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doktorpeace · 5 years ago

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🖊 please introduce us to Erato, I know they're in a masks campaign but I have no idea what else

Oh, gosh, I feel like I talk about them too much as is but I can’t say I’m not glad to have the excuse. This is gonna be really long cause tbh I’m just gonna dump like, a bunch of their lore lmao.

Erato is my Masks: A New Generation character in a campaign being played alongside @twerkyvulture (As Amanda ‘Megafauna’ Ghorbani, The Transformed) @draayder (as Josephine ‘Rattlesnake’ Short, The Reformed) @spitblaze (as Les ‘Void’ Hawking, The Doomed) @heedra (as Enid ‘Frag Beetle’ Day, The Scion) and @skarchomp (as Parker ‘Cobalt’ Andrews, The Legacy) with @dykeceratops as our GM. The current arc features @mechanicalriddle as Zoe, The Nova as a guest member. Here’s a group shot done by @tredlocity. Clockwise from the top left: Cobalt in blue, Erato in the track suit, Les in the cloak, Zoe with the mismatched eyes, Enid’s the big robot, Amanda’s got the scales and claws, and Josephine’s got the mask and tonfa.

To get back to Erato specifically though they’re an Anti Metahuman/Metahuman Suppression Weapon created by the in universe tech group Wright Industries, founded by Ingrid Day, Enid’s mom. They’re generally stronger, faster, and more durable than humans and can copy the superpowers of others for 5-10 minutes by touching them thanks to what is basically a meta-stem cell transplant interacting with other parts of their systems. (Also, I 100% swear to god that I did not consider ‘Robot Hero Who Copies The Powers Of Others’ is literally fucking Mega Man despite loving Mega Man a ton until after I had hashed out the concept with my GM’s assistance. Only once Abby said ‘oh like mega man’ I was like ‘wait, shit’.) I’ll tell you some about them as a person before unloading their history onto you, lol. Being an android built for combat and kept in an underground research lab, kept on a rigid schedule, constantly taking tests, physical, mental, written, oral, ethical, etc. etc. etc. and under constant supervision Erato lacked for real interactive experience before the campaign started only really ever getting to takl with authority figures and their sisters. They were very passive and observational, owing in part to their power set requiring a lot of adaptation to make the most of. They’re naive and very bad at exercising discretion in decision making, sometimes they overstep boundaries when talking with people without meaning to, and they’re really emotional! They have trouble dealing with strong emotions cause they haven’t managed to discover coping mechanisms that work well for them, they tend to get angry kind of easily and need time to blow off steam. But they’re also very genuine, honest, and well meaning. They are almost never mean, rude, or snippy, they do their best to do well by others, and have a strong sense of justice paired with a deep distrust and dislike of the current legal system in universe. This is in part due to the conditions of their creation (and in part because the intent behind it was kind of right!) and in part due to Enid’s life being threatened by a representative of the state while they and their teammates were in jail after being arrested following a huge brawl with an anti-methuman terrorist group. They’re also very willing to put forth the effort to improve as a person and to mend relationship wounds, almost always apologizing first to Enid when they fight and genuinely trying to work in advice and feedback they get from others, which they often get from Les and Parker. They’re also relatively educated, from the tests of their creators, from home and public schooling, from personal research, but that doesn’t undo their naivety. They also just straight up lack some very basic and/or common sense knowledge. Like, they don’t know what a bear is. Why would you teach a battle android working in a densely populated, extremely built up city about wild animals? All in all they’re kind of inexperienced and immature and make mistakes a lot but they’re (usually) very willing to admit their mistakes and to try and improve and get better. They genuinely and truly want what’s best for others and are learning to value them self as much as their teammates. They’ve also taken it upon them self to start doing humanitarian work in their free time over the summer. In a fight Erato is adaptive and quick witted but tends to put themself in more danger than is necessary. They also sometimes use more extreme force than the others believe is called for, but after the first time they did they and Parker had a real heart to heart about it, Les helped Erato learn and practice some coping, centering, behaviors they could do even under pressure and Erato did their best to adapt. That said they Fucking Hate The Keeper So God Damned Much Because Of How Much Suffering He’s Caused Their Friends And How Much Danger He Presents And Would Kill Him With No Remorse. So they don’t intend to apologize for ripping his arms off whatsoever. They and their sisters, collectively known as The Muse Units, were made to work as a group and as a proof of concept that atomized units could replace traditional police for use against metahuman criminals and to slowly phase out The Registry, the legal department which handles general metahuman based laws. If successful the units could be mass produced and improved upon, rapidly replacing current, error prone, law enforcement. At the time of their development, between late 1999 for blueprint drafting and until mid 2002 when the project was shut down, they were the cutting edge for AI development aided in no small part by Ingrid’s technokinetic powers allowing her to make advancements few others could. (As a note Erato’s body was finished being built in early 2001 but their unique personhood didn’t really come to fruition until February 18th, 2002, so that’s what I consider their ‘birthday’.) Ultimately, however, while a few of the Muses excelled some did not perform to expectations, the project fell behind schedule, investors lost interest, and a minor scandal involving a casualty happened, resulting in the project being shut down. The Muses were placed in indefinite storage, the data gained from their short existence used on other projects such and some of the tech advancements used to inform future decisions by the company. And it would have stayed that way, if not for the fact that in 2018 Ingrid Day was revealed to be The Locust in a conflict where Enid tried to defend her against a militia group who had been hired to take her down, being shot and presumably killed in the process. As The Locust she had been terrorizing Boston for over a decade trying to take it over and being involved in the deaths of over 70 people. (Which irl btw would make her like, the 8th most prolific confirmed serial killer of all time, Yikes!) Wright Industries, desperately needing to prove their hard stance against metahuman criminals and needing a PR stunt to deflect from their connection to their former CEO re-awakened Erato. They weren’t the most powerful or best performing of the Muses, but they were above average, obedient, and had an easy enough to monitor and control power set with little risk for property damage to boot, the perfect choice. Erato then took to the streets of Boston acting basically as a vigilante, following orders, stopping minor crimes, and sometimes working alongside the police. They attracted the attention of The Viceroy, a semi-retired 56 year old hero who never registered in spite of it being compulsory legally. They both have the ability to copy the powers of others, though he can just by sight, and he has body elasticity too. These make him durable and extremely adaptable, add to that his detective skills and he’s something of a local Boston legend. He took them in as his Protégé. Though they remained distant for quite some time with Erato still coming and going between his place and Wright Industries, having promised not to reveal his assistance to the doctors who Erato reported their work to. It was this way for about a year and a half before the campaign started and Erato began living with Viceroy full time, no longer wanting to go back to Wright Industries as they began to think more independently and consider what they wanted for them self more. During this time Erato had chance encounters with each of the other characters a few times as they also did minor vigilante work, peaking with a villain who is a member of Superhuman, an extremist pro-metahuman group, attacked the school that Josephine, Les, and Amanda all attend. After that incident Erato was prompted by Viceroy to contact each of these other young potential heroes to form a team, The Upstarts. Additionally during this time Viceroy took in Enid who had been abandoned by her biological father and had been getting bounced around foster care. Over time the three of them have become kind of a weird family, living in a warehouse full of cats with a couple of bedrooms grafted on and an ultra secret basement lair underneath full of advanced stuff Viceroy makes. Though Erato and Enid have definitely had their ups and down, more recently in the story (and we’ve been doing this campaign for well over a year now) they’ve been putting in serious effort to better their relationship and be good adoptive siblings to one another. I love their relationship a lot, they’re good kids.

That gets us up to the start of the campaign but hoo boy, I’ve been writing for like, an hour now. Since then Erato’s helped take down a nazi-aligned terrorist organization, they’ve got a boyfriend in their teammate, Les, and they’ve made friends outside of their core group of teammates. They’ve also enrolled in school doing well on some classes and poorly in others, namely learning how to Code and Woodworking. Currently they’re at a sleep away summer camp for superpowered kids called Camp Justice, about 10 miles outside of Boston. They really, really hate it there. Constant supervision, being made to do tests, things scheduled out against their will, inability to leave the area? Yeah that certainly reminds them of something. The difference between it and school, which does share these features, is they wanted to go to school. They very much Did Not want to go to camp. As a result they’re finally going to have to start facing the trauma they’ve got from their origin and also actually tell the others other than Les and Amanda about their sisters. Whiiiiich...Enid saw one of them disassembled and showed off in parts at a school science fair display set up by Wright Industries to gauge interest in students. And she hasn’t mentioned this to Erato...for 4 months Uh Oh! Lastly, here’s my tag I use mostly for art I make of them, it includes some texts posts and picrew dumps too though, lol. Feel free to look!

#cubecubed #erato #masks

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kegareki · 5 years ago

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dameamaryllis replied to your post “every time i work a bit on my ‘verse based on chinese BL system...”

Oh, I really like what I've seen of this so far! Would you tell us more about your protagonist and his relationships with these characters? (And am I reading the hints right, that the "light" has some sentience and/or is influencing human thought?)

:D i am always up for talking about my stuff

answers under the cut!

to answer your second question first: yes to both!

in the setting of the story, the vast majority of humans follow the church of the ever-living light. there are some pockets of surviving, older religions, but the church of the ever-living light is pretty much omnipresent.

it’s been in existence for... less than a thousand years, i’d say? with it rising to prominence during a large-scale war. its main tenets haven’t changed much in the years since.

the ‘ever-living light’ is something of a god and something of a transcendence: it’s not exactly a person, but it’s personified. saints of the ever-living light are mortals that have been ‘chosen’ and ‘blessed’ by the ever-living light to carry out its will as listed by the church; they’re generally exceptional and used to increase the church’s influence and advance the church/ever-living light’s agendas.

the ever-living light ‘grants’ holy/light magic to its believers. saints and popes are the most powerful, magically. this magic is exhaustible, however: what the ever-living light gives, it can also take away.

(several saints have died throughout the years because their magic depleted fully at a crucial moment. their deaths, although tragic, were used to reenergise the population and reaffirm their course.)

inspiration about this comes from ‘western fantasy’ settings in system novels--it’s unrealistic to me that an entire species would fall under the umbrella of one religion (i mean... look at Real Humans, lmao). one of the specific ones is the light god arc in “quickly wear the face of the devil”. there’s another specific one, but i. unfortunately do not remember it. r.i.p

the truth of the ever-living light is that, rather than being innately divine like you’d expect a god to be, it lifted itself up to the position of a god and is using faith as fuel to keep itself ‘godly’ in the eyes of mortals. the holy/light magic ‘gifted’ to its followers are portions of its own power, loaned out for as long as the person in question will follow its will, and as a result there’s a sort of ‘link’ between the ever-living light and the mortal that allows for greater influence in the person’s thoughts.

it passes itself off as a kind, compassionate being, but it’s more true that it’s greedy and vicious. it’s enacting a centuries-long campaign to rid the world of demons because it harbors resentment for the species; it doesn’t directly yank back its power from its followers when it realises that they’re straying and instead waits for the most opportune moment.

it wants humanity in good shape basically just to be a robust population to throw at the demons. and, like, honestly? being followed because people love you feels a lot better than being followed because people fear you. love and faith can be turned into swords against your enemies, but if you use fear instead, those swords will be turned on you as soon as they can manage it.

the upper echelons of the church are more or less partners-in-crime with the ever-living light. they’re not a PR tactic/expendable tool like saints are; they’re PR and the hands that wield the tool.

... and, in the ‘original story’, sheng qinghe is absolutely oblivious to all of this!

two of his followers/group members--his childhood friend, sen sizhen, and the scholarly male friend that he makes later on, mo yunxing--are not. i think mo yunxing’s family tends to be church members, and sen sizhen has a unique perspective of “being close with the person cultivated to be a saint while not being valuable herself except as leverage,” so they both end up sort of intuitively grasping that there is danger in sheng qinghe’s position and that it’s imperative that he serve the church of the ever-living light well.

when sheng qinghe questions what they’re doing, they divert his attention so that he stops thinking about it. when he’s staring in silence at the bodies of the demons he’s just felled, they take his arm and lead him away. when sheng qinghe wonders if the violence they’re doing is justified, they’re quick to remind him of all of the atrocities that demons have done.

i had intended sen sizhen to act as sort of a love interest for sheng qinghe, since Girl Childhood Friend is popular for that, but she’s ended up in a sort of older sister role to him, wanting to protect him from things that he doesn’t yet understand--that, under her watch, hopefully he will never understand. she cares about him a lot, but there’s a slowly widening gap between them because she feels like she has to shield him from ‘the cruel reality of the world’. neither she nor mo yunxing think that he is capable of facing that reality.

OH i don’t know if it could be inferred or not, but: sheng qinghe, in his role of a saint, is being used to spearhead “a final war” against demons. that’s why he ends up fighting against the demon king--it’s the “final step” in defeating the demons.

in the ‘original story’, he succeeds. with their backing gone, the rest of the demons soon follow their king to the grave. sheng qinghe is touted as the hero of humanity.

in the fic i’m writing, the main character transmigrates to stop this.

so, for the relationships question:

the main character transmigrates into zhu yixian, a fox spirit who is more or less one of the demon king’s most prominent lackeys. in the original setting, xi youtian had rescued zhu yixian from fur traders when he was a kit and raised him up in the absence of his parents, and in return zhu yixian devoted his life to serving him.

that’s more or less true here, too, but. mc zhu yixian is an entirely different person, so of course things change.

see, the thing about the mc is: they love sheng qinghe, and they think of him as their idiot son, so of course they want to get personally involved in his upbringing so that they can stop him from... (gestures to sheng qinghe forcing down his conscience, again and again, and culminating in literal genocide) that

so here, we have a demon who has more or less been adopted into the demon king’s family ............ more or less adopting in turn a saint of the ever-living light

zhu yixian is, of course, not being upfront with their identity--revealing that they’re a demon would NOT end well at this stage--but they’re kind to sheng qinghe, and they help him out in some situations, and scold him and tell him to think, and sheng qinghe really does end up viewing them as something like an older brother/uncle who’s looking out for him

unlike sen sizhen and mo yunxing, who try to protect sheng qinghe by shielding him from the things that they think/know will hurt him, zhu yixian instead wants to make sheng qinghe think. they don’t want to give sheng qinghe the option of just. closing his eyes and ears to the world. they want him to be better than he would be otherwise

... but, of course, you can’t make anyone do anything. you can only give them the tools with which to make their choice and hope that they make the choice that’s right for them

uhhh, other relationship stuff that i don’t know how to sort:

it’s not uncommon for demons to mix in with humans--they do share the same planet, after all, and even the same continent--so it’s not really strange for zhu yixian to traipse around in human territory. it is a little strange for zhu yixian to cultivate a relationship with a human

xi youtian doesn’t probe about it, though. he doesn’t interfere in his followers’/friends’ personal lives much.

he thinks it’s funny that zhu yixian talks about sheng qinghe like they’re his long-suffering parent, though

xi youtian has three other prominent lackeys; they’re pretty much close as family. one of them is the Mom Friend, who’s warm and likes taking care of people; there’s the Enabler Friend, who is always so down with whatever idea someone has; and there’s the Snark Friend, who has a bad mouth but a good temper. although xi youtian is their king, they’re privileged enough to speak to him as equals

zhu yixian is younger than all of them. although they’re a young adult by the time they meet sheng qinghe, they’re still viewed as the baby of the family

zhu yixian gets indulged A Lot. they can get away with all sorts of things and even be looked at affectionately while they’re being a brat or acting spoiled. on one hand, they’re like “guys! you need to discipline children more!” and on the other hand, they’re like “this is great, actually”

zhu yixian’s original life may not have been the greatest, so like. second childhood with people who love them and will also give them all the hugs they want? talk about relationship security

fox spirits can transform into human form when they reach adolescence. i have a scene written about zhu yixian’s first transformation; they come careening out of the room in one of xi youtian’s childhood robes and happily babbles at xi youtian about how they have hands! and can finally see over the table when sitting!!! and xi youtian laughs a little like “those are what you’re most excited about?” and zhu yixian replies very seriously “i have things to say, and most people don’t listen to tiny foxes who have to stand to see over the table.”

later, Snark Friend is like “huh. i was expecting you to be taller.” and zhu yixian is like “I’M STILL GROWING”

the atmosphere at home is really warm, haha. they all care about each other a lot, and you can feel it

(which is another reason on the ever-increasing list for why things CANNOT go as they did in canon. it’s not just that sheng qinghe’s canon behaviour was wildly out of character as they understood him to be--it’s that they want to preserve the lives of these people.)

zhu yixian thinks sheng qinghe’s friends Are Not That Smart. sheng qinghe doesn’t have to worry about school entrance exams or anything like that, but they’re still a little concerned that stupidity is contagious

sheng qinghe is easily influenced, after all, if canon is anything to go by

sheng qinghe doesn’t really understand what zhu yixian is talking about until his jock friend realises zhu yixian’s identity as not only a demon but one of the hands of the demon king and yells it in the middle of a restaurant and all of sheng qinghe’s friends follow suit in immediately becoming hostile and assuming that he’s been tricking them and zhu yixian, aggrieved, is like “WHAT are you talking about? when did i lie? when did i try to hurt sheng qinghe???” and sheng qinghe is like ... (thinks back over years of interactions) (zhu yixian literally gave their real name) (zhu yixian has helped sheng qinghe and co on more than one occasion, at no benefit to themselves) (My Friends. Might Be Stupid After All.jpg)

that is... all for now, i think

thank you so much for being interested in my stuff <3 <3 <3

#dameamaryllis #keg wrecks #keg writes #this is. a very long reply my gd #i hope that it's. uh. coherent. i don't know how long ive been typing #bl verse

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flyingcookierambles · 11 months ago

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edit edit edit: after more investigation, i found some 4chan /vt/ threads. total rrat posting, conspiracy stuff, yes, i take it with a grain of salt of course. but they kept mentioning hana mori ppl are in the company, the clique, nepotism, etc. i googled this and learned that like 6 or 7 people were all former hana mori people! it is/was a loose collaboration group of indie vtubers who were all friends. one of the most famous of the remaining ones is shoto! i was so surprised.

rrat posting theorizes that during the 1st wave auditions, the friends of HM all auditioned together, hoping to be able to work together. of course, most of the first 3 waves, minus ST and NK, all seem to be former HM members.

i can see the appeal of having a ready-made group of friends with good chemistry be your first employees. this ensures good collaboration and no drama in the early days/years, and can help create a close knit community/fandom. however, now with the graduations and drama, i can see how ppl may be biased towards their friends and/or be accused of nepotism, recommending audition entries over others, etc., when viewing from the outside. this system of getting a ready-made friend group of indies doesn't seem to work in the long term once you begin to add more diverse new people with each wave who were not former HM members. they may feel left out of inside jokes between childhood friends, leading to resentment or loneliness towards their coworkers' "clique." even if the "clique" of former HM member did not intend this, it is just how stronger and longer relationships can be, i can see how it may be misinterpreted as intentionally isolating and bullying, when it is just a misunderstanding/accident.

still, even if only 5 people are bullies, 3 being former HM members and 2, VA and IE being genuine outsiders/newcomers to the "clique," it seems that the other former HM members, SY UV RL PR PG FR, are not really mentioned in any drama. just because 3 HM members, EP EA MP, are mentioned, it does not mean that all former HM members are part of the "clique" or were part of the clique's bullying. just a shame that 25 uninvolved coworkers are being thrown under the bus due to potentially only 5 people and manager. i hope that they are able to return to their PL or have a new reincarnation far away from this drama.

i even hope that the 5 people can move on, and it is all the fault of negligent staff. the way that EP IE VA spoke in the stream, even though VA lied/bluffed that he read the documents thoroughly, it is possible that he didn't or was only given cherrypicked portions to make DB/ST look bad, as DB gave more context to what was there.

i think that they are young / like the same age as me (weird to think about..), and this is their first legal battle. of course there would be "personal information."

if no livers or this "clique" were part of the bullying, and it was all the staff (which i hope), they might just have been named as bystanders or witnesses. it would be silly to have to use their character/vtuber pen names in court.

maybe something like "DB has 1 example of workplace harassment. during a meeting on so-and-so date, DB/ST tried to propose a project, but was rejected without reason. witnesses/other participants during this staff meeting were Jane Doe and June Doe, who play the characters of EP and EA." or something totally innocent, literally just "my coworkers A and B were standing there and can vouch for this" or something. nowhere in DB's statements did she name who was harassing her. niji staff may have told the livers total lies and said that DB's documents said that they were harassing her, to frighten them into agreeing to go with the smear campaign stream.

its just a horrible tactic of turning friends and coworkers against each other. kusosanji...

i really hope this is the black company taking advantage of an accidental misunderstanding between 2 different groups of people who otherwise got along fine. i really hope that there aren't any actual bullies....

Edit edit edit 2/15 - the grand unifying rrat theory. The GURRAT. birthed in the depths of 4chan, forged by the sweatiest basement dwellers.

The sad thing is. It is very plausible....I'm sad that the bullies and clique could actually be real..... I really hoped it wasn't and was just an issue with staff, but the GURRAT proposes that staff and livers are one in the same. Still, even if it's all former HM members, plus complicit newcomers IE and VA, and maybe AA if the discord leaks are real... that's still like 18 or 20 other totally unrelated innocent people who weren't affliated with HM at all in the past, just stuck on this sinking yacht. I feel bad for them and hope they can move forward from this, returning to their PL or something, and never again associating with a black company like kusosanji.... (or. I guess. Hanamori 2.0 at this point. Coup d'état and all that clique stuff.

edit edit edit: so the website was taken down by the author since some people can't see the "only a theory" disclaimer. anyways, chinese fans on bilibili translated it and put it on a pdf that has chinese/mandarin and english. -> https://maipdf.com/est/a14208551385@pdf

So in case graduations happen again soon, I looked up PLs on the niji sub which has gone basically rogue and is actively discussing PL. I followed RZ's PL, which I was like. Holy hell, 1 million subs. All the comments joking about RZ being his side hustle or a side quest and RZ was a big animation storytime youtube joke make sense now. Brooooo what are you doing in niji.

EA's PL was surprising. I didn't follow her previously, but I was more active in the vocaloid fandom and the vocaloid song English fan dub circles when I was younger. I watched some of EA/Shannon's videos and in hee comments are other singers I know and follow like JubyPhonic and rachie! From like 5 years ago! Crazy. I want to try to rewatch some old YouTube utaite chorus collab projects and see if I spot Shannon. It's so weird to think they I may have seen her years ago become she became a vtuber/ EA and didn't even realize.

For FO, I actually know and still follow his personal danmei reviewing twitter which he has since privated and his still public old vtuber PL. my friend who is more into danmei and manhua that me actually recommended his older twt and youtube channel to me. Then like 2 months later he privated his stuff and left and then FO debuted lol. My friend who knew him longer immediately recognized his voice in his debuted stream lol.

Edit 2/13 - that public explanation steam on EP's yt....oof. wtf. That only made things worse guys. These are the worst lawyers with the worst advice I swear wtf is even going on anymore....??

I think im following PG's past life acc on twitter and I don't even know why. I'm not subscribed to her old YouTube account where she did utaite type music. I'm just baffled. I just say that her old twitter is locked but I'm somehow following her and I can't even remember why. Lol.

Anyways saw some funny posts on a certain fruit farm website about SB falling his death a second time to get out of this situation. And I'm just like. A second time???

Turns out he is/was a legendary tf2 player Pyro main. It sounds like he had a video game addiction or something that was really ruining his life and/or he got burnout playing tf2. So he decided to fake his death so he could return to school or something. Like. OK, congrats on the therapy and college completion or whatever, but like you couldn't just have a normal hiatus post????? he like vaguely mentioned in his final stream that he had a terminal illness and then just stopped streaming for 5 years, so everyone thought he died. Like, on one hand, I and many other commentators seem to think it's a bit funny and totally ridiculous. I guess that only learning that this is a hoax years after and also not being tf2 fans/his fans helps make this like a weird prank to outsiders. On the other hand, faking a terminal illness and your death is really stupid and insensitive to people who actually have those issues. Plus to his old fans who knew him for many years who respected and trusted him, that's gotta hurt bad. Like. Bro what. SB unprivated his old YouTube videos though, I'm curious to see the highlight reel of supposedly the world's best tf2 player, even tho as a person who doesn't play fps or moba or tf2, I don't really understand how much skill it takes to do his playstyle, so I might not appreciate it as much as it is.

Anyways kusosanji has shit pr and lawyer team, but their talent scouts/audition people knew how to pick them very well. Like one of the top apex players and tf2 players, multiple musicians and comedians, etc. All these extremely talented peoples' past present and future careers being totally ruined by a company that doesn't care about them and their wellbeing at all. Even if they tried to leave via terminations (shout out to SY liking a company critical comment and then outting "returning soon" message on her pl youtube) and return to their past life, people have lost trust in them due to kusosanji (or due to already existing past life drama like above with SB). If they tried to make a new indie vtuber account they would be starting from 0 and even then if people match up their voices or life story details from some off hand comment during a zatsu, it'll be over for them again, back to 0 and having to reincarnate. Just a waste of potential, it's sad for all livers involved. Incredibly cowardly to have the public facing employees who have the mpst to lose take the worst of the harassment while the neglectful and abusive managers and rich ceo and investors can stay safe and anonymous and in a totally different country. I hope no poor indie vtuber decides to audition for any new en waves, which I doubt they'll even do anymore going forward. Being forced into a black company sounds awful. Comments online theorize that at this point, the investors and so management are seeing this workplace culture clash and deciding to deliberately sabotage the remaining EN branch so they have an excuse to merge it to the main branch and gradually dissolve/graduate/fire everyone like for the OG EN (india) KR and ID.

Edit edit: yeah.....even if the whole rrat / great unifying rat king theory from 4chan is true, that still really only means that like 5 people of a clique are bullies, plus mayyybeee AA?? But like really, other than those 6 people, like there's still the 25 other people (who as far as we know) are not bullies or even involved in this, that really were just trying to grow their career and make friends in a new place. They couldn't have known about the massive apocashitstorm pr disaster that was coming up. I feel so bad for the new kids Krisis and TTT too...like.. holy crap they JUST got there....

*insert meme that Vivi is the unluckiest new member*

Just because the management is bad and maybe 6 people are guilty of bullying, all 25 other innocent incredibly talented people are being dragged into this. It's just awful.... :(

I want so support them, they're unlucky innocent bystanders in this I think, but not as they are right now. Still not exactly normal vtuber etiquette, but this whole situation is totally abnormal, but I'll just find their pl youtube or twitch accounts and follow them there, patiently awaiting if/when they return to those accounts. People on reddit are all saying like "I hope my oshi graduates/gets fired" and that might literally be a better ending for them right now. So weird.....

Edit edit edit: oof yeah. Again, as an outsider to SB's pl and the tf2 moba fps genre community, plus 7 years have passed, I have some forgiveness towards him for the fake death thing that i can understand his older OG fans may not have. Still, it sounds like he talked about his past in a zatsu. He legit had a video game addiction and ended up homeless and jobless. I can understand toa degree why he had to make his hiatus/break from tf2 and video games in general so final so that he would not be tempted to play it again. Still, just an extreme decision to fake an illness and death instead of just admitting you want to go to college and not be living in japanese net cafes and the streets.

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kfs1001 · 6 years ago

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Colton Haynes was literally told he couldn't be a gay actor by managers.

'It was like a Tab Hunter situation'

Photo: Colton Haynes via InstagramColton Haynes is among the celebrities who came out in 2016.13 June 2017 21:04 GMT

Greg Hernandez

Colton Haynes is opening up about the pressure he faced to stay closeted as he rose to fame.

‘I was literally told from the day that I moved to Los Angeles that I could not be gay because I wouldn’t work,’ Haynes said this week on the Sirius XM show Andy Cohen Live.

‘Then I was with my management team and a team of people that just literally told me I couldn’t be this way. They tried to set me up with girls.

‘I was rumored to date Lauren Conrad (The Hills) for six months because they were kind of angling a story. And then I dated every other young person which of course I didn’t date.’

Haynes, who rose to fame on the MTV drama Teen Wolf, did not try and deceive any of the women he went out on ‘dates’ with.

‘They knew the whole time,’ he said.

‘It was like a Tab Hunter situation. It was really horrible.’

Hunter was a 1950s movie idol who was forced to attend movie premieres and other events with women to give the public the impression that he was straight.

He was not and eventually Hunter came out publicly in 2005 in an autobiography.

Haynes said his being forced to live a false life in public led to anxiety and panic attacks so severe that he had to quit The CW show The Arrow.

‘I was so tired of not being myself, of having lowering my voice for certain things, of having to not dress the way I wanted to dress.’

After coming out, Haynes says it felt ‘like I lost 150 pounds.’

None of this surprises me and I can imagine D and C being the same situation. C was outed and he agreed, thus they had to take a different route with him. I suspect D got the old talk just like Colton. A fearful, you shall never work again talk. this all done by a in the man of profits over human rights, greed over common human decency.

Control, control, control. That is the mantra some of the many of those in positions of power. Yes, the target fo their control might be talented but they refuse to allow people to be who they really are. The industry has build themselves around legal contacts which overweight the constitutional rights of freedom and free speech.

C gave us an example of the how the business treats those who do not toe the line at the beginning to STFF. I am sure there are those who did not see the at aloo, Went right over their heads.

Colton said if felt as if he lost 150 pounds when he came out what kind of pressure did they force one him. How did they abuse him? Abuse is not always physical Mental is far more damaging. Here we have people screwing people over just because you are different.

Years ago, white folks played Orientals or native Americans because of backward bigoted beliefs. Today, the last bastion of the age old bigotry is focused on gay, lesbian and transgendered people. One reason is you can’t just point a finger at someone who is LBGTQ and point a finger as you can someone who of a different ethnicity. Like religion, LGBTQ, people can melt into society easily but unlike religion there are no symbols to give them away. Yes, there might be some mannerisms that stick out but there are many straight people (myself being gay) that I know who can be, as we say, fem.

We have the Me Too movement turning the world upside down. It started in Hollywood for good reason--the casting couch and the fact the no one has told the power that be to fuck right off. Women are fighting the end campaign to full equality, but, in general, the closet remains the last holdout of a bigotry which has no bearing in human life. We all know what the counterpoints to the argument are--homosexuality is unnatural--it is a sin against god--people who practice it are deviant--they are pedophiles. The list goes one. to some homosexuals are do not have rights to a good life or life at all.

Colton and others showed great courage in coming out. The powers that be must have shot back with their threats but it is the audience who has the final say. If the powers that be see a backlash or their profits drop then they will act like they really care about someone they would usually marginalize. it is all image but it appears to be the image of the studio and their conservative values which must be protected at all costs.

Thus D can’t come out and he has to play the game spelled out for him by his conservative manager and studio hieads. He is stuck in a life most of use would never put up with. Contracts supersede constitutional rights and even his right to marry who he loves.

C has got to patient and he certainly knows the crap the studios would force him. Being outed probably helped him more than he may have considered back then. He is successful and famous for his voice, his acting skills and the way he plays with words.

Youi only need look at social media to see how successful D is. LM posts a picture of her on the beach and she gets a hundred thousands likes, D posts a picture of his with his draping wife and he barely gets a few hundred.

Okay just checked twitter, D is down to 1.93 million followers down from 2.1 million. What’s gone wrong. D is a fabulous talent and his PR people are blowing it. He wins four huge award and D loses fan on Twitter? To me is shows the PR is failing. Maybe if they let D be D, his social media states might be better.

This game they are playing with D is a waste of his talent and time. They put him out on huge posters and he seemed to be at more events than hours in a day, but something is not working. Losing 140K followers is telling.

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migleefulmoments · 6 years ago

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The truth about Power of Attorney and Fiduciary Obligations:

How Ricky ISN’T destroying Darren’s life or the law behind using a POA.

One of the main tropes that fuels the cc conspiracy is that Ricky, as Darren’s manager, has Darren’s power of attorney (POA) and that allows him to do all sorts of nefarious acts that Darren is powerless to stop him simply because of the POA.

Today Chrisdarebashfulsmiles wrote this piece:

chrisdarebashfulsmiles

every time that i see references to s/tar t/reck in M’ stans nickname i think about two different things

1) they decided to ignore the blatant truth about D because… S/tar W/ars folks!!

2) RR sometimes is a genius but always against D. You know what was the biggest problem about the en/gagement post of January 2018? D (and C with him) didn’t think about calling a lawyer and ask him to write a document o whatever it took to avoid that kind of post. If you know even a little about pr and manager, you know that they have a power of attorney that they can use for a lot of things: in all of them there’s also the use of their client SM.

Since last year, i have to be honest, i think the ST mistake was done on purpose. Because of course RR knows about how much D loves SW. But putting this aside, a post like that can’t be erased with a “Oh sorry we were kidding, we are not engaged she’s my beard”. And all of that opened a door to what RR and Bears are still seeking: money (him) and fame (her).

It was easy for every lawyer on the Earth to find whatever occasion D allegedly did not what they requested and it was easy, with the help of SS, to find occasions to give them every thing they wanted. I still feel is a miracle that D won the awards he deserved, because everything was about her.

Something is for sure changed around E/mmys, when we expected her to go out of his life and instead, my opinion of course but i know that it’s shared by some of my closest friends here, they started to build the sham wedding. Because you can say the contrary every minute of your life but that s** is fake af.

And thinking about the past, D’ speech when he won GG, Sag etc, they pointed all to the fact that in the future we would have seen less stuff awards worthy. And he was right, we are only see Ads of all sort… to the point that we went literally crazy for his M/et appearance.

I’m not joking now writing that i hope that the expiration day is near because this man not only deserve to do his job and not 56484595050 pay off to every people that enabled and that are enabling her, but because he needs to be free to be who he is. Because i don’t want (despite liking seeing him and listen to him) to see C doing again something RR related (i still have to accept the fact that J and K are produced by LG and so RR).

And i wanna go crazy for D’s jobs like before.

Her point-I think- is that Ricky wants money and Mia wants fame so Ricky used Darren’s POA to post the engagement post on Darren’s Instagram which started the ball rolling until he found himself walking down the aisle him. The core underlying premise is that Darren was unable to reverse it once it started nor was he capable of stopping it from escalating. She claims that Ricky wrote the “fake” Star Trek engagement post using the wrong space-travel franchise and “a post like that can’t be erased with a “Oh sorry we were kidding, we are not engaged she’s my beard”. Really? Why couldn’t Darren set the record straight and fire his manager? That would be the logical thing to do. It isn’t normal to just go along with whatever your team writes until you find yourself married to someone you hate. God- it’s so dumb. Going along with an unhinged plan simply because his manager posted it on social media is the definition of stupid and poor decision making.

But let’s back up a little. Chrisdarebash... starts out by claiming that “If you know even a little about pr and manager, you know that they have a power of attorney that they can use for a lot of things: in all of them there’s also the use of their client SM”. One of the long held ccBeliefs is that Ricky holds Darren’s POA and that POA gives Ricky the power to do whatever he wants and Darren is forced to do whatever it is that Ricky signs his name to- regardless of how detrimental it is to Darren’s person or career. In legalese- Darren is the principal and Ricky is the agent. So is that cctrue? Does the principal forgo all rights by giving the agent his POA? NO, of course it isn’t true. There are laws regulating the use of a POA and the law says the agent must act in the best interest of the principal at all times. Anyone who knows anything about the law knows this is called FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION.

“The power of attorney creates a strict fiduciary duty to manage the principal's funds appropriately, including engaging in careful bookkeeping to document all expenditures.” (X)

The entire trope that Ricky is controlling Darren’s life because he holds his POA is utter rubbish. It simply isn’t true. Abby, the Ivy League lawyer- either knows this and simply lies about it or doesn’t understand one of the most basic concepts of the law. This is something that every America should understand because ALL Americans should sign a medical power of attorney to make medical decisions if they are unable to.

The entire cc fandom should have the skills to Google this concept on their own but clearly they have no desire to know the truth. This one lie allows them to dismiss a lot what they don’t like about Darren. It just allowed Chrisdarebash...to claim that Darren was forced to get married simply because Ricky wrote a post on Darren’s Instagram about a Star Trek engagement. It allows them to claim that Ricky forces Darren to do #ads and gigs they can’t stand. It is a powerful ccExcuse except it is based on a complete lie...and that is how the ccers role. They don’t care about facts and truth. Whatever rationalizes their foregone conclusion- Chris and Darren are in lurve- is fine. Me? I prefer to base all of my theories and excuses on true, real concepts. I like to use Google to ensure that I understand what I’m talking about-ESPECIALLY when I attack other people for being stupid cause ain’t nothing more embarrassing to me than raging about something and being stone cold wrong. As evidence I present the entire statement by

chrisdarebashfulsmiles

every time that i see references to s/tar t/reck in M’ stans nickname i think about two different things

1) they decided to ignore the blatant truth about D because… S/tar W/ars folks!!

me: “bears”?

me: No idea what this is supposed to mean.

me: this cracks me up. ”When WE expected her to go” was exactly like this weekend when you all fabricated the fantasy that “Mia campaigned to go to the Met” and then obsessed about it for days. You all mislead yourselves.

me: there is nothing to suggest the expiration date is near. If you start listening to Darren, actually hear what he is saying, you will see that he is quite happy. If you continue to misconstrue the truth, you will end up being shocked and disappointed time and time again. It’s all on you.

And i wanna go crazy for D’s jobs like before.

me: well as fans we don’t actually get to dictate how or where Darren’s career goes. We can only wait for projects, support them, or move on to another celebrity.

leka-1998

With all the ignoring of the truth the stans are doing, there’s probably not much time left to do anything else. Well, aside from sending hate our way. It’s a sad thing, needing lies to be true because you couldn’t even imagine living with anything else. I could feel the desperation through my screen when they went crazy because of one simple tweet. I’d pity them if they weren’t directly contributing to the hell D’s living.

me: hahahahahahhahahahahaa. omg, I’m wheezing. No self awareness and copying my words.

Monday night was fabulous. That was the best thing to happen in a long time. I think we all - including D of course - needed it. It’s definitely sad that good things are so rare at this point and he’s going to pay for getting so much love while the PBB was left to survive without attention. It’s sick.

me: let’s be real, she got more coverage over the last several days on cc blogs than she would have had she gone. Oh look, another phrase I use a lot.

It’s time to realize that there is no reason for her to be in the spotlight because she’s not interesting or talented or anything else that would justify her being where he is most of the time. I can’t wait for her to be left with nothing. And most importantly, I can’t wait for D to finally live his best life. That day can’t come soon enough.

me: the only spotlight she’s in is the one that the cc fandom shines.

ajw720

@chrisdarebashfulsmilesI agree 100%, i think something went horribly wrong right around the emmys and somehow RR/PBB/SS found the power to force the wedding. I am confident in stating D did not plan to go this far and they clearly threatened something big to get him to agree. (I would go so far to say that PBB and family von beard were planning well before D agreed). And any person watching can see that he has gained nothing as a result, if has been one giant loss. And the only value would be IF he finds his way to freedom soon. Because as I repeatedly state, this cannot be sustained long-term and no question, he foretold it in his January speeches. I also agree it is amazing he won despite the circus around him and I think that is a testament to how well love and respected he is in the industry. And no question, he had a strong behind the scenes campaign likely led by RM, who still needs to now step up and help him win his life back, far more important than any award.

me: well...he gained a spouse and that IS the point of getting married so I would say he nailed it. As for you repeatedly stating he can’t sustain this long term...it’s been 9 years. Exactly how do you define “long term” cuz I gotta say, I would say he has sustained it long term.

The level of ignorance is astounding and continues to get worse by the day. You may be right the ST reference may have been intentional, after all RR and PBB LOVE LOVE LOVE to play games with the stans and see how much and what they can get away with. And stans let everything go. B/en, ST, rings, handshake, I’m gay, timelines, the fact that the entire wedding was SOLD. They continue to kiss her ass and directly contribute to this hell. At this point, they are partially responsible because they are choosing to pretend like everything is normal.

me: That is RICH coming from the women who believes FetusMiarren is Mia and lets her jerk your chain in ways that continue to entertain and astound me. As for you “list” of “proof” that stans ignore-I have written posts proving almost all of them are complete and utter bullshit. You cannot expect stans to believe complete rubbish, even if you repeat it incessantly. Bullshit is bullshit and it will always be bullshit. Your junior high obsession with Mia is really, really scary and super immature...especially for a professional.

#Chris colfer #mia swier #mia von criss #darren criss #crisscolfer #cc #ccer #ccers #cc fandom #cc blog #cc family #how POA's work #you're obsession with Star Wars is making you sound like nut jobs #POA

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sp00kymulderr · 6 years ago

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dO THEM ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL /EVIL LAUGH (??)/ uhm from the "let's talk about" post úwù 💗 I'm sorry I'm making you write so much but i really wanna know!!! ILYSM

ANYTHING FOR YOOOU!

There is a lot here, I’m apparently feeling very chatty tonight so sorry about some of the long ramble-y answers again:

1: Talk about the first time you watched your favorite movie.

Itwas 2005, and 15 year old me had dragged my dad and brother to thecinema to see a movie that looked really interesting to me – itfeatured several badass women in the main cast at a time when Iwasn’t seeing much with actually strong, well written femalecharacters in. So I had to see this, and it was sci-fi which my wholefamily enjoys, so off we went to watch it. At the beginning, therewas a filmed intro of Joss Whedon talking about the movie and aboutthe TV series it came from, which I knew nothing about and thatworried me. But then the film started and I swear my heart stoppedfor a moment, I fell so deeply in love with the setting, thecharacters, the cast. The film was Serenity, and it started a lot forme

2: Talk about your first kiss.

Myfirst kiss wasn’t special like I wish it had been. I was about 14and it was with my best friend at the time, a guy who I had nofeelings towards whatsoever. I regret the kiss a lot, and the kissesthat followed. I wish I hadn’t felt pressured in to it the way Idid.

3: Talk about the person you’ve had the most intense romantic feelings for.

Idon’t really get intense feelings for people that often, especiallynot now I’m older. There was a guy when I was in secondary schoolthough, who I genuinely thought I loved (I didn’t). It was veryunrequited and took over my life for too long, and was a catalyst tothe depression I later suffered with.

4: Talk about the thing you regret most so far.

Partof me regrets going to uni, but then I think about all theexperiences I had at uni and I would never have had those, or madethose friends, or enjoyed myself that much anywhere else. I can’tthink of much that I really really regret, I tend to think thingsthrough a lot before I do them.

5: Talk about the best birthday you’ve had.

Iam the queen of good birthdays, istg! I ALWAYS go on holiday for mybirthday, have ever since I was young, so I have so many good ones.But I think it has to be between going to New York for my 21stor Berlin for my 23rd (my favourite place in the wholeworld), or this past birthday which I spent on my own in New Zealandand got to go to Hobbiton for the first time!

6: Talk about the worst birthday you’ve had.

Ihave genuinely not had a bad birthday yet. This year would’ve beensad if I hadn’t gone to Hobbiton, as I was completely on my own forthe first birthday ever.

7: Talk about your biggest insecurity.

I’ma total mess of insecurities tbh. I wouldn’t know where to start.

8: Talk about the thing you are most proud of.

In2012, when I left uni and moved to London on my own, I started a blogcalled The Theatre Tourist where I wrote about two of my biggestpassions; theatre and travel. A year after I started it, I got myfirst invite to review a theatre production which I accepted havingnever written a review. Once I wrote it, I knew this was what Iwanted to be doing, I fell completely in love with it. And to thisday I still run that blog, I have a fair few readers and connectionswith theatre PR’S all around the world. Currently I’m writing atleast a review a month for New Zealand theatre but when I was back inLondon I was being invited to at least 4 a week every week. I am soproud of that blog.

9: Talk about little things on your body that you like the most.

Mytattoos. They make me feel better about myself because I find thembeautiful and they mean a lot to me.

10: Talk about the biggest fight you’ve ever had.

Thatbest friend I mentioned earlier. He accused me of all sorts andcaused so much stupid drama in my life. We had a massive argument inthe hallway at school once, I ended up in tears in the bathroom andwe stopped talking to each other. He was a massive fucking jerk andI’m glad he’s not in my life any more.

11: Talk about the best dream you’ve ever had.

Ihad a lot of great dreams just before I moved to New Zealand, aboutwhat a great time I was going to have out here, and they havedefinitely come true

12: Talk about the worst dream you’ve ever had.

Istress dream quite a lot, the most recent one was losing my family ina natural disaster and it was awful.

13: Talk about the first time you had sex/how you imagine your first time.

Iwaited quite a while, so I was 18 when I lost it. It wasn’t perfectbut it was nice and with someone I liked at the time. It was, however, in a single bed which was AWFUL god. But other than that, there’s not much to talk about.

14: Talk about a vacation.

Whichone to choose though??? I love travelling and have been so lucky totravel a lot, I studied tourism and it’s always been a huge part ofmy life. That’s why I’m out here on this beautiful island in themiddle of nowhere right now.

15: Talk about the time you were most content in life.

Idon’t feel content a lot, but my first and subsequent 6 visits toBerlin have been the best I’ve ever felt in my whole life. Berlinis the one place I feel completely at home and know I belong.

16: Talk about the best party you’ve ever been to.

Idon’t go to a lot of parties! And the ones I went to when I wasyounger, I don’t remember a lot of them… I went to a really funfoam party in my first year of uni that I always remember fondly iffuzzily.

18: Talk about something that happened in elementary school.

Whichone is elementary? Primary I think? Jesus, who remembers primaryschool? I don’t think much exciting happened when I was that young!

19: Talk about something that happened in middle school.

Waitwhat’s middle school if the next question is high school? Do theyhave a school between primary and secondary in America? I’mCONFUSED

20: Talk about something that happened in high school.

Ohall sorts of shit.

21: Talk about a time you had to turn someone down.

Therewas this guy in college who I became pretty close friends with thenlater told me he really liked me. He was sweet but so not my type soI just said no and then he never spoke to me again lol

22: Talk about your worst fear.

Interms of an actual phobia, I’m really afraid of dogs. Which ispretty inconvenient, they make me panic.

23: Talk about a time someone turned you down.

Ugh,I got drunk at a work party and asked out a guy from IT I had beeneyeing up and he turned me down which is fair enough I was a messback then. But then I had to see him at work all the time and it wasso embarrassing for me.

24: Talk about something someone told you that meant a lot.

Justrecently I’ve been having a crisis about what I’m going to dowith my life once I get back to the UK next year, I want to get a jobI actually love as opposed to ending up in a shitty call centre jobhating my life again. But the other day my manager told me that shegenuinely believes I can do absolutely anything and be brilliant atit, and that just boosted my confidence so much.

26: Talk about things you do when you’re sick.

Iusually try and just get on with things and don’t admit I’m sickunless it’s really bad. I hate sitting still, I need to be doingsomething all the time even when ill.

31: Talk about what you think death is like.

Scary?Death scares me, I can’t lie. I try not to think about it.

32: Talk about a place you remember from your childhood.

TheatreRoyal Bath, I associate so many good memories with this building.When I was a kid and first expressed an interest in Shakespeare mymum used to sometimes take me to see plays there. I started a massivething in me and it’s always a place that makes me feel happy.

33: Talk about what you do when you are sad.

Iput on music. Loud. Usually Bowie, because I know he will make mefeel better, he always does.

34: Talk about the worst physical pain you’ve endured.

Ireally hope this doesn’t tempt fate, but as of yet I’ve onlyexperienced self inflicted pain. Never broken a bone or sprainedanything. Uhm so probably my first tattoo but even then that was a good pain for the most part.

35: Talk about things you wish you could stop doing.

Beinganxious. Seriously, if I could control my anxiety or make itdissapear things would be so different.

38: Talk about songs that remind you of certain people.

Meand my dad share a fairly similar musical taste, and he was the onewho introduced me to all the musicians I love so deeply now.Specifically listening to Delilah by The Sensational Alex Harvey Bandmakes me think of him. With my mum, we both love Alice Cooper so anytime I hear him I think of her.

39: Talk about things you wish you’d known earlier.

Iwish I’d known earlier that there’s no shame in ‘sleeping around’.I felt ashamed for a long time about my sexual habits, and got shamedfor them. I know now that it’s all bullshit and me being in controlof my sexuality is a good thing.

Ialso wish someone had told me that you’re allowed to have stops andstarts in your career, for years after uni I tried so hard to followa career path that wasn’t working for me but I thought I would be afailure if I gave up, or if I ended up doing something that didn’trelate to my degree. Even though I still struggle with the idea of acareer, I at least do know now that I am allowed to do whatever thehell I want whether I studied for it or not.

40: Talk about the end of something in your life.

In 2016 the West Endmusical Sunny Afternoon closed. By the time it closed I had seen it150 times, literally seeing it at the very least once a week for twowhole years. It changed me a lot – I became more confident, I madea group of the best friends I’ve ever had, I started a fan groupfor it and worked with the marketing team for the show on a socialmedia campaign. It was a HUGE part of my life. When the show closedit felt like the end of an era, I really didn’t know what I wasgoing to do without it. It meant so much to me. But now I have allthese great friends who still talk and hang out and I have two castsof actors whose careers I’ll be following for the rest of my life.

#personal #get to know me #weird because I dont like talking about myself IRL but on the internet SURE heres my whole life story #Sorry a lot of these are angsty I'm in a weird headspace

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ozgeersoy · 4 years ago

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Publishing as Method: In Conversation with Ozge Ersoy and Paul C. Fermin

On publishing cultures and trends, conceptualisations of “Asia,” and care and community during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This interview was originally conducted in December 2020 for the publication anthology of Publishing as Method (curator Lim Kyung-yong) in ArtSonje Center, Seoul. As part of this project, around forty initiatives around Asia were interviewed about their publishing activities, including archives, artist-run spaces, collectives, publishing houses, bookshops, art book fairs, and design studios. The conversation with Özge Ersoy, AAA’s Public Programmes Lead, and Paul C. Fermin, AAA’s and IDEAS Journal’s Managing Editor, is shared below. It has been updated and revised for IDEAS Journal.

Lim Kyung-yong (LKY): It seems that the small publishing culture is now quite active in Hong Kong. So is the annual Hong Kong Art Book Fair. What is the reason for the emergence of this kind of publishing culture in Hong Kong? Many artists or curators seem to use these publications as a stage for themselves, and as this publishing culture spreads throughout Asia, cooperation projects through publishing are increasing. How does AAA diagnose this trend?

Özge Ersoy & Paul C. Fermin (ÖE & PCF): We’re just as excited about all the book fairs and small publishing and distribution platforms that have emerged in Hong Kong in the last ten years—Small Tune Press, Zine Coop, Display Distribute, and Queer Reads Library, immediately come to mind—they breathe so much life into the scene. We believe publications made by these independent publishers are sites where art history is being circulated and contested, and that their voices are critical for a fuller understanding of lived realities on the ground—narratives unable to make it past the usual gatekeepers, or that do not register in, say, more academic discourses. That’s one reason they’re part of our Library Collection.

At the same time, there’s a much longer history around art publishing in Asia that we are committed to study and share with our communities. It Begins with a Story: Artists, Writers, and Periodicals in Asia—the 2018 symposium AAA organised in collaboration with The Department of Fine Arts at The University of Hong Kong, and the second symposium presented at Focal Point in collaboration with the Sharjah Art Foundation—was inspiring on this point, as it explored the countless ways periodicals have acted as sites of exhibition, artistic experimentation, and art history making, while shaping communities around them. For instance, Anthony Leung Po-Shan presented a paper on a group of Hong Kong artists invited to write and develop works for the Hong Kong newspaper Mingpao in the early 2000s, playing a crucial role in connecting art with society and politics.

On IDEAS Journal, we also have pieces that do the work of historicising various publishing cultures. Our former AAA colleague Michelle Wong wrote about three moments of art writing circulation in Hong Kong, with one of her case studies stretching back to the 1960s. Display Distribute wrote an ambitious piece that historicised zines and independent publishing cultures in East and South East Asia, locating alternative trajectories to the usual Western-dominated narratives in the region. Artist Merve Ünsal wrote about the prominence of self-publishing practices of artists and art initiatives in Istanbul, helping us understand it as, in part, a response to the lack of public funding and institutional support, and also a symptom of the need of self-historicisation in a geography ridden with coups, ruptures, and ideological shifts—and this is important to acknowledge.

Karen Cheung reminds us that smaller publishing platforms, especially with regards to zines, have been proliferating because they’re ideally suited to responding—real-time—to ongoing events and movements, given their low costs, ease of production, the fact that they’re less beholden to gatekeepers and institutional constraints, and how in many ways they capture visceral and affective perspectives often neglected in more traditional publishing platforms. Zines come to be a “perfect representation of the spirit of camaraderie and mutual support amongst strangers at protests.” A question we’re starting to ask, so powerfully articulated by Joy James (credit to Eunsong Kim for this reference), is the extent to which acts of care and support under situations like these become stabilising functions of what she calls the “captive maternal.” An open question for which we don’t have any good answers in the context of Hong Kong.

That said, it’s important to acknowledge that practitioners in the cultural field operate under ever increasing precarity, and so whatever “emergence” or “trend” we’re seeing must also be understood as adaptations to decreasing social safety nets across the board, including for many artists and writers and freelancers lumped into that category euphemistically called “flexible labour.” Attempting to navigate the high barriers to entry—internships, gatekeepers, cultural capital, proximity to “global cities,” not to mention discrimination faced along various axis including race, class, gender—these all contribute to what Byung-Chul Han diagnoses as our “burnout society” (credit to Patrick Blanchfield for this reference). In this sense, the “cooperation projects” you’re noting, and perhaps we can also add the increased attention to “mutual aid” projects, come to be means of survival and solidarity under neoliberal precarity. While none of this is news at this point, we feel it is important to reiterate.

LKY: Within a heavily capitalised and highly developed society like Hong Kong and Singapore, a role seems to be required to produce knowledge or information and classify it. For example, we can expect various roles from Singapore for the practice of art in Southeast Asia. I wonder how AAA recognises “Asian” art, how AAA understands and conceptualises “Asia.”

ÖE & PCF: AAA gets the “Asia” question a lot—and for good reason. Lee Weng Choy even wrote an essay about it in 2004, in which he opens by wondering how often AAA deals with the “Asia” versus “Asian” distinction.

While it may seem like a hedge to say that’s an impossible question, and that any response risks a number of essentialising and reifying moves—really, one sense in which we understand “Asia” is as this endlessly constructed, contested, and contradictory space. It is imagined. It is historical and material. It is produced and reproduced.

“Asia” as a signifier has been wielded aspirationally as an organising principle for transnational solidarity or so-called “Pan-Asian” unity, while also being deployed for more nationalistic, imperial expansion. We like how David Xu Borgonjon, who we worked with on a solid IDEAS essay about the racial politics of art school recruitment, noted that “Asian” is also a fetish category. Because while Weng distinguishes “Asian” as an adjective (characterising something as “Asian” in its essence), against “Asia” as a signifier of a more “deliberately complex, contested, and constructed site,” David makes a distinction between “Asian” as “a biopolitical concept of race” versus “Asia” as “a geopolitical concept of place.” Lots of ways to frame this.

You also see “Asia” crop up in the competitive logic of “global cities” (as outlined by Saskia Sassen)—for example in the Brand Hong Kong campaign, launched by the government in 2001, where they attempted to rebrand HK itself as “Asia's World City”—this marketing/PR/branding exercise in turn becoming another site of ideological contestation for actors across the political spectrum.

But that discussion seems like a quaint, distant memory, with all the structural and material violence being unleashed, literally, everywhere right now in 2021. Stuart Hall put it so powerfully when he questioned his own discipline of cultural studies, asking “what in God’s name is the point”—given the urgency on the streets. He added that anybody taking these issues seriously as an intellectual practice “must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we’ve been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything.”

Your question also raises the issue of knowledge production and circulation. Elite capture and co-optation is a very real thing, something Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò has written about quite persuasively. Who are these sorts of discourse ultimately for? What structures do they obscure and reproduce? How is the very discourse itself structured in advance by the subject positions of the speakers in relation to the state? Jackie Wang reminds us how market logics are often behind the compulsion to brand one’s analysis as the latest “hot take,” how you’re pushed to distinguish yourself and set yourself apart from others—as opposed to how your work builds upon and is in conversation with others—and basically how damaging this is for knowledge production.

On that point, it’s only right for us to acknowledge some people and institutions who have been influential for the two of us on the “Asia” question—especially the ways they help trouble narratives centring the nation-state or region in Asia, which in turn helps us see critical differences, entanglements, and linkages across these arbitrary demarcations. Climate change, for example, is no respecter of national borders—and groups like Feral Atlas have spoken to this point—“nature” as something that precedes and exceeds the human. At the same time, Iyko Day cautions us that certain calls to move “beyond the human” assume—and problematically so—a shared humanity that can be deconstructed in the first place, instead re-inscribing the very Eurocentric frameworks we hope to disrupt.

And then there’s also Third Text Asia and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, or more recently the fascinating work by folks at Verge: Studies in Global Asias. Individual scholars like Chen Kuan-Hsing, more specifically his 2010 book Asia as Method, still gets a lot of traction too—even if in productive disagreement—challenging us to think of Asia as itself a site that generates theory (not simply a site for “Western speculation”), enabling certain decolonial efforts. But we'd also like to acknowledge our indebtedness to scholars like Iyko Day, Shih Shu-mei, Lisa Lowe, Neferti X. M. Tadiar, Raewyn Connell, all our AAA Researchers—the list could go on—with the main point being that we aren’t thinking in isolation, and that countless others have been thinking longer and deeper about these issues—and one challenge for us has been enquiring into what’s actually helpful for clarifying the stakes, or what’s simply a form of co-opting or re-inscripting of the status quo.

Two of AAA’s own projects on the “Asia” question include Mapping Asia in 2014, and more recently the MAHASSA project, spearheaded by our AAA Researchers led by John Tain, which brings together a diverse group of faculty and emerging scholars to investigate parallel and intersecting developments in the cultural histories of Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. We present this project in partnership with The Dhaka Art Summit and Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University, with support from the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative, and have organised several talks and panels alongside closed-door sessions. For us, one of the most generative discussions involved the politics of famine in the context of anticolonial and antiauthoritarian struggles in South Asia and North Africa, and how social realism and abstraction responded to narratives of nationalism. The hope is to better understand common and divergent trajectories in cultural histories within Asia and across regions, rather than trying to find the definitive word on what Asia might be.

One last thing we want to say about this is that we aren’t actually walking around all day thinking about abstract notions of “Asia” and the impossibility of defining it—because no one is. (Well, actually, someone out there probably is…)

LKY: AAA has worked with many institutions, not only in Asia but also around the world. As you know, more and more countries around the world are now becoming culturally, politically, and economically conservative in their own interests. We experienced globalisation and took it for granted, but domestic centralism related to the coronavirus and minority hatred is also strengthening. How is this situation affecting your activities? AAA works on an invisible global art network, but it also seems that such a network is being threatened. I wonder how AAA recognises and responds to this situation.

ÖE & PCF: First, we want to express our gratitude to you and The Book Society, who in many ways are helpful models for responding to this trend—we want to ask you this same question! How do you do it? Every time we visit Seoul, we make it a point to visit your space, and last time we were touched to see a poster on your front door in support of Hong Kong. We also want to acknowledge your generous book donations to our library over the years. Even this very project is another instance of Book Society reaching out and thinking critically with institutions across the region. How can we continue to collaborate with and support you?

But, yes, your question notes the re-emergence of nationalistic and far-right movements across the globe. COVID-19 has exacerbated existing inequalities, and there continues to be a disproportionate effect on the same, already struggling communities. According to a recent World Health Organization report, low-income countries have received just 0.2 percent of all COVID-19 shots, while wealthier nations have received more than 87 percent. Some are referring to this as vaccine apartheid, as yet another example of this moment’s necropolitics. There is so much suffering and grief right now, more than any one person is able to properly frame or comprehend—it staggers us; it exceeds us.

Given the health crisis and the conservative pressures you mentioned, we are all pushed to think about existing structures for education, community, and care. Many of our collaborators across the region are asking how to re-imagine these structures, and our ongoing online conversation series Life Lessons started in response to these questions. Some examples include Melati Suryodarmo and Ming Wong speaking about traditional performance forms in Asia that influenced their teaching practice and the types of kinships they’ve developed around their work; Suzanne Lacy and Wu Mali discussing how social practice builds on feminism and ecology; Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh and Zeyno Pekünlü discussing collectivity as a form and method of learning, and the role of the university as both an enabler and an obstacle in developing collective pedagogical models.

Also, over the last year, AAA has made accessible several Research Collections that look at artist-driven initiatives that take mutual support and solidarity as their core values. Womanifesto, a feminist biennial programme that was active in Thailand from 1997 to 2008, is an example we would like to highlight. This initiative started with an exhibition in the mid-nineties to make space for women artists, and has evolved into a biannual event with exhibitions, workshops, residencies, and publications, which reflected the changing strategies in contemporary feminist thinking and practices. For those interested, we would recommend the discussion “Backyards and Neighbourhoods” that brought together artists Varsha Nair and Phaptawan Suwannakudt with scholar Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez, where they discussed what has changed since the mid-1990s—around the time of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing—when women artists and curators sought to create spaces for visibility and representation.

Two other archival collections we would like to highlight were spearheaded by a team led by Chương-Đài Hồng Võ: Manila Artist Run Spaces Archive, featuring material on six initiatives active between the mid-eighties and the early 2000s, and Green Papaya Art Projects Archive, which comprises substantial materials on the longest active, artist-run organisation in Manila. Ringo Bunoan, who has been instrumental in the work around these archives, asks at what cost artist-run spaces in the Philippines adapt themselves to the current crisis characterised by pandemic fatigue and unfair practices in the arts field: “To be truly alternative now, artists must be part of the reckoning and reconfiguration of the structures that perpetuate divisions and inequalities that have long plagued the art scene in the country.”

As always, we keep learning from artists.

LKY: In addition to archive activities, AAA is engaged in activities such as research, publication, and exhibition. Please introduce some of them. In particular, I would appreciate it if you could explain AAA's publishing programme.

ÖE & PCF: AAA’s publishing practice started twenty years ago and has gone through many changes in form and content. At the beginning of AAA’s journey, our Co-founder and Director Claire Hsu printed 1,000 copies of the exhibition catalogue for China’s New Art: Post-1989 (1993), organised by Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong, as she received its publication rights. AAA then sold the books as part of its first fundraising project, and the sales allowed AAA to hire its first librarian and start building its database. Later, AAA produced monographs like Wu Shanzhuan Red Humour International (in collaboration with Inga Svala Thórsdóttir) (2005) and From Reality to Fantasy: The Art of Luis Chan (2006). Between 2012 and 2015, AAA published four bilingual volumes of an e-journal called Field Notes, featuring contributions by more than one hundred scholars, critics, artists, and curators. Each issue focused on a theme: from the significance of archival practices in the region, to the popular Mapping Asia project that challenged our inherited notions of bounded territories, turning instead to myth, liminal spaces, and active entanglements.

More recently, AAA shifted gears and, since the last four years, has been focusing on its online publication IDEAS Journal, which allows for a more flexible and responsive publishing schedule. IDEAS commissions essays, conversations, and also more visually driven notes, with a rigorous yet hopefully unpretentious style for people who like reading things with clear stakes—in other words, propositions and analysis over merely descriptive commentary. IDEAS is more interested in new ways of thinking, rather than simply new things to think about. It’s important for us to acknowledge Claire Hsu and Doretta Lau for bringing IDEAS into being; Janet Chan, Emily Wong, and Chelsea Ma for being fabulous and editing its Chinese language version; and Karen Cheung, without whom we would be lost, heartless, and lacking a decent soundtrack for our emotional undercurrents. All the incredible writers we’ve gotten to work with deserve recognition here, too—IDEAS literally doesn’t exist without them. Christina Yuen Zi Chung was the first writer Paul was privileged to work with when he joined, and in many ways she continues to be the gold standard and inspiration for us both. It was such a pleasure working with her that we invited her back to do a public talk on “Reimagining Feminism in Hong Kong.” Shout-out to the brilliant Christina.

We also have an AAA office in Delhi with an amazing team headed by Sneha Ragavan, where they’ve lead research projects like the Bibliography of Modern and Contemporary Art Writing of South Asia, gathering more than 12,000 pieces of published art writing in thirteen languages from the twentieth century. This bibliography is available online as an interactive online database. They also collaborate with foundations and sponsor research grants around art writing, artistic research, and visual culture. Currently they’re working on a three-volume set of dossiers, which bring together art writing from the region.

Finally, we’ve also been building editorial collaborations and partnerships, such as Afterall’s Exhibition Histories series that we contribute to, along with the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. This partnership has resulted in three publications so far: Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992–98 (2018), FESTAC ’77 (2019), and Uncooperative Contemporaries: Art Exhibitions in Shanghai in 2000 (2020)—all focusing on exhibition histories.

LKY: What are your main projects now? I wonder about future plans.

ÖE & PCF: It’s AAA’s twentieth anniversary, and for us, this is an opportunity to celebrate all the artists and educators who have contributed to AAA and its communities. There are two ongoing exhibition projects we would like to highlight. The first is Learning What Can’t Be Taught at AAA Library, which looks at the major changes in art education in China from the 1950s to the 2000s through a selection of artworks, archival materials, and interviews. The exhibition focuses on six artists from three generations who were each other’s teachers and students at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou: Jin Yide, Zheng Shengtian, Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, Jiang Zhuyun, and Lu Yang. With this exhibition, we’re asking whether “artistic attitude” can be taught or passed down from one generation to another. In a text for Art & Education, Anthony Yung (who has been leading this research at AAA for the last decade) and Özge mention how Zheng Shengtian, who was born in 1935, studied art in the 1950s, and experienced the political turmoil in China in the second half of the twentieth century, has continued to test the boundaries of what is suitable for teaching and learning. When we recently asked Zheng about the moment when he turned from a student to an artist, he responded with a sentence that still resonates with his students: “I am still waiting for this moment to come.”

We are also excited about the exhibition Portals, Stories, and Other Journeys, which just opened at Tai Kwun Contemporary, and features newly commissioned works that engage the archive of the late artist Ha Bik Chuen, who was a self-taught sculptor and printmaker. Ha’s personal archive covers fifty years of art in Hong Kong. Curated by Michelle Wong, this exhibition invites artists Banu Cennetoğlu, Kwan Sheung Chi, Lam Wing Sze, Raqs Media Collective, and Walid Raad to explore the potentials and the limitations of archives, as well as our sense of scale, self, and history vis-a-vis Ha’s own archive. Özge is currently working on bewitched, bewildered, bothered, Banu Cennetoğlu’s artistic contribution in the form of talks, film screenings, and a publication, which delves into the politics of posthumous archives. The publication, titled The Orpheus Double Bind, features the English translation of a text by the literary critic Nurdan Gürbilek. Interested in how the author questions their authority to give voice to the dead, Gürbilek writes: “Orpheus looks back; because he wants to transcend the threshold of death and see Eurydice in all her invisibility, to give form to her dark obscurity. This desire the writer feels, for the darkness of the other, is at once the writer’s source of inspiration and his destructive act: Orpheus loses Eurydice a second time because he wants to bring her back, wants to give form to her absence; but what makes the work possible, in all its obscurity, is this gaze that wants to give form to absence.”

Another thing we’re excited about is working with Gudskul, a collective from Jakarta, to develop programmes around self-organisation and collective learning; and also the Mobile Library: Nepal project, which offers support for community-based, collaborative initiatives and universities in Nepal—spearheaded by Susanna Chung and Samira Bose. Co-presented by Siddhartha Arts Foundation, this project is another example of how we work collaboratively with like-minded organisations in Asia to enrich reference points within Asia. Lots of things to look forward to.

Paul is especially grateful to be working on an upcoming IDEAS essay by Eunsong Kim, whose writing over the years—clarifying, poetic, transformative, and always committed—should be on syllabi everywhere. She’s also working on a book for Duke University Press called The Politics of Collecting: Property & Race in Aesthetic Formation, and recently co-launched offshoot journal. Shout-out to the mighty Eunsong Kim. Thank you so much for existing—accelerating reality—a reminder that nothing’s ever a given. Wu-Tang forever.

Özge Ersoy is AAA’s Public Programmes Lead. Paul C. Fermin is AAA’s and IDEAS Journal’s Managing Editor.

All images are courtesy of Özge Ersoy.

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maspwinj2 · 7 years ago

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What do u think how many fans are getting suspicious of J/G only by going through G's insta? One who can see though all that perfect family show off? Im one of those fans who love spn, Js & isn't into fandom, the one who followed Js, their wives & spn pages on insta. Coincidence I joined insta during G joined & I swear 2 god its her insta that made me suspicious of J/G & dig about J2. Going through STT, few tinhatter blogs & now im a J2 believer. Timeline of O's birth is a clusterfuck.

because g’s insta reeks of fakeness and when you see a c list actor push so hard his wifes insta account it makes rationnal people smell the bullshit? lol

no really all those instagram posts from both of them show that jared is only a prop to gen, to make her look like the perfect mom and wife and to give her jared’s fame as a spotlight

have you ever seen an actor SO actively promoting his jobless wife lifestyle instagram for MORE THAN A MONTH???? (during march and half april most of jared’s instagram was about promoting gens brand new instagram, putting a link to her insta on every posts, and popandsuki collab and using odette, now it has slowed down and it’s around one post a month tagging nowandgen)and he literally has a link to her mom blog on HIS PROFESSIONAL INSTAGRAM ACCOUNTwhat. the. fuck. (gen has NEVER put links to jared’s AKF campaigns on her twitter for support but he has to promote her lame ass insta??? cant you see there’s something wrong there hets?)

have you ever seen a fucking actor have a link for a blog about entertaining kids, buying expensive clothes and pregnant pics?what kind of fucking agent would tolerate that kind of crap for the actor hes managing? well the kind who has to reward with jared’s fame, the beard who protects his actor’s fake heterosexuality and who gives jared the image of a traditionnal family man, that’s the kind of agent who would accept and encourage that

i dont know how many casual fans like you got suspicious because of that on-going stunt but you gotta be incredibly stupid and/or blind to think what has been happening (and he’s still happpening) on jared’s SM is genuine

let’s not forget that most of the times jared posted about gen and/or popandsuki the real jared was busy at a con or working so yeah all of that is PR and i hope more and more people will see through that crap,

it’s sad that someone like gen who used her daugther’s birth to promote herself and earn money, used transgender rights to make an ad for a deodorant, or make herself look like a warrior after hurricane harvey put a little water stain in her house, who shamelessly steal pics, ideas and captions from other instagram accounts and who uses jared like a prop is considered by some as a role model

anyway im really glad you could see the light, PR will never understand that less is more and that nowandgen bullshit is just yet another over the top stunt that proves me (and people like you) that jared is married to gen only for appearances and mutual benefits

PS: like literally all you need to do is watch that stupid filter video gen posted where jared looks like he wants to kill himself to see she doesn’t give a shit about him and just wanted a vid with him to get clicks. just HOW can anyone think that his sad face means he’s happy with her???????? HOW

jared when he has to be with gen:

#asks #aaaaaaaaaaaaanyway #oh look it's me using an ask to rant #im sure you missed that!#lol

51 notes · View notes

ruffoverthinksthings · 8 years ago

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I've thoroughly enjoyed the Claudine/Frollo headcannons, do you have any in mind for Esmeralda/Phoebus? If the sequel movies are wiped from this universe, that means their son doesn't exist (or not yet). Also, do you have another headcannon for onesided fresme on frollo's part? How would he handle being unable to obtain her in this universe?

Ilike to believe the sequels and spin-offs are valid, as the bookseries (which is, as of the Rise of the Isle of the Lost, is canon…to a certain extent) makes reference to characters that could onlyexist outside of the original movies, such as:

Diegode Vil, presumably the child of Ivy de Vil from the 101 DalmatiansTV series, or a descendant from the rest of the extended de Vilfamily, and

Jade,Jay’s cousin and presumably the daughter of Nasira, Jafar’ssister from the Aladdin video game series

There’sa level of personal bias, with the amount of work I’ve already putinto expanding the world with my own ideas, but I think we can allagree that the Isle and Auradon would be a whole lot less interestingif we didn’t have the likes of:

Mozenrath(Aladdin animated series) acting as Maleficent’s longsuffering middle manager, and personal chew toy as an “inferiormagical being,”

LadyWaltham (Tarzan animated series) adding an element of sympathyto the Isle of the Lost with her regretting her brother Clayton andher nephew are still on there and unable to return, and

LadyCaine (Tangled: Before Ever After), who adds a deliciouselement of grayness and a MASSIVE stain on the otherwise pristinereputation all sympathetic Disney monarchs have.

Ontothe headcanons:

Phoebusbecomes one of the new Captains of the Guard in France once theoriginal forces are merged with, or completely replaced by the newlyestablished Auradon Royal Guard. Though the actual administrative andexecutive power lies much higher up the ranks (such as theCommander-In-Chief, Beast), he himself is an incredibly influentialmember, well-known and well-loved by the citizenship and the fellowsoldiers he patrols the streets with.

Auradonhad to rely heavily on translators, human and machine, or translatingmagic during its tumultuous first years, as everyone struggled tofind one common language for every state to use as the internationalstandard (it’s English still). A LOT of things get lost intranslation or don’t translate too good into another language, orsomeone gets VERY offended when someone who is fluent in both Frenchand Chinese tells you exactly what they meant, and howunflattering it is.

Andthis isn’t even going into all the numerous cultural clashes andfaux paus, such as one unfortunate Louisiana chef realizing you’renot supposed to serve pork to most Agrahbans until he was alreadyuncovering the dish...

Phoebusbridges the gap through his calm, professional demeanor, alwaysshowing politeness and civility to everyone whoever they may be, andof course, his sense of humour, given “a real workout” when hehas to figure out how to make someone laugh with universallyunderstood comedy (someone falling face first into a pile of horsedung), non-verbal humour (wearing a silly, pink, fuzzy bunny earswhilst on duty), and using simple plays on word that foreigners caneasily get, or are tailored specifically to their language.

“Inever quite realized eggs could be such a huge source of humour,”he muses when he has to speak to Spanish speaking citizens.

However,his usefulness quickly dwindled as the culture clashes settled down,people started learning English, and of course, the already olderPhoebus found himself growing ever older and unable to keep up withthe rapid pace of advancement and pop culture references in Auradon,not to mention his disadvantage of “not being gifted a smartphonefor my first birthday.”

Hehas an incredibly cushy administrative position that pays well,commands respect from his soldiers still, and gives him great hoursto spend with his family and other pursuits, but as he’s no longergoing out (or being allowed) on patrols and interacting personallywith the people in his jurisdiction, he can’t help but wonder ifhe’s just being eased into the idea of retirement, and Auradon issimply too nice to boot him for the much feared “chainsaw HR” ofsome corporations from BGU London.

(Forthose not familiar with the term, “chainsaw HR” is when entiredivisions, and numbers into the hundreds are suddenly, and oftentimeswithout proper recompense or retirement packages, fired or forcedinto early retirement.

It’sa play on the term “axed” for being suddenly fired, and chainsawsbeing a modern, much more efficient tool for the same job as aliteral ax.)

It’ssafe to say that at the age of 55 or so, and having already lived oneillustrious career then a brief revival, he’s having a midlifecrisis, not helped by the fact that many other Auradonians about hisage are feeling as obsolete as last year’s ayGem.

(“Butit came out just a year ago!”

“Yeah,but they updated to a new, much better firmware and hardwarearchitecture, all the hot new apps don’t even bother with legacyupdates.”)

Esmerelda has fared much better.

Shehas become an activist in this world, using the power of theinternet, the normalization of the “other,” and the erasure ofthe national and ethnic boundaries that once separated communities tohelp her fellow Romani people (I won’t use “gypsies,” as that’san offensive term to them), and other marginalized, and forgottengroups, such as much of the Wild Fae population.

Shealso owns and teaches at a dance studio, using them to train the nextgeneration of performers (“Be they for the street, the stage, orthe screen”), and waging a subtle campaign to remove the stigma forblatant and shameless use of sexuality.

I’vealways known Auradon is a conservative wet dream in many respects,and the fact that ripping a tiny tear in your skirt is considered“scandalous” by teenagers says a lot.

Beforeyou ask, YES, Esmerelda is still as desired and lusted afternow as she was BGU—probably even more so, now that we have thecombined populations of all the states, and she is a very popular andcommon presence on the internet.

Beforeyou also ask, Phoebus has long gotten over it and considers it “partof the package.”

Sheis one of the most knowledgeable and well-versed with moderntechnology out of the “Travellers” (Auradonians who were adultsor close to it Before Great Uniting), seeing as her troupe ofperformers have always been highly adaptable and all to ready to dowhatever it takes to survive, fit in with the locale they have foundthemselves in, and afterwards, thrive.

Thatthey have generally relied on being couriers and brokers ofinformation, and the internet basically being a giant free market ofinformation has helped GREATLY.

Withher religion, she still isn’t 100% on the existence of God, onlyever praying to Him during times of crisis or as a show of good faithwith the religious institutions of Auradon, but the Greek Pantheonhas given her hope that Supreme Beings like Him do exist.

“Atthe very least, He’s been very light on throwing down lightningbolts from up on high.”

(Thoughmuch less murderous and many other negative traits than the original,Disney Zeus is still INCREDIBLY fond of “warning shots.”)

Andonce more, before you ask, I can seriously see her making a cameo inthe canon as a guest dance instructor for the Descendants, if sheisn’t already a full-time staff member of Auradon Prep, and yes,she would definitely mentor Evie by showing her much healthier waysof expressing her sexuality and femininity without feeling like she’sdegrading herself, or turning herself into a “slab of meat in thebutcher’s window.”

Zephyrwas born BGU, and if my idea that the states had been communicatingfor a few years before the idea of fusing is canon, has a veryunique perspective of being a “Traveler Tot,” living with theideas and concepts imported over through the portals andcommunication crystals, before he got to live it in Auradon when thetechnology and materials could be more easily accessed and produced.

Heis still hyperactive and excitable as ever, though most of that wasbeing channeled into a combination of soldier training and becoming acircus performer like his parents; in his mind, there really isn’tmuch difference between the two, as they both require incrediblephysical skill and endurance, a sharp and creative mind, andrelentless, dedicated training, day-in, day-out.

“Itall really comes down to what you mean when you say you ‘slayedthem,’” he says.

Thisquickly changes in Auradon when he finds himself addicted to HeroRising, the video game that Carlos was seen playing during hisfirst night in Auradon. While initially Phoebus sees it as a good wayfor him to blow off all his excess energy and get some physicaltraining done, and Esmerelda tolerates it as he’s not going offstealing and rearranging stop signs, it evolves into something muchmore for him in time.

Atfirst, he’s the best player on the block, then in theneighbourhood, then the school, then the city, then the state, andfinally, one of the Hall of Famers in Auradon. As he grows older, hejust barely passes his high school subjects as a conditional for hissponsors support and working with the Hero Rising developersas a PR person, community idol AKA a “Paragon,” and beta tester.The height of his fame and success comes when the latest release,Hero Rising: The Lost Legion, features a new playablecharacter based off of him, and his unique dance-like fighting style:

“Twister.”

Trueto the name, his life is sent into a spin cycle after that.

Afew years pass, a new Hero Rising is released, and everyone isgushing over the new characters, and Twister gives up his place onthe cover art alongside the series “cornerstones” to give them achance to shine.

NewParagons are brought in as the old guard goes off to college, retiresfrom the business into different, less-demanding pursuits, or isquietly given a send-off as they simply aren’t as salable nor asgood as they were a few years ago.

Zephyrquickly realizes that while he’s still got it, these new kids areinsane, and have so many advantages he didn’t, like muchbetter nutrition, a much more generous school schedule, and havingthe infrastructure, the audience, and the sponsors for Hero RisingParagons already there, rather than helping spearhead them.

Hecontinues on, making less and less public appearances, awkwardlybeing one of the only adult Paragons in crowds increasingly filledwith little kids and teenagers, and new characters based off the newParagons get the spotlight.

“Everyonealready knows Twister, and played him to death in all the specialinstance maps, the players want someone new!”

Thedeath-knell of his career and the cold, hard slap from Reality comeswhen Twister is removed from the roster due to development costs, andthe fact that Zephyr’s fees and royalties were considered too highfor the relatively lower cost of a new, fresh face who the fans aremuch more eager to see digitized.

Heand Phoebus both find themselves facing obsolescence, being leftbehind by a world that has simply moved too fast for them and leftthem in its dust, as they were only ever good at one thing each:fighting, either real bad guys or fictional ones.

Andso, with Esmerelda’s love and support, the two go off to reeducatethemselves and train in the new industries and careers Auradondemands, incidentally becoming the inspiration for the blockbusterfeel good movie of eight years from this time of writing:

“WithHonours”

Thestory of how a father and son went back to college, forced to startfrom scratch in a brand new world, learning new tricks, makingstrange friends, and doing a whole lot of growing up they didn’tknow they still needed to do.

Nowonto Frollo:

Helaments his permanent loss of Esmerelda (unlike the other Villains,he harbours no fantasies of Claudine getting him off the Isle—notwhen there’s still so much Good Work to be done here in this landof Sinners and Nonbelievers), and takes the disastrous results of hisobsession and lusting after her as a cautionary tale, the catastrophethat befalls those who turn away from God and the Right Path, and howthey take the whole world down with them.

Publicly,he is “that” preacher yelling about modesty, the sanctity ofmarriage and sexuality, and how pretty much everyone on theIsle is damned for engaging in such scandalous, salacious acts likepremarital sex, sexual intercourse without the intention ofprocreation, and of course, homosexuality.

Privately,he seeks a form of redemption by raising a good, Christian child inClaudine, the child he would have born with Esmerelda and raised ifcircumstances had been different (yeee-eep), and is looking for awoman with whom he can have a much healthier relationship with, toshow someone from this Isle what marriage and the word “love”truly means than the perversion the Islanders have turned it into.

Asboth Claudine and Not Esmerelda will attest to, he’s failedmiserably on both counts, but as usual, is blissfully unaware ofeither.

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thehowtostuff-blog · 6 years ago

Link

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s visage loomed large over the European parliament this week, both literally and figuratively, as global privacy regulators gathered in Brussels to interrogate the human impacts of technologies that derive their power and persuasiveness from our data.

The eponymous social network has been at the center of a privacy storm this year. And every fresh Facebook content concern — be it about discrimination or hate speech or cultural insensitivity — adds to a damaging flood.

The overarching discussion topic at the privacy and data protection confab, both in the public sessions and behind closed doors, was ethics: How to ensure engineers, technologists and companies operate with a sense of civic duty and build products that serve the good of humanity.

So, in other words, how to ensure people’s information is used ethically — not just in compliance with the law. Fundamental rights are increasingly seen by European regulators as a floor not the ceiling. Ethics are needed to fill the gaps where new uses of data keep pushing in.

As the EU’s data protection supervisor, Giovanni Buttarelli, told delegates at the start of the public portion of the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners: “Not everything that is legally compliant and technically feasible is morally sustainable.”

As if on cue Zuckerberg kicked off a pre-recorded video message to the conference with another apology. Albeit this was only for not being there to give an address in person. Which is not the kind of regret many in the room are now looking for, as fresh data breaches and privacy incursions keep being stacked on top of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal like an unpalatable layer cake that never stops being baked.

Evidence of a radical shift of mindset is what champions of civic tech are looking for — from Facebook in particular and adtech in general.

But there was no sign of that in Zuckerberg’s potted spiel. Rather he displayed the kind of masterfully slick PR manoeuvering that’s associated with politicians on the campaign trail. It’s the natural patter for certain big tech CEOs too, these days, in a sign of our sociotechnical political times.

(See also: Facebook hiring ex-UK deputy PM, Nick Clegg, to further expand its contacts database of European lawmakers.)

And so the Facebook founder seized on the conference’s discussion topic of big data ethics and tried to zoom right back out again. Backing away from talk of tangible harms and damaging platform defaults — aka the actual conversational substance of the conference (from talk of how dating apps are impacting how much sex people have and with whom they’re doing it; to shiny new biometric identity systems that have rebooted discriminatory caste systems) — to push the idea of a need to “strike a balance between speech, security, privacy and safety”.

This was Facebook trying reframe the idea of digital ethics — to make it so very big-picture-y that it could embrace his people-tracking ad-funded business model as a fuzzily wide public good, with a sort of ‘oh go on then’ shrug.

“Every day people around the world use our services to speak up for things they believe in. More than 80 million small businesses use our services, supporting millions of jobs and creating a lot of opportunity,” said Zuckerberg, arguing for a ‘both sides’ view of digital ethics. “We believe we have an ethical responsibility to support these positive uses too.”

Indeed, he went further, saying Facebook believes it has an “ethical obligation to protect good uses of technology”.

And from that self-serving perspective almost anything becomes possible — as if Facebook is arguing that breaking data protection law might really be the ‘ethical’ thing to do. (Or, as the existentialists might put it: ‘If god is dead, then everything is permitted’.)

It’s an argument that radically elides some very bad things, though. And glosses over problems that are systemic to Facebook’s ad platform.

A little later, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai also dropped into the conference in video form, bringing much the same message.

“The conversation about ethics is important. And we are happy to be a part of it,” he began, before an instant hard pivot into referencing Google’s founding mission of “organizing the world’s information — for everyone” (emphasis his), before segwaying — via “knowledge is empowering” — to asserting that “a society with more information is better off than one with less”.

Is having access to more information of unknown and dubious or even malicious provenance better than having access to some verified information? Google seems to think so.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – OCTOBER 04: Pichai Sundararajan, known as Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google Inc. speaks during an event to introduce Google Pixel phone and other Google products on October 4, 2016 in San Francisco, California. The Google Pixel is intended to challenge the Apple iPhone in the premium smartphone category. (Photo by Ramin Talaie/Getty Images)

The pre-recorded Pichai didn’t have to concern himself with all the mental ellipses bubbling up in the thoughts of the privacy and rights experts in the room.

“Today that mission still applies to everything we do at Google,” his digital image droned on, without mentioning what Google is thinking of doing in China. “It’s clear that technology can be a positive force in our lives. It has the potential to give us back time and extend opportunity to people all over the world.

“But it’s equally clear that we need to be responsible in how we use technology. We want to make sound choices and build products that benefit society that’s why earlier this year we worked with our employees to develop a set of AI principles that clearly state what types of technology applications we will pursue.”

Of course it sounds fine. Yet Pichai made no mention of the staff who’ve actually left Google because of ethical misgivings. Nor the employees still there and still protesting its ‘ethical’ choices.

It’s not almost as if the Internet’s adtech duopoly is singing from the same ‘ads for greater good trumping the bad’ hymn sheet; the Internet’s adtech’s duopoly is doing exactly that.

The ‘we’re not perfect and have lots more to learn’ line that also came from both CEOs seems mostly intended to manage regulatory expectation vis-a-vis data protection — and indeed on the wider ethics front.

They’re not promising to do no harm. Nor to always protect people’s data. They’re literally saying they can’t promise that. Ouch.

Meanwhile, another common FaceGoog message — an intent to introduce ‘more granular user controls’ — just means they’re piling even more responsibility onto individuals to proactively check (and keep checking) that their information is not being horribly abused.

This is a burden neither company can speak to in any other fashion. Because the solution is that their platforms not hoard people’s data in the first place.

The other ginormous elephant in the room is big tech’s massive size; which is itself skewing the market and far more besides.

Neither Zuckerberg nor Pichai directly addressed the notion of overly powerful platforms themselves causing structural societal harms, such as by eroding the civically minded institutions that are essential to defend free societies and indeed uphold the rule of law.

Of course it’s an awkward conversation topic for tech giants if vital institutions and societal norms are being undermined because of your cut-throat profiteering on the unregulated cyber seas.

A great tech fix to avoid answering awkward questions is to send a video message in your CEO’s stead. And/or a few minions. Facebook VP and chief privacy officer, Erin Egan, and Google’s SVP of global affairs Kent Walker, were duly dispatched and gave speeches in person.

They also had a handful of audience questions put to them by an on stage moderator. So it fell to Walker, not Pichai, to speak to Google’s contradictory involvement in China in light of its foundational claim to be a champion of the free flow of information.

“We absolutely believe in the maximum amount of information available to people around the world,” Walker said on that topic, after being allowed to intone on Google’s goodness for almost half an hour. “We have said that we are exploring the possibility of ways of engaging in China to see if there are ways to follow that mission while complying with laws in China.

“That’s an exploratory project — and we are not in a position at this point to have an answer to the question yet. But we continue to work.”

Egan, meanwhile, batted away her trio of audience concerns — about Facebook’s lack of privacy by design/default; and how the company could ever address ethical concerns without dramatically changing its business model — by saying it has a new privacy and data use team sitting horizontally across the business, as well as a data protection officer (an oversight role mandated by the EU’s GDPR; into which Facebook plugged its former global deputy chief privacy officer, Stephen Deadman, earlier this year).

She also said the company continues to invest in AI for content moderation purposes. So, essentially, more trust us. And trust our tech.

She also replied in the affirmative when asked whether Facebook will “unequivocally” support a strong federal privacy law in the US — with protections “equivalent” to those in Europe’s data protection framework.

But of course Zuckerberg has said much the same thing before — while simultaneously advocating for weaker privacy standards domestically. So who now really wants to take Facebook at its word on that? Or indeed on anything of human substance.

Not the EU parliament, for one. MEPs sitting in the parliament’s other building, in Strasbourg, this week adopted a resolution calling for Facebook to agree to an external audit by regional oversight bodies.

But of course Facebook prefers to run its own audit. And in a response statement the company claims it’s “working relentlessly to ensure the transparency, safety and security” of people who use its service (so bad luck if you’re one of those non-users it also tracks then). Which is a very long-winded way of saying ‘no, we’re not going to voluntarily let the inspectors in’.

Facebook’s problem now is that trust, once burnt, takes years and mountains’ worth of effort to restore.

This is the flip side of ‘move fast and break things’. (Indeed, one of the conference panels was entitled ‘move fast and fix things’.) It’s also the hard-to-shift legacy of an unapologetically blind ~decade-long dash for growth regardless of societal cost.

Given the, it looks unlikely that Zuckerberg’s attempt to paint a portrait of digital ethics in his company’s image will do much to restore trust in Facebook.

Not so long as the platform retains the power to cause damage at scale.

It was left to everyone else at the conference to discuss the hollowing out of democratic institutions, societal norms, humans interactions and so on — as a consequence of data (and market capital) being concentrated in the hands of the ridiculously powerful few.

“Today we face the gravest threat to our democracy, to our individual liberty in Europe since the war and the United States perhaps since the civil war,” said Barry Lynn, a former journalist and senior fellow at the Google-backed New America Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C., where he had directed the Open Markets Program — until it was shut down after he wrote critically about, er, Google.

“This threat is the consolidation of power — mainly by Google, Facebook and Amazon — over how we speak to one another, over how we do business with one another.”

Meanwhile the original architect of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, who has been warning about the crushing impact of platform power for years now is working on trying to decentralize the net’s data hoarders via new technologies intended to give users greater agency over their data.

On the democratic damage front, Lynn pointed to how news media is being hobbled by an adtech duopoly now sucking hundreds of billion of ad dollars out of the market annually — by renting out what he dubbed their “manipulation machines”.

Not only do they sell access to these ad targeting tools to mainstream advertisers — to sell the usual products, like soap and diapers — they’re also, he pointed out, taking dollars from “autocrats and would be autocrats and other social disruptors to spread propaganda and fake news to a variety of ends, none of them good”.

The platforms’ unhealthy market power is the result of a theft of people’s attention, argued Lynn. “We cannot have democracy if we don’t have a free and robustly funded press,” he warned.

His solution to the society-deforming might of platform power? Not a newfangled decentralization tech but something much older: Market restructuring via competition law.

“The basic problem is how we structure or how we have failed to structure markets in the last generation. How we have licensed or failed to license monopoly corporations to behave.

“In this case what we see here is this great mass of data. The problem is the combination of this great mass of data with monopoly power in the form of control over essential pathways to the market combined with a license to discriminate in the pricing and terms of service. That is the problem.”

“The result is to centralize,” he continued. “To pick and choose winners and losers. In other words the power to reward those who heed the will of the master, and to punish those who defy or question the master — in the hands of Google, Facebook and Amazon… That is destroying the rule of law in our society and is replacing rule of law with rule by power.”

For an example of an entity that’s currently being punished by Facebook’s grip on the social digital sphere you need look no further than Snapchat.

Also on the stage in person: Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, who didn’t mince his words either — attacking what he dubbed a “data industrial complex” which he said is “weaponizing” people’s person data against them for private profit.

The adtech modeus operandi sums to “surveillance”, Cook asserted.

Cook called this a “crisis”, painting a picture of technologies being applied in an ethics-free vacuum to “magnify our worst human tendencies… deepen divisions, incite violence and even undermine our shared sense of what is true and what is false” — by “taking advantage of user trust”.

“This crisis is real… And those of us who believe in technology’s potential for good must not shrink from this moment,” he warned, telling the assembled regulators that Apple is aligned with their civic mission.

Of course Cook’s position also aligns with Apple’s hardware-dominated business model — in which the company makes most of its money by selling premium priced, robustly encrypted devices, rather than monopolizing people’s attention to sell their eyeballs to advertisers.

The growing public and political alarm over how big data platforms stoke addiction and exploit people’s trust and information — and the idea that an overarching framework of not just laws but digital ethics might be needed to control this stuff — dovetails neatly with the alternative track that Apple has been pounding for years.

So for Cupertino it’s easy to argue that the ‘collect it all’ approach of data-hungry platforms is both lazy thinking and irresponsible engineering, as Cook did this week.

“For artificial intelligence to be truly smart it must respect human values — including privacy,” he said. “If we get this wrong, the dangers are profound. We can achieve both great artificial intelligence and great privacy standards. It is not only a possibility — it is a responsibility.”

Yet Apple is not only a hardware business. In recent years the company has been expanding and growing its services business. It even involves itself in (a degree of) digital advertising. And it does business in China.

It is, after all, still a for-profit business — not a human rights regulator. So we shouldn’t be looking to Apple to spec out a digital ethical framework for us, either.

No profit making entity should be used as the model for where the ethical line should lie.

Apple sets a far higher standard than other tech giants, certainly, even as its grip on the market is far more partial because it doesn’t give its stuff away for free. But it’s hardly perfect where privacy is concerned.

One inconvenient example for Apple is that it takes money from Google to make the company’s search engine the default for iOS users — even as it offers iOS users a choice of alternatives (if they go looking to switch) which includes pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo.

DDG is a veritable minnow vs Google, and Apple builds products for the consumer mainstream, so it is supporting privacy by putting a niche search engine alongside a behemoth like Google — as one of just four choices it offers.

But defaults are hugely powerful. So Google search being the iOS default means most of Apple’s mobile users will have their queries fed straight into Google’s surveillance database, even as Apple works hard to keep its own servers clear of user data by not collecting their stuff in the first place.

There is a contradiction there. So there is a risk for Apple in amping up its rhetoric against a “data industrial complex” — and making its naturally pro-privacy preference sound like a conviction principle — because it invites people to dial up critical lenses and point out where its defence of personal data against manipulation and exploitation does not live up to its own rhetoric.

One thing is clear: In the current data-based ecosystem all players are conflicted and compromised.

Though only a handful of tech giants have built unchallengeably massive tracking empires via the systematic exploitation of other people’s data.

And as the apparatus of their power gets exposed, these attention-hogging adtech giants are making a dumb show of papering over the myriad ways their platforms pound on people and societies — offering paper-thin promises to ‘do better next time — when ‘better’ is not even close to being enough.

Call for collective action

Increasingly powerful data-mining technologies must be sensitive to human rights and human impacts, that much is crystal clear. Nor is it enough to be reactive to problems after or even at the moment they arise. No engineer or system designer should feel it’s their job to manipulate and trick their fellow humans.

Dark pattern designs should be repurposed into a guidebook of what not to do and how not to transact online. (If you want a mission statement for thinking about this it really is simple: Just don’t be a dick.)

Sociotechnical Internet technologies must always be designed with people and societies in mind — a key point that was hammered home in a keynote by Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and the tech guy now trying to defang the Internet’s occupying corporate forces via decentralization.

“As we’re designing the system, we’re designing society,” he told the conference. “Ethical rules that we choose to put in that design [impact society]… Nothing is self evident. Everything has to be put out there as something that we think we will be a good idea as a component of our society.”

The penny looks to be dropping for privacy watchdogs in Europe. The idea that assessing fairness — not just legal compliance — must be a key component of their thinking, going forward, and so the direction of regulatory travel.

Watchdogs like the UK’s ICO — which just fined Facebook the maximum possible penalty for the Cambridge Analytica scandal — said so this week. “You have to do your homework as a company to think about fairness,” said Elizabeth Denham, when asked ‘who decides what’s fair’ in a data ethics context. “At the end of the day if you are working, providing services in Europe then the regulator’s going to have something to say about fairness — which we have in some cases.”

“Right now, we’re working with some Oxford academics on transparency and algorithmic decision making. We’re also working on our own tool as a regulator on how we are going to audit algorithms,” she added. “I think in Europe we’re leading the way — and I realize that’s not the legal requirement in the rest of the world but I believe that more and more companies are going to look to the high standard that is now in place with the GDPR.

“The answer to the question is ‘is this fair?’ It may be legal — but is this fair?”

So the short version is data controllers need to prepare themselves to consult widely — and examine their consciences closely.

Rising automation and AI makes ethical design choices even more imperative, as technologies become increasingly complex and intertwined, thanks to the massive amounts of data being captured, processed and used to model all sorts of human facets and functions.

The closed session of the conference produced a declaration on ethics and data in artificial intelligence — setting out a list of guiding principles to act as “core values to preserve human rights” in the developing AI era — which included concepts like fairness and responsible design.

Few would argue that a powerful AI-based technology such as facial recognition isn’t inherently in tension with a fundamental human right like privacy.

Nor that such powerful technologies aren’t at huge risk of being misused and abused to discriminate and/or suppress rights at vast and terrifying scale. (See, for example, China’s push to install a social credit system.)

Biometric ID systems might start out with claims of the very best intentions — only to shift function and impact later. The dangers to human rights of function creep on this front are very real indeed. And are already being felt in places like India — where the country’s Aadhaar biometric ID system has been accused of rebooting ancient prejudices by promoting a digital caste system, as the conference also heard.

The consensus from the event is it’s not only possible but vital to engineer ethics into system design from the start whenever you’re doing things with other people’s data. And that routes to market must be found that don’t require dispensing with a moral compass to get there.

The notion of data-processing platforms becoming information fiduciaries — i.e. having a legal duty of care towards their users, as a doctor or lawyer does — was floated several times during public discussions. Though such a step would likely require more legislation, not just adequately rigorous self examination.

In the meanwhile civic society must get to grips, and grapple proactively, with technologies like AI so that people and societies can come to collective agreement about a digital ethics framework. This is vital work to defend the things that matter to communities so that the anthropogenic platforms Berners-Lee referenced are shaped by collective human values, not the other way around.

It’s also essential that public debate about digital ethics does not get hijacked by corporate self interest.

Tech giants are not only inherently conflicted on the topic but — right across the board — they lack the internal diversity to offer a broad enough perspective.

People and civic society must teach them.

A vital closing contribution came from the French data watchdog’s Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, who summed up discussions that had taken place behind closed doors as the community of global data protection commissioners met to plot next steps.

She explained that members had adopted a roadmap for the future of the conference to evolve beyond a mere talking shop and take on a more visible, open governance structure — to allow it to be a vehicle for collective, international decision-making on ethical standards, and so alight on and adopt common positions and principles that can push tech in a human direction.

The initial declaration document on ethics and AI is intended to be just the start, she said — warning that “if we can’t act we will not be able to collectively control our future”, and couching ethics as “no longer an option, it is an obligation”.

She also said it’s essential that regulators get with the program and enforce current privacy laws — to “pave the way towards a digital ethics” — echoing calls from many speakers at the event for regulators to get on with the job of enforcement.

This is vital work to defend values and rights against the overreach of the digital here and now.

“Without ethics, without an adequate enforcement of our values and rules our societal models are at risk,” Falque-Pierrotin also warned. “We must act… because if we fail, there won’t be any winners. Not the people, nor the companies. And certainly not human rights and democracy.”

If the conference had one short sharp message it was this: Society must wake up to technology — and fast.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do, and a lot of discussion — across the boundaries of individuals, companies and governments,” agreed Berners-Lee. “But very important work.

“We have to get commitments from companies to make their platforms constructive and we have to get commitments from governments to look at whenever they see that a new technology allows people to be taken advantage of, allows a new form of crime to get onto it by producing new forms of the law. And to make sure that the policies that they do are thought about in respect to every new technology as they come out.”

This work is also an opportunity for civic society to define and reaffirm what’s important. So it’s not only about mitigating risks.

But, equally, not doing the job is unthinkable — because there’s no putting the AI genii back in the bottle.

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sheminecrafts · 6 years ago

Text

Big tech must not reframe digital ethics in its image