#rather than mass produced corporate bullshit

[the-far-bright-center]

"Over a decade after its release, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005) still stands out as George Lucas’s summative and most masterful artistic statement. I use the word “summative” deliberately, because Sith incorporates a broad cinematic heritage, and also draws from Lucas’s own interests in narrative/illustrative art, architecture, world religion and mythology, anthropology, philosophy, pedagogy, and even race-car driving. In finding a tonally and visually radical common ground for these fixations, the film also addresses and subverts the director’s own oeuvre; and, as has always been the case with Star Wars, Sith contends with the poles of past and future, searching for (and sometimes grappling with) the space between. Of course, the Star Wars saga has always been anachronistic, employing science fiction iconography while also pulling famously from Joseph Campbell’s theory of monomythic commonalities in world narratives; the original film, released in 1977, also acted as a gateway to a commercial future, opening the floodgates (along with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws [1975]) for a new kind of American blockbuster cinema. However, while Lucas and Spielberg offered auteurist statements on genre that were also fortunate enough to generate mass appeal, the majority of big-budget fare has since become studio-incubated and sanctioned by market control groups, resulting in films that are often devoid of passion for cinematic language. Ironically and sadly enough, this can certainly be said of J. J. Abrams’s insipid The Force Awakens (2015), a reactionary attempt to conserve a falsely utopic view of the saga’s origins."

—Mike Thorn, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith: George Lucas' Greatest Artistic Statement?

[sarkywoman]

I’m getting seriously sick of all the people in writing groups being like, “AI’s not that bad, don’t be afraid, try using it for x, y, and z, then you’ll see how useful it can be.”

- x, y, and z are nearly always parts of writing. What part of ‘I write because I like writing’ don’t people understand? I want to make money through doing something I enjoy, not by offloading it onto a computer like a boring office task!

- If you can get your computer to write a decent novel for you, then congrats! You’ve destroyed the writing industry! You might make a little bit off your AI dross at first, but the same tool you exploit now can be exploited on a much larger scale by corporations, who won’t need to sell your crap once they’re mass-producing their own.

- Even if you’re only using it for outlining/editing/research/idea generation/dialogue/description... Again, if the software plateaus and stops here, that’s still a significant portion of writing that can be outsourced. People like screenwriters will find themselves reduced to polishing AI-generated turds rather than creating their own work. That will obviously pay less, but also it will be far less fulfilling.

- Using it for research? Are you damaged? Have you seen how nonsensical it can be? Every time someone brings up an issue, AI lovers claim “oh that’s all fixed now with the new one”, but then there’s a whole host of more bullshit, made-up references and straight-up lies. The people who do successfully use AI to research use it in exactly the same way one would use a search engine, so what exactly is the difference? It’s not revolutionary to type a question into google and get an answer, just oooh now it’s automatically bulletpointed, how incredible...

I’m not worried AI will be a better writer than me. I just know that enough people are willing to eat shit that it won’t matter. They’ll take what’s available.

[faustocosgrove]

read this fantastic post about the vegan to ecofascist pipeline yesterday and the OP already has like 50 annoying people in the comments and i’m currently suffering from a bout of can’t shut up disease so i’ve made my own post. and god knows this is already a dissertation and i haven’t even written it yet.

going to be referencing the inspirational post throughout, and i refer to the points in the pipeline as steps 1 through 7 for brevity’s sake.

the OP refers to the crossing from step 3 to step 4 as where the danger starts, but from step 2 to step 3 is where the problems start. they do point out in the description of step 5 that not all animal products are produced in a way that harms the environment, but if you personally decide to not consume any animal products because some or many animal products are produced in a way that is harmful to the environment you’ve already lost the plot. this is terf brand “some men are bad therefore all men are evil” bullshit. like if you want to be vegan for literally any other reason you do you, but there is an element of willfully ignoring sustainable animal farming in the pipeline’s line of thought.

besides, the whole point of not buying animal products because their production is bad for the environment is a boycott. for a boycott to work you’re supposed to go back to buying the product once the company has fixed whatever it is that they’re fucking up. otherwise they’re not going to change. why would they? if you’re never buy beef again the cattle farmer has nothing to gain by not pumping his sewage into the river.

and yeah yeah yeah i know the voting with your dollar thing isn’t the way things work. like y’all remember that post about people in indonesia(?) having no guilt for wearing mass produced t shirts when the factory in their backyard is fucking up their fields? there is another way, vegans haven’t figured that much out yet. the whole idea that “production of X bad therefore i’m not going to buy X” is already signed up to the voting with your dollar individualistic notion of the power of the consumer. but even when you stay within the economic framework this idea comes from, the rest of the pipeline becomes silly.

step 4 is silly because previously, before step 3 vegans had a choice, either they could solve the problems of cafos with individualistic choices or with collective action and they chose individualistic choices. the very next step is collective action, or an attempt at rallying collective action. the whole individualistic thing clearly doesn’t work or else no one would get past step 3. but rather than think about other collectivist things they could do, we’re sticking with the incorrect framework and going with it. gonna whittle that square peg to fit in the round hole. already this is a population of people who cannot handle being wrong about something.

step 5 is more vile than silly because if someone isn’t making enough money to buy the gelatin free supplement pills you need to take while on a vegan diet in order to get all your micronutrients and amino acids that it’s their fault climate change is happening???? or like for food allergies, if nuts and soy are off the table then a person can literally be born with a body that is morally impure and corrupt and contributing to climate change. this step is already eugenics.

step 6 is silly because it was actually algae who first changed the climate on earth by oxygenizing the atmosphere :-) but i digress. like how do you do this entire category of “humans bad” without including yourself??? if you can conceptualize “vegans good, non vegans bad” you have got to have some sort of types of humans categories. not that the sorting of people was good before but like i don’t get how anyone can think this. there is just so much less mental gymnastics you have to do to just say “it’s not the individual it’s the corporations!” but for some reason there’s this clinging to the ideas of personal choice and personal freedom. this step also reeks of catholic guilt.

step 7 is silly because the whole point of bettering the environment is so that it is more habitable for humans. like hello hypothetical vegan who is reading this and frothing at the mouth. you’ve set out to do one thing and ended up doing the opposite thing. you moron. you dumbass.

and as i sit here staring at the intellectual chasm between steps 5 and 6, the only way i can possibly come up with where someone would think this is if they were experiencing extreme isolation. and there’s also a chasm between 3 and 4 of people minding their business even if they’re not doing logic correctly and the vegans we all hate who do dramatic reenactments of a jehovah's witness on your door step but with a vegan lifestyle. and hold on i’m having a Kronk moment here it’s all coming together. isolation, jehovah’s witnesses, the I in BITE is isolation, that’s right veganism is a cult. the whole thing about vegans being the most annoying people on the planet isn’t for them to convince anyone, it’s to cement them in the cult. like if the recruitment works i’m sure like any cult they’ll take anyone they can get but just like jehovah’s witnesses that’s not the point.

did i mention yet that this pipeline of greased first with don’t kill and eat the cute animals  sentiments then further down with shock images of slaughter houses? the peta aspect is a hook to get people into this. so is the purity hook, i think that’s the reason they bother with arguing that it’s not moral to eat meat from small farms because small farms can still be exploitative. and like *frustrated noise* anything with a purity hook should be so easy to see that it’s fascism!!!!!! like how is this still a problem? we are on the queer and autism website. no one here is “pure” in the way the world outside of this screen wants you to be as a person. why is there no site wide discussion about letting go of purity as an idea? like 5 years ago there was a site wide discussion about ecofascism and ecofascist dog whistles, particularly with captain planet memes. how is there not a “quick guide to not being a fascist on the internet” post????

also have i mentioned that the notes on this post are so good? well the reblogs and tags are anyway. don’t go in the comments. people bring up the racism, the lack of concern for plant agriculture, the overpopulation myth, the fact that you can’t farm on all land and sometimes you’ve gotta use grass and grazing animals, vegan leather really being plastic, the christianity, also the person who tagged it as “capitalism can eat a bag of dicks” made my day.

i need to stop. i know no one has actually read all of this. in conclusion: veganism is a cult, fascism is bad, and i wish i could bang out a thousand words after thinking about a subject for less than 24 hours with my brain in a state where i am simultaneously thinking everything and nothing and i feel like i am vibrating sideways into a different dimension (no i have not taken any drugs shut up) and get a degree from it just like a real dissertation BYE

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Facebook's alternative facts

Facebook acquired a company called Crowdtangle in 2016; it makes a social media analytics tool that the press has used to monitor subject-matter trends on Facebook, especially in the runup to the 2020 elections.

Facebook just gutted Crowtangle.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/technology/facebook-data.html

Crowdtangle had operated as a semiautonomous unit within Facebook, primarily used by media companies to track the social media performance of their stories. A turning point came when the NY Times’s Kevin Roose figured out how to rank posts that included links to the real web.

Roose created a Twitter account called @FacebooksTop10 that served as a moment-to-moment leaderboard for the most popular web-links being “engaged with” on Facebook (Facebook separates “engagement” — liking and replying — from “reach” — how many people see a post).

Roose’s research revealed that far-right cranks like Ben Shapiro and Sean Hannity were dominating Facebook’s news ecosystem. These reports were most unwelcome within Facebook leadership, whose internal communications were leaked to Roose.

These leaks reveal the anxieties of top Facebook leaders — including Nick Clegg, the former UK Deputy PM who sold out his supporters, created the conditions for Brexit, and then landed a cushy, 4-million-per-year job as head of FB’s “global affairs.”

These leaders worried that objective data about Facebook users’ “engagement” would validate suspicions that the service was a far-right echo-chamber whose US users were trending to ageing conservatives, a group that advertisers are lukewarm on.

Facebook’s leaders debated what to do about this and ultimately decided to neuter Crowdtangle, replacing it with selective disclosures that put the service in a better light, choosing among several other metrics (like reach) to characterize the discourse on the platform.

Publicly, Facebook says it’s not killing Crowdtangle, but rather, integrating it into an “integrity team” — minus its leadership (on “vacation” with no defined role at the company) and key personnel (who are being scattered to other parts of the business).

Facebook’s attack on Crowdtangle is significant, especially in light of its sustained assault on independent accountability and transparency tools like Ad Observer, a project from NYU’s engineering school.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#adobserver

Ad Observer tracks paid political disinformation on the platform. Its users volunteer to install a free/open browser extension that captures the ads Facebook serves to them. These are flensed of any private information and uploaded to Ad Observatory, a public repository.

Accountability journalists and researchers use Ad Observatory to track whether Facebook is living up to its public promises to limit paid political disinformation. The project has documented many failures to uphold those promises.

In its smear campaign against Ad Observer, Facebook has insisted that the project is both dangerous (Facebook falsely claims it captures private information) and redundant, because Facebook maintains its own ad repository for researchers.

But Ad Observer has already caught multiple instances of paid political disinformation that was not included in Facebook’s repository.

Facebook has proven that it cannot be trusted to honestly reflect its own practices in its transparency efforts.

As Crowdtangle enters a decline — leadership sidelined, engineers scattered — we should interpret Facebook’s promises to replace it with its own “accountability” tools, run by the leadership faction that decried Roose’s top-10 list, in light of the Ad Observer fiasco.

After all, these leaders insisted that the problem with Roose’s list is that it measured “engagement” and not “reach” — but when the company produced its own internal “reach”-based leaderboards, they looked much the same as the “engagement” ones.

Roose agrees with FB leaders in that Facebook isn’t merely a far-right echo chamber (he says that it contains such a chamber, but that’s not the whole story). But there’s one way in which FB is firmly Trumpian: its insistence on “alternative facts.”

Trump is a bullshitter, raised in the “positive thinking” church of Norman Vincent Peale, whose gospel dictated that you could manifest new realities by insisting that they were already here — “fake it till you make it” (AKA “gaslighting”).

https://www.npr.org/2017/01/19/510628862/how-positive-thinking-helped-propel-trump-to-the-presidency

This ideology — call it gaslightism — is the fantasy that powerful people can warp reality simply by declaring it to be something else (think of the GWB official who sneered at the “reality-based community” and its skepticism over war in Iraq).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

It’s a common trait among wealthy narcissists. Elon Musk insists that the laws of physics will bend to his satellite internet network and allow for multiple universes’ worth of electromagnetic signalling.

He’s sure that the laws of geometry will bend to his tunnels and somehow relieve traffic congestion by adding private vehicles; that he will make massive leaps in computer science and create safe autonomous vehicles.

Trump’s insistence the virus would “disappear…like a miracle” was just the latest installment in a long history of bullshitting (“positive thinking”), including things like pretending to be his own publicist, boasting to journos about his prowess.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/audio-listen-donald-trump-pretend-be-his-own-hank-berrien

Facebook’s desire to “control the narrative” is part of this intellectual tradition, and it’s hardly the first time the company has done it.

Early in the company’s history, Zuckerberg defended his “real names” policy by saying that anyone who objected was “two-faced.”

It’s hard to overstate how deranged this is: surely Zuckerberg presents a different facet of his identity to his spouse, his kids, his shareholders, his co-workers and the press. It’s not “two faced” to talk to your boss differently from how you talk to your lover.

However, by forcing billions of Facebook users to confine themselves to a single identity, Zuckerberg does make it easier to target them with ads. This “two-faced” business is just an attempt to will a radical, sociopathic norm into existence.

This attitude permeates Facebook’s corporate conduct: remember the “pivot to video?” Facebook wanted to compete with Youtube — the number two supplier of display advertising, after FB itself — so it declared that videos were very popular on Facebook.

Not that videos would be popular — they were already popular. The company told its media and ad partners that they were missing out on a gold-rush because FB users loved watching FB videos.

Media companies literally laid off their newsrooms in order to hire video production teams based on this intelligence. The entire media- and ad-ecosystem reoriented itself around Facebook’s market intelligence.

There was just one problem. Facebook was lying. FB users weren’t watching its videos, and Facebook knew it. The company was just betting that if it convinced media companies to spend billions making videos, its users would watch them.

https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-lawsuit-pivot-to-video-mistake/

This fraud devastated the media world, first by triggering waves of layoffs of experienced journalists to make way for young video producers, then by killing or hobbling their employers and triggering another wave of mass layoffs.

Zuckerberg knows it’s not “two-faced” to show different parts of yourself to different people. Facebook knew that no one was watching FB videos. They were just betting that they could fake it until they made it — the core tenet of gaslightism.

The Crowdtangle affair is more of the same. Facebook’s US market is dominated by furious, old conservatives. The company knows it — but they also know that if they admit it, people who don’t match that description will be less likely to stay on its platform.

They know that advertisers don’t pay much to reach that audience. They know that an aging user-base will dwindle over time unless there’s a cohort coming in behind it. They think that if they suppress the true nature of their business, the nature will change.

Gaslightism is what Exxon embraced half a century ago, when it suppressed its own scientists’ conclusions that its product would render our planet unfit for human habitation. They were betting that if they just kept the news quiet, something might come up that changed it. #ExxonKnew

The wealthy and powerful have always practiced gaslightism (hence folktales like “The Emperor’s New Clothes”).

To be clear, we’re all prone to kidding ourselves with wishful thinking, but wishful thinking is different when it’s combined with unchecked power.

That’s why Thomas Jefferson argued for an anti-monopoly clause in the Bill of Rights — not because he disbelieved in smart people with good ideas, but because he disbelieved in infallible people.

Mark Zuckerberg is not an evil supergenius. He’s not a supergenius, or any kind of genius. He’s just an everyday mediocrity like you or me, someone who talked himself into thinking that he should be the czar of 3 billion lives.

https://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

The problem of concentrated, unaccountable, autocratic power isn’t evil supergeniuses. The problem is people no better or worse than you or me, indulging their worst impulses with no one to call bullshit on them.

Nerfing Crowdtangle and attacking Ad Obverser are just ways for Facebook to preventing journalists from calling bullshit on it — a way to further secede from the reality-based community. It’s pure gaslightism.

Image: Japanexperterna.se (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/

Minette Lontsie (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Facebook_Headquarters.jpg

CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Anthony Quintano (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/quintanomedia/41793468502

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[peanutbutterpickletime-mk2]

So let me total this up. America currently has issues with:

-Paying people living wages

-giving people access to health care

-water becoming a questionably obtainable resource

-racism so bad you’re still killing people over it

-gay rights are practically non-existent- and the ones they do have are inherently dangerous to members of the LGBTQ+ community as they often have regulations and laws that “out them” to the public.

-would rather see good usable food in the dumpster than in the hands of those who could use it but can’t afford it.

-so many and frequent enough school shootings, active shooter drills are made mandatory

-homelessness on an incredible uptick, squalor is a very common living arrangement

-zero organization or cooperation with pandemic prevention and relief

-mental health crisis

-police who can be hired without a GED, Background check, and training less than a year long.

-a government that’s been paid by the corporate rich to prevent any progress for human rights.

-environmental protections and regulations hanging by threads

-one of the worst public education systems in the world

-gun “laws” that allow civilians to own weapons of mass murder. And systems in place that make it illegal for the health and safety boards to report statistics involving gun related crime, death, etc...

-the richest peoples aren’t taxed because “it’s too complicated” (but you can launch a three year investigation into a middle class working family that missed something on their last tax filing)

-most leaders are associated to things like sexual harassment/rape, human trafficking, and drug abuse.

-did I mention these leaders need not ever pass a drug test?

-anti-union behaviour so bad people are being physically threatened, and often fired.

-Food and safety regulations so slacked that they allow things like lead poisoning in food, asbestos in baby powder, and toxic chemicals to be used in beauty products.

-Aboriginal homelands and sacred sites being destroyed for more corporate bullshit.

-massive anti-immigration policies and overall behaviour : btw your country isn’t well enough off to sustain your current population, and the Introduction of immigrants actually help to re-stabilize this.

-extremely toxic body image propaganda

-massive pay and opportunity discrepancies between the sexes

-idolizing toxic destructive behaviour in favour of being the “perfect employee/student”.

-paid bail systems, so many crimes are legal depending how big your wallet is.

-people still brainwashed to believe that everything is how it should be and to change any of it would be a “violation” of their privileged human rights...even if it means establishing them in the first place.

...remind me again why you believe it’s the “Greatest Country in the World?” Because honestly, globally, everyone else is just watching with wide eyed disbelief that you’re even classified as a “first world” country still.

So why the hell do I care of a country I don’t live in exists like this?

On the one hand, human beings deserve to be treated respectfully and protected despite their age, gender, sexual orientation, race, or wealth status. It doesn’t matter where they live. Human rights are human rights.

On the other hand I live in Canada, “America’s little sibling” and I’m terrified to see many people here desperately trying to cling to the same ideologies that the USA has. Mostly because of the sheer amount of bullshit your country produces by means of media content and the lies laced within it.

You’re an extremist society based in capitalist and corporatist ideology. And your people are dying because if it. Yet you still want to defend the way you’re doing things....change will never happen if you keep pretending everything is fine the way it is.

[tyhardaway]

My Bored Parking Lot 1999 Retort

xEEx & Arpy recently opined on the 1999 Billboard List. I obviously respect thieir opinions but I wanted to force myself to see if I could pull anything edible out of this fetid dumpster.

These tracks weren’t for us. These were a salve for the miserable masses. Yes, there are some a lot of really bad recordings on this list, but gun-to-head-five-desert-island picks—while not easy—was surprisingly doable. I’m an optimist by nature and I have a moment

Best of the Best of the Worst of the Worst

Firstly, this is the Billboard list and there’s no one I know who gave a care about Billboard then or gives a care now. This industry bullshit is simply not relevent to any aspect of the Leisureverse. tKoL broke camp in 1999.

Also, rock was absolutely dying in ‘99 and there was a lot of sickly desperate pop rock attempts at bankable relevance as hip hop was becoming the new cash normal. We had all migrated/evolved to alt, garage, DIY, and indy by then and none of our burners qualified for the gen pop top selling lists. And we liked it that way.

Lastly, 1999 was a waning but still huge video era. Some of these were absolutely driven by video. Chicken meet egg.

Some of the songs on my list are absolute garbage. I know this. But there are some hook-worm factory-produced focus group bangers, too. All save Lauryn’s piece fall into this category, actually. Lauryn’s song is really nice, own that album. And only one recording is on my pocket phone right now and that’s Fly Away. Whew, that’s really bad but, the hook is forever (and Lenny’s first four records are good).

———

My 1999 Subset in Order

(all tracks are on the world wide)

1. Britney Spears - Baby One More Time

Historic corporate video expoitation banger

2. Lauryn Hill - Doo Wop (That Thing)

Beautiful end-era soul song

3. Jay-Z - Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)

3. Will Smith (with features) - Wild Wild West

Same fast food, different wrappers

5. Lenny Kravitz - Fly Away

A timeless hook attached to a rotten fish

———

To be honest, I’d probably rather be on the aforementioned desert island with only these five songs than living in this pandemic race war third world plastic TeeVee dictatorship.

[jyndor]

so I was talking to my friend @timelordthirteen about some shit and I decided to just share with you all about the importance of actually explaining shit instead of just saying it. the Left, I am looking at you bitch (ily bitch but)

lol would put a read more but tumblr's being a petty little bitch today ❤

shitposting is fun. dunking on asshat right wingers is fun. you know what is not fun? seeing people not understand the basic terminology that we use in the ~discourse*

but. if we are going to use terminology, if we are going to inject regular old laypeople conversations with (imo) unneccessary amounts of academic terms, then we should try to use them correctly** because in many cases misusing them means we as leftists do not have a full understanding of what the fuck we're on about. this dilutes both the meanings of these terms and their purposes. I know I am wordy as fuck and can be hard to understand sometimes (thanks adhd) so what I am about to say is a little ironic, but clarity is fucking important when it comes to strategy and organizing.

so I am going to examine some commonly misused concepts and terms today. yay.

1. THEORY, PRAXIS AND FRAMEWORKS FOR ANALYSIS weeee yes I am fun at parties tyvm

what is a framework? a structure, in this case, for analyzing some bullshit we deal with irl. that's it lol but I use it a lot so I figured I'd define it here. examples of frameworks are: intersectionality, marxism, queer theory. seriously, if you can think it, it has already been analyzed through the queer lens.

what is theory? ideas, knowledge in the abstract based on looking at shit happen and analyzing that shit. it is useful because it can help us articulate what we are going through in our shitty lives. this is why I often recommend people learn about chomsky's manufacturing consent (theory of why we get the info we get from the media tl;dr), not because I think chomsky is the ultimate leftist grandpa but because this site needs some media literacy lmao. and btw, this clip narrated by amy goodman is a great, trippy little 4:30 min long video that explains the basics of manufacturing consent so you don't have to open a book or use drugs!

theory can help serve as a framework to understand what the fuck is happening to us irl, but imo is kind of an incomplete understanding of shit without lived experience (aka - theory v praxis). this is one reason why we should listen to marginalized groups on their own shit and not talk over them - because all of the research and theory in the world does not make me a Black woman living in Flint (aka - ground up organizing v technocracy). it is not about being nice, or politically correct, although we should be nice and we should care about people just because they're people. if you understand the why of listening to marginalized groups, you understand that it is mainly about communities knowing their own problems best and therefore having the best solutions for those problems.

2. MARXISM, CAPITALISM AND OTHER BUZZWORDS (and leftists need hobbies)

so marxism is a framework for socioeconomic analysis observed by mr kpop himself, karl marx (and his sugar daddy friedrich engels). because leftists love to argue, there are so many kinds of marxism, and if you ever feel like you are shouting into the void too much, just look up some arguments between stalinists and trotskyists. it's just... magical. no, I am not defining tankie here.

as many people smarter than I am have said (read: kwame ture seriously watch this video it's iconic), karl marx did not discover socialism or invent it or whatever, he observed capitalism and saw how shitty it is, like any other sane person would do. the point of marxism is not karl marx (which he would say) or tankies or fuckin guillotines***

things that marxism is:

- an analytical tool for looking at the world

- a theory which was used to develop the basis of different kinds of post-capitalist economic systems like communism and socialism

things that marxism is not:

- a system of economics or government lmao marx did not govern dick

- scary

marx looked at capitalism and said "this is definitely gonna fail someday because it's clearly unsustainable, I mean the proletariat is bigger than the bourgeoisie who owns everything uh yeah so I can do basic fucking math. if I have one capitalist and fifteen hundred workers, eventually that capitalist is gonna lose his damn head because he is gonna hoard all that wealth and his workers are gonna get pissed that they don't have their basic fucking needs met. lmao now put on some kpop, freddy" or something. idk that might not be a direct quote.

what is capitalism? (besides horseshit) a system of economics where industry is privately owned. and yes, this includes publically traded corporations because they are still owned by individuals (shareholders) even if they aren't privately owned by one person or a group of partners. truly a nightmare to live in, and we hate to see it.

what is the proletariat? well, the working class. and the bourgeoisie is the owner class, the capitalist class. the rich.

and this is something else that we need to discuss, tumblr. if you are going to say "eat the rich" please understand who you are talking about. we're not talking about random actors or musicians, or doctors or lawyers, even if they make better than a liveable wage. even if they often have zero class consciousness, meaning they don't ~see class, like colorblind racism for classism.

anyone who has to sell their labor for wages and is not part of the owner class is working class. this includes people who cannot work for any multitude of reasons (disability, can't find work, caretaker, etc) and also white collar workers who might be well off in relatively high paying jobs because they don't own the means of production, or capital that is used to produce shit. so yes, that rich actor who is a part of a union is actually part of the working class in marxist theory. when we say eat the rich, we mean jeff bezos, not john boyega. jeff bezos owns the means of production. john boyega is a working actor who is in a union.

this is important not because we shouldn't get pissed off when actors and celebrities do tone deaf shit like singing about imagining no possessions in their mansions while people starve during a pandemic. they need to put their money to good use, have some class consciousness, instead of asking fans to donate to causes that they could fund. but they are not the bourgeoisie until they start owning the means of production. and there is no doubt that many of them do, which is why we might eat gwyneth paltrow but we won't eat john boyega.

and by the way, eating the rich is metaphorical, a reference to french revolution-era philosopher jean-jacques rousseau's quote: "when the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich." obviously I don't even need to explain it but I will anyway. basically, the people will forcibly redistribute the wealth of the rich if they have nothing else. this is why there are some very smart capitalists who are in favor of reforms and raising taxes, because they recognize the danger to their necks in not providing for basic needs of the working class. no, "eat the rich" does not mean be pro-cannibalism. but there are many capitalists who would prefer to die than lose their hoard so

oh, and one last thing. "no ethical consumption in capitalism" is tossed around a lot and it's a million percent true, but I need all of us to understand that it is not an excuse to support harmful practices but it is also not meant to shame consumers. it is rather an understanding that we as consumers are not responsible for the monstrous impact of capitalism. we live in it, we have no choice but to consume, and sometimes (most of the time) that means we have to buy shit that was produced in unethical ways. unfortunately supply chains being what they are, all consumption causes harm in some way.

it is a reminder that individual actions are not going to have the impact of collection actions. this is why plastic bag bans, though well-meaning, are not going to have the same impact on climate catastrophe as, say, banning fossil fuels would.

I am a vegetarian and I can recognize that I am doing a whole lot of nothing by not supporting factory farms, and when I was a vegan I wasn't doing much either. boycotts without mass support don't have much evidence of working. this is why bds exists - boycott divestment and sanctions. boycott, meaning don't support goods from various conpanies connected to something, divestment, meaning get companies/countries/institutions to remove their money from something, and sanctions, meaning getting countries to penalize a country for their bad behavior until they comply.

this is what the anti-apartheid south africa movement did and what palestinian rights organizers support for israeli apartheid.

do not allow legislators to put the burden of fixing the ills of society that capitalism created on consumers' shoulders.

3. INTERSECTIONALITY (because it deserves its own section)

I don't have as much to say on this as I did the last bit because holy shit capitalism, man.

intersectionality, a term that was coined by law professor kimberlé crenshaw in the late 80s to serve as a framework for people to critically assess how legal structures impact Black women differently due to class, race and gender. it is not incompatible with marxism (in fact marxism has been argued to be a form of intersectionality).

intersectionality can and should be used to examine why the Black queer experience is unique, for example. I also want to acknowledge that professor crenshaw isn't the only person to come up with intersectionality; sojourner truth spoke about it even if she didn't coin the term, for example. patricia hill collins, another influential af Black feminist academic****, created frameworks for viewing intersectionality. also you can read her book black feminist thought here for free.

intersectionality has been used - improperly - by liberal feminists***** to excuse bad behavior from leaders who pretend to care about women while creating and enforcing legislation that harms women. anyone who stans politicians at all needs help. it has also been misrepresented as essentialism, which it is also not (essentialism is the idea that everything has some assets that are necessary to its identity) because intersectionality isn't saying that every Black queer woman has the same experience, just that Black queer women might experience similar issues because of a system that negatively views them as Black and queer and women.

intersectionality does not excuse kamala harris for prosecuting poor moms of truant kids.

okay if you guys have things to add please do because I want us to educate each other instead of always talking shit. both is good.

* I am not calling out people for not being academic enough or not speaking english or not reading enough theory because LOL I am a 2x neurodivergent college dropout who radicalized by working retail and not by hearing karl marx talk dirty to me. also, not everyone speaks english like, I am truly not shitting on people.

** I recognize that language is fluid and ever changing, and that is a good thing. But diluting terms that serve specific purposes is not ever going to be good.

*** and I don't want to dismiss intra-leftist theory discourse (🤢) because I know how annoying it is to hear bernie sanders lumped in with liz warren, or bernie sanders lumping himself in with post-capitalists lmao of course I get it. but twitter discourse is not dismantling capitalism so ANYWAY

**** actually crenshaw built on collins' work (black feminist thought) and the collins built on crenshaw' work we love to see it.

***** I should go ahead and define liberal feminism as well as rad fem and terf and shit because people use them all very very loosely, especially terf (not every transphobe is a terf but every terf is a transphobe, it's like the rectangle/square thing). but I am exhausted with this so next time.

[eruhamster]

Got an online friend mad at me talking about how empty the nostalgia of shit like Toy Story 4 was, and tried fruitlessly explaining how imho there’s a phenomenon in the 30 years between the 1980s and the 2000s of people fighting over who’s childhood was best not on how their childhoods personally were, but based on whatever (usually crappy) materialistic, mass-produced toy crap/media they grew up with, and how today that’s capitalized on today with companies like Disney really soaking up the nostalgia with constant bad sequels being created literally just for the $$$ potential rather than out of love and soul 

But then I was thinking more about how you see that to an extent with music in each generation, from old men blabbing about U2 still being good and relevant (hint:it’s not) to the undying love for even crap like Barbie Girl. Obviously a lot of old shit was actually good (Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Dio, Toto, Britney Spears, etc etc etc etc) but a lot of it wasn’t and it’s the same kind of ‘I GREW UP WITH IT SO IT’S GOOD’ bullshit

And then you know, Sherlock Holmes had the same kind of nostalgic shit iirc, Arthur Conan Doyle hated it and tried to kill off Sherlock multiple times and replace him or write something new but IT WASN’T SHERLOCK and it was BAD because THEY LIKE SHERLOCK so he got threatened enough he just kept going back to it, usually after being threatened by multiple crazed fans

But of course it’s only really the 80s-00′s wave that’s got such empty capitalistic ties, especially with the current nostalgia manipulation from corporations like Disney, but I thought it was interesting 

[transrevolutions]

On the topic of gun control, then... as you've mentioned, limiting civilian access in the face of rampant police excess is a no-go. You've surely seen the leftist arguments in favor of gun ownership which follow that logic. I do agree that between civilians in a functional society there is no need to carry such destructive devices, but I'm not sure I'd call what we've achieved particularly functional. It's all very... thorny, taking a firm stance in either direction. What are your thoughts on the roll of gun ownership in the US under present conditions (which is to say, the looming threat of police violence and entrenched right wing gun culture)? I ask this without any ulterior motives, I promise. This is hardly my area of expertise.

Ugh, this is definitely a tough one. There's definitely two sides to it coming from a leftist perspective- there's the valid and understandable concern that limiting civilian access would give the military/militarized police a greater monopoly on weaponry, forestalling potential revolution, but there's also the reality of schoolchildren being slaughtered en masse because some civilians can't seem to comprehend that killing random people is a bad thing.

Yeah, this is not a very functional society, you're right on that one. Right now it's a society built on a rapidly decaying shell of an outdated social model that constantly teeters towards collapse as people drill holes in it to temporarily prop it up from the inside, and those people are absolutely relying on systemic violence monopolies to enhance this, but then again, guns are not the end-all be-all of, for lack of a better word, insurrection.

I tend to lean utopian-anarchist in my socialist/communist theory (I'm def. not an ML, although I do think that anarchists and MLs have intersect and that leftist unity is very important in the face of a growing wave of fascism) which has the side effect of me tending to think more about the particular solution for a problem than how to get there, which I something I'm trying to work on. So I'm not sure exactly how we'd get from here to a demilitarized society step-by-step, but I think right now, as a society and as leftists in a right-wing country hyped up on Cold War era bullshit, the sad reality is that we're running damage control here.

By damage control, I mean that while we educate and organize and work towards hitting that critical mass and countering incessant propaganda, we also have the task of making sure people don't die in the meantime. That's why I call myself an advocate of democratic socialism but a mutualist anarchist from an ideological standpoint. Taking a country like the US straight from corporate capitalist neoliberalism to a collection of self-governing communities is either downright logically impossible or would involve an enormous amount of civilian casualties. And while the system is really and truly fucked, we do need to put up safety nets in the meantime. The less violence, the better. Sometimes things just can't be solved through reform, but those that can usually should.

Yeah, corporates like Amazon should not exist, but since they do exist right now, unionizing would at least take a bit of strain off the workers. Landlords should not be an accepted role in society, but because they are right now, eviction moratoriums carve out a little bit of their power in a crisis. It's why my view on voting can frustrate further leftists- do I think just handing in your ballot will create true systemic change? Absolutely not, but I'd personally rather have a president who does a shitty job but also doesn't align himself with Nazis on public television than one who does.

To go back to gun control, I think the place for it right now involves making weapons like assault rifles harder to acquire. Taxing them isn't ideal, because we all know fines just mean it's legal for rich people, but things like limits on how many guns can be produced in a single location, what kind of ammo can and can't be made, and universal background checks for gun owners can help to bring things down, at least a little. Yeah, ghost guns and the like will still be a thing, but at least there's less deadly mass murder weapons than there were before. This, of course, goes hand in hand with defunding and demilitarizing police, but a strong civilian push for federal action will be necessary here.

I am also by no means an expert, all I'm saying here comes from my own research and the values I hold, and I don't think that my perspective is the only one with a legitimate stance. Thank you so much for your question, I really appreciate being able to have good faith dialogue- it's rare on the internet these days!

[nicskoyoga]

That girl needs therapy...

I’m excited to embark on a new journey, with a therapist I’m expecting to spend quite a lot of time with. Because I really want to? I guess so, yeah. Sick to death of experiencing my own let-downs. :(

Who cares? No-one REALLY 

... not enough to get up off their arse and find out exactly what needs to be done. 

Only those who’ve had to walk the path themselves can empathize completely. And actually I don’t know if I know anyone who has been through it all, and would be available to hold my hand. Why? Cos that’s not their vocation, and they’re not my mother, lover or dearest friend. 

Gratitude without showing it

So completely grateful for the advice I’ve been given though....

Don’t get me wrong. It’s just so difficult to take advice though isn’t it? 

Some people just learn in different ways. Some of us have to have our hand held, and...

Why? Because we’re a different kind of addict to our problems. 

We’re the kind that hasn’t got the get-go to behold true deep reliable faith in ourselves. We gotta see it, have it agreed, and confirmed 1million times over, cos...

We’re too damn stuck to be able unspell ourselves from our own stupid miseries.

Heck I’m still I’m happy I’m me though!!! Wouldn’t wanna be the lot of ya, ha ha ha ha. 

That’s probably my worst personality trait failing showing bright and true as it is there for ya for free, go on, hate on me. But ... I do believe I think I’m better, and yet I know I’m bloody useless too. And you’re amazing and better than me in too many shameful ways (yawn. but yet AWFUL!!!!) 

So yeah... I know stuff. I’ve experienced changes. I could do with just a little bit more

Now... I know I’m getting all ahead of myself; already getting so super excited that I may be able to really enjoy my life deeply soon when,

I’ve had literally 1 session of therapy so obviously the help hasn’t yet begun really.... And yet, 

I do believe a change is on the horizon.

This year has been pretty damn challenging in terms of managing (or not) my mental health problems. BUT it’s getting easier, I feel less sick, literally feel like good food is edible again. I have less headaches and anxiety attacks and my depressive states are gradually reducing.

Why do I tell this story?

Imagining that few to no people will read me. Because it’s me truthfully now. It’s what I am happy to help explain, and share. 

God I try to let people know,

but it’s so damn depressing I don’t want to burden, 

I just want to explain a little... 

so they can understand;

why I am unable to tell them what is good with my life 

and why I don’t want to join in anymore, 

why I don’t want to actively live my life... 

Because things aren’t in place in my life, 

and every time I try to get on track, I get a knockback again before long, in the shape of stupid, F**king, ever-reappearing mental health shite.

Can you tell I’m a little bit angry about it? 

I’m hugely ashamed about it, 

...that I keep letting myself and others down, but not quite enough to pull my finger out, hey. Yep ... loser, and knows it. The ramblings of a suicidal you’d think? Nope I can’t even be bothered to think my life is worth ending, I’d rather suffer in knowing it’s wasted.

I used to, and still kind of do believe that 

therapy is only really worthy of those who are suicidal. (WRONG)

Any of you who have ever encountered the questions by a health professional asking you if you are suicidal or have ever had suicical thoughts may know what I mean. 

I mean... why are you asking me like it’s a determinator of how awful my life is, are you telling me to

get to that point before I’m ready to get help? Heck what the hell! 

Obviously I know it’s about a duty of care. But my god, there’s gotta be some truth in giving those who are waiving the white flag at the grim reaper a red flag up to the top of the “that girl needs therapy” list

Money health talks

Do you know I managed to fail a health assessment for Employment Support Allowance, I was going to challenge it, yet I read the report and the statements were true. 

And yet here I am 6 months later. Same situ, off job seekers.  Struggling to keep working. I may as well take another bloody corporate job, at least I get better pay and better hours, cos my extra time and space right now doesn’t appear to be doing the trick

Sack me again, let me drain the corporations and get closer to that more important suicidal feelin’, yeah!!?

That trick I thought I had up my sleeve of becoming a yoga teacher would help me end of. 

NOPE. Girl still needs therapy. 

Of course I don’t have a clear strategy, I’ve been too poorly to address the essentials. Shame on me. 

So where’s my support? My family find ways to help me hugely but it’s not easy, it’s not without discomfort and it’s certainly doesn’t feel like taking liberties living in luxury.  It’s not possible for me to drain my parents retirement on which they’re living.

 The system isn’t supporting me, and I am struggling to support myself. It’s sick. 

So now a motivation for me to earn money is for me to afford my therapy. How nuts is that. 

I choose a better present and a future as my priority. I’m offered to pay less but as a professional in a similar field I don’t wish to exploit this generosity. It’s empowering to know it’s possible, yet whilst I set my priorities on my basic needs and this, 

How  dare I lower her rates to charity level, that’s not on. Not unless I’ve succumbed to the addictions of life, materialism, capitalism, being unable to be in solitude or celebrate at low - zero expense

... then that’s my problem as far as I am concerned and should it happen, then I’ll be happy to say I’m sorry I am asking to take advantage of your generosity.

Money talks

My belief is that our economic balance is total trash, 

Equality in life is at the essence of my beliefs,

Hence why I fall victim to believing that you are entitled to earn what your clients earn, if they value you, they will share the value of their time with you for the value of your time. 

What they fail to see more often than not, is that the value of my time is not the time in which they have me in a room, or the spare minutes around or messages exchanged. Working as a yoga instructor, or fitness instructor is so poorly valued, 

We spend so much time if we are doing a good proper job in keeping things afloat. 

IE let’s example a building contractor. Why do you pay them so much? Well of course they have to go and 

source the materials and put a premium on them no doubt, 

and they have to do the plans 

and my god may they have to market themselves? 

Or pay for tools (no I don’t just need mats) 

Let’s talk about my laptop which I wouldn’t have got honestly unless for work, 

for the phone which is on it’s arse which needs replacing to enable me to pitch for more work, 

what about the photo and video editing software, mic, camera etc that would all help me to keep going along this track so I can create content and stuff. 

God I’ve even got to pay for word processor these days, 

my insurances. 

Do you know what I’d 100% ditch my car if it wasn’t for work so 

How much do you spend on your car cos you’re income allows? 

RANT OVER(ish) ... at the fear of sounding like a self-entitled arsehole, ha. But you see where I am going with this. These are not just set up costs, they’re business costs which will need attention over time, for an exchange of services = business 

Even if it’s not a tangible asset, it’s a lifestyle choice like a car that actually you might walk away with lifelong lifestyle value against rather than depreciating bullshit.

There is business costs you wouldn’t consider, and you have lifestyle expectations that you demand of your employment, so because you think that it’s a choice or privilege for someone to pursue their vocation and it’s their responsibility or problem, and nothing of your concern that they have not found the way to achieve their income or funding without asking for reasonable rates of pay that reflect your own salaried hourly rate.  Where do you expect business funding to come from? - Those who advantage from the business!

That’s why it’s so hard

Because, 

Conflicting with this I also believe that yoga should not have this prestige image, or something of aspirational, it should be accessible to the masses ... god it’s within us so let me teach you how to practice yourself for free

My words are coming to an end. Terrible ramblings, I don’t have the patience right now to produce some quality content to share, hence why I don’t mind no-one it reading now. But maybe in time to come it may be seen and understood as a backstory. Shedding whatever lights I felt at the time, maybe changed, hopefully understood in the future with less conflict.

I would like to end this by offering my deepest apologies for my untruths, lies, letdowns, and would like to offer my deepest gratitude to those who read, who help, and who have the heart to care without judgement that this girl who needs therapy may always but has faith she will be absolutely amazing soon.

Almost THE END

And the last depressive note, just because hey, I am, and why not after being vocal on it. 

Sleeping tablets.. I’ve had over my dose tonight, again. and look at the energy exuding from me. 

Tomorrow no doubt I’ll be wiped and find my day tiresome needing naps or if I was in a office I’d be sitting pretending to do some mundane tasks extremely slowly (very rewarding). 

So well done, thanks for the help there NHS / Benefits system. Sort the shit out. 

Time out. 

And next up... when is it ok to start telling people I am letting them down because I am too depressed and anxious? 

.............................................THE END

[ganzeer]

MAKING THE INTANGIBLE TACTILE Scripps College Frederic W. Goudy Lecture, Spring 2018

Let's get one thing straight: I'm not a printmaker, nor am I a bookmaker. I might've cranked the lever on a letterpress machine two, maybe three times. Which makes even first year students at this here institution far more knowledgeable about printmaking than I can ever hope to be. You are probably a lot more clever as well, because anybody who goes off to study things like printmaking and bookbinding in the year 2018 is likely wise enough to avoid the manipulation of today's mass media, which seems far too taken by the virtual and augmented. Regardless of how useless these technologies have proven to be so far.

But let's not forget that when printmaking first came into existence, it too was considered "mass media". A new and revolutionary way to share ideas with a great many people.

Before Gutenberg printed bibles using movable type in 15th century Europe, there was the movable type invented by Pi Sheng in 11th century China. A detailed description of Sheng's invention was described in Shen Kuo's THE DREAM POOL ESSAYS, a seminal work that covered everything from astronomy, geology, and natural phenomena to architecture, philosophy, and even UFO sightings.

Some might find it surprising that this massive book was printed using tried-and-true woodblock methods rather than the new emerging technology of movable type, but I don't think its weird at all. After all, we still shoot movies on traditional film even with the advent of Virtual Reality. And we still walk into brick-and-mortar stores to buy books printed on paper, even when armed with the power to download them onto our more convenient Kindles. Not to mention the comeback of Vinyl, which absolutely no one could've anticipated.

What this tells us is that the advent of one technology doesn't necessarily have to spell the end of an older one. There's room for coexistence, there's room for variety.

Many will tell you that printmaking began with block-printing in the Far East, and they wouldn't be wrong. But prior to woodblocks there was the stamp or seal. Evidence points to cylinder seals originating in Mesopotamia around 7000 years BC. Often carved out of stone, these seals would be rolled onto soft clay, leaving an impression that could be replicated an endless number of times.

Seals dating back to Ancient Egypt were also found. Egypt is also where the art of stenciling was common practice. Hieroglyphs were stenciled onto stone walls, which were then chiseled by sculptors. An ingenious method that allowed for the speedy reproduction of information without skimping on the tactile qualities of 3-dimensional materiality. But perhaps, the greatest mass media device invented at the time was likely Egyptian paper, what the Greeks called: papyrus, which was produced as early as 3000 BC if not earlier.

A lot of craft and labor went into the making of papyrus, which made it valuable. So valuable that a scribe would not be allowed to write on papyrus prior to spending several years honing his craft on discarded pieces of wood and shards of pottery. Once a scribe was ready, he or she would use papyrus for religious texts, official documents, letters and love poems, erotica, technical manuals, record keeping, spells and medical texts as well as, rebellion.

The image of seated mouse draped in fine linen being serviced by wild cats is a fine example of rebellion in Ancient Egypt. So powerful is this satirical image that it is immediately understood regardless of language, regardless of culture, regardless of time. The prey ruling over the hunter. The hunter serving its prey.

It should come as no surprise that this fragment is dated back to the 19th dynasty, between 1295 and 1186 BC. Which coincides with the first known strike in recorded history - carried out by the artisans who worked on the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. These artists knew they were more powerful than kings and queens and shamans and aristocracy. They knew they were more powerful because it was their artwork that propped up regimes and made legends out of ordinary men. They knew that they were the cats in this story, and their rulers no more than mice.

This rebellion must've been organized, or at the very least, significantly infectious, because we find variations of this same image surviving on more than just one fragment, all dating to the exact same period.

What we're looking at here, may be the earliest surviving form of the protest flyer, or even... the meme.

This is also significant because the Ancient Egyptians believed that the act of writing and drawing was no less than magic. That by putting a rather abstract thought in writing on a tangible object in the physical world was a way of making that thought become reality.

Which is perhaps why we find sculptures of scribes carved out of ever-lasting stone, a material usually reserved for the statues of gods and pharaohs.

I think about this often. About the special power of materializing ideas, of putting them out into the world, physically. I think it was 2011 when I started thinking about it seriously, when I created this image known as the Mask of Freedom. Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was recently ousted, and the military took over, promising it would only be temporary. A transitional period in which the military oversaw the country's transformation to a legitimate democracy. Referendums were held and people went out to vote in unprecedented numbers. Inspiring montages flickered on television screens and proud patriotic music took over the airwaves. The ushering of Egypt's newfound democracy was on everyone's lips, with the role played by the country's honorable military never going unmentioned. It seemed like... a good idea to question that. Hence the Mask of Freedom, with accompanying text reading: "NEW! The Mask of Freedom! With salutations from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to sons of the beloved nation. Now available for an unlimited period of time."

I first posted the image online, and it got its generous portion of likes and shares and what have you. It was all good, but then... about a week or two later, I hit the streets armed with stickers of this image and proceeded to put them up on lampposts around Downtown Cairo. And within an hour, I was arrested.

Luckily, I still had Twitter on my phone back then (I don't anymore), and I was able to tweet about it before getting thrown in the back of a police car. The reaction to this was something akin to Kim Kardashian's ass breaking the internet, except... instead of Kim's ass, it was the Mask of Freedom. 

Within hours, thousands of people changed their profile pictures to the image of the Mask. And Cairo's very acute activist community managed to stage a protest where I was taken for questioning. Before I even got there. And they were armed with fresh printouts of the Mask of Freedom, a hi-res image of which was already available online. And within hours, I was released without charge.

That wasn't the end of The Mask of Freedom. Within two days, bootlegged T-shirts sporting the mask were being sold in Tahrir square. In fact, different versions of the same shirt were going around, and the image was seen often at protests over the next couple years.

This is the difference between putting a picture on the internet and giving it a physical manifestation in the real world. The internet, believe it or not, isn't as important as some make it out to be. I keep coming across college art magazines where students frequently talk about the power of clicks and "engaging content", and it is one of the saddest, most disheartening things I've ever seen. As someone who has participated firsthand in a revolution described by US media as a social media uprising, let me tell ya: online activism is bullshit. Egypt's dictator would have never been ousted had people not taken to the streets and occupied public squares, and I would've never been released from military-police custody had activists not showed up at their doorstep.

Even the term "online activism" is ridiculous. It's a little akin to saying "telephone activism". There's no such thing, it's just a communication tool. Sure, it's a pretty good one, but a rather pointless one if what is being communicated does not seep into the physical world in some way or function.

Realizing the rather versatile applications of the Mask of Freedom, in that -much like the ancient Egyptian image of mouse ruling over cats- it could work in a range of situations regardless of time, place, or culture, I found myself using it more than once.

Poland, 2012 - After joining the EU, Poland's market really opened up to big multinational corporations. And after years of suffering under soviet dictatorship which lasted til 1989, you could now see the Polish embracing consumerist culture with intense fervor. My response was to use the Mask of Freedom in a stencil on a wall in Katowice, historically known to be a big mining town in Poland. Hence the figure equipped with mining tools, while clad in Gap, Adidas, and Converse.

The text in Polish reads, very simply: "Beware the Mask of Freedom."

Fast forward to 2015, and the Mask of Freedom reemerges as a very applicable American critique, in a 3-color screenprint on wood at a solo exhibition at Leila Heller Gallery in New York City.

Of course, having come from a very old place, where dynasties have fallen, and others have risen, where Gods were no longer worshiped in favor of other Gods, and where culture has shifted and changed and altered more than once, I find it quite easy to look at everything with a critical eye, whether they be old... established, often deemed unquestionable things... or new.

Of course, as much as I'd like to, I don't always get to do this sort of work. The unfortunate reality of being a working artist is that every so often you're gonna have to take on commissions. One such commission  was a sort-of art-video I did for Irish rock band, U2. This was part of a big campaign where they got 11 artists to do visual companion pieces to songs from their latest album. The band had stated that their inspiration for this particular album, Songs of Innocence, was the punk rock of the 70's. And in thinking about that, it occurred to me that music videos weren't yet a popular artform in the 70's, and one's visual experience of a band pretty much relied on the artwork on record sleeves and gig posters. So I thought why not make a video made up entirely of posters. This would also bring a very physical, very tactile quality to the video which I thought would be cool.

862 posters. Designed over 3 weeks. Filmed in 1 day.

Okay, I have one last project I'd like to talk to you about. For a museum in Germany, I was asked to do an exhibition based on my current work-in-progress. A sci-fi graphic novel titled THE SOLAR GRID. Now I didn't want to just take pages from the graphic novel and display them on the wall. It's really not how the pages are meant to be experienced. They're meant to be in a book that you could curl up with. And I really didn't think it would make for a very compelling exhibition. What I wanted to do was create something specific to the museum experience. Not something meant for a book, and not something meant for the internet, but something really specific to entering into a museum space.

The premise of the graphic novel is that, after a major environmental catastrophe on a global scale, a lot of people leave Earth and settle on Mars. Over time, Earth becomes a de facto factory for Mars, exporting goods that are produced in solar-powered factories that never stop. This is made possible by a network of satellites, called The Solar Grid, that orbit the planet and keep it basked in eternal daylight. Effectively eliminating night on Earth.

Not everyone has migrated to Mars. In fact, most people haven't. And they are left on a nightless Earth to suffer the consequences. Not just that, but they have the waste that Mars sends back to deal with.

So, there are a lot of somewhat abstract ideas here. Ideas that I wanted to bring to the museum's space in a tangible way. The result was this installation.

So we built this room, and covered it in blown up panels from the graphic novel. This particular scene shows the sun setting, and then the sky lighting up with a great many smaller suns. And where there would've been another panel from the book, instead you have actual light blasting out of the room. Once inside the room, you see the walls covered in all the waste that the characters in the book would have to go through to survive. And right above your head, the ceiling is covered with these very harsh overhead lights, giving you a bit of the actual experience of being within the world of the graphic novel.

Now you'll notice that all the examples I've cited here show work where the form and the content are closely related. I first think of an idea, and then I figure out the form it should take.

A lot of the time I come across book-arts and printmaking where the materials used are the extent of the artist's idea. Where, rather than... the form an artwork takes being informed by an idea, the tools themselves become the idea. Where there's an almost kind of fetishization that this is a letterpress on top of a screenprint or whatever. Please don't do that.

Remember than not everything written in verse is poetry, and not everything covered in paint is a painting. What is being expressed is what truly elevates something to a work of art. How it is expressed is of course equally important. But before you get there, you must first consider what it is that needs expression, that demands expression.

That is your starting point.

Because that is what makes you unique, what makes you powerful. More powerful than kings or pharoahs or presidents. More powerful than CEOs or advertising executives or even Kim Kardashian. Remember that. Remember that every time you set pencil to paper–or even stylus to tablet–because that line you draw... has the potential to change the world. Every time.

Good luck.

Ganzeer March 19, 2018 Claremont, CA

[criticalotterstudies]

It was curiosity, not stupidity that killed the Dodo. For too long, we have held to the unfair myth that the flightless Mauritian bird became extinct because it was too dumb to understand that it was being killed. But as Stefan Pociask points out in “What Happened to the Last Dodo Bird?”, the dodo was driven into extinction partly because of its desire to learn more about a new, taller, two-legged creature who disembarked onto the shores of its native habitat: “Fearless curiosity, rather than stupidity, is a more fitting description of their behavior.”

Curiosity does have a tendency to get you killed. The truly fearless don’t last long, and the birds who go out in search of new knowledge are inevitably the first ones to get plucked. It’s always safer to stay close to the nest.

Contrary to what capitalism’s mythologizers would have you believe, the contemporary world does not heap its rewards on those with the most creativity and courage. In fact, at every stage of life, those who venture beyond the safe boundaries of expectation are ruthlessly culled. If you’re a black kid who tends to talk back and call bullshit on your teachers, you will be sent to a special school. If you’re a transgender teenager like Leelah Alcorn in Ohio, and you unapologetically defy gender norms, they’ll make you so miserable that you kill yourself. If you’re Eric Garner, and you tell the police where they can stick their B.S. “loose cigarette” tax, they will promptly choke you to death. Conformists, on the other hand, usually do pretty well for themselves. Follow the rules, tell people what they want to hear, and you’ll come out just fine.

Becoming a successful academic requires one hell of a lot of ass-kissing and up-sucking. You have to flatter and impress. The very act of applying to graduate school to begin with is an exercise in servility: please deem me worthy of your favor. In order to rise through the ranks, you have to convince people of your intelligence and acceptability, which means basing everything you do on a concern for what other people think. If ever you find that your conclusions would make your superiors despise you (say, for example, if you realized that much of what they wrote was utter irredeemable manure), you face a choice: conceal your true self or be permanently consigned to the margins.

...

The ideas that do get produced have also become more inaccessible, with research inevitably cloaked behind the paywalls of journals that cost astronomical sums of money. At the cheaper end, the journal Cultural Studies charges individuals $201 for just the print edition, and charges institutions $1,078 for just the online edition. The science journal Biochimica et Biophysica Acta costs $20,000, which makes Cultural Studies look like a bargain. (What makes the pricing especially egregious is that these journals are created mostly with free labor, as academics who produce articles are almost never paid for them.) Ideas in the modern university are not free and available to all. They are in fact tethered to a vast academic industrial complex, where giant publishing houses like Elsevier make massive profits off the backs of researchers.

Furthermore, the academics who produce those ideas aren’t exactly at liberty to think and do as they please. The overwhelming “adjunctification” of the university has meant that approximately 76% of professors… aren’t professors at all, but underpaid and overworked adjuncts, lecturers, and assistants. And while conditions for adjuncts are slowly improving, especially through more widespread unionization, their place in the university is permanently unstable. This means that no adjunct can afford to seriously offend. To make matters worse, adjuncts rely heavily on student evaluations to keep their positions, meaning that their classrooms cannot be places to heavily contest or challenge students’ politics. Instructors could literally lose their jobs over even the appearance of impropriety. One false step—a video seen as too salacious, or a political opinion held as oppressive—could be the end of a career. An adjunct must always be docile and polite.

All of this means that university faculty are less and less likely to threaten any aspect of the existing social or political system. Their jobs are constantly on the line, so there’s a professional risk in upsetting the status quo. But even if their jobs were safe, the corporatized university would still produce mostly banal ideas, thanks to the sycophancy-generating structure of the academic meritocracy. But even if truly novel and consequential ideas were being produced, they would be locked away behind extortionate paywalls.

The corporatized university also ends up producing the corporatized student. Students worry about doing anything that may threaten their job prospects. Consequently, acts of dissent have become steadily de-radicalized. On campuses these days, outrage and anger is reserved for questions like, “Is this sushi an act of cultural appropriation?” When student activists do propose ways to “radically” reform the university, it tends to involve adding new administrative offices and bureaucratic procedures, i.e. strengthening the existing structure of the university rather than democratizing it. Instead of demanding an increase in the power of students, campus workers, and the untenured, activists tend to push for symbolic measures that universities happily embrace, since they do not compromise the existing arrangement of administrative and faculty power.

It’s amusing, then, that conservatives have long been so paranoid about the threat posed by U.S. college campuses. The American right has an ongoing fear of supposedly arch-leftist professors brainwashing nubile and impressionable young minds into following sinister leftist dictates. Since massively popular books like Roger Kimball’s 1990 Tenured Radicals and Dinesh D’Souza’s 1992 Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race on Campus, colleges have been seen as hotbeds of Marxist indoctrination that threaten the civilized order. This is a laughable idea, for the simple reason that academics are the very opposite of revolutionaries: they intentionally speak to minuscule audiences rather than the masses (on campus, to speak of a “popular” book is to deploy a term of faint disdain) and they are fundamentally concerned with preserving the security and stability of their own position. This makes them deeply conservative in their day-to-day acts, regardless of what may come out of their mouths. (See the truly pitiful lack of support among Harvard faculty when the university’s dining hall workers went on strike for slightly higher wages. Most of the “tenured radicals” couldn’t even be bothered to sign a petition supporting the workers, let alone march in the streets.)

But left-wing academics are all too happy to embrace the conservatives’ ludicrous idea of professors as subversives. This is because it reassures them that they are, in fact, consequential, that they are effectively opposing right-wing ideas, and that they need not question their own role. The “professor-as-revolutionary” caricature serves both the caricaturist and the professor. Conservatives can remain convinced that students abandon conservative ideas because they are being manipulated, rather than because reading books and learning things makes it more difficult to maintain right-wing prejudices. And liberal professors get to delude themselves into believing they are affecting something.

...

In Hyde Park, where I live, the University of Chicago seems ancient and venerable at first glance. Its Ye Olde Kinda Sorta Englande architecture, built in 1890 to resemble Oxbridge, could almost pass for medieval if one walked through it at dusk. But the institution is in fact deeply modern, and like Columbia University in New York, it has slowly absorbed the surrounding neighborhood, slicing into older residential areas and displacing residents in landgrab operations. Despite being home to one of the world’s most prestigious medical and research schools, the university refused for many years to open a trauma center to serve the city’s South Side, which had been without access to trauma care. (The school only relented in 2015, after a long history of protests.) The university ferociously guards its myriad assets with armed guards on the street corners, and enacts massive surveillance on local residents (the university-owned cinema insists on examining bags for weapons and food, a practice I have personally experienced being selectively conducted in a racially discriminatory manner). In the university’s rapacious takeover of the surrounding neighborhood, and its treatment of local residents—most of whom are of color—we can see what happens when a university becomes a corporation rather than a community institution. Devouring everything in the pursuit of limitless expansion, it swallows up whole towns.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/04/the-dangerous-academic-is-an-extinct-species

[transformationagent]

The Politics Of Today, And Why The Joke’s On US

Kim Daniela

I will preface this article by stating my political beliefs, which are that politics in our world/matrix reality are designed predominantly for the agenda of domination and control. Politicians of power countries are merely puppets of the 'Cabal', or 'Deep State' def: a body of people, typically influential members of government agencies or the military, believed to be involved in the secret manipulation or control of government policy. With these statements in mind, I'll now present an alternate political message. All I ask of you the reader is to have an open mind and to be able to suspend your disbelief for just a moment. If you're on the path of awakening, this information is essential knowledge.. You may ask, "Where is the evidence of this domination and control agenda, or of the deep state?" The answer is that once you are open to it and pay attention, there is so much evidence it can be overwhelming. So I will outline what I can in one brief article, beyond that you are welcome to embark on the learning journey and down the rabbit hole yourself. Firstly, for those of you who haven't read or participated in school studies of either George Orwell's 1984 (published 1949) or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (published 1932), do yourselves the favour of reading one or both of these books. Both Huxley and Orwell were members of the famed 'Fabian Society', def: a British socialist organization whose purpose is to advance the principles of democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist effort in democracies, rather than by revolutionary overthrow. Basically, the Fabian Society had a powerful influence over the politics of the British Empire and internationally, as do all such societies. This is where both authors were introduced to the agenda of domination and control, or what has been referred to as the New World Order, hence their works of 'fiction' were actually depicting real plans for our world/reality by those in control. The proof is always in the pudding, so as usual rather than choosing to either immediately buy or debunk this information, why not do your own investigating? Take a look at our current global reality and make some comparisons. Then you will at least see, irrespective of your opinion, that there are many undeniable parallels. Fast forward to today, and on the premise that a globalist agenda is indeed in full swing, how might it all come together? We can only paint a picture by connecting as many dots as possible. Starting with secret societies, or what might otherwise be termed elitist membership groups, whose ongoing meetings are unquestionably producing the political policies we see being played out on an international scale. How, you might ask? By the fact that all the global power players are members/on the guest lists to these top secret meetings. On rare occasion, information from one or other of these meetings has been leaked, confirming the globalist agenda and revealing decisions that have consequently been made politically. The pyramid of power starts at the top with three corporations, known jointly as Empire of the City: Vatican City, City of London and Washington DC. It then filters down via the groups The Bilderbergers, The Trilateral Commission, The Council on Foreign Relations in the US, and their UK counterpart Chatham House/Institute of International Affairs, The Club of Rome, Skull and Bones, and the upper levels of the Freemasons. The US Bohemian Grove meetings also play a part in agenda setting, while the Tavistock Institute in London is a major medium used in influencing our reality and brainwashing the masses. By clicking on all of these hyperlinks you can better educate yourself as to who all these players really are and how they are interconnected. It is important to note that anyone who reaches a high-tier level on the global political front has been initiated into one or more of these groups and must ultimately follow their policies and agenda. Within the pyramid of power there are a select few, namely thirteen ruling families, at the very top. They have been in power through many generations, and control the modern world via the above mentioned Empire of the City. Vatican City holds the spiritual control centre, City of London the financial control centre and Washington DC the military control centre. All high-tier elected officials and politicians follow agendas dictated from above. Even in the case of opposing parties, behind the scenes they are all part of the same game and beholden to the ruling forces. Therefore it usually matters not who is 'selected' as president or prime minister, and in the event an individual decides they want to rock the political boat, they are disposed of. Case in point John F Kennedy, and his brother Robert Kennedy behind him. Martin Luther King was also gaining too much traction against the establishment and so he was killed. The modern banking system is the means used to maintain physical control. Together, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the US Federal Reserve (all private organizations) are at the top of the financial pyramid system, and all the other banks fall underneath. For a wonderful insight into the creation of the federal reserve and the sham that is the whole modern monetary system, read The Creature From Jekyll Island by D Edward Griffin. Following on, war and the drug trade both offer great means of profit, via sale of weapons, reconstruction, and sale of pharmaceutical and street drugs. Hence global wars are ongoing and promoted by those in power as being necessary. Big Pharma has taken over the US medical industry and is trying to infiltrate in as many nations as possible, while the CIA controls the international street drug trade, where billions are made. These industries pummel funds into the financial infrastructure, notably via the 'big three' institutions. And for a fantastic read that outlines how a power country pillages the rest of the world, namely developing nations, check out NY Times bestseller Confessions Of An Economic Hitman by John Perkins. The mainstream media are essentially employed as PR agents for the globalist agenda, as well summarized in this Article. Distraction allows the globalists to mind control the masses, holding their attention with many a frivolous story while important chess moves are happening behind the scenes. Celebrities are the most powerful distractors, including present day politicians. Mainstream media is used to manipulate and fabricate the so called facts. For anyone who hasn't seen the brilliant movie that summises an aspect of this so well, Wag The Dog, I highly recommend watching it! The purpose for all of this is essentially to keep people from awakening to their true power.. that as free conscious beings with unlimited creative potential, who do not need governing as they think they do. Read This. At the forefront of the 'awakening to the globalist agenda' movement for over 25 years is David Icke, with 22 books, countless articles and many hours of live/video presentations to his name. Here are two excellent such presentations of David's that connect many dots and highlight an overall picture of the globalist agenda, Mind Control And The New World Order and Agenda 21, The Plan To Kill You. Watching both will give you a good introduction into what is happening within our world/matrix reality today. At the end of the day, it is your choice to believe what you wish, but my hope is that this article will at least open your eyes to a deeper view of reality than what is presented in the mainstream. For that mainstream has been carefully engineered to brainwash you and I and all of the masses into believing the lie; that we are limited, unintelligent beings who need controlling and governance. The joke is indeed on us! Hence our reality will continue on into greater manipulation, political shenanigans, control and chaos, so long as we allow it. Or until we awaken en masse and say "Enough of the bullshit!" For an awakened population puts an immediate end to a ruling elite. Through a revolution of consciousness, the non-bloody kind, we intelligently co-create a system within a world that works for all.

[archiveofprolbems]

If You Don’t Have Bread, Eat Art!: Contemporary Art and Derivative Fascisms by Hito Steyerl

Is art a currency? Investor Stefan Simchowitz thinks so. He wrote with uncompromising clarity about the post-Brexit era: “Art will effectively continue its structural function as an alternative currency that hedges against inflation and currency depreciation.”1 Have silver paintings become a proxy gold standard?2 How did it come to this? During the ongoing crisis, investors were showered with tax money, which then went into freeport collections, tower mansions, and shell companies. Quantitative easing eroded currency stability and depleted common resources, entrenching a precarious service economy with dismal wages, if any, eternal gigs, eternal debt, permanent doubt, and now increasing violence. This destabilization is one reason the value of art looks more stable than the prospects of many national GDPs. In the EU this takes place against a backdrop of mass evictions, austerity, arson attacks, Daesh run amok, and Deutsche scams. Results include child poverty, debt blackmail, rigged economies, and the fascist scapegoating of others for widely self-inflicted failed policies. Art is an “alternative currency” of this historical moment.3 It seems to trade against a lot of misery.

Christie's auctioneers vend a Mark Rothko painting.

Meanwhile, reactionary extremism intensifies in many places. I won’t bore you with specifics. There’s always another attack, election, coup, or someone who ups the ante in terms of violence, misogyny, snuff, or infamy. Derivative fascisms4continue to grow, wherever disenfranchised middle classes fear (and face) global competition—and choose to both punch down and suck up to reactionary oligarchies.5 Ever more self-tribalized formations pop up that prefer not to abolish neoliberal competition—but instead eliminate competitors personally. Derivative fascisms try to fuse all-out free trade economics with (for example) white nationalism[6] by promoting survival of the fittest for everyone except themselves. Authoritarian neoliberalism segues into just authoritarianism.

A permanent fog of war is fanned by permanent fakes on Facebook. Already deregulated ideas of truth are destabilized even further. Emergency rules. Critique is a troll fest. Crisis commodified as entertainment. The age of neoliberal globalization seems exhausted and a period of contraction, fragmentation, and autocratic rule has set in.

The growth of the global auction market from 2005 to 2015, according to data from Auction House, ArtNet, and AMMA.

Alternative Currency

Art markets seem not overly concerned. In times in which financial institutions and even whole political entities may just dissolve into fluffy glitter, investment in art seems somehow more real. Moreover, as alternative currency, art seems to fulfill what Ethereum and Bitcoin have hitherto only promised.6 Rather than money issued by a nation and administrated by central banks, art is a networked, decentralized, widespread system of value.7 It gains stability because it calibrates credit or disgrace across competing institutions or cliques. There are markets, collectors, museums, publications, and the academy asynchronously registering (or mostly failing to do so) exhibitions, scandals, likes and prices. As with cryptocurrencies, there is no central institution to guarantee value; instead there is a jumble of sponsors, censors, bloggers, developers, producers, hipsters, handlers, patrons, privateers, collectors, and way more confusing characters. Value arises from gossip-cum-spin and insider information. Fraudsters and con artists mix helter-skelter with pontificating professors, anxious gallerists, and couch-surfing students. This informal ecology is eminently hackable, but since everyone does it, it sometimes evens out—even though at highly manipulated levels. It is at once highly malleable and inert, sublime, dopey, opaque, bizarre, and blatant: a game in which the most transcendental phenomena are on collectors’ waiting lists. Further down the food chain, media art, like Bitcoin, tries to manage the contradictions of digital scarcity by limiting the illimitable. But for all its pretense to technological infallibility, Bitcoin is potentially just as dependent on group power8 as art-market values are dependent on consent, collusion, and coincidence. What looks like incorruptible tech in practice hinges on people’s actions. As to the encryption part in art: art is often encrypted to the point of sometimes being undecryptable. Encryption is routinely applied, even or especially if there is no meaning whatsoever. Art is encryption as such, regardless of the existence of a message with a multitude of conflicting and often useless keys.9 Its reputational economy is randomly quantified, ranked by bullshit algorithms that convert artists and academics into ranked positions, but it also includes more traditionally clannish social hierarchies. It is a fully ridiculous, crooked, and toothless congregation and yet, like civilization as a whole, art would be a great idea.

In practice though, art industries trigger trickle-up effects which are then flushed sideways into tax havens. Art’s economies divert investments from sustainable job creation, education, and research and externalize social cost and risk. They bleach neighborhoods, underpay, overrate, and peddle excruciating baloney.

This does not only apply to art’s investor and manager classes. The lifestyles of many art workers also support a corporate technological (and antisocial) infrastructure that whisks off profits into fiscal banana republics. Apple, Google, Uber, Airbnb, Ryanair, Facebook, and other hipster providers pay hardly any taxes in Ireland, Jersey, or other semisecret jurisdictions. They don’t contribute to local services like schools or hospitals and their idea of sharing is to make sure they get their share.

But let’s face it—in relation to the scale of other industries, the art sector is just a blip. Contemporary art is just a hash for all that’s opaque, unintelligible, and unfair, for top-down class war and all-out inequality. It’s the tip of an iceberg acting as a spear.

“The online art market has continued to grow strongly (up 24 percent to $3.27 billion) despite the global art market slowing in 2015,” states the foreword of this art insurer's report.

Degenerate Art

Predictably, this leads to resentment and outright anger. Art is increasingly labeled as a decadent, rootless, out-of-touch, cosmopolitan urban elite activity. In one sense, this is a perfectly honest and partly pertinent description.10Contemporary art belongs to a time in which everything goes and nothing goes anywhere, a time of stagnant escalation, of serial novelty as deadlock. Many are itching for major changes, some because the system is pointless, harmful, 1 percent-ish, and exclusive, and many more because they finally want in.

On the other hand, talk of “rootless cosmopolitans” is clearly reminiscent of both Nazi and Stalinist propaganda, who relished in branding dissenting intellectuals as “parasites” within “healthy national bodies.” In both regimes this kind of jargon was used to get rid of minority intelligentsia, formal experiments and progressive agendas; not to improve access for locals or improve or broaden the appeal of art. The “anti-elitist” discourse in culture is at present mainly deployed by conservative elites, who hope to deflect attention from their own economic privileges by relaunching of stereotypes of “degenerate art.”

So if you are hoping for new opportunities with the authoritarians, you might find yourself disappointed.

Authoritarian right-wing regimes will not get rid of art-fair VIP lists or make art more relevant or accessible to different groups of people. In no way will they abolish elites or even art. They will only accelerate inequalities, beyond the fiscal-material to the existential-material. This transformation is not about accountability, criteria, access, or transparency. It will not prevent tax fraud, doctored markets, the Daesh antiquities trade, or systemic underpay. It will be more of the same, just much worse: less pay for workers, less exchange, fewer perspectives, less circulation, and even less regulation, if such a thing is even possible. Inconvenient art will fly out the window—anything non-flat, non-huge, or remotely complex or challenging. Intellectual perspectives, expanded canons, nontraditional histories will be axed—anything that requires an investment of time and effort instead of conspicuous money. Public support swapped for Instagram metrics. Art fully floated on some kind of Arsedaq. More fairs, longer yachts for more violent assholes, oil paintings of booty blondes, abstract stock-chart calligraphy. Yummy organic superfoods. Accelerationist designer breeding. Personalized one-on-one performances for tax evaders. Male masters, more male masters, and repeat. Art will take its place next to big-game hunting, armed paragliding, and adventure slumming.

Yay for expensive craft and anything vacuous that works in a chain-hotel lobby. Plastiglomerate marble, welded by corporate characters banging on about natural selection. Kits for biological “self-improvement.” Crapstraction, algostraction, personalized installations incorporating Krav Maga lessons. Religious nail paint will slay in all seasons, especially with a Louis Vuitton logo. Hedge-fund mandalas. Modest fashion. Immodest fashion. Nativist mumbo jumbo. Genetically engineered caviar in well-behaved ethnic pottery. Conceptual plastic surgery. Racial plastic surgery. Bespoke ivory gun handles. Murals on border walls. Good luck with this. You will be my mortal enemy.

Just like institutional critique was overtaken by a neoliberal Right that went ahead and simply abolished art institutions, the critique of contemporary art and claims for an exit from this paradigm are dwarfed by their reactionary counterparts. The reactionary exit—or acceleration of stagnation—is already well underway. Algorithmic and analogue market manipulation, alongside the defunding, dismantling, and hollowing-out of the public and post-public sector,11 transforms what sometimes worked as a forum for shared ideas, judgment, and experimentation into HNWI interior design. Art will be firewalled within isolationist unlinked canons, which can easily be marketed as national, religious, and fully biased histories.

Game of Thrones lends itself to serving as a metaphor for fanstastic precarity.

An Alternative Alternative Currency?

Now what? Where does one go from here?

Let’s put the next paragraph into brackets. It just indicates a hypothetical possibility.

If art is an alternative currency, its circulation also outlines an operational infrastructure. Could these structures be repossessed to work differently? How much value would the alternative currency of art lose if its most corrupt aspects were to be regulated or restructured to benefit art’s larger communities? How about even a minimum of rules in the market—gallery contracts, resale-time minimums, artist fees,12 remunerated internships? Introducing blockchain public records for the production, transaction, and locating of artworks in order to reign in tax fraud and money laundering?13Declining the most mortifying sponsor and patron relationships instead of artwashing fossil extraction, weapons manufacturing, and banks bailed out with former cultural funding? How about asking for fees on resales similar to those asked on photocopies to pay for art workers’ health insurance? Or on any offshore art-related transaction? Could art as alternative currency not only circulate within existing systems but even launch not-yet-existing economies (publics, institutions, markets, parallel art worlds, etc.)?

But to expect any kind of progressive transformation to happen by itself—just because the infrastructure or technology exists—would be like expecting the internet to create socialism or automation to evenly benefit all humankind. The internet spawned Uber and Amazon, not the Paris Commune. The results may be called “the sharing economy,” but this mostly means that the poor share with the rich, not vice versa. Should any less unilateral sharing be suggested, the bulk of capital will decamp immediately.14 One of the first steps towards parallel art sectors would thus be to organize even partial sustainability in the absence of bubble liquidity and barely limited amounts of free labor. Whatever emerges will be a new version of art-affiliated autonomy

In contrast to the modernist autonomy of art schemes, this autonomy is not solitary, unlinked, or isolated. Nor will it come about by some fantasy of progress in-built into technology. On the contrary it can only emerge through both a conscious effort and exchange among diverse entities. It’s an autonomy that works through circulation, transformation, and alchemy. The links it could build on exist as weak links (aka, air-kiss links) and reshaping them would need to happen within a compromised mess of contradictory activities. But simultaneously people can try to synch with the art-related undercommons15 by building partial networked autonomy via all means necessary. If art is a currency, can it be an undercurrent? Could it work like an Unter, not an Uber?

How to do this? People are used to perceiving the art world as sponsored by states, foundations, patrons, and corporations. But the contrary applies at least equally well. Throughout history it has been artists and artworkers, more than any other actors, who have subsidized art production.16 Most do so by concocting mixed-income schemes in which, simply speaking, some form of wage labor (or other income) funds art-making. But more generally, everyone involved also contributes in all sorts of other ways to art’s circulation, thus making it stronger as currency. Even artists who live “off their work” subsidize the market by way of enormous commissions in relation to other industries. But why should one sponsor VIP prepreviews, bespoke museum extensions without any means to fill them, art-fair arms races, institutional franchises built under penal-colony conditions, and other baffling bubbles? This bloated, entitled, fully superfluous, embarrassing, and most of all politically toxic overhead is subsidized by means of free labor and life time, but also by paying attention to blingstraction and circulating its spinoffs, thus creating reach and legitimacy. Even the majority of artists that cannot afford saying no to any offer of income could save time not doing this.17 Refusing sponsorship of this sort might be the first step towards shaking the unsustainable and mortifying dependency on speculative operations that indirectly increase authoritarian violence and division. Spend free time assisting colleagues,18 not working for free for bank foundations. Don’t “share” corporate crap on monopolist platforms. Ask yourself: Do you want global capitalism with a fascist face? Do you want to artwash more insane weather, insane leaders, poisonous and rising water, crumbling infrastructure, and brand-new walls? How can people genuinely share what they need?19 How much speed is necessary? How can artistic (and art-related) autonomy evolve from haughty sovereignty to modest networked devolution?20 How can platform cooperatives contribute to this? Can art institutions follow the lead of new municipalist networks and alliances of “rebel cities”?21 In the face of derivative fascisms, can local forms of life be reimagined beyond blood, soil, nation, and corporation, as networks of neighborhoods, publics, layered audiences?22 Can art keep local imaginaries curious, open-minded, and spirited? How to make tangible the idea that belonging is in becoming—not in having been?23What is art’s scale, perspective, and challenge in de-growing constituencies? Can one transform art’s currency into art’s confluence? Replace speculation with overflow?24

Art’s organizing role in the value-process—long overlooked, downplayed, worshipped, or fucked—is at last becoming clear enough to approach, if not rationally, than perhaps realistically. Art as alternative currency shows that art sectors already constitute a maze of overlapping systems in which good-old gossip, greed, lofty ideals, inebriation, and ruthless competition form countless networked cliques. The core of its value is generated less by transaction than by endless negotiation, via gossip, criticism, hearsay, haggling, heckling, peer reviews, small talk, and shade. The result is a solid tangle of feudal loyalties and glowing enmity, rejected love and fervent envy, pooling striving, longing, and vital energies. In short, the value is not in the product but in the network; not in gaming or predicting the market25 but in creating exchange.26 Most importantly, art is one of the few exchanges that derivative fascists don’t control—yet.

But as a reserve system for dumb, mean, and greedy money, art’s social value (auto)destructs and turns into a shell operation that ultimately just shields more empty shells and amplifies fragmentation and division. Similarly, arts venues are already shifting into bonded warehouses and overdesigned bank vaults inside gilded, gated compounds designed by seemingly the same three architects worldwide.

It’s easy to imagine what the motto for art as the reserve currency of a fully rigged system might be. Just envision a posh PR lieutenant policing the entrance of a big art fair, gingerly declaring to anyone pushed aside, displaced, exploited, and ignored: “If you don’t have bread, just eat art!”

×

Thank you to Sven Lütticken, Anton Vidokle, and Stephen Squibb for very helpful comments.

Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker and writer who lives in Berlin.

© 2016 e-flux and the author

Source: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/76/69732/if-you-don-t-have-bread-eat-art-contemporary-art-and-derivative-fascisms/

[gossipnetwork-blog]

Why The Harvey Weinstein Allegations Could Change Our Culture

New Post has been published on http://gossip.network/why-the-harvey-weinstein-allegations-could-change-our-culture/

Why The Harvey Weinstein Allegations Could Change Our Culture

Someday we’ll look back on the great Harvey Weinstein scandal of 2017 as the moment the worm turned on the patriarchy, at least for a while. It was the critical mass that did it. Among the many remarkable things about the story has been the way it has unfolded, or unfurled, like a gradual awakening, a slow-yet-shockingly sudden coming-to from a long, ambient waking nightmare.

It was, of course, an incredibly long time coming. The drumbeat of revelations about powerful men abusing their power to harass, intimidate and assault relatively powerless women had been building since – well, since forever. But evidence of the harassment we’re subjected to on a regular basis has only gotten starker since the election: since the Donald Trump Access Hollywood recordings and the assault allegation since dropped; since Anthony Weiner’s dick-pic apocalypse; since Bill Cosby was revealed to be a serial rapist off the hook on a technicality. It’s rape culture on parade against a chorus of grievances. Anger mounts. It snowballs. It jolts you awake, screaming.

Amid all this, the Weinstein scandal seems worse, somehow. Maybe it’s just because it’s gotten more traction, because the consequences have been swift and categorical. Maybe it’s because we never expected any better from Trump; because Cosby was old and half-forgotten. Weinstein was current, relevant. For those too far removed to have heard the rumors, he represented good things: art; the Oscars; Cinderella dreams come true. Maybe Cosby could help your career, maybe even Trump could, but they weren’t gatekeepers to an industry. They weren’t the actual system made ugly flesh. Harvey Weinstein held all the dreams in his hand. He was prestige, taste, proof that you’d made it. He could make or break you. He’d even break you while making you. That was the price you paid, or rather the tithe, the pizzo.

This is not an individual problem. This is a systemic problem. There are no two sides. “Personal responsibility” doesn’t factor in. Weinstein’s pattern of behavior is emblematic of a system that runs on power differentials. It’s not just Weinstein, or Hollywood. It’s corporate America. It’s the legislature. (140 women denounced “misconduct” in the California legislature.) It’s the torrent of #MeToo hashtags on Facebook and Twitter. It’s patriarchy. It’s a system of oppression in action. You lose some, you lose some.

There’s this idea that the kind of dynamic that we’ve spent the past few days hearing about in detail is natural, somehow. That it’s embedded in our nature. That this dyad – the older rich and powerful guy and the beautiful young woman – is an evolutionary pairing; nature’s red-carpet ready way of ensuring the survival of the species. This is bullshit of the highest order. We’ll believe it the day we see Woody Allen kill a bison with his bare hands.

Flexing power to coerce sex from the less powerful isn’t natural, it’s abuse. And abuse is not natural, it’s cultural. Abuse flows from a socially-sanctioned sense of entitlement; from the belief that rich, white men are entitled to more control over speech, over resources, over law, over everything, than non-rich, non-white men and all women. That they are entitled to control who leads, who works, who speaks.

NBC allegedly killed Ronan Farrow’s story – the one he eventually placed in The New Yorker – because Weinstein was well-known for having a legal team that went after every woman who complained, or threatened to. His harassment usually ended with a coercively extracted promise of silence. The culture of secrecy was what kept the real story from coming to light. The story was distorted – in this case, by a legendary producer of stories. Weinstein (as just one example in an untriggered avalanche of examples) controlled the story at every letter. The women were there to play the girl; or, as a Facebook friend wrote recently on her wall, “the tits or invisible.”

If Weinstein represents the system, then the movies he made represent an official narrative. We recognize them as “life.” By controlling the production of stories, they get to decide who gets to fashion their experience into a “universal” tale, who gets to speak, what can be said and what has to be hushed, disowned, denied. This is culture by gaslight. It bends reality to a lie. It forces reality to comply to the story. It denies the experience of anyone who lives in the world in a body that is not like his. It offloads his shame onto others, makes his secret into theirs.

This is why it feels so significant: because the story – the story that keeps the system in place, and vice versa – is finally starting to crack. In the 1960s, the French semiotician Roland Barthes wrote an essay titled “Myth Today,” in which he showed how popular culture generates myths, and how mythology has always worked: Its function is turning culture into nature. What the Harvey Weinstein scandal shows is that the culture is broken, and that it’s time for new myths. It’s time for new stories that don’t function in the service of power, but shed some light on what’s really going on.

Carina Chocano is the author of You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks & Other Mixed Messages

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5 Great Thinker Quotes You’re Using Wrong

Nothing obligates us appear smart like repeating something an actual smart being formerly did. Why bother coming up with your own droll reply, when you’re pretty sure you formerly read about something Winston Churchill may or may not have said to some other dick, course back in the working day? Or perhaps “its been” Oscar Wilde. Or maybe nobody actually used to say at all, and you’re just mincing up half-remembered takes in your foreman. You check their own problems: Some of the more popular quotes from some of the most famous geniuses don’t actually aim what we believe that they do. For illustration …

5

Murphy’s Law( “Anything That Can Go Wrong, Will Go Wrong”) Was Just A Dig At His Own Bumbling Assistants

You know Murphy and his damn Statute: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” In other statements: The universe is always out to got to get. It doesn’t trouble if you plan ahead and preparations for all contingencies — something will always go wrong and bolt you over. Yep, the fundamental rules of the universe are why our last camping expedition was just going shit; it’s not because we strategy it at the last second and produced nothing but a Taco Bell combo box.

What It Actually Necessitates:

The original signify was more like, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong … when you’ve got these chuckleheads for assistants.” The Murphy in Murphy’s Law wasn’t some historic genius or ancient philosopher, but a U.S. Air Force engineer called Edward A. Murphy. His evidence was provoked by a military venture committing a rocket-powered sled, apparently designed as a way to capture and relish a particularly elusive roadrunner.

US Air Force * Holds up signed that replies “Yipes! ” * Murphy was tasked with installing sensors of his own design on the sled, to evaluate its speeding, but once the test was ended, the sensors hadn’t weighed shit. Murphy blamed the failure on his assistants, pronouncing TAGEND

Nick T. Sparks Murphy’s Employee’s Law: “[ shrug ]. ”

“If there’s any room they can do it wrong , they will.” Yes, the original form of this popular proverb was just a passive-aggressive boss chewing out his employees( for something that might have actually been his flaw ).

As the sled venture prolonged, other members of the team distilled Murphy’s phrase to a more familiar species( “If anything can go wrong, it will” ), and give it serve as a remember to make their patterns as idiot-proof as is practicable. Murphy’s Law was never meant to imply there’s a sitcom-like regulation that the universe is out to get you. Just that your boss thinks you suction. Of trend, this is all evidence of another universal rule that generally holds true: “Shit rotations downhill.”

4

“Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History” Was A Plea To Get Well-Behaved Women Some Recognition Already

One of many beads of wisdom assigned to Marilyn Monroe, the word “Well-behaved ladies seldom[ or rarely] acquire history” is most often used in one of two ways: A) as a announce of encouragement for women to stand up, get noticed, and carve their place into the annals of biography, or B) as an excuse for used to go and getting hammered. After all, Monroe, bless her being, was pretty good at both those things.

What It Actually Entails:

It is necessary that well-behaved women seldom obligate biography … but they should . You’ve probably already predicted that the matter is paraphrase wasn’t actually from Marilyn Monroe — it was reproduced 14 years after her death by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. In 1976, she produced a scholarly essay documenting the eulogies of colonial females, which voices almost as merriment and sex as a Marilyn Monroe flick, sure. In her analysis of those eulogies — often the only the recording of these women’s lives — Ulrich manufactured the following see TAGEND

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich If you can’t to be dealt with when they’re polite, you don’t deserve them when they’re slightly more polite .

Ulrich’s message wasn’t “fuck the rules, ” it was more “can I get a little adore for all my virtuous sisters in the house? ” Her work is all about celebrating the ordinary people who gradually enact societal change over the decades, but are forgotten by biography since they are do it quietly. In her work A Midwife’s Tale , for instance, Ulrich combed through the( at first glance, unusually dull) publication of an average 18 th-century American midwife — uncovering the previously unknown economic and cultural rights wallop of midwifery in the country. For speciman: How many of people know “midwifery” was a word? We sure didn’t.

Unfortunately, Ulrich herself is pretty well-behaved, so people will probably resume ascribing her terms to more “unruly” women.

3

Charles Darwin Said “Science Has Good-for-nothing To Do With Christ” So They’d Stop Bugging Him About Religion

We can simply portrait it: Sir Charles Darwin was maybe taking part in some scorching conversation about progression with a cluster of religious zealots, when they asked about to explain how his dumb ape hypothesis jived with the Bible. And Darwin shut them all down with his famed, history-changing zinger: “Science has nothing to do with Christ.”

What It Actually Means:

Darwin didn’t hate religion — he just didn’t feel qualified to write about it. Harmonizing to his son, ol’ Chuck would get words from people expecting him about ethical and spiritual topics he simply didn’t suffer qualified to discuss. In 1879, at age 70, he replied to one such note like so TAGEND In other words: “What are you asking me for? ” He never set out to disprove the existence of God, and didn’t even consider himself an atheist TAGEND

So, how did Darwin earn his religion-hating honour? Blame his crony, T.H. Huxley. After On The Origin Of The Species was engraved, the British Association for Advancement of Science regarded their annual fit at Oxford and invited the clergy, since the two groups had been friendly up to that detail. Some clergy members hugged Darwin’s theory, some had skepticisms, and some were openly unfriendly. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce was one of the latter — he flat-out expected Huxley if the gorilla he condescended from was on his father’s back, or his mother’s.

Huxley shot back by saying that he would rather be related to apes than a humankind who employed his offerings to obscure the truth. Happens went downhill from there. Darwin, nonetheless, had the good sense to be sick that week and stayed out of the combat, which specified the colour for the progression debate in the 19 th century: Chuck would stay home and work on his volumes, while T.H. loudly antagonized creationists in his call. Others have since taken up that baton — you know them as “most of Reddit.”

2

The Concept Of “Invisible Hand” Was Coined By Someone Who Actually Believed In Government Regulation

We’ve all was right here: You leave a quick provide comments on a picture of puppies wearing bowties, and next happening you know, you’ve been sucked into a days-long dialogue about financials. And at some place in that dispute, someone perhaps mentioned the “invisible hand” — the idea that even if corporations act like avariciou dickholes, the market will ever deal with them by itself, without Uncle Sam butting in. Predatory banks will eventually lose their clienteles. Non-abusive contractors will get more project. Capitalism is just best available, you guys.

This notion was first described by 18 th-century philosopher Adam Smith, who is considered the leader of modern economics( and examined precisely looks just like you just imagined, right down to the wig ). Smith fanboys like Milton Friedman have expended his ideas to explain why the government shouldn’t govern business, or tax the rich, or bother with commie bullshit like aid — exactly sit by, and give the invisible hand sort it all out!

What It Actually Necessitates:

You know who was a big fan of taxing the rich to help the poor, though? Adam Smith TAGEND

That’s Smith himself in the very same work where he justifies his invisible side intuition, so it’s not like he got softer with age or something. Smith knew that the free market had its restrictions. He exploited an entire section of his most famous run, The Wealth Of Nations , to explain the areas where “just let them do whatever they want” is not available — public works, the legal plan, education, and health care. Sure, he disagreed with rehearsals like prescribing tariffs, compensation caps, or setting monopolies, but these are not exactly radical standings. Pass a company a monopoly and before you know it, a cluster of drunkards dressed like Indians are dumping the produce in the Boston Harbor.

To sum up, Smith would have hated privatized health insurance, did not believe in trickle-down financials, and spurned the flat taxation. The invisible side can steer us, but when it is necessary to absolutely free markets, it’s not leaving out any glad endings.

1

Karl Marx Said “Religion Is The Opium of the Masses” Because Opium Is Awesome

Karl Marx is the poster boy for atheism.

The German philosopher and granddaddy of communism furnished a perfect slam-quote to explain why religious parties were such mindless dolts: “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” This short but persuasive suppose has inspired countless jumpy t-shirts and skeleton-filled signs. So, Marx clearly meant that he considered religion kinfolks akin to mentally impaired, unproductive drug addicts laying on their own squalor, right? There’s no other explanation here.

What It Actually Intends:

First of all, if the current state of widespread pharmaceutical drug addiction has shown us anything, it’s that opiates are the opiates of the masses. But, maiming social question aside, check out the context in which Marx said that TAGEND

Marx said some pretty nice situations about belief and its role in culture, before angsty college minors wanting to make their parents feel stupids at Thanksgiving started quote-cropping him. Marx announced religion “the heart of a heartless world” and “the spirit of a spiritless situation, ” praising its ability to help people get through a tough life. He experienced empathy for the persons who seek refuge in belief , not disdain. If he saw you exploding extinction metal at carolers, he’d call you a thoughtless dick.

Instead of abolishing religion in his red utopia, Marx talks about wanting to create a macrocosm absolutely amazing that people don’t feel they need it anymore. It’s almost like he’s speaking in a way that won’t alienate the great majority of the person or persons likely to be reading his wield. He doesn’t even appear to use the word “sheeple! ” Go figure.

Tim Lieder’s story has appeared in Lamplight, Shock Totem, and Daughters of Frankenstein: Lesbian Mad Scientists( published by Lethe Press ). His latest wrote narratives are in Sugarplum Zombie Motherfuckers. He too owns Dybbuk Press, through which he’s produced nine titles including King David and the Spiders from Mars. Stephan Roget infrequently tweets over at @StephanRoget, where he’s largely just excited he didn’t have to use an stres. Check out his most recent articles here . For other far-famed sayings you’re totally botching, check out 6 Famous Literary Quotes Everyone Expends Exactly Incorrect and 5 Classic Movie Quotes( Where We Wholly Discount The Context ) . Subscribe to our YouTube canal, and check out Iconic Pop Culture Moments You Remember Wrong, and other videos you won’t assure on the site !

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