#trying to spread out and be more comfortable online in my own curated space of interests

[romagaze]

I’m certain that the echo of your words and the impact of your art will outlive the day in which the horizon is touched by a human hand. Keep creating; you’re doing wonderfully, and it’s not going unseen 🖤

whoever you are, know, i will tape to my heart as a reminder.

[wingzie]

Hi.

Your experience as a Jikookers is the same as the experience of Taekookers. Extreme shippers fighting and having meltdowns on the TL make a lot of people equate the unit name with these behaviors.

Sadly the first thought that came to my mind when Jimin mentioned JK is that tkk would make a scene about it. Instead of just feeling relief they are doing well, or just comfort we're getting news, I felt dread. And the worst is I was right.

I'm really struggling with the state of the fandom now, especially twitter fandom. People say you just have to curate your online experience and most sane armys are just taking a break from SNS and everything will get better once the guys start coming back from MS. I'm not this optimistic.

I've been thinking finding fellow ARMY irl could be better. But there's still a good chance to meet someone you would block straight away online.

I'm not a very social person. I used to come online to find people remisniscing, celebrating, sharing.. There's always been hating but now it feels like it's only hating (and comparing numbers). There was a clear shift from COVID on. It's not just solo endeavors and MS. You said it, how the way to handle things has changed.

I don't know how to fend off all the negativity any more than I know how to casually meet ARMY offline. I dream of an ARMY community manager, of a campaign about mental heal, abusive relationships (how many think they know better than the members what's good for them and think they are actually showing love and support when they are just being abusive), how to make the parasocial relationship a positive thing, etc.... A lot of these people who make ARMY spaces unbreathable actually need help.

Hi Anon! I'm sorry you feel this way. I feel like some Army experienced feelings of anger or betrayal since the Festa Dinner, which has made them unfairly lash out on the members. Some cannot cope that we lost an aspect of control, but this has always been the members decision and we have to accept that with respect. As I said in my other post, the heart of Army is massively the same. Just this morning I saw a Tweet about the Purple Ocean from Muster and it reminded me of the Flashlight project during PTD. There will ALWAYS be discourse online. That is the reason for it's existence. I am in other fandoms and they all suffer from the same issues since Covid and Elon. However, for every "bad" person or post, there are plenty of good ones out there. If you look for then. I mentioned to someone yesterday that it's like when people always leave awful reviews for a bad meal, but very rarely mention when they have a good meal. That's why I always try to find a balance. Both Jimin and Namjoon have told us over the years to not engage with negativity and I have always taken those words to heart. Things in online spaces have changed, but I guess I am more of a fighter and optimist. For each negative post I see, I spend more time posting/repositing posts that spread positivity or praise. I see no point in boosting some random February 2024 account sprewing hate. We have to be responsbile or our own spaces and I DO think things will improve once Jin returns. There's still that shared joy and excitement whenever a member posts or content comes out. It's just that the negative is less contained than it used to be. As for events offline. My first event was for a local screening of one of the concerts. I then attended a few events for members Birthday's. With the HYYH anniversay coming up, maybe you could look into seeing if there's any events for it? It's also Sope's Birthday soon and I plan to go to events for each of their Birthday's, so that could also be an option. However, if you dont' feel comfortable going in person, then that is perfectly acceptable. I'm sure there will be no judgement! We all have our own ways. For example, I always buy a mini cake for each members' Birthday haha. Though I had some negative experiences offline, there have been some really good ones. That's just how things are and then you can take the steps to protect yourself afterwards. I'm actually going to another event with the same group I mentioned before. If it doesn't go well, then I will just leave. If things have improved, then I will stay and enjoy myself. I understand it's not easy though, especially when we have certain expectations. Please do look after yourself though and feel free to DM me if you wish to discuss further. Much Love Wingzie/Becca

[damnfandomproblems]

[suggestion]

i'm the guy that submit the "censorship is a plague" rant and it came across my dash, i had no idea it was gonna spread that far lmao. it was an angry vent but to add to that, seeing a bunch of people commenting stuff like "youtubers censor words to avoid demonetization, otherwise i agree" is uhhhh, i literally don't care and i can assure you the rest of us who actually need to be able to know what content is where to curate our online spaces don't either. the entire point about censorship fucking over everyone still stands.

also youtubers covering sensitive subjects only to censor triggers because they care more about their ability to make money or their own comfortability than the safety of folks actually affected by said sensitive subjects is not "valid". i came across a video that had "!!!TRIGGER WARNING!!!" in the title and then it didn't say what the trigger was because... it'll get in the way of their ability to make money? and yes, i kinda get it. some youtubers make a living off youtube cash, but maybe it's time to consider a different career if your entire living is made from talking about horrible things happening to people (because i'll be real, i see this issue most commonly within true crime community, yter allegations and drama that all involve REAL people) and not actually respecting others who are affected by it, especially if there are real victims involved in what you're covering, because you want to make money off of it.

like do any of you remember how a youtuber had video evidence of another youtuber trying to meet up with a 13 y/o girl, confessed on camera to trying to do it multiple times, had pages upon pages of text evidence that he was attempting to meet with this 13 y/o for sex, and was very openly outing himself as a predator on camera for like 20 minutes and he kept all this evidence hidden from everyone until he could get full monetization on the video? and didn't even go to authorities to begin with because he wanted a monetized video first?? cause there's a pretty big fuckin issue there that i couldn't emphasize with a giant red circle enough.

I am going to post this as this.

[welcometophu]

Into the Split: Reinforcements 4

Twinned Book 3: Into the Split

Reinforcements 4

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By the time breakfast is over, the room is more than full. Cats, dogs, mice, birds, lizards, and any number of other animal life line the room. Dayton has been replaced by a tawny lion, curled on the floor at the foot of the chair of one of Rory’s bandmates. Clan taking their animal forms has helped squeeze more people in, but it’s still crowded and standing room only around the edges. Nikolai and Seth give up their seats and take up space by the wall, Nikolai standing with his arms wrapped around Seth from behind, anchored in his stability and warmth.

Nikolai only recognizes some of the people in the room, although he suspect he was introduced to others along the way. He hopes it doesn’t matter that he can’t put names to most of these faces. At least he knows that someone thinks they’re important to what they’re trying to achieve.

Alia sits with Pawel, Alaric, Sera, Del, and others that Nikolai isn’t sure he recognizes. When Alia stands, much of the room falls silent, the rest following in the wake. She smiles tightly. “We shall begin. I do not expect that we will meet like this often, but I thank all of you for taking the time to travel here to Haverhill, to come together in a meeting of Talent. I hope that in the future we will be able to continue to work together to achieve a peace our world has not yet seen.” She glances at Pawel.

He rises quickly enough to knock his own chair over. While Alaric reaches to right it, Pawel moves out from behind the table. “I’ve knocked my computer off the podium while teaching. Probably better for me to get somewhere a little more clear,” he says, his voice raised and clear, easy to hear throughout the room. His hands move as he speaks, although Nikolai isn’t sure the gestures exactly match the words. “I know that everyone here has heard some version of this story, that everyone has some pieces of information, but I want to make sure that we begin from a clear starting line today, and that we can easily map out where we are going. I don’t want to bury us in detail, but rather, I want to give an overview of the important facts. We are working together—Clan and Mage, Lineage and Emergent—to try to eliminate a threat against all Talented people from the Shadows.”

On one side of the room, Mattie coughs loudly.

Pawel ignores her. “We have determined that our world is not the only one, and that there is one other world which is tightly connected to our own, and that may share a fate with ours. That world has already been overrun by Shadows, threatening Talented and non-Talented people alike.”

“There was a third one,” Del interjects, leaning forward on the table where she still sits. “It collapsed.”

Pawel’s attention shifts abruptly as he gives her a sharp look. “What?”

She gestures at the rest of the room. “Do you want me to talk about the Dreamscape, or do you want to keep explaining?” she asks. “Because it sounds like you’re enjoying the explaining. You like teaching.”

Del flinches, and Nikolai gets the feeling that someone kicked her out of sight, but her gaze at Pawel doesn’t waver.

Pawel turns his back on Del. “We have determined that the Talents of Traveling and Dreamwalking have something in common, as well as having aspects in common with Shadowwalkers. The Dreamscape lies between all of the worlds, and Dreamwalkers are able to all reach the same Dreamscape. But they are not able to exit it into other worlds, except in unique situations. Within the Dreamscape, we were able to identify our correlation to another world.”

“Two worlds,” Del says, her voice low, but carrying.

Pawel gestures at her, and she smiles slightly, sitting back in her chair.

“There are three paths,” Del says. “There’s a point where they diverge, and I remember that when we first saw them, Carolyn and Kit said that one was right, one was almost right, and one was very, very wrong. It’s turned out that the one that was almost right is a world parallel to ours, but they have Shadowwalkers actively trying to hunt them. The third one was already overrun, and badly. The path’s gone now. It was there, just a few days ago, and now it’s just not there at all. And the Shadows continue to encroach along the edges of the paths, and it’s getting harder and harder to get to the other world.”

The way home is growing blocked. Nikolai’s fingers curl against Seth’s stomach, and Seth covers his hand, squeezing lightly. Nikolai exhales, tries to center himself.

“We’ve been working on creating a network,” Del explains. “We went from a dozen Dreamwalkers to well over a hundred. My meadow’s been invaded and isn’t peaceful any more.” She sighs heavily. “It’s a price to pay. There are more coming in, and we have Dreamwalkers all over our world and the other one. We can work together to create a Ritual in the Dreamscape that would affect both worlds.” She glances at Pawel. “Once we have an idea what that Ritual is.”

“Dreamwalkers can’t work together,” someone says from the far side of the room.

“There are three in this room,” Nikolai replies. He feels the weight of the attention levied on him for that statement, and he’d take it back if he could. “Dreamwalking requires education. Training. I’ve had Seth with me since we were kids, and he’s my anchor. But we aren’t interacting, so you know it’s possible. Del’s right there, and Nikita, and me. Dreamwalkers can work together. Just because they haven’t in your world doesn’t mean they can’t.”

He takes an involuntary step back at the sudden buzz of sound and lets Pawel and Del handle the explanations of exactly who he and Seth are. There’s a weight in the room when they’re done, as if the people he doesn’t know are staring at them.

It’s not comfortable.

Seth’s calm washes over him, envelopes them both in warmth, and Nikolai focuses on that rather than the regard of too many strangers.

“Yeah, sure.” Sera pats Pawel on the shoulder, then climbs onto the table to stand on it. The ink on her hands is crawling up her arms, creating new designs as they watch. “I’m Sera, and I’m a Technopath, which is a really fancy name for an Emergent Talent that has something to do with technology. Some of us interface with technology natively, some of us have it inside of us. Me, I absorb it, and thanks to that I’m kind of always online, like a human interface to the internet at large. Anyway. Pawel put me in charge of creating chat rooms and a space to gather online and bring together information in secure databases.”

She makes a face, nose wrinkling. “And in some cases to get into some other secure databases that do not belong to us. Technopaths are sometimes born hackers, too. Which is a legal grey area that we are going to ignore because we managed to get some information that you guys are going to really be interested in.”

She hops forward, ending up sitting on the edge of the table, her feet kicking. “So, we’ve established our own network. We’re encrypted and secure, and we’re currently hosting the Dreamwalker spaces online. Carolyn and Pawel have also started to curate a ton of information about Talents, which is great, since it lets us get a better look at data. But security is a huge thing, because what we also found is that we aren’t the only secure repository of data about Talents out there. And the other one is owned by the government.”

Silence.

Sera raises her hands. “So. If you’ve ever thought hey there’s a government conspiracy about us, you were right! There is an organization within the government named Sigma Delta—yes, the sum of change. They’ve been gathering information on us for decades. Lineage information. The percentage of normal people who Emerged in an average year prior to the Emergence, and the same information for the years since. And Rituals. They have databanks of information about Rituals, but not information on casting them. Information on what happens when they’re cast. We haven’t managed to crack all the files we’ve found, and to be honest, we’re trying not to let them know that we’re rooting around in their data.”

“They know.” Mac blinks into existence as she speaks, reaching out to touch Pawel’s shoulder, grabbing him to yank him close enough to whisper in his ear. Pawel holds up a finger and Sera stays silent while Pawel and Mac confer quietly. When they separate, Mac takes a step closer to Sera and stands, legs slightly spread, and hands clasped behind herself.

“Sigma Delta is a special program for Talents being trained for the military,” Mac says. “I began training with them as a teen, just after the Emergence. After all, they knew I’d be exactly what they wanted, and it wasn’t a secret that I’d Emerged. From what I know, they already had a lot of people in the program prior to the Emergence. I heard a bit about it before I was formally involved, back when my dad was just starting to date my mom.” She hesitates, adds, “My stepfather. Senator Delwin Palmer. He’s highly involved in the project. It’s a top security, eyes-only kind of thing, and I’m breaking a lot of oaths by talking about it here.” Her gaze shifts, finding someone on the other side of the room. “But given what I’ve managed to put together, and what Sera’s said, I think we need to talk about it.”

Cass stands up, a chair falling down behind her, and pushes through the crowd, heading for the door.

“The government’s been involved in our lives since before the Emergence,” Mac calls out. “And it’s still trying to find more of us. Trying to make us do their—” She cuts off, disappearing from view.

She doesn’t reappear anywhere inside the room, and Cass is already gone.

“Well then,” Sera says. “That wasn’t part of my speech, but… I’ve actually got more for you, and what I have is even worse. From what we found, we think they may have caused the Emergence. Probably accidentally, but what they were trying to do wasn’t any better.”

Her feet kick slowly as she holds one hand out, three fingers up. “Once upon a time there were three separate Lineages: Soulstealers, Deathstalkers, and Shadowwalkers. Sigma Delta decided they wanted to create a controlled heavy duty government weapon. They collected a group of latent Deathstalkers—people who were of the Lineage but had never manifested the Talent. These particular Deathstalkers also happened to have Shadowwalkers in their Lineage. Then they unleashed the few Soulstealers they had managed to find, allowing them to feed on these Latent Talents while they set a Ritual in place. The Ritual was meant to make anyone who had a shred of a forgotten Lineage to Emerge. I don’t think they expected it to go global the way it did.

“So it had two effects. The Emergence started, and it hasn’t stopped. There’s something different about our world now, and people are more likely to Emerge. And it created the kind of Shadowwalkers we know now out of those people who were part of the Ritual. Starving. Soulless. Split between the Dreaming and the darkness.” She glances at Mattie. “Able to be healed and become Shadowwalkers of the traditional, legendary variety. If you can find their soul.”

Conversation erupts throughout there room and Nikolai can’t piece it together. Too many threads, too many voices saying too many different things.

“So,” Seth murmurs to him, turning so that they face each other, forehead to forehead, cocooned in their own quieter space. “When they did the Ritual here, it somehow affected us as well.”

“Maybe because our worlds were so close,” Nikolai muses. “Maybe because of people like Alia and Valentine, or even like Nikita and me, or you and Heather.”

He wonders what happened in that third world. He wonders why they died so quickly, and where the Shadows from that world are going now.

It’s not a good thought.

“Can we reverse this Ritual?” Someone who was an eagle only moments ago asks. “Can we undo what the Mages did to us?”

“It is the Mages fault,” someone else says.

Alia slips into the form of a lion and roars, the sound echoing off the walls before she returns to human. “This is not about Clan versus Mage,” she says sharply.

“Clan were there, too,” Sera says, feet still kicking where she sits. “There are Clan in the government organization, and there are Mages, and there are a whole host of other kinds of specialized Talents. This isn’t about what kind of Talent anyone has. This is about some people,” she emphasizes the words, hard and sharp, “deciding to try to gain power through any means possible. And what they did opened us up to the potential for being destroyed.”

“In our world, that’s exactly what’s happening,” Seth says, his voice cutting through the commotion around them. “In the third world that Del talked about, that’s probably already happened. Just because it’s not that bad here yet doesn’t mean it won’t get that way. It wasn’t bad in our world, at first. We were able to hide. Then more and more people started dying, and fear is an amazing thing: it changes the world overnight.”

Alaric stands abruptly, shoulder to shoulder with Alia, looming despite not being the bear. “This is not about Clan versus Mage,” he growls, the words resonating throughout the room. “This is not about Talent or non-Talented people. This is about making sure that the Shadows cannot have our world. This is about undoing the damage that has been done, here and elsewhere.”

The woman who was an eagle takes another step forward, hands on her hips. “Can we reverse the ritual?” she asks again. “Can we undo it? Make the Shadows go back to being whatever they were before, and keep them from hunting us?”

“We don’t know,” Pawel admits. “I’ve been talking to the folks who’ve come down from Burlington, and we’ll be spending more time in discussion once we can include all available Mages.”

“We have a blended community. Our Mages would be happy to work with you,” a pregnant Clan woman calls out, and Pawel nods to acknowledge her, motioning as if to have someone from their table join him as well.

“The problem is, we don’t know how they did the ritual, just that it happened,” Pawel says. “And one concern is the amount of energy that was involved. Did they leverage using the Soulstealers to take the energy from willing donors? Did they use unusual Talents as a battery source, or possibly the energy from the mass Emergence that began around the world? Did they somehow use something from the Dreamscape, and that’s why it became so intrinsically tied to this situation?” He spreads his hands. “We know a lot more than we used to, but what we don’t know is still an abyss, open and yawning in front of us. And worse yet, the things we don’t know could kill us if we make an attempt to do something without more information. Magic will make do. If a ritual is cast, the energy has to come from somewhere, and I suspect that when the original ritual was created, that wasn’t accounted for.”

“And that’s why it went horrifyingly wrong,” Sera says, her heels thunking back on every word. She hops down from the table. “That’s all I’ve got for you right now. We’re working on identifying the cabal  behind that original ritual, and seeing if we can use that to get more information. The Technopaths are kind of having a blast right now trying to see how deep they can get before they’re discovered.” She holds up her hands. “Not me, of course. I’m making sure that I keep my Talents in totally legal places.”

That’s the signal for everyone to move, apparently. The group breaks up, people moving between tables, some leaving. Nikolai stays where he is, with Seth close by. He’s not sure what happens next, or how he’s going to be involved in it, but for the first time, it seems like they have a direction. He’s just not certain it’s a good one.

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[meeedeee]

Cancel Culture: The Internet Eating Itself RSS FEED OF POST WRITTEN BY FOZMEADOWS

As social media platforms enter their collective adolescence – Facebook is fifteen, YouTube fourteen, Twitter thirteen, tumblr twelve – I find myself thinking about how little we really understand their cultural implications, both ongoing and for the future. At this point, the idea that being online is completely optional in modern world ought to be absurd, and yet multiple friends, having spoken to their therapists about the impact of digital abuse on their mental health, were told straight up to just stop using the internet. Even if this was a viable option for some, the idea that we can neatly sidestep the problem of bad behaviour in any non-utilitarian sphere by telling those impacted to simply quit is baffling at best and a tacit form of victim-blaming at worst. The internet might be a liminal space, but object permanence still applies to what happens here: the trolls don’t vanish if we close our eyes, and if we vanquish one digital hydra-domain for Toxicity Crimes without caring to fathom the whys and hows of what went wrong, we merely ensure that three more will spring up in its place.

Is the internet a private space, a government space or a public space? Yes.

Is it corporate, communal or unaffiliated? Yes.

Is it truly global or bound by local legal jurisdictions? Yes.

Does the internet reflect our culture or create it? Yes.

Is what people say on the internet reflective of their true beliefs, or is it a constant shell-game of digital personas, marketing ploys, intrusive thoughts, growth-in-progress, personal speculation and fictional exploration? Yes.

The problem with the internet is that takes up all three areas on a Venn diagram depicting the overlap between speech and action, and while this has always been the case, we’re only now admitting that it’s a bug as well as a feature. Human interaction cannot be usefully monitored using an algorithm, but our current conception of What The Internet Is has been engineered specifically to shortcut existing forms of human oversight, the better to maximise both accessibility (good to neutral) and profits (neutral to bad). Uber and Lyft are cheaper, frequently more convenient alternatives to a traditional taxi service, for instance, but that’s because the apps themselves are functionally predicated on the removal of meaningful customer service and worker protections that were hard-won elsewhere. Sites like tumblr are free to use, but the lack of revenue generated by those users means that, past a certain point, profits can only hope to outstrip expenses by selling access to those users and/or their account data, which means in turn that paying to effectively monitor their content creation becomes vastly less important than monetising it.

Small wonder, then, that individual users of social media platforms have learned to place a high premium on their ability to curate what they see, how they see it, and who sees them in turn. When I first started blogging, the largely unwritten rule of the blogsphere was that, while particular webforums dedicated to specific topics could have rules about content and conduct, blogs and their comment pages should be kept Free. Monitoring comments was viewed as a sign of narrow-minded fearfulness: even if a participant was aggressive or abusive, the enlightened path was to let them speak, because anything else was Censorship. This position held out for a good long while, until the collective frustration of everyone who’d been graphically threatened with rape, torture and death, bombarded with slurs, exhausted by sealioning or simply fed up with nitpicking and bad faith arguments finally boiled over.

Particularly in progressive circles, the relief people felt at being told that actually, we were under no moral obligation to let assholes grandstand in the comments or repeatedly explain basic concepts to only theoretically invested strangers was overwhelming. Instead, you could simply delete them, or block them, or maybe even mock them, if the offence or initial point of ignorance seemed silly enough. But as with the previous system, this one-size-fits-all approach soon developed a downside. Thanks to the burnout so many of us felt after literal years of trying to treat patiently with trolls playing Devil’s Advocate, liberal internet culture shifted sharply towards immediate shows of anger, derision and flippancy to anyone who asked a 101 question, or who didn’t use the right language, or who did anything other than immediately agree with whatever position was explained to them, however simply.

I don’t exempt myself from this criticism, but knowing why I was so goddamn tired doesn’t change my conviction that, cumulatively, the end result did more harm than good. Without wanting to sidetrack into a lengthy dissertation on digital activism in the post-aughties decade, it seems evident in hindsight that the then-fledgling alliance between trolls, MRAs, PUAs, Redditors and 4channers to deliberately exhaust left-wing goodwill via sealioning and bad faith arguments was only the first part of a two-pronged attack. The second part, when the left had lost all patience with explaining its own beliefs and was snappily telling anyone who asked about feminism, racism or anything else to just fucking Google it, was to swoop in and persuade the rebuffed party that we were all irrational, screeching harridans who didn’t want to answer because we knew our answers were bad, and why not consider reading Roosh V instead?

The fallout of this period, I would argue, is still ongoing. In an ideal world, drawing a link between online culture wars about ownership of SFF and geekdom and the rise of far-right fascist, xenophobic extremism should be a bow so long that not even Odysseus himself could draw it. But this world, as we’ve all had frequent cause to notice, is far from ideal at the best of times – which these are not – and yet another featurebug of the internet is the fluid interpermeability of its various spaces. We talk, for instance – as I am talking here – about social media as a discreet concept, as though platforms like Twitter or Facebook are functionally separate from the other sites to which their users link; as though there is no relationship between or bleed-through from the viral Facebook post screencapped and shared on BuzzFeed, which is then linked and commented upon on Reddit, which thread is then linked to on Twitter, where an entirely new conversation emerges and subsequently spawns an article in The Huffington Post, which is shared again on Facebook and the replies to that shared on tumblr, and so on like some grizzly perpetual mention machine.

But I digress. The point here is that internet culture is best understood as a pattern of ripples, each new iteration a reaction to the previous one, spreading out until it dissipates and a new shape takes its place. Having learned that slamming the virtual door in everyone’s face was a bad idea, the online left tried establishing a better, calmer means of communication; the flipside was a sudden increase in tone-policing, conversations in which presentation was vaunted over substance and where, once again, particular groups were singled out as needing to conform to the comfort-levels of others. Overlapping with this was the move towards discussing things as being problematic, rather than using more fixed and strident language to decry particular faults – an attempt to acknowledge the inherent fallibility of human works while still allowing for criticism. A sensible goal, surely, but once again, attempting to apply the dictum universally proved a double-edged sword: if everything is problematic, then how to distinguish grave offences from trifling ones? How can anyone enjoy anything if we’re always expected to thumb the rosary of its failings first?

When everything is problematic and everyone has the right to say so, being online as any sort of creator or celebrity is like being nibbled to death by ducks. The well-meaning promise of various organisations, public figures or storytellers to take criticism on board – to listen to the fanbase and do right by their desires – was always going to stumble over the problem of differing tastes. No group is a hivemind: what one person considers bad representation or in poor taste, another might find enlightening, while yet a third party is more concerned with something else entirely. Even in cases with a clear majority opinion, it’s physically impossible to please everyone and a type of folly to try, but that has yet to stop the collective internet from demanding it be so. Out of this comes a new type of ironic frustration: having once rejoiced in being allowed to simply block trolls or timewasters, we now cast judgement on those who block us in turn, viewing them, as we once were viewed, as being fearful of criticism.

Are we creating echo chambers by curating what we see online, or are we acting in pragmatic acknowledgement of the fact that we neither have time to read everything nor an obligation to see all perspectives as equally valid? Yes.

Even if we did have the time and ability to wade through everything, is the signal-to-noise ratio of truth to lies on the internet beyond our individual ability to successfully measure, such that outsourcing some of our judgement to trusted sources is fundamentally necessary, or should we be expected to think critically about everything we encounter, even if it’s only intended as entertainment? Yes.

If something or someone online acts in a way that’s antithetical to our values, are we allowed to tune them out thereafter, knowing full well that there’s a nearly infinite supply of as-yet undisappointing content and content-creators waiting to take their place, or are we obliged to acknowledge that Doing A Bad doesn’t necessarily ruin a person forever? Yes.

And thus we come to cancel culture, the current – but by no means final – culmination of previous internet discourse waves. In this iteration, burnout at critical engagement dovetails with a new emphasis on collective content curation courtesies (try saying that six times fast), but ends up hamstrung once again by differences in taste. Or, to put it another way: someone fucks up and it’s the last straw for us personally, so we try to remove them from our timelines altogether – but unless our friends and mutuals, who we still want to engage with, are convinced to do likewise, then we haven’t really removed them at all, such that we’re now potentially willing to make failure to cancel on demand itself a cancellable offence.

Which brings us right back around to the problem of how the modern internet is fundamentally structured – which is to say, the way in which it’s overwhelmingly meant to rely on individual curation instead of collective moderation. Because the one thing each successive mode of social media discourse has in common with its predecessors is a central, and currently unanswerable question: what universal code of conduct exists that I, an individual on the internet, can adhere to – and expect others to adhere to – while we communicate across multiple different platforms?

In the real world, we understand about social behavioural norms: even if we don’t talk about them in those terms, we broadly recognise them when we see them. Of course, we also understand that those norms can vary from place to place and context to context, but as we can only ever be in one physical place at a time, it’s comparatively easy to adjust as appropriate.

But the internet, as stated, is a liminal space: it’s real and virtual, myriad and singular, private and public all at once. It confuses our sense of which rules might apply under which circumstances, jumbles the normal behavioural cues by obscuring the identity of our interlocutors, and even though we don’t acknowledge it nearly as often as we should, written communication – like spoken communication – is a skill that not everyone has, just as tone, whether spoken or written, isn’t always received (or executed, for that matter) in the way it was intended. And when it comes to politics, in which the internet and its doings now plays no small role, there’s the continual frustration that comes from observing, with more and more frequency, how many literal, real-world crimes and abuses go without punishment, and how that lack of consequences contributes in turn to the fostering of abuse and hostility towards vulnerable groups online.

This is what comes of occupying a transitional period in history: one in which laws are changed and proposed to reflect our changing awareness of the world, but where habit, custom, ignorance, bias and malice still routinely combine, both institutionally and more generally, to see those laws enacted only in part, or tokenistically, or not at all. To take one of the most egregious and well-publicised instances that ultimately presaged the #MeToo movement, the laughably meagre sentence handed down to Brock Turner, who was caught in the act of raping an unconscious woman, combined with the emphasis placed by both the judge and much of the media coverage on his swimming talents and family standing as a means of exonerating him, made it very clear that sexual violence against women is frequently held to be less important than the perceived ‘bright futures’ of its perpetrators.

Knowing this, then – knowing that the story was spread, discussed and argued about on social media, along with thousands of other, similar accounts; knowing that, even in this context, some people still freely spoke up in defence of rapists and issued misogynistic threats against their female interlocutors – is it any wonder that, in the absence of consistent legal justice in such cases, the internet tried, and is still trying, to fill the gap? Is it any wonder, when instances of racist police brutality are constantly filmed and posted online, only for the perpetrators to receive no discipline, that we lose patience for anyone who wants to debate the semantics of when, exactly, extrajudicial murder is “acceptable”?

We cannot control the brutality of the world from the safety of our keyboards, but when it exhausts or threatens us, we can at least click a button to mute its seeming adherents. We don’t always have the energy to decry the same person we’ve already argued against a thousand times before, but when a friend unthinkingly puts them back on our timeline for some new reason, we can tell them that person is cancelled and hope they take the hint not to do it again. Never mind that there is far too often no subtlety, no sense of scale or proportion to how the collective, viral internet reacts in each instance, until all outrage is rendered flat and the outside observer could be forgiven for worrying what’s gone wrong with us all, that using a homophobic trope in a TV show is thought to merit the same online response as an actual hate crime. So long as the war is waged with words alone, there’s only a finite number of outcomes that boycotting, blocking, blacklisting, cancelling, complaining and critiquing can achieve, and while some of those outcomes in particular are well worth fighting for, so many words are poured towards so many attempts that it’s easy to feel numbed to the process; or, conversely, easy to think that one response fits all contexts.

I’m tired of cancel culture, just as I was dully tired of everything that preceded it and will doubtless grow tired of everything that comes after it in turn, until our fundamental sense of what the internet is and how it should be managed finally changes. Like it or not, the internet both is and is of the world, and that is too much for any one person to sensibly try and curate at an individual level. Where nothing is moderated for us, everything must be moderated by us; and wherever people form communities, those communities will grow cultures, which will develop rules and customs that spill over into neighbouring communities, both digitally and offline, with mixed and ever-changing results. Cancel culture is particularly tricky in this regard, as the ease with which we block someone online can seldom be replicated offline, which makes it all the more intoxicating a power to wield when possible: we can’t do anything about the awful coworker who rants at us in the breakroom, but by God, we can block every person who reminds us of them on Twitter.

The thing about participating in internet discourse is, it’s like playing Civilisation in real-time, only it’s not a game and the world keeps progressing even when you log off. Things change so fast on the internet – memes, etiquette, slang, dominant opinions – and yet the changes spread so organically and so fast that we frequently adapt without keeping conscious track of when and why they shifted. Social media is like the Hotel California: we can check out any time we like, but we can never meaningfully leave – not when world leaders are still threatening nuclear war on Twitter, or when Facebook is using friendly memes to test facial recognition software, or when corporate accounts are creating multi-staffed humansonas to engage with artists on tumblr, or when YouTube algorithms are accidentally-on-purpose steering kids towards white nationalist propaganda because it makes them more money.

Of course we try and curate our time online into something finite, comprehensible, familiar, safe: the alternative is to embrace the near-infinite, incomprehensible, alien, dangerous gallimaufry of our fractured global mindscape. Of course we want to try and be critical, rational, moral in our convictions and choices; it’s just that we’re also tired and scared and everyone who wants to argue with us about anything can, even if they’re wrong and angry and also our relative, or else a complete stranger, and sometimes you just want to turn off your brain and enjoy a thing without thinking about it, or give yourself some respite, or exercise a tiny bit of autonomy in the only way you can.

It’s human nature to want to be the most amount of right for the least amount of effort, but unthinkingly taking our moral cues from internet culture the same way we’re accustomed to doing in offline contexts doesn’t work: digital culture shifts too fast and too asymmetrically to be relied on moment to moment as anything like a universal touchstone. Either you end up preaching to the choir, or you run a high risk of aggravation, not necessarily due to any fundamental ideological divide, but because your interlocutor is leaning on a different, false-universal jargon overlying alternate 101 and 201 concepts to the ones you’re using, and modern social media platforms – in what is perhaps the greatest irony of all – are uniquely poorly suited to coherent debate.

Purity wars in fandom, arguments about diversity in narrative and whether its proponents have crossed the line from criticism into bullying: these types of arguments are cyclical now, dying out and rekindling with each new wave of discourse. We might not yet be in a position to stop it, but I have some hope that being aware of it can mitigate the worst of the damage, if only because I’m loathe to watch yet another fandom steadily talk itself into hating its own core media for the sake of literal argument.

For all its flaws – and with all its potential – the internet is here to stay. Here’s hoping we figure out how to fix it before its ugliest aspects make us give up on ourselves.

          from shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows https://ift.tt/2V13Qu4 via IFTTT

[freedom-of-fanfic]

I loved your post about antishipping being the cool new trend for young/college age teens! Pretty much nailed my own opinion of it (and then I blew through your whole blog in like two hours lol I love how you discuss things! You're always so calm and polite which is something I appreciate a lot!). I'd value your input on how we might be able to put a stop to a lot of anti behavior if you have any c:

I’m very glad you’ve enjoyed my blog!

Unfortunately, there’s no way to stop anti behavior. The joke is: we’re allowed to ship and they’re allowed to hate ships; we’re allowed to write dark fanfiction and they’re allowed to loathe it. Until somebody is doing something illegal we can’t actually stop them.

However, we can limit anti influence on fandom spaces. And I don’t think it’s easy, or I wouldn’t have a blog like this.

The primary public goal of anti-shippers and anti-darkfic communities are to obliterate ‘bad’ ships and dark content in fandom spaces.  All public action taken with the intent of having their views communicated to shippers/creators of dark content are aimed to either drive them out of fandom or make them see the light of their evil ways. Their social power mainly comes from generating negative emotions in fandom, and I think there are 3 primary forces:

Fear: anti-shippers have proven that they are willing to go to great lengths to force fandom members to bend to their standards, including tag invasion, public shaming, dogpiling, callouts (true or false or a combination thereof), misgendering/erasing orientations, general and targeted online harassment including suicide baiting and wishing for physical harm, verbal harassment, verbal intimidation, reporting falsified TOS violations, and in extreme cases doxxing, false reports to authorities, destruction of property, threats of violence, and actual assault. Understandably this makes potential targets want to avoid notice so that they’re not ‘next’, reducing creative output.

Anger: nothing gets people talking about you like anger. People like to complain, and that spreads reports of anti-shipping attacks further (which spreads fear). Shippers increasingly dwell on their anger and frustration over antishippers, taking focus away from creating fanworks.

Exhaustion: being afraid and angry all the time will take a lot out of a person.  Self-doubt makes it even worse. Antis keep the pressure on with a constant stream of negativity and double down by questioning the motives, moral integrity, and social awareness of bad shippers and dark content creators.  Exhaustion cuts creative output just as effectively, if not more so, than fear and anger. People will create out of spite with the first two emotions, but exhaustion makes people want to leave and find something less tiring to enjoy.

So I think the best way to cut the power and influence that antis have is by shutting them and their rhetoric out of fandom spaces.  this looks like:

Block antis. Block all antis. block virulent negativity. Block even antis that hate the same ships you hate. Keep yourself away from the nastiness and also protect yourself from their notice (if you block them they can’t see or reblog your posts as easily).

Avoid black and white ‘discourse’. Don’t dwell on social debates about purity and the moral implications of your ships or fictional content. Be selective about the meta you indulge. Remember that nuance exists. Don’t publicly argue with people who refuse to see nuance, spreading their nonsense further.

Don’t fight fire with fire. Don’t borrow anti arguments to prove what hypocrites they are or use anti logic to explain why ships are bad (e.g. ‘antis say that x/y is bad b/c x is older than y and they call that pedophilia.  but antis ship y/z, even though they fight all the time; that’s abuse!’)

Ignore hate messages. If people send you hate for your ships or creations, ignore and delete them. it makes you a boring target if you don’t react and cuts the hate significantly. (This won’t work unless the main goal is getting a rise out of you. In the case of a targeted hate campaign, the goal is usually pleasing the instigator of the hate campaign, and reacting or not reacting won’t make a difference. :( )

Surround yourself with creative content and positivity. Curate your dash and social media circles to be mostly, if not entirely, fandom positivity focused and about creating new content instead of complaining about bad content or bad fandom behavior.

Spread positivity. If you have the energy, try to share the things that make you happy. Recommend fanfics, comment on fanart, talk about your favorite headcanons.

If you’re like me and you can’t entirely ignore shitty things that happen in fandom, create a separate space away from your main fandom space to indulge your salt. that way you can walk away and take breaks. (I tend to find salt begets more salt.)

last thing may not work for everyone: be kind and/or civil when interacting with antis. There’s of course no obligation to be nice to people who antagonize you, but I find that in general being kind in response to people being jerks gives them room to relax, stop being defensive, and talk openly. Most individual antis aren’t that different from shippers; they just have different ideas of what a safe, comfortable fandom space looks like. (And if they refuse to stop being a jerk, ignore/block them.)

that’s my two cents, which, as usual, looks more like 2 dollars. I hope it’s helpful.

[thethoughtnetwork]

Three Weeks into Lockdown

Three weeks into lockdown: Reflections, Progress, Futures

Being on lockdown is an incredibly difficult concept. I find that as an artist, lockdown is incredibly bittersweet. One moment I thrive being in my own ecosystem, I can access deep thoughts that sometimes feel too difficult to reach, I feel like I’m in my own playground of materials which are at my disposal. There’s no reason to stop. Like other artists, I come alive when re-shaping, re-hashing, re-thinking. I love that I’ve had to challenge myself to another mode of working; I have learnt so much more about the way that I practice. There’s something so liberating as an artist, knowing that you can adapt and move forward.

But within that same breath of liberation, comes a heavy wave of passion need to say something, loudly, about how upset I am about this situation. This upset is not at my own circumstance, but one of local, global weight. It’s hard to nurture an outrage that is based on decisions in the past when loss of life is happening today – more so when the Government has removed itself from the picture and has shifted responsibility entirely onto the public, responding to concerns by robotically repeating the mantra: “stay home, protect the NHS, save lives”. So as lives are extinguished in their hundreds every day, we become bruised with questions, deep mourning for those we never get to meet, and trying to find yourself somewhere between here, there, not here, out there, in here.

We no longer have the ability to be open and curious about our senses in our outside world. We are fearful of asserting our presence on the outside, and receiving anyone else’s presence or anything else’s presence. Humans also progress with that connectivity, especially artists. We have conversations, analyse body language, go away, come together, eat together, sit in silence, create energy and distribute it into (material) things and each other. With that being taken away, you’re relying on your own being and becoming to multiply your voice, thoughts and feelings. I have always found in my work that I embody this tension between machine and matter, I exist digitally and physically simultaneously in my work, but now I am my own critic, friend, family, artist, I fear at times I am spreading myself so thinly I am just about holding together. Whatever ‘together’ is?

There’s kind of so much more I have to say about the horrible sickness of being in this situation. I constantly feel deflated by our country, the way our society can be so inconsiderate, ignorant, deceptive. I feel such a division from this chaos, I don’t even feel part of it sometimes. My mind constantly drifts to the borders, the borders of our country, our systems – I think I’m searching for an exit point, like we all are. A few years ago, I had to force myself to stop caring about everything – I felt such a huge weight, responsibility, passion for those who were suffering. When Brexit happened I barely thought about my own future, I was thinking about those across borders or trying to cross borders. When the virus happened, I was thinking about those below the poverty line, the domestic abuse victims, the homeless, the disabled. All those feelings of ‘oh shit – but who will think of them now’? came back to me. A constant emotional shiver that paralyses your thought process from deviating to something more productive. I sometimes think that if we had a more compassionate Government, someone who should care for the many, I wouldn’t have these momentary lapses of deep, deep guilt and frustration.

It is interesting that we operate in these ways. Is it an artist ‘thing’? That feeling of empathy for a subject, a thing, a person, a group of people, a feeling? A need to respond to that gut feeling. As I write this text, I smile at the constant shifting between content and distraught feelings within this text, based on the last three weeks. I really cannot stress the highs and lows of this situation – only the people going through it will understand. Although we have this total breakdown in structure, networks, routines, we also have gained so much more than we had before. Although I will stress, nothing can make up for the loss of lives we have experienced globally.

Another artist ‘thing’ is that we listen to our environment and constantly respond to it. Sight, touch, smell, sound, energy, thought – what incredible utensils. It gives us a reason to emerge out of our complex haze of unknowing and knowing. Whilst as a collective, we are constantly flooding with disrespect, hate, violence and ignorance, nature is rebuilding. All that is silent, the forces in between our narratives are growing, we are emerging a new system of previously uncharted strength. We have had to ground ourselves to the present and stare out of our tiny windows to the one thing we should have never hurt, the thing that forces us to survive. I think as humans, this is the one opportunity we will receive to connect and acknowledge our losses, weaknesses and move forward with the right values.

We are kind of manifesting and developing co-personalities as our world has `broken down we have had time (or are having time) to disjoint. I can’t help but feel that we are in a tunnel, and once we are through it, we are human beings with a new-found agency, ability and responsibility to never go back. Artists are constantly in a state of open-exchange, so this process of exchange that has been somewhat distorted, has been strange. I find it incredibly ironic that I have dedicated a lot of my research to networks that function without human intervention, and now that has become more apparent than ever. I previously made the connection that there is no hierarchy between humans and non-humans, but now I think it needs underlining.

For me, practice is in headspace. This process has truly taught me that I do not need physical territory to practice, it kind of exists all around me – like a body zorb. Before my University went into lockdown, I did something that can only be compared to Dale Winton’s Supermarket Sweep. I loaned all of the books I felt deep in my gut that I needed to access, knowing that they would be my other voices. That impulsive moment has served me well in the last three weeks. I will now go onto talking through my practice, and the research that has guided my transition from being in a state of comfortability to ‘what is happening (with everything)’?  Thank you for getting this far – my confusion, rage, sadness, and whatever else is here for you to connect to or just listen to.

Having inhabited a space that wasn’t my space to keep forever, feeling for material formations that weren’t mine to touch (belonging to the material world), I have now had those abilities revoked since moving out of the Yard. I am now bound by my own square space, existing among digital bacteria and other sonic dust. The world has kind of enforced this re-shuffle of physical and mental existence. I can’t help but acknowledge one of the books which has guided me through this state of uncertainty: Practice of Place by Emma Smith. This text outlines a displacement of ‘stable entities and presences’ to the ‘activation impermanent spatialities in a continuous process of becoming’.  This narrative feels increasingly prominent as we kind of shift from nothing to something – mediating in a state of presence and absence. Attempting to exercise The Thought Network and finding a visual form for it has been challenging, but that is because I am not flicking an on button to activate it and make it ‘work’. This question of place, space and presence has reminded me that the structure of a thought network is not just created/activated by me alone. It’s interesting how it took isolation to realise this fundamental truth. Non-conscious thought, external forces, material force are all variables in a virtual democracy. Do any of them have this place, or space? Is this process about giving them that space to flood to?

The process of turning mind to matter is simple: 1. Think about a shape 2. Make the shape. However, with the changing circumstantial tides, we are re-shaping the matter once more. Are we in the act of creating a new material condition? I began reading ‘Curating Immateriality’ (DATA Browser 03) which challenged materiality ‘is’ by subjecting it to mental abstraction. It was soon on my radar that The Thought Network could be in a state of de-materialisation, a process the matter becoming post-object. This would suggest a new independent, open-exchange between the conceptual and material dimensions of the work.  

Previously, my work relied heavily on the experience of releasing thoughts, engaging with multiple forces beyond the human condition and the ability to affect and be affected. How do you facilitate those same connections, but online? I’m not sure you can without acknowledging that everything has changed, everything is constantly changing. Our population, our potential, our becoming. I still feel that I am in a deep dwelling of the immaterial condition.

The Internet: A host of production and consumption. I have shifted my thoughts onto the internet, in a somewhat, live unfolding of my headspace. Like the diagram, it feels like when you’re in it you kind of shift in states of actual and virtual. I am raised with more questions, narrow paths down cybernetic imagination, models of language replacing models of matter – it feels like I am in one giant, flowing, modulated, open, closed, collaborative diagram with the world, the internet and myself. I’m not sure if I lose agency over my own thoughts, does the internet own it? Freeze it? Lose it? Do my thoughts exist inside of the internet? Outside of it? around, among, in between? I’m fascinated with spaces – where is my territory? Where can I act? Is it far away from here? I would like to point out that in one of my most recent texts I speculated about the diagram’s state:

Deleuze argues that the diagram is transformed from the realms of physical experience and continues existing above, in an ‘energetic dimension’ (1988, p.121). It could be argued that the diagram reaches both a state of morphology and morphogenesis. Morphology is the study of forms and arrangements and the latter arguing for the agency to act in a phenomenological sense. Therefore, it became clear that the diagram articulated both internal and external space that blurred the line between ‘here’ and ‘there’.

Like the diagram, the internet also exists in oxymoronic tones. Rosalind Krauss said that the ‘“the net” cannot be called a medium – only a ‘meta-medium’ as all of the machines create an “ensemble”’. In this way, this collaborative way of practicing remains – even being within isolation.

So, here we all are – taking great leaps in our personal and artistic lives. A few years ago, I bought a book called ‘The Internet Does Not Exist’ and it suggested that if the internet disappeared, we would have no evidence to say it ever existed in the first place. This trustless experience of virtually being and becoming online is very interesting. It’s incredibly challenging being in this situation of floating between being in a site and non-site, I must continue to remind myself that I do not have to understand the internet fully in order to exist on/in/around it. We can liken the internet to a cloud of unknowing, but at the same time it feels like we are in our own cloud of unknowing – so I guess we have that in common.

[antialiasis]

The War of the Worlds

So after seeing that live War of the Worlds concert the other day, I started getting curious about the book. I was interested in exactly how faithful of an adaptation the album was, plus just feeling a little uncultured for considering myself a fan of this classic story without being more than very vaguely familiar with the actual book. So I decided to do something about that.

I started by just going on Wikipedia (hence that H. G. Wells quote I posted the other day) and reading the plot summary to get the basic gist of how it might be different. The plot summary featured passages like “Now in a deserted and silent London, he begins to slowly go mad from his accumulated trauma, finally attempting to end it all” and “The narrator continues on, finally suffering a brief but complete nervous breakdown, which affects him for days”, which made me think that aaactually maybe I should just read it, particularly after feeling a great kinship with the author after reading that quote that I posted. And luckily, it’s in the public domain and freely available online.

Overall, I enjoyed it a lot, actually more than I expected. The War of the Worlds came out in 1897, and like a lot of people, I can’t help but feel sort of instinctively prejudiced against books written that long ago - I expect something kind of stuffy and unrelatable, rooted in the values and concerns of a bygone, alien era. The War of the Worlds, somewhat ironically, is not alien in that way at all. Human society may have changed over the course of the past 120 years (120 years!), but the basic emotions and instincts of human beings are the same as always, and The War of the Worlds is an intensely human novel - more than the activities of the Martians per se, it’s about human reactions to the invasion, the narrator’s harrowing emotional journey through his encounters with the Martians, how the people he meets cope with the horrors that are happening, the dawning realization that humanity is powerless to stop this alien apocalypse.

In other words, it’s also my kind of novel, and it’s delightful to me to see just how similar this is to the sorts of things modern authors write about analogous situations - the sorts of things I might write. There’s even a bit that presses my buttons pretty hard: The narrator is holed up with a curate (the book equivalent of Parson Nathaniel) who is slowly losing his mind and has started shouting and raving in a way that’s set to alert the Martians outside to their presence. After trying desperately in vain to get him to be quiet, the narrator, “fierce with fear”, grabs for a meat cleaver on the wall and leaps after the curate, then, “with a last touch of humanity”, turns it around to strike him unconscious with the butt of it instead. A man desperate to survive after weeks of unending horrors is driven almost to horrific murder with pure, animalistic terror, but can’t actually do it? Yes, please. This is totally what I would write into a story about a Martian invasion, and 120 years ago H. G. Wells wrote the same thing, because humans and the fascination with the outer edges of human psychology in extreme, horrifying situations transcends time and culture.

That being said, it is of course obvious in the framing of the novel that it’s set and written in the 1890s, and that’s pretty fascinating too. I noticed particularly how much communication has changed - in the novel the Martians have murdered a party of scientists and set a large area on fire days before the news starts to spread that okay, there are Martians and they’re hostile and this is kind of a big deal. A man sends a telegram to London about it, but is dead before they telegram him back to confirm, and when they get no response, they shrug and figure it’s a hoax. It seems incredible to read about people going about their lives normally the day after an alien mass murder, simply because they’ve only heard vague third-hand stories if that and none of it seems terribly real. It’s unthinkable in the modern world to imagine information spreading at such a slow, human pace - it really makes you appreciate how much the world has changed in that respect.

In other places, the novel is simply scientifically dated, in delightfully quaint ways. Everything about Mars in it is of course wild speculation from long before we’d gone to space or knew much of anything about Mars: Wells posits that its red color is the color of its native vegetation, for instance. The Martians themselves have evolved to sustain themselves simply by injecting the blood of other creatures into their own veins, and this completely removes their need for a digestive system, allowing them to consist almost entirely of brain. And the narrator asserts that this (along with their asexual reproduction) is what causes the Martians to experience no emotions - because human emotions come from the digestive and sexual organs, and would simply disappear if we were to evolve to discard those organs! The way it’s described sounds very logical, and it must have seemed totally reasonable at the time, but it’s pretty amusing for a modern reader.

That speculative aspect is often really interesting, though, and it was fun to see how much more of that background the novel has than Jeff Wayne’s adaptation (understandably). I was not at all expecting an explanation for why the Martians would decide to feed on humans specifically rather than other animals, but that’s in there: the Martians brought in their cylinders the corpses of a couple of Martian animals which coincidentally happen to be bipedal and fairly similar to humans in size, and it is subsequently deduced that these must be their primary native food source. They simply regarded humans as the most edible-looking creatures on Earth, the same way we’d probably feel most comfortable eating a bulky, quadrupedal alien resembling cows or sheep than one whose basic form looks more like a human or an insect. It takes a standard weird trope that your average person would just shrug and accept and explains it to make perfect sense - beautiful.

In the musical version there is a moment where the narrator mentions the Martians have long since eliminated bacteria from their planet, obviously in order to set up the ending; I’d often heard the ending referred to as one of the most infamous examples of a deus ex machina, so I wondered if the novel had had no such setup at all, but it actually sets it up even more extensively, in two separate chapters (once when discussing the biology of the Martians in detail, from which the line in the musical is taken, and also in a different chapter where the narrator explains that the Martian red weed would eventually be killed off by microbes).

(Really, the ending is fucking awesome and I will fight you on this. The whole point of the novel is how for all of humanity’s arrogance and what they consider awesome weaponry, they can barely touch these superpowered invaders, but the Martians’ own arrogance and reliance on their superior technology is their downfall in the end - they’ve rendered their own bodies frail and defenseless against these invisible threats that they simply forgot existed and never accounted for (or never knew; the novel also suggests maybe bacteria never even evolved on Mars), which we humans are protected from because of our evolutionary history of struggling with disease and developing defenses against it. It is not an authorial asspull to save the day on any level at all; it’s carefully foreshadowed and exactly thematically appropriate and makes perfect sense within the established premises of the novel and is generally one of the best endings of anything ever. Putting it in the same category as lazy “but then a contrived coincidence/power pulled out of nowhere/conveniently arriving character fixed everything” resolutions is pretty ridiculous.)

Of course, since at the outset I had wanted to examine how Jeff Wayne’s musical version had adapted the novel, I was also looking out for that. The adaptation is all in all quite faithful to the basic story; the actual core storyline of the Martian invasion is pretty much identical aside from being compacted, with most of the narrator’s lines closesly adapted from the novel as direct or near-direct quotes (where changed, they’re usually cutting out detail or slightly simplifying the language).

There are mainly two major changes. In the novel, the narrator never goes to London himself until the end; instead, there are a couple of chapters from the point of view of the narrator’s younger brother, a medical student in London (still written in the narrator’s voice, though, since in-universe he’s writing this account after the fact, relaying what his brother described to him). The brother is there for the panic when (several days into the invasion) the government calls for an evacuation of London, and then eventually gets on a steamer out of the country, from which he witnesses the HMS Thunder Child’s valiant last stand. These chapters feel a little out of place, and the introduction of several new characters to tell this part of the story who then simply disappear is fairly extraneous and doesn’t get the reader terribly invested, so it’s definitely a solid and sensible choice in the adaptation to simply remove the brother and have the narrator be in London and witness the Thunder Child chapter himself. Since he’s obviously not going to be on the boat getting out of England himself, though, to get the listener invested in the fate of the steamer, Jeff Wayne instead puts the narrator’s girlfriend/fiancée Carrie and her father on the boat - with them also providing his reason to go to London to begin with. In the novel, the narrator is married and lives with his wife near where the first Martian cylinder lands; after they turn out to be hostile and dangerous, he leases a horse-carriage to take his wife to safety in the town of Leatherhead and then comes back alone to return the carriage, which is how they get separated. He then spends the rest of the novel worrying for her safety and wanting to get to Leatherhead to find her again. This setup is a bit complex, and all in all I think the musical version made a good call in simplifying it to one that’s easily comprehensible with much less dialogue; it does create an interesting difference in the narrator’s situation during the second act, though, as in the musical version he knows that Carrie made it to safety, while in the novel he believes his wife to possibly if not probably be dead until they both meet again in the epilogue.

The other major change is in the narrator’s dealings with the curate/Parson Nathaniel. In the novel, the narrator meets the curate, a young man, shortly after escaping from the fighting machines and being separated from the artilleryman, and they spend weeks together, first traveling and then trapped in an abandoned house after a cylinder lands on top of it. The curate is cowardly, indecisive and grows increasingly agitated and incoherent, and he is in a constant conflict with the narrator for most of this time. His character is frustrating, pitiful but starts to border on despicable, a man reduced to a gibbering, animalistic mess selfishly hogging food and recklessly endangering the narrator and himself with inane ramblings.

Parson Nathaniel in the musical adaptation, however, is a more genuinely pitiable figure. The narrator only comes across him shortly before the cylinder lands on the house they take shelter in; he sounds much older than in the book, and he has a wife, Beth, who he deliriously believes to be one of the devils here to claim the earth for Satan. His religious philosophy, while deranged, feels much more coherent than that of the curate in the book, and ultimately he comes across as much more of a sympathetic and tragic figure. That’s likely the root of why this change was made - the curate in the book is desperately unlikeable, which mostly fuels the narrator’s conflict with himself and the long, grueling setup culminating in that desperate moment of nearly killing him. Obviously I’m a fan of that part, but it would’ve been very hard to do that setup in a way that would actually work in the musical version, and making the parson’s desperation and misguided faith into the focus for that part instead makes a lot of sense. It helps that “The Spirit of Man” is one of the best songs on the album.

(Interestingly, the outtakes on the Collectors’ Edition include some voice outtakes with a much younger-sounding parson who is much closer to the curate’s character in the book and seems to match his role much more closely, with more direct or near-direct quotes from the book. The change to the parson’s character must have happened fairly late in the development of the album, then - after they started recording vocal work. I’m pretty interested in the story here and how they developed the final version of “The Spirit of Man”.)

The addition of his wife Beth is a less obvious choice, and even before I read the book it felt a little weird how unceremoniously she was disposed of in the musical version. Part of me thinks she may have been added in part just to get one female voice on this album - the book contains basically no real female characters with significant speaking parts whatsoever. That lack isn’t too glaring in the book - there are very few characters with significant speaking roles to begin with - but it’s still reasonable to want to patch it up a little in a more modern adaptation. But her role is also as an optimistic, hopeful contrast to the parson’s apocalyptic ravings, which the narrator probably couldn’t have provided in the same way after everything he’s seen. And the parson’s relationship with her develops him a bit more and adds to his tragic nature - she’s his wife, so they must have loved each other once upon a time, but this alien apocalypse has driven him to believe she’s in league with the Satan himself, and even when she dies he only channels his anguish into his nonsensical convictions. Beth is the only character who remains steadfastly hopeful and urges sanity and reason - in the book, the narrator remarks that seeing the curate’s descent into madness tightened his grip on his own sanity, but perhaps Beth’s genuine hope serves the same purpose for him in the musical version.

(It also occurs to me that theoretically Beth’s optimism could be viewed as setup for “Brave New World” - if one man could stand tall, she sings, there must be some hope for us all, and later, the narrator comes across what initially seems to be just such a man, with a plan for saving humanity and keeping its spirit alive. But I’m not sure I buy that as a reason for her presence - both because it seems a bit backwards given the artilleryman turns out to not actually represent the true hope of humanity and because otherwise these two songs feel very separate and not like they’re supposed to be connected at all.)

I found it interesting that in the book, the way the artilleryman frames his plan is a lot more explicitly eugenicist in nature - he talks a lot more about getting the right sorts of men and women into their underground city and keeping the riffraff out (“We can’t have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It’s a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race.”), compared to “Brave New World”’s vague, innocent-sounding “With just a handful of men…” Interestingly, the Icelandic translation of the musical version felt closer to the book in this respect, because there that line was translated as “With just a few chosen men” - definitely getting the feeling the translator had read the book. I suspect this was very intentionally toned down for the musical version because the narrator initially pretty much buys into the plan, which would be a bit jarring with the full implications of the original.

The artilleryman’s character in the book also generally comes across as more of a… well, the sort of nerd who today might fantasize about the zombie apocalypse. He focuses a lot more on how the Martians will keep humans as pets and how most humans will eventually just accept their Martian overlords, relishing the minutiae of how grim things will be and the depths to which humanity will sink and how they must resist descending into savagery, while Jeff Wayne’s version is far more focused on his grandiosely optimistic ideas about what the underground city will be like - banks and prisons and schools! We can get everything working! He sounds enthusiastic at the idea of this underground living, whereas his book counterpart appears to suggest it strictly as a means of survival.

I don’t have much of a big conclusion here; Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of the War of the Worlds is a good adaptation, its changes are solid, and overall it puts the novel fairly faithfully into an accessible dramatic format, but I still really appreciate the book’s somewhat more complex and nuanced, if also somewhat more cynical, takes. Overall, I think The War of the Worlds is a really good story, and I’m amazed that here I am enjoying its explorations of human nature 120 years on. And if you want to enjoy it in a more accessible form than a 120-year-old novel, go give the musical version a listen, because it is great.

[houseofvans]

Sketchy Behaviors | Jenny Sharaf (SF)

Never afraid to reinvent herself or her art, San Francisco based artist Jenny Sharaf’s works are fluid and spontaneous; her approach fearless and at times vunerable; and her style cool and comfortably bad-ass.  We’ve not only been fans of her visual and abstract creations, but also her passion to work with her community in SF and Oakland to spread art and creativity – from her work with the Lab’s 24-Hour Telethon, The Parking Lot Art Fair to her most recent project- the Public Art Tour.  Sharaf shares some insight into her work and process; important issues and themes; and her thoughts on the contemporary arts scene in this installment of Sketchy Behaviors.  

Photographs courtesy of the artist

Tell us a bit about yourself and your art background.  

My name is Jenny Sharaf and I live with my partner-in-all-things John in San Francisco where we are the parents of an 80lb blue nose pitbull named Lola. Though i live in San Francisco, my wanderlust is at an all time high and if I’m not traveling the world, I’m plotting my next escape.

I grew up in a relatively small beach town in Los Angeles called the Pacific Palisades. Surrounded by salt-licked-waves and girls tanning on smooth beaches, my favorite place growing up was the bluffs; where I could sit above it all and watch it from a distance. I certainly was not your typical California beach babe, but I was wildly inspired by its appeal.

I found myself in San Francisco and went back to school at Mills College to receive my MFA. At Mills my ideas about feminism and California culture collided and my art was heavily influenced because of it.

My life now is a state of constantly making art. Whether it be painting, working on something digital or organizing big public art events in the city, or climbing some construction scaffolding in Paris to smack one of my stickers on the side of a building, I am always finding news ways to reinvent myself and my art.

How did you end up creating art and doing it professionally? And what have you learned along the way?

I’m just doing what I love doing and sometimes people agree to pay me for it. I create new work and new concepts non stop, I contact people that inspire me in hopes of collaborating. Even though I’m afraid at times to be vulnerable, I put myself out there every single day in hopes of new people discovering my art and hopefully falling in love with it. Being an artist can feel very scary, I think maybe I love being scared.

You’ve mentioned “process” as an important aspect of your work.  Could you take us through your creative process?

When I’m in the studio or working on a project on site, I always love that intense moment of chance and not having a plan. It takes a serious level of trust in yourself and the materials.  Those are the wonderful times that feel one-the-line and frightening, but are always rewarding.  In those painting meditative moments, I have no sense of time and space. My best work and most dynamic ideas come out of a period of making and thinking simultaneously.

What important issues and themes do you find yourself and your work drawn too?  Why are these important to you and how do they permeate into your works?

Artists are vitally important to our culture, our story and our future. They represent our freedom of speech and expression. The contemporary moment that we are living in feels very historical. Artists are more necessary now than ever and we all should critique the world around us through whatever means possible.  As I’m finishing this interview, I’m watching Trump’s first week in office. It doesn’t feel real, but it very much is. This is a call to duty. This is the first president that rose to power on twitter and a tv game show. Currently it’s scary times. I suggest everyone find a great apocalypse outfit.

The colors and abstract drips of your work are some of our favorite things.  You recently created a beautiful interior for last year’s Fog Fair and a mural for the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs.  How did this come about and how do you approach the design of interiors and exteriors?

Both of these opportunities came through curators & designers following me on instagram. Charles de Lisle and Cultured Magazine invited me to collaborate with them on a “reading room” for the FOG art fair. It was a lot of fun and it was a moment to make something large, inclusive and accessible to an art crowd. For Ace Hotel, their art director at the time; Matt Clark, approached me after seeing an instagram post by artist, Thomas Campbell. The art world is sometimes a really nice place after all! It’s also really wonderful when one project leads to the next.

Whether you’re calling it “placemaking" or whatever new buzz word we’re using, it’s rewarding to create a work of art that people want to include in their own story. I will always love painting on canvas, but it feels much more exciting to do “murals” or large-scale installations, where the audience can insert themselves and interact with the art directly. It’s less egocentric, even though I do always appreciate a @tag :), but mainly just so I can see others enjoying my work!

From painting, murals, videos, installations to paint on paper and digital works, do you have a preferred medium and if so what do you specifically enjoy about it?  Is there a medium you’ve have yet to tried and are dying to?

I’m always dying to try new things, new ideas, new materials. I probably have about thirty ideas going in my head at any given moment.  As as a preferred medium, I love paint and always have. It’s the most temperamental and if you do the dance, it will talk back in this amazing way. It’s literally fluid (duh), so you have to be a bit go-with-the-flow to fully embrace the stuff. There’s nothing better than a painting session with your headphones blasting and paint just flowing oh-so-naturál. There are a million things I want to try that I haven’t yet.  It’s hard to predict where it will go….That’s part of the reason I love being an artist.

What has been some of the best art advice you’ve gotten and some of the worse?

Best art advice– Dream bigger. Don’t be shy. Don’t glass-ceiling-yourself.

Worse art advice–  Be practical and realistic.

Not only are you a passionate artist, but you’re really activity in your community with various projects that are focused on community engagement and about promoting the arts.  Can you talk specifically about how you founded The Lab’s 24-Hour Telethon and tell us about it and its purpose.  What other community based activities are you working on or currently developing?

Throwing big art events in the Bay Area is really important work to me it helps keep the art scene alive for the community and for myself.  I was approached to come up with the task to raise money for the The Lab. I grew up on TV and I’ve always been particularly enamored by it because my parents were in the business. They were TV journalists and were always deep diving into the life of some interesting personality. I loved the idea of bringing that to life in a new form and so the The Lab’s 24-Hour Telethon was born. It helped majorly that Cinefamily had been doing a super awesome telethon as well. It was in the zeitgeist. San Francisco needed a version. It ended up being a big success that I am extremely proud of. Since then, I’ve done projects with San Francisco’s Department of Public Works that involves giving new life to public places by highlighting our local contemporary artists.

Most recently, I’m working on a program called Public Art Tour. It’s going to be an online experience and a series of big public events, bringing attention to local artists and San Francisco’s downtown public art. We are scheduled to do a massive party under the Bay Bridge, closing down the Spear Street’s cul-de-sac and making some legally permitted-noise;) Maybe Vans wants to set up a skate ramp? Call me.

The Parking Lot Art Fair that you founded in the Bay Area sounds like a super fun and exciting get-together.  How would you describe this event to folks?  What has been the best aspect of this for you?  

It was a blast. Basically, The Parking Lot Art Fair was a renegade art fair outside of a “legit” art fair at Fort Mason (in San Francisco).  All the artists set up very very early morning, as soon as the parking was free and permitted. At that point, the chaos began. The best part was being able to see the Bay Area art scene spread out in oceanside parking lot and realizing how much talent and weirdness this place still has left. San Francisco and Oakland have had many growing pains in the last few years and because of it the art scene has also foregone many changes. In terms of housing costs (studio space, etc) a big portion of our community has had to leave. So to be able to celebrate a more fringe art scene feels insanely gratifying.

How would you describe your personal style? Favorite Vans?

My personal style is all over the place. I like to be comfortable. When I’m not in my painting white or navy onesies and painted Vans (raw canvas pair I’ve probably had for 10 years), I love to play with fashion and try on different looks. Right now my look is very Gloria Steinem plus a sixties-Italian-cyclist inspired; ripped black jeans, my boyfriend’s cashmere sweater and a fringe black suede jacket. I always wear sunglasses - my look never feels complete without them.

My favorite vans are the classic black and white checkered low tops. They always look effortless. OR the high top surfer-girl-chic sneaks.

Name 5 of your favorite artists, followed by some of your top 5 favorite bands / musicians to create too.

Artists: Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, John Baldessari, Joan Brown, Alicia McCarthy

Music: Paul Simon, alt-J, Jungle, Ace of Base,Haim

What are your thoughts on the state of contemporary art?  The good, the bad, and the ugly.

The good - the art world is accessible than ever because of social media and the internet.  You can basically get anyone to see you work these days, which is a big change from ten years ago.  

The bad - there’s still a lot of old white guys that seem undeserving of shows, but they know people and they already have money to create massive bigger-the-better machismo art.

The ugly - the art world is huge, and can be incredibly hard to navigate and can be mean. We should all work harder to be nice to each other, especially about something as special as art.

You’ve worked with various clients and done many collaborations.  What have been some of the most rewarding projects? What do you like best about collaborations and what are some of the aspect you’d like to see changed or evolved if any?

I love collaborating with cool brands. Working with the Ace Hotel is always awesome. Such great people and a company that really gets the creative experience. I just worked with this handbag line Luana Italy. They really let me do whatever I wanted and honored my voice as an artist, which I always greatly appreciated. I think big brands are finally embracing and empowering the artist's’ voice– allowing the space it takes to achieve that.

What would you tell folks who want to follow in your footsteps?  Pitfalls to avoid and/or words of inspiration.

I’d say, don’t follow in anyone’s footsteps. That’s always something to remind yourself.  Make your own path and listen to your own visual / conceptual impulses.There is absolutely no rule book or how-to guide to being an artist. It looks different for everyone.  I by no means have figured it out, but I do try to practice trusting the inner voice and taking risks.

Lastly, what’s up for 2017?  Any exciting projects you can let us in on?

For 2017, I plan on working hard, painting like a madwoman and traveling. I’m doing some fun projects with B&O Play by Bang and Olufsen as a cultural ambassador- public art events, listening parties, contemporary art experiences.  Also, I’m curating a weekend at Ace Hotel and Swim Club Palm Springs on March 18th called “What’s Your Name / Who’s Your Daddy” featuring Sahar Khoury, Alicia McCarthy, Francesco Igory Deiana and Jess Meyer. Also, planning some mural projects overseas, but it’s too early to talk about. Don’t want to jinx it! Follow me on instagram to keep up with it all:)

Website | Instagram | Public Art Tour

[jennierosehalperin-blog1]

Media for Everyone?

User empowerment and community in the age of subscription streaming media

The Netflix app is displayed alongside other streaming media services. (Photo credit: Matthew Keys / Flickr Creative Commons)

In 2002, Tim O’Reilly wrote the essay “Piracy is Progressive Taxation and other thoughts on the evolution of online distribution,” which makes several salient points that remain relevant as unlimited, native, streaming media continues to take the place of the containerized media product. In the essay, he predicts the rise of streaming media as well as the intermediary publisher on the Web that serves its purpose as content exploder. In an attempt to advocate for flexible licensing in the age of subscription streaming media, I’d like to begin by discussing two points in particular from that essay: “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy” and “’Free’ is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service.”

As content becomes more fragmented and decontainerized across devices and platforms (the “Internet of Things”), I have faith that expert domain knowledge will prevail in the form of vetted, quality materials, and streaming services provide that curation layer for many users. Subscription services could provide greater visibility to artists by providing unlimited access and new audiences. However, the current licensing regulations surrounding content on streaming subscription services privilege the corporation rather than the creator, further exercising the hegemony of the media market. The first part of this essay will discuss the role of serendipity and discovery in streaming services and how they contribute to user engagement. Next, I will explore how Creative Commons and flexible licensing in the age of unlimited subscription media can return power to the creator by supporting communities of practice around content creation in subscription streaming services.

Tim O’Reilly’s second assertion that “’Free’ is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service” is best understood through the lens of information architecture. In their seminal work Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Morville, Arango, and Rosenfeld write about how most software solutions are designed to solve specific problems, and as they outgrow their shells they become ecosystems, thereby losing clarity and simplicity. While the physical object’s data is constrained within its shell, the digital object provides a new set of metadata based on the user’s usage patterns and interests. Media is spread out among a variety of types, devices, and spaces, platforms cease to define the types of content that people consume, with native apps replacing exportable, translatable solutions like the MP3 or PDF. Paid services utilize the data from these ecosystems and create more meaningful consumption patterns within a diverse media landscape.

What content needs is coherency, that ineffable quality that helps us create taxonomy and meaning across platforms. Streaming services provide a comfortable architecture so users don’t have to rely on the shattered, seemingly limitless, advertising-laden media ecosystem of the Internet. Unlimited streaming services provide the coherency that users seek in content, and their focus should be on discoverability and engagement.

If you try sometimes, you might get what you need: serendipity and discoverability in streaming media

Not all streaming services operate within the same content model, which provides an interesting lens to explore the roles of a variety of products. Delivering the “sweet spot” of content to users is an unfulfillable ideal for most providers, and slogging through a massive catalog of materials can quickly cause information overload.

When most content is licensed and available outside of the service, discoverability and user empowerment should be the primary aim of the streaming media provider.

While Spotify charges $9.99 per month for more music than a person can consume in their entire lifetime, the quality of the music is not often listed as a primary reason why users engage with the product. In fact, most of the music on Spotify I can describe as “not to my taste,” and yet I pay every month for premium access to the entire library. At Safari Books Online, we focused on content quality in addition to scope, with “connection to expert knowledge” and subject matter coherency being a primary reason why subscribers paid premium prices rather than relying on StackOverflow or other free services.

Spotify’s marketing slogan, “Music for everyone” focuses on its content abundance, freemium model, and ease of use rather than its quality. The marketing site does not mention the size of Spotify’s library, but the implications are clear: it’s huge.

These observations beg a few questions:

Would I still pay $9.99 per month for a similar streaming service that only provided music in the genres I enjoy like jazz, minimal techno, or folk by women in the 1970s with long hair and a bone to pick with Jackson Browne?

What would I pay to discover more music in these genres? What about new music created by lesser-known artists?

What is it about Spotify that brought me back to the service after trying Apple Music and Rdio? What would bring me back to Safari if I tried another streaming media service like Lynda or Pluralsight?

How much will users pay for what is, essentially, an inflexible native discoverability platform that exists to allow them access to other materials that are often freely available on the Web in other, more exportable formats?

Serendipity and discoverability were the two driving factors in my decision to stay with Spotify as a streaming music service. Spotify allows for almost infinite taste flexibility and makes discoverability easy through playlists and simple search. In addition, a social feed allows me to follow my friends and discover new music. Spotify bases its experience on my taste preferences and social network, and I can easily skip content that is irrelevant or not to my liking.

To contrast, at Safari, while almost every user lauded the diversity of content, most found the amount of information overwhelming and discoverability problematic. As a counter-example, the O’Reilly Learning Paths product have been immensely popular on Safari, even though the “paths” consist of recycled content from O’Reilly Media repackaged to improve discoverability. While the self-service discovery model worked for many users, for most of our users, guidance through the library in the form of “paths” provides a serendipitous adventure through content that keeps them wanting more.

Music providers like Tidal have experimented with exclusive content, but content wants to be free on the Internet, and streaming services should focus on user need and findability, not exclusivity. Just because a Beyonce single drops first on Tidal, it doesn’t mean I can’t torrent it soon after. In Spotify, the “Discover Weekly” playlists as well as the ease of use of my own user-generated playlists serve the purpose of “exclusive content.” By providing me the correct dose of relevant content through playlists and social connection, Spotify delivers a service that I cannot find anywhere else, and these discoverability features are my primary product incentive. Spotify’s curated playlists, even algorithmically calculated ones, feel home-spun, personal, and unique, which is close to product magic.

There seems to be an exception to this rule in the world of streaming television, where users generally want to be taken directly to the most popular exclusive content. I would argue that the Netflix ecosystem is much smaller than in a streaming business or technical library or music service. This is why Netflix can provide a relatively limited list of rotating movies while focusing on its exclusive content while services like Spotify and Safari consistently grow their libraries to delight their users with the extensive amount of content available.

In fact, most people subscribe to Netflix for its exclusive content, and streaming television providers that lag behind (like Hulu), often provide access to content that is otherwise easily discoverable other places on the Web. Why would I watch Broad City with commercials on Hulu one week after it airs when I can just go to the Free TV Project and watch it an hour later for free? There is no higher quality paid service than free streaming in this case, and until Hulu strikes the balance between payment, advertising, licensed content, and exclusive content, they will continue to lag behind Netflix.

As access to licensed content becomes centralized and ubiquitous among a handful of streaming providers, it should be the role of the streaming service to provide a new paradigm that supports the role of artists in the 21st Century that challenges the dominant power structures within the licensed media market.

Shake it off, Taylor: the dream of Creative Commons and the power of creators

As a constantly evolving set of standards, Creative Commons is one way that streaming services can focus on a discoverability and curation layer that provides the maximum benefit to both users and creators. If we allow subscription media to work with artists rather than industry, we can increase the power of the content creator and loosen stringent, outdated copyright regulations. I recognize that much of this section is a simplification of the complex issue of copyright, but I wish to create a strawman that brings to light what Lawrence Lessig calls “a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.” The unique positioning of streaming, licensed content is no longer an issue that free culture can ignore, and creating communities of practice around licensing could ease some of the friction between artists and subscription services.

When Taylor Swift withheld her album from Apple Music because the company would not pay artists for its temporary three-month trial period, it sent a message to streaming services that withholding pay from artists is not acceptable. I believe that Swift made the correct choice to take a stand against Apple for not paying artists, but I want to throw a wrench into her logic.

Copies of 1989 have probably been freely available on the Internet since before its “official” release. (The New Yorker ran an excellent piece on leaked albums last year.) By not providing her album to Apple Music but also not freely licensing it, Swift chose to operate under the old rules that govern content, where free is the exception, not the norm.

Creative Commons provides the framework and socialization that could provide streaming services relevancy and artists the new audiences they seek. The product that users buy via streaming services is not necessarily music or books (they can buy those anywhere), it is the ability to consume it in a manner that is organized, easy, and coherent across platforms: an increased Information Architecture. The flexible licensing of Creative Commons could at least begin the discussion to cut out the middle man between streaming services, licensing, and artists, allowing these services to act more like Soundcloud, Wattpad, or Bandcamp, which provide audience and voice to lesser-known artists. These services do what streaming services have so far failed to do because of their licensing rules: they create social communities around media based on user voice and community connection.

The outlook for both the traditional publishing and music industries are similarly grim and to ignore the power of the content creator is to lapse into obscurity. While many self-publishing platforms present Creative Commons licensing as a matter of course and pride, subscription streaming services usually present all content as equally, stringently licensed. Spotify’s largest operating costs are licensing costs and most of the revenue in these transactions goes to the licensor, not the artist. To rethink a model that puts trust and power in the creator could provide a new paradigm under which creators and streaming services thrive. This could take shape in a few ways:

Content could be licensed directly from the creator and promoted by the streaming service.

Content could be exported outside of the native app, allowing users to distribute and share content freely according to the wishes of its creator.

Content could be directly uploaded to the streaming service, vetted or edited by the service, and signal boosted according to the editorial vision of the streaming content provider.

When Safari moved from books as exportable PDFs to a native environment, some users threatened to leave the service, viewing the native app as a loss of functionality. This exodus reminds me that while books break free of their containers, the coherence of the ecosystem maintains that users want their content in a variety of contexts, usable in a way that suits them. Proprietary native apps do not provide that kind of flexibility. By relying on native apps as a sole online/offline delivery mechanism, streaming services ultimately disenfranchise users who rely on a variety of IoT devices to consume media. Creative Commons could provide a more ethical licensing layer to rebalance the power differential that streaming services continue to uphold.

The right to read, listen, and watch: streaming, freedom, and pragmatism

Several years ago, I would probably have scoffed at this essay, wondering why I even considered streaming services as a viable alternative to going to the library or searching for content through torrents or music blogs, but I am fundamentally a pragmatist and seek to work on systems that present the most exciting vision for creators. 40 million Americans have a Netflix account and Spotify has over 10 million daily active users. The data they collect from users is crucial to the media industry’s future.

To ignore or deny the rise of streaming subscription services as a content delivery mechanism has already damaged the free culture movement. While working with subscription services feels antithetical to its goals, content has moved closer and closer toward Stallman’s dystopian vision from 1997 and we need to continue to create viable alternatives or else continue to put the power in the hands of the few rather than the many.

Licensed streaming services follow the through line of unlimited content on the Web, and yet most users want even more content, and more targeted content for their specific needs. The archetype of the streaming library is currently consumption, with social sharing as a limited exception. Services like Twitter’s Vine and Google’s YouTube successfully create communities based on creation rather than consumption and yet they are constantly under threat, with large advertisers still taking the lion’s share of profits.

I envision an ecosystem of community-centered content creation services that are consistently in service to their users, and I think that streaming services can take the lead by considering licensing options that benefit artists rather than corporations.

The Internet turns us all into content creators, and rather than expanding ecosystems into exclusivity, it would be heartening to see a streaming app that is based on community discoverability and the “intertwingling” of different kinds of content, including user-generated content. The subscription streaming service can be considered as industry pushback in the age of user-generated content, yet it’s proven to be immensely popular. For this reason, conversations about licensing, user data, and artistic community should be a primary focus within free culture and media.

The final lesson of Tim O’Reilly’s essay is: “There’s more than one way to do it,” and I will echo this sentiment as the crux of my argument. As he writes, “’Give the wookie what he wants!’… Give it to [her] in as many ways as you can find, at a fair price, and let [her] choose which works best for [her].” By amplifying user voice in curation and discoverability as well as providing a more fair, free, and open ecosystem for artists, subscription services will more successfully serve their users and creators in ways that make the artistic landscape more humane, more diverse, and yes, more remixable.

Media for Everyone? was originally published on jennie rose halperin

(Source: jennierosehalperin.me)

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