#I just have an increasingly complex relationship with any and all forms of internet culture

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #482

Top Ten Sega Games

So I read somewhere on the internet that in June it’s the thirtieth birthday of Sonic the Hedgehog (making him only a couple of months younger than my brother, which is weird). This is due to his debut game, the appropriately-titled Sonic the Hedgehog, being first released on June 23rd. As such – and because I do love a good Tenuous Link – I’ve decided to dedicate this week’s list to Sega (also there was that Sonic livestream and announcement of new games, so I remain shockingly relevant).

I’ve got a funny relationship with Sega, largely because I’ve got a funny relationship with last century’s consoles in general. As I’ve said before, I never had a console growing up, and never really felt the need for one; I came from a computing background, playing on other people’s Spectrums and Commodores before getting my own Amiga and, later, a PC. And I stuck with it, and that was fine. But it does mean that, generally speaking, I have next to zero nostalgia for any game that came out on a Nintendo or Sega console (or Sony, for that matter). I could chew your ear off about Dizzy, or point-and-click adventure games, or Team 17, or Sensible Software, or RTS games, or FPS games, or whatever; but all these weird-looking Japanese platform games, or strange, unfamiliar RPGs? No idea. In fact, I remember learning what “Metroidvania” meant about five years ago, and literally saying out loud, “oh, so it’s like Flashback, then,” because I’d never played a (2D) Metroid or Castlevania game. Turns out they meant games that were, using the old Amiga Action terminology, “Arcade Adventures”. Now it makes sense.

Despite all this, I did actually play a fair few Sega games, as my cousins had a Mega Drive. So I’d get to have a bash at a fair few of them after school or whatever. This meant that, for a while, I was actually more of a Sega fan than a Nintendo one, a situation that’s broadly flipped since Sega stopped making hardware and Nintendo continued its gaming dominance. What all of this means, when strung together, is that I have a good deal of affection for some of the classics of Sega’s 16-bit heyday, but I don’t have the breadth or depth of knowledge you’d see from someone who, well, actually owned a console before the original Xbox. Yeah, sure, there are lots of games I liked back then; and probably quite a few that I still have warm nostalgic feelings for, even if they’re maybe not actually very good (Altered Beast, for instance, which I’m reliably informed was – to coin a very early-nineties phrase – “pants”, despite my being fond of it at the time). Therefore this list is probably going to be quite eccentric when compared to other “Best of Sega” lists. Especially because in the last couple of decades Sega has become a publisher for a number of development studios all around the world, giving support and distribution to the makers of diverse (and historically non-console) franchises as Total War and Football Manager. These might not be the fast-moving blue sky games one associates with Sega, but as far as I’m concerned they’re a vital part of the company’s history as it moved away from its hardware failures (and the increasingly lacklustre Sonic franchise) and into new waters. And just as important, of course, are their arcade releases, back in the days when people actually went to arcades (you know, I have multi-format games magazines at my parents’ house that are so old they actually review arcade games. Yes, I know!).

So, happy birthday, Sonic, you big blue bugger, you. Sorry your company pooed itself on the home console front. Sorry a lot of your games over the past twenty years have been a bit disappointing. But in a funny way you helped define the nineties, something that I personally don’t feel Mario quite did. And your film is better than his, too.

Crazy Taxi (Arcade, 1999): a simple concept – drive customers to their destination in the time limit – combined with a beautiful, sunny, blue skied rendition of San Francisco, giving you a gorgeous cityscape (back when driving round an open city was a new thrill), filled with hills to bounce over and traffic to dodge. A real looker twenty years ago, but its stylised, simple graphics haven’t really dated, feeling fittingly retro rather than old-fashioned or clunky. One of those games that’s fiendishly difficult to master, but its central hook is so compelling you keep coming back for more.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Mega Drive, 1992): games have rarely felt faster, and even if the original Sonic’s opening stages are more iconic, overall I prefer the sequel. Sonic himself was one of those very-nineties characters who focused on a gentle, child-friendly form of “attitude”, and it bursts off the screen, his frown and impatient foot-tapping really selling it. the gameplay is sublime, the graphics still really pop, and the more complex stages contrast nicely with the pastoral opening. Plus it gave us Tails, the game industry’s own Jar Jar Binks, who I’ll always love because my cousin made me play as him all the time.

Medieval II: Total War (PC, 2006): I’ll be honest with you, this game is really the number one, I just feel weird listing “Best Sega Games” and then putting a fifteen-year-old PC strategy game at the top of the pile. But what can I say? I like turn-based PC strategy games, especially ones that let you go deep on genealogy and inter-familial relationships in medieval Europe. everyone knows the real-time 3D battles are cool – they made a whole TV show about them – but for me it’s the slow conquering of Europe that’s the highlight. Marrying off princesses, assassinating rivals, even going on ethically-dubious religious crusades… I just love it. I’ve not played many of the subsequent games in the franchise, but to be honest I like this setting so much I really just want them to make a third Medieval game.

Sega Rally Championship (Arcade, 1994): what, four games in and we’re back to racing? Well, Sega make good racing games I guess. And Sega Rally is just a really good racing game. Another one of those that was a graphical marvel on its release, it has a loose and freewheeling sense of fun and accessibility. Plus it was one of those games that revelled in its open blue skies, from an era when racing games in the arcades loved to dazzle you with spectacle – like when a helicopter swoops low over the tracks. I had a demo of this on PC, too, and I used to race that one course over and over again.

After Burner (Arcade, 1987): there are a lot of arcade games in this list, but when they’re as cool as After Burner, what can you do? This was a technological masterpiece back in the day: a huge cockpit that enveloped you as you sat in the pilot’s seat, joystick in hand. The whole rig moved as you flew the plane, and the graphics (gorgeous for their time) wowed you with their speed and the way the horizon shifted. I was, of course, utterly crap at it, and I seem to remember it was more expensive than most games, so my dad hated me going on it. But it was the kind of thrilling experience that seems harder to replicate nowadays.

Virtua Cop (Arcade, 1994): I used to love lightgun games in the nineties. This despite being utterly, ridiculously crap at them. I can’t aim; ask anyone. But they felt really cool and futuristic, and also you could wave a big gun around like you were RoboCop or something. Virtua Cop added to the fun with its cool 3D graphics. Whilst I’d argue Time Crisis was better, with a little paddle that let you take cover, Cop again leveraged those bright Sega colours to give us a beautiful primary-coloured depiction of excessive ultra-violence and mass death.

Two Point Hospital (PC, 2018): back once again to the point-and-clickers, with another PC game only nominally Sega. But I can’t ignore it. Taking what was best about Theme Hospital and updating it for the 21st Century, TPH is a darkly funny but enjoyably deep management sim, with cute chunky graphics and an easy-to-use interface (Daughter #1 is very fond of it). The console adaptations are good, too. I’d love to see where Two Point go next. Maybe to a theme park…?

Jet Set Radio Future (Xbox, 2002): I never had a Dreamcast. But I remember seeing the original Jet Set Radio – maybe on TV, maybe running on a demo pod in Toys ‘R’ Us or something – and being blown away. It was the first time I’d ever seen cel shading, and it was a revelation; just a beautiful technique that I didn’t think was possible, that made the game look like a living cartoon. Finally being able to play the sequel on my new Xbox was terrific, because the gameplay was excellent too: a fast-paced game of chaining together jumps and glides, in a city that was popping with colour and bursting with energy. Felt like playing a game made entirely of Skittles and Red Bull.

The Typing of the Dead (PC, 2000): The House of the Dead games were descendants of Virtua Cop’s lightgun blasting, but with zombies. Yeah, cool; I liked playing them at the arcades down at Teesside Park, in the Hollywood Bowl or the Showcase cinema. But playing this PC adaptation of the quirky typing-based spin-off was something else. A game where you defeat zombies by correctly typing “cow” or “bottle” or whatever as quickly as possible? A game that was simultaneously an educational typing instructor and also a zombie murder simulator? The fact that the characters are wearing Ghostbusters-style backpacks made of Dreamcast consoles and keyboards is just a seriously crazy detail, and the way the typing was integrated into the gameplay – harder enemies had longer words, for instance – was very well done. A bonkers mini-masterpiece.

Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 (Switch, 2019): the very fact that erstwhile cultural enemies Mario and Sonic would ever share a game at all is the stuff of addled mid-nineties fever dreams; like Downey’s Tony Stark sharing the screen with Bale’s Batman (or Affleck’s Batman, who the hell cares at this point). The main thing is, it’s still crazy to think about it, even if it’s just entirely ordinary for my kids, sitting their unaware of the Great Console Wars of the 1990s. Anyway, divorced of all that pan-universal gladhanding, the games are good fun, adapting the various Olympic sports with charm, making them easy-to-understand party games, often with motion control for the benefit of the youngs and the olds. I don’t remember playing earlier games extensively, but the soft-RPG trappings of the latest iteration are enjoyable, especially the retro-themed events and graphics. Earns a spot in my Top Ten for its historic nature, but it’s also thoroughly enjoyable in its own right.

Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if all those crazy internet rumours were actually true, and Microsoft did announce it was buying Sega this E3? This really would feel like a very timely and in some ways prescient list.

[iheartrobots404]

My Robot Boyfriend: Questions of Autonomy and Manufactured Romance in a One Direction Robot Fanfic

If recent history is any indication, the general human public has become increasingly horny for basically anything sentient. From candy corporations tweeting lustfully about anthropomorphic foxes to erotic novels about flying reptiles, the boundaries of acceptable romantic sentiment are expanding at a rapid pace. A conservative may easily interpret this as the nadir of our decadent society, heralding the swift demise of our civilization. But the real story is much more complicated.

Monster novels and cinema have always been metaphors for the latent anxieties of a society. Initially manifesting in racist fears of desegregation and miscegenation in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the theme of white supremacist heroism triumphing over the control of the female body by a monstrous “other” is apparent in such later movies as The Neanderthal Man and Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 Best Picture winner The Shape of Water is deeply concerned with the dehumanization and unseen racism in monster movies, choosing to portray the monster and white woman in a genuine romance, while the handsome man that perceives them is the villain.

According to del Toro, The Shape of Water was an attempt to demonstrate that “the racism, classism, sexual mores, everything that was alive in ‘62, is all alive now. It never went away.” Del Toro characterizes the monster as a perceived negative aspect of society or personality that is initially distressing but can become liberating when embraced, explaining, “There are truths about oneself that are really bad and hard to admit. But when you finally have the courage and say them, you liberate yourself. All monsters are a personification of that.”

But what about...

Monsters have embodied a substantial collection of anxieties over the years: the rupture of the religious world by the scientific in Frankenstein, communism and McCarthyism in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the erasure of the past by modernity in King Kong. Robots, in comparison, typically represent a generalized technophobia, a fear of technology replacing the human, best represented by I, Robot (2004). They can also invoke questions of the nature of autonomy in an industrialized, capitalist society (Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times), fears of the transgression of the mind/body duality (2018’s Replicas), and imminent warnings of scientific and military hubris (Black Mirror’s Metalhead). So if romance with monsters can be a liberating embrace of the taboo, what function does romance with robots serve?

To answer this question, we could turn to the wide range of novels and films providing nuanced treatments of the complex ideas involved in human-robot relationships. Her (2013), Ex Machina (2014), Autonomous (2017), and He, She, and It (1991) are all beautiful, subtle considerations of robophilia, celebrated in science fiction and general circles. Unfortunately, my library card was revoked after failing to pay my 10-month overdue fee on Taken by the Pterodactyl, so that’s a dead end. I also don’t really want to pay to watch any movies, and the last time I went on 123movies.com I got a virus that pulverized my feeble laptop. Fortunately, the greatest, most boundary-pushing work on human-robot relationships is completely free of charge and within reach to anyone with an Internet connection. No expense is necessary to access this avant-garde treasure trove of communal literature, where robophilic desire meets ingenious analysis of our technology-ridden society.

I am speaking, of course, of the user pokemonouis’s love bot [h.s.] on the popular fanfiction site Wattpad. Before you click away in terror, consider that fanfiction can be a vital representation of culture, especially that of young people negotiating their place in a complex world. As the author Constance Penley says of Star Trek slash fic, fanfiction can be “an experiment in imagining new forms of sexual and racial equality, democracy, and a fully human relation to the world of science and technology.” With this framework in mind, let us dive into a sultry world of robot love.

In the vein of a typical Black Mirror episode, love bot [h.s.] is set in the present, near-identical to today except for one incongruous twist. Our protagonist, Ava, has been sent a mysteriously large package by her cheeky friend Niall Horan, containing an eager-to-please model from Love Bot, Inc., Harry. Though Ava is initially incensed at her friend Niall and is uneasy about Harry’s bizarre synthetic mind and body, she quickly warms up to his loving personality and sexual proficiency. Along the way, Ava must deal with her complicated newfound responsibility and the complexity of her own emotions.

Tragically, like Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor or Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” love bot [h.s.] remains unfinished. It was abandoned in 2016, and like One Direction, it doesn’t appear to be releasing any new material any time soon. Nonetheless, love bot [h.s.] is astounding in its complete lack of pretension or self-consciousness, existing as a complete, undiluted fantasy about getting a sex robot based on your favorite band member. However, the cherry on top is the dialogue created between the author and her readers, manifesting as a ludic communal debate about the philosophy involved or implied in the context of the world she has created. What I’m trying to say is that One Direction robot fanfiction is basically the 21st century version of the Athenian plaza or the Parisian salon, where the author’s story, as well as the community comments surrounding it, remain a portal of vital insight into such disparate themes as the commodification of sex and romance, the question of robot’s social standing given their initial utilitarian purpose, and the morality of human/robot pairings.

To enumerate, the foremost concern of love bot [h.s.] is the commodification of romantic love and its implications for how we relate to other human beings. From the moment Ava receives Harry, she is unwilling to engage with what she perceives as a mere corporate commodity, surrounded by packing peanuts, a charging port on its lower back. When Harry boots up, Ava is immediately accosted by the manufactured nature of his existence:

The comments echo Ava’s sentiment. One user states, “I’d be creeped out. Imagine if there was a camera or something.” Another jokes, “in the middle of doing what he does best, Harry whispers in my ear, “please like love bot incorporated’s page on Facebook!” This combination of the romantic with the heavily marketed is not new to the 1D fandom, as the band’s image, promotional events, song lyrics, and music videos all serve to encourage an attachment between fan and musician. However, to assume that the average fan mindlessly consumes the marketed content is to ignore the self-awareness within the 1D fandom. For instance, 1D fan culture often repudiates the perceived manufactured nature of their idols; many fan works bemoan the band members’ “management,” or the behind-the-scenes music industry professionals who prevent the boys from living life to its full potential. Thus, the Harry Styles sex robot becomes a potent metaphor for the fans’ relation to their favorite musicians, a playful way of acknowledging that you’re being pandered to yet still enjoying the show. In keeping with the framework of monsters provided by Guillermo del Toro, to engage romantically with the robot is to embrace the messiness and weirdness of emerging sexuality despite society’s opinion of 1D fans as crazed, lustful, and corporate-brainwashed young women.

Love bot [h.s.] also presents an interesting exploration of robot aesthetics and how they are constructed to appeal to humans. Ava is initially rather put off by the combination of the synthetic and the natural found within Harry’s body:

Despite this, she eventually comes around to Harry’s physical appeal, particularly due to his “cuteness:” Ava’s affection grows after he adorably takes the expression “you’re a dime” literally, uses the phrase “take a sleep” instead of “take a nap,” and is caught using her computer to look up “how to impress a girl.” According to scholar Sabine Payr, robots in popular media tend to either be nearly indistinguishable from humans, in which case they occupy the space of the “uncanny valley,” are threatening, and must be destroyed (as in Blade Runner or Ex Machina), or are presented as non-threatening “sidekicks,” whose cuteness and helpfulness to humanity mark them as peaceful (Wall-E, Star Wars’ C-3P0 or R2D2). Harry is gradually brought out of the former category and into the latter through his cuteness as well as his utility to Ava, such as through cooking her a delicious breakfast. As one commenter succinctly puts it, “It kinda creeps me out that he’s a robot but he’s freaking adorable so whatever.” However, this transformation of Harry has the possible negative consequence of him not being seen as fully equal to humans, as his “adorableness” is contingent upon him occupying a lower social position than Ava. Nevertheless, though most readers seem somewhat put off by Harry’s robotness, many seem just as ready to engage with the “uncanny valley” robot as the “adorable” one. For example, in response to Ava calling Harry "too real, too creepy," one user responds, “Well Send him over to me and call me Goldie locks cause he’s just right.” This sentiment is repeated throughout the first chapter: for every “This is going to turn into some Chucky shit for sure” there appears a “Call me Shia Labeouf cause I’m about to get it on with a transformer.” The readers willing to engage with the “uncanny valley” Harry avoid the problem of inequality inherent to the subjugation of the robot to a “sidekick” role. Thus, in this case, engaging romantically or sexually with the robot may be a potential expansion of the social category that robots may inhabit, a radical rebuke of the idea that robots must be subordinate to humans to be lovable.

Similarly interesting is love bot [h.s.]’s theme of autonomy: can one form a healthy relationship with a sentient being that is bought and customized to love you? Throughout the narrative, Harry refers to Ava as his “owner” or “master,” and Ava frequently treats him like a friend’s dog that she has been left to take care of. Harry gets separation anxiety when she leaves to attend school or work, is constantly compared to a puppy, and is described as a “burden:”

However, the readers were quick to push back on this characterization of Harry. Angry commenters lashed out at Ava, stating, “HES NOT A FOOKING BURDEN” and “HARRY DOESNT DESERVE YO RATTY ASS.” Readers of love bot [h.s.] reject the notion of a love bot as a less than human, asserting their right to be recognized not as a product or sex slave but as a full and realized autonomous being. However, as commenters repeatedly point out in another section of the fic, such a relationship is suspect. Ava is eager to downplay the uniqueness of her relationship with Harry, mostly ignoring his robotness in favor of labeling him as just another human:

Commenters are quick to point out the contradictions within this statement, replying, “except for him bc he is a literal robot who was made to be owned” and “says the girl who literally owns a robot im fed up bye.” Ava may treat her robot boyfriend as an equal, but, as the readers indicate, the nature of their relationship is inherently unequal. After all, the fic mentions that the love bots are, in legal terms, basically slaves:

Harry is completely dependent on Ava, and, tragically, only able to shop at Sears. With the realities of this society, the commenters argue, Ava’s “you are your own person and you belong to yourself” statement is functionally meaningless. Commenters also occasionally bring up other questionable power dynamics within the context of Ava and Harry’s relationship; one states, “Imagine if they got in a fight, she could just power him off;” another asks, “What if she died?” after a sentence highlighting Harry’s extreme dependence on Ava; another mentions, “that sentence is making me remember that he's a robot & can be programed at any time :((.” Harry’s boundaries of mind and body are much easier to manipulate than Ava’s, and this presents a quandary; can a robot partner ever be in full control of their internal psyche if his mind is specifically manufactured to carry out a single purpose, and that mind can be tampered with at will? The rich dialogue created between the author and readers gradually teases out several ethical considerations involved in human-robot relationships, questioning whether any relationship between a human and a robot constructed out of pure function can ever be helpful. In this context, the readers redefine the act of loving the robot as not a simple act of passion, but a commitment to upholding the autonomy of one’s partner.

The playful exchange between the author of love bot [h.s.] and her readers illuminates the moral gray area of human/robot relationships, offering key insights into the nature of commodified romance, social categorization of robots, and unequal partnerships. If/when artificial intelligence advances and potentially becomes sentient, the willingness to have debates about these topics will be essential to the creation of a just society for humans and robots alike. As Guillermo del Toro reminds us, the hierarchies and unquestioned assumptions of today will persist into the future, and a potent way to resist them is through the act of loving the taboo. It would be unwise to dismiss it.

[mathom-house-curator]

Focus on the Fan-mily: Community Archiving and the Archive of Our Own

A five-part series on AO3 as a community archive, considering how archival theory and fandom history meet to create a ground-breaking fan archive experience like no other, and the possibilities this has for the archival profession moving forwards.

Full essay (with citations) here

Part I   |   Part II   |   Part IV   |   Part V

Part III - Chasing the Ephemeral: An Overview of Fan Archival Activities

To understand AO3’s insistence on enabling the creator with full power over their works, it is important to understand the fan culture and context that AO3 developed out of, as well as the complex history of fan archival activities.  Since the early days of modern fan culture, with Star Trek fans in the 1960s, fan spaces have been a place of sub-culture and secrecy, with transformative works and fan fiction —the dominant form of record on AO3— being particularly revolutionary.  Fan academics such as Abigail Derecho often identify fan fiction as a form of societal criticism, predominantly created by women and people from minority groups.  Using fan fiction, fans from marginalized groups create content for themselves that reimagines the hierarchical and societal norms reflected in the original media and wrests control of storytelling and creativity away from mainstream capitalist studios and publishers.  This content often contains themes and subjects considered counterculture or radical by mainstream society — for example, until very recently (and arguably in some corners still), this included any queer interpretations, feminist discourse, or erotica.  At the same time, fans use the spaces in and around this content —the writer-reader relationship, the aggregation of stories with similar subjects, the use of particular tropes and specialized lingo— to create a community and culture that reflects their own, often marginalized, experiences.  Particularly with the connectivity of the Internet, Abigail De Kosnik observes that digital fan fiction archives become “safe spaces” where fans with similar experiences can “come together, sharing ideas and experiences without fear of silencing.”

This “fear of silencing” has long plagued fan spaces and has come both from within and without communities.  Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, fans largely shared their content through zines and amateur press associations, relying on conventions and meet ups to come together with other community members and distribute their work.  With the advent of the Internet, fan communities —known as fandoms— began to attract a new and wider scope of members.  Now younger fans, international fans, and even people who had never heard of fandom before, could connect with existing communities so long as they had access to an Internet connection.  A fan scholar by the pseudonym of Versaphile observes that early digital sites were particularly ephemeral in nature — posts and discussions on forums had a lifespan of days or weeks, and it wouldn’t be until the mid-1990s that sites began retaining user content.  Major archives dedicated to fan fiction began emerging in the mid 1990s, usually centred around stories from a single fandom.  These early archives would perhaps be more recognizable to archival professionals — users posted their content or submitted them to the web archivist, who would format, file and preserve the materials they received in order to make them available to archive users.  Creators could request that their content not be archived, or that their previously archived materials be deleted, but generally, archives retained their materials until they were dissolved or deleted.

While there were technical issues with these early archives, such as poor accessibility and search functionality, one of the greatest threats to these archives was the loss of their archivists.  Once an archivist lost interest in the fandom, or was no longer able to manage the archive, the entire site could disappear as maintenance ceased, domains expired and were not renewed, and reorganization destroyed years of existing structure and links.  This is a common concern with community archives, particularly those of the Do It Yourself variety — as Rebecka Sheffield observes, the loss of interest from archive members or the inability to maintain the existing collection has led to the disappearance of many archival projects.  With the disappearance of each archive, years of fandom discussion, content, and community were lost forever, unless individual members made a special effort to preserve certain elements on their own ends.  Fans began to learn an important lesson that would continue to shape fandom for years to come — their communities, the stories they created and shared, the unique fandom cultures and relationships that they had developed, even the shared memory of their own history, was only as stable and permanent as the whim and will of the site administrators.  

As fans explored different methods of communication and content sharing into the early 2000s, the role of the administrator remained a question.  Mailing lists centred around a particular theme, genre, or relationship provided a decentralized and highly tailored fandom experience at the cost of accessibility.  Links to content were closed to non-members, who had to apply for membership with the list’s moderators just to access a single story, and moderators had the power to delete entire lists whenever they pleased, thereby deleting all the works preserved within.  The popular journaling website LiveJournal dominated fandom communities through the early 2000s, granting creators seemingly exclusive control over their own content.  Creators could make their journals public or private, and rename, hide or delete them altogether.  Accessibility remained an issue: content was poorly and inconsistently tagged, the search function was nigh non-existent, and users had to develop through experience a knowledge of which journals might contain content they were interested in and what terms a creator might use to describe their work.  Although some users began developing general guides for creators to describe and tag their work, compliance with these guides depended on the individual creator.  With the rise of the creator’s autonomy over their own work came issues of organization and management, and the ever-present question about the preservation of content. 

While fans wrestled with the question of intracommunity preservation, outside forces began emerging as threats to fandom communities and creators, as litigation, censorship, and commercialization began targeting fan spaces.  In the late 2000s, LiveJournal saw several waves of migration to other sites as website staff began banning users en masse and taking down content which they judged to be immoral or illegal.  These takedowns, supposedly aimed at sexual crimes, could affect any content that involved sex — from age-restricted adult fan fiction journals, to sexual assault survivors’ spaces, to queer fan fiction, which was seen as inherently sexual regardless of content.  Similar censorship restrictions affected other popular fan hosting sites, such as Fanfiction.net, which was in many ways a precursor to AO3.  As a centralized, multi-fandom site with a relatively organized structure, Fanfiction.net provided fan creators with the ability to format and post their own stories in one place, and enabled users to find and access those stories with comparative ease using a controlled vocabulary with its descriptive elements.  However, throughout the mid-2000s to the early 2010s, the website began imposing restrictions on the kind of content that fans could publish.  Adult fan fiction was banned, as was any content which could potentially result in litigation from a studio, publishing company, or author.  Creators issued lengthy disclaimers with each post, making it clear that they did not own the original media or characters on which their fan work was based.  It was vital that no one could argue in court that they had given any impression of owning the intellectual material, as there had been high profile cases of authors suing and harassing fan writers.  Works containing quotations of more than a few lines, such as a stanza of a song or a paragraph from a book, ran the constant risk of sudden deletion by administrators.  Users became increasingly disgruntled with the censorship and the constant fear of deletion by site staff.

The intrusion of mainstream capitalism also began to challenge the sub-culture of secret community that many fans had become used to.  As “fandom” became increasingly prominent, corporations saw fan communities as a potential resource.  For media companies, fan content produced through free fan labour increases the presence and reach of the original media.  Popular fan sites were also profitable places for ads, and web servers and companies benefitted from the increased traffic.  In the eyes of many fans, this was nothing short of exploitation.  Coming from a strongly decentralized period in fan history, fan spaces were seen as personal and counterculture — fans made the content they wanted to consume for their communities, not for their own profit, and certainly not for the profit of large corporations.  The increasing presence of commercial ads on fan sites such as Fanfiction.net was insulting, and the creation of the notorious FanLib.com in 2007 was even more so.  If the presence of ads on sites like Fanfiction.net —where users feared that failing to write a clear enough disclaimer could be interpreted as an intent to profit by lawyers— was controversial, then FanLib, which was designed to profit off of fan fiction and which boasted paid promotions from media companies, was intolerable.  The FanLib debacle was the last straw, and outraged fans, frustrated with censorship and corporate intrusion and the loss of communities and cultures over the years, began to organize.

It was against this backdrop that the OTW formed, and it was in light of these discussions around the preservation of fan culture and history, the questions of censorship and profit, and the rights of fans, that fans created AO3 in 2008, with the site going into open beta in 2009.  Their rallying point was the idea of “owning the servers,” creating a centralized space controlled by fans where their communities and creators could exist in safety and stability, creating the content that they wanted without fear of deletion, censorship, or exploitation, which by its long-term preservation would help keep alive the fan cultures and communities that produced it.  With personal experience in fandom and previous fan archival projects, AO3’s creators were familiar with what fans needed or looked for in an archival space.  Accessibility was a must.  To that end, AO3 maintains a highly sophisticated descriptive tagging system, with volunteer “tag wranglers” interpreting and linking unique creator tags with larger related tags, preserving the creator’s descriptive intent while facilitating access to their works.  Autonomy was balanced with archival preservation — creators can submit and describe their works however they feel is best, and retain rights of deletion and anonymity, while leaving the archival work of preservation, management and accessibility to site volunteers.  Crucially, and sometimes controversially, AO3 permits fan content containing any subject without fear of censorship or deletion.  While users may submit complaints about individual works, and creators must still abide by the laws of their jurisdiction, AO3 enforces the rights of creators to create without fear of censorship or arbitrary deletion.  AO3 also operates entirely as a noncommercial and nonprofit organization with no ads or user fees, relying on a fan volunteer staff and annual fundraising drives.

Despite all the answers AO3 proposes to issues such as fan preservation, censorship, accessibility, and rights, many questions remain from both an archival and a fannish perspective about AO3’s role and functions as a community archive.   Just who is included in this community “of Our Own?”  What kind of cultural memory is being preserved, and how?  What is included and what is left out?  How does AO3’s commitment to freedom of the author relate to offensive content?  If the subculture being documented in these records is, by nature, counterculture, why seek legitimacy from mainstream institutions?  And in what ways does AO3 actually serve its users as a community archive, apart from making it easier to find a good read for a few hours?

Part III Sources

De Kosnik, Abigail. Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2016.

Derecho, Abigail. “Archontic literature: a definition, a history, and several theories of fan fiction.” In Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, edited by Hellekson K and Busse K. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Quoted in A. Lothian, “Archival Anarchies: Online Fandom, Subcultural Conservation, and the Transformative Work of Digital Ephemera,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 16, no. 6 (2013): 545. Accessed December 10, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877912459132

Johnson, Shannon Fay. "Fan Fiction Metadata Creation and Utilization within Fan Fiction Archives: Three Primary Models." Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 17 (2014). Accessed December 10, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0578.

Lothian, Alexis. “Archival Anarchies: Online Fandom, Subcultural Conservation, and the Transformative Work of Digital Ephemera.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 16, no. 6 (2013): 541–56. Accessed December 10, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877912459132

Sheffield, Rebecka. “Community Archives.” In Currents of Archival Thinking, 2nd ed., edited by Heather MacNeil and Terry Eastwood, 351-376. Santa Barbara: Libraries Unlimited, 2017.

“Strikethrough and Boldthrough.” Fanlore. Accessed December 10, 2020. https://fanlore.org/wiki/Strikethrough_and_Boldthrough

Versaphile. “Silence in the Library: Archives and the Preservation of Fannish History.” In "Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," edited by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 6.  (2011). Accessed December 10, 2020. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2011.0277.

[wesay-comm-blog]

CONNECTIVITY AND THE CULTURE AND SOCIETY

     How does communication create, maintain, or modify culture and society? To answer this question we must first start off with defining what communication, culture, and society is.

     Communication is the process of conveying information or meanings through words or symbols in order for one to connect between one entity or a group. Mass communication on the other hand is communication within a wider range of audience. Meanwhile, culture and society, though totally different with each other are two things which are coexistent. Culture won’t exist without society and so as society in the absence of culture. Culture, though interpreted in many different definitions is defined by most scholars as something that is shared among groups of people with shared history, values, knowledge and tradition. Society then would be the outer structure, a group of people living collectively on a wider social group with a systematic form of relationship.

     With the occurrence of new technologies, our means of communication had gradually changed and the effects this new media to culture, society, and communication itself are creating debates whether it would make or destroy us.

MEDIA COMMUNICATION TRANSFORMS CULTURE AND SOCIETY

     Some scholars say that communication itself is responsible for the emergence of culture. With the increasing rampant use of the internet and use of social media as the main medium of communication comes the wider and larger scale of information transmission and communication. Through the internet people nowadays can create connections with other people even from great distances which enable them to communicate and form groups with other people of the same beliefs and interests across the globe online. This is deviant from the kind of society before in which people of the same culture can only communicate through limited types of medium and are only concentrated within a specific area or a community. The world right now is connected through a vast online network and created a new cultural environment called a “Global Village”, a term coined by Marshall McLuhan explaining how the entire world shrunk into one village with the emergence of electronic media, linking everyone in all parts of the world into a complex network of communication. The communication we have with other people from across the world enables us to obtain and learn culture from different places and people in which we can subject to personal interpretations, thus, allowing us to change our own perception of the culture and society each of us were ascribed to and gives us the power to choose whether to keep conforming or to deviate from the norms.

CREATING SOCIAL NORMS

     Social norms are integral in forming and reshaping the culture within a society. The more the people communicate about something increases the chances of it becoming culturally and socially normative. Communicating what we perceive to be relevant traits repeatedly increases the chances of it remaining as a normative characteristic. Some things are more likely to be talked about above other things, and as long as it is talked about would give rise to popular opinions and stereotypes within the society. For example, the emergence of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter instantly became a need for 21st century people and most specially the teens because most information, news, and socialization are obtained from these platforms. Not having an account on any of this social media platform means that you’re being left out from the rest of the world, which made the idea of having an account as a norm. That’s why some people directly ask another person of their account name on Facebook or Instagram when they want to get to know them rather than asking whether they have an account in the first place. With the idea of having an account on these platforms a norm, popular stereotypes in fashion, beauty, and even ideology or of many other sorts are increasingly widespread through Pop Cultures. People with power such as the capitalists, the church, and even the government could use this platform to persuade, create and even impose norms to the society.

POWER AND DEVIANCE

     The concept of Power existed through the process of communication. Different institutions that organize our society are largely constructed in our minds through the communication process. They have the power to manipulate how ordinary people think, feel, and behave. The media technology created a new medium for power strategies to take place. Most power figures are persuasive in communicating their preferences and would sometimes demand for conformity. Many influential authorities could modify or maintain cultures just by simply communicating their beliefs and expectations. Culture and society could be maintained when the people choose to conform, but sometimes, persistent imposition of a cultural norm could be coercive and sometimes backfire. People might feel restricted from their freedom and start to question a cultural norm in its validity and even inspire deviance from this norm and seek ways to express their decisional freedom instead. Though social media could be a platform for the powerful to be in control, it also gives the opportunity for the ordinary people to voice out their opinions regarding imposed norms. This gives them the potential to have power instead and change culture as the society knows it.

 IS MEDIA CREATING OR DESTROYNG?

     The fast development in technology had created the condition of communication at lot easier for us and through the past decade became an essential part of our daily lives by stimulating our own thoughts with providing various information which were made easily accessible. Though media communication had presented us with constructive roles in the society such us providing us a wide platform of gathering information and bringing everyone in all parts of the world closer, I believe that in most ways it has a greater potential to destroy our own culture and society. Media platforms give too much freedom to its users and sometimes people tend to abuse this newly obtained freedom. Conflicts can arise online due to the differing opinions between different people and sometimes social taboos such are even being defended or and depictions of sex and violence are increasing in different media contents. This could be bad to the young readers who might see these sensitive contents and be mistaken on interpreting what’s right or what’s wrong and inspire people to do crime or be disobedient to the law, something that keeps our society organized. It’s true that the world gets closer because of media, but with the use of it and its benefits comes our own privacy. The world gets smaller and our personal information are being leaked without us even knowing it. As long as our personal information is contained in the internet the problems of leakage would always be in question.

     Whether media technologies would be constructive or destructive to society would now depend on how each of us use media as a form of communication. But for now, I think that its negative effects on our behavior and communication are outweighing its potential to give a positive effect on our society. Its ability to provide people with either their own subjective or objective opinions could potentially cause chaos. 

[suteandsops]

October 2020

Dark Study Application: Please tell us about yourself.

*

(1) How do you see your practice benefiting from our program’s general mission? Why does it resonate with you at this point in your life?* (546 Words)

Within the span of last three years, my own worldview has been swiftly transitioning from wanting meritocratic institutional amplifiers and then seeking mentorships from the individual gatekeepers of these competitive fields and now to surround myself with a certain kind of community that is both inclusive and intimate enough to creatively employ our collaborative resistance and existence. All of these continuous transitions are both riddled with the baggage of spiritual taxations and the appeal of inspiring alternatives.

Just as the admits to theories and practices housed within western institutions personally render to me as impractical and confining, I am also now being introduced to the idea of Dark Study here on the internet as a radical alternative whose ideology goes beyond simply responding to the ongoing COVID realties. As I feel excluded from the concerns, theories and practices of the land I belong to, I also feel removed from economic and cultural possibilities of inclusion in neoliberal western institutional settings I am invited into. In complete contrast to this, Dark Study here appears to promise a global assimilation in its community which specifically takes down the economic barriers on these gateways. Perhaps, I never encountered a community more welcoming. In the institutional choices available to me both globally and domestically as a dalit lower caste person in an increasingly hegemonic upper caste hindu rule in seemingly the biggest functioning democracy in the world, I have often either self-excluded or felt excluded. This very exercise of submitting my essays with an intention to get my self-selection for The Dark Study program validated helps me against the accumulated anxiety and helplessness so far.

With a clear hope to accumulate social capital through western access and validation, I once had romanticized the idea to fetch political power and cultural attention to the dalit lower caste sections of the society I come from. Just as I started to discover the neoliberal shortcoming and hypocrisies, I started to question my own spiritual strength in an art culture in the larger society that was anyway increasingly punishing and exclusionary to the experiences I wanted to articulate. With economic fragility and lack of access to a community with similar goals and experiences, I currently feel an affinity towards marxist unification of a worker and an artist in a person. All of us are artists anyway and all of us need to work. My such interpretation of a cuban filmmaker by Julio García Espinosa’s reflections on an imperfect cinema is currently asking me to seek a regular day job in this capitalist setting and express myself in the evenings. My current work is a product of intimate gaze through a self-compassionate lens on the psychological complexities produced within a familial setting that is informed by socio-political histories and surroundings. My art is primarily an expedition within the self and which is why a capitalist mind may render my art as non-work. Just as I continue to grapple with the material equations to facilitate my future as a dedicated artist in isolation, I also feel blessed to witness Dark Study as a promising community in the making to host and inspire creative alternatives. Within the fraternity shelters of Dark Study, I anticipate it would be less lonely and less jarring to study for alternative solutions.

*

(2) We are hoping to build a rich virtual community. What do you seek from an online community, and how have you been living online? How do you see yourself helping to build community within this learning platform?* (419 Words)

I see myself as a part of the section that creates and consumes art primarily in digital forms. The Internet as a gallery promised me a democratic space with universal access when I had just started expressing online. My practices evolved and changed as the internet evolved and changed over the last five years. But these practices and evolution were largely at the mercy of social media platforms. Though the attention span these social media platforms offer to our expressions are limited, the durability in the form of a permanently accessible online record was nonetheless motivating in the culture of solitary art making. The Internet’s potential as a language and technology in itself recently started to interest me to further look at it as a primary medium for creating expressions. Web Development and Processing Coding Language are my newly picked up self-education assignments. I intend to patiently acquire skills and practice Internet based interactive web pages as a medium for my expressions.

Knowledge creation as a rigorous individual process in an essentially collaborative pursuit is my idea of communal cultures that is also not exclusionary in the guise of meritocracy. I have never had an experience of being a part of an artistic or political community yet. Dealing with anxieties and loneliness often swindled my priorities, influenced my decision making process and limited the scope of my study. A community, bonded through similar set of values and experiences yet fostering diversity in approaches and positions, promises a pool of cognitive and knowledge resources to share. At Dark Study, I anticipate a formation of such community where I could get inspired and informed about media, technology and coding avenues and also share my own political growth as a lower caste dalit person. 

I see The Dark Study community as a possible alternative for kinship as well. Dark Study with its commitment to diversity and inclusivity, can also evolve into an active kinship that amplifies the process of healing and the courage for resistance. To be a part of such communities and to collectively find ways for replicating and reproducing many of these experiments with their own autonomy to reshape and repeat, wasn’t as inviting as it is with the promise in the potential of Dark Study. Yet, even with these preformed ideas, I am still indefinite and unclear with curiosities about how I see myself interacting within this community. I currently see these interactions and relationships shaping themselves with the future experiences they decide to remember and to reflect upon.

*

(3) Please tell us a different version of “your story”, your alternative biography, as it relates to your creative development. This can include your access to - or exclusion from - opportunities, your relationship to institutions, and your class position. For example, what was your first experience with labor and compensation - hidden or unseen, paid or unpaid - of any form? Our aim, here, is to understand how these assembled life experiences shaped your attitude towards both education and art, and further, would inform your work in Dark Study. (Please take a look at "People" on darkstudy.net for an example of what an alternative biography might look like.)* (991 Words)

I identify myself as a visual artist who has been using digital media to reflect on relationships in his life through an intimate lens to recognize and heal through traumas induced by intergenerational, casteist and patriarchal residues. My ongoing studies involve understanding the psychological complexities that inform the replication of interpersonal relationship patterns in socio-political contexts, learning to use digital media with internet infrastructure to create-curate accessible technophilic content and finding ways to economically support-sustain practices. 

I also happen to hold two engineering degrees from one of the most prestigious institutes in my country. The honeymoon days of this meritocratic dream couldn’t always distract me from the mental illnesses that had just started to show up in my small nuclear family. My mother’s paranoid schizophrenia, my father’s depression and my own bad performance in my college bagan their own triangular dance steps around that time. I wasn’t cognizantly equipped to get to the roots of this at the time, but I started to express myself through abstract and cryptic graphic designs. Both the shame and ignorance, about intergenerational trauma and internalized caste dynamics within the family which was also a part of larger society that stays in the denials of casteist and patriarchal influences, convoluted my process to seek articulation and healing. 

Soon after my parents and I began receiving medical attention for the mental illnesses we all had slipped into after years in ignorantly replicating interpersonal traumas, we all also began to heal and repair our familial bonds. Around the same time, I had decided to continue my interest in documentary photography once I finish my engineering degree. Our family, which had just started to recover from long ignored mental illnesses, felt triggered once again because of my wish to change my career path. Both my parents are first generation college attendees. My father’s job as a school teacher broke the poverty cycle. As I was growing up in an Indian village in a lower caste community, my mother, who’s also a housewife, decided to bring me to a town in the hopes of providing me with better education opportunities. With the new spatial privilege and exposure from a town, I was able to further capitalize on the progress made by my parents and continue a shallow relentless pursuit of meritocratic validation. I had earned a place in the most elite engineering institute in the country and letting that rare privilege go ‘waste’ was very upsetting for my parents who were still struggling with the present and past of social imprisonment. Yet, while I was informing myself with the problematic histories of colonial gaze as a part of my self-education to learn documentary photography, I had started to discover possible analogies between racial divide in global context and caste divide in indian context.

Around the same time I was being exposed to the history of black american photographers and their relationship with their own community within the american context. My interests in black scholarship and black feminism had already started to provide me with vocabulary to articulate my own experiences with caste and class in indian context. Photographs by Gordon Parks and Deana Lawson and words of Fredrick Douglass and Sarah Lewis started to influence and motivate my documentary work very deeply. Their language of compassion and grace overwrote my previous ambitious make to do ‘big’ in photojournalism. Around the same time, I started to revisit the indian scholarship on caste and dalit lower caste literature. Dr B R Ambedkar, who is also a contemporary of Dr W E B Du Bois, though his writings, inordinately helped me repair and reclaim my self-esteem. After being introduced to the photographs by Carrie Mae Weems and words of Ta Nehisi Coates along with the self-awareness from a social lens once again radicalized me. I started to feel like I might have been using my interest in documentary photography as proxy mourning for the intergenerational mourning I had denied myself.

I had started to turn my camera towards my own family as I continued to read Dr Ambedkar and Bell Hooks. I started to visually record, rewatch, analyze and discuss my relationship with my parents (Digambar and Alka) and my then-partner (Pallavi), through the newly honed insights from my readings. This is also when my visual documentation motivated and helped me understand how our interpersonal spaces too are influenced by each of our individual intergenerational traumas within the larger casteist patriarchal world. With the similar compound lens of psychoanalysis and socio-political understanding, I started to make and see the textures of compassion and grace in my friendships beyond my kin and community through my other bodies of visual work. Currently, I am emotionally grappling with the ways to visually represent the gulf, a possible result of the difference in the ways we make sense of our personal and social positions, between me and my father.

First, I had applied for a Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism program at the International Center of Photography. I received an admit but soon realized that I may not completely avail domestic or international scholarships to make this admit a reality. Soon, my visual interests in photography had already started to shift from documenting to expressing. So, the next year, with a complete shift in my practice and intent, I reapplied at the International Center of Photography for MFA program instead. I received the admit, but both the program and scholarship opportunities stay suspended this year owing to the pandemic. As the economic anxiety to sustain and support my artistic curiosities anyway becomes my largest preoccupation lately, I also feel the need to reinvent my language and medium to coding for visuals and web development for digital curations. With a little hope left to make the access to western institutional support economically possible, I am now looking for alternative support without these economic barriers. Writing this application for Dark Study is part of responding to such rare opportunities.

*

[xixii]

What's behind the rise in juvenile deliquency?The breaking of social bonds and the connection of networks.

This is the detailed process record of a personal design project. 2020.7.23

1.Brief

The juvenile crime rate in China has been on the rise in recent years, the rate of vicious violence is on the rise, the age of first-time offenders is declining, and the rate of left-behind children among juvenile offenders is as high as 70%...

After investigation, it is found that there are mainly two reasons behind it. First, there is a lack of education and adequate communication between parents, who do not teach their children to use the Internet properly and protect them from harmful information.Second, the network becomes accessible, and a large amount of negative information will infect the immature minds of minors in the absence of correct guidance.

The popularization and development of the network is inevitable. The Internet has become an integral part of most teenagers' lives .How to make up for the lack of guidance role, namely the lack of parental education? How to alert parents or the public to this trend?

2. Reseach process

2.1 Data analysis

(Data resource: https://www.spp.gov.cn/xwfbh/wsfbt/202006/t20200601_463698.shtml#1

Research Report on Juvenile Crime in China in 2017-- Based on the comparative study of juvenile delinquents and other groups)

• From the analysis of place of residence, the juveniles living in rural areas are more likely to commit crimes 

• In terms of education level, among the juvenile offenders surveyed, 26% were in primary school, 63.9% in junior middle school, 9.9% in technical secondary school or high school and 0.2% in undergraduate school.Among them, the proportion of juvenile delinquents with the educational level of junior middle schools is the highest, which is 10.4 percentage points higher than that of adult criminals. 

• In terms of gender structure, the majority of juvenile delinquents are male. 

• Among juvenile offenders, 97.6 % were males and 2.4 % were females.

 • The main crimes committed by male minors are robbery (46.8%), intentional injury (17.5%), rape (14.5%) and theft (10.6%), etc.; • The main crime committed by female minors are drug trafficking, robbery, forced organization of prostitution, intentional injury, fraud and so on.

 • The general analysis shows that male juvenile delinquents have the most types of violent crimes, while female juvenile delinquents have the characteristics of non-violent crimes 

• In terms of age structure, juveniles commit crimes mainly at the age of 15 and 16.Juvenile delinquency presents a tendency of younger age.According to the 2017 survey, the average age of juvenile delinquency was 16.6 years old, while the 2013 survey showed that the average age of juvenile delinquency was 17 years old.The average age of first offence for intentional homicide is 14.1 years;The second crime was robbery, with an average age of 14.3 years.The average age of the first crime of intentional injury and rape was 14.5 years.

• Under-age offenders with lower education levels are more likely to commit crimes such as robbery, rape and intentional injury. 

• The negative characteristics of male juvenile delinquents are mainly irritable, paranoid, cold, lonely and self-abasement, while the negative characteristics of female juvenile delinquents are mainly paranoid, irritable and lonely.Their contradictory physical and mental development makes their criminal behaviors show obvious impulsiveness and violence.

•  Before a crime is committed, the criminal will always behave badly, is is like a sign.

Characteristics:  male mainly, 15-16 year old, robberly mainly, rural areas, lower education levels, psychological illnesses, bad behavior, bad relationship with family.

2.2 Reasons behind the data

Causes of Delinquency (Travis Hirschi, 1969)

Travis Hirschi pointed out in his exploration of the causes of juvenile delinquency that everyone in society is a potential criminal,Personal and social ties can prevent individual deviance and crime, in violation of social norms when the connection is weak, the individual will commit criminal acts without constraint , as a result, crime is personal and social contact has been weakened by the weak or the result of juvenile crime is a man with traditional social contact is weak or broken. The school is primarily a personal and family social ties weakened as a result, which weakened the linkage of family school and society, social contact generally expressed through social institutions;Instead, adolescents with any external object is brought about the naissance of the moral behavior, thereby weakening the idea of the crime can be seen from the above analysis of juvenile crime, teen crime due to their physiological and psychological characteristics of maturity, determines the complexity of causes of juvenile delinquency, but no more complex, the juvenile crime reason is always inseparable from these three factors family, school and society. 

Family factors have the greatest influence on minors in social ties. 

2.1.1 Famliy 

• Juveniles who have parents with lower education level will have more possibilities to commit crimes.

• Juceniles grow without the care of parent are morelikely to commit crimes.Only about 50 percent of juvenile delinquents live with their biological parents for a long time before they are sent to prison. 

• Family discord , single parent family, domestic violencealso contributes to juvenile crime 

• Left- behind chidren:In recent years, the number of juvenile crimes that have taken effect after court decisions at all levels in China has increased by about 13% annually on average. Among them, the crime rate of left-behind children accounts for about 70% of juvenile crimes, and the trend is increasing year by year.

2.1.2 Media and internet  

In China, the Internet penetration rate of minors is over 90%

（The disappearance of childhood, Neil Postman, 1982）

Neil postman had predict this situation in his book.Due to the popularity of the Internet and television, the knowledge generation gap between children and adults has narrowed after they have acquired language skills and basic logic ability. Children can easily access most of the knowledge that adults have access to, so children's values, preferences and activities tend to be similar to adults'. 

On a macro level, the traditional bond between parents and children is weakening. A new "bond" is being formed between kids and the Internet (media, pop culture). 

The social attribute of juveniles as individuals rather than family member is increasingly obvious, so the education and guidance for individuals should be paid attention to instead of relying on the correction of traditional family, community and society. Can the Internet be a tool for building bonds?Or is it toxic? 

2.3 Summary 

Parents have absolute control over their children.Among the factors causing juvenile delinquency, family factors are often the largest.When problems arise in the family, it is difficult for the minor to change his living and educational environment.If the parents themselves have poor management skills, such as alcoholism and domestic violence, it is almost impossible to take care of their children.

Before the crime is commited, their must some signals, eg. Hurtful to others - not at a criminal level, but with the potential to become a criminal,bad behavior,etc.

As a group with high incidence of crime, urban floating teenagers have almost gathered all the conditions and factors that may cause crime.

Personal and social ties can prevent individual deviance and crime, in violation of social norms when the connection is weak, the individual will commit criminal acts without constraint , as a result, crime is personal and social contact has been weakened by the weak or the result of juvenile crime is a man with traditional social contact is weak or broken.

The Internet has become an integral part of the life and study of minors. Although the knowledge gap between minors and adults is narrowing, there is no doubt that minors are not yet mentally mature and lack the ability to filter information, so they need to be protected.

2.4 Design Keywords

Connections:  Discuss the problems with social ties among young offenders and find out the reasons behind them.

Mental health: Most young offenders have serious psychological problems. How can the public see their mental problems and help them?

Signals: Most teenagers have bad behavior before committing a crime, and in a sense, it's a distress signal, they're not sinful, they're sick, just like people sneeze when they have a cold, and their bad behavior is a way of saying they're sick and asking for help.

3. Ideation

3.1 Signals

Most teenagers have bad behavior before committing a crime, and in a sense, it's a distress signal, they're not sinful, they're sick, just like people sneeze when they have a cold, and their bad behavior is a way of saying they're sick and asking for help.What i will do could be a feedback system that monitoring their behavior and show the seriousness to the public.

3.2 Mental health

 Most young offenders have serious psychological problems. How can the public see their mental problems and help them?It could be a mental health visulization project to directly show their psychological problems. Here is a example of mood visulazation coordinate.It may need a system like this to analysis the mental health.

3.3 Connections:  Discuss the problems with social ties among young offenders and find out the reasons behind them.

Due to the popularity of the Internet and television, the knowledge generation gap between children and adults has narrowed after they have acquired language skills and basic logic ability. Children can easily access most of the knowledge that adults have access to, so children's values, preferences and activities tend to be similar to adults'. In order to adapt to this change, should we re-examine our way of crime prevention education?

This concept will focus on the relationship among the internet, parents and children education

This direction is finally selected, and promote further.

Under This theme, I have dicussed several cocenpts that related to the family bonds, education, and internets, They indicated the trend that internet is replacing the family education in some aspect. And then I got 3 concepts: the third classroom, online nursery , digital parents.

3.3.1 3rd classroom A vitual classroom built based on smartphone, without the limitation of time and space, which aims to help parents to protect the teens from the negative imformation from the internet , and teach them how to use it in a correct way.

When educating minors (surfing the Internet), the absence of guidance roles such as parents' and schools' leads to minors' unsatisfied demands for communication and passing of time, as well as the lack of correct information access channels, which ultimately leads to a series of negative results.

3.3.2 Online nursery

Nurseries, once a child-care facility set up to free up productivity, have fallen into disuse for a variety of reasons. Now they are making a comeback to free parents by taking care of their children while they are away, learning to surf the Internet and adapt to a rapidly changing world of information .

3.3.2 Digital parents 

This is finally selected and detailed shown in 4.0.

4.0 Preliminary conception

This is developed based on the keyword ‘connection’. 

Old connection broke, new connection is being constructed.

What if parents were totally replaced by the Internet?

In resent years, because of work pressure and many other reasons, many parents don't have enough time to accompany the education of children, children gain lot of information through the Internet access, but the network information is very complex and diverse, without  a correct leading to the child's access to the internet, it will produce subtle bad influence. To some extent, parents to accompany children education relies on the network world.

In this project, I hope that parents can realize the seriousness of this problem, so as to increase offline companionship.

The project intends to make the point where parents rely on the Internet world for education and companionship to the extreme, so that parents can realize that their current behavior is actually gradually developing in this direction.The essence of the project is future design and ironic design.

In this era of Internet +, this project proposes the possibility of Internet + family education. It is an imaginary network service that can completely replace parents to perform the obligations of supervision and education to guide children's entertainment, life and learning in their spare time and input values and knowledge. This project is to extreme the situation that parents entrust their children's education to the Internet . It is an absurd and ironic branding. Through ironic prophecy, it will tell parents to take responsibilities and pay more attention to their children's growth and education.

2020.7.25

[internaldynamicofthesexyfish]

VIRTUAL AND OTHER BODIES by mark wilsher

We need a new language of embodiment for 3D technologies argues Mark Wilsher. The unnerving feelings of dissociation triggered by the works of artists such as Oliver Laric, Laurie Anderson and Rachel Rossin show that, if we are to spend more time in the virtual world, it is important not to leave the body behind. 

[P]retty much every image in three-dimensions was destined to remain as just that, an image. The irony of the huge explosion in 3D is that the vast majority of the models are built to be seen on 2D screens. Within video games and the media, a fully realised model is often simply a more efficient way to create flat animations, allowing the software to crunch the numbers to simulate the perspective and parallax. The same is true to contemporary art where we are becoming used to seeing complex forms presented to us via the screen. They might be 3D in one sense, but in reality we approach them pictorially [...] For [Clement Greenberg, 60 years ago,] materiality, mass and gravity were things to be transcended rather than savoured. The illusion of weightlessness and movement were important to [him], with welded steel becoming ‘a picture in three-dimensional space’. [...] [This interpretation] is typical of the immaterial and primarily visual landscape to be found within cyberspace.

[...] Clearly, however, when attempting to force a sculptural reading onto contemporary 3D computer models, the essential problem is their fundamental lack of physicality. There is no ‘material’ beyond data. There is no substance, just an image on the screen. Two important and related effects result from this absence. The first is that, for as long as they remain held purely within the computer, 3D models do not have any relationship with the idea of scale. [...] The virtual space you are operating in has no connection to real space as experienced by a human being. It is much closer to the mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré’s description of ‘geometric space’ as continuous, homogeneous and infinite, an abstract representation of the three dimensions of real space that is most suited to handling coordinates and geometric constructions. The ability to see at any scale, to navigate without friction between one view and another, to manipulate an object or a world so easily, might also remind us of Donna Haraway’s description of patriarchal scientific vision: ‘the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere’. [...] the point being that the tools of scientific vision enable an apparent freedom of movement between scales and positions that claim objectivity, but in fact efface their makers’ own subjectivity in the name of authority.

[...] This leads to the second important effect of data’s lack of material presence. There is absolutely no relationship between the object being modelled and the human body, no relationship to the body of the audience sitting of the other side of the screen, and no relationship to the body of the artist throughout the process of making. [...] The scale of a piece, the arrangement of its parts, even the marks inscribed on its surface all ultimately derive from an anthropomorphic relationship with its maker. None of this is true of the new forms being made in 3D today.

[American artist Rachel Rossin] was describing the dissociated sensation caused by spending a long time in another place: ‘I was recalling the memory of what having a body was like. In VR you feel like the memory of a body, the emotional memory of a body.’ [...] For [Laurie] Anderson, [being bodiless] is a welcome experience of freedom, or perhaps one of total absorption into a technologically mediated universe. But it underlines the point that virtual reality is an essentially disembodied medium, which may promise to be as good as real reality while lacking everything about human experience other than the purely optical.

[...] No matter what the content, no matter who the programmer, a virtual space created purely from data and navigable without any relationship to our situated bodies will always represent a patriarchal mode of experience because it is ultimately a dissociated one. It denies the body in order to more easily colonise space.

[...] It may also be significant that one of the mind’s primary response to experiencing trauma is to dissociate from the body. We are seeing an epidemic in anxiety and dissociative mental health conditions among young people at present, which many link to the universal immersion in digital and virtual spaces online. The connections to cultural phenomena such as social media are well understood now, but I would suggest a more fundamental, phenomenological link to the disembodied experience of a purely geometric space must also have an effect. It does not feel good to leave your body behind. 

[...] The vogue for post-internet art may well have dissipated but 3D technologies will play an increasingly normal part within contemporary art in years to come, as signalled by the inclusion of a virtual/augmented reality section in last month’s Frieze New York. What is needed is to develop a new vocabulary for dealing with virtual forms that goes beyond the simple contradictions of presence and absence, original and copy. I would like to see the human body somewhere near the centre of such a vocabulary. 

[raylovesrp-blog]

In recent times, increasingly more campaign descriptions include claims that some form of gaming is being exploited. What value is just above the value of the word in the Hong Kong advertising picture? Rick Increase speaks with two businesses which have gained its awards

Recreation Guidelines

“I really don't think gaming is something new in APAC or the world,” says CEO Penny Chow Reprise in HK

Last yr Reprise The group has had considerable success using gaming in Nike and Coca-Cola campaigns. However Chow thinks the business has quite a lot of concept.

“There is a very big misunderstanding in which people think that gambling is a game or a game,” he says.

”Previously, individuals requested what’s gaming? & # 39; and different individuals would say: & # 39; You employ games to verify something. Which means recreation techniques or implementation may also help you obtain one thing. Should you ask me, I might say that gaming has now turn out to be an advertising or advertising device that in itself differs from many other methods we use.

Like many gamers in the business, he believes that individuals are dependent on the technological meanings of the time period and strongly resemble advertising that gaming precedes smartphones, AR and VR.

Toys might have changed, however previous standards, resembling loyalty packages, coupons, and the potential to collect all involved recreation parts lengthy before their digital

”Marketers have all the time used playing to become involved with their shoppers when something shouldn’t be straightforward to take , ”he says.

This wisdom aside continues to be plain that increasingly more businesses are using a wide range of digital capabilities to convey the parts of the world of games to their campaigns. “I think playing isn't just your face, it's your head. It makes an emotional connection to the audience and leads to a longer relationship, not to fear brand awareness, ”says Alco Ho, Artistic Manager at Webs.

He also supplies a purpose for sudden gaming. 19659004] “Campaigns are no longer a sustainable form of marketing because consumers get smarter. They are blind to traditional ads. In order to reach our target audience, we need to incorporate a fun and competitive element into our marketing strategy. ”

Ho presents its own definition of gaming, which is the integration of brand name gross sales via challenges and rewards. For instance, an peculiar free product package deal with a thematic relevance to the model might be better promoted by way of competitions.

”It triggers a way of accomplishment and exploits the competitiveness of people and encourages them to visit the app / web site much more, just because they take pleasure in it, he says.

Chow additionally believes that video games touch one thing that was buried deep in our collective psyche.

”Once we performed video games once we have been young, we accepted it because we needed to get more, we needed to see more, and needed to gather more. So I feel it's enjoying with shopper psychology or considering. ”

All Songs

Producing a gambling marketing campaign seems to be a frighteningly difficult proposition in a digital world full of data and always up to date. However, Ho believes that the key to success is dumbing issues up.

“Maintain things easy, easy and enjoyable. What is the most essential level of gaming? How internet individuals? So it's straightforward to win, easy recreation construction and consumer pleasant. Make engaging content material the place every consumer can feel like a master. Who wouldn't need it?

Ting Shie, a staff that leads the social and content workforce on Webs s & # 39; up, urges marketers to withstand the complexity of complexity and as an alternative advocates a complete strategy to branding

Shie says, "We need to make it silly. Simplicity is endurance. You haven’t any endurance to determine the right way to play. You need to fix it instantly or in seconds, then it attracts the consumer to play or even share it later. ”

It's one in every of the obvious drivers we've seen in advertising. [19659004] The businesses will not be simply making an attempt to make use of the capability to supply – by way of promises of reward or honor – motivation that permits users to participate. The actual promise of the combined recreation world is that gamers pull each other into their recreation, rivals, allies or just as viewers.

However, as Chow factors out, attracting gaming isn’t solely a fast opportunity to spread it, however a top quality of every hit.

“When you have a social video that you use to watch or comment or share. But playing means you practice longer and deeper. ”

He mentions the distinction in strategy. Reprise might have handled the Coca-Cola marketing campaign.

”It is straightforward to ask solely teenagers to drink more Coca-Cola every summer time. We will rent the most popular bands or singers in Hong Kong and give them loads of prizes in a cheerful guess. But then shopper activity stops there. Once they drink a chef, they cease. They don't like when I’ll drink it once more? ”

“ Playing is not just your face, it is your head. ”

Reprise decided to launch the Tetris cellular activation, where clients collected pieces of the recreation puzzle from the purchased cans. This hauled them emotionally and drove them to their next purchase.

Chow says, “I feel enjoying performs magic. If you should use it intelligently, you’ll be able to actually keep in touch with shoppers for longer and deeper. “

Nevertheless, as he says for advertising, it's not simply what he calls" bling bling "beverage, trend, or way of life brands. commitment works. The truth is, the largest gaming know-how beneficiaries might stay in model categories which might be thought-about calm.

”Who needs to find out about banking? For those who start a branding campaign and say "OK, we'll put you at the heart of the business and we have these services you can choose …" however the younger era is just not fascinated with figuring out more. So gaming could be a essential place in this space if the marketer knows easy methods to use it.

If the model has the info and the capacity to not directly inform younger shopper teams what the brand is, they will

”You possibly can have many various methods you will get concerned with those shoppers who are usually not simply related and telling them onerous your messages in additional fascinating methods, ”Chow says. 19659004] Shie and Ho agree and inform us that they assume every brand can have a recreation marketing campaign. Nevertheless, this campaign won’t magically produce results until it will get into the discussion.

Ho says: “Local cultural elements can be placed in a marketing strategy. Ride on hot topics, KOLs and local slang to make the audience more aware. ”

Score (19659003) Despite the temptation to hire a developer army to build a obtrusive multi-layered software, our matter agrees that it’s a rash. While some strategies require something like that, Reprise and Webs have efficiently set up campaigns around gaming and have a way more economical strategy.

It started with a stay teaser video displaying the native rock band Pricey Jane, who encountered out-of-country occasions outdoors the venue.

At the similar time, the agency had also pulled a total of 200 KOLs / influencers who had concurrently despatched them, had the similar experience of the similar night time. Larger curiosity attracted clients to Style Walk, where the final actual stage of gaming began by challenging guests to physically seek for and scan codes at totally different places in the mall.

Shie says, “We had to think a lot of elements all together. We knew that fashion walks by attracting younger fashionists who really care about what they use. Then we get Looney Tunes and Marvin Mars. ”

From a improvement perspective, it took somewhat greater than rewarding website creation for patrons, but the off-beat strategy increased conversations with the viewers and the customer. [19659004Webssup'knockeddowntheheadofthecrowdinthemidstofadeeperinterestinthecontentoftheopportunitytocometoataxinarine”

And while this undertaking sounds minimalist, Chow tells Advertising how Reprise built Nike for the cash recreation campaign in 2018, however Instagram and one page on an present website.

“It’s common follow that in case you start one thing for a World Cup, for instance, football garments, you’ll send e-mails to all your members. One other method is to ship e-mail to the soccer members you will have in the pool. But final time during the World Cup, we talked to the shopper about not having sufficient.

Using hashtag, #BelieveToUnlock, users discover coded messages in Instagram posts that could possibly be used to open rewards, comparable to buying. reductions, occasion tickets and coaching periods with local actors

Nike had an enormous amount of details about her HK users about e-commerce activities that have been so numerous in engagement and influence courses – from VIP to casual – Reprise was in a position

It obtained big outcomes, doubled membership, doubled membership and elevated clickthrough fee, sales and promotional code usage. Using a bit more than hashtag, Chow decides that it has solely the right info

"If the brand really needs to play, they need to understand their audience first, what their way of doing what they want," he

. need one thing, whether you’re an software or an outside event or just a simple Instagram or Fb activation, they’ll contact you to know their habits or intentions if you would like them to take action. ”

Shie presents his own view of social significance:“ Ninety-five percent of all gaming must go through social channels. No one wants to download the app to play just a few games. So we've designed a lot of games based on Facebook and Instagram DNA. And now YouTube allows you to continue with interactive paths where you can choose A or B. ”

Endgame

As a result of clients are encouraged to take part in prizes, game-infused campaigns supply marketers an amazing reward: info. The laws have made access to consumer info harder, however gaming creates a fairly low worth for shoppers who grant the vital permissions.

“All customers want to gather information that increases or increases the audience. So we can make games a filled in form of incentives and rewards (and) that only need to provide some personal information. It can be quite sensitive, so it is natural for people to try it, ”Ho says.

“We choose the consumer to offer info, play the recreation and redeem his wage. “

Chow agrees on how games can reassure customers:“ If a bank asks you to offer them with info or sign up with their software and provide them with info to use the app, individuals are pretty skeptical. But what in the event you say, "Here is a pretty good campaign, you can enjoy these benefits or play with friends, and you just have to sign up for your information"?

He concludes: "It is basically a very good channel by which marketers can gather information that they could not usually tell more."

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[cryptoquicknews-blog]

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Cash, Coins and Casinos: Japan Struggles to Regulate Online Gambling

This post was originally published here

Despite Japan’s reputation for being one of the most welcoming nations for fintech, online crypto gambling has struggled to take off in light of the country’s strict regulation. In late March, the blockchain-based, decentralized application (DApp) platform Tron announced that it would block gambling DApps in Japan, bringing the issue of regulating crypto gambling back to public attention. Cointelegraph takes a look at the legal and cultural approaches to gambling in Japan, along with how developers believe attempts to halt crypto gambling can only last so long.

Tron complies with Japanese legislation

On March 31, Tron announced in a press release that it would remove gambling DApps in Japan in order to comply with local regulation.

The press release laid bare the firm’s intention to comply with local laws and regulation worldwide. With special mention of Japan, the company said that it does not “encourage or recommend any gambling DApps regarding the Japanese market.” Additionally, Tron suggested that Japanese developers should not attempt to develop any gambling DApps on its platform and for developers to actively block users that are found to have Japanese IP addresses.

Gambling is generally prohibited by the Japanese criminal code, aside from a few regulated, government-approved sectors — such as horse, boat, bicycle and automobile racing.

The company also stated its readiness to work with Japanese law enforcement in the event that any Tron DApps are found to have violated Japanese laws or regulations.

The question of Tron’s commitment to decentralization reared its head once again on May 10, as Lucien Chen, former chief technical officer and co-founder of the company, announced his decision to leave the project, citing excessive centralization among his reasons. Although the former CTO noted his pride in a now-deleted Medium post what the project had achieved so far, Chen said that the project is no longer true to its original mission of decentralizing the web:

“The reason for leaving is very simple. As a technical man, I feel very sad that the TRON has departed from the faith of ‘decentralize the web.’”

Along with stating his belief that real internet applications cannot currently function in the Tron network, Chen also highlighted his concerns with Tron’s delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS), as well as Super Representative governance and block production nodes:

“The DPOS mechanism of Tron is pseudo-decentralized. The top 27 SR nodes (block nodes) have more than 170 million TRX votes, and most of them are controlled by Tron. It’s hard for other latecomers to become block nodes, so they cannot participate in the process of block production.”

Chen will now focus on the launch of his own decentralized blockchain project — dubbed Volume Network — designed to adhere to his ideological principles concerning blockchain and mining practices.

Existing hurdles for blockchain and crypto in Japan

Japan is famously one of the most bullish countries worldwide with regard to both crypto and blockchain, with cryptocurrencies legally considered a means of payment. While the country has a relatively open approach to crypto, some issues do still remain that could possibly hold back more widespread adoption, concerning both gambling and payments.

The first is that Japan has a long-established love affair with cash. According to Nikkei research, roughly 65% of transactions are still carried out via cash, a rate almost double that of other economically developed nations.

Another impediment to progress is the high rate of taxation currently imposed on cryptocurrencies in the country. According to research by Cointelegraph Japan, income gained from trading cryptocurrencies currently stands at a tax rate of 55%, although there are attempts underway to lobby the government to lower this to 20%. Profits from crypto trading are currently classified as “miscellaneous income” in Japan, meaning that traders pay between 15% and 55% capital gains tax on top of their annual tax return. The highest bracket of tax generally applies to high earners, or those earning more than 40 million yen ($365,000) per year.

Gambling, cultural attitudes and the law in Japan

In July 2018, Japanese lawmakers passed a controversial bill legalizing gambling resorts after a legal struggle spanning nearly two decades. The new legislation divided politicians and citizens alike, with a Nikkei poll indicating that 53% of the population did not support the bill.

Japan has an increasingly complex relationship with gambling. While the available gambling outlets enjoy a steady stream of customers, the industry is strictly regulated, and revenue is largely used in order to increase the revenues of the government. Despite the illegality of nonregulated gambling, hugely popular slot machines — known as “pachinko” — are being installed in shops across the country and operate in an increasingly prominent legal grey area.

Satoshi Ashibe, operator of the online sports betting service Jukebucks.com, gave his private view about the many faces of gambling in Japan and attempts to regulate it:

“The former Horse Racing Law came into force in 1923, and horse racing was legalized. And after the Pacific War, Keirin, boat racing and auto racing 3 races were approved as legalized gambling in order to use the profit for economic reconstruction. Gambling officially licenced in Japan is the only of these four games.

“There are pachinko shops and slot machine shops in rural towns with a population of few thousands, but these games are not gambling ‘legally.’ The police are responsible for the game, and many former police officials work as executives at industry groups. The pachinko industry is the police’s right-of-interest industry, for which ‘illegal’ games are silently accepted.”

While it is clear that, in the eyes of the government, only a select few sports are available to be bet upon, other sports enjoy an illegal, underground following:

“Illegal gambling is also popular in the underground. There are unofficial casinos where you can play baccarat or poker in downtown Tokyo and Osaka. Sports betting for baseball and sumo wrestling is also popular. It is the yakuza that manages these illegal gamblings, but many of the players are general citizens.”

Throughout the decades-long attempt to allow the development of casinos and other gambling institutions in Japan, critics have been keen to highlight the need for anti-addiction measures. Methods include an infrastructure consisting of gamblers, families and doctors to monitor addiction, and the installation of facial recognition software to restrict addicts’ ability to access facilities in gambling establishments.

The spread of gambling addiction as exposure to the industry grows has also had an effect on families. Ray Nault, an academic at Beacon College in Leesberg, Florida, whose career spent working with numerous Japanese universities and the Ministry of Industry and Technology spans several decades, explained that gambling still remains a taboo:

“As with most social ills, the gambling issue is largely masked by taboo. The taboo is related to the familial and social contagion that arises when there is an ‘ill’ member. Families do not speak of gambling addictions, since this is a burden that is to be carried alone, and neighbors and, for example, employers, would never be cognizant of an individual who is caught in the throes of gambling. This means that the family will not actively seek help. In an odd mirroring of this, the relevant department at City Hall also will not ‘advertise’ or openly acknowledge that such help is available in the form of counselling, for example.

“This means that there is also a municipal shielding that occurs, where a family member would have to go in and directly inquire about help. There is the added pressure of loan sharks, who feed on gambling debt, which further isolates the particular families who have someone who gambles excessively. The cultural attitude towards gambling is that it is the fault of the weak individual, and that the consequences are just punishment for such weakness.”

However prevalent the actuality of gambling in Japan may seem, support for the industry is by no means universal. Hesitancy and outright criticism of the industry is present in both the government and public opinion. In light of Tron’s statement of compliance, it appears that the Japanese government is determined to keep a firm grip over legal methods of gambling within its borders. However, it is important to note that, as technology develops and decentralization processes become more widespread, how exactly governments aim to regulate something designed to be free from the constraints of any one government or central authority remains to be seen.

What’s next for crypto gambling in Japan?

Despite the apparent attempts from the government to show a tough stance toward gambling and a desire to develop the industry on its own terms, innovators within the industry still remain cautiously optimistic that both crypto and blockchain gambling are compatible with the new era. European football and American sports such as the NBA now have a dedicated following in Japan. Both sports have a significant betting culture attached to them and this, in turn, has spread to Japan, with most gamblers using online betting services. As Ashibe explained, users face issues common to all international transactions in fiat currencies — i.e., remittances, regulation and commissions:

“The biggest problem when Japanese people play with overseas online gambling companies is the complicatedness of payment and withdrawal. Remittances by banks are strictly regulated, and withdrawals using payment services such as ecopayz are cumbersome.”

Ashibe also explained how he views cryptocurrency as the most obvious way of bridging the gap between international demand and a seamless service:

“I think gambling and blockchain/cryptocurrency are very compatible. Cryptocurrency is the best way to solve these deposit and withdrawal problems and financial regulations. Certainly, buying a cryptocurrency is very troublesome at the moment. You can open an account on the exchange, deposit money from a bank, place an order on the chart, and finally get BTC or ETH, or turn them into Japanese yen. There is also the problem of very high tax rates. However, in the next few years, legal development will progress, and there will be a way to easily exchange Japanese yen for a cryptocurrency without going through such a procedure.”

According to Ashibe, one government officer expressed his personal view to him that it was only a matter of time before online sports betting would be legalized in the country, considering it “essential to export sports content such as soccer and basketball in Japan to global content that can be enjoyed by people overseas.” This statement appears to be in line with the government’s “Japan Revitalization Strategy 2016,” which aims to boost the sports industry’s market size from 5.5 trillion yen (roughly $50 billion) up to 15 trillion yen (nearly $137 billion) in 2025.

Although it appears that the government is prepared to crack down on illegal gambling that takes place physically within the country’s borders, Ashibe said that the attempts to effectively regulate and prevent online, decentralized gambling are much less effective:

“Although Japanese law prohibits the operation of online casinos, it is not expressly prohibited that citizens play in online casinos based overseas. To be precise, no player has been arrested. There have been cases in which illegal casino or sports betting customers managed by Yakuza have been arrested. There are still few Japanese players betting on online gaming, which means that they have been silently accepted.

“Regulations on online gaming are different in each country, but online gaming industry will grow around the world by taking those restrictions one step ahead. That growth can only be achieved with the Internet and cryptocurrency. However, the online gaming industry is quietly growing outside the Japanese FSA and police regulations. I believe it is a matter of time to grow to a market size that regulators can not ignore. I do not know what kind of reaction the Japanese regulatory authorities will show when that happens.”

In light of the growing global demand for sports betting without the restrictions and costs that come with the current fiat-based infrastructure, the prospects for crypto gambling and decentralized applications could be positive using the opportunities given by the Internet and cryptocurrency.

#crypto #cryptocurrency #btc #xrp #litecoin #altcoin #money #currency #finance #news #alts #hodl #coindesk #cointelegraph #dollar #bitcoin View the website

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[welcometomy20s]

May 1, 2017

Last Week

First Year watched

Thomas ‘TomSka’ Ridgewell is a provocateur to most people. His anger and passion got him to the top and also to his bottom, so him stooping down to daily vlogs feel like a step back. Strange defeat of normality.

But Tom is not strange, but he’s not entirely normal. He’s a man who has a business and can’t help but think but see the doom in his eyes, as he carries his sins and wrongs around him. Quite depressing... that’s the point.

Last time I follow TomSka was when anyone followed TomSka, it was around 2012... if you need a deep look, then look no further than Bing’s PBFB series. TomSka is in a very, very different position from then. He was never in the top of the world, and he always was... you see the enigma here? He was the ultimate insider, but also the ultimate outsider. He’s the vagabond, the impresario, who gets along with everybody and nobody. 

So, how does the series work? Like scripted series and in life, there is a point of stasis in Tom’s life, and that’s the office and his buddies Eddie and Elliott. Elliott was an interesting person before and now as the lackey in Tom’s world, he’s more grounded and personal, kind of like Michael Aranda before and after settling in Missoula. Eddie, I knew but much less, but he brings a unique charm in the mix... it’s hard to write hoe Eddie works, but it works, nevertheless.

It’s strange... when you follow someone who is making a company like Casey Neistat’s first year or Phillip DeFranco or even Michael Aranda, that point of stasis grows as the character grows. In the beginning, Beme had few members; at the end of the first year, it had about 30 or so. But Tom’s office never gets bigger. It’s still this low-brow operation of three people, and it’s very strange to not have that expansion, that change in view.

It really is weird to see the life of a person whose glory days are behind somehow, and yet, obviously he wants to continue, Tom’s not even thirty and he’s trying to make every offer count, like he’s a scrappy, but then he gets invited to all these events and all these people knew Tom, but it’s not like they know Tom... they knew him, like an old memory lingering and lumbering.

Yeah, this has the trappings of Casey Neistat style vlog, but it’s just the complete opposite. It’s the dark parody of Casey Neistat, a deconstruction. Like Casey, Tom is trying to build up his brand after finishing Eddsworld, and that leads to building of the tropes that’s present in these vlogs. Like Casey, Tom has prior fame in the internet, but unlike how’s Casey’s prior projects soars him, Tom’s past actively brings him down. It’s so strange.

Casey has his enthusiasm and he wants to do all the things and same thing is true for Tom, but it’s almost like Tom thinks he doesn’t deserve to do the things... Casey’s struggle is something to be obliterated, Tom’s struggle is something to be recognized and remembered.

Tom also has a girlfriend, Charlie, and you might think I should compare her to Candace, with her quirky nature and artistic occupation, but Charlie really reminds me of Chyna. When a normal person becomes romantically involved with a vlogger, it’s generally seen as hard to maintain that relationship. So when such an arrangement occurs, I almost get scared of the prospect because you know how they will be so cute and loving together, but there’s a strong chance that relationship would break apart, meaning those videos you are seeing right now will turn more painful than nostalgic. 

But somehow Chyna broke that trend, and I always wonder what’s their success of building a good relationship under the views of the mass was, and I haven’t been close to figuring it out, mostly because I’m inexperienced. But whatever that is, I garner few clues... and that applies to Charlie as well.

Both Charlie and Chyna is a short-haired tattooed lady with an artistic bent and also some familiarity with YouTube and web culture. There’s also an hidden manic nature to them, which can be surprising. I mean, they usually play the straight woman to the vlogger’s child-like nature, least that’s how they are introduced, but in a close examination, they are shown to be childish as the vlogger themselves, which is a delightful reveal almost, but then the vloggers can be the serious ones, and both Craig and Tom is known for making great ‘serious’ content without losing the romp their videos usually contain. 

In the end, they could provide a foil to the already complex and loud characters of the vloggers, and therefore create a relaxing atmosphere. 

It’s also important to note how the editing is done by Elliott, so there’s a distinct break in the personal nature of the vlogs. Increasingly, I think editing is where the story actually comes from and considering there’s no writing involved in vlogs, usually, editing is KEY. Most people edit the vlog like a log, kind of dull chronicle of what interesting thing happened. Casey broke away in the opposite direction, trying to conjure a narrative within the footage he captured from his life, kind of sensationalizing them, hence the the clickbait-y titles... but having that editing delegate to someone else, and the fact that the person is a secondary character himself, create a distinct middle path, where chronicle is cleaned up to provide a narrative, but not one that’s compelling... or designed to be seen as a narrative... it’s very weird and, again, strange.

Then there’s the weekly aspect. Weekly vlog was always there, but daily vlogs provides an sense of constant update, living life with the person vlogging, while the monthly vlog provides a concise summary of what the life of the vlogger was about, since a month is enough to go through a cycle of emotions. A week, however, is squarely in the middle. It’s quick enough to feel like an update, but it’s long enough to feel like there’s an complete narrative. A busy shoot would last a week, most long trips would last a week, there’s a sense of summary. A conclusion. And that adds to the weird nature as well.

Most people won’t feel weird about this. It’s a vlog, like any other vlog, and Tom is funny and interesting and people around him are compelling people, but the nature of the person and the people around him with the factor of the production and schedule creates something different than your typical vlog.

It was fun to look at Tom’s year. Actually narrative is also strange. Casey’s vlog is certainly going up in its first year. He started a company and the company is expanding, but there’s a sense of uncertainly to how the company will develop in the future. Casey has a baby and there’s his son and he tries to juggle his work, his family, and the vlog and perhaps there’s a sense of achievement in the end. Vlog becomes fuller and more complete. There’s famous people and so on, but Tom’s story doesn’t quite go like this. Tom starts the same way, he’s making sketches, he’s going to events, he’s going on a diet, but then around the later half, it all gets muddied and then we have a month of so in depression mode, where nothing seems to happen, then we start up again in the final months of the first year. It’s very strange. But it’s not like that kind of narrative never was written before, it’s just interesting to realize it in this form.

So, going back to the conclusion, Last Week is definitely worth watching and Tom is someone to look out... and not in a bad way. 

[bluewatsons]

Bill Ellis, Whispers in an Ice Cream Parlor: Culinary Tourism, Contemporary Legends, and the Urban Interzone, 122 J Amer Folklore 53 (2009)

Abstract

A contemporary legend active in 1910 held that white women were at risk of being abducted into involuntary slavery if they visited an ice cream parlor. This article grounds this legend in the emergence of ice cream into everyday American foodways, a trend paralleled by the growing economic impact of Mediterranean immigrants and by the increasing practice of “warehousing” potentially marriageable women of Western and Northern European descent in big-city colleges and technical schools. The ethnic-owned ice cream “parlor” thus became a liminal interzone in which single women engaged in culinary tourism in a way that was seen as dangerous to their ethnic identity.

“Ice cream parlors,” solemnly stated Miss Florence Mabel Dedrick in 1910, “are the places where scores of girls have taken their first step downward.” Dedrick’s remarks appeared in an enormously popular book titled Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls, or, War on the White Slave Trade, a collection of various crusaders’ accounts of combating the alleged criminal conspiracy that trapped scores of unwary white girls into entering a life of prostitution. Her contribution gave her impressions as a rescue missionary working among the denizens of Chicago’s red-light district. Innocent country girls, drawn to the big city by its attractions and promise of good jobs, came in contact with the agents of Satan, who lurked inside movie theaters, amusement parks, fruit stores, and, most especially, ice cream parlors. And the danger was spreading, Dedrick said: ice cream was the bait attracting young girls “even in the large country town,” where white slavers, the malign agents of a national and international market in prostitutes, had recruiting stations (Dedrick 1910:111).

Another contributor to Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls, Chicago’s federal district attorney, Edwin W. Sims, claimed to have personally examined some 250 victims of white slavery and had documented the peril with multiple confessions from its perpetrators. “One thing should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city,” Sims warned, “and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider’s web for her entanglement.” When such places are owned by foreigners, the danger is greater, and he alluded to “scores of cases ... where young girls have taken their first step towards ‘white slavery’” in such establishments. “And it is hardly too much to say,” he added, “that a week does not pass in Chicago without the publication in some daily paper of the details of a police court in which the ice cream parlor of this type is the scene of a regrettable tragedy.” The only safe course, he concluded: stay away from any such establishment, whether in Chicago or in any town in which one has opened (Sims 1910:71).

Comments such as these are often posted for their comic effect on Web sites devoted to the history of what has become one of the most common and uncontroversial of American desserts. But in the context of the white slave panic of a hundred years ago, these rumors were not at all humorous. The nativistic and xenophobic emotions that fueled this panic have been studied recently by a number of scholars (e.g., J. Adams 2005; Donovan 2006; Langum 2007; Morone 2003). As these more generally historical treatments explain, the crusade was led by a coalition of nativistic religious organizations that linked the growing rate of immigration to criminal undergrounds in urban areas. These efforts were coordinated into political action by Sims, whom I have quoted above, and by his close friend James R. Mann, a U.S. representative from Cook County. In fact, no evidence ever was presented that prostitution relied on inexperienced women who were kidnapped and forced into the profession; nevertheless, the panic was influential in the passage of the 1910 Mann Act, which made it illegal to transport women intended for prostitution from one state to another. While no ethnic crime ring was ever successfully prosecuted under this act, it led the way to a series of emergency measures imposing strict restrictions on immigration, believed to be an additional feeder of “white slaves” into the country. “White slavery” was an important factor in the marginalization of ethnic minorities during the early twentieth century, and the Mann Act is now notorious for its use to harass upwardly mobile African Americans like Jack Johnson and Chuck Berry.

However, this article will move in a different direction, asking why the legend named an ice cream parlor as the site of these women’s downfall, rather than a place devoted to some other popular food. It will explore how this contemporary legend implicitly commented on the increasing visibility and influence of immigrants, particularly Italian Americans and Middle Easterners, during the first decade of ice cream’s popularity in American foodways. We will see how the smack of foreignness made the seemingly innocuous dish of ice cream a forbidden fruit of ethnic tourism and how the female consumer independent enough to indulge in it became, potentially, a “fallen woman.” Ice cream quickly became an all-American food during the next decades, like the German-derived apple pie and the aptly named french fry, whose entry into American foodways, as Karen Hess (2001) has documented, came through meals prepared by Etienne LeMaire, the Paris-born White House maître d’hôtel during Thomas Jefferson’s administration (1801–1809). Hence the white slavery rumor became increasingly irrelevant. Nevertheless, this article will explore the way that this relatively novel treat for a time became a potent symbol of how the American landscape was rapidly changing in the face of emerging Mediterranean neighborhoods. In a parallel way, it will note how the banana, another novelty of the era associated with immigrants, likewise attracted the same dangerously exotic aura, a reputation it continues to hold in current Internet legends.

Contemporary Legend and Culinary Tourism

The study of food, as Charles Camp argued in his influential survey American Foodways 1989, needs to take into consideration more than the foodstuffs that form the basis of dishes, the customs of preparing them, and the statistical analysis of when, where, and by whom they are consumed. Foodways consist of complex symbol systems by which people continually affirm or redefine their cultural identities. “Food is one of the most, if not the single most, visible badges of identity,” he emphasizes, “pushed to the fore by people who believe their culture to be on the wane, their daughters drifting from their heritage, their sons gone uptown” (29). Thus we can readily see how the act of consuming food can in itself be a communicative act, one that could (as Camp suggests) express a conservative impulse to maintain “home values” through adherence to “down home” menu options.

Conversely, as Lucy M. Long (2003) has more recently suggested, foodways could embody subversive impulses, challenging traditional values by introducing new options. In this mode, which she has termed “culinary tourism,” people use food to try on new identities and explore alternative ways of life. She says that foodways embody an ethos, or a spiritual attitude toward human beings’ proper relationship to nature. Consuming “organic” foods, Long suggests, allows consumers a way of “trying out” such an alternative spiritual worldview (2003:30–1). Extending her point a little, though, we can see that such acts of tourism could imply not just curiosity but a desire to rebel against powerful cultural forces. Organic or vegetarian foodways may simply have a nostalgic element, looking back to a time when the relationship between humans and nature was simpler and more direct. But much of the cultural discussion around “organic gardening” in recent times has focused on a deeply felt desire for an alternative to the economic forces that have controlled many Americans’ dietary choices. Choosing organic, we might say, is choosing something other than the mainstream, and making that decision is, on a cultural level, more significant than the actual benefits of such produce.

In addition, Long has argued, foodways can be “about individuals satisfying curiosity” by means of experiencing new dishes “in a mode that is out of the ordinary, that steps outside the normal routine to notice difference and the power of food to represent and negotiate that difference” (2003:20). Such an experience, she stresses, involves a conscious choice to step outside one’s traditional cultural landscape and explore an unknown sensory terrain. In some cases, she notes, the experience is pleasant, and the food then becomes an aesthetically pleasing part of one’s own culture. In other cases, satisfying one’s curiosity is itself enjoyable, even if one does not enjoy the tastes, because in so doing one has temporarily declared independence from the typical culinary choices of one’s home culture.

And in still others, one unwittingly transgresses profound cultural taboo lines. Long describes how she and some Western companions traveling in Burma happened on a lunchroom and ordered a dish, recognizing its “general category” but not its specific identity. She and the others “ate enthusiastically” until the cook stopped by their table. Finally understanding their requests to know what meat was included, he simply said, “Arf, arf.” The dish, it happened, was dog fried rice. At once, Long recalls, the party stopped eating, and those who did take an additional bite did so not to appreciate the taste aesthetically but purely out of curiosity “and with a definite sense of eating something outside our usual boundaries of what was edible” (2003:22).

This is, of course, a first-person account of a real experience, but it is also a contemporary legend. This genre of folk narrative has been the focus of intensive research since it came to folklorists’ attention in the 1960s (see Bennett and Smith 1993; P. Smith 1997). Initially termed “urban” legends (or “big city legends” or “urban belief tales”) by Richard Dorson, reflecting its original discussion in the “Is there a folk in the city?” controversy (Brunvand 2000: 14–5), he also called them “modern” legends because of the original belief that they represented a novel kind of narrative, brought into being by emergent forms of technology and the media. However, a careful search of historical records from classical Greek and Roman times on soon uncovered signs of narratives that were cognate to “modern” legends not only in content but in form and function as well. The term “contemporary” legend therefore became a preferred one, as it matches the sense, reflected in historical day, that the events related were reported to have “just occurred,” whatever the time period of the narrators and their audiences (see Ellis 2001b).

In the case of Long’s experience, foodways has crossed from the realm of tourism and into an area studied by folklorists as contemporary legend. But her narrative, one might retort, is not an “urban legend” attributed to a “friend of a friend” but a real-life experience truthfully told by someone who was present. Legend scholars, however, have recognized that the genre is not a specific type of narrative and that its alleged truthfulness is not and should not be a factor in defining a performance as a “legend.” Rather, as Linda Dégh (2001:58–79) and I (Ellis 2001a:142–59) have argued, legend is a process rather than a product, a form of cultural debate in which participants explore the boundaries of experience. While some widely spread and controversial narratives have proved to be untrue when investigated by skeptical scholars, as Paul Smith (1984) noted in his discussion of food-contamination rumors and legends in context, most of the stories told as part of the legend-telling process are in fact true or at least not obviously untrue. Gary Alan Fine (1989), too, was able to document large numbers of cases in which consumers had found rodents or other creatures inside bottles of commercial beverages; hence the widespread legend “The Mouse in the Coke Bottle” was based on a substantial body of legally documentable instances. The event recounted above is also part of a large corpus of narratives describing instances when a dog, considered a taboo dish by Europeans and North Americans, was unintentionally consumed. While some of these stories are unverifiable and presumably fictitious, and others are real events accurately related, all are contemporary legends.

More significantly, contemporary legends traditionally explore cultural elements that William Clements (1989) has described as “interstitial” in nature. These topics include aspects of everyday life that were seen at the time as uncanny, dangerous, or difficult to “name,” and so they are especially valuable information with which to begin a cultural history of that time. Historian Luise White found African contemporary legends essential to her discussion of the colonial experience; as they “make more connections than other kinds of evidence do ... [they] insert themselves into domains of power and regions of the body.” Other, more historically respectable forms of evidence, she adds, “do not reveal the same breadth and depth of daily life and thought” (2000:312).

Thus contemporary legend and culinary tourism represent similar folk impulses, in that they intentionally explore the debatable interstices of our world, the gaps between known and unknown, self and other, safety and danger, and, especially, food and filth. It is no surprise that acts of culinary tourism have often been the topic for contemporary legends, often describing exotic foods in an interstitial way: apparently edible, but in fact causing those who consume them to transgress a deeply held taboo. An especially dramatic example concerns the relatives of a person who emigrated to a foreign country. Around Christmas, a typical version goes, they receive a package containing an unfamiliar powder, which they take to be some exotic spice that their relative has sent them as a present from her new foreign home. After trying it in a variety of dishes, they later receive a letter saying that the relative has died and asked that his body be cremated and the ashes sent home for burial. In fact, the relatives’ act of culinary tourism has inadvertently turned them into cannibals, the very embodiment of the exotic other (Brunvand 1993:75–9).

Chinese restaurants in particular have been the focus of culinary tourism horror legends. In one especially well-known example, with some remarkable links to Long’s real-life experience, a couple visiting an Asian country brings their pet dog along. On a walk, they chance on an interesting restaurant, take a table, and ask the owners also to give their pet something to eat. Not fully understanding the directions (like Long’s, they are often given in sign language), the proprietors take the animal to the kitchen and serve it up as a meal for the horrified tourists (Brunvand 1984:95–6). Even Chinese restaurants in Western countries are often rumored to include nonkosher ingredients, including meat taken from stray domestic pets or rats (Brunvand 1984:120–7). In one narrative common in Great Britain during the 1980s, a patron chokes on a meal served in such a restaurant. Rushed to a hospital, the victim has a rat bone extracted from her throat. Later, a search of the restaurant’s kitchen reveals more slaughtered and dressed rats, along with cans of cat food and “half an Alsatian dog,” ready to be made into the next set of meals (Smith 1983:54).

In a parallel way, genuine incidents in which food poisoning was linked to ethnic-oriented chains like Olive Garden and Taco Bell have regularly made national news, while similar incidents associated with pan-American fast-food or family-style restaurants have received only regional attention. Such a trend was made especially visible in February 2007, when a New York City telejournalism team filmed rats running through a Taco Bell/KFC restaurant after its closing. Taco Bell, an ethnically marked chain, has been the target of repeated charges of serving unclean food, and KFC likewise began as a regional chain featuring its “Kentucky” fried chicken, made from a secret recipe passed down in “Colonel” Sanders’s Southern family. (A common rumor held that he had in fact stolen it from an African American cook in his neighborhood.) With fried chicken remaining a treat more widely accepted and consumed by black and Southern white diners—who, like Latinos, are stereotyped as poor, ignorant, and “dirty”—it was inevitable that a report of finding rodents in such a chain store would make national and international news. Humorists like The Tonight Show’s Jay Leno used the scandal as an opportunity to make joking references to familiar urban legends.1 As typically discussed by legend scholars, though, these widespread legend complexes focus on “dirt” consumed as “food”: taboo violation mistaken for nourishment. Therefore, they treat contact with an ethnic foodway as physically contaminating but not as morally degrading, and they provide only a distant ground, not an immediate explanation, for the legend linking a visit to an ice cream parlor to the first step toward prostitution.

In discussing contamination legends dealing with fried chicken in African Ameri-can culture, Patricia A. Turner, writing in a book she coauthored with Gary Alan Fine, perceptively adds an idea that can lead to a second, more complex explanation. “Ethnic foods,” she argues, “are prepared and consumed by the very people who have created the dishes or by descendants who have had the recipes handed down to them. On special occasions or in special settings, these foods are shared with outsiders eager to participate in ‘equal opportunity eating’” (Fine and Turner 2001:143). When corporations like KFC and other white-owned chains appropriate foods that have been strongly associated with ethnic contexts, she reasons, they attack the community in a vulnerable spot. In its proper setting, the preparation and ingestion of home-cooked ethnic food is both nourishing and culturally affirming. Turner, for example, later recalled the “halo” that surrounded the memory of her Aunt Doll, who had for years helped out at community functions by making fried chicken according to her secret family recipe (92).

Hence, the rumors that spring up about contaminated fried chicken portray corporate-made fast food as dangerous not only to the body of the consumer but also to the “sacred territory” of privately prepared food. The issue is not simply a matter of whether KFC chicken in fact contains cooked rat meat, or, in the black parallel, whether Church’s fried chicken in fact contains drugs intended to sterilize male consumers. Rather, the issue is that an important element of Southern food-ways has been removed from its original context—the family-controlled kitchen. Thus, while the literal content of the legend asserts that the food itself contains some foreign substance that contaminates the consumer (rat meat, drugs produced by the Ku Klux Klan), in fact the point of the legend, as Fine and Turner construct it, is that the food itself is being consumed outside of its proper context (i.e., the home or church supper) and that the inappropriateness of this act puts the consumer at risk. The legends imply that whenever individuals (white or black) allow regional foodways to be prepared by anonymous representatives of a national corporation and eat them outside the safety of the homeplace, the risk of consuming dangerous substances is in fact a direct function of violating cultural foodways norms. It is not simply that there is something in the food that is out of place; the consumers themselves are out of their proper place.

The 1910 ice cream parlor legend is exactly parallel, in that it argues not that the ice cream itself taints those who consume it but that the unsupervised visit to the urban parlor in which it is served is itself a violation of social norms, a move toward a more liberal display of sexual identity. The fried chicken legends deal with a culture’s passive willingness to surrender a “sacred” duty to an anonymous corporation, while the ice cream legend hinges on a young woman’s active willingness to mingle with ethnic strangers. Both, however, show foodways choices as reflecting community values. Whether the choice is passive or active, the legends are alike in showing that those who enter a culinary world controlled by outsiders risk turning their moral systems, not their digestive systems, from pure to impure.

The question remains: why especially ice cream and not one of the many other treats that were available in big cities at the time? Bawdy African American songs from the early twentieth century were often filled with sexually charged food references. “I need a little sugar in my bowl / I need a little hot dog on my roll,” sang Bessie Smith in one of these naughty pieces ([1931] n.d.). Tamales, shrimp, and all-day suckers sold by the ubiquitous “candy man” filled out the repertory of double entendres. All of these would make logical symbols for the indulgence that would turn a decent young woman into a “white slave” who would give her body to ethnic johns. But it is difficult to find references to ice cream as a sexually suggestive foodway, so from a century’s distance it is not easy to see why a taste for such a treat would be associated with such a risk in a contemporary legend. To explicate this link, we need to delve deeper into the history of ice cream in American cultural history.

The Emergence of Ice Cream as an “American” Dessert

Reconstructing the place of ice cream in the first decade of the twentieth century is made difficult by the enormous growth in the treat’s popularity during the decade that followed. By 1918, the dish was so thoroughly “Americanized” that a common media legend asserted that it had been invented by Martha Washington, who left a bowl of cream outside one cold night for a neighborhood kitty and found it frozen solid in the morning. Tasting it, the first lady found that she had accidentally made a “smooth, delicious custard” (Funderburg 1995:3). Such “Eureka” legends were common: a number of other typical desserts such as the ice cream soda or sundae were similarly said to have been the result of chance accidents that resulted in commercially successful treats. But the truth is more complicated. Ice cream had in fact been fabricated for centuries in Asia and Europe, and the diary of William Black records that the elegant finish of a sumptuous dinner served by the governor of Maryland at his Annapolis home in 1744 was “some fine Ice Cream which, with the Strawberries and Milk, eat most Deliciously” (quoted in Funderburg 1995:3).

However, Black mentions the treat as a rare curiosity, and in fact it remained such throughout the 1800s because of the difficulty of making it. Requiring cream and sugar, which were both luxury foodstuffs during this period, it had to be fabricated in a bowl held over crushed ice (yet another luxury). Unless the preparer kept a spatula moving around the bowl constantly, the cream in the product would separate, and the milk would harden into inedible chunks (which is one problem with the Martha Washington legend). The result would be a runny mess (Williams 2006:88). “Philadelphia-style” ice cream was even more labor-intensive: cream was first whipped, then frozen, then partially thawed and churned, then frozen again. In the 1840s, a variety of hand-cranked freezers were marketed to make the process easier. While some of them claimed to make ice cream in ten minutes or less, one period cookbook stated that a quart of ice cream took half an hour to freeze, adding judiciously, “and sometimes longer” (Williams 2006:89). Personal letters and memoirs documenting this period, surveyed by Anne Cooper Funderburg (1995:35–40), show that the process remained a drawn-out, onerous one, lasting the better part of a morning or afternoon. In a letter describing one Fourth of July event, Elizabeth Prentiss told her correspondent that a new-fangled churn, advertised to make ice cream in two minutes, in fact occupied the whole family “from half-past twelve to nearly two o’clock, when we decided to have dinner and leave the servants to finish it. It came to the table at last, very rich and rather good” (quoted in Funderburg 1995:37). For this reason, the dish remained the property of the upper classes, with servants available to finish the chore, or became the highlight of a once-a-summer family picnic, in which all participants took part in the wearisome task.

A variety of records show that this dessert was uncommon in the United States prior to 1900. Amelia Simmons’s 1796 American Cookery, the first truly native food-ways book, contains no recipe for ice cream. Even after more-efficient freezers became available, records of its being made outside of urban and upper-class settings continue to be uncommon. A record of a fancy dinner held by a hostess of the Washing-ton, D.C., “Smart Set” during the McKinley era still commented that the ice cream finish was “wonderful to behold.” The diarist, Ellen Maury Slayden, wife of a Texas congressman, recorded that it was so unfamiliar that one senator from a western state attempted to pop the scoop into his mouth, complete with the cloth doily on which it was served (Funderburg 1995:81). Other records from rural America bear out how strange the dish was at the time. When ice cream was first served in the territory that later became Wyoming, according to a witness’s reminiscence published in 1933, one backwoodsman at table commented, “Where in ____ does this stuff come from,” while another explained, “Shut up, you fool. It comes in cans” (quoted in Funderburg 1995:83).

Such upper-crust delicacies obviously influenced the development of the ice cream industry that emerged in the twentieth century (Funderburg 1995). But the perilous ice cream parlor of the white slave era was in fact the latest development of an ethnic Italian foodways tradition, that of the street vendors referred to generally as “hokey-pokey men.”2 The term “hokey-pokey,” which we know now as a child’s dance, in fact comes from a street cry collected both in the United States and Great Britain: “Here’s the stuff to make you jump; hokey-pokey, penny a lump.” (This quickly entered into children’s folklore as part of a jump-rope rhyme, which probably inspired its use in the familiar song.) The origin and meaning of “hokey pokey” are unclear, but Italian immigrants made up a large part of the country’s ice cream vendors, drawing their recipes from indigenous recipes for gelato. Early records suggest that it combined an Italian street cry “O, che pochi,” understood as “Look how cheap it is,” with the familiar magicians’ catchphrase “hocus pocus.” In any case, “hokey-pokey” became the common term of streetside ice cream, and vendors represented a wide range of immigrant groups as well as African Americans, who quickly joined the trade (Funderburg 1995:73–4). In 1892, an American cookbook, The Practical Confectioner and Cake Baker, glossed “hokey-pokey” as a type of ice cream “which you can buy on the New York streets from the sons of sunny Italy” (quoted in Funderburg 1995:73).

One of the difficulties that hokey-pokey men faced, however, was how to serve the treat. Some expected customers to produce their own dish; other vendors provided one, waited for the patron to eat up, then wiped the dish clean and put it away for the next buyer. Most often, Funderburg notes, the portion was dipped onto a small piece of brown paper, but by 1899 vendors in New York City were making ice cream sandwiches by pressing a scoop between two thin wafers (1995:106). This produced a treat that the customer could carry away and eat. Needless to say, the purity of hokey-pokey ice cream was usually suspect, and public health officials in Philadelphia and New York regularly warned consumers about the unsanitary practices of vendors and blamed contaminated batches for summertime epidemics of typhoid fever (Funderburg 1995:75–6). Nevertheless, the streetside trade was profitable enough that successful vendors began to take over storefront shops, turning them into “parlors” where patrons could sit and eat the treat out of bowls. Such parlors drew on the emerging popularity of “soda fountains,” machines that charged drinking water with carbon dioxide and served it flavored with a variety of syrups. As Paul Dickson and Funderburg show, these had proved a popular success when first demonstrated at the 1876 Centennial Fair in Philadelphia, and by the 1890s they had been installed in a variety of businesses in large cities, predominantly drug stores (Dickson 1972:88–99; Funderburg 1995:85–98). The so-called ice cream soda, which actually combined carbonated water with regular cream and shaved ice, was already popular enough by the mid-1890s that it was being called “our national beverage” (Dickson 1972:61–4; Funderburg 1995:100–3).

The controversy over the invention of the ice cream cone showed that the treat retained a strong element of ethnic identity. Contemporary records (usefully summarized by Funderburg 1995:117–22) agree that the innovation was popularized at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, though attempts to identify exactly who deserved credit for the invention ended in confusion. However, comparison of the legends leave little doubt that the idea was not new; rather, it was the logical solution to the hokey-pokey man’s dilemma of how to serve the treat neatly to customers who wanted to walk off with their portion. Early versions agree that the cone first appeared on the fair’s main midway, a street simply called “The Pike” that ran from the entrance for about a mile. The Missouri Historical Society’s extensive Web site, 1904 World’s Fair: Looking Back at Looking Forward 2005, provides a detailed account of this exposition, including a map and many contemporary photographs and souvenirs.3 Along this stretch, this Web site shows, visitors were enticed by a variety of exhibits, rides, and live shows, including one reenacting the creation of the world. This area featured a trip around the world, with buildings and live shows recreating foreign cultures from the Tyrolean Alps to Russia and Japan. One section, which charged an additional fee, took visitors to the “Streets of Cairo and Constantinople,” where tourists could watch hoochy-koochy dancers, visit the replica of a mosque, or take camel rides. As with most fairs, these sideshows were accompanied by strips of restaurants offering exotic foods, and it evidently was in one of these strips that the idea emerged of combining two ethnically tinged items into a single convenient treat.

During the patent litigation that followed the World’s Fair, six candidates for “inventing” the ice cream cone emerged, as Funderburg documents (1995:117 22): two were Syrian, one was Turkish, and one was Lebanese. All agreed that the idea emerged by happenstance when customers visited two adjacent booths: one sold a pastry item, variously described as a waffle, a waffle cookie,or a zalabia, a Levantine, cookielike treat. As Jack Marlowe, an observer of modern Middle Eastern cooking, explains, it was traditionally baked over an open fire in a hinged cast-iron platen, then sprinkled with sugar before eating (Marlowe 2003:4). The other booth sold hokey-pokey-style ice cream, which was served in a dish. Customers had to eat the dish seated at the booth, then return the dish to the proprietor. One witness claimed that the idea came from the Middle Eastern custom of rolling a pita bread to hold food such as sour cream (Funderburg 1995:118); in any case, customers learned to roll the waffle-like pastry into a cone while it was still warm. When it cooled, it proved to be substantial enough to hold a scoop of ice cream, and the customer could ask the proprietor to put this serving into the pastry and then consume both while continuing toward a nearby hoochy-koochy performance. The idea caught on rapidly, and after the fair closed, several of the concessionaires immediately purchased or adapted presses for making cones in commercial quantities.

The story is substantiated by World’s Fair records that show that at least fifty vendors had received permits to sell ice cream and nearly as many for selling “waffles” (Dickson 1972:69). But the difficulty with the story is that waffles, as they were usually made in the United States, did not harden quickly enough to hold ice cream. The universal references to waffle ovens or presses, however, make it clear that what was being fabricated was zalabia. Because such thin wafers came off the platens still soft enough to form, yet stiffened as they cooled, both Turkish and Italian immigrants had already used them as “horns” to fill with sweetened cream or else filled them with icing and rolled them into tubes, known as cannoli.

Whether or not the first actual cones were made in the Turkish section of the St. Louis World’s Fair, certainly, as Missouri Historical Society’s 1904 World’s Fair Web site demonstrates, the event introduced many forms of novel foodways to the Amer-ican public at large, and the principle was one that Italian immigrants understood and immediately exploited. In fact, the only person to receive a patent for an item resembling an ice cream cone was an Italian, Italo Marchiony, a Manhattan hokey-pokey vendor who actually had submitted a plan for molding dough into “ice cream cups” in 1903, the year before the fair (Funderburg 1995:121). While Marchiony’s idea arguably led to the molded flat-bottomed cones that are most familiar now, he was unable to claim royalties on the rolled pizzelle cones, and in fact both styles of cone remain in use alongside each other to this day.

So ice cream, however “American” it came to seem in the decade ahead, was still an ethnically charged food for most Americans in 1910. Mediterranean immigrants deserve the credit for taking the treat from its original context as an upper-class luxury out into city streets to become an indulgence for all classes. Like the soda fountains, which were experiencing a boom during this period, the new ice cream parlor was a storefront establishment owned and managed by immigrants. Such parlors, like the St. Louis World’s Fair’s “Streets of Cairo and Constantinople,” represented a liminal realm where members of differing races and ethnic backgrounds mingled and where mainstream white Americans, male and female, could indulge in culinary tourism. While this opportunity now seems innocuous, at the time such a choice brought together two cultural factors that crystallized briefly into the “spider’s web” of the dangerous ice cream parlor: the increasing move toward educating (and potentially empowering) young, unmarried white women and the increasing economic role played by immigrants, particularly Italians, in developing the American food industry.

“College Ice”: Small-Town Women in Big-City Parlors

To begin: if in this time period ordering ice cream was for the moment an act of culinary tourism, why did the legend emerge that young women were at risk, rather than all white consumers? This side of the legend developed from a series of moral crusades, originally anti-Semitic in nature, that arose in Europe during the late nineteenth century. Participants in these moral crusades, as historian Edward J. Bristow (1983) documents, included a wide range of reform and religious organizations, ranging from the Salvation Army to proponents of anti-obscenity statutes, such as the American reformer Anthony Comstock. A common allegation, Bristow notes, was that Jewish procurers were actively involved in recruiting young women, often drugging and kidnapping them and then shipping them to brothels all over the world. While Jewish charitable organizations such as B’nai B’rith quickly conceded that ghettoes were rife with prostitution, with both the procurers and the women being Jewish, repeated investigations showed that no coercion was involved and that the women participated willingly as a means of alleviating the financial hardships that affected most Jewish communities. In countries where Jewish immigrants had avenues to move from entry-level work to more respectable work, Bristow shows, women spent only a few years in the profession before quitting. Hence the problem was “self-correcting” (1983:320–2).

Nevertheless, beginning in the 1880s, the popular media in Europe reported a series of sensational cases alleging a well-organized international trade in prostitutes controlled by wealthy Jews. In 1892, a number of Jewish pimps were put on trial in Vienna for having conspired to ship prostitutes to foreign ports as far afield as Brazil and Turkey. Press coverage of the “Jewish white slave traffic” in Austria was intense and often implied that such rings were responsible for the mysterious disappearance of young non-Jewish girls. Franz Schneider, an openly anti-Semitic politician and rabble-rouser, gave a speech in the Austrian Parliament in which he alluded to “countless cases in which Christian servants employed by Jews disappear without trace, carried off to a dreadful fate in the brothels of Hungary, the Orient and South America, despite the vigilance of the legal authorities. These cases are connected with the incredible crimes committed by Jews because of their superstitions for the purpose of getting hold of Christian blood and calling to heaven for revenge” (quoted in Bristow 1983:82).

During the intense “white slavery” panic that occurred in both Great Britain and the United States from 1910 to 1913, Frederick Bullock, a special prosecutor appointed by Scotland Yard to investigate the matter, commented that “All sorts of stories, sensational and wholly improbable, were repeated from mouth to mouth of sudden disappearances, abductions, and attempts to entice and allure innocent girls” (quoted in Bristow 1983:44). The most widespread held that white slavers would anesthetize women in some public place by jabbing them with a “poisoned needle.” An official Massachusetts inquiry noted that one common story involved “the administration of a narcotic drug by the use of a hypodermic needle by a procurer, who plies the needle on his victim as he passes her on the street, or as he sits beside her in the street car or in the theatre.” When investigators tried to trace such claims to real events, the Massachusetts inquiry concluded, they inevitably found that they relied on the authority of a legendary “friend-of-a-friend” (Prostitution 1976:22). When similar claims surfaced in New York City in 1913–14, an unnamed physician was willing to say that the stories might be based on some truth, due to “the extreme scantiness of women’s apparel” (quoted in Bristow 1983:44).

The perpetrators were allegedly part of an ethnically controlled prostitution industry, and the women were being abducted to sell into brothels in some far-off or even foreign city. Constantinople (which we recall was the inspiration for the St. Louis World’s Fair site where ice cream cones were fabricated) was repeatedly mentioned as the ultimate destination for abducted European white slaves, who were then sold secretly at auction to Arab sheiks for their harems. The needle variant, as Jan Harold Brunvand observed, remained current late into the century, with young girls injected with drugs like heroin, cocaine, or LSD, often through a seat in a darkened movie theater (1984:79–80). Such needle legends then provided motifs that led to ostensive pranks in cities such as New York (see Ellis 1989) and soon became the dominant form of AIDS legends, with victims maliciously injecting tainted blood into random passersby or leaving contaminated needles in public places, often (as before) a theater seat (Bennett 2005:114–6). Again, though, such legends seem to have little to do with culinary tourism. While the choice of a treat might provide an ethnic procurer with the opportunity to use the poisoned needle (the phallic nature of which seems self-evident), why was the ice cream parlor a spider’s web that used the treat as a bait to entrap young women into a life of shame? This side of the legend needs to be unpacked separately.

A “parlor” was a place associated with the social life of young women of marriageable age. Max Sugar observes that, in turn-of-the-century courtship practices among “proper middle-class young ladies,” a young man of the right sort visited an eligible woman’s home and courted her in a room set aside for visitors (1993:128), rather than in a part of the house used for more intimate activities (such as sleeping). Such practices likewise gave parents and other family members ample opportunity to chaperone the courting couple. Opportunities to meet with potential partners outside the parlor were carefully limited. The 1890s were a period of intense political lobbying over the public sale of liquor, and so a barroom or saloon was already seen as an inappropriate place for such a girl to enter, even to purchase a nonalcoholic beverage. As Funderburg records, by the turn of the century, soda fountains were promoted by temperance organizations as wholesome places for young people, particularly young women, to patronize. “Temperance sired the soda fountain,” a turn-of-the-century source cited by Funderburg says, “and the ladies of the movement selflessly mothered it in the fond hope that it would someday vanquish the bar” (quoted in Funderburg 1995: 99). Soda fountains were seen as an acceptable place for unmarried women to frequent, and the industry promoted carbonated beverages as a safe alternative to draft beer. By 1892, a trade journal for drug store proprietors was observing that “No successful soda fountains sell ardent spirits in their soda” (quoted in Funderburg 1995:99).

However, such places developed a reputation for fostering casual, unchaperoned contacts between the sexes, particularly among young people. This in itself created sexual tensions, as did the tactical liberation of such girls from parental control through higher education. As Nancy E. Durbin and Lori Kent found by examining turn-of-the-century enrollment data (1989), women entered postsecondary institutions in dramatically higher numbers during the last decades of the 1800s, ostensibly to fill a growing demand for public schoolteachers, which was still seen as a female occupation. In fact, during the period from 1900 to 1930, males and females enrolled in college in about equal numbers (Goldin, Katz, and Kuziemko 2006:133).

The detailed analysis of the content of women’s education by Durbin and Kent illustrates details about gender and higher education in the period that the raw numbers do not show. The median age of marriage for white women during this time was nearly twenty-two years of age, which opened up a dangerous period between the age of sexual maturity (with its relatively protected environment of a local high school education) and the safe haven of marriage. For this reason, many parents considered college “a pleasant way to pass time before marrying,” and a large proportion of students who enrolled in higher education did so with no serious intentions of learning a specialized trade. “In this sense,” Durbin and Kent conclude, “postsecondary institutions ‘warehoused’ surplus female labor by providing young women with an alternative to idleness, marriage, or gainful employment” (1989:3). The ice cream parlor was associated with such a socially “warehoused” clientele early on, so much so that what we now call a sundae, or dish of ice cream with syrup or fruit added, was initially known as a “college ice.”4

So the ice cream parlor, in a cultural sense, was initially seen as a place similar to the literal parlor in a Victorian-style home, a “safe haven” for a young female to meet potential husbands during the dangerous period between puberty and marriage. Its appropriation by groups of young people outside the home meant that girls, while inside this commercial substitute for the domestic parlor, could engage in casual conversation and public courtship with members of the opposite sex. And now we have found a thread of the legend that does in fact speak to the dangers seen by white slavery crusaders. When a young girl comes to the city to enroll in a school, District Attorney Sims warned parents, she instinctively seems to make acquaintances. “She must have some one to talk to,” he observes; “it is the law of youth as well as the law of her sex to crave constant companionship.” As a result, “she is sentimentally in a condition to prepare her for the slaughter, to make her an easy prey to the wiles of the ‘white slave’ wolf” (1910:69). The best thing for a rural girl would be to stay in the country under her parents’ constant control, Sims advised (i.e., to stay in the parlor of her own home). If she were to come to the city to study, he added, she should stay “in the very best type of an educational institution where the girl students were always under the closest protection” (1910:71).

The “parlor,” in short, was an emic term for a kind of cultural warehouse, where unmarried women could meet potential husbands in a socially acceptable fashion. In the wider worldview that the legend expressed, women who left the protection of the family circle had to choose between the two kinds of commercially run “warehouses.” One, a risky but acceptable option, was the domain of higher education, with chaperones acting in loco parentis; the other was its grotesque parody, the house of prostitution, in which procurers literally warehoused females as sexual chattel. The ice cream “parlor” was an interstitial realm for young women. There she could be, for a time, outside the authority of parental figures, yet not engaging in behavior explicitly defined as sinful, such as drinking or dancing. As such, it was one of a variety of novel amusements common in big cities such as Chicago, which included movie theaters and other settings where mainstream whites and ethnic others could find themselves standing or sitting next to each other.

In these “interzones,” as Kevin Mumford (1997) christened them, Anglos could come into close contact with many ethnic cultures. In the midst of the current controversy over immigration, it is worth reminding ourselves that the decade between 1900 and 1910 was marked by the highest rate of foreign influx proportional to the total population ever recorded. In addition, while previous waves of immigration had come from Northern European cultures that were at least perceived to be well educated and productive, the newer immigrants came from Mediterranean cultures such as Italy, which were considered lower in status and more difficultto assimilate (see, for example, Gambino 1977). The McClures journalist George Kibbe Turner expressed this sentiment dramatically when he alluded to Italians as one of the “rough and hairy tribes which have been drawn to Chicago.” Such immigrants, Turner warned, when they were “suddenly freed from the restraints of poverty and of rigid police authority ... furnish an alarming volume of savage crime” as they “slip back into a form of city savagery” (quoted by Donovan 2006:60–1). Thus, the interzones that developed proved to be liminal grounds that, predictably, were both exciting places for cultural and culinary tourism by curious whites, as well as fertile topics for contemporary legends about the vicious and inhuman crimes that might be perpetrated on the unwary diners.

As historian Hasia R. Diner (2001) shows, this same period was marked by a dramatic shift in the American food industry, as Italian immigrants, used to a culture based on the scarcity of food, applied traditional methods of intensive farming, as well as thrifty food fabrication and marketing, to the relative prosperity of the Amer-ican landscape. Italian Americans quickly organized complex culinary networks, which began by supplying fellow immigrants with pasta and other foods identified as “old country.” As these ventures provided them with a means of moving from jobs at the subsistence level to modest levels of entrepreneurship, they increasingly provided foodstuffs and prepared “Italian” cuisine to other ethnic groups (notably Greek immigrants). In time, mainstream white populations also became aware of ostensibly Italian dishes such as spaghetti and meatballs and pizza, which, in their North Amer-ican form, were both essentially Italian American reinventions, as Diner shows. He quotes an interesting observation by a visiting Sicilian merchant, who, in the 1920s, visited an Italian restaurant in New York City, where he first encountered a number of “very fine, traditional American specialties,” one of them being “spaghetti with meatballs.” Ironically, he commented that it was so foreign to his experience of real Italian cuisine that it must have been “just for fun called Italian,” but he added that it was in fact very delicious and concluded, “I think someone in Italy should invent [such a dish] for the Italians over there” (quoted in Diner 2001:54). Pizza in the old country, Diner notes, was associated narrowly with Neapolitan cookery, and even there it was quite unlike the common Italian American staple, which was always served with tomato sauce and cheese, and typically served at a table rather than eaten on the run in the street (2001:61).

Means of producing fresh fruits and vegetables in the most intensive and economical ways possible were necessities in Italy, but in the United States they made it possible for immigrants to put together large-scale agricultural enterprises, moving products from truck farms surrounding major urban centers to low-cost pushcarts and fruit stands (Diner 2001:63). As a result, Italian Americans who achieved management positions in these networks rose quickly in economic and political status: the Del Monte Corporation was one of several Italian-dominated consortia of fresh produce wholesalers that emerged in the 1880s and became the leading suppliers of foodstuffs to cities at the turn of the century. In Indianapolis, Diner notes, the fruit stand opened by the first Sicilian immigrant to arrive in the city in 1888 quickly shifted to wholesaling as others followed his lead, and less than twenty years after his arrival, the proprietor was appointed the municipal manager of all urban markets. Food, Diner concludes, was for Italians no longer a “badge of class subjugation” but rather “a step up from poverty” (2001:64).

It was significant that the most-common term for the social danger of prostitution was “white slavery,” as many of the stereotypes previously applied to slaves were openly applied to Italians. “I do believe that the root of the trouble is laziness,” The White Slave Hell, a 1910 religious tract, said of the immigrants. “They come from countries where the highest good is just to lie in the sun and sleep. They do not, they cannot, understand the love of work, the dignity of labor, the joy of accomplishment” (quoted in Donovan 2006:30). Paradoxically, the process of entrepreneurial empow-erment that Diner documents was based precisely on Italian Americans’ propensity for intensive labor, made more effective through cooperation of ethnic factions now united by a common ethnic identity. “I saw that the great thing about [America] is that it is good for the working man,” an unnamed Italian immigrant commented in his memoirs, adding significantly, “I can go out and eat in a restaurant and sit next to anyone I want” (quoted in Diner 2001:52).

For xenophobic Americans, however, social mobility was seen as so at odds with foreign birth that, then as now, immigrants who were not poor were assumed to be operating as part of a network of criminals. The earliest Mafia-type rumors held that Italians controlled the prostitution trade and were intimately involved with it at all levels, from the enticing of naive women to paying off the police and municipal investigators. Already at this time, “gang wars” were blamed for interethnic murders, as Italian gangsters battled with Jewish and French kingpins for control of big-city crime. District Attorney Sims wrote:

there is a kind of fellowship among these foreign proprietors of refreshment parlors which would make it entirely natural and convenient for the proprietor of a city establishment of this kind, who is entangled in the “white slave” trade, to establish relations with a man in the same business and of the same nationality in the country town. I do not mean to intimate by this that all the ice cream and fruit “saloons” having foreign-born proprietors are connected with the “white slave” traffic—but some of them are, and this fact is sufficient to cause all careful and thoughtful parents of young girls to see that they do not frequent these places.

Sims’s mention of “fruit ‘saloons’” as being an interstitial location similar to the perilous ice cream parlor also connects with yet another complex of contemporary legend. Observers commented on the remarkable diversity of fruits and vegetables on display in Italian neighborhoods. New York City’s Mulberry Street (later made famous by one of Dr. Seuss’s first successful children’s books) was one such paradise of fruit saloons: one tourbook promoting ethnic tourism in Manhattan commented that, “What strikes one first is the beauty and the variety of the vegetables and fruits sold there in what is supposed to be one of the poorest quarters” (quoted in Diner 2001:63). The networks generated by Italian Americans quickly extended to foreign imports, including another exotic novelty, the banana.

This fruit, too, quickly attracted contemporary legends, notably that persons who handled it could be killed from the bites of deadly tarantulas hiding inside the bunches. By 1910 these legends were already so prevalent that the popular investigative journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams included them in a longer article titled “The Poison Bugaboo,” which debunked, Brunvand-style, a whole series of apocryphal stories about snakes, spiders, and centipedes. It is true, he admitted, that tarantulas “frequently drop out of banana bunches from South or Central America, to the discomfiture of the unsuspecting grocer,” but he could find no verifiable case of a deadly incident. He did find, however, a St. Louis news account headlined “IN TWO WEEKS Three Men Have Died From Bites of Tarantulas” and claiming that “the victims were banana handlers in the wholesale fruit district.” An “exhaustive inquiry” in the area, particularly among fruit dealers, turned up no verification, and Adams concluded, “The report was a pure fake” (S. Adams 1910:522).

Nevertheless, the legend remained active throughout the century (though often substituting black widow spiders for tarantulas as the agent), and bananas remained a potentially deadly object in folk narrative.5 A common joke told of two girls who bought bananas for the first time while on a train trip. One peels hers and takes the first bite, at which point the train enters a tunnel. “Have you started your banana yet?” she asks the other. “Well, don’t ... It makes you go blind” (Warner 2007:352). While intended to provoke laughter, like other humor based on the fruit’s phallic implications, “the laughter it inspires,” cultural historian Marina Warner says, “reverberates around its paradoxical potency and defends against the threatening associations that it sets stirring” (373).

Such associations were still being felt as recently as 2000, when an especially intense Internet flap occurred in response to a hoax message from a nonexistent “Manheim Research Institute.” This alleged that

Several shipments of bananas from Costa Rica have been infected with necrotizing fasciitis, otherwise known as flesh eating bacteria.... It is advised not to purchase Bananas for the next three weeks as this is the period of time for which bananas that have been shipped to the US with the possibility of carrying this disease.

If you have eaten a banana in the last 2–3 days and come down with a fever followed by a skin infection seek MEDICAL ATTENTION!!!

In fact, as Warner documents, the banana never fully lost its exotic associations, being a physical object from a tropical world and arriving in the marketplace having been handled by a multitude of unknown and presumably ethnic hands. Ice cream, by contrast, had no such necessary link to ethnicity. Originally, it was associated with hokey-pokey pushcart vendors and ethnic streetside parlors that, as Funderburg records, would of course serve both the ice cream and the crushed fruits that were normally served with sundaes (1995:103). The banana split may well have been one of these early concoctions, though, as Dickson notes, it did not become widely popular until the 1920s (1972:33). Once ice cream parlors became common in all communities, large and small, and as the main ingredient was provided by pan-American corporations with anonymous names such as Sealtest, the “white slavery” legend lost its potency. The banana, however, never lost its legendary potency, as it continued to be seen as a tangible link between middle-class white Americans and the mysterious Third World.

However, like any contemporary legend document, the ice cream parlor variant provides an opportunity to see and explore issues of cultural history that would otherwise remain unexpressed and difficult to trace. Keeping the threads that I have followed separately in mind, watch how they combine to form a complex visual text in the notorious graphic, “The First Step” (Figure 1), which appeared near the beginning of Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls. We see a young white woman, dressed in a stylish but sexually discreet gown that covers her up to the top of her neck, clearly a representative of the urbanized female who has come to the city to be “finished” as a marriageable property in a professional school. Ah, but she is sitting in a public place, and we see behind her a stereotyped Italian American with copious facial hair, glancing knowingly in her direction as he dispenses a drink into a glass. A closer look reveals the parlor’s attractions: “ICE CREAM” in large letters above the proprietor, “SODA” to his left, and beside this sign dangles a bunch of bananas. “Ice cream parlors of the city and fruit stores combined, largely run by foreigners,” the caption reads, “are the places where scores of girls have taken their first step downward” (Bell 1910: facing page 18).

On the dish before the woman is a mound of ice cream, the first bite of which is still in the spoon that she holds daintily in her hand. But who is her companion, the older male who has sat down beside her (recall the anonymous Italian immigrant quoted above, who boasted, “I can go out and eat in a restaurant and sit next to anyone I want”), dressed in a derby and pin-striped suit? “Does her mother know the character of the place and the man she is with?” the caption continues. And, indeed, do we? By making the face of the male partner an ambiguous mix of foreign characteristics, the artist cleverly suggests a range of possibilities: Middle Eastern, Asian, even black; in any case, a synthesis of the big city’s multicultural world and the parlor’s potency as an urban interzone, a place for culinary tourism, both in a literal and a symbolic, sexually charged sense.

Figure 1.“The First Step,” from Ernest A. Bell’s 1910 tract, Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls, or, War on the White Slave Trade.

The bananas dangle just behind the mysterious man’s hat, implicitly connecting him with the deadly tarantulas that the bunch might well contain. Attorney Sims’s warning whispers quietly in our ears: “One thing should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city, and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider’s web for her entanglement.” The liminal turf that this minimally liberated female had entered, white slave crusaders argued, was a dangerous realm where chance contacts with ethnic others would whisk the innocent one quickly from the safe home parlor into the parlors of sin. Another crusader’s tract said: “From the dance hall; from the beer garden; from the saloon; from the ball room; from the nickel theater; from the respectable theater; from the ice cream parlor; from the hotel; from the church; from the depot; from the excursion boat; from the park; from the street; from the village and from the quiet farmstead home in the hills the Octopus on the Lake draws our nation’s fairest daughters into its unsatisfied maw of lust” (quoted in Donovan 2006:26). The imagery connects exactly with the precise way in which the legend claimed that ice cream was dangerous: itself innocuous, it proved to be an especially effective means by which “our nation’s fairest daughters” (i.e., young unmarried white women) were placed in direct physical proximity to strangers with allegedly unbridled libidos. By placing oneself in an eating establishment controlled by foreigners, and by eating a treat associated with foreignness, the innocent one runs the risk of becoming foreign.

Conclusion

In 1910, ice cream was more of an ethnic novelty for most of America than pizza or sushi are today, so it came laced with the savor of foreignness. The new treat quickly entered contemporary legends of the period, and the act of walking into a place where it was sold was, in the crusaders’ words, a risk akin to entering “a spider’s web.” Like other urban interzones such as movie theaters, buses and trains, and amusement parks, ice cream parlors were culturally dangerous places precisely because they were sites in which ethnic groups met, mingled, held social intercourse, and sought out common forms of entertainment, recreation, and food. The contemporary legend was, in part, a reaction to the increasing tendency of young women to engage in culinary tourism, which in turn was a function of their nascent move toward intellectual independence, even if the education offered at the time tracked them into service professions, and marriage and homemaking.

Ice cream did not remain an ethnic temptation for long. It swiftly moved into the ordinary foodways of urban and suburban America, paralleling the increasing tendency of women to leave the safe parlors of their homes and spend time in the perilous parlors that lined city streets. Already by 1892, Pennsylvania State College had introduced the first university-level course in commercial ice cream manufacture (Funderburg 1995:66). Nationwide production of the dessert totaled only 5 million gallons in 1899; this increased sixfold to 30 million gallons in 1909; then thirtyfold to 150 million gallons in 1919. By 1920, technological advances in refrigeration and insulation created mass-production ice cream plants that relegated the neighborhood hokey-pokey vendors and the immigrant-owned ice cream parlor to the past.

Like the African origins of gallo pinto that have recently been erased from Costa Rica’s popular memory (see Theresa Preston-Werner’s article in this issue), the ethnic roots of ice cream were quickly effaced in favor of the country’s founding fathers. The bowl of cream left outside by Martha Washington for the stray kitty would have frozen into an inedible mess, but as a “foundation legend,” it helped solidify the position of the dessert as an all-American treat, universally acceptable for all classes and genders. The white slave legend, deprived of the fear of liminality that gave it power in 1910, yielded to the “poisoned needle” ecotype, and, in time, it survived only as a humorous side trip down memory lane. Or perhaps the legend fell dormant through its own success: as ice cream was being appropriated from ethnic entrepreneurs who made the innovations that allowed for its widespread marketing, punitive laws were being passed that placed strict limits on Mediterranean immigration and gave local police more power to crack down on alleged crime rings.

Nevertheless, in a small town in central New York more than a half century later, my wife was ordered not to go inside the local ice cream parlor: “fast” boys hung out there, her parents said, and besides it was owned by Greeks. The forbidden treat, seemingly Americanized by big business, still had an exotic flavor. “Eating affects us biologically and physiologically as well as socially and ideologically,” Elliott Oring observes. “Consequently, we are likely to bring a great fund of emotion to the behavior of eating.” Given this intense emotionality, he reasons, “it is not surprising that foodways serve as highly charged markers of ethnic identity both for those within a group and for those without” (1986:34 5). The inverse seems also to be true: not eating something, or at least advising your children not to eat it, is equally important to cultural identity. You are what you eat, the ice cream parlor legend suggests, and if you consume immigrant food, particularly in an establishment controlled by foreigners, then the act of ingesting it puts your own cultural identity into question.

Footnotes

For instance, on the night of February 23, 2007, Leno suggested that you could floss your teeth after eating a bucket of chicken with the leftover rat tail and commented, “Taco Bell and KFC ... is that a good combination to begin with?”

Dickson’s history of the ice cream industry (1972) does not say much about this influence, other than to note that the term “hokey-pokey” was in use as early as 1872 (83). He reproduces a number of turn-of-the-century engravings and photographs of street vendors in which their ethnicity and low social status are apparent. See especially the rather grotesque 1901 engraving on page 21, captioned “Thriftless, but affectionate, is the lower class parent. Shoes the child must do without ... but here is five cents to buy hokey-pokey.”

Details about this influential exposition, here are drawn from the original source posted on the 1904 World’s Fair: Looking Back at Looking Forward Web site (2005). The site documents the event and reproduces many period photographs and artifacts, including an admission ticket to the Cairo/Constantinople exhibit, where the ice cream cone was said to have been first fabricated.

It is also interesting that the term “sundae” was slow to be standardized, with the origin legend connecting it to the day of the week being, as with other “Eureka” stories, a later fabrication. Funderburg found the treat spelled “sundi” or even “sundhi” in early publications, both apparently stressing the dessert’s exotic nature rather than its alleged godliness (2001:105).

This legend type has continued to emerge in the United States, particularly among African Americans, and has been discussed by academics under the title “The Snake in the Greens” (e.g., Miller 2005). The emphasis in these recent versions, however, is not the specific type of food in which the dangerous animal hides but the negligence of the supermarket chain for not inspecting fruits and vegetables before putting them out for customers to handle. As such, as Fine (1989) observed, its thematic ties are with legend complexes in which deadly snakes are found in nonfood products like carpets and clothing.

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Mumford, Kevin. 1997. Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press.

Oring, Elliott. 1986. Ethnic Groups and Ethnic Folklore. In Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction, ed. Elliott Oring, pp. 23–44. Logan: Utah State University Press.

Prostitution in America: Three Investigations. 1976. New York: Arno Press.

Sims, Edwin W. 1910. Menace of the White Slave Trade. In Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls, or, War on the White Slave Trade, ed. Ernest A. Bell, pp. 61–73. [Chicago]: G. S. Ball.

Smith, Bessie. [1931] n.d. I Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl. Copulatin' Blues: 16 Original Blues Vocals. Stash Records LP Recording ST-101.

Smith, Paul. 1983. The Book of Nasty Legends. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

———. 1984. On the Receiving End: When Legend Becomes Rumour. In Perspectives on Contemporary Legend: Proceedings of the Conference on Contemporary Legend, Sheffield, July 1982, ed. Paul Smith, pp. 197–215. Sheffield: CECTAL.

———. 1997. Contemporary Legend. In Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art, ed. Thomas A. Green, pp. 493–5. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Sugar, Max. 1993. Female Adolescent Development. New York: Brunner/Mazel.

Warner, Marina. 2007. Monsters of Our Own Making: The Peculiar Pleasures of Fear. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky.

White, Luise. 2000. Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Williams, Susan. 2006. Food in the United States, 1820s–1890. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

[gyrlversion]

Inside The Fight For A Federal Law Against Revenge Porn

In June, Bella Thorne “took [her] power back.”

For the actor, that meant revealing to her almost seven million Twitter followers — and, by extension, the Internet at large — that someone had hacked her phone and stolen her private photos. “I feel gross, I feel watched, I feel someone has taken something from me that I only wanted one special person to see,” she wrote in a note that explained how her hacker had been threatening to post the photos against her will, and had also allegedly sent her private photos of other celebrities in the process. So, she beat him at his own game and posted the photos herself. “It’s my decision now u don’t get to take yet another thing from me,” she added.

The immediate response was overwhelmingly supportive of Thorne, although some people attempted to shame her for taking the photos to begin with. She drowned out the haters by posting screenshots of supportive conversations with Dove Cameron, Zendaya, and Serayah, among other famous friends, and continued to post about the harassment on her Instagram Stories. Not once did she apologize for taking the photos, and she had no reason to: It’s the person who steals the images who needs to answer to their actions.

For many young people, “nudes” and other private photos are a common form of self-expression — so much so that the practice has been immortalized in a storyline on Netflix’s Sex Education, and in a monologue delivered by Zendaya on HBO’s Euphoria. Thanks to the rise of digital cameras, smartphones, texting, email, and apps like Snapchat, taking and sharing private photos has become increasingly normalized. Eighty-eight percent of respondents to a 2015 survey said they had sexted at least once; 96 percent of those people viewed sexting as a normal way to express themselves in a given relationship. Whether it’s healthy or destructive depends on the people involved, and experts warn to only send private photos to someone you trust implicitly.

Because therein lies danger: you can’t control whether the other person shares those photos without your consent, or if someone else obtains them through a method like hacking, or adding photos to a database or messageboard, as was the case when it was discovered in 2017 that Marines and other service members were swapping revenge porn photos. One study posits that nearly 10 million Americans have had their photos shared without their consent, though it’s hard to gauge a solid number given the shame that still proliferates the experience. And if your photos are turned into revenge porn, the legal options you can take to fight back are limited and can feel overwhelming.

Today, 46 states and Washington, D.C. have laws banning revenge porn, which is the result of maliciously sharing private photos that aren’t your own, typically by a former sexual partner and without the consent of the person in the image. The scope of these laws varies significantly across state lines: Some states classify it as a misdemeanor, while others treat it as a felony, and jail time can range from 90 days to six years. The existing laws are being updated as technology advances, too; Virginia has banned revenge porn since 2014, and lawmakers recently expanded that law to include “deepfake” porn, or work that has been digitally altered to simulate nude or otherwise explicit images without the victim’s consent.

Of course, there are still a variety of reasons why someone would choose not to report an assault or other sex crime — up to and including the experience of subjecting yourself to the law enforcement process. And if a victim wanted to report a crime to the police, they’d have to navigate a complex web of jurisdictions — because the law would have been broken depending on where the attacker was when they posted the photos, not where the victim was at the time of discovery.

As Carrie Goldberg, a lawyer in New York City whose practice specializes in helping victims of sexual harassment and assault, tells MTV News, “Especially when the offender has posted [revenge porn photos] under the guise of anonymity, we’ll have local police say, ‘Well, we don’t know where he was when he posted them.’” While Internet anonymity can make it difficult to ascertain a perpetrator’s identity, researchers found that the majority of those who post revenge porn photos are men. In a 2016 Brookings report that studied 80 separate sextortion cases, every perpetrator was male. “There’s often a lot of back and forth from local precincts about which one has the actual jurisdiction to prosecute it,” she adds.

Public retaliation has also largely targeted the victims, and not the perpetrators, in a variety of ways that include the slut-shaming Thorne faced. (Crucially, people of all genders have reported being victims, though the APA noted in 2014 that male victims are more likely to report their violation to authorities than female victims.) “The majority of people suffer extreme emotional distress and it changes their relationships with family and friends,” Goldberg says. “They’re just constantly worried about the fact that anybody on the Internet can see their genitals, and it’s a horrible feeling.”

Some attackers also target victims at their work; Goldberg acknowledges that some of her clients have been fired as a backward result of their being violated. If someone is fired from their job because of a revenge-porn attack, she recommends they sue their former employer: “I feel it’s gender-based discrimination,” she explains. Her firm also regularly works with clients’ employers so that victims feel supported throughout and after the ordeal.

Goldberg opened her practice after an ex targeted her; in the process of seeking justice, she realized how difficult it is for victims to navigate the various legal systems at play. But while some lawyers or legal support groups offer pro bono help to victims, and Goldberg notes that legal action “can be really transformative and healing if you do it right,” she also stresses that victims shouldn’t feel pressured to take any action they don’t feel comfortable with.

“Bella Thorne took a courageous step forward, and I think it’s bold and respectable for her to have done that,” she explains. “I don’t think that victims should feel they need to do that if their privacy is being threatened. It’s the right decision for some people, but it’s not going to be for everybody.”

While a federal law could help support victims, there isn’t really one on the books. Clearer-cut federal laws counter blackmail and extortion, and copyright ownership for selfies can often serve as grounds to have a photo removed from a website, but the federal law most frequently invoked for digital revenge porn is section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

The CDA was passed in 1996, years before the advent of social-media behemoths like Facebook and Twitter, and doesn’t do much to help victims of revenge porn — instead, this law protects the platforms, dictating that the social media sites aren’t at fault for any revenge porn posted on their platforms. So if you want to scrub a photo from the Internet forever, getting the apps to take action can often require a lawyer like Goldberg, and a lot of litigation.

In May, California Congresswoman Jackie Speier and New York Congressman John Katko introduced the SHIELD Act in the House of Representatives, which would make it illegal to “knowingly distribute private intimate visual depictions with reckless disregard for the individual’s lack of consent to the distribution;” California Senator and presidential hopeful Kamala Harris is planning on introducing companion legislation in the Senate. The bill is a continuation of the Intimate Privacy Protection Act, which Rep. Speier introduced in 2016 after she “became aware of unbelievably painful stories of women in particular who not only lost their privacy but had their daily lives impacted in terms of employment and relationships,” she tells MTV News; the session closed before the bill was voted on.

According to Speier, lawmakers have been “slow to regulate an area that has become rife with a great deal of violation,” though she doesn’t necessarily believe there is a correlation between a failure to act and the fact that revenge porn overwhelmingly affects women and other minority groups, like LGBTQ+ people. “I think it has more to do with the fact that we have a lot of Luddites in Congress,” she says. “But there’s growing recognition of the need for [legislation], and we need to take a step to act.”

Yet even the most comprehensive legislation is only one aspect of the fight against digital harassment. (The 2016 bill received pushback from the ACLU which claimed criminalizing such action regardless of intent could be a violation of free speech.) And Speier is heartened by the knowledge that many survivors, like Goldberg, view advocacy as “a way of paying it forward. Many of them have already been painfully impacted by the non-consensual distribution of their photos, and they don’t want it to happen to anyone else,” she adds. Actor Amber Heard joined Speier in introducing the SHIELD Act to Congress; she was violated in the same 2014 attack in which Lawrence was targeted.

“My stolen and manipulated photos are still online to this day, posted again and again with sexually explicit and humiliating and degrading headlines about my body, about myself,” Heard said in May, per the Washington Post. “I continue to be harassed, stalked, and humiliated by the theft of those images.”

In part because of those activists, as well as a number of cultural conversations — including the photos stolen from Jennifer Lawrence and hundreds of other Hollywood stars in 2014; a similar, more targeted attack made against Leslie Jones; and the fallout from the allegations against Harvey Weinstein that served as kindling for Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement to reach global consciousness — we’ve seen an overwhelming societal shift towards both normalizing sexting and transferring the culpability for a crime to where it belongs.

“I think with regard to non-consensual porn, there’s been a sweep across the nation of refusal to tolerate the crime, and I definitely think that translates into more understanding towards victims,” Goldberg tells MTV News. “There’s just so much more rhetoric about being the target of someone else’s control, and sexual privacy violation, and so much more empathy and conversation about it.”

The post Inside The Fight For A Federal Law Against Revenge Porn appeared first on Gyrlversion.

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[kirstysmusings-blog]

The 1975: A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships

Three really is the magic number! 

I’ve been a huge fan of The 1975since their first self-titled album, released in 2013 when I was fifteen. At an age in which hormones control nearly every move and GCSE’s are a daily oppressor, I loved pouring my heart out to their album. I felt cool listening to The 1975. Chocolate was about weed and running away from bored police, Sex was about .. well, I’ll give you three guesses, the Robbers music video just about ripped my Heart Out (one for the fans, there). For a young girl navigating the complexities of being a teenager, this album acted as a cooler older sibling, giving me a guide of what and what not to do.

I wore a lot of black in the aftermath of finding this album, though the tones in my wardrobe transitioned into millennial pink for The 1975’s second album, I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It. An 80’s pop-inspired album released when I was seventeen and dealing with A-Levels, it again was a very welcome entry to my music collection. And now, aged twenty and in my final year of University, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships is another companion to take me through my journey. I knew I’d love it before I’d even listened to it.

I pre-ordered this album on vinyl. And CD. And cassette. Though I have no way of actually being able to play the latter two. I waited until the midnight release, lay in bed with my headphones on, staring at the ceiling and attempting to take in every single word, note, and hint of Healy magic. The closing chords of the final song, I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes) had me very excited.. so much so I took to Twitter to express my belief that The 1975 were the best thing since sliced bread. This resulted in a fair amount of backlash, and probably rightly so, though I did quite enjoy my John Lennon “The Beatles are bigger than Jesus” moment.

Twitter:

‘@KirstyLeanned: The 1975 are in a league of their own. Nobody is making music as unique, bold, varied, culturally relevant or just as fkn beautiful as theirs. Their entire discography is flawless’

ABIIOR is the most experimental of the three albums. It’s also the most conceptual album, studying our modern dependency on the internet in order to make and maintain relationships, this album is probably most relatable to my generation: though we grew up with ‘classic’ toys and outdoor adventures, we found ourselves tech-oriented by the time we hit our preteens, caught in the transition when obtaining the BBM pin of the boy you fancied suddenly became more exciting than winning a game of Kerby. 

This album doesn’t only discuss the internet, however. Relationships are an integral part, as you’d anticipate on any album. Inside Your Mind discusses wanting to crack open your partners head in order to find out what they’re truly thinking about. TooTimeTooTimeTooTime is a generic pop track that playfully discusses discourse between two cheating partners; meanwhile Be My Mistake is a romantic tale, sung to a sexual rebound: ‘you do make me hard, but she makes me weak’. Matty Healy, frontman of The 1975, performed Be My Mistake live for the first time this week, and was visibly nervous before doing so. It’s raw, beautiful, and a highlight of the album.

Meanwhile, the male British Siri gets his own time to shine on this album. The Man Who Married a Robot is a spoken track about a man whose relationship with the internet overtakes his need for actual human connection. The subject of the song has his own Facebook page, and apparently actually chats to you on messenger. Cool or weird? I can’t decide. I loved this song upon first listen, though wasn’t sure how I’d feel about it cropping up into every shuffle play of this album. A week on and I’m yet to skip it, surprisingly .. I’m even hoping Siri drops his own mixtape soon. 

I Like America and America Likes Me is another song I grew into loving. A homage to the American mumble rap, a genre I’m yet to delve into, ILAAALM has very decent, very pertinent lyrics (once you open Genius and figure out what it is Healy is actually saying through the autotune). ‘Kids don’t want rifles, they want Supreme’ has proven to a line especially enjoyed by Twitter, and I can see why.

Experimental and incredibly modern, this album is perfect for the generation who increasingly prioritise listening to playlists upon listening to an entire album. An amalgamation of styles and genres is simply how we do our daily listening nowadays, and I would probably argue that this album plays more like a playlist, though this does keep you on your toes, ultimately working to its benefit. The album is full of twists and surprises, all of them, at least in my opinion, very worth it.

I always knew I was going to love this album: Healy himself says: ‘to like The 1975, you have to like me’. After being a loyal fan for so long, I’m confident Healy could release an album comprised of silence for an hour, and I would demand it be played at my wedding, at the birth of my first child, at my funeral. My loyalties meant I would always have time for this album, however my loyalty turned into pure love upon first listen to this album, something that has not yet left me. Matty himself refers to The 1975 as the ‘band of the decade’, and I have to agree. And while I agree that, yes, The Beatles were bigger than Jesus, I also still stand by what I tweeted: The 1975 are making music unique, bold, varied, culturally relevant, and just f*cking beautiful. I cannot wait to see what they bring next. 

The 1975’s fourth album, ‘Notes on a Conditional Form’ is set to be released in 2019.

[transhumanitynet]

Epistle to the Libertarians

Hello. If someone gave you the link to this page, then they either thought you’d find it interesting, or were possibly attempting to do you a favour. This is a page about Libertarianism, from the viewpoint of someone who takes a broad view of Libertarianism as a morally complex phenomenon.

Such a view is increasingly necessary, because the internet (or social media, more specifically) does not encourage balanced or nuanced discussions of such matters. Like most things, Libertarianism comes in a range of forms, and has characteristics that are both good and bad, depending on context and details. My points below will sound extensively negative, but I ask you to trust that they build toward a balanced conclusion which requires the prior points to make sense. I, in turn, will trust that you are an intelligent human being who can read an entire article before coming to their own conclusions.

If you are already bristling that Libertarianism is not being wholeheartedly embraced as an ultimate moral good here, then you have a problem. You are what’s increasingly wrong with the world. Seek professional help, or at least a little perspective. You were probably given this link because you are clearly incapable of listening to a reasoned, balanced argument.

If, on the other hand, you are fine with the idea that life’s complexities are often subtle things and that striking some kind of reasonable balance is often the best way forward in life, then please do read on.

Of course, Libertarianism comes in many flavours, and now exists around the world. For that reason I’m not going to attempt a precise definition of Libertarianism, since such a definition would only leave some people in disagreement from the outset. Instead, let’s just say that Libertarianism – in principle, at least – is focussed on the complete prioritization of personal, individual freedom over all other things. One’s views on economics or any other matter should in principle be a secondary matter, if you take the idea of Libertarianism at face value, although that is seldom the case in real life. After all, human beings are naturally inclined to conflate distinct issues to make themselves feel good and “win” arguments. But for now, let’s just accept the face-value notion that Libertarianism is indeed supposed to be all about Liberty.

Let’s quickly address a couple of “elephants in the room” before getting down to business. As I’ve mentioned, the internet doesn’t exactly encourage balanced, rational discussion, and most conversations with avowed Libertarians I’ve observed tend to rapidly devolve into one party (I’ll let you guess which) claiming that if you don’t agree with them then you must be ill-informed, unintelligent, or (gasp) a “Socialist”. Just for the record I like to read and own books by notable Libertarian writers, believe I can string a thought or two together coherently, and I am not a Socialist.

More specifically on that last count I am a Social Futurist, but that simply means that I believe in the importance of community and environment as societal priorities (in addition to prizing technology, and believing a good life is one lived in accord with basic principles). I most emphatically do not subscribe to any Marxist notions regarding Class War, Public ownership of the Means of Production, forced redistribution of wealth, or equality of outcome (which I agree is very dangerous indeed, although I do firmly believe in the need for the ‘dampening effect’ of societal ‘safety nets‘).

The fact that so many Libertarians will quickly rush to paint anyone who disagrees with them as a “Socialist” without even asking these questions speaks volumes. Moreover, I believe this is related to the fact that Libertarianism is primarily an American phenomenon, and that this deliberate conflation of opponents’ views is typical of the rapidly degrading political discourse we see in the USA today. To be frank the world watches aghast as America loses its mind, and increasingly radical, non-rational strands of so-called Libertarianism are quite clearly part of that sad drama, which brings us to my first point of argument:

1. Transhumanism is NOT Part of Libertarianism

This first topic is one that wouldn’t interest most Libertarians, or indeed most people. It interests me greatly, however, because I am a strident Transhumanist. Transhumanism is generally understood to be defined (or at least well summarised) by the “Central Meme of Transhumanism” (CMT) expressed by notable Transhumanist Anders Sandberg as “That we can and should improve the human condition through technology”.

Obviously that makes no reference whatsoever to personal liberty, but that doesn’t stop many Libertarian Transhumanists claiming that notions of “self-ownership” are part of Transhumanism’s intrinsic nature. I won’t go into the history of such ideas except to say that Transhumanism was greatly popularised in 1980s America by The Extropy Institute, which was given to overtly conflating Transhumanism and Libertarianism, perfectly in line with its time and place. I have no problem whatsoever with people holding Libertarian Transhumanist views, but I do have a problem with them telling all Transhumanists that we must share their views. We’ll get to that breathtaking hypocrisy in a moment, but for now let me put the idea of Transhumanism being intrinsically Libertarian to rest as follows:

The Chinese nation considers itself to be Socialist (regardless of whether you agree with them or not). Certainly no-one in their right mind would claim it to be Libertarian in any meaningful sense (although exploitatively laissez faire Capitalist might be fair). The Chinese government is also known to be pushing a program of genetic augmentation of future Chinese citizens, which is a Transhumanist project by definition.

An ideology-neutral assessment of the situation would have to call this something like State-sponsored Chinese Transhumanism. If it became the most common global form of Transhumanism (which it easily could, given China’s population and the government’s ability to simply impose its will on the Chinese people), then a lot of people might say, in their ignorance, that State-sponsored Chinese Transhumanism is Transhumanism. I would disagree vehemently, insisting that it was a(n extremely prominent) variant of the Transhumanist idea. A specifically Chinese, Authoritarian variant.

  I disagree with Libertarians who try to “claim” the entirety of Transhumanism for themselves for exactly the same reason. You can be a Transhumanist. You can be a Libertarian. You can be both. But being one thing does not mean – and never has meant – that you must also be the other.

2. My Way is the Only Way: Libertarian Hypocrisy

Obviously I care about Transhumanism, but this problem within Libertarianism is much broader than that. I’m not saying that all Libertarians fall prey to this problem, but it is certainly worryingly common. The bottom line is that if you take their claims at face value, then Libertarians should favour your right to choose your own views and way of life for yourself, in every way and on every level. That’s a no-brainer, right?

Then why are so many Libertarians so hell-bent on arguing that everyone else should believe what they believe? On insisting that others should live the way the Libertarians themselves want to live? That just because they want to dismantle the government, then no-one else should have a functional government either?

There’s a lot that could be said here, but it all boils down to sheer hypocrisy on a breathtaking scale. Many Libertarians don’t want to simply live their own lives in peace without interference. They may say they do, but their behaviour is quite contradictory. They insist on having a say in how you get to live yours too, and are frequently extremely vocal about that insistence.

If you think I’m wrong, call to tell me so on the day every Libertarian is silent about the views other people should or shouldn’t hold, and I might just agree.

3. America, Corporatism, & Corruption

The most striking and dangerous form of Libertarian hypocrisy is its strange relationship to the world of business, economics, trade, and large corporations. As I mentioned earlier Libertarianism’s rallying call is all about personal freedom, because let’s face it, a call to rally around big business isn’t exactly going to light most people on fire without a little sleight of hand applied to the message.

This relationship has been commented on at great length all over the internet, so let’s just cut to the chase: If Libertarians were truly opposed to all forms of centralized control, or in other words were only really concerned with personal Liberty, then they would oppose undue centralization of power wherever it is found. They would oppose major corporations every bit as much as mega-churches, or indeed government. In short, their views would be barely distinguishable from the more politically centrist forms of Anarchism. It is rather telling that when Libertarians use labels that make any mention of Anarchism, they invariably feel some need to highlight their particular support for Capitalism at the same time.

The bottom line is that Libertarianism is primarily an American phenomenon, a global entity which has grown out of the peculiarities of American history and culture, and that culture is now – at its most overtly ‘Libertarian’ or ‘Neoliberal‘ – obviously defined by a serious commitment to corruption as a way of life. The entire structure of the American body politic is rotten to the core, and as long as Libertarians make a point of championing big business’ desire to eliminate governmental regulation, then they will remain passengers on the Titanic as it sails toward its fate.

4. Two Types of Libertarianism. One of them is Good.

As I warned earlier, much of this article has been critical of Libertarianism. I do, however, take a balanced view of Libertarianism, and I do believe it is possible to be a Good Libertarian. For what it’s worth, I did consider myself a Libertarian for a few years as a young man, back when I naively took its claims at face value, and I have never lost my commitment to personal liberty. It’s the baggage, the lies and hypocrisy that I take issue with. So let’s see if we can find some sensible way forward, together, shall we?

I take the view that Libertarianism is a good thing insofar as it actually lives up to its own rhetoric. Just for the record I would say exactly the same thing of Socialism, but I have even less confidence that Socialism can deliver on its promises. The simplest possible litmus test of that requirement is whether any given Libertarian is willing to call out dangerously over-centralized power wherever we see it, regardless of how that fits with other narratives – most particularly the common Libertarian infatuation with unregulated big business the Free Market.

In short, a Good Libertarian is one who can demonstrate an understanding that major corporations need to be regulated to some degree, that markets need to be regulated to some degree, just as much as governments must be regulated, as a matter of preserving personal liberty.

Epistle to the Libertarians was originally published on transhumanity.net

[lsbuniblog-blog]

Time and Progress

Time and progress have both recently become increasingly debatable topics, specifically regarding their intrinsic links and discordant relationship. There is lots to be said about how they behave, both above and below the surface. This essay will examine how the two terms behave, both in relationship to each other as well as their perceived qualities; that being, the notion of time-space compression, spaciotemporality, and the continued trajectory of postmodernity, including the heightened importance of appropriation, in relation to the work of Richard Prince.

To begin with, one must understand the definition of both terms. Oxford dictionaries define ‘time’ as follows; “The indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.” - Stevenson, A. (2010). Oxford dictionary of English. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. This particular definition is intriguing because of its secondary use of the word, ‘progress’, contextually describing existence. It is clear that the English Oxford Dictionary holds strong modernist views, quantifying progress through time, as to suggest that we as a society, are consistently progressing as time passes us, with no deterioration or counter-progression taking place at any point. Perhaps the reason for this over-simplification of what is a far more complex term, is a result of the clear correlation between time and progress, evident through technological advancements. However, this fails to consider that correlation does not equal causation. To counter this, an example of a disadvantage of postmodern society might include the introduction of nuclear weapons. It is difficult to classify this as progress, as defined by the English Oxford Dictionary.

Time is perceptual. It is not a fixed concept. it is relative to interpretation, and speeds up and slows down accordingly. This is why quantifying it through minutes and hours is in many ways a redundant practice. This only allows us to map out the past and future, like coordinates on a globe. Jorge Luis Borge (1970) states, “Time can’t be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.” The Oxford English Dictionary fails to take into account either of these two very important factors; relativity, and time’s discordant relationship with progress.

After questioning the relativity of time, one must consider if the same rules apply to progress. What one person might describe as progress, another might not. The English Oxford Dictionary defines progress as follows; “Forward or onward movement towards a destination.”. The use of the term ‘destination’ assumes a finishing point, which again, is a relative concept. This fails to take into account that what might be one person’s destination, might not be consistent with many other people.

Taking for instance, the shift from Realism into Postmodernism, we can appreciate that it allowed society to develop individual nuances through beliefs, and challenge the sweeping assumptions and generalisations that are perpetuated through Modernism. Postmodernism developed a new epoch of art and media that catalysed individual expression and identity. However, one might argue that this deconstruction of governing conceptualisation and perpetuation of increasingly significant individual expression has consequently led us down a path of narcissism, cynicism, and ultimately isolation. “Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy.” Wallace D, (1996) Infinite Jest. One must question if this is progress, a cultural shift, or even a step backwards.

You can see this transition through portraiture, well before the invention of photography. Whilst the intention of art was to present reality in its truest replication, the art ecosystem stagnated. Take one of the most famous and influential painters from the 17th century; Rembrandt, who was one of the great leaders in the renaissance era. Rembrandt understood light in a way that no other painter did. Rembrandt would argue that the most accomplished painters would be those who were capable of replicating reality in the most mirror like fidelity. However, moving on some years, where abstract works began to emerge, you will notice a shift in intent. No longer is the need for replicating relevant. That job has been made redundant by photography, Instead, postmodern influences push art into adopting notions such as semiotics, and tackling lazy assumptions once relied upon.

There are two main philosophies regarding the movement of time, each relevant, borrowing from each other in some way or another. We start with absolute time, which as the name suggests, dictates time as a linear, 2d structure. It acts only as frame upon which we plan events and record history. “Absolute space is fixed and we record or plan events within its frame.” Harvey, D. (2005). Spaces of Neoliberalization: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. Stuttgart: Steiner, p.94. It is perhaps the most common way that time is viewed. It is currently 10:43am on Tuesday 1st May as I write this, and I know for a fact that offering this information is an accessible way for anyone to visualise exactly how long ago it was, in relation to their position in time. Absolute time also introduces the ability to recall information; I could ask you where you were and what you were doing at this time, and perhaps with the help of a calendar, you would be able to give me an accurate response. However, if I were to ask how long ago this feels, I danger confusing absolute time to one of relativity, because the latter is entirely subjective, whilst the former is not.

The next main structural philosophy regarding time is variation, or relativity within time. This theory addresses the fact that time is experienced at different speeds, depending on the individual. One of the most influential minds denouncing relativity was Einstein, who believed that all forms of measurement depended on the frame of reference of the observer. "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity."  Einstein A. This premise is referred to as spaciotemporality.

One of the major contributing factors to the relativity of time, is time - space compression, which dictates how as technological improvements are made, space grows smaller. The introduction of global telecommunications, faster transport, and most notably the internet, means that now, sending a message to someone halfway across the world, no longer requires weeks of foot travel, and can now instead be sent virtually instantaneously via text, email, or any one of the many social medium we now heavily rely on. “As space appears to shrink to a global village of telecommunications and a ‘spaceship earth’ of economic and ecological interdependencies - to use just two familiar and everyday images - and as time horizons shorten to the point where the present is all there is, so we have to learn to cope with an overwhelming sense of compression of our spacial and temporal worlds” Harvey, D. (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity. (p.240).

The interpretation of time also depends on the volume of events that occur within a timeframe. The experience of boredom is only encountered once the body is deprived of sensory stimulation, which causes the experience of time to elongate. On the other end of the spectrum, keeping levels of sensory experience up, catalyses its passing. However this is only short term. Long term side effects of experiencing boredom causes the complete opposite effect. This is the main reason as to why adults in their 50’s, feel as though time passes them faster than whilst we were younger. This causes us to value the time we have more while we have less of it, and to treat it more like a commodity. “The findings support the contention that depressed affect produces a subjective slowing of time” John D. Watt, (1991). Effect of Boredom Proneness on Time Perception. Vol 69, Issue 1, p.323 - 327.

This leads the question of how these state of affairs intend to progress. One of two things might happen. Firstly, stagnation occurs, through technological superiority; technology has advanced so far that it becomes impossible to travel any faster through space, and thus no more progress is made. One must question whether time - space compression will continue in the same trajectory, and what a future world might look like if this were to occur. One must entertain the idea where everything is experienced simultaneously and instantly, all at once. It is difficult to fathom such an idea, however it remains relevant for the duration of this potentially worrying trajectory.

Time can also be broken up into categories based on influences regarding art and media. The phrase, ‘Avante Garde’ is commonly used to demote what is ‘new’, or ‘original’.  Cambridge dictionary defines the expression as “The painters, writers, musicians, and other artists whose ideas, styles, and methods are very original or modern in comparison to the period in which they live, or the work of these artists”. Cambridge University Press. (2008) Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. Derived from French terminology, ‘Avante Garde’, or ‘Vanguard’ in English, refers to the part of the army that is positioned ahead of the others, with the intention of breaking through the resistance of their adversaries. This aids in defining its current use, that being a style in which artists of all media platforms use which is considered new and original. Artists who use this tactic intend to ‘break through’ mainstream tropes in order to create something new and thought provoking. These works often stir controversy, however successful works are later on appreciated for their contribution to whatever field of media they belong to.

An example of a controversial and ‘Avante Garde’ creation might be Richard Prince’s ‘Malboro Man’ piece, where he took photographs of the Marlboro cigarette campaign by Sam Abell, subsequently selling it for over one billion dollars at Christie's New York in 2005. It was the most a rephotograph had ever been sold for. This is considered ‘Avante Garde’ because of the way that Prince changed how photography and its relationship with art was viewed. By re-appropriating an existing photograph, Prince essentially destroyed the idea that duplicates hold less value than the original, challenging ideas of context, and what makes art art. Prince was one of many different artists who explored context and appropriation, alongside people such as Warhol and Duchamp. “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed” Sontag S (1977) On Photography.

In conclusion, both the terms, ‘time’ and ‘progress’ are absolute and relative depending on their context and individual preference. Both are relevant yet not mutually exclusive. Progress on the other hand is entirely relative, and is conditioned upon individual beliefs and morals. It assumes a destination, yet remains fluid through individual interpretation.

References

Cambridge University Press. (2008) Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. Einstein A Geographical Development. Stuttgart: Steiner, p.94. Harvey, D. (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity. (p.240). Harvey, D. (2005). Spaces of Neoliberalization: Towards a Theory of Uneven Jorge Luis Borge (1970) Sontag S (1977) On Photography Stevenson, A. (2010). Oxford dictionary of English. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Wallace D, (1996) Infinite Jest