining car, Gar and Kory were talking. And Gar was thinking about you. After the Asylum, you hadn’t really spoken to him, or to anyone. The Asylum freaked everyone out, but your silence towards him put Gar on edge.

“Do you think (Y/N)’s mad at me?” Gar asked Kory.

“Why would she be mad at you?” Kory asked, trying to be empathetic, but her focus was elsewhere.

“At the Asylum, when I attacked the guy, maybe I freaked her out.” Gar whispered, looking down. He knew what you had been through, what you had done. He thought that your silence toward him afterwards was because you saw him as much of a monster as the men who forced you to commit violence.

Kory was quick to reply. “Maybe it freaked you out.”

The statement hung in the air.

“How did it feel?” Kory asked softly.

“Weird.” Gar said, not missing a beat. “I didn’t hate it.”

Kory nodded. “Good. You shouldn’t. It’s a part of who you are.”

“I killed him.” Gar said, his voice breaking a bit.

Kory nodded. “And (Y/N) has, too. What would you say to her if she was the one telling you these feelings?”

“That is wasn’t her fault. That she didn’t have a choice. That the violence doesn’t define her. That there’s more to her than that.” Gar answered, a small smile playing on his lips.

Kory nodded, her own smile playing at her lips. “You should listen to yourself.”

Gar laughed and opened his mouth to reply when Kory cut him off. “You and (Y/N) have something in common. That creates a connection between you two.”

That statement hung in the air and Gar’s eyes bounced across the car as he thought. And Kory picked up on his actions.

“You care for her, don’t you?” She whispered.

Gar looked up, almost mortified at being called out on it. “What?”

Kory smiled mischievously. “You wanna make out with her, don’t you?”

Gar’s eyes widened and he shook his head. “No? no.”

“It’s perfectly natural, kissing.” Kory continued.

“I’m not comfortable talking about this.” Gar said, his voice slightly higher than normal.

“You’re getting agitated.” Kory pointed out.

“Yeah, you think?” Gar replied, almost pained. He wanted this whole conversation to be done, which caused Kory to laugh.

“Can I have that?” Gar asked, referring to her drink on the table between them. He didn’t wait for an answer, reaching out and downing the shot very quickly. Which Gar regretted very quickly afterwards.

“Listen,” Kory said, her eyes scanning the train car. “I’m not going to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do. All, I’m going to say is that maybe there’s a chance that your feelings are reciprocated.”

Halfway through her statement, Kory noticed the missing man. “Stay here.” She told Gar and got up, leaving Gar there in the train car alone to think about his feelings and her words.

[apophenic-ocelles-blog]

Her conditions at the next

Her conditions at the next studio were bare at best, and at times the most personal privacy she had, while performing for strangers on live camera, were a few hanging sheets separating her from the others walking in and out of some rundown flat. Although she was the frequent victim of what would certainly qualify as flagrant, physical sexual harassment in any other business, Anna stuck through it, priding herself on her ability to talk a path out of a "bad situation" with male employers."I was alone in the room, and it felt like there were hundreds of people around me. And I couldn't keep up with what they were all saying, and what they were asking of me. It was quite shocking. But then I learned to be perceptive about which member was a potential paying customer and not to waste time with all of them in the free online space.But some women are not free to make the choices Lana has. Oana, 28, counts herself as an escapee from the sex industry. At 16 - a minor - she fell in love with a boyfriend who persuaded her to do video chat.The massive LiveJasmin would have you believe it's owned by "Gestao e Investimentos, Lda", a company based in an autonomous region of Portugal — and has a host of fraud complaints lodged against one of its subsidiaries. But a recent tax bust against LiveJasmin's Hungarian CEO Gattyán György — one of the richest men in Hungary — and his corporation, Dolcer Holdings, shows just how muddled the corporate picture is. No doubt deliberately.

To this end, Studio 20 employs trainers, a psychologist and an English teacher. Most of the clients are North American and European, so it is essential the models can communicate with them.To investigate, I visited the biggest camming studio in the US, Studio 20 in Hollywood. A lot of times, when you sign onto a popular cam site, or when youre on a porn site and a camming ad pops up, it looks like the girls are camming from their bedrooms. Actually, though, a lot of the time, theyre camming from studios like Studio 20 that are basically these buildings filled with rooms decorated like bedrooms."Mostly they're nice guys, not crazy men," she says. "There are a lot of members looking for love. They want the connection. Some members want you to call their name. Or to talk to them while you dance and strip. I'm very honest with them - they know I have a boyfriend, and they know we are not going to have sex in real life.For the unfamiliar, camming is where clients pay to either watch a livestream of or have an individual video chat with a sex worker. It can’t be pirated and watched for free because the whole point of it is that it’s intimate and personal—you’re actually interacting with the person behind the screen.

It is illegal in Romania for a man and woman to webcam together, but it is impossible to say how commonly the law is flouted in the way Oana describes. She went on to work as a prostitute in Germany, until she found the courage to return to Bucharest and a new life. Now she works in sex work prevention - talking to young women about her experiences, and trying to persuade them of the danger of video chat.One of the cam girls, Rosie Renee, became a camgirl in May because she wanted a job where she could choose her own hours and work from home.Eventually they came. My chat room began to fill up and I started talking to a few guys in the group chat. I only typed at first: At the time I lived in a sharehouse with only guys my age and really wasn’t interested in them finding out about my moonlit habits.Today, things are different. After saving money and learning enough savvy to avoid continued exploitation, Anna is done with money-sucking studios, and so she works only about five days a month, from her own home. Five days of camming per month allow her to match the Romanian per capita income of roughly $US12,000 per year with a minuscule fraction of the labour. If she wants more money, she works more days. CONTINUED BELOW...

[legendary-defender-of-fandoms]

Avatar Hunk AU Sneak Peek

So, I wanted to have a few Avatar Hunk stories ready for @hunk-appreciation-week , but I bit off more than I could chew & don’t have any of them done. To compensate, I thought I would share some backstory, Headcanon, story ideas, and other stuff that I want to put in my Avatar Hunk AU.

Part 1 - The Premise

Before I get too far, I need to give credit where credit is due. @avatarpabu97 was the one who originated the idea of Hunk being the new Avatar. I thought it was cute at first, but the more they shared about their Headcanon & the more I thought about it, the more I realized how it was a fantastic idea. It fit with the cycle of the preceding Avatar shows, it gave our favorite sunshine boi a chance to shine, and it could lead to some awesome stories that combine the best of Voltron AND Avatar! @avatarpabu97 had a lot of cool ideas for what kind of Bender everyone would be and who would be where, and our ideas might overlap in some spots. But I had a few ideas of my own for how the Voltron folks would fit in the Avatar universe.

Anyway, the Premise. For my Avatar Hunk AU, it would be set in the world of Avatar about 70-80 years after the events of Legend of Korra. The tech levels would be more advanced than what we have (given their access to Spirit Energy, Bending, etc.), but not quite on, say, Star Trek levels. Korra has died (of old age, or at least peacefully in her home), and the world has started to look for the new Avatar. But given the technological advancements made since Korra’s time, this is seen as more of a side quest by the general public. The White Lotus & the New Air Nation dispatch a few teams, and some ambitious mover producers decide to create game shows to find the new Avatar, but for the rest of the world, life moves on. A new research and development corporation, Galra Tech, starts to make serious advances in harnessing Spirit Energy. The CEO, Zarkon Daibazaal, is a suave businessman who started his company to help people. But having all this power at his disposal leads to corruption, and the chief scientist for his company - his wife, Honerva - has been performing more and more unsettling experiments. They may have plans to invade the Spirit World to reap untold power, conquer the world, yadda yadda yadda. So the Avatar will be needed once more to prevent the exploitation of the Spirit World, another Spirits vs Humans war, and possibly the destruction of the planet? Haven’t planned that far yet.

Part 2 - The Characters

Hunk - Born and raised in Zhao Fu, Tsuyoshi Hershel Seidou Garrett is the only son of Tsuyoshi Garrett, an Earthbender (and a distant descendant of Haru from the original series), and Lisa Seidou, whose family immigrated from the Northern Water Tribe after the Earth Empire dissolved. His nickname was a misnomer, since he was a very small baby, but he quickly grew into it. His parents always knew their child was special (Spirits used to gravitate towards him when he was a baby, he took to Earthbending like a turtle duck to water when he was five, he started Metalbending & helping his father in the family Satomobile shop when he was ten, and he’s always been the sort to end disputes & help those in need), but they wanted Hunk to discover his destiny on his own, let him decide if he should let the world know he is the Avatar. Hunk earns an academic scholarship to the Hiroshi Sato School of Technology & Exploration at Republic City University, where he meets a colorful group of friends & discovers the dangers of Galra Tech’s Spirit Energy experiments. When Hunk starts to realize he’s the Avatar, he’s not sure what to think. I mean, the Avatar is supposed to save the world every other week, isn’t he? And the Avatar’s always been some confident badass who can take out armies by themselves & never backs down from a fight. Hunk wants to help however he can, but he’s not sure he has what it takes to be the Avatar. Until he realizes just how much is on the line, in which case Hunk decides it doesn’t matter if the Spirits made a mistake or if someone else should be the Avatar. He has the ability to help others, and he’ll do whatever he can to save the people he loves.

Gyrgan - Hunk’s animal companion, an Armadillo Lion. Hunk saved him from poachers when he was a cub, and the two have been inseparable ever since. Gyrgan is slow to trust new people, but once he has accepted someone in his life he becomes a giant lap kitty. Threatening those he loves, however, can lead to a death more terrifying than failing an Altean linguistics class. Hunk has taught him proper manners, so he’s not a menace & is permitted to be boarded at RCU. Much like Naga and Appa, he’s huge & can be ridden by Hunk, but typically won’t let others ride.

Lance McClain - A Waterbending mischief maker from Whale Tail Island, Lance and his family move to Zhao Fu when Lance is 12 years old. The two instantly bond over their love of “Nuktuk, Hero of the South” (who, much like Captain America and Wonder Woman, has evolved past his propaganda origins into a pop culture hero with multiple reboots, spinoffs, and Saturday morning cartoons). Lance isn’t quite the scholar Hunk is, but he does manage to get into RCU on a Probending scholarship & is excited to go to his sister Veronica’s alma mater. Until he finds a certain big-eyed mullet boy is on his Probending team & in his classes (not sure how far the Klance stuff is going to go, because I have little writing experience & even less experience with LGBT+ rep. But I want it to keep true to the 30+ years of Klance sexual tension that dates back to GoLion.) Still, when the world starts to fall apart, Lance won’t be left out of the action. (Might also make Lance a descendant of Sokka and Suki, but not sure how to work that into the story)

Katie “Pidge” Holt - The daughter of the head of the Technology department at RCU, Pidge is a child prodigy when it comes to computers. She manages to skip a few grades & get into the Hiroshi Sato School of Technology at the age of 15. Pidge has a pet Owl Cat named Rover who becomes instant besties with Gyrgan. Pidge’s mother was the daughter of Air Acolytes, and Pidge is a skilled Airbender. However, Pidge doesn’t really connect well with others. Until she gets to Computer Algorhithms class and meets Hunk, the first person close to her age who not only understands her techno jargon, but contributes with his own tech knowledge instead of scoffing & calling her a nerd or teacher’s kid. She’s not so sure about his buddy/roommate Lance, but he kind of grows on her & they eventually bond over their love of Space Sword video games. Pidge’s brother Matt was interning at Galra Tech when their experiments in the Spirit World started to spiral out of control, and Pidge will do whatever it takes to bring him home. Even if it means fighting the entirety of the Spirit World.

Keith Kogane - You know how Mako & Bolin had it rough, growing up on the streets after their parents were killed by a Firebender? Now imagine if either one had to do it alone & never knew what happened to their mother because she took off when they were babies. After Keith’s father is killed in a freak industrial accident, the young Firebender falls in with the Blade of Marmora Triad. He’s caught during a raid by Detective Takashi Shirogane and his partner Ulaz, a former Blade, but instead of putting him juvenile detention Shiro decides to give the kid a shot at a new life (maybe he shows mercy to someone the Blades ordered him to kill, or he has impressive Firebending skills, or Shiro’s a sucker for mullets). Keith starts channeling his aggression into Probending, playing against a certain hotshot from Whale Tail Island over the years, and he eventually gets into the Lin Beifong School of Criminal Justice at RCU. He’s less than thrilled to be on the school’s Probending team with Lance, and after Shiro disappears Keith considers dropping out. But when Shiro reappears (backstory below), Keith will put aside his petty rivalry with Lance and help Shiro with taking down Galra Tech once and for all.

Takashi “Shiro” Shirogane - A skilled Metalbender & brilliant detective, Shiro is everything Hunk thinks an Avatar should be. Intuitive, compassionate, a great leader, skilled in a fight - is there any chance Raava can pick this guy to save the world? But one night, Shiro & his partner Ulaz (not sure if they’re just platonic partners or if they’re also partner-partners, also not sure where Adam & Curtis will come in if they exist at all) are sneaking through a Galra Tech laboratory after receiving anonymous tips that Honerva was capturing Spirits to experiment on, an explosion destroys the building. Shiro loses his partner, his arm, and six months of his life (which Honerva May or May not be responsible for). When he finally returns to his Republic City apartment, he’s visibly distraught by the lost time & a vague memory of something horrible coming. Pidge & Hunk work together to make Shiro a prosthetic he controls with Metalbending, at which point Shiro realizes Hunk is the Avatar & warns him about the Spiritpocalypse. Hunk isn’t sure what Shiro expects him to do about it, and Shiro promises to stand by his side in the coming war to defend humanity & avenge Ulaz.

Allura & Coran will also be part of the story, but I haven’t quite figured out their motivations or backstories yet. Allura will be a powerful Healer from the Northern Water Tribe (not sure if she’ll be a Princess or the daughter of Alfor of Altea Industries, a company that was bought out by Galra Tech through shady deals, corporate espionage, and some old friend backstabbing), and Coran will be Varrick’s grandson & heir to Varrick Industries.

Part 3 - The Stories

I’ve only got a couple of plots right now, but more are coming.

1) A New Beginning - this will be a prologue for the series, confirming the death of Avatar Korra & introducing everyone to baby Hunk. We’ll also get to see Tsuyoshi, Lisa, and a bit of their extended family. Expect maximum cuteness. This is the only story I’ve started so far, and I have it all figured out in my head. I just need to transcribe it.

2) The Boy and the Armadillo Lion - this will be how Hunk meets Gyrgan & when he starts to suspect he might be the Avatar. There will be some tough stuff in here regarding poaching, but most of the animal torture will be implied. One of those “this guy needs to be returned to his mother/oh, don’t worry, he’ll be with his mother soon enough” situations. We’ll see “a boy and his future pet” bonding similar to Hiccup & Toothless, lots of fighting & chasing, and Baby’s First Avatar State. Also debating if I want Old Man Meelo to make a cameo. I love the idea of Meelo deciding to be a hermit in the Swamp because the Avatar’s going to need a cooky wise old mentor in the swamp, but it may raise too many questions if he watches Hunk fight off the poachers without doing anything to help. Maybe Hunk will ride through the Swamp on his way to RCU while wrestling with his insecurities about being the Avatar, and after fighting a few Swamp Hallucinations in the form of past Korra baddies Meelo will pop out of nowhere like Rafiki saying something like “You forgot to be the leaf!”

3) A series of vignettes about young Hunk developing his Bending skills. Earthbending sand castles with his dad, figuring out Metalbending while watching him work on his uncle’s racing Satomobile (oh, he has an Uncle Filo who races Satomobiles professionally), thinking he’s using Lavabending to weld a broken pipe (but Tsuyoshi realizes it’s Firebending), healing his friend Lance when he gets scraped up after trying to pull off a Nuktuk dive while their families vacation at Lake Laogai (which, without the Dai Lee hideout, is a fairly popular vacation spot), that sort of thing.

[justinelong-indiefilms]

Coming of Age in the New Generation: Independent Young Adult Films in the 2010s

FILM FESTIVAL LINEUP

       High school is a hard struggle that everyone can relate to. The teenage years have been a popular theme in film for a long time from The Breakfast Club, to 13 going on 30, audiences know the stereotypical characters and plotlines that come with the trope of a coming-of-age movie. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, indie movies that dealt with teenagers focused on sex and aspects of exploitation films. This is what was selling at the time and it worked, but as people and society changed, so did the independent film industry. Coming of age cinema in the 2000s dealt with new challenges that came with being a young adult in the newest age. Four films that capture the essence of it are Edge of Seventeen (2016), Booksmart (2019), Bling Ring (2013), and Me, Earl, and The Dying Girl (2015). These stories have their own loveable characters and quirky moments, but they all share some common themes. These indie projects focus on the rise of social media and how an online space can ruin relationships and reputations. They also emphasize the social hierarchy and constant anxiety of partying, fitting in, and making friends. Finally, even though there are some differences, they still pay tribute to those blockbusters coming of age movies we all know and love. Independent films combine some Hollywood themes with specific characters and some more darker ideas. This creates a more relatable world for teenagers across the country.

           Edge of Seventeen (2016)

     This movie follows Nadine, a 17-year-old struggling to get through high school after losing all her friends and having family issues. She also gets herself in trouble by accidently posting on social media about her fellow students. The movie touches on suicide, mental illness, and how a lot of people are tone deaf about the subjects. One review from The Guardian said that “it’s depressingly rare for a director to look beyond the teenager as a highly marketable brand and convincingly tap into the mess of insecurities, contradictions and swirling, unfocused surges of anger” (theguardian.com). I really connected with this movie and thought it was sensitive to the complicated topics at hand but paired with loveable characters. There were also great cinematic techniques overall.

        Booksmart (2019)

         Olivia Wilde’s directing debut became an instant classic once it hit theatres. It follows two best friends who have followed the rules and lived by the books ever since they were kids. As graduation approaches, they feel like they should explore the rebellious side of high school and take after their peers. The plot development involves them figuring out their sexuality, drinking and drugs and overall finding themselves. A review at the time said that “it’s adorned with verbal whimsy and brought to life by a vibrant cast but its substance is scantly developed, it’s clear and simple premise dismayingly oversimplified” (Brody, 2019).

Bling Ring (2013)

          With this film, A24 took a bunch of young Hollywood actors (Emma Watson, Israel Broussard, etc.) and put them in a crazy storyline that was based on a true story. This movie is centered around a group of teens who find secretive ways to break into celebrities’ houses and steal money, jewelry, and anything they can get their hands on. They feel like they are on top of the world and get an adrenaline rush from not getting caught by the police or pretending they are on the “elite” side of society. The director wanted to highlight “not the paralysis of having more than you could possibly want, but rather about the addictive thrills of wanting what you can’t quite have and trying to get it” (Scott, 2013). This ties into the part of coming of age where mistakes are made and sometimes, they could affect your future.

 Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl (2015)

        This movie stars a lonely, nerdy guy in high school named Greg (a common theme by now) who finds out that a girl he knows, Rachel, was diagnosed with Leukemia. They soon create a trio with their friend Earl and try to cheer up Rachel during her treatment. It is a witty, heartwarming film that also pokes fun at the cheesy teen rom coms mentioned before in the intro. The boys are young filmmakers and decide to create a home movie made dedicated to Rachel as they try and navigate the highs and lows of how their teen years are coming to an end. Life is coming at them fast, and it is hard to handle as an 18-year-old. The film was presented at the Sundance Film Festival and had an amazing reaction from the audience. According to Rolling Stone, “it’s that sharply funny, touching, and vital” (Travers, 2018).

         I personally grew up watching and adoring films like these. Little did I know this genre was a subcategory on its own and had so much more to it than I knew. These independent movies are exposing young adults to face controversial topics and compare them to their own lives. They provide a realistic depiction of high school and going through an important stage in life with a parallel world online. I hope you have the chance to experience one, if not all, the movies in this lineup.

 SOURCES: 

 The Edge of Seventeen review – an abrasive teen you can grow to love. (2016, December 04). Retrieved May 01, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/dec/04/the-edge-of-seventeen-abrasive-teen-you-can-love

Brody, R. (n.d.). "Booksmart," reviewed: Olivia WILDE'S Toothless teen comedy. Retrieved May 02, 2021, from https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/booksmart-reviewed-olivia-wildes-toothless-teen-comedy

Scott, A. (2013, June 13). Twinkly totems of Fame, theirs for the taking. Retrieved May 02, 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/movies/a-bling-ring-lusting-after-celebrity-trinkets.html

[ohsoethical]

Fashion Factfiles #3: The Sumangali System

Hey guys, happy February and welcome to another Fashion Factfiles blogpost!

The Fashion Factfiles is where we expose the brutal realities of the garment industry, the side that the big corporations and big names in fashion work hard to hide behind ‘girl power’ tees and ‘look at us recycling omg we duz care’ campaigns.

This month we’ll be highlighting an issue that many may not be familiar with, but is absolutely horrific and heartbreaking: the Sumangali System.

WARNING: Content regarding sexual abuse and suicide throughout.

Source: http://www.sify.com/news/sexual-abuse-in-textile-mill-help-us-write-tamil-nadu-women-news-national-qlbmpRabbcdgh.html 

In Tamil Nadu, India, there are about 1600 spinning mills (where fibres are spun to make yarn- like the thread you see sold in Queens market), that employ around 400,000 workers. 90% of the workers are women, with about 60-70% aged 15-18.

Many of these women are employed through the Sumangali (married woman) Scheme; an employment scheme that is essentially bonded labour (when a person is forced to work to pay off a debt) and child labour.

Indeed, this scheme involves agents from spinning mills visiting impoverished families in the villages, recruiting young girls to work in the mills for a 3-5 year contract, with a promise lump sum of money at the end of the contract that they can use as dowry (money given to the bride’s husbands family when they get married- tradition in this area).

Parents are encouraged by the money, due to the desperate conditions many of these families are in, as well as the hefty amount of money required for their daughters’ dowry. Parents are ensured their daughters will be protected and kept ‘clean’ (i.e. no funny business, so they remain good potential wives). The spinning mills also provide accommodation and food in hostels near the mills, where the girls are required to stay.

Underprivileged, illiterate, and migrant women are the focus, as they are thought to be more submissive, and less demanding of higher wages (e.g. less likely to understand labour laws in the area or unable to articulate/speak out about problems). The majority are also from low-caste (mainly Dalit) communities in Tamil Nadu, putting them at risk of further exploitation, due to the pre-existing discrimination and vulnerability to exploitation faced by those of low-caste.

Indeed, what parents and workers are not aware of, is the sheer brutality and torture the young girls face. Listed below are just some examples of the poor treatment they endure.

source: http://www.dw.com/en/rampant-abuse-in-tamil-nadus-spinning-mills-study/a-19284995

POOR WORKING CONDITIONS

Excessive working hours, with an average of 12/13hrs a day, six days a week.

"They work at least 12 hours a day, and often it goes up to 16 hours. There is no fixed resting time and the food that is served is monotonous. This, in turn, leads to the women becoming quickly weak."

“I was promised that I could continue my studies, but instead was forced to work for 12 hours in a shift. Supervisors torture girls to extract work beyond their capacity.”

Extremely poor working environment.

“I had so many respiratory problems because of inhaling cotton all day. 15 of work hours in such high humidity, heavy noise of machines, claustrophobic rooms, dirty toilets and mandatory night shifts completely spoiled my health. A couple of my friends even had accidents because of exhaustion. They had to quit the jobs in a year or so and never got paid.”

The work is physically challenging, but also dangerous.

"They are also not given any protective gear, leading to injuries time and again.”

Women are sometimes locked in bathrooms or dark basements during audits to avoid poor working conditions being revealed.

One worker aged 16 was promised a job and steady income that would help support her economically desperate family. The working conditions seriously affected her health and she fell sick, but was forced by supervisors to continue working without any medical help. Her condition deteriorated and she ended up in hospital. After her recovery, her dad persuaded her to return to work, but after a few weeks, she begged her dad to take her home saying she would die otherwise, so he admitted her to hospital. However it was too late, and she died a day later.

POOR HOSTEL CONDITIONS

Wardens of hostels make sure workers go to work irrespective of their health. Wardens have also been found to physically beat female workers. In one case, wardens were found inspecting the girls’ sanitary pads to monitor pregnancies.

The hostels are found to be unhygienic, with toilets left uncleaned for weeks and lack of arrangements to dispose sanitary pads- in one study, sanitary pads were found dumped in the corner of every bathroom.

The rooms are overcrowded, with 10-15 workers sharing one room. They often sleep on thin mats, on the bare ground.

source: https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/photo-essay-how-tn-textile-mills-force-girls-bonded-labour-earn-dowry-67781

DENIAL OF BASIC RIGHTS

Extremely poor wages- according to one study, while monthly minimum wage amounts to about 113 euros, workers are paid only about 19 euros.

Workers are denied leave, even in family emergencies. 4-6 days are provided for major festivals, however workers must return within six days. Returning late will result in punishments, including wage deductions and overtime. Some workers have been exploited for more than six months for taking more than the stated days of leave.

Movement is restricted outside of their factory or hostel. 

The women have no working contracts, factory identity cards, salary certificates or anything indicating their employment, meaning factories can get away with exploiting and firing workers more easily (no legal protections for workers without official employment, making it difficult to claim their rights e.g. claiming wages they may not be given). In fact, about 70-90% are actually employed as apprentices and remain apprentices, despite the law stating only 10% can be apprentices. This allows factories to keep them as unofficial employees as well as pay them less.

Workers are denied the right to form/join trade unions or demand better working conditions. In a 2016 study, 33/743 mills had a workers committee for workers to express grievances. This is made harder by the fact that they are located in rural areas, away from any existing trade unions and organisations to help.

If management are accused of maltreatment of workers, they go to great lengths keep it quiet. For example, withholding the girl’s wages and pay her only once the family drops the case. In other cases, they make up stories about the girl having an affair, and families are shamed into silence.

SEXUAL ABUSE

Girls in the Sumangali system are extremely vulnerable to sexual abuse. This was publicly exposed in 2016, when an eight-page letter from women in a textile mill was sent to Tamil Nadu’s social welfare officer, describing the abuse they endured.

“He forces himself on us, constantly hugging us and squeezing our breasts…Any worker who resists his advances loses part of her salary. We need this job and don't know who to talk to about the abuse we face everyday. Please help us.”

The sexual abuse experienced by workers was recently brought to the courts of Madras. It was revealed that women were being sexually harassed, with no means of seeking justice and no complaints committees. Horrific accounts included young girls aged 15 being locked in a room and abused by multiple men, and one girl aged 12 who was abused and made to have abortions.

source: https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/photo-essay-how-tn-textile-mills-force-girls-bonded-labour-earn-dowry-67781

SUICIDE

The conditions are so extremely dire, suicide has become frequent in this sector. 

One worker recalls an incident she witnessed a year and a half ago, where a young girl threw herself off a roof, after a supervisor pulled down her skirt in front of other workers. 

“About 30 of us saw this, but we were scared. Since the police did not file a case due to the management’s pressure, we did not think there was anything we could do.”

In 2016, a 17-year old girl was found unconscious in her room, with wound marks on her body and rope impressions around her neck. She had been working 4 hours of overtime everyday after her 8 hour shift, and was sexually harassed by a male worker. After one year she wanted to leave, but her parents convinced her to complete her contract.

After a report in 2014 highlighted the exploitation of these women under the Sumangali Scheme, the High Court of Madras ordered for it to be abolished. However, despite laws banning the employment of women under 18 years and a minimum wage being set, in reality, little has changed. In fact, a study in 2016 found that in 351/743 mills, Sumangali was still around, under different names and taking different forms.

Mills have begun luring young women into textile mills by promising free education, jewellery and trips abroad. They also encourage and ‘brainwash’ them into bringing their friends to the mills, taking over the job of the agents who would recruit among the villages. In one mill, a noticeboard was found promising workers a trip to a water theme park for every two girls they brought to the mill, and a silver anklet for every five girls.

source: https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/photo-essay-how-tn-textile-mills-force-girls-bonded-labour-earn-dowry-67781

Companies alleged to be involved in the schemes include: H&M, M&S, Next, Diesel, Old Navy (GAP), Timberland, Tommy Hilfiger, Primark, Tesco, Mothercare, and ASDA-Walmart. I’m not suggesting you boycott these brands, but instead inquire about their connection with the Sumangali System, and ask them what they’re doing to ensure their suppliers are not exploiting their workers.

While I have extreme hatred for factory managers and their systematic abuse of female workers, we need to hold these brands to account also. These mills are often subcontracted, that is, the brands sign agreements with one mill to produce a certain amount of yarn, however this mill then signs agreements (subcontracts) with another mill to meet the (extremely high) targets set by brands. This means that it is the contracted factory, rather than the initial mill or the brand, that is responsible for the maltreatment of the workers. This allows brands to avoid any blame or responsibility- hence why literally EVERY brand is out here subcontracting work.

It is absolutely vile that they are exploiting the desperation of impoverished families, knowing that individuals who are struggling to just keep their families fed will be reluctantly endure such conditions in order to meet their near impossible targets, to ensure the survival of their loved ones. 

source: https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/photo-essay-how-tn-textile-mills-force-girls-bonded-labour-earn-dowry-67781

Please help us raise awareness of the suffering and strength of these women. Their stories deserve to be told.

source: http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Madurai/plea-to-ban-all-forms-of-bonded-labour-in-tamil-nadu/article4976950.ece

References and other important sources:

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/coimbatore/sumangali-scheme-still-alive-in-new-garb-allege-activists/articleshow/62245582.cms

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/looms-repackage-sumangali-to-lure-girls-into-child-labour/articleshow/62435629.cms https://littleindia.com/forced-labor-prevalent-indian-factory-supplying-hugo-boss-report/ http://www.sify.com/news/sexual-abuse-in-textile-mill-help-us-write-tamil-nadu-women-news-national-qlbmpRabbcdgh.html http://www.firstpost.com/india/sexual-harassment-debate-rages-but-little-help-for-women-employed-in-unorganised-sector-4216457.html

http://www.dw.com/en/rampant-abuse-in-tamil-nadus-spinning-mills-study/a-19284995

Rahul, N (2017). Gender and caste at work: Evolution of a factory regime under the sumangalfi scheme. Social Change, 47(1), pp. 28-44.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-women-labour/death-of-teenage-indian-mill-worker-raises-concerns-over-bonded-labor-idUSKCN0WJ2BZ

https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/sumangali-scheme-when-marriage-assistance-becomes-bonded-labour-disguise-52320

https://www.solidaridadnetwork.org/sites/solidaridadnetwork.org/files/publications/Understanding_Sumangali_Scheme_in_Tamil_Nadu.pdf

https://www.fairwear.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/fwf-india-sumangalischeme.pdf

https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/photo-essay-how-tn-textile-mills-force-girls-bonded-labour-earn-dowry-67781

http://www.indianet.nl/pdf/FabricOfSlavery.pdf

Labour, Exploitation and Work-Based Harm by Sam Scott

[jeroldlockettus]

How Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians)

Daniel Ek, a 23-year-old Swede who grew up on pirated music, made the record labels an offer they couldn’t refuse: a legal platform to stream all the world’s music. Spotify reversed the labels’ fortunes, made Ek rich, and thrilled millions of music fans. But what has it done for all those musicians stuck in the long tail?

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability.

For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

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Over the past year or two, we’ve done a couple special series of episodes. One was called “How to Be Creative”; the other was “The Secret Life of a C.E.O.” You wouldn’t think those two themes would intersect all that often. But today, they do — in a rare conversation with this man:

Daniel EK: My name is Daniel Ek and I’m the C.E.O. and founder of Spotify.

How does Daniel Ek define Spotify’s mission?

EK: So the way I think about our mission is to inspire human creativity by enabling a million artists to be able to live off of their art and a billion people to be able to enjoy and be inspired by it.

Spotify, if you don’t know, is a Swedish music-streaming service with roughly 100 million paid subscribers. Another 100-million-plus listen free on an ad-supported model. But it’s the subscribers that drive 90 percent of the company’s revenue. Ek co-founded the company in 2006, at age 23. It went public in 2018 and its market cap is now around $25 billion. Billion, with a b. For a company that doesn’t really make anything — other than making the connection between a beloved product and people who want to consume that product. The Spotify story is a singular story about the sudden transformation of an old, hidebound industry; it’s also a story about digital piracy, bandwidth, and of course about creativity; oh, also: it’s about the future of podcasting. In person, Daniel Ek is mild-mannered and unexcitable; he doesn’t soundlike an anarchist. But don’t be fooled.

EK: I think we are in the process of creating a more fair and equal music industry than it’s ever been in the past.

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Depending on your personal perspective, Spotify is either an idealized digital jukebox or, as Radiohead’s Thom Yorke once put it, “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse.” Yorke wasn’t the only musician to hate on Spotify, especially in its earlier years. The Beatles and Pink Floyd famously kept their music off Spotify, as did some younger musicians:

ABC News anchor: Superstar Taylor Swift abruptly pulling all her albums from the streaming service Spotify, just days after the release of her hot new album 1989.

Today, Taylor Swift, Pink Floyd, the Beatles, and Radiohead can all be heard on Spotify. The barriers that might have made Spotify seem impossible have mostly been leveled. Primarily by one person: Daniel Ek. He grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Stockholm. These days, he spends about one week a month in New York, but he still lives in Stockholm.

EK: Yeah, and I have two very young kids, so one has just turned four and one is about to turn six.

DUBNER: You’re in the middle of it, aren’t you?

EK: I’m definitely in the middle of it.

One constant throughout Ek’s life has been music.

EK: So my grandfather was an opera singer and my grandmother, she was an actress but also a jazz pianist. So in my family learning music was almost an essential. It was probably more important than you going to college or university at that level. And in Sweden, we have public music education, so it almost costs nothing to get music education in Sweden and my cousin told me — he was way older than me — and was like, “You should learn how to play the guitar because that’s how you get girls.” And I was four or five at the time and definitely didn’t realize why that was a big thing. But I really thought he was really cool. So I was like, OK, well, he must know something, so I learned how to play the guitar. And then about the same time, I got my first computer. And that was a seminal inflection point because I had these two parallel interests that were both formed at a very, very young age.

For a time, Ek thought he might become a full-time musician. But the other interest began to win out.

EK: I think it was 1996 I got broadband Internet. It was like 10 megabits and when you think about it today — because it took until maybe two, three years ago until the average person in the U.S. even had that. But I had it in 1997 and —

DUBNER: And that was just a Swedish thing.

EK: That was just a Swedish thing, because the Swedes said, “Look, we believe everyone should have broadband. That’s going to be a big thing and by the way, we’ll subsidize your PC too, and it will cost $500 and you can get state-of-the-art PC.” So I had this virtually new computer which was subsidized by the government. I had this broadband that was subsidized by the government. And I went on the internet obviously all the time. The problem was there wasn’t really a lot to do on the internet except reading stuff. So I read a lot of stuff, but it wasn’t like the internet had movies for streaming or music or any of that stuff. And on came Napster. And it was a pure epiphany for me because you can search for any kind of music in the world. And within 10, 15 minutes you could have the entire album and you can listen to it, which was amazing.

Napster, which launched in 1999, became the most prominent peer-to-peer file-sharing service. And by “peer-to-peer file-sharing service,” I mean a piece of software that let a user like Daniel Ek download music files directly from the hard drives of other Napster users all over the world. Which meant that if one person bought a CD and copied it onto their hard drive, and shared it on Napster, all of a sudden, an infinite number of people could own it. For free. One problem: this is an infringement of copyright, and totally illegal. At least in most places. Sweden did not forbid the downloading of pirated content until 2005; the country became an international hub for illegal downloads and even gave rise to a political party, the Pirate Party, that won seats in the European Parliament. I asked Ek whether he had thought about the legality of music piracy.

EK: Yeah, I thought about it. But I was 14. It wasn’t like it was a big thing. And since it was so easy to access and the alternative was for me to go out and buy a record with money I didn’t have, it was like the only option. So it was this weird thing where you start off with something and all of a sudden, maybe I was — wanted to listen to Metallica and all of a sudden realized that this person also had King Crimson. Which was like, “Oh, holy shit, I didn’t know that Metallica was inspired by those guys.” And Led Zeppelin and Beatles and all the seminal ones that all of a sudden you start listening to. Or prog music or Jimi Hendrix’s entire discography. It brought me this weird sense of very broad music education and quite eclectic taste, which in turn got me even further into music. I mean, I don’t think I would have been that interested in music if it weren’t for piracy, to be honest, because I come from a working-class family. We couldn’t afford all the records that I wanted.

Napster became very large very fast. You might have thought the music industry would see this growth as a natural expression of demand for their product, and try to find a way to exploit that demand. But they didn’t see it that way. They saw piracy as nothing but theft. And as the music industry began to go the way of many fading 20th-century industries, they blamed their decline on piracy.

A pair of economists wrote a research paper at the time which found that illegal downloads in fact did almost nothing to affect music sales. They wrote: “Our estimates are inconsistent with claims that file-sharing is the primary reason for the decline in music sales.” The idea here was that the kind of people who illegally downloaded music weren’t the kind of people who were going to pay $15 for a CD anyway. Daniel Ek certainly wasn’t going to pay $15 for one CD. What he found ludicrous was that the only choice the music industry gave you was $15 for one CD versus zero dollars for all the music in the world.

EK: My view is that the music industry has always been excluding the vast majority of its potential. And what do I mean by that? Well, at the peak of the recorded-music industry, 2001, it was about 200 million people who were participating in the economy, who bought records. So was it 200 million people who were listening to music? No, of course not. That number was in the billions. So what the music industry did fairly well was they priced a product at a premium for an audience that was willing to pay for it. But it only captured a very, very small portion of the revenues. So what was obvious to me as I started using Napster back in the day, it was just, this is a way better product than going to a record store, there ought to be a way where you can give consumers what they want and at the same time make it work for artists.

DUBNER: As you got to know the record labels over time, years after Napster started, do you think they regretted not having partnered with Napster earlier?

EK: I definitely think so. I mean, in hindsight they probably realized that it was the wrong thing, but they thought by shutting it down that they’ve contained the problem and didn’t realize that it would just create seven new ones.

The music industry did get Napster shut down, but it had to keep playing whack-a-mole with a bunch of new pirated-music services.

EK: If you think about piracy for music, what it really forced in this first incarnation was the unbundling of the album.

Unbundling the album, that is, into single songs.

EK: So Apple then created a business of that by selling songs for 99 cents.

Apple, by way of iTunes, introduced the world to legal music downloading. It had taken Apple a while, but they finally succeeded in negotiating the rights with record labels. Daniel Ek, meanwhile, was having a lot of success himself.

EK: I started web-design companies, web-hosting companies, and a bunch of different companies.

He actually started doing this work when he was 14. By the time he was 18, he had a couple dozen programmers working for him. He enrolled at the Royal Institute for Technology but only lasted a couple months. Starting and selling internet companies was more fun. Ek was a millionaire by the time he was 23, and he started living like one: a fancy apartment, nightclubs, a red Ferrari. All this left him flat, and depressed. As he’d later tell Forbes magazine: “I was deeply uncertain of who I was and who I wanted to be. I really thought I wanted to be a much cooler guy than I was.” He moved into a cabin in the woods, back near his family; he played guitar, meditated, and over time thought up the idea for Spotify. It was very simple, really: an essentially infinite library of all the music in the world, available instantaneously, to anyone with an internet connection. How hard could that be? Ek and his co-founder, Martin Lorentzon, had two fundamental problems to solve: building the technology to allow for the instantaneous streaming of music; and persuading the rights-holders of all the music in the world to go into business with a brand-new company from Sweden — a country famous for its music piracy — and headed by a man who’d grown up on pirated music.

EK: There’s many different pirates, we would put it. There’s the pirates who just religiously feel like everything should be free. We were never that. Sean Parker definitely was never that either.

Sean Parker as in the co-founder of Napster; Parker later provided some venture capital to Spotify.

EK: There’s the other group who just looks at it like, this is the kind of consumer experience that makes sense and that’s how the world will look at it.

DUBNER: So then how professional of a pirate were you? What was the highest level of professionalism of piracy you ever accomplished? It was uTorrent, was that the name of the company?

EK: So actually this is probably an unknown part of the story. I wasn’t very much at all a professional pirate. At the time as I was thinking about starting Spotify, my co-founder, who’s not very technical, said to me, “Hey, there’s my friend who’s asking me about this programmer and he needs some advice.” And I was kind of dismissive about the whole idea and then he told me the name of this programmer and this guy was the founder of uTorrent.

This guy was Ludvig Strigeus, and uTorrent was a piece of file-sharing software that was particularly useful for digital piracy.

EK: And he’s a legendary engineer and I knew about him from engineering circles as being one of those persons who wins a lot of competitions for being great engineers. And I was like, “I have to meet this person.” And he had started this thing, just a fun side project, and it was uTorrent and it was growing very massively. We were actually trying to recruit him to come to Spotify. And he was like, “Well, I got this thing, uTorrent, and I don’t really know what to do with it.” So we persuaded him to sell uTorrent to us instead. And the whole idea from the beginning was actually to fold it because we didn’t really care about it.

DUBNER: Because by then you’re saying you already had a vision of how to make this the legit model work?

EK: Yeah yeah.

Spotify did install Strigeus as a top engineer at Spotify; and they didn’t shut down uTorrent — they sold it, to BitTorrent, the huge peer-to-peer protocol. I asked Daniel Ek which early task had been harder: building out Spotify’s technology or persuading the record companies to let him stream their music.

EK: Well, it’s hard at different stages. So first, you need to have a really good idea of what it is that you’re trying to solve. And in our case it wasn’t necessarily that the technology had a worth in and on itself. It was more around, how do we solve a real problem? And I think the problem that we were trying to solve was it needs to feel like you have all your music on your hard drive. So if you think about that, that means instantaneous. So we probably have to solve that. It probably means also all the world’s music. Okay, well you have to solve all the rights issues and all of those different things all encompassed in this one thing. So it was very clear to me that if we could deliver something that felt like you had all the world’s music on your hard drive, it would likely be way better than piracy, which was the dominant force of music consumption at the time.

From the outset, Spotify partnered with the record companies, first in Europe and eventually the U.S. What enticed the labels to participate? Actually, they would have been fools not to. Remember, the music industry was in steep decline thanks to changes in technology, economics, and consumer preferences. As Ek noted earlier, the industry’s model had always been inefficient: charging relatively high prices to capture only the top layer of the listening market. Most people got most of their music on the radio, which was free.

Now, before you start feeling too sorry for the record labels, let me say this: in the history of the creative arts, and in the modern history of business generally, it would be hard to find an industry that was sleazier, more exploitative, and more deserving of its comeuppance than the music industry. Through means legal and illegal, from sham contracts and bribes to strong-arming and collusion, the industry had for decades stayed fat by making relatively skinny payments to the people who actually made the music. Their royalty statements were masterpieces of creative accounting. Yes, they did provide venture capital to thousands of musicians with no money, but on the rare occasion when one of those musicians recorded a smash hit, the label made sure to capture most of the profits. What about the industry’s role in discovering new talent? That’s a bit of a myth — like saying that publishers “discover” great authors or NFL coaches “discover” great quarterbacks. They mainly cherry-pick the talented people who’ve already worked their way up, and then squeeze out as much juice as possible for their own use. Many industries exploit their labor force, but few had done so with as much vigor as the music industry.

Now that they were starting to go under, Spotify was offering a lifeboat — and a fairly luxurious one: 70 percent of streaming revenues and an equity stake in the company. The big record labels — Sony, Universal, and Warner — were reportedly each given between 4 and 6 percent of Spotify’s shares, with a consortium of independent labels getting another 1 percent. When Spotify went public, in 2018, these stakes would be worth billions. The labels would also get to keep drawing down 70 percent of Spotify’s revenues, and distributing it to their artists according to their own royalty formulas.

EK: Correct.

DUBNER: So that 70 percent flows then to the rights-holders , which are primarily still the three big music labels.

EK: Yep.

DUBNER: But in terms of the money flowing to the actual creators of the content, that’s complicated and problematic. So can you talk about your views on that and how actually involved you are or can be or want to be?

EK: Yeah, sure. Yeah, it’s — music copyrights generally is probably one of the more complicated areas of both law, just because of how copyright law is treated by society, and then just how it actually works and how it flows down. It’s pretty complicated for a lay person to understand. But the best way to start is just taking two steps back. So the birth of the music industry, and if you think about the role that everyone had, a record company was both — it used to cost a lot of money to make music. So a record company could help you by paying for the studio, the studio engineers, all the people to help you record your music. So that was a pretty big value-add. The next thing that ended up being a big problem was getting promoted onto — in the U.S. was thousands of different radio stations. And internationally it was multiplied by 10 times. It was a pretty big thing. And then distribution ended up being very expensive. So why we have major record companies ended up being — it ended up being easier for them to aggregate around distribution. And that’s how they were formed. That’s how they grew to power.

If you look at it right now, some of those things have obviously shifted. So the recording of music ends up becoming fairly cheap today in most instances because anyone can record if they have a laptop and a mic. Distribution also ends up becoming fairly cheap because you can just put your music on Spotify or Apple Music or any other service virtually free and get distributed. Now the flip side of that is the problem of then getting heard ends up becoming harder than ever before.

DUBNER: Because the supply is so much greater.

EK: Yeah. The supply is infinite, so in order to stand out you have to do quite a lot more. And where we have been as an industry just a few years ago was that you couldn’t rely on one income stream alone. So even if you felt, OK, this is digital distribution or streaming and I kind of get that. The truth of the matter is radio certainly here in the U.S. is still a massive, massive force. So you needed to do a lot of radio both for promotion but just generally distribution and even how you did royalty accounting and all those different things was a massive thing. And then physical still matters greatly. Certainly in the middle of the country. So the value-add by record companies is fairly great and is very important certainly as you’re thinking about how to get this out.

Now the roles going forward is changing quite dramatically. So you’re finding that there are a lot more younger record companies coming out that are formed by maybe being specialists in a certain genre. They’re now finding equal opportunities to get their music heard. So they’re being distributed via indie labels or they may even go and distribute their record companies through one of the major record companies in order to get the support that they’re getting. So the industry is really changing. And we’re obviously a huge part not so much in the change but just being a participant in that dialogue about where it’s going, what is the role of a manager, what’s the role of a label, what’s the role of an agent, what’s the role of a publisher. Because all of those roles are now moving along as the industry is becoming more and more digital.

DUBNER: Right. But you — from what I gather Spotify has little leverage or maybe even interest in once you turn over the royalty share in how they distribute it to their artists, correct? You have nothing to do with that, I assume.

EK: We have nothing to do with that. What we are trying to do, however, because this is such a dramatic shift in an economic model for artists, one of the big things was just how do we educate people about this. Because really even the iTunes model was fairly simple. Because I’m selling my goods and I’m getting X for it. We can argue what X should be, but it’s really that. Here with streaming it’s like I’m getting a revenue share of something and it’s streaming, and it looks like it’s a very small number per stream. But what is a million streams? Is a million streams a lot? Is it a little? Is it — how should I think about it? That ended up being a very big shift.

DUBNER: Are you saying that independent artists are over time via Spotify gaining leverage in the revenue ecosystem or not really? Because the common complaint is this: Spotify is great for customers.

EK: Right.

DUBNER: Spotify has turned out to be a life-saver for labels. Spotify has been great for Spotify, and for you. And it’s been great for some musicians. But then there are others who feel that they’re worse off than they would have been. Now every case is a little bit different. But to those who feel like, “Great, I’m glad all music is available to everybody all the time and I’m glad everybody else is making out well” — what do you say to those artists, or maybe what do you say to someone who’s starting in music now? Can it be a sustainable future for them?

EK: I think we are in the process of creating a more fair and equal music industry than it’s ever been in the past. So I’ll take an example, back in 2000, 2001, at the very, very peak of the music industry, peak of CD, all of those different things. Our estimate is that there were about 20- to maybe 30,000 artists that could live on being recorded music artists. Now, they could be touring, they could be doing other things, and the number could be far greater than that. But there were only 20- or 30,000 that could sustain themselves being that. Why? Well, because, again the distribution costs so much, which ended up being that there’s very few artists that could even get distributed to begin with. And because the costs were fairly high for a person buying the music, you ended up going with what you knew and wouldn’t take that much risk on unknown artists. So in the world with streaming, what’s really interesting is the alternative cost for you to listen to something new is virtually zero. It’s just your time. And because of that, you do listen to a lot more music than you did before and you listen to a bigger diversity of artists than you did before which in turn then grows the music industry.

DUBNER: You were saying there were 20, to 30,000 artists that could be supported. Do you know what that number is now?

EK: I don’t know what the number is now but it’s far greater. Even on Spotify itself, it’s far greater than that.

The economist Alan Krueger taught for years at Princeton and worked in both the Clinton and Obama White Houses. He was also fascinated by the economics of the music industry. Krueger once gave a speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame comparing the music industry to the modern economy at large. In both cases, he argued, most of the earnings were going to fewer and fewer people at the top of the pyramid. It’s what some people call a tournament model, where the winners get most, if not all, of the profits. Krueger died recently at age 58 — by suicide. He left behind a book, to be published soon, called Rockonomics. In it, he writes that there are roughly 200,000 professional musicians in the U.S. today, accounting for 0.13 percent of all U.S. workers. That percent has stayed about the same since 1970.And what’s the median annual income for these musicians? Twenty thousand dollars. The argument Daniel Ek is making sounds good in theory — that digital distribution should make it easier for lesser-known artists to find listeners and get paid. Remember how Ek defines the Spotify mission:

EK: To inspire human creativity by enabling a million artists to be able to live off of their art.

This was one of the great promises of the digital era — that you wouldn’t have to be a superstar to make a living. In 2006, the journalist Chris Anderson published an influential book called The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Daniel Ek, in a 2010 interview, called The Long Tail his favorite book. But Alan Krueger’s findings don’t support the long-tail promise. Social media and algorithm-driven recommendations — including Spotify’s own playlists — seem to magnify the bandwagon effect, whereby popular songs become even more popular by virtue of their popularity. In 2018, Spotify’s most-streamed artist was Drake, with 8.2 billion streams. Assuming a typical streaming royalty rate of 0.4 cents per play, that’s nearly $33 million going to Drake’s camp. But the pyramid is sharp, and things fall off really fast once you go beneath the top. Alan Krueger cites an industry survey which found that just 28 percent of artists earned money from streaming in 2018, with the median amount just $100.

So if you think about the streaming-music revolution as a sort of tournament, let’s think about how the various constituencies are making out. Spotify and Daniel Ek are doing very well; so are the company’s original funders, who got a huge return on their investment. The record labels have also been big winners: not only did Spotify reinvigorate their industry but it seems to have substantially improved their overall valuations. The Universal Music Group, for instance, which is currently for sale, has recently been valued at more than $30 billion; in 2013, its valuation was just $8.4 billion. Other winners in the Spotify tournament are customers, who get much more music than they used to get for much less money; and the most popular musicians are also winning big. One constituency that’s not obviously sharing in the winnings: the long-tail artists, of which there are many.

DUBNER: So if you weren’t you, and you were looking at this revolution from the outside, what would you say about the fact that a company like Spotify, which doesn’t produce content — well, it’s starting to, more — but is essentially a friction-remover and a distributor, is worth more than the entire music industry was about the time of its creation?

EK: Well, I mean I don’t want to — I’m actually very little focused on what a company is worth or isn’t, or if that’s fair. There’s something called a Wall Street which is really focused on that instead. I don’t really focus on that. We at Spotify are interested in is how do we get a music industry which actually participates in all of the income streams?

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Daniel Ek was a teenage entrepreneur; a millionaire in his early twenties; and now, at 36, a billionaire, having built Spotify into a streaming juggernaut that is now worth more than the entire music industry was worth at the time of Spotify’s founding. Spotify is in the news pretty much constantly these days: launching their service in India, filing an antitrust lawsuit in Europe against Apple, claiming that Apple’s App Store is unfairly favoring its own Apple Music over Spotify. For Ek, the biggest challenge at the moment would seem to be figuring out a way to derive more value — more revenue — from the massive, sprawling ecosystem of recorded music, an ecosystem whose business evolution has been very slow.

EK: So if you look at say the video industry — I say video and I really encompass the entire TV industry, the movie industry, all in video. What I find fascinating is it used to be a conversation where it started off only as paid. Then it added advertising as a component. And then there was a bunch of firms that were only focused on the advertising part of it and then a bunch of firms that were only focused on the subscription income. So most notable, you had CBS on one end, on the advertising end of the spectrum. You had HBO on the other end of this spectrum, asking for subscription income. And then if you look at it today, the truth of the matter is CBS is about 50/50. So it focuses as much on subscription income as it does on advertising. And HBO still is paid-only. But you’re — as an industry, it’s moving that both of these revenue models are equally important.

And that’s my point with the music industry too. My point it’s like, what would happen to the music industry if you all of a sudden combined the the power of advertising as a revenue model, the power of subscription as a revenue model, the power of a la carte on top of that as a revenue model. The three of them on a base of the three billion people around the world that are interested in music easily, just by virtue of looking at how much time people spend listening to music, ought to be at least multiples greater than what the current music industry is and probably larger than the music industry’s ever been.

DUBNER: And you just added 1.3 billion or so in India, yes, potentially?

EK: The Indian music market, what’s fascinating to me, is 90 percent of that market is about Bollywood films. And they are throwing off music and that’s what’s selling in India.

DUBNER: Is it being well-monetized still? I mean people buy it, or I mean —

EK: It’s not well-monetized. But the music industry is essentially a byproduct to the film industry, which for me tells a very interesting story, that there’s so much development left to do. What would happen if the ecosystem there was healthy? Then people wouldn’t think about making music just for movies.

DUBNER: So the India Spotify story could turn out to be exactly the opposite in a way of the American Spotify story, where some people feel here small artists are getting — the long tail is so skinny that you can’t make a living. And theoretically it may disincentive some people from creating. There — maybe there’s incentives to join, even the middle of the long tail there would be a step up, yeah?

EK: Yeah. Well, I mean it’s virtually non-existent. So it’s in a much earlier development stage than the U.S. music economy.

DUBNER: Let me ask you about consumer surplus, which is something economists love to talk about — those rare cases where you get something for much less than you’d be willing to pay. So Spotify is, relatively, super cheap, $10 a month for all the music I want. And that $10 would buy two-thirds of one downloaded album. So if you like music enough to buy two-thirds of one album per month, then to get all the music in the world essentially for that same price is ridiculously cheap. So I’m curious to know two things. What do you know about willingness to pay more? And what do you know, if anything, about the disposable income that’s now been captured by consumers by not having to spend more than $10 to consume the universe of music — where that disposable income goes, I’m curious to have any data on that.

EK: Well, I mean, obviously we agree. We think $10 a month is a very, very cheap and an amazing proposition. But the amount of people who wake up in the morning thinking, Hey, I want to pay $10 a month for music isn’t as great as most people would believe. And we believe that is because not only did piracy exist in a big way just a few years ago, but there are all of these other sources where you can access music very cheaply. Mostly free. So you can go on radio and listen to it, but you can also go on YouTube and you can find the entire archive of music, including all the bootlegs and videos and you can listen to that entirely for free. That��s what we’re competing against. So in order to do that, you can imagine then it’s a free product versus one that’s $10 a month. That’s a pretty big stretch , certainly since all of these other things may have other things like convenience — in the case of radio, works in your car, works in all those different things. And then, in the case of YouTube, it’s just, it’s everything. It’s even greater than what Spotify’s library is. So that’s where we’re, from a competitive set, wrestling with. Now obviously as cars get more and more connected, I do think streaming service is a way better user proposition.

DUBNER: Although I did wonder with autonomous vehicles theoretically coming maybe relatively soon.

EK: Right.

DUBNER: It does strike me that listening to music in a car is a perfect complementary activity. Because you need to drive, you need to keep your eyes on the road, but your ears are free. I do wonder with autonomous vehicles whether it may actually be harmful to streaming music because now my eyes are free to something that might be more interactive.

EK: Right. I mean, you may be right. I don’t know. I think that what’s really interesting, however, is that countercultural force right now from people looking into their phones is all of these well-being things, both Google and Apple released “screen time,” which is supposed to restrict your screen time. And we have the Alexa in your home, which is another device which you’re not supposed to look at, which are all great countercultural reactions to this, watching a screen, which we wouldn’t probably have imagined just a few years ago.

DUBNER: Do you have those kind of aspirations for Spotify to get into, health and wellness and hand-holding of various sorts?

EK: Not directly. To the extent that we do something like that, we’re already very big in terms of meditational music, wellness music, sleep, pink noise, white noise, everything on the spectrum. And now with podcasts obviously on the service too, there’s a lot of people who are focused on those things, which I’m very excited about.

Spotify has been streaming podcasts for years. But it made news recently by spending a few hundred million dollars to acquire two podcast-production companies, Gimlet and Parcast, and a firm called Anchor that’s primarily a podcast technology platform.

EK: Correct. Correct.

DUBNER: So that really changes things in a number of ways. Because you have been successful not being a content creator or producer — too much, at least. So I guess first question is why, and then the second question is, how will it unfurl?

EK: Right. Well, in the future, I don’t think people will make a choice whether they’re subscribing to a music service. We think that they’re making a choice whether they will have an audio service of their choice. It wasn’t this well-thought-out master plan. “Hey, we need an adjacent business, and we don’t know which one it is.” It wasn’t like that at all. What actually happened, because Spotify is a platform was we started seeing in my home country Sweden actually, we started seeing record companies buying podcasts and uploading them to the platform as another revenue opportunity for them to grow. And it resonated really well with listeners. And that was the first step. And then in Germany, record companies there had massive amounts of rights to audio books, which I wasn’t aware of. And they started uploading that to the service and very quickly, we went from no listening to that and now we’re probably if not the biggest, the second-biggest audio book service in Germany. And this is without our involvement. This just happened by proxy of us being a platform. So we started seeing it resonating really well into people’s lives. And they thought of Spotify not just as a music service but as a service where they can find audio. And it played really well into our strategy of ubiquity — i.e., being on all of these different devices in your home, whether it’s the Alexas or TV screens or in your cars or whatever as just another source where you could play your audio.

DUBNER: But why do you want to go to the trouble to pay a couple hundred million to buy a firm that’s creating it when almost everybody making podcasts would probably willingly have their content on Spotify?

EK: Yeah. Well, the reason why is really twofold. So one is that the format of podcasts, we’re still very early on into what it will be. If you really think about it, for most people, there’s all of these basic things for creators that haven’t been solved, like how well am I doing. It’s not that easy to find out. How am I monetizing the show and the value for advertisers, it’s just not that easy to find out. And thirdly, what are people saying about my show, feedback. Those are three very elemental things that if you think about it almost all other formats, if you’re a journalist today and writing in text, there’s ways to solve all three of them. We can already —

DUBNER: I mean what you’re describing does exist to some degree on Apple Podcasts, which I realize Spotify has a complicated relationship with. But that’s also, like Spotify, it’s a closed ecosystem. It’s not part of the web, quite. So if Apple Podcasts data existed in a non-closed environment would that have been enough for Spotify to not need to buy its own firm?

EK: Probably. I mean, in the end I mean it’s all about solving needs that creators or consumers are having. That’s what we’re focused on. And if someone had solved that need then obviously there would be less of a reason for us to do anything about it. And you know the same thing, if there was massive amounts of audio-book services in Germany I’m sure we wouldn’t have been successful.

DUBNER: Can you talk about Spotify customer data. What do you have and what do you do with it?

EK: Well, what we do with it now is very tightly regulated because we’re originally a European company and in Europe, I believe, five or six years ago there was a new initiative called G.D.P.R. that officially became a law some time April, May I believe last year. And obviously we’re complying with that. And what it basically says is that all the data that we have around you as a customer, you need to be able to ask us for it and we need to deliver it back to you. You need to have an opportunity for it getting deleted by us.

DUBNER: What are your abilities to monetize that data, though, to third parties?

EK: Well our ability to monetize it is obviously based on the contract that we have with our users, so obvious things that would be what genre of music are you listening to, what’s your age, what’s your demographics. And those are things that advertisers can target against.

DUBNER: Right. And how well do you monetize that currently?

EK: You mean if we do monetize it?

DUBNER: Yes. If you do monetize it how well do you —

EK: We monetize some of those aspects of course like any normal ad platform. It’s very important though to note that we’re not selling any customer data.

DUBNER: That’s what I’m asking. So there’s ads on the Spotify platform.

EK: Yes.

DUBNER: You’d be fools not to target those to listeners based on their demographics and their listening tendencies.

EK: Of course.

DUBNER: But you do have a lot of data that would be valuable to third parties.

EK: Oh yeah, massive amounts, but not even just for other advertisers. But you can imagine even for the music industry, there’s tons of data about how their songs are performing or other people’s songs might be performing that could inform them about what they’re doing. We’ve taken the stance that we don’t monetize the data itself at all. We don’t sell the data.

DUBNER: Why?

EK: Well, it’s an important one for us that users should be able to rely on us not — my fundamental view is, it’s their data. If we can use the data in order to make the Spotify experience better, then all good and great. And I think many users would say yeah, I agree with that. But because now of G.D.P.R., which I do think is the right step — we can argue about like was it the right implementation of it and all those things. But I do think it’s great for customers that there’s something like G.D.P.R. there. And you can delete the data. You can also say opt out of specific things that we are gathering about you and say, hey I don’t want you to know X or Y.

DUBNER: Yeah. I’ve read that you operate your life in a series of sort of five-year commitments. I don’t know how finite or real that is, but if it is real.

EK: Right.

DUBNER: Where are you now in the five-year cycle, and what happens next?

EK: It’s not always been five years, by the way. So when I started the company, it was a five-year commitment because being 23 at the time, having started lots of different companies before I really wanted to see what would happen if I applied myself to one thing and only one thing and do it for a meaningful amount of time, how far I could get on that problem. And the longest I could imagine spending on anything was five years. So that’s how it ended up being five years. And then when the five years passed, I was 28 so I said, Well when 30 — so it was a two-year increment. And now I said to myself, just before going public last year, is this what I want to do? And what would happen if I made a 10-year commitment? Which felt pretty daunting and what is it that we would have to do, what does the company have to look like for me to be interested to do this for another 10 years? Well what would my role have to look like in order for me to be interested?

DUBNER: Is that a key component, how interested you can remain — I mean it needs to be constantly challenging to you?

EK: Yeah, definitely so. I mean to be honest because otherwise if you don’t have that passion and you don’t feel like you’re growing and challenging yourself, someone else will probably do a much better job.

DUBNER: So where are you right now?

EK: I’m in year two now of a ten-year commitment.

DUBNER: So what did you see in the future of Spotify that you thought was going to be so amazingly, excitingly challenging for 10 years?

EK: Well, there’s really two things. So the first and more important one is really from the inception of Spotify, the assumption was that we would solve the user problem. I.e., — get people to listen in a much better way and then they’ll contribute back to the music industry. The core assumption was that the music industry would take care of all the other things — how people get signed, how they get heard. And I realized that that just didn’t happen. So we’re largely doing business the same way as we were doing 10 years ago. There’s been some evolution of that. But I want to work with the music industry. I was never a disrupter. That’s the big misunderstanding about me. I’ve — I believe the record companies are important and will be important in the future. But we believe we can be the R & D arm for the music industry, that we can develop better tools and technology to allow them to be more efficient and thereby creating more, better solutions for them and for artists.

DUBNER: Can you give an example of how the efficiency happens?

EK: Well, one of the hardest problems right now for an artist is to get heard. One of the biggest platforms to be heard at would be Spotify, right? So today the primary tool that an artist has to get heard on Spotify besides putting the music on there is getting known by one of our editors. So in a weird way, while we want to democratize music, we’ve become gatekeepers as well. So the question is: can we develop tools that enables artists to promote their music more efficiently just by themselves on the platform? And that could be in the form of being able to talk to their existing super fans that are on the platform. It could be in the form of better promotional tools for record companies in how they pitch music and get the music out there.

Spotify having become a gatekeeper — whether inadvertently or not — is an important point. A song that Spotify adds to one of its playlists will get many more streams than one that doesn’t. And streams translate into money for the rights-holders. So having that power is important, especially from a profit-maximizing perspective. If Spotify were primarily concerned with profit-maximizing, it might promote content that is cheaper for Spotify to stream. Maybe it’s content they produce themselves; or just content that comes with a lower payment rate than others. It may not sound like a big difference to pay a rights-holder 0.4 cents per stream versus 0.3 cents, but if you’re talking hundreds of millions or billions of streams, it adds up.

DUBNER: What do you listen to these days?

EK: Music-wise or podcast —

DUBNER: Well, both.

EK: So music-wise I’ve been really interested in African music lately. So particularly West African dancehall music has been something that’s been pretty cool. We launched in South Africa a year ago. So all of those playlists started bubbling up and there’s been a lot of really cool —

DUBNER: It must be so cool to launch in a new place as a means for you guys to discover what’s the music —

EK: Oh yeah, for sure, and there’s a lot of things that you just don’t even know about. So that’s been for me the biggest thing over the last year that’s been really interesting. And then on the podcast side, it’s such a fascinating format to me. There’s obviously people who can listen to Crimetown or whatever it may be, just to get entertained. For me it’s more the educational part of it. So it could be a Freakonomics. There’s one called Invest Like the Best that’s quite interesting and thoughtful about investments and how you do that. I do listen to quite a lot of history podcasts as well. Just to get an hour uninterrupted about a subject. There’s no other format that goes to the same depth as I find that podcasting does.

DUBNER: Are there still holes in the Spotify music library that you really want to fix?

EK: There are. But obviously by now the holes that we have are probably more regional holes than the fact of the big ones. I’m sure that there are — Garth Brooks being probably the best-known example right now. But most of it is really about old music, getting the archives up. I’m very proud that we did that deal with the BBC a few years ago where we’re now bringing the entire archive onto streaming. Same with Deutsche Grammophon, the German equivalents as well.

DUBNER: Would you ever consider in a case like Garth Brooks — I mean, I’m sure you’re going to say no to this, because it would be illegal — but would you ever consider saying, “Look, we’re Spotify, we’re just going to put the music there,” and then he will see how well it does. And then the first check gets written. And then that will bring him to the table in a proper way. Would you or did you ever do that?

EK: No. We’ve never done that. It goes against the ethos of what it is we’re trying to do. I mean, again, when we started, that was the modus operandi. There was all these —

DUBNER: A sort of terrorism in a way, yeah?

EK: Yeah, a lot of these services, where people just uploaded all the music and then they figured out the problem later on. That was never the approach that we took.

DUBNER: And why was that? I mean, do you consider yourself a particularly ethical person? Is that the way Swedish business is done? Because to be fair, Uber pretty much did that. They would go into cities where they knew that local authorities wouldn’t allow them to operate.

EK: Right. Well I don’t like to say that we’re more ethical than other people. It just felt like the right thing to do. And I believed that the problem for the music industry with the past had been just that fact, that it always felt like it was people who wanted to disrupt the existing music industry. I don’t believe that the music industry has to be disrupted. I believe it has to be evolved. So we like to work with them as partners. That’s always been our approach. There isn’t music on Spotify that the copyright owners haven’t authorized us.

DUBNER: I have one last question. If you weren’t doing this now — let’s just pretend Spotify really hadn’t worked, that either the technology or the rights-gathering proved impossible. You’d be doing what now, and where?

EK: If I weren’t doing this, I would probably do something in health care. And it’s a weird revelation, if you asked me ten years ago, I wouldn’t have said that. But right now it’s like I came to that realization because people always said, “Oh, Spotify is so amazing,” and my response was always, “Well, it’s not saving lives, but it’s good.” A few years ago I was thinking to myself, why am I not saving lives, and what would I do if I did that? And I talked about these technology currents, and I think in healthcare a lot of those technology currents are starting to play out. And it’s not just about the sort of digital part of these things. It’s just the advancement in biotech overall, CRISPR, proactive medicine. It’s going to be the next decade or two decades, we’re fundamentally moving from a place where we will look at doctors or the way we treated people like it’s almost witchcraft two decades from now. We’ll just know a lot more. And that’s fascinating, to think about the implications that that will have economically, because I believe in the end it means that we can spend a lot less of our GDP on healthcare and as a consequence hopefully treat a lot more people. So yeah, I’m really interested in that part, and what’s going to happen in that space.

DUBNER: Do you think you will do that, I mean, in eight years? At the end of this ten-year, quote, commitment, you’ll be only 44.

EK: Right.

DUBNER: Do you think you will try something radically different for you like that?

EK: I hope so. My interests — I love music. It’s been a passion really since the beginning of my life. And that will always be a passion and always be something that I’ll do in some shape or form. But we’re here a very, very short period of time on Earth. And I feel a tremendous amount of responsibility having — you know, it’s insane that I’m 30-plus years old and having had as much fortune as I’ve had, so I feel like I need to do a lot more than what I’m doing to leave the world a better place than what I entered it.

If you want to learn more about Spotify — including how a team of Swedish social scientists tried to reverse-engineer it to see how the platform really works — check out a new book called Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music.

*      *      *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Harry Huggins, Zack Lapinski, Matt Hickey, and Corinne Wallace. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Daniel Ek, co-founder and C.E.O. of Spotify.

RESOURCES

“The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis,” by Felix Oberholzer‐Gee and Koleman Strumpf (Journal of Political Economy, 2007).

The post How Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/spotify/

[mrmichaelchadler]

Larry Cohen: 1941-2019

Since the creators of B-movies generally do not have such luxuries as famous actors, familiar properties and large budgets to work with, they have to rely more heavily on an ingredient that is just important but much lower in cost—a great idea. Not just any great idea, of course, but the kind of idea that makes you stop in your track and think “Man, I’ve gotta see that.” The problem is that, in many cases, even if they do manage to beat the odds and come up with that killer idea, they don’t always have the resources or talent to do it justice. 

One B-filmmaker who never had that problem was Larry Cohen, who passed away this weekend at the age of 77. He may have never had the same level of name recognition as such contemporaries as George Romero or John Carpenter, but his films, in which he took often outrageous premises and built upon them with witty dialogue, incisive social commentary and colorful characters, were among the best genre films of their era and continue to pack a punch today.

Cohen was born on July 15, 1941 in Manhattan and from a young age, he developed a fascination with movies. In an interview I did with Cohen a couple of years ago, he professed a special fondness for the films produced by Warner Brothers during that era. “It was a great studio—they had really ballsy movies and political movies … They were shot at a fast pace with a lot of action and fast talk, as opposed to MGM movies, which were a lot slower and more luxurious. He began his career as a writer for television, first by writing for such shows as “The Defenders, “The Fugitive” and “Rat Patrol” and then by creating such shows as the 1965-’66 Western “Branded” (sorry fans of “The Big Lebowski”) and the 1967-’68 paranoid sci-fi saga “The Invaders.” Watching the shows that he created today, one can actually see the ideas and conceits that Cohen would embrace throughout his career—especially in the mixing of standard genre tropes with sly commentary about what is going on the real world, including the blacklist and the Red Scare—coming together in distinctive ways that set them apart from a lot of what was going on in television at that time.

He then began to make the move into writing feature films in 1966 with “Return of the Seven,” a largely forgettable sequel to the hit Western “The Magnificent Seven,” “I Deal in Danger” (1966), a spy film comprised of the first four episodes of another series he co-created, “Blue Light,” and the psycho artist horror film “Scream, Baby, Scream” (1969). Later in 1969, he would come up with what would prove the first great example of his kind of audacious storytelling that would eventually become associated with his name. In “Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting,” on which he cares a co-writing credit with Lorenzo Semple Jr., Cathy (Carol White) arrives from London to live in San Francisco and immediately meets and falls in love with the seemingly nice and clean-cut Kenneth (Scott Hylands). She soon becomes pregnant but then begins to discover that Kenneth is deeply disturbed and elects to not only break up with him but to have an abortion as well. Some time passes and Cathy has now married a rising politician and given birth to their child when Kenneth turns up again with a shocking demand—Cathy must kill her baby to even the scales for having aborted his child. Channeling real-world concerns into a thriller framework, this was a truly startling screenplay (one that almost certainly would not pass muster today) and if the execution did not quite do it justice—although the screenplay required a daring test pilot of a director to do it justice, Mark Robson, fresh off the success of “Valley of the Dolls,” was strictly United material—it certainly promised better things to come in the future.

"Bone"

Like so many screenwriters, Cohen tired of directors messing with his material and finally moved into the director’s chair in 1972 with the bizarre dark comedy, “Bone.” As the film begins, Beverly Hills couple Bernadette (Joyce Van Patten) and Bill (Andrew Duggan) interrupt their latest round of bickering when they discover a strange man (Yaphet Kotto) on their grounds and invite him in, assuming he is an exterminator. The man, Bone, isn’t and takes the two hostage but soon discovers that his captives are not as rich as they appear to be. Nevertheless, he sends Bill to the bank to get more money and threatens to do great harm to Bernadette if he doesn’t return. While in line, Bill gets distracted by a sexy young woman (Jeannie Berlin) and decides to abandon his wife. While all this is going on, Bernadette gets increasingly drunk, seduces her captor and launches a plan for them to murder Bill and collect his insurance money. Making the most of what were presumably limited resources, Cohen devised an ingenious work that tackled racial, sexual, and class concerns in a manner that pulled no punches and got great performances from his cast to boot. Although closer in tone to something like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff?” than anything else, the film ended up being sold more along the lines of a straightforward exploitation movie—one wonders what the typical grindhouse crowd must have thought when they encountered this instead of the usual junk that they were presumably expecting.

Cohen was then contacted by Sammy Davis Jr., who wanted to do a film where he was the central character for a change, and the idea of doing a contemporary version of the Warner Brothers gangster films of the Thirties came up. When Davis couldn’t pay for the script for “Black Caesar” (1973) due to tax trouble, Cohen ended up selling it to American-International Pictures and wound up directing the film as well with Fred “The Hammer” Williamson in the lead. Charting the rise and fall of Tommy Gibbs (Williamson), who begins as a kid struggling to survive on the streets of Harlem, becomes the head of the black crime syndicate and wages a war against his enemies that leads to his downfall, the film was fairly conventional in its structure, Cohen added any number of twists that are still startling to observe today—in perhaps the most infamous bit, the adult Tommy gets the drop on the racist cop who beat him as a child when he was doing shoeshines on the street, smears the guy’s face with shoe polish and forces him to sing before beating him to death with a shine box. These wild bits, coupled with Williamson’s undeniable screen charisma and a driving soundtrack by James Brown, helped make the film a hit and AIP clamored for a sequel despite the fact the central character had definitively died. 

Needless to say, that didn’t stop Cohen and by the end of 1973, he had “Hell Up in Harlem” in theaters with Williamson again in the lead. Like most rushed sequels, this is a relatively undistinguished programmer but it does contain one magnificently inspired sequence in which Tommy chases an attacker through the streets of New York that seems to end when his quarry eludes him and boards a plane taking off for Los Angeles. That doesn’t stop Tommy—he boards the next flight to L.A., spends the next few hours flying out and lands just in time to finish things up at the baggage claim at LAX.

"It's Alive"

Not wanting to be pigeonholed solely as a blaxploitation filmmaker, Cohen made his shift to the horror genre where he would achieve his greatest fame. His first effort there, and one of his most famous films, was “It’s Alive” (1974), in which he took one of the squirmier premises in screen history—a woman gives birth to a monstrously deformed baby that slaughters anyone unlucky enough to cross its path—and embroidered upon it with a narrative that managed to make its so-called monster somehow sympathetic in the manner of Frankenstein’s Monster, presented some extremely pointed commentary regarding the pharmaceutical industry (who devised the pills the mother took that presumably caused the mutation and who need the child killed in order to cover up their culpability) and included moments of jet-black humor as well as well as impressive contributions from makeup maestro Rick Baker and famed composer Bernard Herrmann. Completed in 1974, the film was released by a regime at Warner Brothers that did not get it and thus the film only received a limited release. Three years later, the film was re-released with an inspired new ad campaign (“There is only one thing wrong with the Davis baby. It’s alive.”) and became a box-office hit that would inspired two Cohen-directed sequels, “It Lives Again” (1977) and “It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive” (1987) and a 2009 remake that was so bad that Cohen claimed that the head of the studio that made it actually apologized to him for it.

From this point, Cohen embarked on a series of wildly ambitious films (especially considering the low budgets that he was working on) that continued to join together familiar genre tropes with increasingly pointed social satire and commentary. In “God Told Me To” (1976), he tackled religion with a story of a New York cop (Tony Lo Bianco) trying to solve a rash of bizarre violent crimes perpetrated by people who claim that God told them to kill and stumbles upon a cult whose leader (Richard Lynch) inspires some startling revelations about his own past and possible connection to the increasingly bizarre happenings. “Q-The Winged Serpent” (1982) involves a giant flying serpent that is flying around decapitating New Yorkers and a small-time crook (Michael Moriarty) who happens to discover the beast’s hiding place and tries to trade that information to the police in exchange for a big payday. “The Stuff” (1985) was a broad satire target crass commercialism and corporate indifference in telling the tale of a brand new dessert treat, known as The Stuff, that sweeps the country and turns those who eat it into addicts. An industrial spy (Moriarty) hired by the now-struggling ice cream industry investigates and it turns out that the Stuff is a living parasitic organism that is essentially eating the very same people who are eating it—a minor fact that those selling the substance seem blithely unconcerned with in their quest for profits. In “The Ambulance” (1990), a comic book artist (Eric Roberts) investigates the disappearance of a woman he just met—after collapsing on the street, she was picked up by an ambulance but never made it to any hospital—and uncovers the expected mad and elaborate conspiracy.

Among genre movie fans, the films that I have just cited, with the possible exception of “The Ambulance,” are justly famous, not only for the films themselves (which expertly blend the comedy and horror genres with style and ease) but for the stories regarding their productions. In “God Told Me To,” there is a scene in which someone dressed as a policeman begins to shoot up New York’s St. Patricks’s Day parade. Considering the number of elements that would be occurring, there was no way that he could possibly get the required permits to film during the actual parade and recreating it would cost far too much money. Instead, he just took his actor—a then-unknown Andy Kaufman, just to add to the weirdness—and stuck him into the parade and filmed without any permits. As for “Q,” that film came about when Cohen was fired from another movie that he was directing, a big-budget adaptation of the pulp classic “I, the Jury” and decided to conceive another movie to do instead—not only did “Q” beat “I, the Jury” into theaters, it cost only a fraction of that film’s budget and wound up being a bigger hit to boot.

"Full Moon High"

Although these horror/satire hybrids would be the films that he would become most associated with, Cohen would occasionally change things up with unexpected forays into different types of filmmaking. “The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover” (1977) was an ambitious biopic that centered on the 40-year career of the former FBI director (Broderick Crawford) but which also served as a corrosive look American history during that time. Although the budget limitations are a little more obvious this time around, the film hit more than it missed. “Full Moon High” (1981) was a sweet-natured comedy in which Adam Arkin plays a teenager in 1959 who is bitten by a werewolf while on a trip to Romania—rendered ageless by this attack in addition to the usual side effects, he returns to his old high school 20 years later to reenroll, this time posing as his son. Although it had the misfortune to come out in the midst of a mini-glut of werewolf movies (that included “The Howling,” “An American Werewolf in London” and “Wolfen”) and disappear from view, it remains a charming work that suggests what the later “Teen Wolf” might have been like if it was actually good. 

Cohen then returned to his early thriller roots with two 1984 films that he shot back-to-back. In “Special Effects,” Eric Bogosian plays a filmmaker driven mad by a massive flop who accidentally films himself murdering a one-night stand (Zoe Lund). After discovering a lookalike (also Lund), he elects to make a movie about the dead woman utilizing that footage but when it gets destroyed, he becomes convinced that he needs to recreate it. In “Perfect Strangers,” a Mob hitman (Brad Rijin) discovers that a young, pre-verbal boy has seen him committing a murder and is ordered to kill the kid but before he can, he finds himself getting into a relationship with the boy’s mother (Anne Carlisle). “Wicked Stepmother” (1989) was another overt comedy but one perhaps better known for its own oddball behind-the-scenes story—after filming for a couple of weeks in the title role, star Bette Davis suddenly left the production  and rather than shut everything down, Cohen rewrote things so that her character would suddenly change her appearance so that the rest of the part could now be played by Barbara Carrera.

Although it would become harder over time for Cohen the director to get work—especially since the studios were now specializing in expensive versions of the B-movies that he specialized in—he still found work as a screenwriter and his name turned up on the screenplays for such films as “Best Seller” (1987). “Maniac Cop” (1988), “Body Snatchers” (1993,” “Guilty as Sin” (1993), and “Cellular” (2004). Of his work as a pure screenwriter during that time, his best-known project is probably the 2003 hit “Phone Booth,” a thriller in which a fast-talking publicist (Colin Farrell) with a messy personal and professional life impulsively answers a call at the last phone booth in New York and finds himself targeted by an unseen sniper who threatens to kill him if he attempts to leave. Cohen originally pitched the basic idea for the film to no less than Alfred Hitchcock but it was abandoned when they could not conceive of why the guy would have to remain in the phone booth. 

Cohen’s final film as a director was “Original Gangstas,” an entertaining blaxploitation revival that brought back some of the genre’s greatest icons—including Fred Williamson, Jim Brown, Ron O’Neal, Richard Roundtree and Pam Grier—to kick some young punk ass. However, while he wasn’t doing anything new, his legacy continued to flourish. A member of an informal club of genre filmmakers known as the Masters of Horror, he would go on to direct an episode of the horror anthology series by the same name in 2006. He had reportedly been working with JJ Abrams on a project anthology series for cable television. 

"Q: The Winged Serpent"

His oeuvre returned to the spotlight in 2017 with the release of “King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen,” a wildly entertaining documentary in which Cohen looks back on his crazy career and which features additional testimonials from friends and coworkers as well as a slew of mouth-clips that will make you want to see the full features immediately. Among students of the genre, Cohen’s influence as a storyteller cannot be denied.

Of course, any discussion of the works of Larry Cohen at this site cannot conclude without mentioning an anecdote that Roger and others would often cite. In 1982, “Q” screened at that year’s Cannes Film Festival under the original title “The Winged Serpent.” As those who have seen the film know, the movie is largely dominated by a brilliantly out-of-left-field performance by Michael Moriarty, the kind that might have earned awards had it not been included in a film where giant creatures tear the heads off of topless sunbathers. Anyway, after the screening, there was a luncheon and the following conversation was said to have taken place between Samuel Z. Arkoff, the B-movie legend who produced “Q,” and film critic Rex “Myra Breckenridge” Reed.

REED: Sam! I just saw “The Winged Serpent!” What a surprise! All that dreck—and right in the middle of it, a great Method performance by Michael Moriarty!

ARKOFF: The dreck was my idea.

A great story, of course, but the genius of Cohen—and I do mean “genius”—was that he took concepts that others could have easily reduced to dreck and transformed them into witty, provocative works that pushed all the right buttons. As a filmmaker, Larry Cohen was a true master—not necessarily of horror alone. For film fans who have long sparked to his offbeat output, his passing will prove to be a great loss.   

from All Content https://ift.tt/2HDYZvO

[theconservativebrief]

The internet was supposed to save democracy.

The web, and in particular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, were supposed to make information easier and freer to share, to advantage the citizen at the expense of governments, to provide access to more information and viewpoints and more vibrant debates than residents of democracies had ever experienced before. It was supposed to topple dictators, to build social collaboration, to punish defection and isolation.

Now, in 2018, the familiar techno-utopian pronouncements of the 1990s and ’00s seem not just wrong but like a bad joke.

Citizens enjoying a wealth of new information? Take a look at the depth of the fake news problem.

Citizens being privileged over countries? Hard to take seriously after Russia orchestrated a successful effort to hack the US election.

Individuals gaining power over hierarchy? What about the individuals whose data was obtained without permission by Cambridge Analytica and exploited for political ends?

How could we have gotten this so wrong? To find out, I reached out to a number of men (and, this being the tech industry, the most prominent and enthusiastic voices were men) who, in the early years of the internet, expressed optimistic views of the potential of the web to improve democracy, politics, or just society generally, to ask them if they’ve reevaluated their views in light of recent events. Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, and Jeff Jarvis replied by email; Alec Ross, currently a candidate for governor of Maryland, talked on the phone.

Some have rethought their premises. Others insist their initial views were less utopian than many critics believed, and that they’ve been right all along. Others landed somewhere in the middle. Their responses have been very lightly edited for length and clarity.

Bio: Writer, researcher, professor of journalism and interactive telecommunications at New York University and NYU Shanghai. Author of several books, including Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008), Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2010), and Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream (2015).

What he said then: “The use of social media tools — text messaging, e-mail, photo sharing, social networking, and the like — does not have a single preordained outcome. … The safest characterization of recent quantitative attempts to answer the question, Do digital tools enhance democracy? (such as those by Jacob Groshek and Philip Howard) is that these tools probably do not hurt in the short run and might help in the long run — and that they have the most dramatic effects in states where a public sphere already constrains the actions of the government.” (“The Political Power of Social Media,” Foreign Affairs, 2011)

What he says now (via email):

Dylan Matthews

[Your 2008 book] Here Comes Everybody was full of persuasive arguments that the social web was fundamentally changing dynamics of political organizing, largely for the better. I know you’ve written some on how Facebook has fallen short of that potential, so I’m curious for your thoughts, as well as any reflections on which of your predictions about the web and democracy have and haven’t been borne out so far.

Clay Shirky

I’ve long said the organizational and communal models enabled by the internet are a challenge to 20th-century institutions, not an extension of them. Not only do I still think that’s true, now almost everyone thinks it’s true. (This is a big change — at the beginning of the decade, people were still writing think pieces about how socially and politically unimportant Facebook and Twitter would turn out to be.)

However, I underestimated two things, and both of them make pessimism more warranted. The first is the near-total victory of the “social graph” as the ideal organizational form for social media, to the point that we now use “social media” to mean “media that links you to your friends’ friends,” rather than the broader 2000s use of “media that supports group interaction.”

The second thing I underestimated was the explosive improvement in the effectiveness of behavioral economics and its real-world consequences of making advertising work as advertised.

Taken together, these forces have marginalized the earlier model of the public sphere characterized by voluntary association (which is to say a public sphere that followed [Jürgen] Habermas’s conception), rather than as a more loosely knit fabric for viral ideas to flow through.

Here Comes Everybody is about that former model — I just looked in the index, and I mention Facebook only four times in the book, while I wrote about Meetup so much it has its own set of subheadings in the index. Both companies were relatively young at the time, and the book was not focused on them as firms so much as enablers of social patterns, but the social pattern I was most interested in was opt-in, active, and created a sense of membership among its users, as Meetup does, not just connectedness, as Facebook does.

Voluntary associations (groups that know who their members are, roughly, whether organized around veganism or socialism or a shared love of Family Guy) defend themselves against material that comes in from the outside, and they also contain the spread of information they produce. Without that social club as an organizational form, you get an emphasis on the pleasure of shared emotion, and especially outrage, among a large, loosely knit social fabric, which gets privileged over most other kinds of reactions and over almost many forms of collective action.

When you add to that environment the presence of advertising firms that can now finally do what ad firms have long claimed to be able to do, namely to predictably and reliably engender a fairly tailored set of emotional reactions in a narrowly defined target audience, you get, well, today.

Bio: Journalist; professor and director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. Author of What Would Google Do? (2009), Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live (2011), and Geeks Bearing Gifts: Imagining New Futures for News (2014). Creator of Entertainment Weekly, blogger at BuzzMachine.

What he said then: “Today, it occurs to me that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube may be the Gutenberg press of the Middle East, tools like this that enable people to speak, share, and gather. Without those tools, could revolutions occur? Of course, curmudgeons, they could. Without people and their passion, could revolutions occur? Of course not, curmudgeons. But why are these revolutions occurring now? No, curmudgeons, we’ll never be able to answer that question.

“But it does matter that the revolutionaries of the Middle East use — indeed, depend upon — these social tools and the net. That is the reason why we must protect them, for by doing so we protect the public and its freedoms. If you follow [Malcolm] Gladwell, et. al., and believe that the social tools are merely toys and trifles, then what does it matter if they are shut down? That is why the curmudgeons’ debate with themselves matters: because it could do harm; it could result in dismissing the tools of publicness just when we most need to safeguard them.” (“Gutenberg of Arabia,” BuzzMachine, 2011)

“Dictators and politicians, media moguls and marketers try to tell us what to think and say. But now, in a truly public society, they must listen to what we say, whether we’re using Twitter to complain about a product or Facebook to organize a protest. If they are to prosper, these institutions must learn to deal with us at eye-level, with respect for us as individuals and for the power we can now wield as groups — as publics. If they do not, they may be replaced by entrepreneurs or insurgents, good or bad.” (Public Parts, 2011)

What he says now (via email):

Dylan Matthews

Your book Public Parts begins with a long interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, where you seem to share a philosophy centered around the value of “publicness” and overratedness of privacy with him. Have you reevaluated that philosophy in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal? Do you think Facebook has gone too far in data sharing? Have you adjusted your view of Zuckerberg?

Jeff Jarvis

I share with Zuckerberg a belief that a connected world can be a better world. I do not think that Cambridge Analytica itself negates that view. Do you?

Does Facebook “go too far in data sharing”? The API that allowed a researcher to take the public data of friends of friends was disabled shortly after it was used (and note this was a feature that was used by many media and marketing companies as well). Note also that Facebook does not — contrary to frequent talk-show assertion — share or sell data to advertisers. It, like Google — and like news media in the rare instances when we are smart enough to get our own first-party data — shares the fruits of that information with advertisers in terms of better targeting and ad effectiveness.

I want to be careful about not overreacting to the 2014 violation of Facebook’s terms of service by one researcher who then worked with one nefarious company. For I believe the future of news media, and I do hope we have one, is to abandon our mass-media ways, treating everyone alike and underserving countless communities in society — and bring people relevance and value as individuals and members of communities.

That means we need to know people as individuals; we need to have information — or to use what is becoming the scare term, data — about them. If we go overboard in forbidding the collection and use of that information, I fear that we will cut off our nose to spite our face and cut off a critical strategy for a sustainable future of news and journalism.

Have I adjusted my view of Zuckerberg? I’ve adjusted my view of the net to this extent: I was and remain an optimist. I was rather a dogmatist about the value of openness. I still value openness. But as Twitter, Blogger, and Medium co-founder Ev Williams said at [South by Southwest] recently, he and we did not account for the extent of the bad behavior that would follow. These companies accounted and compensated for dark-hat SEO, spam, and other economically motivated behavior. They did not see the extent of the actions of political bad actors and trolls who would destroy for the sake of destruction.

Note well now that Facebook is hiring 20,000 people to combat that bad behavior on its platform, while, for the sake of apples-to-pears comparison only, the US now employs fewer than 30,000 journalists on daily newspapers. What does that say about society’s problems and priorities? We soon might be investing more in detecting and banning bad behavior than we do in reporting the truth.

Do I blame Zuckerberg or Facebook or that? No. I say we have a problem as a society that we need to work on as we negotiate new norms around our new, connected reality.

Bio: Philosopher, researcher, and freelance writer on technology and society. Author of numerous books, including Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web (2002), Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (2007), and Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room (2011).

What he said then: “The Web’s architecture itself is fundamentally moral. … The Web is not the messiah dressed in cables and bits. It does not signal the apocalypse. It does not even make us all millionaires. But it is also more than merely another new technology. … It’s a world we build simply by using it, and what is of worth stays and adds to the Web’s overall worth.” (Small Pieces Loosely Joined, 2002)

“I think it’s essential that there be people keeping people like me in line, and reminding us that big business has reemerged on the internet. In fact, it’s conceivable that large corporations are going to sink the internet, and that even though there are new voices being heard, say, through the blogosphere, the biggest sites on the blogosphere are either very traditional media companies or they’re people who are now playing the basic role of very big media companies.

“And so the argument that it hasn’t changed that much I think needs to be considered. And yet I look around and I see how fundamentally transformed — often in ways that we forget, because we’re living in the midst of this — how fundamentally transformed so many aspects of our lives are.

“It seems to me empirically true that we’re dealing with a transformative, exceptional technology that holds open utopian possibilities.” (Interview with ABC Radio Australia, 2012)

What he says now (via email):

Dylan Matthews

Small Pieces Loosely Joined was one of the first books I read to champion the web’s potential to improve political discourse, and I know you’ve written some on how Facebook has fallen short of that potential. I’m curious for your thoughts, as well as any reflections on which of your predictions about the web and democracy have and haven’t been borne out so far.

David Weinberger

The net is certainly more open to systematic and systemic attack than some early web optimists like me thought. It also centralized itself around key commercial providers in ways that I’d hoped and predicted it wouldn’t.

It’s a tragedy that while the web connects pages via an open protocol, the connections among people are managed by closed, for-profit corporations. A lot of our political problems come from that: The interests of those corporations and of its users and citizens are not always aligned. That’s bad.

Within the internet ecosystem, I feel my tiny role is to be one of the people who occasionally interrupt the important discussion of the failings of the net to say, “Okay, but we should also sometimes remember just how much the net has positively transformed politics as well.”

That’s not what we need to be focusing on right now because we’re facing issues that threaten democracy itself. Nevertheless, we should be trying to preserve the good the net has done as we work to mitigate its harm to our political system.

We would scream and cry if we were forced back into the old political information ecosystem: 22 minutes of nightly news, mimeographed (look it up) one-pagers on a handful of issues that you could pick up at your campaign headquarters, a range of opinions in the mainstream media (which was pretty much the only media) that range from moderate left to moderate right, and the marginalization of virtually all voices that didn’t issue from white men in suits.

We are far more engaged, far more politically informed (and, yes, far more misinformed, alas). Yes, we form “echo chambers,” but we are also are more aware than ever of the diversity of opinions around us. Furthermore, and this is a looong conversation, talking with like-minded people is how we make sense, collectively and collaboratively, of what’s going on. It’s also how people form political movements.

The web excited many of us because we could talk about what mattered to us and do so in our own voice. We sound like ourselves on the web. That has helped politicians sound more like humans. Of course, it also allows trumpeting, racist narcissists to sound like themselves too.

Since many early web enthusiasts like me felt emboldened by the fact that what we liked about the web was baked into the internet’s very architecture, it is particularly disappointing — horrifying, actually — to see that architecture get turned against the values we hoped it would support.

When addressed with nation-scale resources, the internet enables perfect surveillance. The ability for anyone to speak on any topic without having to ask permission also enables bots to pepper us with their lies and hatred. The anonymity that is the default on the net, a property that is liberating for the vulnerable and oppressed, also lets hackers, cowards, and frauds demean our conversations and erode our trust.

I have hope, though. Our interactions with the internet are mediated by applications, and applications can be adjusted so that they serve us better. I’m not saying it’s easy, but it is possible.

Bio: “One of America’s leading experts on innovation.” Former senior adviser on innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; author of The Industries of the Future. Current candidate for governor of Maryland.

What he said: “Dictatorships are now more vulnerable than they have ever been before, in part — but not entirely — because of the devolution of power from the nation state to the individual. … One thesis statement I want to emphasize is how networks disrupt the exercise of power. They devolve power from the nation-state, from governments and large institutions to individuals and small institutions.

“The overarching pattern is the redistribution of power from governments and large institutions to people and small institutions. … The Che Guevara of the 21st century is the network.” (Remarks at the Guardian’s Activate summit, 2011)

“These technologies can be used against citizens and they frequently are, to deadly effect. However, this does not reverse the irreversible dynamic of connection technologies putting power in the hands of citizens and networks of citizens at the expense of hierarchies, including the state.” (Interview with Huffington Post, 2013)

What he says now (via phone interview):

Dylan Matthews

You’ve expressed a lot of optimism about the potential for social networks and online networks more generally to undermine dictatorships, empower citizens, and so on. Have your views on this evolved at all in the wake of the 2016 election, revelations about Facebook, etc.?

Alec Ross

Look, my views on this haven’t changed at all. I’ve never held the view that technology — what I believe is that technology can disrupt the power of hierarchies at the expense of citizen networks. I believe that to be true. I think a lot of people made a mistake by lumping it into democracy specifically. I always think the technology can be used for closed theocracies. The technology itself is value-neutral and inanimate.

In the case of Russia using Facebook as well as it did, [social media] took a big hierarchy like the United States and its democratic institutions and undermined it, even though it was in a position of asymmetrical disadvantage. It can advantage the upstart against the incumbent, and in the case of Russia versus the United States, that’s Russia.

Some people have falsely characterized my views as utopian. My views have never been utopian or dystopian. Ideas are like technology: They can fuel a city or destroy. Whether it’s used for good or ill depends on the people using it.

Dylan Matthews

A lot of people would look at what happened with Cambridge Analytica and dispute that that constituted the advantaging of citizens over governments. It was a firm with rich political backers exploiting average citizens’ data without permission, a case of Facebook and social media being used to enhance corporate power and the power of political elites, not citizen power.

Alec Ross

I disagree. Cambridge Analytica — how long has it existed? Not very long, right? It’s this very little organization. What was undermined was the American election. It was undermined by this relatively small upstart political firm.

So where I think what was really destroyed was the election. What they did is they used their tools and their targeting to basically create an insurgent army of unwitting American voters. I guess that’s my view on it. You conflated corporate power and the power of the state. I wouldn’t conflate those two. I think the power of the state is made considerably more vulnerable by exposure to technologies. I don’t think the same holds true in reference to corporate power.

Dylan Matthews

Facebook is being used to perpetrate a genocide against Muslim people in Myanmar, with the tacit approval of the country’s government. How does that fit into your theory?

Alec Ross

From my standpoint, it’s being used in the same way in which Hutu radio was used to foment a genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s. The difference between social media being used to foment hate today versus the 1990s is that it’s inherently more collaborative as opposed to something like radio where it’s one-way. Here you can get lots of different people participating.

Again, I’m cold-blooded about this. If you asked me, if it were up to you, would all of our smartphones go dead and all social media go dead? If you think it’s a net negative, if you’re at all intellectually honest, you’d say, “If it were up to me I’d push a button and turn it off.”

Am I in favor of that? No. I’m not in favor of all our smartphones and social networks going dark. I’m in favor of exerting increased levels of responsibility, but am I in favor of turning it off? No.

Dylan Matthews

I don’t think many people are saying we should turn off all smartphones and end all social media.

Alec Ross

If you look at the critique coming out of a lot of European capitals and the European academics and the people closing their Facebook accounts, I think there are many saying it’s not worth it.

Dylan Matthews

I hear a lot more criticism of specific networks, like Facebook, than blanket condemnations of the idea of connecting people. Facebook clearly has a different, and arguably more dangerous, ecosystem than, say, Instagram.

Alec Ross

But Instagram is Facebook. Facebook owns it; it’s the same thing.

Dylan Matthews

But it’s a different app, with a different culture.

Alec Ross

It’s a different ecosystem, but do you imagine the data sharing practices are any different?

Dylan Matthews

I suppose not.

Alec Ross

I don’t think there are many competitor social networks. As a practical matter, if you see where most people are congregating, it’s on a small number of platforms. Twitter is drawn into this as much as Facebook is. Name another social media platform.

Dylan Matthews

Do you think there’s any role for the government to play in regulating social media companies to prevent abuses?

Alec Ross

I think there is a reasonable role for government to play — for example, getting platforms to keep from promulgating genocide. That seems pretty reasonable to me. But to be perfectly blunt, I don’t see government as the source of vast expertise in how to regulate the online world, and I think some of the biggest pieces of shit using social media to foment hate come from government.

The president of the United States is a cyberbully. If you look at members of Congress, do you really want them to be the ones setting norms for our online platforms? Most of them would get kicked off if there was much in the way of regulation there. The theory and practice are two different things. I see the government playing a negative role, by and large, in making the internet a more harmonious place.

Dylan Matthews

What about antitrust enforcement? You just said you don’t think Facebook has real competition.

Alec Ross

From an antitrust perspective, less so. If I were a venture capitalist, I’d see there’s a great big market out there of people abandoning Facebook. I wouldn’t attack this from an antitrust perspective, but a market competitiveness perspective. I think the barriers to entry are lower than what the conventional wisdom says.

I think there’s room in the market for new entrants, so I think the corrective is better arrived at by people imaging the social networks they would like that don’t exist right now, than something coming out Trumps’s DOJ.

If you look at what the Trump administration has been willing to politicize, I do not trust his Justice Department.

Dylan Matthews

That sounds to me like a statement that we can’t have any antitrust enforcement at all for the next two and a half years, more if Trump is reelected.

Alec Ross

I know, it sucks. I’m not saying this in a happy way! I’m saying this with the experience of having governed. This isn’t something out of the textbook; this is something out of reality.

The simple fact of the matter is that we have a cyberbully president. You think I trust his Justice Department? Hell no. Does this mean meaningful antitrust can’t be trusted as long as he’s president? Yes. I don’t think his NSC or EPA can be trusted. It’s hard to think about anything coming out of Trump’s administration as anything other than malignant.

Dylan Matthews

You’re running for governor. What role do you think state governments have in fixing the problems the Russian hacking scandal and Cambridge Analytica exposed?

Alec Ross

I think that sunlight is the best disinfectant. There are certain things a governor can do. I think transparency in how election dollars are spent is critically important. If there’s a nickel spent for any kind of issue advocacy or social advocacy, the origin of those dollars should be transparent in real time; it should be disclosed.

Dylan Matthews

Not just candidates but advocacy groups too?

Alec Ross

I mean, a lot of quote-unquote “issue advocacy” is inherently candidate-oriented. I believe in transparency, I really do. If someone’s fighting for a $15 minimum wage and they spew a bunch of information, the origin of the money and the amount of the money should be transparent.

I also think, and I think this will seem almost comically naive, but there are things called libel and slander, and I don’t understand why they’re considered now to be off the books. A lot of what’s being published meets the technical measure of liberal and slander. We need to bring good old-fashioned enforcement on the book of false speech, the whole fake news phenomenon. It’s against the law in terms of what’s on the law; it’s just not enforced.

Dylan Matthews

I’m not a lawyer, but my understanding is that the Supreme Court has sharply limited what can be punished as libel in cases where you can’t prove actual malice and the information is simply false.

Alec Ross

You just hit the right word: malice. If you look at what was the case in the 2016 election, it fits the technical legal definition of malice.

Dylan Matthews

But let’s go back to what you said about mandating disclosure by advocacy groups, which I found extremely alarming. One reason we don’t have laws like that is to prevent harassment and violence against vulnerable people. When Alabama subpoenaed the NAACP’s membership lists, the Supreme Court unanimously blocked it, saying that forcing the group to give up its membership lists violated freedom of assembly. And frankly, if the membership lists had been released, people could have been lynched.

Alec Ross

I think that’s a very reasonable point. I think our problem right now is the exact opposite. Harassment is being promulgated by a set of actors who are willing to spend behind closed doors with zero transparency. It’s a reasonable and convincing point.

The question right now is where is harm actually taking place. In disclosing membership, the details matter. When you talk about disclosure and transparency, what specifically do you mean by that? The name of the organization and the amount? Or the composition of the organization? I will not pretend to have arrived at what I think the right answers to that are. I think we need to be moving in the direction of transparency.

Original Source -> The internet was supposed to save democracy. I asked 4 tech optimists what went wrong.

via The Conservative Brief

[topmixtrends]

EARLY IN THE Manhunt: Unabomber miniseries, which first aired on the Discovery Channel in the summer of 2017, there’s a scene where Jim Fitzgerald (played by Sam Worthington) expresses his sympathy for the argument against modern civilization that Theodore Kaczynski outlined in “Industrial Society and Its Future,” more popularly known as the “Unabomber Manifesto.” Two years after Kaczynski’s arrest, the FBI profiler still has the manifesto kicking around in his brain, still sees the rest of society as “sleepwalking” through life: “Watching TV, eating trash, working to become something for someone else,” he says. “And nobody does anything about it. Nobody even tries. Nobody except for Ted.” “Yeah, but Fitz,” his colleague reminds him, “he’s the Unabomber.”

Obviously, you don’t get Discovery to commit to an eight-hour docudrama by glorifying terrorism, and the miniseries is careful to present Kaczynski as a very bad man whose bombings maimed and killed several victims, and who was brought down by the indefatigable efforts of a massive FBI task force — or, more specifically, one FBI profiler who refused to play along while his superiors chased one false lead after another and was ultimately able to convince everyone that applying “forensic linguistics” to the manifesto was the key to uncovering the identity Kaczynski had hidden for 17 years.

At the same time, however, the show heavily romanticizes Kaczynski, most noticeably in the relationship it creates between him and Fitzgerald. (For clarity’s sake, let’s call the characters, as the show does, “Ted” and “Fitz.”) In real life, the two men never met, were only ever in the same room once, during Kaczynski’s sentencing in 1998. Manhunt: Unabomber, though, thrusts them together in a series of prison encounters straight from the Hannibal Lecter playbook. As noted earlier, Fitz’s prolonged examination of the manifesto has led him to identify deeply with the Unabomber’s message, so when he tells Ted, “I want you to change the world; I want you to start a revolution,” it’s not entirely clear whether he’s just following his bosses’ instructions to convince a terrorist to plead guilty so he won’t be able to use the trial as a platform to continue attacking the American way of life.

Yet because Kaczynski is a real-life evil genius, we can’t be allowed to admire him, not even in the ironic way audiences are allowed to admire Hannibal Lecter. Instead, the miniseries does everything it can to make us feel sorry for Ted. “There’s something so tragic about him, isn’t there?” Fitz’s love interest says shortly after reading the manifesto for the first time. “A guy who could write like that, think like that […] so much insight and passion. And yet his life turned out in such a way he thinks the only way he can get people to hear what he has to say is by blowing people up.”

The sixth episode of the miniseries is fully dedicated to this sympathetic approach. Set shortly after the publication of the manifesto in the Washington Post, it spends the day with Ted (played by Paul Bettany) as he bicycles from his remote cabin into nearby Lincoln, Montana, to see if the local library has gotten the paper yet. They have, but there’s already a waiting list, and the town librarian gushes about how the Unabomber is “obviously very well-educated, very intelligent. […] A lot of what he says makes sense to me.”

Ted is also writing a letter to his brother, David, which prompts him to reflect on his life. It starts with the anger and frustration he felt when his best friend in middle school discovered girls, to which he reacts by sending the boy a particularly volatile piece of homemade flash paper, a clear prototype of the bombs he would build as an adult. From there, Ted gains early admission to Harvard at the age of 16, and in his sophomore year is selected as a test subject in an experiment conducted by the prestigious psychologist Henry Murray. The process begins harmlessly enough, with a series of interviews in which Murray draws out young Ted’s political and philosophical beliefs, which already show hints of the anti-industrial ethos of the manifesto. But then Ted is invited into a lab room where he’s strapped to a chair in front of a movie screen, unable even to turn his head away as he’s forced to watch films of those conversations and is subjected to humiliation and abuse.

In voice-over, Ted tells his brother about all this, suggesting the experiments were part of the infamous Project MKUltra, a CIA research program designed to develop “mind control” techniques to extract information from interrogation subjects by breaking them down psychologically. (Murray’s Harvard experiments are real, and MKUltra is real; the link between the two, which has been asserted by others, remains inconclusive — although Murray definitely worked with the CIA’s forerunners in the OSS.) “Murray spent a year seducing me and then spent two years breaking me, two years,” Ted’s narration continues, as he prepares to make his way back to his cabin after a heartfelt conversation with the librarian’s teenage son about how being different from other kids is a good thing. “Why’d I keep going back? To prove to them that they can strap me into an electric chair, but I will never give in. They will never break me. And they didn’t. I didn’t break. They did not break me.”

The show’s creators, however, seem at least partially convinced he was broken. Now that his demands to have “Industrial Society and Its Future” published have been met, Ted could fulfill his end of the bargain — to stop the bombings. “But every time my mind drifts,” he writes later that night, “it goes back to that room in Harvard. Whenever I close my eyes, I’m there, strapped to that chair, helpless, impotent, stripped of all respect. And I feel so much anger. I’ve been living on anger my whole life.”

Sorting through his feelings, Ted wonders if the things he’s done are rooted in his frustration at having been betrayed by the parents who sent him to Harvard ill-equipped to deal with the pressures of adult life, at being a 53-year-old virgin, at never being able to fall in love and start a normal family like everybody else. “My life wasn’t supposed to go like this,” he laments. “My God, David, […] it wasn’t supposed to go like this.” The criminal mastermind is revealed to be a scared, confused man-child — one who will eventually accept a guilty plea only because the alternative is to be branded by his own defense attorney as mentally unstable.

In his 2013 essay “Dark Ecology,” reprinted in the collection Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays, English environmental activist and philosopher Paul Kingsnorth describes his initial encounter with Kaczynski’s “sparse” prose, the manifesto’s “logical and unsentimental” arguments, and his hope that the text wouldn’t prove too persuasive. “If I do end up agreeing with him,” Kingsnorth confesses, “and with other such critics I have been exploring recently, such as Jacques Ellul and D. H. Lawrence and C. S. Lewis and Ivan Ilich, I am going to have to change my life in quite profound ways.” Even though Kingsnorth had already begun to simplify his life radically, moving his family to the Irish countryside, “to grow our own food and compost our own shit and educate our own children and make our own jam and take responsibility for our own actions” (as he writes in another essay), he was still deeply embedded in the modern world — he was writing these essays, for example, on a laptop computer with a broadband connection. As much as he wants to make a clean break, he admits, “I can’t work out where to jump, or what to land on, or whether you can ever get away by jumping.”

Kingsnorth discusses the motivations for his partial break from society throughout Confessions, the experiences and realizations that prompted him to describe himself as a “recovering environmentalist.” Though he first got involved with environmental activism because of his profound feeling for the natural world, he is repelled by the contemporary movement’s emphasis on sustainability. “What does this curious, plastic word mean?” he asks.

It does not mean defending the non-human world from the ever-expanding empire of Homo sapiens sapiens, though some of its adherents like to pretend it does, even to themselves. It means sustaining human civilization at the comfort level that the world’s rich people — us — feel is their right, without destroying the “natural capital” or the “resource base” that is needed to do so.

Sustainability-based environmentalism tells us that we don’t need to radically change our way of life, and we certainly don’t need to reduce our consumption. We just need to tweak the means of production a little bit, exploit the resources of the natural world a bit more responsibly, and we should be able to handle a world population that grows to eight or nine or even 10 billion, no problem.

Kingsnorth briefly considers the connections between this “neo-environmentalist” mindset and the rise of neoliberalism, an economic relationship at the heart of Canadian environmentalist and political scientist Peter Dauvergne’s new book Environmentalism of the Rich (2017). Dauvergne examines the ways large businesses do just enough to be able to tout themselves as environmentally responsible, while “efficiency gains and savings from corporate sustainability are going straight back into churning out more nondurable and disposable products, building more big-box stores and producing more billionaires.” As he sees it, “A politics of global sustainability will not be possible without a world economy of less waste, less resource exploitation, and less biological disruption — and thus less greenhouse gases, deforestation, overfishing, biodiversity loss, desertification, and pollution.”

But Dauvergne doesn’t offer practical advice on how to kick-start that idealized world economy, just a hopeful wish for “a spirit of outrage at the world order” that will lead us to spurn our culture of conspicuous consumption. So how are we supposed to move from the neo-environmentalist world where we just get more efficient at maintaining our current standard of living and destroy the planet a little less rapidly to a world where we’re not only consuming fewer natural resources but are actually happy doing so?

For Kaczynski, the solution was logical and unsentimental. “Technology has gotten the human race into a fix from which there is not likely to be any easy escape,” he wrote. “To relieve the pressure on nature it is not necessary to create a special kind of social system, it is only necessary to get rid of industrial society.” Not to improve it, but to “dump the whole stinking system” and start over with no social structure more complex than small villages. Only then, he argued, could the humans who survived the collapse of the modern world find true freedom, rather than slaving away their entire lives to prop up the system. Mind you, Kaczynski’s vision of freedom was essentially limited to “the power to control the circumstances of one’s own life” by coming up with our own means of food, shelter, and self-defense.

Popular memory tends to focus on the “technology bad”/“nature good” aspects of Kaczynski’s message, making it easy to imagine him as a misguided (or even misunderstood, if you’re feeling particularly sympathetic) social critic. Nearly a quarter-century after the manifesto’s publication, you can still get a quick laugh whenever news breaks of some fresh technological development, like the release of the iPhone X, by declaring, “The Unabomber had a point.” Even Manhunt: Unabomber goes out of its way to reinforce that point of view with Fitz’s internalization of the manifesto. “I know you’re not insane,” he assures Ted. “Every time I stop at a red light, or I follow the arrows at IKEA, or I sit and I wait and listen for the modem to dial up, I can see the systems that control our lives and I feel my freedom being hemmed in and I hate it.”

When you actually read “Industrial Society and Its Future,” though, it becomes harder to embrace Kaczynski. You can’t count on him as a champion of racial equality or social justice, because he explicitly tells you he doesn’t care about these things — in fact, working to achieve them only gets in the way of the real goal of smashing industrial society to ruins. He hates conservatives, who “whine about the decay of traditional values, yet […] enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth,” but he really, really hates “leftists,” whom he sees as more interested in reconfiguring the system to their advantage rather than creating a genuine alternative to society. This is especially true, he claims, of academics, “who have secure employment with comfortable salaries, and the majority of whom are heterosexual white males from middle to upper-class families” — though this claim might just be the former math professor’s own bugaboos coming to the surface.

The vision Kaczynski hammered out at his typewriter, alone in the wilderness of Montana, is, ultimately, an apocalyptic one. From the vantage point of the early 1990s, he looked to the future and predicted that “the industrial-technological system will be undergoing severe stresses due to economic and environmental problems,” coupled with a rise in “alienation, rebellion, [and] hostility” throughout the world’s population. “We hope that the stresses through which the system is likely to pass will cause it to break down,” he wrote, “or at least will weaken it sufficiently so that a revolution against it becomes possible.” A revolution that could accelerate the process would definitely be preferable, as far as Kaczynski was concerned, but this wasn’t about, as the mid-20th-century philosopher Eric Voegelin famously put it, “immanentizing the Eschaton” — i.e., deliberately embracing the end of the world to bring about the kingdom of heaven (or even just a really good facsimile) on earth. “We have no illusions about the feasibility of creating a new, ideal form of society,” Kaczynski reminded his readers. “Our goal is only to destroy the existing form of society.”

Roughly 20 years later, Paul Kingsnorth’s prognosis seems to deliberately echo Kaczysnki’s. “Our civilization is starting to break down,” he writes.

We are at the start of an unfolding economic and social collapse that may take decades or centuries to play out — and which is playing out against the background of a planetary ecocide which nobody seems able to prevent. We are not gods, and our machines will not get us off this hook, however clever they are and however much we would like to believe it.

So, where do we go from there? “Is it possible to read the words of someone like Theodore Kaczynski and be convinced by the case he makes, even as you reject what he did with the knowledge?” Kingsnorth asks.

Is it possible to observe the unfolding human attack on nature with horror, be determined to do whatever you can to stop it, and at the same time know that much of it cannot be stopped, whatever you do? Is it possible to see the future as dark and darkening further, to reject false hope and desperate pseudo-optimism without collapsing into despair?

What, specifically, should we do if we’re not prepared, as Kaczynski was, to kick the industrial system when it’s down and destroy it before it can destroy us?

For Kingsnorth, the immediate answer was, as we’ve seen, to “escape from the urban consumer machine” and make a new home for his family in Ireland, fulfilling “a personal duty to live as simply and with as little impact on the rest of nature as I possibly can.” Kingsnorth has also grappled with these questions in his two novels, The Wake (2014) and Beast (2016), presenting a pair of case studies of what it’s like to live in beleaguered retreat from society.

Yet The Wake is not about a man who chooses to withdraw peacefully from a society he has come to despise — although there’s plenty about life in an English village in 1066 that antagonizes Buccmaster of Holland, the novel’s narrator, starting with the stupidity of his neighbors and the sanctimonious control the Catholic Church holds over the territory. Something worse is coming, though, and the omens pile atop one another, from the giant black bird with eyes of fire that appears over Buccmaster’s land to the arrival of Halley’s Comet. Buccmaster’s resentment of authority is so well established that, when his two teenage sons are drafted into a defense force that goes out to meet an attempted invasion by the Norwegian king Harald the Landwaster when they should be home, bringing in the harvest, his fury is already entirely predictable.

His rage grows stronger when they defy him a few weeks later to volunteer for a second campaign, this time against the armies of Guillaume of Normandy, which results in the death of England’s monarch, Harold Godwinson, on the battlefield at Hastings. In Kingsnorth’s imitation of Old English, Buccmaster describes the despair of the days that follow:

there is no one lifan in angland now has not seen all they cnawan tacan from them. there is no man in angland in any part from mierce to northanhymbre to efen us the free socmen of holland has not seen efry thing they cnawan tacan and none of this in their grip. lic the wind what brings down the waet before haerfest there was naht we colde do to stand in the way of such a slege naht but to go out after with sicols and loc at our broc felds and tac what straw and seed we colde …

The Norman conquerors seize his land, and that of the other local socmen (free tenant farmers), by royal decree. When he and some of his neighbors refuse to pay the new, higher tributes, the Normans attack the village, destroying Buccmaster’s farmhouse and murdering his wife. For some time, Buccmaster has been convinced that he was chosen by the ancient hero Wayland the Smith, “the deorc ealdor of all anglisc folc,” who has been speaking to him along these lines:

i is the eald one dweller in the beorgs i walcs the high lands i macs the hwit hors and the hwit man i is forger of wyrd and waepen cweller of cyngs i walcs through deop water to cum to thu

But it’s the destruction of his land that sends Buccmaster fleeing into the wilderness, to the sacred spot where his grandfather took him as a child, the home to England’s pre-Christian gods. There, he begs for their intervention: “[A]ngland is beornan in ingenga fyr thy folcs is bledan their crist has left them lic we saed lic we always saed he wolde.” There is no miraculous sign, of course, but Wayland assures him that the power of the gods is in him: “thine is the bodig thu ceoses the time.” And so, like the Unabomber, Buccmaster decides to live at the margins of the civilized world, dedicating himself — and, eventually, a small band of comrades — to its harassment and, with any luck, its destruction.

The withdrawal of Edward Buckmaster, the protagonist of Beast, to the moors of west England is equally hostile, but not as directly confrontational. “I came here to measure myself against the great emptiness,” he declares, explicitly comparing himself at the outset to St. Cuthbert, the seventh-century monk who retired to an island off the Northumbrian coast to take up a life of solitude:

We head out because the emptiness negates us. We leave the cities and we go to the wild high places to be dissolved and to be small. We live and die at once, the topsoil is washed away, and the rock is exposed and it is not possible to play the games anymore. Now, I am exposed rock. Like Cuthbert, I have been washed clean.

What happens, though, when we strip away the veneer of civilization? For Buckmaster, it brings a foreboding awareness of some dark creature stalking him, and the harder he tries to pin the feeling down, the more disoriented he becomes. Alone with his own thoughts, he begins to reassess humanity’s place in the natural order, our relationship to “the beetles the bacteria the earthworms the centipedes the viruses the mycelium the seeds lying dormant in the soil waiting for us to burn ourselves out.” At first, it is a terrifying vision:

I was a stranger here I could see it now I was a foreigner an invader an immigrant and they were turning on me. […] This was their world and they would take it back they would take it back from me soon there would be no lane here no church no paths I could see the future and in it was nothing but trees nothing but the things living in the trees and in the soil a great silent green orchestra spread across the whole of the world. I had walked out too far. I had walked to this lonely place and now I was surrounded and they would eat me.

Instead of encountering a folkloric hero urging him to lash out at his oppressors, Buckmaster must face a “huge black cat with yellow eyes” that goads him down a path to a more hallucinatory existential confrontation. We soon come to realize that, just as Ted describes in Manhunt: Unabomber, Buckmaster has been living on anger his whole life. Yet because he chooses to remove himself from a world that infuriates him, channeling all his rage into a solitary conflict, Edward Buckmaster is able to move beyond that anger in a way Buccmaster of Holland, so eager to lash out at anyone he sees as an enemy of “triewe angland,” cannot — the same way that Theodore Kaczynski, fixated on ideologically symbolic and physically real revenge against the industrial developers encroaching upon his Montana retreat, could not.

Facing a world that seemed equally stacked against him, the prophet Elijah also fled into the wilderness, where the Lord soon tracked him down, demanding, “What doest thou here, Elijah?” Elijah complained about how hard his life had become now that “the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.” Unimpressed, God subjected Elijah to a massive display of wind, earthquake, and fire, then spoke to him in “a still, small voice,” repeating: “What doest thou here?” Failing to take the hint, Elijah offered the exact same excuses, at which point the Lord lost patience and gave Elijah a specific set of instructions about who he should meet with and what he should tell them. In other words, just when Elijah thinks he’s done with activism, God tells him to get up off his ass and start organizing.

Maybe Kingsnorth felt a similar call in 2009, when, along with Dougald Hine, he co-wrote the “Uncivilization” manifesto, in which they announced the formation of the Dark Mountain Project. Looking out at the world, the two men saw “an empire corroding from within […] a people who believed, for a long time, that their actions did not have consequences,” and they wondered “how that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth.” As they put it:

If we are indeed teetering on the edge of a massive change in how we live, in how human society itself is constructed, and in how we relate to the rest of the world, then we were led to this point by the stories we have told ourselves — above all, by the story of civilization.

The goal, then, would be “to challenge the stories that underpin our civilization” by giving serious creative consideration to a world where human civilization is no longer the central fixture but, as in Edward Buckmaster’s vision, simply one part of a larger ecosystem. Kingsnorth and Hine soon found other writers and artists eager to explore the ramifications of an “Uncivilized” worldview — enough to support an ongoing series of Dark Mountain anthologies, featuring personal essays, short stories, interviews, and photography.

Some of the selections in Walking on Lava (2017), a “greatest hits” compilation recently published by Chelsea Green, have an overtly apocalyptic tone, invoking mythological models like the Kali Yuga or the descent of the Sumerian goddess Inanna into the underworld. Survivalist Dmitry Orlov offers his perspective on the modern world’s imminent collapse:

[T]he best case scenario is it happens quickly. There’s a fast die-off, and the ecosystem is saved. […] The worst case scenario is business as usual until the planet can no longer support life.

Other contributors, however, are still able to look at the world around them — and its future — with optimism. Florence Caplow writes about visiting the site of the former Japanese-American internment camp at Manzanar, California, and encountering the remnants of a contemplative garden that had been designed and built by one of the prisoners, an illustration of “the power of the human heart rising up in the middle of darkness.” Vinay Gupta, describing himself as akin to the Kapalika ascetics who carried a skull to remind others of the inevitability of death, similarly invokes “the green shoots of a new culture which ache to climb the wreckage” of industrial capitalism.

“The end of the world as we know it,” Kingsnorth and Hine remind readers at the end of their manifesto, “is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we shall find the hope beyond hope, the paths that lead to the unknown world ahead of us.” Community is crucial to that vision — and here it may be worth remembering that Theodore Kazcysnki also used the first-person plural in “Industrial Society and Its Future.” But the “we” of the so-called “Freedom Club” was a lie — there was never anyone other than Kazcynski involved in his campaign of terror. Though, like any well-known incarcerated killer, Kazcynski has his fans and pen pals, few seem willing to continue the war against modern civilization in his name. Meanwhile, in addition to publishing the Dark Mountain anthologies, Kingsnorth and his allies have been coming together at three-day “Uncivilization Festivals,” recently rebranded as “Base Camps,” along with other smaller gatherings across Britain. It’s possible to see a future in the Dark Mountain movement, though what others will make of Kingsnorth’s legacy — or, for that matter, how Kingsnorth will continue to define it — remains to be seen.

But there is a precedent to which we can look. For Elijah overcame his crisis of faith, resuming his life of prophetic activism until the Lord summoned him to heaven. Before he left, though, Elijah passed his mantle on to his protégé, Elisha — whose first miracle upon returning to his comrades in Jericho was to heal the polluted waters of a local spring. Call it a small act of environmental reclamation, perhaps; helpful to the members of the local community but nowhere near enough to save the world. Then again, as Kingsnorth warns us, “there is no saving the world,” not anymore, “and the ones who say there is are the ones you need to save it from.”

¤

Ron Hogan helped create the literary internet by launching Beatrice.com in 1995. He is an active presence in New York City’s literary scene, hosting and curating events such as Lady Jane’s Salon, the first monthly reading series dedicated to romance fiction.

The post Waiting for the End of the World appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2zeEHSF

[mrandyzavala]

An Open Letter to Vancouver Park Board Members

Dear Park Board Members,

I know you've gotten a lot of feedback over your recent decision about Vancouver Aquarium. As someone who lives on the opposite end of the continent, who am I to pitch in another voice? Well, I had a very successful career as a marine mammal trainer for the past 12 years, and just recently left to pursue another passion.  However, I am still very connected to the marine mammal community. 

There is something really, really special about that place.  I've only been once, but it is - in my opinion - one of the best aquariums in all aspects: research, animal wellness, habitat design, conservation messaging, insanely advanced and open-minded veterinary care, rescue/rehabilitation...and it doesn't hurt that it's in one of the most beautiful places on the planet.  Please believe me when I tell you that Vancouver Aquarium lives its conservation message.

I wanted to better understand who all of you are, because there is no way you'd be on a commission without a pretty impressive background.

You all seem to have huge hearts.  John, you seem like a huge supporter of green and sustainable living.   Casey, you have dedicated your time to helping people in need, like your time volunteering for the Canadian Diabetes Association and promoting an active lifestyle.   Catherine, wow.  A lawyer, an entrepreneur, a warrior for equal rights for all human beings.  Sarah, your work in creating and maintaining green spaces is as impressive as the hotel company you work for, who has a really impressive track record for being environmentally friendly.  Stuart, I love that you not only work with kids with special needs, but that you volunteer your time at (among other places) a hospice.  Michael, your restaurant (wish I could try it...maybe if I ever am lucky enough to live in Vancouver!) sets the bar high for all others in the industry, with an unwavering dedication to sustainable food choices and zero waste.  And Erin, your work in conservation with your eco-friendly spa and special education combined with your academic background in forest genetics is really impressive.

With all that you do to improve not just the city of Vancouver for itself and its residents, but giving so much to human beings who are often over-looked or avoided, I am so surprised at your decision regarding the Vancouver Aquarium.  You decision has effectively signed a death warrant for any cetaceans that need care.  Now they will seek help and receive nothing but an injection of barbiturates, even if they are not critically or terminally ill.

An eight week old Indo-pacific bottlenose dolphin who was separated from her mom in Perth, Australia.  She was euthanized after a couple of days because they could not find her mom, and there was nowhere to rehabilitate her long-term.  Here is the news story

Imagine a white-sided dolphin, entangled in fishing gear in such a way that she hasn't been able to eat in weeks.  She is emaciated, she has infections from the wounds resulting from the fishing lines wrapped around her face, dorsal fin, and in her mouth.  She washes ashore, terrified to be away from her family but has no strength to keep up. 

Her care requires more than a quick tune-up and shove back out to sea (seriously, if only it were that easy...).  Her condition is very poor, but not hopeless.  With several weeks or months of rehabilitative care, she can go back out to her family.  She can continue to raise calves...not just her own, but she will add to the survival success of other young dolphins as well.   A few weeks ago, she would have a chance at living her life before becoming hopelessly entangled in gear left by our own species.  The Vancouver Aquarium was the only facility capable of housing rescued cetaceans long-term.  It is not some "let's catch just get more dolphins but say we are rescuing them" scheme.  The Canadian government decides not only if wild dolphins can go back to the wild, and if so, where they go.

An Atlantic white-sided dolphin calf being euthanized in Connecticut.  Story here

What you guys have done is taken away the only beacon of hope for the amazing variety of cetacea that swim your waters.  Is that what you guys want?  With your combined interest and activity in eco-friendly ventures, how do you rationalize killing dolphins?  Stuart, you wrote, "Together, we focussed on one incredible action. We seized the opportunity to do some positive work for Qila and Aurora also in the name of a long, sorrowful stream of other Cetaceans who didn't want to die." 

Do you know what it is like to hold down an animal struggling, terrified, and watch the life drain from his eyes as euthanasia solution is pushed through his veins?  It is a horrible experience when a companion animal is "put down"; any animal lover (I am assuming you guys are in this group) knows the dread of making the decision to have a vet end your loved one's life.  This is usually decided based on criteria establishing quality of life, which has deteriorated due to terminal illness or injury.  It is offering a dignified, peaceful death to an aging or ill non-human family member.

That is not the case with euthanizing cetaceans on the beach solely because there is no place to rehabilitate them. 

If you wanted Chester to have a chance at life, but not live at Vancouver Aquarium...where then would you want the DFO to send him?  Which facility?

Please consider traveling with first responder teams to a 6 month old dolphin, who is terrified and whistling for her mother, her eyes wide and frantic. She seems healthy and could be brought to a long-term care such as Vancouver Aquarium, but that option has been removed.  There are no long-term care facilities she can go to within a reasonable distance.  So, because she cannot immediately be put back to sea, her life must be ended. Please consider having to restrain this baby (the equivalent to a one year old human toddler) as a vet tries to find a blood vessel in order to sedate her and eventually stop her heart.  You guys should have the experience at least once of looking at an animal who can be saved with long-term care, or an animal who is healthy but dependent on mom (who has died), and struggle as the animal fights for her life.  You are the ones pinning her down.  You are the last souls she sees as her life is ended.  Ended by the Vancouver Park Board.

Or, you can give these animals hope and a chance at living their lives.

So many of you have advanced degrees.  So many of you do so much for other humans and the environment as a whole.  But it doesn't seem any of you have experience or knowledge in marine mammal natural history, wild or otherwise.  It doesn't appear as though any of you have volunteering in a marine mammal stranding center (you really should do it, it's totally insane and heartbreaking but rewarding....and they need all the help they can get.  You would make a really big difference).  It appears as though you've chosen to ignore the 13,000 letters sent to you against the ban.  Why?

How can such a group of educated, accomplished, passionate people decide to ignore so many voices with experience and knowledge that they lack?  I just don't understand. 

Many of you pride yourselves on your leadership skills in your LinkedIn profiles (Casey, Catherine).  Your roles as leaders in a park board means you need to consider evidence that is in contrast with your personal opinions.  You don't agree with holding cetaceans in captivity.  Okay.  Now you don't agree with bringing ANY cetaceans to Stanley Park...which means you disagree with rehabilitating cetaceans in British Columbia.  Which means you are okay with killing any stranded dolphin, porpoise, or whale. 

Levi, a harbor porpoise who was rehabbed for several months at Vancouver Aquarium, was successfully released back to his home.  Is his life not worth this?

John, you were quoted saying you'd prefer that distressed cetaceans were just hauled up on a boat, treated, and set free.  Seriously John, if it were that easy, we wouldn't need marine mammal rescue centers.   But that is the problem.  In both Canada and the U.S., the federal governments have a long list of criteria that need to be met in order to deem an animal releasable.  There are a number of illnesses, injuries, and conditions (e.g. Dependent calves) that cannot be treated on a boat, or in a small hospital pool.  The DFO requires that to rehabilitate a cetacean, they need to have habitats that currently, only Vancouver Aquarium has.   It seems surprising to me that someone with your background would make such a naive comment in light of the scientific evidence you have been given by true marine mammal advocates.  

John, I swear I am not picking on you, but what about your heavy involvement with the Bloedel Conservatory? That place looks INCREDIBLE.  And it has lots of free-flighted parrots.  Parrot species which are extremely endangered in their native lands.  Is it okay to keep these extremely intelligent animals - ones who are consistently and illegally exploited for the pet trade - in captivity?  Is it because each animal at the conservatory was born in a zoological-type facility?  Are any of those birds caught from the wild?  Are parrots a large draw to the conservatory?  Do they contribute meaningfully to the revenue brought in?

Stuart, I know that you are firmly planted in the "anti" captivity camp.  I read several of your most recent blogs, including one in which you posted a letter from Steve Huxter.  You're clearly very concerned about the well-being of cetaceans.  You're disgusted by the drive hunts and thoughtless collection (capture) of whales and dolphins from the wild, as am I.  As are most of us who work or have worked with captive marine mammals.  We have some common ground. But let me tell you something I have learned in my 12 year career: the general public does not care about animals.  Not like you, not like me.  They literally need it slapped in their apathetic (or, occasionally, well-meaning) faces.  Is that my argument for you to suddenly switch positions on this topic of the educational value of cetaceans in human care? No, I'm not trying to insult your intelligence or your passion.  But hear me out: When I worked at Clearwater Marine Aquarium -a rescue and rehabilitation facility in Florida - I worked with this amazing dolphin named Panama (here is a blog all about her, if you're interested). Long story short, she was an older dolphin found near death as a direct result of humans feeding her from their boats and piers.  She received completely inappropriate food and very poor quality fish and fell very, very ill.  The older calf she had did not hunt; he/she had learned to beg for food and that was it.  Panama was rescued, rehabilitated, and deemed unreleasable by the U.S. government.  She was placed at Clearwater Marine Aquarium.  At some point during her illness or stranding, she completely lost her hearing. 

Panama in 2010

Let me tell you something, Stuart.  After I gave my public presentation on the dolphins, it wasn't unheard of for people to come up to me and actually APOLOGIZE for the times they fed wild dolphins.  It was like this bizarre confessional situation, where I was basically answering the standard "how long do they live" and "how smart are they" questions and boom, someone would approach me with a terrified and/or sheepish look on their face and say, "....I fed dolphins from my boat. I had no idea it could do something like this." Your concern regarding the "cycle" of lonely cetaceans at Vancouver Aquarium shows that you're concerned about their mental well-being from a social standpoint.  Trust me when I say that any caretaker worthy of their position and responsibility shares your concern.  I'm offering a different perspective on what Chester and Daisy, and others like them provide.  They give a rare and powerful wake-up call to people who would otherwise literally not think twice about doing something really harmful to a dolphin or porpoise...or generally, the ocean itself. I lived in the mecca of illegal wild dolphin interaction when I worked in the Florida panhandle.  I saw dolphins begging for fish from boats, and even worse, I saw essentially flotillas of jetskiers chase down dolphins on shallow sandbars....including a mother with a very young calf.  The jetskiers were totally happy just to be near dolphins, but had no idea what damage they were causing (or could've caused).  When I approached them, they blew me off, saying if the dolphins wanted to swim away, they could.  I reported them to NOAA, and nothing ever happened.  The same thing kept happening with different groups of people.  I wonder, if they'd seen a calf who was orphaned because his mother was killed by a boat strike, if they would reconsider their actions in a similar situation.

One of the shots I took (from an idled boat) to try to report these people.  The mom and calf are just under the surface

The calf....very, very young.  Probably around a month or two.  Too young to be able to out-maneuver watercraft, which means mom won't leave his side.  They both had to avoid as best as possible these obnoxious people. 

So many of the reasons why marine mammals strand nowadays is because of human-related activity.  Don't you think it's worth exploring an alternative concept of a "conservation-themed" exhibit? Where people can see animals like Chester and Daisy, understand their unique situations, see how well cared for they are, and understand how animals like them wind up in situations where the Canadian government decides they cannot be released back to the sea?  Too all of you, please reconsider your decision.  Please talk to the DFO (why haven't you already done this? This is so disappointing and scary). Please consider being involved in actual marine mammal rescue before you make a decision like this.  Remain consistent with the ways you guys have ALL chosen to live your lives: to make the city of Vancouver a better place for all of its residents...especially the ones who need help the most.  Why limit your compassion to humans? Sincerely, Cat Rust _________________ A huge thanks to Malgosia Kaczmarska for helping me sort through fact and fiction in this messy situation.  A resonating shout-out to Friends of the Vancouver Aquarium for their INCREDIBLY rallying cry and fierce dedication (who else would stand in the pouring rain for four hours just trying to be heard in order to spare the lives of animals we care so much about)?  Vancouver Aquarium yet again sets the bar. 

from The Middle Flipper http://ift.tt/2qEaaLl