#unintentional reverse order of chronology

[evilasiangenius]

Word Search

I was tagged by @kirkypet to do a word search in my fics for BREATHE, PAUSE and BOTHER.

Some selections from the current Good Omens series, Mistakes Were Made.

BREATHE (from Mistakes Were Made: The Book of Crowley)

“I would be lying if I said that I never had the same ideas before,” Crowley admitted.  “The things I said to Asmodeus about trying to make you fall...they weren’t all lies.  Besides, I can’t lie to him.  Not very well, at least.  He knows me too well.  I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t believe it on some level.”

“Wait, what do you mean?”

Crowley shrugged, but then remembered that Aziraphale could not have overheard his conversation with the Prince of Hell.  “It would have been a coup, if I could have corrupted you into falling.  They would have made me a Duke of Hell if I could have pulled it off.  I would have had my own division and everything.  Middle management.  And then you’d be right down there with me, but...I couldn’t do it.  You would have hated working for Asmodeus, even more than you hate working for Gabriel.  And...it wouldn’t have been worth it.  I couldn’t live, knowing I damaged you.”

“Oh.”

“So here we are.  Two idiots trying to pull off the impossible.”  Crowley drank down her wine to the lees and nearly tossed them to the ground before remembering that the Persians did not play kottabos.  

“Really, you think it’s impossible?”  Aziraphale breathed, or remembered to breathe more like, realizing how close he had come to danger from Crowley, just as Crowley had come close to danger from him.

“Heard of anyone falling since...well, since the Fall?  And that was eons ago.  Ages before the creation of this world.  Lots of time and worlds since, and you don’t see any new faces Downstairs or hear of anyone demoted so far that they end up on the top rung of Hell.  Well, not you know, being in charge of anything, but the rungs are reversed and-”

“Right, I understand what you mean. You’ve put some thought into this, haven’t you?”

“Sometimes there’s nothing to do but think, and it’s better to think about the big problems of existence than your own specific problems of existence,” Crowley said coolly.  “More wine?”

PAUSE (from Mistakes Were Made: The Symposiums)

“Beautiful youth, why don’t you have a seat?”  

Aziraphale smiled to himself, feeling a thrill of excitement; it was obvious that Crowley didn’t recognize him in disguise.  He wondered how long it would take Crowley to notice, and decided to play along.  “This symposium is full to the brim so I can’t stay too long.  I’m just seeing if a friend is here.”

Crowley took a deep breath through her mouth, running air over her tongue. “Come on, sit with me while you look.  If you don’t see him, perhaps your friend has stepped outside for some fresh air and will be back soon.  Have a rest, relax.  A young man like you has probably been running around all night without a pause, going from party to party.”  Crowley’s mouth moved into the hint of a smile, and Aziraphale shrugged.

“Something like that.  I suppose I could rest my feet.”  He looked around.  “Is anyone watching?”

“Nah,” Crowley.  She gestured for him to sit, patting the supper couch.  “Your reputation is safe with me.  Here, come and relax.  Recline with me, Angel, and have some wine.”

“Oh, thank you,” Aziraphale said with a smile, realizing that Crowley had recognized him despite the disguise.

“’Wine, o dear boy, and Truth,’” Crowley quoted, pressing the deep bell-shaped stryphos to Aziraphale’s hand.  “The truth always comes out in the end, doesn’t it?”

“Certainly.  Thank you Crowley,” Aziraphale said and took a sip, making a face when he realized the wine was neat.  “Did they not mix this yet?  What kind of party is this, that they’re drinking wine unmixed?”  He set the cup back down on the low table.

Crowley took a deep breath, tasting the air with the tip of a forked tongue. “These flowers are nice,” she said.

“Oh thank you, I’m rather fond of the crocuses myself.”

“They’re beautiful, but you know they give you away,” Crowley said.  “Not even the right season for crocuses.  Hasn’t anyone commented on them yet, Angel?”

“No, not really.  I’m surprised myself…?”  Aziraphale paused, noticing that something unusual. The party had grown quiet, very quiet, and it seemed they had slipped into a resonant space where their voices echoed bell-like in the deep stillness, slightly out of phase with the rest of reality.  “Is something wrong? What are you doing?”

“Oh no, nothing’s wrong, darling,” Crowley said with a smirk.  “Nothing at all.”

BOTHER (from Mistakes Were Made: The Epic of Gilgamesh)

“Not safe at all traveling these days.”

“No, not safe at all.” Crawley scowled.  “Hasn't been safe for a long time.  Especially if you're traveling alone.  They can really surprise you sometimes, popping out of cunning hiding places.  Can't always spot them coming.  Did you know that it's much easier looking like what the humans call a man?  Most they do is try to rob you.”

“Oh yes.  I learned that the hard way early on.  I've been carried off more than once in a local war or raid you know.  Dreadful. Nearly got discorporated more than once.  I don't know what they thought I was,” Aziraphale made a face.  “I've found it's better to look and dress like, you know, what you said, what they call a man.  Been doing it for some time now.  That way there's less bother and trouble.”

“Clever.  But it shouldn't have to be that way.  I should be allowed to go about the world as I am without bother and trouble.” Crawley tossed back curling locks that gleamed dark copper in the sunlight.  “You know what's really outrageous?  Once you stand next to a man and look like property yourself, then there's less of a chance of getting carried off like so many camels and goats.”

“That is outrageous!”  Aziraphale exclaimed.  “Everyone should be allowed to walk about as they will without being...property. Wait, is that why you're walking so close to me?”

Tagging @spodumene​ and @thelaithlyworm with TREMBLE, SOFT, and TASTE

[oyasuminto]

Blooming Panic Masterlist

Posts are in chronological order from oldest to newest.

Napping on Toasty Headcanons

BIGLADY and June Relationship Headcanons

BIGLADY, June, NakedToaster, nightowl, onionthief, Quest, societyboy, two2, and xyx + Secret Talents Headcanons

Threesome Dynamic Headcanons

NakedToaster, nightowl, onionthief, Quest, two2, and xyx Learning that MC Broke societyboy’s Nose Headcanons

NakedToaster, nightowl, onionthief, Quest, societyboy, two2, and xyx + Horny, Needy S/O Headcanons

NakedToaster/MC/xyx Poly Headcanons

Quest + Virgin Reader Headcanons

xyx Knifeplay Headcanons

nightowl and xyx Yandere Headcanons

BIGLADY + Pastel Baker Girlfriend Headcanons

xyx Oral Headcanons

NakedToaster, nightowl, Quest, and xyx + S/O Being Flirted with Headcanons

nightowl NSFT Headcanons

BIGLADY, June, NakedToaster, nightowl, onionthief, Quest, societyboy, two2, and xyx + Ideal Date Night Headcanons

nightowl + Easily Flustered S/O Headcanons

NakedToaster, nightowl, Quest, and xyx + Unintentional Turn-Ons Headcanons

BIGLADY, June, NakedToaster, nightowl, onionthief, Quest, societyboy, two2, and xyx + Cooking Headcanons

BIGLADY, June, onionthief, societyboy, and two2 + Pet Name Headcanons

NakedToaster, nightowl, onionthief, Quest, societyboy, two2, and xyx + Body Part Headcanons

NakedToaster and Quest Headcanons

BIGLADY, nightowl, onionthief, societyboy, and xyx + Having Marks Left After Sex Headcanons

NakedToaster Being Cockwarmed While in VC with xyx Headcanons

BIGLADY, June, NakedToaster, nightowl, onionthief, Quest, societyboy, two2, and xyx + S/O Wearing Lingerie Headcanons

xyx Getting Flustered Headcanons

BIGLADY, June, onionthief, societyboy, and two2 + Meeting You In Real Life Headcanons

NakedToaster, nightowl, Quest, and xyx + Parenting Headcanons

NakedToaster and xyx Working Together Headcanons

NakedToaster, nightowl, onionthief, Quest, two2, and xyx + Insecure, Plus-Sized S/O Headcanons

two2 + Kids’ Shows Headcanons

Lawrence Oleander + NakedToaster as Cousins Headcanons

NakedToaster, nightowl, Quest, and xyx + Encouragement Headcanons

NakedToaster Pegging Headcanons

NakedToaster, nightowl, Quest, and xyx + Dom-Drop Headcanons

Fuwafuwa Putting NakedToaster in a Reverse Mating Press Headcanons

NakedToaster + Virgin S/O Headcanons

onionthief Headcanons

xyx NSFW Headcanons

NakedToaster/nightowl Threesome Headcanons

NakedToaster, nightowl, Quest, and xyx + Dominant S/O Headcanons

BIGLADY and June + First VC Headcanons

nightowl, Quest, NakedToaster, onionthief, and xyx + Dick Length Headcanons

NakedToaster, nightowl, Quest, and xyx + Goth Subculture Headcanons

[starryoak]

(MASSIVE PERSONA 5 ROYAL SPOILERS) Theory

I’m certainly not alone with this theory, but I decided, after watching a playthrough of Royal again with my friend, to write down every piece of evidence supporting this theory, because it’s so obviously the case that it can’t have been unintentional.

See, I headcanon that the Persona of the main villain of the Royal exclusive content is not a Persona, but rather another entity like Nyarlathotep from Persona 1 & 2; Under the cut I will be explaining the evidence for this theory.

So, we’ll be going through the evidence in chronological order (in order the events are revealed to you in-game, not timeline-wise)

The first reference to the idea that Maruki’s being manipulated by some other entity is that when Lavenza first contacts Akira, she says that he’s being controlled by ‘an entity’ rather than saying ‘that man’ or anything more reasonable like that.

[Image Description: a screenshot of the line in question, captioned below]

Lavenza: (Previous dialogue: You have been imprisoned once more...) This time, not by the God of Control, but a different entity... One who's bound you through your future.

And then when it comes time to explain and she says he's probably got a Persona, and Morgana protests...

Morgana: There's no way to have a Persona and a Palace at the same time! Lavenza: Determining when Maruki first awakened to his powers is wholly impossible. However, by the time he crossed your paths... There's no doubt that he was making use of his actualization-although, he may have only been doing so subconsciously.

Like, she totally dodges that question entirely? She never comes back to it and it's blatantly obvious? It’s kind of ridiculous to imagine that it wasn’t planned. And that is, indeed, evidence of why it’s not a Persona; Maruki has a Palace. So, given the evidence described above and below, I think it’s more reasonable to suggest it was a ruse than not.

Here’s another bit of evidence; two of the Shadows you fight in Maruki’s Palace, Byakhee/Evil Synthetic Organism and Hastur/Warped Abyss, were created and last seen in the game Persona 2, as special Personas you could acquire and also explicitly Byakhee is referred to in Tatsuya’s Scenario as one of Nyarlathotep’s servants... It’s a very odd choice to make to have it not be important.

After all; entities like Nyarlathotep have a history of masquerading as Personas to accomplish their own goals, and that’s another factor; Azathoth’s design. I’ve taken a picture of Nyarlathotep disguised as Takahisa Kandori’s Persona and Azathoth and labeled similarities in design.

(click here for a zoom in version)

1. They share a theme of being golden religious statues (with Azathoth being a cross) that open up to reveal a monster made of tentacles 2. The way they both open to reveal sunken in glowing eyes drawn in a similar manner. 3. The color of the needles at the ends of the tentacles are a close, CLOSE match to the color of the suckers on Nyarlathotep, like, Nyarly’s is #5BC1E5 and Azathoth’s is #53C0EC, that’s a... pretty close match. 4. The needles at the end of the hands also very much evoke the claws at the end of Nyarly’s hands, as well. 5. And finally, while Nyarly is much more humanoid, there very much is a level of tentacle theming between both of them. It’s not hard to notice.

As well, Azathoth is the ancestor of Nyarlathotep in the Cthulhu mythology, so it connects them as well, though I imagine in universe given the nature of Nyarlathotep in the Persona universe as the Ur Shadow, the situation is reversed with Azathoth being a direct creation of Nyarly’s.

As we learn about Maruki’s circumstances of getting his Persona, we have another thing; Personas don’t talk in the real world, ever, really as far as I can remember. If it happened, they certainly didn’t tell their user to ‘lend me your power’. However, we know for certain that people who didn’t earn their Personas but received them from other entities (Wildcards, Jun Kurosu & Tatsuya Sudou, Akechi) are generally the only people who have powers beyond summoning a single Persona. And there’s also the fact, to me that screams it out that it’s suspicious; every time he uses his powers, they’re utilized in a manner that cause him to need to keep relying on his powers or confirm it’s good to rely on them. Think about it; it only seems to talk to him when he’s under duress, and he doesn’t seem to have chosen how they worked... And in Rumi’s case, it coincidentally solved the situation in a way that isolated him further from any loved ones that could keep him on the straight and narrow, coincidentally leaving him with a reliance on it instead of normal methods of solving his problems... it totally would have been capable of just making her think she wasn’t there and never saw what happened, yet for some reason it erases him entirely from her life? To me, it feels like Azathoth basically was doing the traditional ‘isolate victim from loved ones in stressful situations’ thing that cults and abusers do, as with nearly every time it talks to him it rewards his ‘trauma is something you can erase easily with no consequences’ thoughts, because every time it allows him to use them, it’s in a situation where it is obvious that the victim was in a situation where they were a danger to themselves or in total misery.

As well; when Maruki fights you in his Metaverse outfit, he never removes his mask to summon his Persona. I can’t help but find that suspicious.

Finally, there’s one last piece of evidence; when Azathoth evolves into Adam Kadmon and merges with Maruki, the framing of it is... Very obvious something isn’t normal; Adam Kadmon’s tentacles stab into Maruki’s neck, and that’s when Maruki says the “I am thou, thou art I” speech... which is something that I’m fairly certain we never hear a person say while evolving or awakening their Persona, and the only person we hear say it is Yusuke when summoning, for The Aesthetic. That’s the Persona’s line to say. Like... none of the Persona awakenings or evolutions are framed the way that they frame Maruki’s awakening, the closest is when Futaba awakens to Necronomicon, but that’s not nearly as ominous, as Futaba is only raised up into the cockpit by the tentacles, not stabbed in the neck with them and then be the one to say the mantra?

That’s all the evidence, really, but there’s a lot of it. To be clear, this wouldn’t absolve Maruki of his actions so much as explain them as being the result of manipulation, but still something that he chose to do himself and he’s responsible for them.

I hear a lot that these theories are just meaningless speculation because there’s no way that Atlus would be referencing the first two games, but there’s another element to this; Persona 5 has the most references to the original games that the Persona series has had in years. Kazuma Kaneko returned to the Persona series for the first time in decades, for one, and my secret pet theory Futaba was intentionally designed to be Baofu from Persona 2′s biological daughter, but an actual piece of evidence is how much Persona 5 based media has referenced the story of the original Persona’s manga adaption.

Naoya Toudou, the protagonist of Revelations: Persona, is a character with a backstory that may be very familiar to people who’ve played Royal (or if you’ve watched The Day Breakers, you might recognize the names...) Naoya was born the younger twin between him and his older brother, Kazuya, who was 4 when he died, getting hit by a truck as he was crossing the street to buy something for his brother (who was sick with a cold at the time), and his mother, in her grief, mistook Naoya for Kazuya. He learned that his brother was trying to do something nice for him when he died because someone was trying to assure him his brother was a good person for that, and because of that he internalized it as being his fault his brother died, and stopped correcting her when she called him Kazuya and decided it would have been better if he had been the one who died. When she recovered from her grief and his father returned from overseas work, she stopped calling him Kazuya, but the trauma didn’t go away, obviously, and after a fight between his parents when he was 12, he pierced his ear to remind himself that he wasn’t Kazuya and started repressing the exact events after his brother’s death. Sound familiar? Yeah, it’s... very similar to Sumire and Kasumi’s story, as well as Naoya and Kazuya Makigami from Persona 5 the Animation: The Day Breakers, being brothers with the names Naoya and Kazuya (written with identical kanji), where Kazuya is the older and Naoya the younger, having an antagonistic relationship (Naoya’s Shadow in the manga claims to be Kazuya, since he’s the repression of the self loathing and desire for Kazuya to have lived). The fact is that the level of reference that Sumire’s story has to Naoya’s is just unrealistic to expect it to be a coincidence.

So if they’re referencing Revelations: Persona so much, why not Persona 2? There’s also the fact that Persona 5 is essentially a reversed version of Persona 2 as well.  So in my eyes it’s not unreasonable to say that it genuinely may be canon or revealed to be canon that Azathoth was not/is not a Persona.

[eviefrie]

fic masterpost

sometimes i write things. y’all should know about em

(fandoms are organized in alphabetical order, fics within fandoms are organized chronologically)

(header image is from this post)

assassin's creed

deer in the headlights (ao3)

wip; on hiatus. currently ~3600 words

crossover with bioshock infinite

evie frye/elizabeth comstock; elizabeth gets herself stuck in the ac: syndicate universe and has to adjust to her new life.

rated T

castlevania (netflix)

semi-untitled college au (unposted)

wip; on unintentional hiatus. main fic is currently 15,000 words out of an anticipated 45,000.

trephacard; semi-slice of life that takes us across one year of college from 3 different perspectives

main story rated T for now, side fics rated up to E

critical role/the legend of vox machina

short skirt, long jacket (i want a girl) (ao3)

oneshot; complete. ~4300 words.

HEAVILY jossed beauyasha fic that was posted the day after c2e2 aired

rated E

center of attention (wip)

oneshot; currently approx. 7000 words out of like, 10k? idk

a vax/briarwoods fic occurring in a universe where the events of tlovm 1x03 happened just a touch differently

rated V for vampire E

the locked tomb series

marvelous and dangerous (ao3 / tumblr) (art, art) (art)

oneshot; complete. ~31,000 words.

griddlehark; canon-divergent / anastasia (2017) au where gideon asks nona, a young woman with a startling resemblance to harrow, to impersonate the presumed-dead harrowhark nonagesimus.

rated T

written for the locked tomb big bang

put her on her knees (something to believe in) (ao3 / tumblr)

oneshot; complete. ~6400 words.

griddlehark; pre-canon fic in which harrow teaches gideon a lesson about belief

rated E (check warnings/tags on tumblr post)

the witcher (netflix)

the world will follow after (ao3 / tumblr)

oneshot; complete. ~8800 words

geraskier fic where a doppler helps geralt realize some things and then he and jaskier fuck

rated E

wolf 359

under siege by planet jupiter (ao3 / tumblr) (art)

oneshot; complete. ~4500 words.

kepcobi; no goddard get-together fic including social media stalking and band!kepler.

rated T

written for the wolf 359 reverse bang

[bluewatsons]

Robyn Dwyer & Susanne Fraser, Celebrity enactments of addiction on Twitter, 25 Convergence 1044 (2017)

Abstract

Commentators suggest the social media platform, Twitter, might afford challenges to hegemonic knowledge by providing voice to those outside traditional media and by enabling vigorous public discussion and contestation of dominant ideas and concepts. In this article, we ask whether such affordances might be reshaping the culturally charged concept of addiction and, in turn, its accompanying abject and maligned subject, the ‘addict’. To explore this question, we examine Twitter messages about addiction posted by celebrities. These people are among the most highly followed Twitter account holders, meaning their Twitter messages can reach millions of people. Our analysis examines how specific addiction problems, and their solutions, are being constituted through the tweeting practices of celebrities. We also consider the unintentional effects these messages produce. Finally, we examine the ways in which these messages are discussed and contested by the audiences of the celebrities. We find celebrity Twitter activity re-enacts familiar realities of addiction, realities that collapse drug use with harm and addiction, addiction with pathology and death. Abstinence is posed as the only effective and genuine response, and the contradictions in simultaneously individualizing action against addiction and condemning stigmatization are ignored. Despite the ‘revolutionary’ potential of Twitter posited by advocates and some scholars, when it comes to addiction, it seems, the global, uncensored, ‘free’ communication on Twitter serves largely to validate and perpetuate dominant addiction concepts and the stigma and discrimination these concepts evoke.

Introduction

What is addiction and how should it be addressed? For over a century, these questions have occupied a diverse range of actors – biomedical and social scientists, clinicians, social workers, policymakers, the media, affected individuals and the general public (Fraser et al., 2014; Granfield and Reinarman, 2015; Room et al., 2015). In contemporary accounts, biomedical and neuroscientific models and understandings dominate. Here, addiction is articulated as a ‘chronic relapsing disease’ of disordered compulsion – that is, an illness in which an individual ‘loses control’ over their substance use as a result of physiological changes due to use of alcohol or other drugs (Granfield and Reinarman, 2015). More recently, with the increasing prominence of neuroscientific methods and frameworks in addiction research,1 the disease concept of addiction has been refined specifically to a disease of the brain characterized by disrupted neurochemical transmission and lasting alterations to brain circuitry (Campbell, 2007; Elam, 2015; Fraser et al., 2014; Vrecko, 2010). By locating addiction within everyday biological processes, advocates of the neuroscientific approach contend that these models offer alternatives to earlier moralizing and stigmatizing accounts of addiction and of affected individuals (Fraser et al., 2014; Granfield and Reinarman, 2015). Fraser et al. (2014), along with other critical social science scholars, on the other hand, have argued that the ‘brain disease model’ reinstates addiction as a moral disease by delegating responsibility for its treatment and management back to affected individuals. Here, stigma and discrimination are reinscribed for those who ‘fail’, or choose not to engage with, treatment (Elam, 2015; Fraser et al., 2014). Moreover, social science scholars have raised significant questions regarding the ontological status of addiction, challenging the idea of addiction as a stable, unified, pre-existing disease entity. They highlight instead the constructedness of addiction. They point to its reliance on assumptions of ‘normal’ subjectivity (in particular ideas of rationality and self control), its contingency on social and historical forces, and therefore its multiplicity (Fraser et al., 2014; Garriott and Raikhel, 2015; Reinarman and Granfield, 2015). Through such critiques, it is clear that addiction remains a contested concept despite its positioning by dominant biomedical and neuroscientific experts as known and certain.

Biomedical and social scientific accounts of addiction are communicated via established, legitimized knowledge dissemination channels – scientific monographs, journal articles, conference presentations and the like. Traditional media – newspaper, radio and television – have also been key sites for the production and circulation of ideas of addiction and affected people (Beccaria et al., 2015; Bright et al., 2008; Winter, 2016). Recently, the social media platform, Twitter, has emerged as a major means of communicating on addiction. Hundreds of addiction-related Twitter accounts have been established and at least a few thousand addiction-related messages are posted each day (Dwyer and Fraser, 2016). These Twitter messages both reflect and participate in what we call, following Fraser et al. (2014), the ‘addicting’ of contemporary Western societies: the sense in which society is increasingly being subjected to (and by) a logic of addiction as substances, persons, brains and activities are all being brought into, or reinscribed by, notions of addiction.

Early characterizations depicted Twitter as a site of inconsequence and banality (Arceneaux and Schmitz Weiss, 2010; Rogers, 2013). In recent times, Twitter has been recast as an ‘uncensored global public forum’ (Thornton, 2013: 51) affording the ‘real-time’ circulation of news and information as well as the facilitation of public activism and protest (Bruns and Burgess, 2011; Rogers, 2013; Thornton, 2013; though cf. Bird, 2011; Dumitrica, 2016). Jenkins (2006) and Bruns (2006) propose that Twitter, like other new digital media, enables a ‘participatory culture’ where audiences become active cultural producers. Bruns (2006: 9) suggests these new patterns of participation and collaboration have the potential for profound effects on ‘civic participation and democratic engagement’. Similarly, Bird (2011: 505) observes that participatory activity is construed by many scholars as ‘evidence of a revolutionary change in our relationship with the media’, while participants in a study conducted by Dumitrica (2016: 48) among Canadian college students, ‘hailed the “revolutionary” potential of social media to alleviate social imbalances and civic apathy’. Although several scholars have raised questions regarding the realization of this potential (e.g. Bird, 2011; Dumitrica, 2016; Jenkins, 2014), this conception of Twitter is apparent in a body of literature variously exploring Twitter ‘revolutions’ (see e.g. Christensen, 2011; McKee, 2011; Mungiu-Pippidi and Munteanu, 2009; Parmalee and Bichard, 2012). These characterizations suggest Twitter might afford (Fraser, 2013; Latour, 2002) challenges to hegemonic knowledge by providing voice to those outside traditional scientific and media domains and by enabling vigorous public discussion and contestation of dominant ideas and concepts. In this article, we ask whether such affordances might be reshaping the culturally charged concept of addiction and, in turn, its accompanying abject and maligned subject, the ‘addict’. We consider this an important issue because understandings of addiction have very real and serious effects on the everyday lives of those seen as subjects of addiction – effects of criminalization, pathologization, stigmatization and discrimination (Garriott and Raikhel, 2015; Reinarman and Granfield, 2015).

To explore this question, we examine Twitter messages about addiction posted by celebrities. Here, following Driessens (2013), we take celebrity to refer to ‘well-knownness’ – either through achieved stardom (i.e. via talent and accomplishments) or attributed by the media (e.g. reality television participants or socialites such as Paris Hilton). We focus on celebrities because they have significant social, cultural and even political influence. British comedian Russell Brand, for instance, has in recent times transformed his social and cultural capital as a comic into political legitimacy as he establishes himself as a drug policy advocate and anti-austerity spokesperson (Arthurs and Shaw, 2016; Selby, 2014). Celebrities are among the most highly followed Twitter account holders, meaning their Twitter messages can reach millions of people. Our analysis examines how specific addiction problems, and their solutions, are being constituted through the tweeting practices of celebrities. We also consider the unintentional effects these messages produce. Finally, we examine the ways in which these messages are discussed and contested by the audiences of the celebrities. In concluding, we consider the implications of celebrity enactments of addiction for the ‘addicting’ of contemporary society that, we argue, is currently underway.

Background: Celebrity performance on Twitter

Twitter was launched in March 2006. In March 2016, Twitter Inc. reported 320 million people actively using the platform each month. Twitter was initially conceived as a social media platform through which friends could provide each other with brief text information on their current locations and activities. Twitter messages, referred to as ‘tweets’, are constrained to a 140 character limit. Twitter account holders can post their own tweets. They also ‘follow’ (that is, subscribe to) the accounts of other Twitter participants, and messages from these accounts appear in a reverse-order chronological stream of messages called the account holder’s Twitter ‘timeline’ Participants engage with messages in their timeline in multiple ways. They may simply read the messages or they may also ‘like’, reply to or forward (to their own followers) a tweet from someone they follow. Replies to messages are signalled by including the sender’s unique Twitter name (of the form ‘@username’) at the beginning of the tweet (boyd et al., 2010). Recently, several third-party web applications have been developed to allow the posting of longer tweets (e.g. Twitlonger, JumboTweet or Tall Tweets). These applications generally operate by converting text over the 140 character limit to a short URL that links to another webpage.

The social ties guiding the distribution of information through Twitter are the follower–followee networks. An account holder may follow any other account holder unless an account holder makes their account private (boyd et al., 2010). The networking and information dissemination structures of Twitter allow new forms of interpersonal and public expression and new forms of social relations. By eroding traditional separations between consumers and producers of public information, Twitter allows new possibilities for public discussion and debate with the potential to shift authority away from dominant established knowledge-making elites of science and traditional media (Bruns and Burgess, 2011; Thornton, 2013; Weller et al., 2014).

Celebrities were among the earliest groups to participate on Twitter and they are highly popular account holders. In March 2016, of the top 10 most followed Twitter accounts, the first 3 belong to famous singers (Katy Perry, Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift), with the US President, Barack Obama, as the fourth most followed. The fifth most followed Twitter account is the video streaming website, YouTube. The remaining five most followed accounts belong to three more famous singers (Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Justin Timberlake), the American television host, Ellen DeGeneres and Twitter itself (www.twittercounter.com). Celebrities generally have millions of followers but follow relatively few other account holders (Schmidt, 2014). A good illustration is the American singer, Katy Perry. While Perry has nearly 97 million followers, she herself follows only 206 other Twitter account holders (as at March 2017). For celebrities, Twitter is a valuable forum for advertising and self-promotion.

Celebrity practice and, indeed, the practice (or performance) of celebrity on Twitter has received some scholarly attention. Alice Marwick and danah boyd (2011: 139), for instance, have highlighted how famous people perform celebrity on Twitter through the appearance of ‘backstage access’. That is, celebrities present information that appears to be personal, ‘they publicly acknowledge fans’ and they engage in Twitter interactions with other celebrities that give fans the impression of uncensored ‘behind the scenes’ intimate access to the ‘real’ person. Similarly, Bethany Usher (2015: 306) explores the ways in which celebrities use Twitter to ‘manage and maintain their public persona [sic]’. In particular, Usher considers the co-construction of an ‘authentic’ celebrity persona via what she calls ‘crowd-sourced interviews’ on Twitter. Here, celebrities provide a specific time for their Twitter audiences to ask questions, often using the hashtag format ‘#ask+nameofcelebrity’ (2015: 309). Usher argues that, despite the ‘illusion of unstructured glimpses into [the] real life’ of celebrities, traditional relations of power between celebrities and fans remain in place as celebrities and their promotional teams ‘create the space and set the rules of engagement’ for the interviews, choosing when and which questions to answer (2015: 319). Sarah Thomas (2014: 243) has observed that while all celebrities use Twitter to manage their identity and images, they do so in a variety of ways. Some embrace notions of authenticity and closeness to their fans and directly interact with fans. Others maintain distance, favouring a broadcast model of tweeting and, in some cases, having their Twitter accounts maintained by staff rather than themselves. Alongside self-promotion and connecting with fans, some celebrities use Twitter to promote philanthropic or activist causes. The American singer, Lady Gaga, for instance, actively encourages her Twitter audience to donate to charitable causes or to engage in direct action on social issues (Bennett, 2014). Russell Brand’s reinvention of himself as a political activist has also been achieved via his Twitter activities, among other media performances (Arthurs and Shaw, 2016).

Celebrity encounters with addiction are a commonplace feature of traditional media and, more recently, social media (Beccaria et al., 2015; Hanukov, 2015; Tiger, 2015). Some scholars have addressed the framing of celebrity addiction in the media (Beccaria et al., 2015; Hanukov, 2015; Oksanen, 2014). Others have explored the construction of addiction itself on social media. Rebecca Tiger (2015), for instance, analysed the comments posted by visitors to blogger Perez Hilton’s website in relation to the actor Lindsay Lohan. She found that these interactive discussions constructed addiction as illness but also as moral failing. Other scholars have examined how addiction is being materialized on Twitter within messages that use addiction-related ‘hashtags’ – a convention on Twitter and other social media where the hash (#) symbol is added before a word to allow all tweets on a particular topic to be aggregated into a list that can be readily found via the Twitter search function (Dwyer and Fraser, 2016). Scholars are yet to pay attention, however, to how celebrities themselves are producing (rather than merely reflecting) addiction on social media.

Approach

This analysis is informed by the approach taken by John Law in his book, After Method (2004), along with his work with Annemarie Mol. According to Law and Mol (2002), traditional social science research tends to be based on the belief that reality is singular and stable. Traditional research methods both reflect and sustain such realist notions of the world by implying that there is a singular, stable reality that exists ‘out there’ for social scientists to objectively observe and capture through the use of appropriate methodological tools, such as the survey. The necessary implication of such approaches is that reality exists ‘anterior to…our reports of it’ (Law, 2004: 24–25). In contrast, Law and Mol (2002) argue that reality is multiple, enacted rather than revealed via material-discursive practices and therefore open to change.

In the process of creating realities, Law argues later (2011) other ‘collateral’ realities are also made. Law’s interest in collateral realities, and in the general multiplicity and mutability of reality, is expressly empirical. When he describes realities as made in practice, he assumes along with this formulation the need to investigate these practices empirically if we are to understand properly realities as they are made and as they might be made differently. Practices, he argues, are temporary assemblages of relations. When analysed, these assemblages yield knowledge about specific realities. The world is made up of such assemblages, not of stable natural objects or self-evident, foundational entities. One of these assemblages, we can infer, is addiction, constituted in part via Twitter practices. Following Law, we can consider addiction-related tweets not simply as ‘representations’ of anterior reality but as moments of ‘ontological politics’ (2011: 158). By this, he means occasions on which realities – both conventional and novel – are ‘done’, along with other realities ‘collateral to’ the one in question (2011: 161). The significance of his approach is, as he puts it:

[i]f, performatively, representations do realities in practice, then those realities might have been done differently. We find ourselves in the realm of politics.

To clarify how this approach can be used across different empirical contexts, Law suggests identifying the work being done ‘to wash away the practices [at work to constitute realities] and [that] turn representations into windows on the world’ (2011: 161). Using the example of a scientific conference PowerPoint presentation, Law shows how to identify the textual strategies active in constituting realities (here he cites ‘selecting’, ‘juxtaposing’, ‘deleting’ and ‘ranking’). To some extent, we do the same below. In looking at these strategies, and in following Law’s approach in general, we aim to foreground the importance of Twitter practice as an ontological politics of addiction. Rather than merely reflecting a pre-existing reality, that is, the tweets we examine do ontological politics. They make realities, including, or partly through, collateral realities. Understanding these processes is the starting point for creating (much needed) new realities of addiction.

Method

To compose the data set that forms the basis for such an analysis, we searched for tweets about addiction posted by influential celebrities. Influence was determined by the number of Twitter followers and identified via the ‘Twitter Counter’ of most followed registered Twitter account holders. We also searched for celebrities whose encounters with alcohol or other drugs have attracted substantial media attention. Initially, we searched for tweets including the words ‘addiction’ or ‘addicts’. Examination of the set of tweets revealed that celebrities often use the word ‘sober’ in relation to addiction and that ‘drugs’ or ‘alcohol’ were also mentioned in addiction-related tweets. The word ‘junkie’ was also used by some celebrities (for instance, the comedian Russell Brand uses the word). We expanded our search to include tweets containing any of these words.

Relatively few celebrities specifically tweet about addiction. We found 23 influential celebrities who had posted messages addressing the phenomenon. Most celebrities within this set had posted between one and seven messages. Two exceptions were the singer, Demi Lovato (@ddlovato) and Russell Brand (@rustyrockets). Our search returned 42 tweets from Brand (dating back to March 2009) and 25 tweets from Lovato (dating back to 24 July 2011). Both these celebrities publicly self-identify as ‘addicts’ (Brand, 2007; Troup Buchanan, 2015) and both have substantial numbers of followers on Twitter. In March 2016, Lovato was ranked the 20th most followed person on Twitter with 35 million followers. Russell Brand has just under12 million followers (placing him as the 126th most followed). Because of their greater engagement with addiction on Twitter, these two celebrities and the tweets they have posted are the primary focus of our analysis. For each of the Lovato and Brand addiction-related tweets returned by our search, we also collected replies to these messages that had been posted by other people on Twitter. These replies were accessed by entering the message text into the Google search engine.

All tweet data were manually copied and pasted into word processing files for management and analysis. Although Twitter messages are publicly available, we have chosen to protect the identities of private individuals by de-identifying Twitter handles other than those of celebrities. Because tweets may be retrospectively deleted and our searches are reliant on the Twitter search algorithm, we do not claim to have collected every addiction-related message posted by celebrities on Twitter. However, we consider our set of celebrity tweets sufficient to allow close reading of enactments of addiction by influential celebrities who use Twitter. We turn to this analysis now.

Analysis

John Law’s (2011) work on collateral realities provides guidance for the questions we ask of the addiction messages posted by celebrities on Twitter. We examine how relations are assembled within the tweets to enact and ‘hold together’ particular realities of addiction. We consider how these assemblages of relations become and remain stable. We attend to the gaps, silences, tensions and contradictions in the addiction realities being enacted. In doing so, we attend to the collateral realities being enacted ‘incidentally and along the way’ (Law, 2011: 156). When we examine celebrity tweets, the most striking effect is the certainty they perform. The problem of addiction is, for these celebrities at least, entirely clear. Its ontological status is both known and simple; the measures to tackle it are clear and known, as are the signs of success and failure. To make our case, we begin with addiction – the central object of the tweet messages – to show what, and how, realities of addiction are being done by celebrities on Twitter.

Enacting addiction

Perhaps most obvious in the analysis we conducted was the consistency between Lovato and Brand in the addiction object enacted through their tweets. As can be seen in the tweet messages presented in Box 1, for both these celebrities, addiction is a ‘disease’ (Lovato in the first (T1) and second (T2) tweets and Brand at T11). Notwithstanding the certainty expressed by both – addiction is unquestionably a disease for these two celebrities – their tweets do not actually tell us a great deal about the constitution of this disease. Rather, the tweets largely take addiction for granted, no better illustration being Lovato’s circular statement that ‘addiction is addiction’ (T3 and T5).

Box 1. Tweets enacting addiction.

That said, the tweets do articulate some elements of addiction – its nature, causes and effects. For Lovato and Brand, addiction is a disorder (disease) of the mind. Lovato constitutes addiction as a ‘mental illness’ (T4) and Brand as ‘inner insanity’ (T10). The tweets also identify a key symptom of the disease – compromised volition. This symptom underpins Lovato’s seeming frustration over a lack of understanding that people ‘can’t […] just stay sober’ (T6). Brand similarly declares that addiction ‘isn’t just something you can turn off’ (T9). From Lovato, we also learn a cause of the disease: addictive substances (primarily alcohol and other drugs but also sugar) and practices (injecting) (T5, T3). By contrast, as we show later, Brand does not place all blame for addiction on substances themselves. Lastly, the tweets present an important effect of addiction. It is clear from the messages that the disease ‘kills’ – evident in the tweets relating to the deaths of singer Amy Winehouse (T1), actors Philip Seymour Hoffman (T2, T7) and Cory Monteith (T9) and a personal friend of Brand (T8).

Addiction-related tweets posted by other celebrities largely enact the same addiction realities materialized in the tweets from Lovato and Brand. As the examples below illustrate, celebrities post tweets in response to deaths (Pink and Paris Hilton) or they promote addiction fund-raising or awareness-raising activities (Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus). Within these messages, addiction is enacted as a deadly disease (Paris Hilton and Kelly Osbourne) and mental disorder (Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus and Courtney Love) requiring treatment (Lady Gaga, Pink and Miley Cyrus).

@ladygaga 12 August 2014: Please reach out to http://bornthiswayfoundation.orgif you are struggling with depression, mental illness or addiction. You are not alone. (7402 retweets; 8921 likes)

@Pink 10 February 2016: I just lost YET another friend to addiction. If you are having trouble, please get help NOW. For your kids, your parents, your family, for me (3437 retweets; 11,231 likes)

@MileyCyrus 5 October 2011: With our help, they can win a million dollars which will go to treatment for people struggling with depression, addiction and self-injury. (2325 retweets; 308 likes)

@ParisHilton 24 July 2011: So sad to hear about Amy Winehouse. What a talent, way to young to die. Addiction is such a deadly disease. She’s now in a better place. (1481 retweets; 190 likes)

@KellyOsbourne 12 December 2013: @username addiction is a disease and nothing to make dark uneducated satire of! (5 retweets; 13 likes)

@Courtney [Love] 29 July 2013: u have to be a real low life to kick someone when they’re down. mental illness/addiction are not laughing matters! bullies are not funny!(587 retweets; 547 likes)

While these celebrities seem sympathetic towards affected individuals, there is nothing innovative in the addiction realities enacted through their tweets. In these short messages, Lovato, Brand and other celebrities reproduce the pathologized and problematized addiction object of dominant biomedical and neuroscientific accounts (Fraser et al., 2014). A tweet from the authoritative addiction science organization, the US National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), illustrates just how closely these celebrity enactments mirror those of biomedicine, in particular, neuroscience:

@NIDAnews 31 March 2016: Addiction is a Disease: http://1.usa.gov/1RHZT3x.

What work is being done in these tweets? How, precisely, are relations being assembled and arranged to produce the particular addiction objects we have identified in the tweets? Celebrities employ various textual strategies in enacting these realities of addiction – strategies of selection, exclusion and ranking. Particular elements are selected – death, sadness, loss and killing, for instance – to assemble relations that enact addiction as a deadly condition. The use of the words ‘disease’ and ‘illness’ frames addiction as a medical problem. Ranking is also apparent in that alcohol and other drugs are implicitly constituted as primary causes of addiction through the many tweets posted in response to deaths in which these substances were present in the bodies of those who died. What is being excluded? A multitude of things, of course, but in relation to the realities of addiction being made here, obvious and important exclusions include the non-fatal nature of addiction for most people who experience it, the absence of addiction among most people who consume alcohol and other drugs and the degree of controversy among experts and scholars over addiction’s current status as ‘disease’ (Fraser et al., 2014; Granfield and Reinarman, 2015).

The assembling of addiction with death is, in part, an effect of the contexts in which the messages are posted. As we noted earlier, many of the tweets were posted in response to deaths (of celebrities and others). However, this particular assemblage of addiction and death is also a conventional narrative on which the celebrities draw in order to account for, or make sense of, these sad events. In this way, their tweets simultaneously reproduce and perpetuate dominant accounts of addiction as inevitably risky and even deadly. By framing addiction in health terms and, specifically, assembling it as a medical disease, the celebrity tweets also reinforce the efforts of biomedical science to claim authority over addiction. Other voices are excluded or marginalized, and contestations over addiction – long-standing debates about its meaning, its effects, even its ontological status – are obscured. The use of these textual strategies of selection and exclusion is also amplified by the constraints of Twitter’s character limit. Only so many details and concepts can be expressed in 140 characters. Twitter itself, then, affords simplification and the reductiveness inherent in selection and exclusion.

Importantly, not all the celebrities in our set enact addiction as pathology. The following tweets enact it playfully as positive attachment to material objects and activities – clothes, social media websites and food. The singer, Rihanna, goes so far as to cast herself as an object of addiction, here assembling complex and positive (non-pathological) relations between herself, desire, legitimate (‘prescription’) medicine, medical authority and addiction. Lindsay Lohan also troubles conventional notions of addiction as pathology by claiming a ‘healthy addiction’ (distancing herself, perhaps, from past associations with ‘unhealthy’ ones).

@katyperry 25 August 2014: I must admit my outfit is a result of my love for nostalgia and my tumblr addiction #THISISHOWWEDOVMAS (6920 retweets; 12,647 likes)

@rihanna 27 February 2012: I know what you like, I am your prescription, I’m your physician, I’m your addiction! (9078 retweets; 1269 likes)

@lindsaylohan 14 July 2015: My new healthy addiction…TigerNuts by @organic_gemini! https://instagram.com/p/5HSP1spc79/ (98 retweets; 326 likes)

While addiction is framed more positively here, again there is nothing innovative in these messages. Applying a logic of addiction to everyday practices, consumption and attachments has become a commonplace of contemporary society (Dwyer and Fraser, 2016; Fraser et al., 2014).

Enacting addiction solutions

In addition to enacting the same addiction object, Lovato and Brand’s tweets also enact addiction’s cure in the same way, as abstinence. Brand observes this in his tweet on Hoffman’s death (Box 1, T7) where he expresses the ‘hope’ that everyone who needs it has ‘access to abstinence based recovery [treatment]’. Abstinence as solution is also evident in the following tweets, with Lovato interpreting this as being ‘sober’ and Brand also speaking of being ‘clean’. Both these celebrities also discuss their personal experiences of addiction in other media. The tweets we examine here are consistent with the addiction realities they enact elsewhere (such as in interviews, articles, books and, in the case of Brand, film) although in other media their enactments of addiction are often more complex and nuanced as these media allow greater capacity for explanation and elaboration (e.g. Brand, 2007, 2013, 2014; O’Brien, 2014; Troup-Buchanan, 2015; Wilson, 2012, 2014). As the following tweets show, both celebrities also use Twitter to mark their anniversaries of ceasing substance use.

@ddlovato 25 June 2014: Sometimes I look back and wish I would’ve realized I never had to drink or use to have fun…I laugh more sober than I ever did wasted. (24,172 retweets; 37,571 likes)

@ddlovato 16 March 2016: This last year I experienced so much life and too much death…But I made it through…Sober. #4Years #GodsWill (13,349 retweets; 44,121 likes)

@rustyrockets 14 December 2014: Today I am 12 years clean from drugs & alcohol. Thanks to all the junkies & drunks that helped me. If I can do it, anyone can. (4368 retweets; 15,866 likes)@rustyrockets 30 November 2013: There is a difference between ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘time passing’. I used to take drugs, now I don’t. That’s not hypocrisy, I’ve woken up. (1192 retweets; 1693 likes)

These anniversary tweets attract a significant amount of attention from their followers. Lovato’s tweet on the 16th of March 2014, for instance, was retweeted just over 34,000 times and ‘liked’ by nearly 8000 people. Brand’s tweet was retweeted approximately 4500 times and liked by nearly 16,000 people. Messages such as these draw on and reproduce the conventional conversion narrative central to the 12-step addiction model. This familiar narrative tells of a downward spiral of addiction and degradation, an epiphany as a consequence of reaching some crisis point (‘rock bottom’) and then a slow (and difficult) upward climb to enlightenment (abstinent ‘recovery’) and redemption (Keane, 2001). Elements of this narrative are apparent in Lovato’s wish that her now enlightened self could have advised her earlier misguided (addict) self and in Brand’s assertion that he has now ‘woken up’. The abjection of the addicted life is implicit in Lovato’s comment that she laughs more now she is abstinent, while the marking of their anniversaries reinforces the idea of an addict subjectivity requiring continual self-monitoring to safeguard against falling back into addiction (Elam, 2015).

Several matters are silenced in these messages, and inconsistencies and tensions are also evident. Neither celebrity acknowledges that abstinence-based treatments are no more effective than other treatment models and, indeed, that all treatment is modestly effective at best (Ritter and Lintzeris, 2004). In Brand’s case, in his autobiography, My BookyWook, first published in 2007, he identifies as a ‘sex addict’ as well as a ‘heroin addict’. While his tweets enjoin all ‘addicts’ to be abstinent as the only effective solution to addiction, he is notably silent on whether he considers the abstinence model should apply to all addiction objects (for instance, sex or food along with substances). Given his highly publicized marriage to Katy Perry in 2012, one might imagine not. This introduces the possibility of controlled consumption or engagement with objects of addiction, a possibility otherwise disallowed by Brand’s enactment of addiction as a disease of compulsivity.

Enacting collateral realities

Further examination of the celebrity addiction tweets reveals enactments of other realities in the process of constituting the reality of addiction. These are the ‘collateral’ realities described by Law (2011); those he suggests are done quietly, incidentally and often unintentionally. Alongside enactments of addiction as a deadly disease, celebrity tweets also enact drugs as deterministically dangerous and addictive. In doing so, they collapse drug consumption with addiction and simultaneously enact an addict subjectivity – a fundamentally and chronically flawed identity that pre-exists any encounters with substances (and indeed any rewarding activities) and that means any such encounters will inevitably result in addiction.

Lovato’s tweet posted in response to Hoffman’s death (Box 1, T2) is a good example. Seemingly much affected by his death, Lovato was moved to post an expanded tweet (accessed via the URL provided at the end of the tweet message). This provided a further 1000 characters beyond Twitter’s 140 character limit in which Lovato could express her thoughts on addiction. We reproduce it in full in Box 2.

Box 2. Demi Lovato expanded tweet posted on 2 February 2014, accessed from: http://tmi.me/1dAYzj.

In Lovato’s tweet, we can see the dangerousness of drugs. They are not ‘harmless recreational fun’ (although extensive research suggests otherwise for most) but the cause of deadly addiction. A pre-existing addict identity also emerges in Lovato’s message when she speaks of not being able to predict addiction. Her statements about a ‘first-time user or alcoholic’ who could end up suffering from the deadly disease also constitute an addict subjectivity. On the one hand, we have a first-time user who may end up an addict by virtue of the negative power of drugs, and on the other, we have an ‘alcoholic’ personality that appears to pre-exist any encounter with substances. Lovato’s tweet also enacts familiar addiction tropes: of the troubled and emotionally traumatized addict (‘may you rest peacefully […] now that your pain is gone’) and the isolated ‘tortured artist’ whose life ends in tragedy. The latter trope is also evident in the tweets of Brand and other celebrities – reinforced when they are prompted to speak following a celebrity death.

Brand’s tweets enact a very similar addict subjectivity. Unlike Lovato, however, he does not constitute drugs as inherently dangerous and addictive. For Brand, it is only in the encounters between drugs and chronic addicts that addiction emerges.

@rustyrockets 16 August 2012: Watch my documentary on bbc3 tonight, it explains why drug addicts shouldn’t take drugs. Non-drug addicts-GO NUTS

@rustyrockets13 June 2013: Today watch #ThisIsTheEnd with my adored brother @JonahHill. Smoke a Jeffrey [cannabis cigarette] before you go. #unlessyouareachronicdrugaddictlikeme

These constructions are important because, we would argue, the addict identity enacted in celebrity tweets remoralizes addiction by placing responsibility for its treatment and management on the affected individual. This can be seen in Brand’s tweets and in the following tweets where Lovato insists that abstinence treatment succeeds wherever the individual makes a sincere effort and is genuinely ‘willing’. Of particular concern is the tweet where Lovato washes away the crippling effects social and economic disadvantage may have on experiences of addiction. Here again, management of addiction is simply a matter of individual willpower and determination.

@ddlovato13 October 2015: I hate it when people say ‘people don’t change’. Anyone and everyone can change…It’s just about who’s willing to work for it.

@ddlovato10 April 2015: Just met a man named Sonny. 7 months sober and homeless yet he’s doing everything not to drink regardless of his living situation. It made2

Despite their declarations of the importance of individual motives and sincerity, both Lovato and Brand repeatedly call for compassion in the treatment of ‘addicts’. In her expanded tweet, Lovato asks us to ‘lose the stigma’ while Brand promotes his own charitable work as well as the work of a well-known addiction commentator who advocates for the compassionate treatment of those affected by addiction.

@rustyrockets 3 October 2013: Meet me and donate to addict charity. The opportunity to be kind to junkies up close (me) and at a distance (them) http://bit.ly/MessiahUK

@rustyrockets 10 July 2015: Excellent Tedtalk from @johannhari101 [weblink] as he continues to campaign for the compassionate treatment of addicts

Notwithstanding their express intentions, then, celebrity tweets serve to reinscribe the stigma and discrimination conventionally accompanying the notion of addiction and those said to be affected by it. Brand’s notion of the chronic addict renders affected individuals other to ‘normal’ persons. The highly stigmatizing language he insists on using repeatedly – ‘addict’ and ‘junkies’ – reduces people who engage in regular consumption of alcohol and other drugs to a pathologized identity and erases all other aspects of their everyday lives and relations.

In ‘conversation’ with Lovato and Brand

Now that we have analysed in detail the tweets circulated by these celebrity addicts, it is important to consider how Lovato and Brand’s audiences respond. Here, we explore replies to addiction-related tweets posted by Lovato and Brand. We focus our analysis on a single significant tweet from each celebrity. Significance was assessed by highest number of engagements (i.e. retweets and likes). For both celebrities, the significant tweet is the message posted in response to Hoffman’s death (Box 1, T2 and T7). We explore the audience reply tweets in terms of those that confirm and those that contest the statements made by Lovato and Brand.

Replies to Lovato’s extended addiction tweet were overwhelmingly positive. Of 197 replies, only 5 could be interpreted as non-confirmatory. As these stopped short of contesting Lovato’s statements, we have designated these as ‘querying’ tweets. Most replies were brief, comprising statements such as ‘so true’, ‘well said’, ‘I love you’ and ‘amen’ (as a consequence of Lovato’s probable younger follower base, there were also many instances of ‘omg’). Many people observed that Lovato was a ‘role model’ and praised and thanked her for expressing her opinions. Examples of confirmatory replies are presented in Box 3, along with the five querying tweets. The few querying tweets aside, replies to Lovato’s tweet are mainly in agreement with her views and legitimate and reinforce her authority to speak on addiction.

Box 3. Selected replies to Lovato tweeting on death of Philip Seymour Hoffman.*

Of 170 replies to Brand’s tweet, the majority confirmed the addiction concepts articulated in his message. Most replies were brief and tweets containing statements such as ‘well said’, ‘so true’ and ‘I agree’ were common. As the examples presented in Box 4 show, in replying to Brand most people reproduce ideas of addiction as disease arising from psychological trauma (the ‘demons’ noted in T24), constituted by suffering (T25) and inevitably fatal (T29). These replies also acknowledge and legitimate Brand’s expertise and authority to speak on addiction matters (T26, T27). One reply highlights the fear generated through Brand’s conventional assembling of addiction, dangerous drugs and death (T30).

Box 4. Selected replies to Brand tweeting on death of Philip Seymour Hoffman.*

Only nineteen replies contested Brand’s addiction certainties. Many of the challenges raised in these messages articulate matters we have discussed in previous sections. For instance, the merit of alternative forms of treatments and intervention is introduced (T31, T39), and questions about alternatives to abstinence are posed (T36). Some raise the possibility that not all people who consume substances need or desire treatment (T33, T35), with these messages simultaneously challenging the notion of drugs as deterministically addictive. One person contests Brand’s conflation of addiction and death (T38) and, indeed, rejects the reality of heroin overdose entirely. Another person challenges the effectiveness of abstinence-based treatment, pointing out that Hoffman had himself participated in this treatment modality (T40). Still others introduce contextualizing elements to trouble the simple reductive addiction object enacted by Brand – prohibition in one reply (T34), poverty in another (T37). Finally, one person deploys ad hominem logic to contest Brand’s statements, undermining Brand’s arguments through personal attack (T32).

While, overall, there is minimal contestation of Brand’s views in these replies, his enactments of addiction and ‘addicts’ do not go unchallenged on Twitter. Two notable challenges are those mounted by the UK branch of Students for Sensible Drug Policy and by INPUD (the International Network of People who Use Drugs). As the tweets below show, both these groups prepared an ‘open letter’ in which they outlined comprehensive critiques of Brand’s 2014 documentary, End the Drugs War (Wilson, 2014).

@ssdpuk (2,349 followers) 24 December 2014: We’ve written .@rustyrockets an open letter abt his views expressed in the #EndTheDrugWardoc.http://is.gd/n4i5E9 (46 retweets; 26 likes)

@INPUD(2,980 followers) 15 January 2015: @INPUD open letter @rustyrockets in response to recent #BBC documentary on #WarOnDrugs http://www.inpud.net/en/news/open-letter-russell-brand-end-war-drugs (1 retweet; 1 like)

The open letters challenged Brand’s use of stigmatizing language (‘addicts’ and ‘junkies’) and his ‘contradictory, poorly informed, myopic, moralizing, generalizing, and discriminatory arguments’(INPUD, 2015: 1). These tweets did not result in a direct Twitter discussion perhaps because, as far as we can tell, Brand did not reply or respond to the criticisms raised by the two groups (highlighting, as Usher (2015) observed, the traditional celebrity/fan hierarchies in place on Twitter as celebrities retain control over who they interact with and which comments they choose to answer). More importantly, for our purposes, what is telling about these contestations is that they attract minimal engagements (retweets or likes) and are potentially seen by only a few thousand people (those following either SSDPUK or INPUD) compared with the millions of people who see tweets from Lovato and Brand.

While Twitter describes a message and its replies as a ‘conversation’, the tweets we examine are largely one-way communications – from the sender to Lovato or Brand. The celebrities do not reply (or they do not reply publicly, at least). It cannot be known whether the celebrities even see the messages. When a tweet includes an account holder’s Twitter name (at the start for a reply or anywhere in the body of the message for a mention), the only people who see that tweet are the sender and the recipient and any other Twitter account holder who follows both the sender and the recipient. Furthermore, replies sent to an account holder do not appear in the account holder’s Twitter timeline unless they follow the sender. Instead, replies and mentions from non-followed people appear in what Twitter calls the ‘notifications tab’ – a separate page notifying an account holder of any engagements with them or their tweets (new followers, likes, replies, mentions and retweets). So even where Lovato and Brand’s statements are contested, the structure of Twitter means that any such contestations are unlikely to be seen by the millions of people who follow each celebrity. In this respect, the description of Twitter exchanges as conversation, and the idea that these conversations afford a public forum, is not very accurate.

Conclusion

In this article, we have explored how addiction is being made by celebrities on Twitter, with a primary focus on addiction-related tweets posted by the celebrities, Demi Lovato and Russell Brand. As our analysis shows, the Twitter activity of these two widely followed celebrities re-enacts familiar realities of addiction, realities that collapse drug use with harm and addiction, addiction with pathology and death. Abstinence is posed as the only effective and genuine response, and the contradictions in simultaneously individualizing action against addiction and condemning stigmatization are ignored. In the process, key matters that interfere with the simplistic ideas of addiction afforded on Twitter are erased: the pleasures of drug use, the relative rarity of addiction and the potential to live a meaningful life in the context of regular drug use (see Pienaar et al., 2016, for a recent analysis of such assumptions and alternatives). Alongside these conventional enactments of addiction and its solution, other realities are also being made – a pre-existing fundamentally and chronically flawed addict subjectivity, a homogenous category of substances (drugs, alcohol) that are deterministically addictive and dangerous and the self-evidence of addiction itself (‘addiction is addiction’). Together, these collateral realities support and help hold together (stabilize) the enactments of addiction as a disease of disordered compulsion.

It is perhaps unsurprising that addiction is enacted these ways in the tweeting activities of Lovato and Brand. Both celebrities are well-known for their strong endorsement of 12-step addiction models and corresponding abstinence-based addiction solutions (Brand, 2013; Troup-Buchanan, 2015). What is troubling, however, is the simplistic nature of these enactments and just how much contestation and complexity is obscured in them. Brand’s tweets, in particular, are notable in this regard. Brand has achieved celebrity status in no small part due to his skills as a wordsmith yet his addiction tweets lack nuance, relying instead on banalities and clichés – ‘addiction is a disease’ and ‘addiction kills’. While the addiction object they reproduce – the dominant pathologized addiction object of biomedical accounts – is itself simplistic and reductive (Fraser et al., 2014), we would argue that the oversimplification enacted in celebrity tweets is directly afforded by Twitter, namely by its constrained character limits and its limits on conversation. Within 140 characters, there is little room for elaboration or explanation. Instead, as we and other scholars have observed, Twitter is highly intertextual, its character limit necessitating reliance on cultural tropes, buzzwords and other shorthand to establish meaning (Dwyer and Fraser, 2016; Zappavigna, 2011).

Our analysis also troubles notions that Twitter messages constitute a conversation and that Twitter helps flatten power. The view that Twitter is a public forum in which ideas can be debated democratically and alternative views aired widely is a shallow one. Twitter influence is at least partly an effect of recognizability and prior authority (such as celebrity). These attributes are themselves the effect of politics. This means that politics always already inform visibility and circulation in any medium. While Twitter has the capacity to allow circulation of novel concepts, this does not mean those seeking to do so begin on an equal footing with those circulating familiar, already palatable, concepts (Bird, 2011; Marwick and boyd, 2011). The most insidious aspect of Twitter might be the fantasy that it affords the kind of discourse it probably does not.

What this means for addiction, at least, is that despite the ‘revolutionary’ potential of Twitter posited by advocates and some scholars, the global, uncensored, ‘free’ communication on Twitter serves largely to validate and perpetuate dominant addiction concepts and the stigma and discrimination these concepts evoke. The ontological politics of addiction on Twitter – the multiple moments when addiction is being done within celebrity tweeting practices – are such that the addicting of contemporary society continues in conventional terms. Through the tweeting practices of influential celebrities, at least, the possibilities that addiction might be done differently are yet to be realized.

Notes

Campbell (2007) and Vrecko (2010) provide historical accounts of the emergence and rising prominence of neuroscientific accounts of addiction as a ‘chronic relapsing brain disease’ (often described as the ‘brain disease model of addiction’), led by the influential American National Institute of Drug Abuse which funds 85% of the world’s research on addiction.

Lovato continued this message across four additional tweets that she posted consecutively. These enjoined people not to judge others, ‘especially homeless people’.

References

Arceneaux N and Schmitz Weiss A (2010) Seems stupid until you try it: Press coverage of Twitter, 2006-9. New Media & Society 12(8): 1262–1279.

Arthurs J and Shaw S (2016) Celebrity capital in the political field: Russell Brand’s migration from stand-up comedy to Newsnight. Media, Culture & Society 38(8): 1136–1152.

Beccaria F, Rolando S, Hellman M, et al. (2015) From criminals to celebrities: Perceptions of ‘the addict’ in the print press from four European countries from nineties to today. Substance Use & Misuse 50(4): 439–453.

Bennett L (2014) ‘If we stick together we can do anything’: Lady Gaga fandom, philanthropy and activism through social media. Celebrity Studies 5(1–2): 138–152.

Bird SE (2011) Are we all produsers now? Convergence and media audience practices. Cultural studies 25(4): 502–516.

boyd d, Golder S and Lotan G (2010) Tweet, tweet, retweet: Conversational aspects of retweeting on Twitter. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Kauai, HI: IEEE Computer Society. Available at: http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/hicss/2010/3869/00/03-06-04.pdf (accessed 10 February 2016).

Brand R (2007) My BookyWook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Brand R (2013) The only way to help addicts is to treat them as sick, not bad. (5 March 2013). The Spectator. Available at: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2013/03/the-only-way-to-help-addicts-is-to-treat-them-as-sick-not-bad/ (accessed 15 March 2016).

Brand R (2014) Philip Seymour Hoffman is another victim of extremely stupid drug laws, Commentary (7 Feb 2014). The Guardian. Available at: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/06/russell-brand-philip-seymour-hoffman-drug-laws (accessed 15 March 2016).

Bright SJ, Marsh A, Smith LM, et al. (2008) What can we say about substance use? Dominant discourses and narratives emergent from Australian media. Addiction Research & Theory 16(2):135–148.

Bruns A (2006) Towards produsage: Futures for user-led content production[online] Available at: http:// eprints.qut.edu.au/4863/1/4863_1.pdf (accessed 5 December 2016).

Bruns A and Burgess JE (2011) The use of Twitter hashtags in the formation of ad hoc publics. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 6th European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference, University of Iceland, Reykjavik. Available at: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/46515/ (accessed 11 February 2016).

Campbell N (2007) Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Christensen C (2011) Twitter revolutions? Addressing social media and dissent. The Communication Review 14(3): 155–157.

Doyle A (2011) Revisiting the synopticon: reconsidering Mathiesen’s ‘The viewer society’ in the age of Web 2.0. Theoretical Criminology 15(3):283–299.

Driessens O (2013) Celebrity capital: Redefining celebrity using field theory. Theory and Society 43(5): 543–560.

Dumitrica D (2016) Imagining engagement: Youth, social media, and electoral processes. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 22(1): 35–53.

Dwyer R and Fraser S (2016) Addicting via hashtags: How is Twitter making addiction? Contemporary Drug Problems 43(1):79–97.

Elam M (2015) How the brain disease paradigm remoralizes addictive behaviour. Science as Culture 24(1): 46–64.

Fraser S (2013) The missing mass of morality: A new fitpack design for hepatitis C prevention in sexual partnerships. International Journal of Drug Policy 24(3):212–219.

Fraser S, Moore D and Keane H (2014) Habits: Remaking Addiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Garriott W and Raikhel E (2015) Addiction in the making. Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 477–491.

Granfield R and Reinarman C (Eds.). (2015) Expanding Addiction: Critical Essays. New York: Routledge.

Hanukov I (2015) The ‘cocaine Kate’ scandal: Celebrity addiction or public addiction to celebrity? The Journal of Popular Culture 48(4):652–661.

INPUD (2015) Open Letter to Russell Brand. The International Network of People who Use Drugs’ (INPUD) response to Russell Brand’s documentary, Russell Brand: End the War on Drugs. Available at: http://www.inpud.net/en/news/open-letter-russell-brand-end-war-drugs (accessed 23 March 2015).

Jenkins H (2006) Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Jenkins H (2014) Rethinking ‘rethinking convergence/culture’. Cultural Studies 28(2): 267–297.

Keane H (2001) Public and private practices: Addiction autobiography and its contradictions. Contemporary Drug Problems 28(4): 567–596.

Latour B (2002) Morality and technology. The end of the means. Theory, Culture & Society 19(5–6):247–260.

Law J (2004) After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. New York: Routledge.

Law J (2011) Collateral realities. In: Dominguez R and Baert FP (eds.), The Politics of Knowledge. London: Routledge, pp. 156–178.

Law J and Mol A (Eds.). (2002) Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practice. Durham: Duke University Press.

Marwick A and boyd d (2011) To see and be seen: Celebrity practice on Twitter. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 17(2):139–158.

McKee M (2011) The other Twitter revolution: How social media are helping to monitor the NHS reforms. BMJ 342: d948.

Mungiu-Pippidi A and Munteanu I (2009) Moldova’s ‘Twitter revolution’. Journal of Democracy 20(3): 136–142.

O’Brien C (2014) Demi Lovato: ‘Drugs numbed everything. My life was a shambles’. (27 Jul 2014). Mail Online. Available at: www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2705447/Demi-Lovato-Drugs-numbed-My-life-shambles.html#ixzz48JeGXeWB (accessed 26 march 2016).

Oksanen A (2014) Affect and addiction in the Celebrity Rehab reality television show. Addiction Research and Theory 22(2):137–146.

Parmalee JH and Bichard SL (2012) Politics and the Twitter Revolution. How Tweets Influence the Relationship between Political Leaders and the Public. Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books.

Pienaar K, Moore D, Fraser S, et al. (2016) Diffracting addicting binaries: An analysis of lived experiences of alcohol and other drug addiction. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine. Epub ahead of print 10 November 2016. doi:10.1177/1363459316674062.

Reinarman C and Granfield R (2015) Addiction is not just a brain disease. In: Granfield R and Reinarman C (eds.), Expanding Addiction: Critical Essays. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–24.

Ritter A and Lintzeris N (2004) Specialist interventions in treating clients with alcohol and drug problems. In: Hamilton M, King T, and Ritter A (eds.), Drug Use in Australia: Preventing Harm. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, pp. 221–235.

Rogers R (2013) Debanalizing Twitter: The transformation of an object of study. Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference, New York. Available at: www.govcom.org/publications/full_list/rogers_debanalizingTwitter_websci13.pdf (accessed 8 July 2015).

Room R, Hellman M and Stenius K (2015) Addiction: The dance between concept and terms. International Journal of Alcohol and Drug Research 4(1): 27–35.

Schmidt J-H (2014) Twitter and the rise of personal publics. In: Weller K, Bruns A, Burgess J, Mahrt M, and Puschmann C (eds.), Twitter and Society, New York: Peter Lang, pp. 3–14.

Selby J (2014) Russell Brand delivers plea to the UN: Drugs ban leads to ‘death, suffering and crime’. (20 Mar 2014). The Independent. Available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/russell-brand-delivers-emotional-plea-to-the-un-drugs-ban-leads-to-death-suffering-and-crime-9204482.html

Thomas S (2014) Celebrity in the ‘Twitterverse’: history, authenticity and the multiplicity of stardom. Situating the ‘newness’ of Twitter. Celebrity Studies 5(3): 242–255.

Thornton L-J (2013) ‘Time of the month’ on Twitter: Taboo, stereotype and bonding in a no-holds-barred public arena. Sex Roles 68(1–2): 41–54.

Tiger R (2015) Celebrity gossip blogs and the interactive construction of addiction. New Media Society 17(3): 340–355.

Troup-Buchanan R (2015) Demi Lovato discusses her bipolar disorder and alcohol addiction as she launches new mental health initiative. (29 Mar 2015). The Independent. Available at: www.independent.co.uk/news/people/demi-lovato-discusses-her-bipolar-disorder-and-alcohol-addiction-as-she-launches-new-mental-health-10284176.html (accessed 10 March 2016).

Usher B (2015) Twitter and the celebrity interview. Celebrity Studies 6(3): 306–321.

Vrecko S (2010) Birth of a brain disease: Science, the state and addiction neuropolitics. History of Human Sciences 5(1): 53–67.

Wilson R (Director). (2012) Russell Brand From Addiction to Recovery [Documentary]. Produced by BBC Three,UK.

Wilson R (Director). (2014) Russell Brand: End the Drugs War [Documentary]. Produced by BBC Three, UK.

Winter K (2016) Coproduction of scientific addiction knowledge in everyday discourse. Contemporary Drug Problems 43(1): 25–46.

Weller K, Bruns A, Burgess J, et al. (2014) Twitter and society: An introduction. In: Weller K, Bruns A, Burgess J, Mahrt M, and Puschmann C (eds.), Twitter and Society. New York: Peter Lang, pp. xxix–xxxviii.

Zappavigna M (2011) Ambient affiliation: A linguistic perspective on Twitter. New Media Society 13(5): 788–806.

[yueqqi-main]

30 questions

Tagged by: @mafiyaxiii

Gender: Male

Birthday: September 29th

Last movie seen: I don’t even remember anymore. I haven’t had much time to watch movies in awhile.

What do you post/reblog: On my main blog, all kinds of MBTI crap, cat pictures, Harry Potter stuff, and some anime stuff here and there I also post stuff about MBTI Simulator. On my art blog, I post whatever traditional art I have (and stuff about my in progress fanfics) and reblog artsy stuff, writing stuff, and all other kinds of fandom stuff.

Last thing you Googled: “Do gay weddings have 2 bachelor’s parties?” I was curious okay; I’m not that romantic

Favorite blog: All my mutuals. Bonus points if the blog has a nice theme.

Dream job: Nuclear engineer working preferably in the aerospace industry, or a software engineer/programmer/graphic designer either working for a video game company or independently as an entrepreneur.

Dream trip: Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, China (for the Forbidden Palace)...

What would be your first entry in a new diary: I don’t have a diary. I do, however, have an agenda in which I write down my life goals in a chronological order and a phone in which I can use to rant to whoever is willing to listen, which is usually ENFP.

Top 3 things you love about yourself: A) I am able to solve problems creatively when needed, b) my ability to dissociate so I’m pretty much invulnerable to most emotional manipulation, and c) my tenacity to finish things I started (in the case that I determine that the project is worth pursuing).

3 things you wish you knew how to do: Having an eidetic memory, how to do digital art (I’ll learn soon, since I managed to snag a drawing tablet at a decent discount a month ago), and being able to do calculus easily in my head.

Something you wish you had discovered/invented first: Let’s just say that if I were Nikola Tesla, I would make sure that Edison would not have bested me. Alternatively, as a certain Roman Emperor who discovered that Egypt had the Library of Alexandria, I would have saved the library from being burned down so humanity would be much further along in technological advancement.

3 qualities you like in a person: Open-minded but still a critical thinker, loyalty, and honesty.

3 qualities you dislike in a person: Narrow-mindedness, willful ignorance (Unintentional ignorance is fine, but I hate it when someone resorts to basically sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming LALALA), and egocentricity.

Favorite planet: Mars, since it will be the first planet we’ll colonize.

A resolution you make every year:  Me @ me: So, you made all these mistakes last year. Don’t do that.

Something you’re better at than most people: Being able to be harsh and ruthless (as some would describe me) when it’s needed. Most people (that I know at least) allow emotions to get in the way of making important decisions instead of being pragmatic.

Something you’re worse at than most people: Toning down my aggressiveness and sharp tongue when it’s necessary. I accidentally made someone cry last year.

Favorite thing about tumblr: Being able to share ideas and safely communicate without too much worry of offending anyone. I love how most people here are responsive, unlike other websites.

Least favorite thing about tumblr: SJWs and TERFs. Thankfully I can avoid those people like the plague on here.

Weapon of choice: A concealable knife for self defense. Probably a switchblade or a pocket knife. A dagger works too.

Something not many people know about you: That I can actually draw and do artsy stuff pretty well (@ other STEM students), or that I’m an engineering student (@ other artsy people). Also, not many people know that my nerdiness extends to being a TA for my chemistry teacher.

Favorite means of transport: Walking. I can’t drive, and I’m extremely reluctant to learn.

Favorite story: Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

Chicken or egg: Depends on what I feel like frying at the time.

Something that always makes you laugh: Dark humor, science humor, punny humor, and slightly inappropriate humor because I can be immature like that sometimes.

What is the strangest thing about you: To summarize what some of my friends have said about me, I’m a complete cinnamon roll until I’m not, in which I turn into Satan.

You get to switch places with someone for a day, who is it and why: Donald Trump, so I can overturn all of his policies and hand more power to more trustworthy people who actually care about minorities while ensuring that once Trump regains control of his body, he can’t reverse my actions. Or, perhaps resign from presidency altogether.

I tag @tetheredstar, @ricocheting-paper-planes, @ravenclawer, @dethnira, @amazoniansiege, @bgrizzr, and anyone else who wants to do this.

[thenuanceddebater]

Let’s Talk About the CNN Debacle

It’s been a while since I’ve done a “let’s talk about post”, but I feel like this latest debacle associated with the CNN meme is enough of a cause to break my unintentional vow of silence. So, without further ado let’s do a general review of what exactly is going on with this whole CNN story and then we’ll talk about legality versus morality and ethics and how this applies. 

For starters, I’m just going to do an incredibly “quick and dirty” summary of the facts in the CNN case. On July 2, 2017 Donald Trump tweeted a gif of him beating up a man with the CNN logo placed over his head. The context from this gif was his Wrestlemania 23 match with CEO of WWE (then WWF I believe) Vince McMahon. CNN and some other outlets chose to interpret this meme as a sort of implied threat from the President (who it is worth noting also retweeted this tweet from the official POTUS twitter as well). The meme was considered in conflict with a statement from Assistant Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders that, “ The president in no way form or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence, if anything quite the contrary”, a statement that CNN decided to directly tweet at Donald Trump as you can see here. 

Then the story gets interesting. Reddit user HanAssholeSolo on r/The_Donald claimed authorship of the gif in Trump’s tweet. This ignited a media frenzy over HanAssholeSolo’s other posts-- some of which were antisemitic, or racist in nature (one for example which identified CNN contributers with a Star of David called “Something strange about CNN... Can’t put my finger on it...”). Politico journalist Jared Yates Sexton claims to have been the first journalist that revealed HanAssholeSolo’s antisemitic content which quickly circulated both through other press outlets and over social media. 

Meanwhile, according to its own public statement, CNN then began to look for HanAssholeSolo’s identity while also asking the White House why the gif was tweeted in the first place. The White House proved to be evasive in their response, but HanAssholeSolo’s identity was not so evasive. Apparently, HanAssholeSolo had posted/ had visible personal details on his reddit account that CNN then used to identify him via Facebook. It is that this point that CNN first reaches out for contact with HanAssholeSolo on Monday July 3, 2017. 

HanAssholeSolo does not respond to this request for contact but instead begins to delete all of his reddit posts, images associated with said posts, and finally his reddit account after first posting an apology on r/ The_Donald (which I would love to post, but has since been deleted by moderators there, the CNN official statement includes either the apology in full, or at least in part, so I’ll post that again here). After posting this apology, HanAssholeSolo called CNN, confirmed his identity and agreed to an interview. During this interview HanAssholeSolo, “sounded nervous about his identity being revealed and asked to not be named out of fear for his personal safety and for the public embarrassment it would bring to him and his family.” CNN agreed not to publish HanAssholeSolo’s name citing the fact that he had made an extensive apology, but included a line that indicated that this position could be reversed when they stated, “CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.” And the Internet exploded again. 

After this point, it’s difficult to do things chronologically.  All of the backlash seems to happen at about the same time. Some important pieces of backlash comes from Donald Trump Jr. Who makes a this tweet (which I’ll also post below)

This tweet is the first real instance of HanAssholeSolo being called a minor, a talking point that CNN’s critics quickly adopted. This tweet from Ted Cruz is also highly important as it is one of the two main tweets that starts the argument that CNN’s actions may have been illegal. 

The other widely-cited comment is from Julian Assange who had this to say 

Now, these legal claims are going to be the basis of the rest of my discussion of this issue. But, before we get to that CNN did have more information to reveal. First, that HanAssholeSolo called CNN and said that he completely agreed with their statement and was not in fact being threatened.

Which led to yet more memes about how this statement sounds similar to the expected statement a blackmailed person would make such as this one comparing CNN to ISIS (further down the tweet)

As well as comparisons to North Korea’s trial, and imprisonment of the recently-deceased Otto Warmbier. 

CNN’s second revelation is that HanAssholeSolo is not a minor and is in fact a middle-aged man

Now, you can come to whatever conclusions you would like to about HanAssholeSolo’s age. I’ve personally seen no evidence that he was in fact a minor, other than what Donald Trump Jr has retweeted which seems to originate form 4-chan, so I’m going to say that he probably wasn’t a minor. If anyone has any further information on the subject, I’d love to see it. Instead, we’re going to focus primarily on the legal claims here. 

So, first is the legal claim from Ted Cruz. In order for this law to apply, CNN would have needed to have obtained HanAssholeSolo’s IP address, and there’s just no reason why they would have needed that. Nothing that CNN did or said indicates that they must have HanAssholeSolo’s IP address. Again, if there’s information I’m missing please feel free to present it. But, based on what I have seen both from official and nonofficial sources, there is no reason to expect that CNN has HanAssholeSolo’s IP address or even any reason to assume that CNN engaged in any kind of hacking whatsoever. I think it is entirely possible that HanAssholeSolo posted personally identifying information publicly and CNN used that to track down his Facebook which had his other personal details on it. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I think it’s pretty safe to say that Senator Cruz’s remarks while legally correct are completely irrelevant to this situation. 

Next, we need to look at Julian Assange’s claims. Mr. Assange’s claims are at the very least more probable than Senator Cruz’s; however, there is still  no evidence  that these claims are correct as well. CNN denies having made any kind of real agreement with HanAssholeSolo and instead seems to be predicating its actions on the fact that HanAssholeSolo took certain actions which rendered him no longer a part of the story. Therefore, rather than a tit-for-tat agreement that would make it easy to prosecute for coercion, blackmail, etc. you have a more complicated situation in which people make decisions without consulting one another based on previous decisions that the other has made. 

CNN made the completely legal decision to attempt to contact HanAssholeSolo and succeeded in finding him. This resulted in HanAssholeSolo deleting his accounts, apologizing, and then returning the contact to CNN where he informed them of his actions and likely asked to not be named in their story. CNN agreed to not name him but included a, granted poorly-worded, provision in their statement that this fact was subject to change if HanAssholeSolo continued his actions. This is all the information that we have about what CNN did. IF there is more information, lease feel free to present it but from what I’ve seen it just doesn’t exist. 

Now, allow me to be abundantly clear here: CNN absolutely has the legal right to publish HanAssholeSolo’s name if they want to. It is entirely legal for a newspaper to engage in investigative reporting as long as they do not break the law, and nothing that CNN has obtained warrants them breaking the law in any way, shape or form. The only way that this would not be legal is if CNN made the explicit threat to HanAssholeSolo that his name would be published if he continued to engage in his online activities and then told him that the only way to avoid his name being published was to stop his online activities and give a full public apology to CNN. This situation would trigger the New York statute (and a federal statute) on corruption. Anything less than this? Doesn’t trigger that statute. 

This is the burden of proof that the side making legal claims against CNN must meet. And yeah. It’s possible that this happened. But there’s just no evidence of it. Similar to how a lack of evidence of a rape doesn’t mean that the rape didn’t happen, but does mean that a person should not be convicted of rape, I can’t prove that CNN is not-guilty. I can say very, very assuredly that the evidence to convict CNN in a court of law does not exist at the current time. Therefore, it is entirely premature to talk about CNN as if they have done something illegal. 

Finally, a quick legal and ethical note on doxxing. First of all, doxxing is not as illegal as most people assume. As long as the individual in question acquires the personal information through legal measures (especially if the person themselves admits said information), then publishing public information does not tend to be illegal. Ethics are a different story. First of all, ethics tend to be more subjective and individual than law, but according to the Society of Professional Journalists code of journalistic ethics, CNN also behaved ethically in this situation. Despite what a lot of the fracas online would have you assume, CNN did not in fact doxx HanAssholeSolo because CNN did not in fact publish his personal information. So, even the people upset with CNN about doxxing are a reacting a little over-emotionally. 

There is one real valid reason to be upset with CNN, and that is a subjective opinion that the HanAssholeSolo story was not in fact newsworthy and thus did not warrant any kind of investigative reporting. However, newsworthiness is impossible to really put to a more objective metric and is one of the most subjective arguments against a story possible. In this situation for example, asserting that HanAssholeSolo made a simple harmless meme is just as correct as pointing out that HanAssholeSolo inserted himself into the national discourse through taking credit for a meme that the President of the United States himself retweeted, The former interpretation makes this story seem completely un-newsworthy while the latter makes it seem obviously newsworthy. I leave you yourself to decide on which one of these views you agree with, or if you agree with something in-between. Regardless, this is a subjective personal opinion. Not an objective fact. 

In conclusion, this whole CNN situation has been completely blown out of proportion with people making fallacious legal claims against CNN, claiming that they violated objective ethical standards when they did not, and circulating a lot of unintentionally false information. The truth is that the people who are attacking CNN and condemning them for their actions are being just as subjective as the people who originally condemned Trump for tweeting the meme in the first place. They are not being objective. Because by all non-personal standards CNN didn’t really cross the line. And that means that objectively speaking, CNN did nothing legally wrong, or ethically wrong according to the SPJ. Could they have done something wrong to you? Sure. But that’s an opinion. Not a fact. 

[purify-orre-blog]

Addendum: Michael’s Video Logs - CH. 5 Section

TL:DR; Hi, here’s the last video log Michael made during his time in the Killing Game. This is Michael basically saying “I’m moving in with my new (past?) boyfriend and giving up on trying to be more than a player in this killing game”. This one is in the Main Folder, titled “1Intro_Only.mp4”. It is ordered before the first chronological video, “2Gamma_Suspended.mp4” which posted under the Prologue tag. These will also be under the “VideoLog” tag. Check Navigation or Here for the chronological order!

TW/CW : (Unintentional) Self-Injury, Plans of Murder-Suicide (Via Fighting The Mastermind Should An Opportunity Arise And Inevitably Losing)

Accompanying Music: Theme of Suspense (You Know What You Must Do, Even If You Don’t Want To)

The lights are on, and the sound of splashing liquid can be heard from the bedroom area. The Wii by the TV and all the games are gone. Perhaps Michael moved them to Yori’s room?

The living room coffee table is littered with little metal rats. They are stacked up in piles, and it looks like they might be in the process of forming a pyramid. There are over a hundred of them, maybe even over two hundred. On the couch is 5 separate pairs of the remnants of scorched Disney-themed oven mitts.

The carpeted floor is much more scorched than before, and fresh blood stains splatter the ground.

The sound of splashing liquid can be heard for several more minutes, and then it’s silent.

Slowly, quietly, Michael shuffles back into the room, holding a rat with metal tongs. It’s smoking. Michael seems unfazed as he moves to add the rat to the pile.

He’s wrapped a fire blanket over the front of his person, suspended in rope. It looks kind of like a red Snuggie minus the sleeves. And if Snuggies were partly melted through. And also smoking. He’s wearing oven mitts and 4 black-and-white checkered headbands. One is around his neck like a collar, one is over his mouth, another over his nose, and another holding up his hair. His hair is also all tied up in a short ponytail. He’s wearing Oswald-themed Safety-goggles. Fittingly, they are rose-tinted.

He sets the metal tongs into a bucket of water that starts to hiss. He unwraps the fire blanket and folds it the best he can, setting it on the couch.

Michael looks to the camera, his eyes tired, and he sighs. He pulls the two headbands over his face down to make two more collars.

“Project Epsilon has been suspended on account of me, pardon the language, not giving two shakes of a Eevee’s tail. Being the villain like Wes and Gonzap was a dumb idea and just hurt everyone around me. I thought it was the right thing to do, but I know better now.”

He looks over to the pile of rats and sighs, then back to the camera.

“After I typed up my last confession, I rounded up all my bombs and all the… firearms around the park.”

He says, pulling off the latest pair of Oswald oven mitts, tossing them to the ground.

“And turned them into rats.”

His hands are covered in scratches and burn marks, more than from the electrocution, but they seem to be clotting and healing supernaturally. He seems tired by this too.

“I synthesized all my TMs I had stored on my USB to hack and create a sort of super WISH move. That’s a move that rewards extreme faith in yourself for an HP boost over the duration of the turn or as long as it takes to heal to full health. I’ve modified it to boost everyone around within the nearest 45 foot radius, too. If nothing else, I’ll be able to help a little bit this way. I replaced Encore, because I used it all up on Caelum last trial.”

He looks the the camera for the first time, and his irises are completely green. Any blue that was there is gone.

“It can’t heal me any further than after I regained the ability to speak. And it’s incredibly draining. I can’t use any moves for the next three turns. It also altered my being. But Jovi, you probably knew that.”

He looks to the camera sadly.

“And if I use it all up, if I don’t restore my PP? If I run out of moves entirely?”

His hands are scratch-free now. They are just as scarred as before, but no longer bleeding.

“I won’t STRUGGLE, but instead enter a sort of HYPER REVERSE MODE. Chances are I’ll go straight for the first person that isn’t my trainer… In the 15 seconds of consciousness I have left, I’ll have to go for Oswald.”

He gives a calm smile.

“And my USB says Yogi and Yori are my OT, so at least he’ll be safe.”

The smile thins.

“But headbands used this way only restore HP so… It’s not looking great.”

It settles to something ashamed. His hands curl into fists.

“I’m running out of time. And if something happens to him, I know that’ll set me off too.”

He hugs himself and just takes a few deep breaths.

“Move Count. Wish, 4 of 5. Baton Pass, 23 of 64. Spark 9 of 32. Fake Tears, 12 of 32.”

He lets go of the hug, looking at the camera with a serious expression.

“I’m not coming back to this room unless Yori or Yogi make me. I’m also leaving the USB with my logs at the center of the rat pile, near the front of the table next to my laptop with my newest password ‘Y-O-R-G-I-0-4-B-U-S-T’. Said like ‘Yogi or Bust’. Because I love him.”

He looks away for a second and clears his throat.

“Not the smartest password, I know, but he’s cute and…” He covers his face in his hands, blushing fast and bright red. “I just said I love him, didn’t I? Great going, Michael! Tell the world you love the Ultimate Mascot, genius plan!”

He stands there for five seconds, before pulling his hands away and attempting to regain composure, face still beet-red like his hair.

“So the logs broadcasted live for Jovi’s sake, but I figure maybe some of Project Curiousity’s speculations might help the other Ultimates? You’ll find them all in files labeled accordingly. This one is the intro video. Or it will be. I wish I knew how to edit things out…”

He looks back to the camera, blush fading. “Project Curiousity. That’s the list of people with probable motives and connections I know about. So mostly you Ultimates, and former members of Cipher and Snagem.”

The blush is gone. “Most probably still active suspects are me and Jovi. Jovi and I?”

Michael scowls.

“Grammar’s not important, neither of us would do this.”

And he settles on another serious expression.

“Sure, anyone with basic motor skills, parts, and a blueprint could assemble a rabbot, but something like this requires tons of money, connections, years of planning, and I don’t…”

Realization dawns on his face.

“We’re all missing at least two years of memories or more, only one if I’m being really generous. And with the backing of that World Ender organization, literally any of us could have done this. It could be me, or Jovi, or Yogi, or Yori or anyone…”

Michael looks sad. He shakes his head once dismissively, and looks right into the camera.

“I can’t claim to understand why anyone would do this, or how they could have got to this point, be it alone or under the influence of someone like how I was blackmailed, but… I forgive you.“

Michael’s not hiding his feelings anymore.

“You’ve fallen for Hope the way I did, and it betrayed you. That’s the feeling I get.”

He clasps his hands together in a show of bravery, or stupidity.

“Mastermind, whoever you are… I’m sorry I couldn’t be there to take the brunt of their aggression. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to be your friend fast enough. You said I’ll never understand you and you’re right.”

He’s beaming.

“But that doesn’t mean we aren’t friends. I’ll always be your friend, even if you kill me. Even if I kill you.”

Michael looks back towards the bedroom, a soft smile on his face.

“I still have 20 more rats to bring over. They should be cool by now.”

Michael seems at peace.

The video feed cuts off.