#action that still seeks to improve conditions for people existing now (even if not inherently anticapitalist) and revolutionary action

[prolibytherium]

bro so many people on here are under the impression that strikes are a burgeoning communist revolution it’s killing me

[sosation]

Humans and Nature: The Paris Flood of 1910

 Humans and Nature: The Paris Flood of 1910        

The Paris flood of 1910 was a natural disaster that brought Paris together as a community, but physically nearly tore it apart. Over 100 years later, this summer, the water rose again to flood levels but this time many improvements had been made to prevent another disaster. Parisians’ relationship with, and understanding of, nature has evolved. In this paper I aim to compare and contrast the different perspectives on nature between the 1910 Paris and the current day Paris. In addition, I will illuminate Georges Bechmann’s 19th century understanding of “health science,” and describe the Parisian school of thought in regards to water maintenance.

         There were several ideas that influenced the way Parisians saw the world in 1910. Their concept of nature, and the role it played in their lives, is a western perspective.  Nature was to be overcome. In Georges Bechmann’s “Salubrité Urbaine,” published in 1888, Bechmann proclaims that “nature must be assisted.” The implication is that nature serves man. He claims that when too many people are accumulated in a relatively small area, the functions of nature for human benefit no longer work properly and must be assisted. To Bechmann, there occurred “a kind of artificial life which is the condition of existence of city dwellers in general.” (1) These ideas implied that humanity was designed to be separate from nature.

         Despite these “high” concepts at the time, the reality in 1910 was that many French, especially those living near the Seine, very much lived with nature and dealt with it on a regular basis. When the waters began to rise on January 21st, it was no longer a friendly force helping people go about their lives. It became an invading enemy and was perceived as a threat to the survival of the city. Although a state of siege was never officially declared, it was hotly debated in the National Assembly and the military was brought in to assist in the protection and maintenance of the city and its people. The slogan “Tout á l’égout” -everything into the sewer- is an example of people’s reliance on nature to take care of things for them, and during the flood this mentality continued to the detriment of downriver cities.

         The town of Gennevilliers is another example of the people's reliance on nature. The farming village had a symbiotic relationship with the city where “runoff from the city sewers had been collected in the fields near Gennevilliers and was available as free fertilizer to anyone who wanted it.” (2) Being positioned geographically downriver led the people of Gennevilliers to rely on the river to provide them with fertilizer. This became a problem when, in 1910, “the river, which was normally not even a quarter mile across, was now reportedly three and three-quarter miles at Gennevilliers.” (3) The fertilizer which was normally deposited in the adjacent fields was now a part of the vast amounts of water deluging the area.  

Bechmann, and other intellectuals of the time, understood that dirty and stagnant water was unhealthy, but the scientific and medical understanding of the world was not advanced enough to fully understand the means by which these microbes were transmitted. Bechmann refers to “gray water” and “groundwater” being unsanitary because of the “miasmas” they generate. While he slightly missed the mark with his notion of airborne illnesses, the end result was still on target. It was unhealthy and unsanitary to have pools of stagnant water, not because of miasmas but because of the other organisms that either seek out or develop in such pools. The Paris water problem on the whole could be summed up to an issue of “city hygiene.”  In thinking of the city as a living “body,” if the body was ill the apparent next step was to address the issue as one would address any illness with a human body- though health. The best way to keep the city healthy, according to Bechmann, was to have clean water. To achieve this the city constructed 600 km of additional pipeline to bring in clean water and take out soiled water. (4) This state-of-the-art sewer ended up being the reason Paris was so inundated during the 1910 flood as it allowed the rising Seine underground access to parts of Paris it otherwise wouldn’t have had access to. Parisians before the flood believed that they had subjugated the Seine (nature) and manipulated it (assisted it) to accommodate their desire to have a hygienically healthy city.  After the flood it was apparent that their domination of the Seine was actually their weakness and led to a mass pollution of the city and the surrounding areas.

In contrast, over a hundred years later it appears that Paris has learned at least some lessons from the catastrophic event of 1910. Some of this learning has been the global technological advancements that have been made in science and medicine in the past century. The understanding of how diseases are created and spread is vastly superior now than it was in 1910 and that leads to better decision making of how to achieve a healthy population.

Even though humans still are trying to conquer nature in all sorts of ways, it appears that in Paris there have been accommodations to live with nature as well. A better understanding of floodplains and water tables has educated Parisians on where the places most vulnerable to flooding are. In addition, meteorological science has advanced to the point where accurately predicting a flood before it happens is entirely possible and this gives authorities ample time to prepare and implement measures which have been put in place to deal with the eventual flood.  This past summer, forewarning was able to save many lives. “All water traffic...was suspended because there was no room for boats to fit under bridges.” and “more than 20,000 people” were evacuated before the flood. (5) All of these actions have an implicit understanding that there are certain things in regards to nature that are uncontrollable. These measures are an attempt to control the “controllable” and leave nature to do what it will. Doing so inherently is respecting nature and what it is capable of.

Another example of the French, more recently, respecting nature is Operation Sequana, a simulated flood drill that was carried out over eleven days in March 2015. (6)  This drill went a long way to training Parisians on how to deal with the dangers of the flood. Even the staff at the Louvre were drilled on removing art from the basement of the building. This was another lesson well learned from 1910. Even though in 2016 the Seine was 2.5 meters lower than it was in 1910, it still did significant damage to the city; costing Paris over 1 billion euros. (7) The difference this time around was that flooding is now a well understood phenomenon and Parisians mostly got out of its way. Some even seemed to enjoy the rare, and perhaps beautiful, sights of Paris under water.

To conclude, Parisian scientific understanding in the late 19th century up through 1910, and the perceived role of nature at the time, led decision makers down a path of vulnerability and overconfidence in their man-made systems which resulted in the disastrous flood of 1910. Many of these “health science” concepts being applied to city planning was introduced by Georges Bechmann, who could be viewed as the stepping stone between archaic concepts of health and the modern ones we ascribe to today. Today, Paris has drawn from these past experiences, built on them, and adapted to be more accommodating to nature.

 1.Bechmann, Georges.Salubrité Urbaine.1888.Paris

2.Jackson, Jeffery H.Paris Under Water. St. Martins Griffin.2010.pp154.

3.Paris Under Water.pp155.

4. Les égouts parisiens. Article:

https://web.archive.org/web/20061003225317/http://www.paris.fr/portail/Environnement/Portal.lut?page_id=1313&document_type_id=5&document_id=2158&portlet_id=3139

5. Chrisafis, Angelique. “Paris Floods: ‘There’s something terrifiying about it.’” 4 June 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/03/paris-river-seine-floods

6. Van Oldenborgh, Geert Jan.”Rapid attribution of the May/June 2016 flood-inducing precipitation in France and Germany to climate change”.22 June 2016.

7.Flooding in France- Image of the day. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov./IOTD/view.php?id=88157

Anthony Sosa

Dr. Christopher Morris

HIST 4388.001

10-21-16

[thelmasirby32]

10 Ways SEO will lead companies through COVID-19 business recovery

30-second summary:

Ecommerce, curbside delivery and pickup, and buy-online-pick-up-in-store have become the new normal as the world struggles to maintain social distancing.

75% of consumers are now using their social media daily, and only 4% want brands to stop advertising right now.

As consumers seek information about how businesses are handling COVID-19 restrictions, evaluate their buying options, adapt to remote work, and try their very best to stay informed and entertained, search is now more important than ever.

Many companies have halted paid search due to Coronavirus-related business interruptions.

Now is the time for businesses to evaluate their paid search strategy and content creation strategies.

Focus on providing guidance and help through the information you’re putting out and make sure you offer a method by which readers/viewers can stay connected with you.

Jim Yu, founder and CEO shares how to use SEO to protect, pivot, and prepare for post-pandemic success.

Typically, it takes about 66 days for someone to acquire a new habit and continue doing it when not coerced, according to consumer psychologist Paul Marsden. The longer shelter-in-place recommendations persist, the more likely it is that the changes we’re seeing in consumer behaviour will stick.

Consumers that may have been leery about ecommerce or online payments previously have had no choice but to adapt as wide swaths of the industry have transformed in light of COVID-19. Ecommerce, curbside delivery and pickup, and buy-online-pick-up-in-store have become the new normal as the world struggles to maintain safe physical distancing.

As of late March, 95% of consumers planned to avoid public places. Media consumption is exploding—Nielsen expects video consumption to rise by 60% and already, daytime viewing of streamed content is up 39%. Seventy-five percent of consumers are now using their social media daily, and only 4% want brands to stop advertising right now. Most are actually looking to brands for helpful, useful information.

At the very heart of this shift is – search and the optimization of content that delivers the best search results. As the shift from offline to online accelerates during these times companies are being asked to do more with less. As consumers seek information about how businesses are handling COVID-19 restrictions, evaluate their options for buying essential needs, adapt to remote work and education, and try their very best to stay informed and entertained, search is now more important than ever.

The insights that SEO provides with regard to consumer behaviour is essential in times of volatility and demand fluctuation – especially when looked at in real-time. In fact, SEO will guide companies through the economic storm Coronavirus leaves in its wake, from pivoting to protecting the brand and on through to positioning its products and services for success in the future.

Here’s why:

1. Search has an oversized channel share

According to a BrightEdge Channel Share Survey, 53% of all traffic to websites comes from organic search. When we looked at search as a whole, 83% of search traffic is organic and 17% comes from paid search. Many companies have halted paid search due to Coronavirus-related business interruptions. This is the time to revaluate how your paid strategy supports organic, how can you drive more traffic to your best content, feeding consumers’ need for media to consume while furthering your brand goals?

2. SEO provides excellent long-term traffic equity

While SEO does require an upfront investment of resources, earned search engine rankings can persist for years. The content you create, optimize and publish today will serve your brand in the future and can be updated to reflect evolving business goals throughout the economic recovery. Likewise, you have an opportunity now to review your top-performing content, updating and optimizing for the current conditions.

3. Search optimization naturally enhances user experience (UX)

Applying SEO best practices as you optimize your site and content for the new customer journey has the additional benefits of improving UX. Your site becomes better organized and easier to navigate as you properly mark up, structure, tag and otherwise optimize content. Evaluate your site today from a user’s perspective; are there opportunities to improve navigation or accessibility? This is the time to act and correct missing image alt text, lack of internal links, unclear calls-to-action, etc.

4. SEO provides conversion optimization benefits as well

Throughout the processes of planning and creating content, we’re constantly thinking of how it will help a prospect take the next step in their path to conversion. With consumers’ media needs so high due to COVID-19, it’s a great time to fill gaps in your customers’ journey with quality content.

Depending on the type of business you’re in and the extent to which your operations have been affected, this may not even be the time to convert prospects to a sale. However, you may be able to re-optimize for the time being to convert them to another action that will deepen your relationship and enable you to stay top of mind until sales become possible once again.

5. Freshness can give you an edge

Recency matters. Google wants to see EAT content — expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. But we also know the search giant wants to show searchers the most up-to-date information, as well. Continuing to regularly publish quality content — well researched, properly cited, optimized, original content, gives you that much more opportunity to appear in front of motivated searchers even in “noisy” search results.

Update your most popular evergreen content, too. You don’t need to add COVID-related content but can ensure any statistics, information, recommendations, media, and calls-to-action are up to date.

6. Consumers are searching for guidance

You have the opportunity to build share of voice right now in your industry by providing expert advice and accurate information about COVID-19 to consumers. People are looking for guidance and help. Focus on the utility of the information you’re putting out and make sure you offer a method by which readers/viewers can stay connected with you. Include an email opt-in, invitation to join you on social, link to a useful download, or some resources on those lines.

When linking to external sources, make sure you are sharing the most reputable information. Remember that content you curate or recommend is a reflection of your brand, as well. This is especially important when it comes to sharing health or safety tips. Look to sources such as the CDC or WHO to confirm any COVID-related information before sharing or linking.

7. SEO provides local to global reach

Whether you’re a local retail store or a global franchise, your customers are using search right now. Are you positioned to appear in response to their relevant queries? Depending on the resources available at the local level, this could be a great time for local stakeholders to invest in better optimizing existing content for their specific city or region. Or, you might find that resources are available at corporate to support the brand with thought leadership content that can be distributed and promoted globally.

If you had never had the time or resources to work on translation before, this could be a good time to optimize content for your Spanish, French, German or other customers. This could be a great opportunity for businesses with multi-national operations looking to keep their workforce employed and productive during a slowdown. Guided by SEO and marketing professionals, local employees from any department can help provide the hyperlocal context needed for great local content.

8. SEO is an important part of your overall marketing strategy

Unless your operations have completely ceased, you are investing in other channels that generate demand. Those channels inspire people to search for products and services like yours, to learn more about the brand, to read reviews about you, and more. Channel synergy is a delicate balance and it’s important that you maintain your SEO strategy even in (in fact, especially in) uncertain times. SEO is front and centre of digital marketing strategies that span across channels such as paid media, local, mobile, video, email and verticals such as Amazon and ecommerce.

It is particularly important right now that your content delivers consumers to the answer or information they expected to see when they clicked on your ad or listing. Make sure outdated landing pages are updated or removed and redirected. Go over your social accounts with a critical eye to ensure the information in your business descriptions is accurate in light of COVID-related operational changes. Ensure your local listings have the correct hours and methods of contacting the business for service or support. Where and whenever a searcher finds your brand, make sure you’re still offering an experience that instills trust.

9. You’re being considered, even if consumers aren’t currently buying

Organic search is part of nearly every consumer’s research process—it’s often the very beginning of the research process but will be used again and again throughout the consideration phase. This is particularly true of long sales cycles. Remember that this is a huge adjustment for many types of consumers and businesses right now. As their own operations are interrupted by COVID-19, your customers may be compiling lists of potential solutions, reading and watching videos as they consider their options, looking for testimonials and reviews, and more.

Focus on legitimate link building and PR opportunities today to get captive audiences consuming and sharing your content.

10. Search is your best representation of Voice of Customer

The data collection and analysis inherent to good SEO has value across the entire brand. Right now, search data can put you in your customers’ shoes and provide deep insight into how COVID-19 has changed their lives. What are customers searching for now that they weren’t before? They may be searching more for video conferencing tips, grocery delivery, activities to do at home, or online learning. Hotels, flights, vacations, and things to do in the local area likely aren’t top of mind right now.

This is the time to make sure you have systems in place to gather and activate all of this insightful data in real-time, so you can adjust and respond as needed throughout the impending economic recovery. Search data tells you not only what your customers need, but why it’s what they need. It can reveal pain points, motivation and intent that not only helps you optimize content but drives smarter business decisions at every level.

Use SEO to protect, pivot, and prepare for post-pandemic success

Given the uncertainty, SEO is our best option for responding to ongoing COVID-19-related business interruptions with speed and agility. Search is critical not only for discovery but as the channel that provides the greatest insight into consumer behaviour in real-time, as it continues to evolve in response to the pandemic.

Search insights will inform every stage of COVID-19 brand response:

Protection – Of the brand (equity), current and future demand, consumer relationships, and online reputation.

Pivoting – As we evolve our strategies, products and services, messaging and more.

Preparations – For the “new normal”, whatever that looks like for your brand given the conditions you’ll be working in weeks and months from now (and further down the road).

While we don’t know when the current restrictions on travel and commerce might end, we do know they will end—or at least relax somewhat. However, the lasting impact Coronavirus will have on consumer behaviour remains to be seen. As the situation changes, SEO remains our most effective method of understanding and responding to our customers’ needs now and in the future.

Jim Yu is the founder and CEO of leading enterprise SEO and content performance platform BrightEdge. He can be found on Twitter @jimyu.

The post 10 Ways SEO will lead companies through COVID-19 business recovery appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/04/14/10-ways-seo-will-lead-companies-through-covid-19-business-recovery/

[skypalacearchitect]

On February 25, Ivanka Trump criticized Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's signature policy proposal, the Green New Deal, during an interview with FOX News. The specific part of the proposal — which seeks to address the dire threat of climate change as well as fight economic inequality — that Trump had trouble with was its promise to provide “a job with a family-sustaining wage…to all people of the United States.” Trump’s response was hard to make out around the silver spoon jammed into her mouth, but she managed to spit out, “People want to work for what they get. So I think this idea of a guaranteed minimum is not something most people want. They want the ability to be able to secure a job.”

Many critics were quick to point out the hypocrisy inherent in her words, spoken as they were by a millionaire heiress who grew up rich, was handed a high-level job at her father’s company, and now serves in his administration despite her complete lack of government or political experience. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez joined the chorus, commenting on Twitter, “As a person who actually worked for tips & hourly wages in my life, instead of having to learn about it 2nd-hand, I can tell you that most people want to be paid enough to live.”

Others, like writer Ira Madison III, called attention to Trump — whom he dubbed “Sweatshop Shannon" — and her comments in the context of her experience as a businessperson. Madison skewered Trump’s relationship with the predominantly Bangladeshi and Indonesian garment-factory workers who manufactured her clothing line; the Guardian has reported that Indonesian workers “describe being paid one of the lowest minimum wages in Asia.” In 2018, Trump shut down her eponymous clothing line in order to focus on whatever it is she does in Washington, after years of flagging sales, boycotts, and backlash from consumers who turned on the brand because of its association with the president. However, her complicity in the deep-rooted and ongoing issue of sweatshop labor remains.

Trump’s was far from the only fashion brand to allegedly mistreat and exploit an overseas workforce. Nike, Wal-Mart, Gap, H&M, and even Beyoncé’s Ivy Park have faced similar accusations and criticisms over hazardous conditions and low wages in the factories that these and other U.S.-based companies contract to manufacture their products. The rise of semi-disposable “fast fashion” — a term for low-quality, cheap, trendy clothing that takes ideas from high fashion and celebrity culture and rushes them onto store shelves — and the high production quotas, fast turnarounds, and potential exposure to harmful chemicals characteristic to its production have placed immense pressure on already underpaid, overworked employees.

In addition, unions and rights groups allege that physical and sexual abuse are common in factories in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka that supply H&M and Gap, and many cases are left unreported for fear of retaliation; two reports published by the group Global Labour Justice in 2018 prompted those brands to launch their own investigations. As Elizabeth Cline, a journalist and the author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, told Racked in 2018, “While fashion chains continue to get wealthier, people at the very bottom are not getting their fair share. In some instances, real wages in the garment industry have actually gone down.”

This culture of mistreatment is an injustice that the fashion industry has yet to fully address, so unions, labor activists, and most importantly, the workers themselves have been taking action.

For nearly two weeks in January 2019, 50,000 women garment workers in and around Dhaka, Bangladesh, engaged in a series of militant work stoppages, protests, and strikes to demand higher wages, facing down police and causing over 50 factories to shut down. It was essentially a general strike, a show of force from a long-undervalued workforce.

In 2018, Bangladesh was the second-largest apparel exporter in the world, trailing China, with all those exports generating over $30 billion per year. The minimum wage for a Bangladeshi garment worker had recently been raised 50 percent but still only reached the equivalent of $95 per month, which workers say isn’t enough to cover even basic necessities. According to a recent Centre for Policy Dialogue report, a Bangladeshi garment worker’s average salary covers just 49.9% of living costs, and finding affordable housing is a struggle.

The low pay has a much bigger impact on women across the region, as they form the bulk of many garment workforces. In Bangladesh and Vietnam, 80% of garment workers are women; in Sri Lanka, it’s 71%; in Cambodia, that number stretches to 90%.

During clashes between police and strikers, one person was killed and dozens were injured by police firing rubber bullets and water cannons. Since the strike, 5,000 participants have been fired.

Meanwhile, the Bangladesh Supreme Court tried to stymie a renewal of the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, a legal agreement the IndustriALL Global Union, UNI Global Union, and eight affiliated Bangladeshi unions have with over 200 global brands and fashion retailers that seeks to regulate workplace health and safety across the nation’s garment and textile industry. (Ivanka Trump’s brand did not sign on.) The highest court in the country was seeking to replace the agreement with an existing government body that would seemingly work much more closely and on much friendlier terms with international brands and garment manufacturers. Bangladesh’s Supreme Court has deferred its decision on the matter until April.

As its website notes, the agreement “was signed in the immediate aftermath of the Rana Plaza building collapse on 24 April 2013, which killed 1,133 workers and critically injured thousands more,” the aftershocks of which are still felt by the millions of workers still employed in Bangladesh’s busy garment factories. Following the tragedy, Mark Anner, the director of the Center for Global Workers’ Rights at Penn State, released reports indicating there was a huge uptick in union activity, which also contributed to an increase in worker protections. But the increased activity was met with union-busting efforts from management soon afterward. As of 2016, out of Bangladesh’s more than 4,500 garment factories, only about 10 percent had registered unions, which makes the efforts of global industrial unions like IndustriALL (which has affiliate unions in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Vietnam, and many others) all the more important.

Bangladesh isn’t the only Asian country in which garment workers are fighting back. Back in 2010, workers’ unions reported that over 60,000 women textile-factory workers walked off the job to protest low wages in Cambodia. Four years later, three Cambodian textile workers were killed by police during a protest over the minimum wage. In Sri Lanka, where labor’s power is precarious, members of IndustriALL’s Sri Lanka affiliate CIWU still staged a protest outside their place of employment, Tri Star Apparel Exports (Pvt) Ltd., over unpaid wages and benefits in 2016. In 2017, 6,000 garment workers in north Vietnam went on strike to protest company policies and low wages; a similar large-scale strike was called in southern Vietnam in 2015, and wildcat strikes are common across the country’s workforce.

Not all of Southeast Asia’s labor activists are quite so strike-ready, but they are still organizing to raise wages and improve working conditions. Stand Up Movement (SUM) Lanka, a garment workers' educational network founded by former garment worker Ashila Niroshine Mapalagama, is working to build a bottom-up workers-rights movement in a country where the average wage is just 55 cents an hour. One of SUM’s biggest goals is to get to a point where workers earn a living wage within eight hours of work, as well as combating what Mapalagama calls “the hidden cost.”

“There are many hidden costs for workers,” she told journalist Mary-Rose Abraham in 2017. “These workers are separated from their families and are absent from family matters. They cannot obtain leave to perform many social obligations and become distant from society. So these hidden costs are not covered and the workers are under a lot of stress.”

Garment-worker-led organizations like Stand Up Movement as well as local unions and labor activists will continue to lead the way forward, and those in the fashion industry with more power and privilege need to follow their lead, to amplify workers’ voices, and to use their own privilege for good — not evil. Lest we forget, in 1909, the first National Woman’s Day followed a 1908 mass protest by 15,000 women workers, who demanded shorter work hours, better pay, voting rights, and an end to child labor. That was a precursor to International Women’s Day, which was established by the Socialist Party in 1910 and followed an iconic 11-week strike by immigrant women garment workers in New York City, known as the Uprising of the 20,000, who also made demands that may sound familiar to their modern-day descendants: better wages and the right to form unions.

Today and every day, we owe it to our sisters and siblings in all industries — but especially in those fraught with dangerous conditions, low pay, and undervalued output — to continue this ancient fight, to act in good faith, to uplift and support one another in true solidarity. The century and scenes and actors may change, but the struggle remains the same: for dignity, for a living wage, for a safe workplace, for bread, and for roses, too.

[memoryinsufficient]

Since Donald Trump won the US presidential election one year ago, the games sector has tried to work out how to use our medium to resist the rise of the far right. In March, Resistjam brought game developers together around the world to create consciousness-raising works of political art. Rami Ismail is one developer who has used his platform as a respected public speaker at games conferences to speak out against Trump’s discriminatory travel ban and elevate the voices of developers whose work has been affected. Games criticism outlet Waypoint’s remarkable first year included a week-long special feature on the prison-industrial complex.

Videogames and neoliberalism

Class politics of digital media

Art as political response

How to use games politically

References

One year on, it may now be a good time to evaluate the cultures of resistance that are growing in games. What does it mean to resist fascism with games and tech? How can the videogames and technology industries confront our role in fostering cultures of isolated young men who become radicalised? Does it still make sense to focus on videogames at a time like this?

Videogames and neoliberalism

“Duke Nukem’s Dystopian Fantasies” appeared on Jacobin on April 20th, marking a debut post for writer and artist Liz Ryerson on the leftist commentary site. In it, she makes the affirmative case for looking at videogames as historical and cultural artefacts while judging them on their own merits, and makes the connection between the male power fantasy the game embraces, the alienation people feel under late capitalism, and how that can translate into reaction without a coherent understanding of history.

“This is the power of the fantasy Duke Nukem as a cultural figure represents: that through raw machismo, the series of oppressive neoliberal forces that form the framework of our society can be conquered and transcended. Duke cannot exist in a rational world. He can only exist in a one filled with internal contradictions, crossed wires, and broken down buildings.

“His world is never stable. It can only ever be dominated by irrational fears of the unknown and one-dimensional, cartoonish archetypes. His world never resolves any of its cognitive dissonances, and sometimes even seems to be aware of its own self-destructiveness.”

Liz Ryerson (2017) “Duke Nukem’s Dystopian Fantasies”, Jacobin

For the most part, Ryerson’s piece received praise from leftist partisans whether or not they were particularly committed to videogames as a craft. But not everyone felt it was appropriate for a socialist journal like Jacobin to have published a close reading of something like Duke Nukem 3D.

https://twitter.com/garliccorgi/status/855241007692210177

It’s not as if they’d ever previously published pieces on the art, culture and business of games or tech, to relatively little backlash:

Les Simerables, Eva Koffman “SimCity isn’t a sandbox. Its rules reflect the neoliberal common sense of today’s urban planning.”

Empire Down, Sam Kriss “The player in Age of Empires II doesn’t take on the role of a monarch or a national spirit, but the feudal mode of production itself.”

“You can sleep here all night”: Video Games and Labour, Ian Williams “Exploitation in the video game industry provides a glimpse at how many of us may be working in years to come.”

In my own experience occupying the art fringe of the videogame industry–which is admittedly a highly reactionary space–I’ve learned that while there are a lot of young people pouring a lot of energy into their craft, it’s easy to feel lonely and beholden to a lost cause. I’ve worked as a writer and small-time artist and developer for almost a decade, focusing primarily on indie and alternative development communities and agitating in my limited capacity for more of a spotlight on them, their histories, and the labour involved in them. My political activity outside of my work consists largely of anti-fascist organizing in my city–that means participating in teach-ins, free food events, as well as protests and counter-demonstrations against the far-right. This work is voluntary, but can sometimes feel much more fulfilling than my actual profession. It’s easy to feel like no one really cares about fringe technical arts because, well, most people don’t. If the industry’s flagship mainstream titles give us very little to seriously engage with, then why bother digging any deeper?

[bctt tweet=”Political critique of AAA games is a lot of work, for something juvenile at worst, and culturally peripheral at best.” via=”no”]

As the Jekyll that is liberalism has once again fallen into crisis and gives way to its Mr. Hyde that is fascist reaction, I’ve felt increasingly insecure about the nature of my work and why I chose it. I laugh nervously and tell people what I do is bullshit before going any further. Luckily, most of the people I’ve encountered while organizing, or even just through having had a political affinity online, have expressed genuine interest in the medium, the inner workings of our opaque and cloistered industry, and its potential as an expressive and communicative tool. Still, I have met those who think of things like social media as “inappropriate technology”, who automatically assume that anyone who has any interest in videogames is a pepe nazi, or who think of any engagement with new media as a cultural and political dead end.

That said, some of the most personally influential leftist thinkers I’ve come across are also writers, artists and academics in this incredibly weird field. More often than not we organize and march together. This is not an attempt to scapegoat anyone specific or to do as so many desperate thinkpieces did after the election and try to reaffirm the dubious political importance of games as an artform through headlines such as “Trump as Gamer-in-Chief”.

I don’t think that making videogames, no matter how fringe or alt, should be conflated with tried and true forms of street activism. Game jams about the immigration ban are not a form of direct action in the way shutting down a consulate or doing an hours-long sit-in at an airport are. Your app is not saving the world.

ResistJam was an online game jam about resisting authoritarianism. Over 200 games were made by participants.

The dominant ideological expression of late capitalism is liberalism, or more specifically, neoliberalism. Liberalism prefers to try to diversify the middle class of the currently existing system, rather than try imagining something that might liberate greater masses of people. According to this view, capitalism fundamentally works, only needing a slight tweak here or there to make it more “accessible” to those who are deserving. A major way it seeks to accomplish this is by centering symbolic representation of various marginalized identities while also depoliticizing things like technological progress, framing them as inherently good and proof of societal advancement. All actual material concerns and real struggle can then be ironed away in favour of simply trying to optimize the level of participation for marginalized groups, as one would fiddle with a dial. This isn’t to say symbolic representation doesn’t matter, but to fixate on it strips us of the ability to think in terms of collective political power, and cultivate a real political program that fights for material improvements to people’s lived conditions.

Class politics of digital media

Media consumption doesn’t determine political outcomes, at least not in a direct sense, but it does help shape people’s political imaginations. Taking the time to unpack the media we consume can tell us a lot about the conditions of production–that is to say, the ways in which labour power is exploited in order to produce entertainment commodities. This may include the mining of cobalt to make computer hardware, or the manufacturing of consoles and other devices at Foxconn plants, or developers coerced into overwork in order to meet production quotas. There is a potentially international struggle of exploited workers even just when it comes to videogames, yet hardly a labour movement to speak of. That there’s hardly a union presence in the technical arts or in tech work broadly, and that these industries tend toward meritocratic, libertarian or even fascist thinking that tends to be expressed ideologically via their major cultural properties, is not an accident.

Conversely, if politics are the “art of the possible”, then media creation allows us to expand the conceptual scope for what’s possible. Most of the art we consume is conservative in character–even works we consider liberal or progressive are often deeply reactionary in their base assumptions. For example, David Grossman explains why diverse Brooklyn Nine-Nine can’t avoid being apologia for the NYPD, and why using progressive representation to paper over the faults of repressive institutions is indefensible.

Earlier this year, the Vera Institute of Justice polled young people in high-crime areas of New York, and found that only four in ten respondents would feel comfortable seeking help from the police if they were in trouble, and eighty-eight percent of young people surveyed didn’t believe that their neighborhoods trusted the police. Forty-six percent of young people said they had experienced physical force beyond being frisked by a police officer.

“Brooklyn Nine-Nine” tries to get around this problem by pretending the actual Brooklyn doesn’t exist.

David Grossman (2013) “If you think the NYPD is like Dunder Mifflin, you’ll love ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine'”, New Republic

Videogames in particular have their own sordid history of using diversity rhetoric as a way to deflect criticism of unwieldy, increasingly shoddy games produced under highly exploitative conditions, and reflect profoundly disturbing ideological tendencies (sometimes with the help of the arms industry or the U.S. military.) This has led some leftists to believe that the interactive arts as a craft are inherently reactionary and devoid of creative potential. I sympathize to an extent with this position, but having spent significant time in tech and games spaces, I believe these problems arise from the same historical conditions that render most art conservative, as well as specific ones owing to the opaqueness of the industry itself. I think these are things that can be overcome, not without some effort, and part of what keeps me interested in games is its creative fringe, where artists are finding ways to use the medium to capture as well as suggest alternatives to our current predicament.

[bctt tweet=”Videogames have matured entirely within the context of late capitalism and neoliberalism.” via=”yes”]

Videogames have barely a labour movement to speak of, and are an appendage of the tech-libertarian culture of Silicon Valley. An important aspect of their heritage resides in engineers meddling with MIT military computers. They have never, in their production or conception, been entirely separate from the state or the military-industrial complex or from corporate interest, and as a result often exist as an ideological expression of these institutions.

Maybe this was unavoidable, the forces underlying the technical arts world too strong to ever be meaningfully opposed by a few dissenting voices, but I struggle to think of anything in the modern world for which this is not true. Maybe a game jam, or a book fair, or a block party should not be the centerpieces of our activism. These things have their place, but should not be confused for things like street actions (protests, counter-demonstrations against the far-right), grassroots electoral activism, coalition-building between social and economic justice groups, public disobedience (like the destruction of hostile architecture), accessibility and anti-poverty efforts, workplace organizing and so on. This work can be thankless and grueling, but it’s absolutely vital. Still, engaging with media and culture in a way that actually resonates with alienated people is a good way to let them know there’s something else available to them than resigned helplessness. Perhaps it seems like too much effort for too small and marginal a community, but going to any independent games site will bring up literally thousands of entries, much of it being made by people under the age of 30. Many of these people work multiple jobs while making their art for free or almost free, or work under precarious conditions (employment instability, contract work, etc,) and scrape by on crowdfunding, and many–as I’ve experienced both by playing their works and by actually building relationships with them–lean acutely left and hunger for more robust progressive spaces that reward creative experimentation, but often lack the time, energy or organizational guidance that would help them achieve those goals.

But even more broadly, more people play games than identify strictly as “gamers.” Plenty of people who do work in the industry recognize this term as a corporate invention, and don’t actually resemble the stereotype of the socially-awkward, emotionally stunted, self-pitying bourgeois recluses that so much of the industry has historically built its marketing around. While mainstream ideologies in the subculture tend to range from milquetoast liberalism to right-wing libertarianism to cryptofascism, quite a lot more people consume media like games, comics and even anime than are intimately involved with the worst elements of these subcultures. Snobbishly refusing to make any use of these “deviant” or “degenerate” new forms and reacting with hostility at anyone who tries to strikes me as missing an opportunity, and as needlessly ceding cultural ground to people we seek to oppose at every level.

Art as political response

Though GamerGate is nearly incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t been following it closely, it’s unusual in that it captured the attention of people who have nothing all to do with video games when it’s ostensibly preoccupied with whether certain online blogs have properly disclosed their writers’ ties to indie game developers. A recent post at Breitbart, however, helps to explain GamerGate’s appeal: It’s an accessible front for a new kind of culture warrior to push back against the perceived authoritarianism of the social-justice left.

Vlad Chituc (2015) “Gamergate: A culture war for people who don’t play video games”, New Republic

Reactionaries–from bog standard republicans to the fractured jumble of fascoid revanchists that make up the so-called “alt-right”–have for a long time viewed nerd culture as part of the broader culture war. This is why Gamergate attracted conservative figures like Christina Hoff Sommers, Todd Kincannon and Milo Yiannopoulos (both disgraced), Paul Joseph Watson, Mike Cernovich and so on. I don’t think gaming or memes really impacted, say, the election, and I tend to think the way we talk about Gamergate–as though it’s the cause of, rather than a product of, the resurgence of the far-right–misses the forest for the trees. I don’t think leftist and labour activists ought to go out of their way to address these hard-identified gamers either. There’s no reason for us not to remain critical of the industry and the ideologies it reproduces.

But it’s obvious that this is a group that gets really anxious when they start to feel like they don’t have control over “nerd culture” anymore, and who have in many ways acted as shock troops to dissuade people from asking too many questions about the industry’s inner practices. In retrospect, there was an opportunity with Gamergate for those in and around the industry to really interrogate the relationship between its issues with labour and its issues with incubating angry reactionary nerds, and for the most part that didn’t happen. It couldn’t, because those who were most likely to suffer professional and personal attack weren’t organized, and still aren’t. It’s no wonder so many YouTube celebrities turn out to be fascists. Actually embracing those who work in or around these fields and who are desperately trying to inject a little grace and intelligence into the medium may help weaken that stranglehold. Not such a terrible idea considering how many kids are watching the likes of PewDiePie and JonTron.

https://twitter.com/liberalism_txt/status/894978105021956096

We’ve seen this work to an extent: bots that tweet out liberal self-owns and dank communist memes can help bring together people who feel their concerns aren’t otherwise being articulated and addressed, and find if nothing else in this a bond with other like-minded souls. I don’t think these things are necessarily directly persuasive, but they do allow us to give voice to that which both invigorates us and that which causes us to despair.

https://twitter.com/ra/status/828686383623593985

Tim Mulkerin (2017) Nazi-punching videogames are flooding the internet, thanks to Richard Spencer

They’re also a natural consequence of a diverse mass of people all feeling the same disillusionment and disgust in their everyday lives, needing solidarity but also craving catharsis. Taking a second look at these commodities we mindlessly consume may not in itself be movement building, but it can help put things in perspective. (And if these things are in your estimation not meaningful, why waste time getting angry at the people who do find value in them, especially if those people are your comrades in every way that does matter? Don’t we value a diversity of skills and tactics?)

We know this can work with podcasts, publications, flyers, banners, zines, comics, and music, despite the problems endemic to all creative industries. Not only can these things let people know that in fact they aren’t alone, but they also give us an opportunity to craft a compelling alternative vision. Unfortunate though it is that the most visible videogames tend to express the vilest characteristics of the industry, certain indie critical darling games have proven that the same tools can be used to vividly illustrate the daily grind of making ends meet while working a minimum wage job, the dehumanizing procedure of immigration bureaucracy, or the desperate, soul-crushing banality of office work.

Games of labour and the avant-garde

Richard Hofmeier Cart Life

Lucas Pope Papers, Please

Molleindustria Everyday The Same Dream

The Tiniest Shark Redshirt

Jake Clover Nuign Spectre

micha cárdenas Redshift and Portalmetal

Paloma Dawkins, Gardenarium

Colestia Crisis Theory

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  Even more avant-garde works like Nuign Spectre or Redshift and Portalmetal use mixed media aesthetics to illustrate the grotesqueness of prevailing ideologies and conditions, while the dreamy work of an artist like Paloma Dawkins allows us to envision worlds which are seemingly impossible but nonetheless worthy of imagining. Colestia’s Crisis Theory subverts the tech world’s own obsession with Taylorism and systems, specifically using flow chart representation of capitalism to lay bare its inherent instability.

This isn’t to repeat the canard about games being more inherently capable of producing empathy than other art forms, or that we ought to focus on one art form to the exclusion of others. But I do think the exercise of ranking different art forms according to how sophisticated they are is inherently reactionary, arbitrarily limits the scope of expression, and constrains our ability to cultivate the new and different when it’s staring us right in the face.

As film critic Shannon Strucci pointed out in her video “why you should care about VIDEO GAMES”–which was made in response to the very attitude I’m describing–no conservative holdout in the history of the arts has ever been vindicated by a wholesale dismissal of a new form or movement as delinquent and therefore not worth engagement.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system.

Walter Benjamin (1936) The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

But this is just regular old art criticism. Not all art is or should be explicitly used toward political ends, and games are no different. Walter Benjamin famously warned about confounding aesthetic with politics, and how doing so creates space for fascism. Grossman’s piece mentioned above ultimately links the dopey neoliberalism of Brooklyn Nine-Nine to an underlying apologia for a racist police state; this sort of prioritization of representation and aesthetics is commonplace in liberal bourgeois rhetoric (the fixation, for example, liberal pundits have with condemning bigotry as being a “bad look” rather than being actively harmful in calculable ways). The tech world, too, is remarkably consumed with style over substance–it’s a world where rainbow capitalism and tokenism reign supreme while the oligarchs who run it not only would be too happy to work on behalf of fascist governments, but have in the past and are in the present.

make this into a footer link

rainbow capitalism

tokenism

“IBM ‘dealt directly with Holocaust organisers'”, The Guardian

“Peter Thiel, Trump’s tech pal, explains himself”, The New York Times

In Ways of Seeing, art critic John Berger tracks the history of the reification of dominant ideologies through art, from colonialism to sexism to capitalism. Berger describes the nostalgic yearning for more “legitimate” forms of art displaced by newer technology as fundamentally reactionary and regressive, writing:

“The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value, has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible. Its function is nostalgic. It is the final empty claim for the continuing values of an oligarchic, undemocratic culture.”

How to use games politically

Suffice it to say, there is little in the history of games or the arts generally that should stop them from expressing reactionary tendencies. It can’t really be helped, after all, if art is to be a reflection of current and historical conditions. By extension, the most regressive elements of gaming culture tend to value only those games that functionally and aesthetically resemble classic games, and classical forms of art. If games are a reflection of an industry full of people who literally want to suck the blood of the young and think unions are a trick of the devil, that’s at least in part true because art forms that preceded them, like oil painting, are a reflection of an inbred aristocracy that believed in the divine right of the propertied classes to rule and thought that they were justified in pillaging entire peoples because of their superior skull shape. That doesn’t mean we ought to deny subversive art where it exists, and it’s a piss poor reason for refusing to support its cultivation in new forms which are as-yet barely understood.

I want socialist, feminist, anti-racist, anti-fascist art to exist anywhere art is being produced, even if it’s with computers, and especially if its core demographic is young people and kids.

Supporting bold, avant-garde and subversive art is a much bigger social project than simply using what exists toward political ends, but I think if we are going to use what exists for political ends it’s useful to think about how what we create can reconfirm our reality. It’s also worth pointing out that plenty of political art is embarrassing, ineffectual or just plain preachy. The same has been true for lots of “serious” games (maybe even some of the ones I listed above), which may be accused of being boring, simplistic, or worse at conveying their overall point than a book or article on the same subject. (I would counter that games should not try to be like articles or books, but more like paintings, where being simple and straightforward isn’t such a big deal. I would also caution that it’s possible to engage serious subject matter while maintaining a sense of humour.) Conversely, when political operatives try to make use of games–rather than game developers trying to portray current events–this also runs the risk of coming off as condescending, tin-eared and trite. For example, the Clinton campaign made use of a “game-style app” called Hillary 2016 that Teen Vogue described as like “FarmVille but for politics”.

https://twitter.com/emily_uhlmann/status/757570149490761728

But I don’t think this is a bad way to approach politics because they used a game–it’s a bad way to approach politics because it avoids addressing constituents and answering simple policy questions. It betrayed a valuing of data over people that so many find bloodlessly reptilian about tech evangelism. Also, Christ does it sound boring.

A politically meaningful use of interactive art could mean the creation of workshops for marginalized communities, similar to the Skins Workshop for indigenous kids run by AbTec, a research network based in Montreal. Or, it could mean the kind of partnerships like the one Subaltern Games had with Jacobin to promote their game No Pineapple Left Behind, thereby using games as yet another way to engage people about issues like colonialism and capitalism in the global south. I’ve personally recently become involved with the Montreal collective behind Game Curious, an independent annual gaming showcase and workshop that seeks to bridge the gap between the medium, non-gamers, and radical activist groups organizing around real-world political struggles.

Initiative for Indigenous Futures | Workshops: Bringing Aboriginal Storytelling to Experimental Digital Media  The Skins workshops aim to empower Native youth to be more than just consumers of new technologies by showing them how to be producers of new technologies.

Subaltern Games | Jacobin sponsorship “We are proud to announce that we will be collaborating with Jacobin Magazine to help promote our upcoming game, No Pineapple Left Behind. […] Jacobin will tell all of the leftists about our upcoming Kickstarter campaign (even YOU). They are also providing copies of their book Class Action: An Activist Teacher’s Handbook as backer rewards.”

Game Curious | Are you game curious? “Game Curious Montréal is a free, 6-week long program all about games, for people who don’t necessarily identify as “gamers.” Sessions are two hours long and will provide an introduction to a wide variety of games, as well as open discussions and group activities, in a zero-pressure, beginner-friendly environment.”

Likewise, mainstream gaming symbolism can be subverted toward leftist messaging–the appropriation of famous imagery or characters for “bootleg” leftist art could be a means for engaging youth culture and kids. Even having something like a YouTube channel or Twitch stream to engage young people on their interests from a left perspective could help shape healthier, more progressive perspectives. And, although the use of incubators and game jams are not inherently radical, and in many ways benefit the industry by training new exploitable workforces, there’s still no reason we can’t sometimes use some version of them for social and teaching events in the future.

[bctt tweet=”Why should we use games to engage and give voice to people, when other art forms exist?” username=”meminsf”]

There remains the question of why we should use games when we can use any other art form–and especially literature–to engage people on ideas and give exploited or marginalized communities more tools for making themselves heard. My answer may not be satisfying, but it’s this: why not?

I want to use all of these tools and more. I want to use whatever’s available to me and whatever works. I want to go wherever there’s movement and culture, and especially where there’s a mass of alienated, unorganized young people looking for an alternative. I see no reason to leave that on the table, or to throw fledgling modes of expression to people who post videos of themselves drinking a gallon of milk to prove their manhood and long for the Fatherland to cleanse itself in the blood of the degenerate races, or the corporations that love them.

Of course it means more to me because it’s my regrettable industry and subculture, and I don’t blame anyone if they read this and still can’t find it in themselves to give a shit. Still, these cultural properties aren’t going away, so we might as well engage with them. More than that, we can make good on the promise of so many oleaginous tech disruptors that Gaming is revolutionary in how it makes possible different and exciting new worlds. Isn’t a new world what we want?

References

ResistJam brings game devs together against authoritarianism

Your app isn’t helping the people of Saudi Arabia

George Monbiot on neoliberalism (a fantastic article that both introduces neoliberalism to those unsure what the word means, and gives those who have been using the word for years an enriched perspective)

Eleanor Robertson (2016) Get Mad and Get Even, Meanjin Quarterly

Jonathan Ore (2017) “Viewer discretion advised? Your child’s favourite YouTuber may be posting offensive content”, CBC News

Laura Stampler (2016) “Hillary Clinton campaign launches ‘Hillary 2016) game app”, Teen Vogue

The Gamer Trump Trope

Patrick Klepek (2017) “The power of video games in the age of Trump”, Vice

Christopher J. Ferguson (2017) “How will video games fare in the age of Trump?”, Huffington Post

Asi Burak (2017) “Trump as Gamer-in-Chief”, Polygon

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Labour issue examples

Children as young as seven mining cobalt used in smartphones, The Guardian

Chinese university students forced to manufacture PS4 in Foxconn plant, Forbes

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Otto von Bismarck, Wikiquote

Prince Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg (1 April 1815 – 30 July 1898), was a German aristocrat and statesman; he was Prime Minister of Prussia (1862–1890), and the first Chancellor of Germany (1871–1890).

Die Politik ist die Lehre vom Möglichen. Politics is the art of the possible.

Interview (11 August 1867) with Friedrich Meyer von Waldeck of the St. Petersburgische Zeitung: Aus den Erinnerungen eines russischen Publicisten. 2. Ein Stündchen beim Kanzler des norddeutschen Bundes. In: Die Gartenlaube (1876) p. 858 de.wikisource. Back to text

Politically meaningful games under neoliberalism Since Donald Trump won the US presidential election one year ago, the games sector has tried to work out how to use our medium to resist the rise of the far right.