#and same goes for candace's leaked model

[raazberry]

need all hoyoverse dickriders to die and im so serious like THAT IS A MILLION DOLLAR COMPANY. wake up!!! literally all that is being asked of them is to respect the cultures theyre using for their stories instead of mixing up all of south asia, making the characters that are named after real dark skinned people light skinned, and on top of making their outfits extremely sexualised too like. its not that hard to do these simple, basic things when u are, and i repeat, a million dollar company

& the fact that people are going to insane lengths to defend this bullshit is just insane like the game absolutely does not treat its players well enough to warrant any of this shit. 

[symnizaro]

“

As the Committee sought to coordinate rather than dominate American minds, its members turned to a kind of media system that we might now call a platform: the museum. These days we’re not used to the idea of buildings as media systems. But the Committee thought about museums in the same way many think about virtual reality today—as immersive visual environments where we can increase our empathy for one another. Mead, who was a student of Boas and worked for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, pointed out that in a museum, people could walk among images and objects distributed across the walls and around the floor, choosing to pay attention to those that seemed most meaningful to them. They could hone their individual tastes, they could reason about their individual places in the world, and they could do it together.

This view has proved enormously profitable across Silicon Valley. By justifying the belief that for-profit systems are the best way to improve public life, it has helped turn the expression of individual experience into raw material that can be mined, processed, and sold. The big social-media companies, which often began with a dream of making WELL-like virtual communities at scale, have now become radically commercialized and devoted to surveillance at every level. On the WELL, users listened to each other, trying to get a feel for what kinds of people they were and how they might work together. Now user data is optimized and retailed automatically, to advertisers and other media firms, in real time. Computers track conversations and extract patterns at light speed, rendering them profitable. In 2017, Facebook reported annual revenue of more than $40 billion.

Rebecca Lewis, a Data & Society researcher who is now a ­PhD student at Stanford, has studied sixty-five such right-wing influencers on ­YouTube. Most are masters of microcelebrity. They brand themselves with care, spark attention-getting controversy wherever possible, link to one another’s websites, appear on one another’s ­YouTube shows, and optimize their video feeds for search engines. Despite their intellectual differences, Lewis points out that they have been able to create the impression that they are a unified political force. Their chummy, millennial-­friendly style, she argues, goes a long way toward suggesting that really, you know, anti-Semitism and violent, racist riots are the kind of thing that thinking young people everywhere ought to embrace.

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Alt-right figures have consciously modeled their online behavior after the political logic of the 1960s counterculture, and particularly its New Communalist wing. In a 2016 interview with The Atlantic, Spencer could have been channeling an entire generation of commune-builders when he said, “We are really trying to change the world, and we are going to do that by changing consciousness, and by changing how people see the world, and how they see themselves.” The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, put the project less benignly in a leaked style guide: “One should study the ways that Jews conquered our culture in the 1960s. . . . They created a subculture by infesting certain elements of the existing culture. That is what we aim to do.” The identity-based movements of the left have been extraordinarily effective at changing American culture, and the alt-right clearly hopes to copy their success. By claiming the mantle of rebellion, the alt-right can take to the streets in protest as if anticolonialism in the classroom were a new Vietnam War. They can argue that their ability to spew hate is in fact a civil right, and that their movement is simply a new version of the Free Speech Movement of 1964. On ­YouTube, they can tell stories of their own conversion to conservatism in an idiom pioneered by gay activists: the coming-out story. Lewis notes that the conservative activist Candace Owens rose to YouTube fame after she posted a humorous video on her channel, Red Pill Black, that revealed her political beliefs to her parents. Owens titled it, “Mom, Dad?. . . I’m a Conservative.” When friends and families find their new politics reprehensible, the converts need not engage. Their storytelling style alone implies that racism and nationalism are in fact just as natural and true as a person’s sexuality. Pundits on the left are fond of reminding us of how Trump storms and fulminates, the White House itself unable to contain his petulance and rage. Those same pundits then marvel that around 40 percent of the American people still think he is doing a good job. What they fail to understand is that Trump has mastered the politics of authenticity for a new media age. What mainstream analysts see as psychological weakness, Trump’s fans see as the man just being himself. What’s more, his anger, his rants, and his furious narcissism act out the feelings of people who believe they have been dispossessed by immigrants, women, and people of color. Trump is not only true to his own emotions. He is the personification of his supporters’ grievances. He is to his political base what Hitler was to many Germans, or Mussolini to Italians—the living embodiment of the nation. —

If the communes of the 1960s teach us anything, they teach us that a community that replaces laws and institutions with a cacophony of individual voices courts bigotry and collapse. Without explicit, democratically adopted rules for distributing resources, the communes allowed unspoken cultural norms to govern their lives. Women were frequently relegated to the most traditional of gender roles; informal racial segregation was common; and charismatic leaders—almost always men—took charge. Even the most well-intentioned communes began to replicate the racial and sexual dynamics that dominated mainstream America. Lois Brand recalled that on the communes they visited, men would do “important stuff” like framing up domes, while she and the other women would put small amounts of bleach in the water to keep residents from getting sick.

For all their sophistication, the algorithms that drive Facebook cannot prevent the recrudescence of the racism and sexism that plagued the communes. On the contrary, social-media platforms have helped bring them to life at a global scale. And now those systems are deeply entrenched. Social-media technologies have spawned enormous corporations that make money by mapping and mining the social world. Like the extraction industries of previous centuries, they are highly motivated to expand their territories and bend local elites to their will. Without substantial pressure, they have little incentive to serve a public beyond their shareholders. Companies such as Facebook and Twitter are coming to dominate our public sphere to the same degree that Standard Oil once dominated the petroleum industry. They too should be subject to antitrust laws. We have every right to apply the same standards to social-media companies that we have applied to other extraction industries. We cannot allow them to pollute the lands they mine, or to injure their workers, nearby residents, or those who use their products.

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Today’s social media will never be able to do the difficult, embodied work of democracy. Computer-­supported interconnection is simply no substitute for face-to-face negotiation, long-term collaboration, and the hard work of living together. The Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements have taught us that social media can be a powerful force for liberating us from the fiction that all is well just as it is. But the attention these activists have brought to their causes will mean little if the changes they call for are not enshrined in explicit, enforceable laws. Even though the American state can be inefficient, unfair, corrupt, and discriminatory, the logic of representation that underlies it remains the most effective engine we have for ensuring the equable distribution of our collective wealth.

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Speaking our truths has always been necessary, but it will never be sufficient to sustain our democracy. It’s time to let go of the fantasy that engineers can do our politics for us, and that all we need to do to change the world is to voice our desires in the public forums they build. For much of the twentieth century, Americans on both the left and right believed that the organs of the state were the enemy and that bureaucracy was totalitarian by definition. Our challenge now is to reinvigorate the institutions they rejected and do the long, hard work of turning the truths of our experience into legislation.

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