#and there *are* criticisms about the limitations to a purely social model of disability to be made

[obstinatecondolement]

It feels like every day I read attempts to debunk the social model of disability that fundamentally misunderstand what the social model of disability is and who the people who developed that model were, including what the nature of their disabilities was, and I want to scream.

But I don't, because yelling at people on the internet is basically pointless. Instead I check to see that I'm not mutuals with whoever reblogged said misunderstanding and vague about it.

[bubblegumchaos]

TW: Violence, dark humor, all that jazz. Go no further, angry shit, yadda.

So, yanno...i'm just gonna yell into the void about something.

When i was very young, I read a lot of encyclopedias. Most of my knowledge of the world was attributable to the Encyclopedia Britannica, which my mother kept because well, a home should have a nice, impressive looking set of books. Along with a bunch of other old books that just...really weren't the best choice for a regressive anti-technology apocalyptic fundamentalist cult, but then, as we used to joke, my mother doesn't have to make sense, she just has to make decisions.

So, I eventually started plumbing the depths to try and figure out "what the hell is wrong with my family."

While i didn't get an answer about my family in general, I did note that i seemed to be oddly suited to the definition of "psychopath," minus the whole "being a problem for society at large" thing. Asocial, low empathy, lack of guilt, inability to plan cohesively, difficulty conceptualizing consequences, near total lack of emotions except curiosity and rage, both of which are carefully stifled, aggressive tendencies...frankly, I look at my younger siblings and i can definitely assure anyone that asks that had I not been raised quite far away from society, or if I'd stayed in the cult, I would most definitely have been a problem for society.

But psychopaths are *monsters,* you see. They're so, so bad, you see. Everyone assured me, at great length, that I couldn't be that, no, no sirree. I was too nice. Too kind. I didn't punch people nearly often enough (largely because I don't like being punched outside of sex, and I like to be in charge of where I'm being punched, and even that mostly cause I'm kinda badly out together physically, but that's aside the point.)

I wasn't *hate-able.* My empathy was too high.

On that last note, I have spoken elsewhere and i believe here regarding my empathy. My empathy is specifically a learned skill picked up by reading Edgar Allen Poe's Auguste Dupin stories. Dupin explains his near preternatural ability to get inside people's heads by his learned skill of micro-mimicking body and facial language and then analyzing what he feels when he copies someone else. Works absolute wonders, particularly as up to that point (i was 8-9), I was using the classical technique of provoking and hurting people around me to experimentally figure out how other people worked. Admittedly, it's somewhat like recording a speech and listening to it at the lwvel of a whisper in a crowded room, but then mimicry is far less likely to get you punched, and see previous for my feelings on getting punched.

But now i had, for all intent, a system to demonstrate empathy. Thanks to my mother's abuse, I had a complete paranoid delusion aping guilt. I could check plans past others, and once I got my hands on Google at 14, I had the capacity to directly look up what the general, societal consequences of most actions were and model behaviors that achieved my ends. I further had 18 years of direct training in mind control and manipulation, thanks to my cult.

You may notice that what you just read sounds like the origin story of a serial killer. Ape people around them to avoid detection, paranoia making them scrupulous enough to not get caught, and careful study of laws to find the lines, plus a hyper manipulative persona.

Roll with me here. This continues forward.

So, i'm out and about, 2, 5, 6 years free of my cult. I have married a self avowed psychopath who actually HAS been diagnosed with antisocial disorder thanks to a teenage habit of theft and punching people. He is fairly sure I am not one, since I perform guilt and empathy fantastically, by rote at this point. I literally have days that my face hurts from faking emotions for too long, i am slowly developing agoraphobia because there are far too many people to mimic in a retail job, and my guilt subroutine is just a voice chanting in my head, "they're coming to get you, don't fuck up" 24/7 to the point that i am developing hallucinations, but yeah. It's definitely not psychopathy. At this point, that's just ASPD, and i'm just too darn social. Never that. I'm no monster, you see. I'm "nice."

About this point, I have learned to use mind control techniques to help people, carefully applying them with direct permission to help people open up and discuss problems. My near preternatural ability to get into people's heads, my ability to find information, and my absolute lack of fucks about morals (thus making me wildly nonjudgemental), makes me the go-to confidant for many of my friends. This neatly surrounds me with people that can smooth my life out, but you can't tell people you're friends with them cause the world is made of grey paste and you're deathly bored 24/7 and being allowed to pick through people's minds and help them optimize is the closest you get to not wanting to shoot yourself or others. Or that you carefully maintain contact with people so you can check and make sure you're not doing anything jail worthy. Or that a large group to mimic lets you blend in easier, and finding one that also is transgressive, but socially permissable (thanks, kink) blows off some steam.

Of course, people that don't know me find me deeply off-putting, as I am at this point rapidly learning to turn off the mimicry when not immediately interacting with people. This results in me appearing utterly emotionless, but as soon as people talk to me, bing, back on. I had also joined the kink subculture, giving my hedonistic and transgressive sides an outlet.

I'd also gone to the trouble of getting a multifaceted degree. Ostensibly, my degree is "multimedia journalism." If you aren't aware, this means I have a degree in research, interpersonal communication, public speaking, written communication, mass communication, some psychology, critical thinking, media creation and analysis. In short, I have the literal perfect degree for figuring out, communicating with, and functionally understanding people, as well as a vastly enhanced ability to locate obscure information.

Fast forward again. Three mental breakdowns, four years of therapy, poking at my gender, figuring out a lot of mental health problems, and a rotating series of diagnoses, life is...slowly improving. I've left a toxic marriage (toxic on both sides), moved to a completely new place, started over. I have sort of resigned myself to focusing on my (admittedly annoyingly complex and wide ranging) physical disabilities.

And it comes up, in talking to my partner, that his adoptive mother displayed (she's dead) quite a few signs of ASPD. And he asks curiously if there's any connection between ADHD, autism, and ASPD, mainly cause the "personality disorder" part. PD's can, with long or early exposure, sometimes be passed on, you see.

Guess what's being studied, right now? Not a connection between ASPD and ADHD. A connection between psychopathy and ADHD. Wait, but I thought psychopathy wasn't a thing, says I? I thought there was only ASPD, now?

Ah, but for you see, the DSM is a load of horseshit. And i have heard that from multiple communities with different relations to it, and from multiple therapists, psychiatrists, professors...as a general rule, when the people who use it, the people it's used on, and the people who teach it all agree that a document is manure, I get a touch distrustful. I get more so when current studies use umbrella terms disavowed by a document known for being reductivist and that has been noted as having a great number of entries that were manipulated deliberately to make them as narrow and unusable as possible.

So anyway.

Turns out that while no, ADHD and Autism don't make you a psychopath, there's a distinct overlap. Empathy issues are a possiblity in all three, though both ADHD and autism can create *hyper*empathy. Inability to navigate social constructs is another point of overlap.

But really, it's the serotonin deficiency that hurls it across the line for me. And the genetic factors. Can psychopathy result from environment? Yeah, seems so. But there does seem to be a genetic and neurochemical component. Which is...curious for a disorder presented as purely a traumatic abreaction that creates dangerous amorals.

I then looked it up. And wouldn't you know, psychopathy is only pathologized as ASPD/APD, and DPD? The former is the sort of psychopathy that is characterized by violent amd criminal antisocial behavior, and the other an inability to understand and perform social mores at all. But this is the DSM, so these are of course diagnosed by problems caused for others as a first line.

Violation of societal norms, lack of emotions other than rage, aggression...it's almost like the same people that named a serotonin and function deficiency Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder to enshrine the disorder only by those aspects that make neurotypical people uncomfortable rather than seeking to help the neurodivergent person, the same people that invented torturous behavioral correction therapies to "fix" the neurodivergent person? Those strike me as people that might possibly have looked a serotonin deficiency that causes rage, limited emotions, impulsivity, difficulty conceptualizing consequence, and potentially a hell of a lot of other fun side shit and decided to call that "Doesn't get along with others well" disorder.

What really kicks it in the teeth for me, however, is that psychopathy used to mean more than "a social pariah." You see, Theodore Millon, the guy that wrote the book on personality disorders, noted between 5 and 10 subtypes. Do you know what they are?

Nomadic

(including schizoid and avoidant features)

Drifters; roamers, vagrants; adventurer, itinerant vagabonds, tramps, wanderers; they typically adapt easily in difficult situations, shrewd and impulsive. Mood centers in doom and invincibility

Malevolent

(including sadistic and paranoid features)

Belligerent, mordant, rancorous, vicious, sadistic, malignant, brutal, resentful; anticipates betrayal and punishment; desires revenge; truculent, callous, fearless; guiltless; many dangerous criminals, including serial killers.

Covetous

(including negativistic features) Rapacious, begrudging, discontentedly yearning; hostile and domineering; envious, avaricious; pleasures more in taking than in having.

Risk-taking

(including histrionic features) Dauntless, venturesome, intrepid, bold, audacious, daring; reckless, foolhardy, heedless; unfazed by hazard; pursues perilous ventures.

Reputation-defending 

(including narcissistic features) Needs to be thought of as infallible, unbreakable, indomitable, formidable, inviolable; intransigent when status is questioned; overreactive to slights.

(It should be noted: the features listed above are simply what each presentation is most likely to display if disordered. A reputation-defender may not display narcissm, a risk taker may not be histrionic. A malevolent [what a terribly judgy name...] could be negativistic, or avoidant, or histrionic. And so on.)

Now, ya may be going, "wait, hold up, narcissism is on there! We still have that! Schizoid is on there, we have that! Sadism, paranoia, we got all those things!"

Flash quiz: do you know what a personality disorder is? It's a series of learned behaviors that require moderation and unlearning.

Why yes, they did spin multiple neurotypes off into diagnoses that require behavioral therapy to "fix." Why on earth would you think they wouldn't? They're still trying to use reparative therapy on auties. Hell, near as I can figure, histrionic got spun into Borderline Personality disorder. You know what the therapy for that is? DBT, aka, "it IS your fault and you SHOULD feel bad."

Beyond knowing there used to be different flavors, did you know that there is about a millionty scare articles about how psychopaths are everywhere? Guess why.

What do you get when someone has an absolute need to see what's on the other side of the hill and no real fucks to give about how you get there? You get scientists, explorers, people utterly driven to find out. Think about how many of our science and exploration heros are noted as deeply weird and off-kilter. We have whole stereotypes about this. There are books and articles devoted to the transgressive personas and behaviors of famous scientists and explorers.

What do you get when someone is belligerent, paranoid, truculent, violent, fearless? Snipers. Literally. The army has openly stated they like psychopaths quite a lot. Someone that can look at a map of human lives and commit calculus with the phrase "acceptable losses" makes a damn fine general, wouldn't you say? Hunters, too. Make a good king? Or bounty hunter. Or, if we're going to be honest, a martial artist. Hell, think of all the ways our society accepts violence in real terms and symbolically. Management. Video gamer. Espionage. Actuary. Pest control. There are THOUSANDS of of societal uses for people like this.

Covetous? Well, banks are openly quite loving towards psychopaths. CEOs are indicated here. Businessmen. Fandoms with collection as a function have any number of anecdotes of individuals who have an intense drive to get more. "Focused on the chase, rather than the victory, to the exclusion of all else" is considered a positive, laudable personality trait. To put it in other terms, "can't stop, won't stop, never done." Sports players, yes? Football, rugby, hockey...

Risk takers are the real standouts, in terms of societal love. Doctors. Firemen. EMT's. Skydivers. Extreme sports players. Equipment testers. The list goes on. Society loves risk taking psychopaths. Hell, look at the diagnostic criterion up there: it's mostly traits with high positive connotations.

Reputation defending? Politics. Law. Advertising. Acting. Writing. Religion. Leadership of any kind.

I'm not talking out my ass here. All those fields have been noted as friendly towards, attractive to, and having a high representation of people who fit the behavioral model of psychopath.

But only if they're useful. Like literally every other non-normative neurotype.

Society loves ADHD and autistic people when they're displaying savant abilities or when they can mask well enough to use their sensory and cognitive differences to societal ends.

And if they're a problem for people around them, that's treated. The underlying difficulties? The societal structures that punish and harm them? The pain of adapting their entire neurobiome to do all the work of interfacing with different neurotypes while being driven to harness anything useful and discard the rest of their brain? No, we don't treat that. That's just the price of doing business. "Pull yourself up and don't be a problem."

And here's the problem, in plain terms: psychopaths who learn to cope, to mask, to adapt like I did are never diagnosed. I have spent most of my life fairly concerned about the fact that I seem not to have emotions or compunction, that i am always consciously working to figure out and connect to people around me on the most basic level, that I am constantly working to keep an active model of social norms going at all times. And I don't mean "shake hands, eye contact." I mean I have the same mental conversation regarding "don't shoot that person" and "use a turn signal." All prosocial behaviors, all social behaviors period, are a struggle to understand.

The funny thing is, it also makes antisocial behaviors difficult. Shooting someone seems remarkably inconvenient in many cases. Regardless of whether I care about getting caught or not, shooting somone will interrupt my day.

Not shooting them also seems remarkably inconvenient in many cases. Yes, it'd be a pain in the ass to shoot them, but then again, if I do it correctly, I only have to do it once.

But again, "correctly" is a wildly unfixed variable, and the whole question won't come up if I always ensure I fail the "do i currently have a firearm" step. And I don't. Ever.

That's how my brain works. Y'all go on about moral and ethical and legal reasons. That's an exhausting conscious mental conversation to have every other day, so my shortcut is:

"Should I shoot them? Oh, right, I don't have a gun. Guess not. Should I get one? No, cause I might shoot someone, and that'd be a pain in the ass. Welp, no shooting people."

And so it goes. I don't understand any social norms. Good or bad. I have all the problematic issues still, mind you. Environmental factors. I mimic and I was raised in an apocalypse cult in Oklahoma. I spend a lot of brain space sorting between prosocial behaviors and the violent antisocial behaviors I was taught were prosocial.

Because, you see, I can't really understand the prosocial behaviors, but I can see they work. And antisocial behaviors don't, really. Have i impulsively pocketed something? Couple times. Even got away with. Can't steal a house, though. And theft gets boring, for me.

Ok, except piracy. I may quite enjoy piracy.

Cooperation with a larger whole can and does yield benefits. Forcing myself to sit through mind numbing gratification delays does seem to yield results that are beneficial, though I really try to keep that one to a minimum. I refuse to be bored if I can help it. Making nice talky sounds gets me shit faster than making angry talky sounds.

Possibly this is a result if being raised manipulative. No idea. Kinda don't care.

Point is, I'm one of the psychopaths that, while not immediately useful, is also not actively a problem. So no-one will listen when i talk about everything being gray and cold and exhaustingly complicated because people make no sense and almost all my emotions are dialed so far down it's a joke i lack the ability to laugh about.

No one has believed me that the one emotion I have in spades is rage and that i have to literally consciously work out from first principles why violence is a bad option as my sole method of controlling that, my ONLY EMOTION OF ANY STRENGTH, which I cannot allow myself to feel for any length of time because I start losing sight of that consequence model and I worry i'll make a mistake I can't unmake. Or that it took me two decades to learn not to smash things I need when someone looks at me funny. Or just smash them.

Or that i have to keep my hands in my pockets and chant "don't steal" in my head some days. That I wear tight clothing with shallow pockets to make stealing harder so that, like guns, I simply can't do it easily and therefore short circuit my behaviors.

People are more than happy to hurl me at any problem that requires a lack of emotion, but if I dare to be less than appropriately emotional on a date? At a wedding? Funeral? If I make an error and don't diagnose it myself and perform contrition appropriately, regardless of if I knew there was a social or personal rule there? Well, I'm fired/broken up with/punished/evicted.

But I am not actively a problem for society. So none of those things are worth diagnosing. Or helping in any way.

And those that are useful? Are often fed utter horseshit and encouraged to break society. Bankers creating recessions. Generals commanding useless wars. Cops. Doctors that uphold a broken system. Politicians that pursue a broken society.

I know, I can see, that ASPD people catch a shit ton of shit cause they get blamed for "useful" psychopaths mistakes, and none of the benefits when said same psychopaths are lionized. Looking back at what it was, and what it is now, pathologically speaking, it makes perfect fucking sense for the asshats that designed a diagnosis to only include the people they don't like as the "sick" ones, and label the "good" ones as "heroes." Makes a nice distinction there between people we want to demonize and people we want to lionize for having the exact same chemical imbalance, and neatly creates a fall group when any of the "heroes" trip up. Silence those who can't cope, elevate those that can, treat neither effectively, and if an elevated one stops coping, we can just "realize" they were "sick" all along, and oh, yeah, those sick people are so bad, you guys, nothing like those heroes at allllllll.

I am...so tired of this society bullshit.

So anyway, I'm a psychopath. Paranoid, some schizoid. So whatever grains of salt you feel like taking, grab 'em, I guess. I'd mostly like for people like me to stop being weaponized, lionized, or punished for having a different neurotype. I'd like to be able to talk to a doctor about that and for there to be some options beyond "stop that," "get locked up," "have you considered the army" (yes, a doctor actually asked me that as a teenager) or "you seem fine, tho."

And if you resonate with this, well...I'm 32, never been arrested, mostly managed to avoid terrible shit, and I've got a life, couple partners, and I'm surviving, so like. You can do this. Lotta people wanna tell you you can't have this or that cause "you're not bad, tho." They're stupid. Y'ain't evil, just different. Don't let them get to you.

And (this is a joke) if you decide to shoot someone, do it once, correctly. Saves time.

[khalix-hyetology]

(In)visible Disabilities and Machine Bodies in NieR: Automata:- Plato 1728′s plight in a posthumanist light

In [Jacques] Derrida’s terms, it is the blind, the disabled, who “see” the truth of vision. It is the blind who most readily understand that the core fantasy of humanism’s trope of vision is to think that perpetual space is organized around and for the looking subject; that the pure point of the eye (as agent of ratio and logos) exhausts the field of the visible; that the “invisible” is only — indeed, merely — that which has not yet been seen by a subject who is, in principle, capable of seeing all. 

— Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (132)

Embedded and embedding narrative frames assume precisely this self-referential form of form by marking the virtual edges of narrative structure.

— Bruce Clarke, Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems, (94)

Upon Playing NieR:Automata’s DLC, which focused on the machine individual, Plato 1728, I felt that the narrative was engaged with the powerful aspect of disability. It allows the player to take control of a robot who is considered “defective” and does things poorly. Plato 1728 believes that he does poorly in everything, he cannot fight well as when he does his body betrays him, nuts and bolts come off and oil spills. He cannot hold a weapon. Yet, he tries his hardest hoping that he will be accepted and appreciated. 

This does not happen.

What you experience in the gameplay is a first person perspective of what it feels like to be disabled and ostracised for said-disabilities. The game poignantly attempts to show the player the censor and the frustration, alongside the mental trauma, a person with aa disability can face in a ableist society. It does this brilliantly by showing this efficiency prone behaviour and ableism in the lifeforms that invaded Earth. Though they are aliens they have adopted many human like aspects. The other machines tease and ridicule Plato 1728 to the point that he feels alone all the time. No one desires to be his friend and no one seems to care about him. 

Plato 1728 is a horrible dilemma. He was built to be a weapon but he has not of the proclivities and qualities of a weapon. Rather he mentions he abhors violence. Yet, as he is built to fight, he must continue to do so. The machines are all living workaholic existences in which their daily routine is comprised of sparring and maintaining, and building other machines for war alongside taking care of the factory. Some of the machines obviously have consciousness and existential thoughts but this gets stampeded over the nuts and bolts of what they assembly is comprised of. 

We, as the players, are put in the position to play as Plato 1728. It is something that overwhelms us. It is designed to show how inhumane and cruel the machine life routine is. Operating Plato 1728 you notice he glitches and seizes up at times and he cannot move at all. There are system errors shown about as you and Plato 1728 desperately attempt to keep himself composed. Then we are presented with the motor function test. We are in the position of Plato 1728 giving this test. Plato 1728 actually does well. You can, even with his body glitching, get 17-10 rings, which are the objectives of the motor examination. However, then multiple rings come on and off and go away easily and we are given a body that wasn’t either designed to move fast or we do not know how. 

This a crucial part of the narrative. After basically failing the test three times, with an “exceedingly poor” grade, we as players are made to ruminate why the motor function examination suddenly became what it was. Why did the runs suddenly come and go off in such a manner. Why were these tests designed like this. The players are also made to wonder if we were in control of 2B, 9S or A2 would be able to pass a motor examination like this? We probably could. However, in the base game when you start out with a mission directly with tutorials just being on-screen commands you may falter. The prologue is also designed to be 35-40 minutes gameplay that any newcomer can exceedingly fail in as well. 

It is not also a question of machine lifeforms themselves. Before coming to Plato 1728′s narrative, we must finish three coliseums. One coliseum is devoted entirely of machines and you must make 9S choose a machine to battle with. Depending on your level, you get a selection of machines. The thing is you upgrade or you choose a machine based on which level in the coliseum you are, what your skill level is and what the skill level of the machine is — they are all interconnected factors that help you win the tournament in the coliseum. 

Plato 1728, though saying he is a “defective” model, was able to get many rings. It is not his fault the test is designed such a frustrating way that failure seems to be the only option. Even with his disability Plato 1728 tried and succeeded a lot. However, due to the assessment requirements not being met, Plato 1728 is branded as a failure. 

Subsequently, this branding of failure persist. When we are doing combat training we, the players in control of Plato 1728, are shocked when a punch makes Plato 1728 lose both his arms! We can try to evade and move about and do what we can to keep the clock running but Plato 1728 fails. It is not that he is intending to do nothing. He is intending to fight but his body is having issues and no one seems to care and no one seems to assist him with his bodily issues. He is branded a failure. This is not only a desecration of justice but a desecration of life and the game wants you, the player, to feel it, as a machine with disability. 

Plato 1728 then decides, in his loneliness and ostracism, to take care of a doll. The factory is attacked, either by the player as playing one of the protagonists’ androids, and Plato 1728 helplessly watch as the doll he cherished goes up in flames. Feeling traumatised and grief beyond anything, all his pent up sadness came up and he started anyone and anything. When his rage is exhausted, his companions trap him and dispose of him. When we re-enter the factory as another machine, the player sees that some people are shocked that Plato 1728 have had so much power in him that they didn’t realise. Some don’t wish to go into battle, afraid at seeing the destruction that Plato 1728 wrought, some are still thinking he is “useless” and that his model should be stopped while others mourn his downfall and are ashamed at their own behaviours surrounding him. 

In fact, the machine the player is operating comments at his terminal as he has to input data on Plato 1728 goes on to say something like oh yeah, the guy who lost it.

Plato 1728′s consciousness and soul are still alive even if his body is gone. Though he wishes he could have a body again. He comments that the coliseum people are all selfish. The ones were machine are fighting to become stronger, the one where machines are trying to live by rules and the ones where machines are enslaved to be gladiators for android amusement. He says that is he really the crazy one? 

Due to the doll seemingly being the cause of Plato 1728′s madness, dolls when found, are destroyed in the factory now. The players are then shown a psychedelic, gothic music video of a random machine destroying dolls and in the end Plato 1728′s soul reaches out attempting to stop the machine to destroy the doll that looks like 2B but he fails and the 2B doll is symbolically destroyed. 

In my own reading of this DLC and the NieR:Automata game, I found aspects of posthumanism and transhumanism at a clash. My intentions to summarise the events of the DLC is to provide some of my own critical understanding of the game. In the base game, Pascal, 2B and A2 herald empathy and mostly posthumanist aspects in their characteristics. Though Route A follows more of a transhumanist path the characters present show some posthumanist nuances. In the game, the transhumanist agents are 9S and initially, Adam and Eve. 

Transhumanism believes in the augmentation of the human body. It believes that human limits can be “corrected” and transcended. The body is to be a workshop and that workshop perfects upon the body into an ideal type of unit or anatomy in execution. Posthumanism is different; in fact, posthumanism believes more in the imperfections of humans and it rejects the humanist model of ideal human saying there can be no ideal. It considers the value of all living life forms and the systems that interconnect them. It also shows that human bodies can inherently and environmentally differ from each other and that is a good thing. Posthumanism also does not advocate anthropomorphism. 

Bruce Clarke in his book Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems talks about humans as quasi-subjects and quasi-objects. This means they are neither completely subjective markers nor markers of objectification. Humans interact and they are heavily affected and influence by how, what and why they interact with (Clarke 44-45). Clarke also states that humans are biotic creatures and there can be abiotic organisms (Clarke 17). Biotic organism are organisms who can perform autopoiesis. Autopoiesis is the ability of the body;s various parts to organise itself, to keep its integrity but also to allow certain things to change, an example of human genome which does not change but phenotypical components such as hair and eye colour changing. The organisation of autopoietic structures is recursive; unique in its context. Non Autopoietic structures can exist within autopoietic creatures. Clarke states that non-living, non autopoietic organisms are called abiotic. He also states that there are metabiotic structures as well for example consciousness and social and psychical systems that make up society, an example would be media is an abiotic system that influences metabiotic structures like society and biotic humans. 

I talk about autopoiesis and abiotic, biotic and metabiotic structures because these are crucial elements to understand posthumanism. Posthumanism plays a large role in NieR:Automata not only in its embedded narrative style as Clarke would state it, but also as Wolfe would state, it attempts to broaden the self-reflexive criticism of disciplines themselves. Wolfe states that disciplines can keep their integrity, as in autopoiesis, but must understand that there is a multidisciplinary promise to every discipline and that disciplines can evolve. Wolfe follows the second system theory to a bit in that the observer(s) are also scrutinised and called into question or positionality as much as the observation (Wolfe 121). There is a difference to Wolfe between the accurate and the specific (Wolfe 115). Wolfe critiques that disciplines are important that they are specific and not necessarily always accurate as in the universalising way (Wolfe 115-117). Things have context and that context must be taken into consideration. This is important as NieR:Automata also looks a lot on the context of the situation via both its posthumanist narrative style into bioethics and but also through disability studies and trans-species disciplinary actions (Wolfe 141).

Wolfe uses the life of Temple Grandin to talk about the trans-species understanding in that Grandin’s understanding of things in pictures, this hypervisuality within her autistic self which she has to then add language to is both thinking in pictures and allows prosthetics become one with her which are both ahuman or considered nonhuman traits. However her approach has “canonical expression” which includes Renaissance theory of perspective, to Freud’s parsing of the evolutionary sensorium in Civilisation and Its Discontents, through Sartre’s discussion of the Gaze, to Foucault’s panopticon,  and finally to the various modes of electronic surveillance culture.” (Wolfe 130) Wolfe further postulates that there is obviously different ways to thinking that humans have but can be excised (140). He also quotes Derrida’s concept of knowing invisibility as another kind of spatialisation (Wolfe 133). 

The reason I have talked about this is that in the gameplay of NieR’s DLC our narrative focus on Plato 1728 shows many ways of understanding content. The language is not always constructed verbally. The players must level up, become fit and then fight battles in coliseums with different storylines and tangents, and rules and regulations. Plato 1728′s story origins begin with the machine spear which decodes some fragments of his story and this is later extrapolated in the DLC. Plato 1728 is sensitive and kind, communal and intelligent. He has almost all of the understanding of family and familial connections as once stated by 21O independently in the Data Freak quests that androids seemingly lack. Plato 1728 intelligence is differently abled but not all inferior to others and it is not to be taken lightly. When Plato 1728 in grief attacks in a berserk way he is only doing something normal in his condition though normative regulations deemed this to be the progression of him as a failure. 

Plato 1728 is not a failure as he understands that there is lack of justice, a seduction by rules and power in the coliseums and in life in Earth in general. A feeling and understanding he also shares with Emil. Emil is attacked by 9S is losing his mind. Emil calls 9S his “cherished companion” who still must be “punished” because he has done something wrong, obviously, from stealing from him. The player as 9S can defeat Emil in which, in this first form, states that in the end power dominates so much and he says, with reluctance, that 9S can use his room whichever way he prefers. Though, Emil just accedes only because he doesn’t understand what purpose 9S has to do this to him. In a similar way, Plato 1728 does not understand why his companion easily disposed of him instead of coming to his aid.

NieR: Automata uses a very embedded narrative. It uses a verbal embedding, which is a narrative that is horizontal and epistemic (Clarke 100) meaning it uses people in the same timeline such as Emil and 9S battling out within the same time period and context to say some of its story. Then it also has a modal embedding, which is ontological and vertical. That as Clarke expertly puts:

“here the same or different narrators are transported to and thus reframed within different storyworlds — for instance modal borders are crossed in the transit “through the looking glass” from waking to dream worlds, from the present to the past or future, or from physical space to cyberspace.”  (Clarke 100)

When we play as 9S or 2B or A2 we experience the story differently. Swords and hacking tell the story differently. Then there is Route C and D than changes a lot of the narrative setting and climate. The narratives are something, as Clarke puts it, stretching and meets at different viewpoints and that it what makes narratives embedded and autopoietic. They are framed to form something that has integrity but is also perpetuated amongst different disciplines. The modal embedding also goes to mathematics modular group, with the j variant, the function of complex numbers which satisfies a growth condition in the upper plane of a graph and shows the connection between monster group and modular group. 1728 is a number that is the cube of 12 and also part of the j variant. The monster group, or Friendly Giant, being the largest sporadic group in mathematics. The name is embedded into the narrative of NieR Automata thus disciplines evolving, looking at the observer and the observation, keeping the integrity but also going beyond. 

Additionally, many side quests and even the birth of Adam and Eve is a fusion between modal and verbal embedded storytelling. We can see this in both 2B and 9S routes where picture books also tell the story of machines getting consciousness and an identity. Also, we see machines having sex or attempting to in the chasm. It is as if they don’t wish anything to be ex nihilo but to have origin, purpose and an evolution in connectivity. 9S’s trauma is also reflected in quests done for Resistance members when they lose their loved ones. Though 9S’s actions are more severe and a disruption to not only his life but others. 

Going back to Temple Grandin, 9S is someone who espouses humanism and transhumanism a lot. Even when he hears machine talk he keeps on repeating to 2B they meant nothing. He even says that after he is traumatised and going insane. In the Forest, Resource Unit he hears the machine begging him for an explanation to the violence and asking him to just kill them but he almost takes sadomasochistic satisfaction in torturing them and being in denial. To him, only androids can have life. As Wolfe also states that the sciences Cartesian duality of consciousness and cognition is pretty ingrained (Wolfe 116) and 9S is a proof of that. He has selective empathy and he cannot see anyone not abdroid-like to be human. Pascal is an exception because 2B and he had visited him and 9S is just in denial as well to consider Pascal completely living even as there is something disturbing is seeing his memory being wiped. 

9S in Route A ending is accepting of his data being embedded in machines, in a way Plato 1728 was alright in loving a doll. Yet in Route C/D 9S is disgusted to know that their black box does contain the machines’ cores as well. He is angered to know that within him is embedded, in the flesh so to speak, the narrative of machines. This is why it was ironic when sometime ago he told to Pascal that he didn’t have a heart seeing their autopoietic structures are similar in detail. 

Similarly, Adam and Eve killed the aliens feeling they were too “plant-like.” This alone becomes at first their justification. They so are obsessed in bettering themselves in some mythical ideal way that they wish to even dissect humans to achieve this goal. It is noteworthy, that 9S is selectively horrified by this yet he too decides to dissect machines or remnants of YoRHa later on. N2, the machine in the tower, programmed to fight the enemy, felt they must keep the androids alive and manipulated the coding of machine s which help make machines like Adam and Eve and Pascal. Though, they didn’t really know if such machinations would bring forth what it did thus they are killed by their own transhumanist consciousness in a way. 

Empathy is not relinquished by A2 or 2B. Like Plato 1728 who signifies that invisibility, as in his own thoughts and emotions and different abledness, is a form of spatialisation, we can see that in these individuals as well. A2 opens up to Pascal and shows him kindness and empathy. She starts treating him as an equal and is heartbroken to erase his memories. When she fights Emils and tries to help Emil she actually calls him “kid” and wishes to protect him. 2B hearing machines feels terrible about injuring and killing them. That is why Route A ending was also a trans-species ending where 2B understands and accepts the machines’ souls and consciousness. It takes almost death for 9S to do this in Route C/D and he also falls like an angel from heaven. A hero who becomes a brutal villain due to trauma, idealism and grief. A2 already accepts this as in a way her ending shows her need to reunite with her old comrades, Pascal and the village’s lost children. 

The True Ending, reaches out and embeds both the old beginnings and a prospect of evolution. This is semiotically and semantically shown with the Pods but also the different endings that were possible showing that the future, open but still with some integrity and organisation, is not set in stone but growing and evolving. Plato 1728 also sends the player a mail thanking them for reading about his life and looking at it. This brings back the posthumanist term of the observer being observed and visa versa. 

In conclusion, The transhumanist and posthumanist conjugate with trans-species elements and disability studies in NieR:Automata. This is done expertly through various intermeshed narratives. The game attempts to make players embed both storytelling and the codex for change within them. Thus it generates new knowledges and a sense of hope even when the story and game ends. It is interesting to play a game as such that takes into context and spatialization/specialisation that individuals do not need to look human and androids can very well be more than standard AI and machines can evolve into their own beings. 

Sources:

         Clarke, Bruce, Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

        Wolfe, Cary What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001)

[neptunecreek]

Human Rights and TPMs: Lessons from 22 Years of the U.S. DMCA

Introduction

In 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a sweeping overhaul of U.S. copyright law notionally designed to update the system for the digital era. Though the DMCA contains many controversial sections, one of the most pernicious and problematic elements of the law is Section 1201, the "anti-circumvention" rule which prohibits bypassing, removing, or revealing defects in "technical protection measures" (TPMs) that control not just use but also access to copyrighted works.

In drafting this provision, Congress ostensibly believed it was preserving fair use and free expression but failed to understand how the new law would interact with technology in the real world and how some courts could interpret the law to drastically expand the power of copyright owners. Appellate courts disagree about the scope of the law, and the uncertainty and the threat of lawsuits have meant that rightsholders have been able to effectively exert control over legitimate activities that have nothing to do with infringement, to the detriment of basic human rights.. Manufacturers who designed their products with TPMs that protected business models, rather than profits, can claim that using those products in ways that benefited their customers, (rather than their shareholders) is illegal.

22 years later, TPMs are everywhere, sometimes called "DRM" ("digital rights management"). TPMs control who can fix cars and tractors, who can audit the security of medical implants, who can refill a printer cartridge and whether you can store a cable broadcast and what you can do with it.

Last month, the Mexican Congress passed amendments to the Federal Copyright Law and the Federal Criminal Code, notionally to comply with the country's treaty obligations under Donald Trump's USMCA, the successor to NAFTA. This law included many provisions that interfered with human rights, so much so that the Mexican National Commission for Human Rights has filed a constitutional challenge before the Supreme Court seeking to annul these amendments.

Among the gravest of the defects in the new amendments to the Mexican copyright law and the Federal Criminal Code are the rules regarding TPMs, which replicate the defects in DMCA 1201. Notably, the new law does not address the flawed language of the DMCA that has allowed rightsholders to block legitimate and noninfringing uses of copyrighted works that depend on circumvention and creates harsh and disproportionate criminal penalties that creates unintended consequences for privacy and freedom of expression . Such criminal provisions are so broad and vague that it can be applied to any person, even the owner of the device, even if that person hasn’t committed any malicious intent to commit a wrongful act that will result in harm to another. To make things worse, the Mexican law does not provide even the inadequate protections the US version offers, such as an explicit, regular regulatory proceeding that creates exemptions for areas where the law is provably creating harms.

As with DMCA 1201, the new amendments to the Mexican copyright law contains language that superficially appears to address these concerns; however, as with DMCA 1201, the Mexican law's safeguard provisions are entirely cosmetic, so burdened with narrow definitions and onerous conditions that they are unusable. That is why, in 22 years of DMCA 1201, no one has ever successfully invoked the exemptions written into the statute.

EFF has had 22 years of experience with the fallout from DMCA 1201. In this article, we offer our hard-won expertise to our colleagues in Mexican civil society, industry, lawmaking and to the Mexican public.

Below, we have set out examples of how DMCA 1201 -- and its Mexican equivalent -- is incompatible with human rights, including free expression, self-determination, the rights of people with disabilities, cybersecurity, education, and archiving; as well as the law's consequences for Mexico's national resiliency and economic competitiveness and food- and health-security.

Free Expression

Copyright and free expression are in obvious tension with one another: the former grants creators exclusive rights to reproduce and build upon expressive materials; the latter demands the least-possible restrictions on who can express themselves and how.

Balancing these two priorities is a delicate act, and while different countries manage their limitations and exceptions to copyright differently -- fair use, fair dealing, derecho de autor, and more -- these systems typically require a subjective, qualitative judgment in order to evaluate whether a use falls into one of the exempted categories: for example, the widespread exemptions for parody or commentary, or rules that give broad latitude to uses that are "transformative" or "critical." These are rules that are designed to be interpreted by humans -- ultimately by judges.

TPM rules that have no nexus with copyright infringement vaporize the vital qualitative considerations in copyright's free expression exemptions, leaving behind a quantitative residue that is easy for computers to act upon, but which does not correspond closely to the policy objectives of limitations in copyright.

For example, a computer can tell if a video includes more than 25 frames of another video, or if the other works included in its composition do not exceed 10 percent of its total running time. But the computer cannot tell if the material that has been incorporated is there for parody, or commentary, or education -- or if the video-editor absentmindedly dragged a video-clip from another project into the file before publishing it.

And in truth, when TPMs collide with copyright exemptions, they are rarely even this nuanced.

Take the TPMs that prevent recording or duplication of videos, beginning with CSS, the system used in the first generation of DVD players, and continuing through the suite of video TPMs, including AACS (Blu-Ray) and HDCP (display devices). These devices can't tell if you are making a recording in order to produce a critical or parodical video commentary. In 2018, the US Copyright Office recognized that these TPMs interfere with the legitimate free expression rights of the public and granted an exemption to DMCA 1201 permitting the public to bypass these TPMs in order to make otherwise lawful recordings.The Mexican version of the DMCA does not include a formal procedure for granting comparable exemptions.

Other times, TPMs collide with free expression by allowing third parties to interpose themselves between rightsholders and their audiences, preventing the former from selling their expressive works to the latter.

The most prominent example of this interference is to be found in Apple's App Store, the official monopoly retailer for apps that can run on Apple's iOS devices, such as iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, and iPods. Apple's devices use TPMs that prevent owners of these devices from choosing to acquire software from rivals of the App Store. As a result, Apple's editorial choices about which apps it includes in the App Store have the force of law. For an Apple customer to acquire an app from someone other than Apple, they must bypass the TPM on their device. Though we have won the right for customers to “jailbreak” their devices, anyone who sells them a tool to effect this ommits a felony under DMCA 1201 and risks both a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine (for a first offense).

While the recent dispute with Epic Games has highlighted the economic dimension of this system (Epic objects to paying a 30 percent commission to Apple for transactions related to its game Fortnite), there are many historic examples of pure content-based restrictions on Apple's part:

Apple rejected a dictionary because it contained obscene words.

Apple rejected an app that tracked U.S. drone strikes and their civilian casualties.

Apple rejected an ebook because it contained links to Amazon.

Apple would not allow our own action-center app unless we signed a confidentiality agreement about the terms of our arrangement with Apple.

Apple rejected an app that pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong used to organize demonstrations.

In these cases, Apple's TPM interferes with speech in ways that are far more grave than merely blocking recording to advantage rightsholders. Rather, Apple is using TPMs backed by DMCA 1201 to interfere with rightsholders as well. Thanks to DMCA 1201, the creator of an app and a person who wants to use that app on a device that they own cannot transact without Apple's approval.

If Apple withholds that approval, the owner of the device and the creator of the copyrighted work are not allowed to consummate their arrangement, unless they bypass a TPM. Recall that commercial trafficking in TPM-circumvention tools is a serious crime under DMCA 1201, carrying a penalty of a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first criminal offense, even if those tools are used to allow rightsholders to share works with their audiences.

In the years since Apple perfected the App Store model, many manufacturers have replicated it, for categories of devices as diverse as games consoles, cars and tractors, thermostats and toys. In each of these domains -- as with Apple's App Store -- DMCA 1201 interferes with free expression in arbitrary and anticompetitive ways.

Self Determination

What is a "family?"

Human social arrangements don't map well to rigid categories. Digital systems can take account of the indeterminacy of these social connections by allowing their users to articulate the ambiguous and complex nature of their lives within a database. For example, a system could allow users to enter several names of arbitrary length to accommodate the common experience of being called different things by different people, or it could allow them to define their own familial relationships, declaring the people they live with as siblings to be their "brothers" or "sisters" -- or declaring an estranged parent to be a stranger, or a re-married parent's spouse to be a "mother."

But when TPMs enter the picture, these necessary and beneficial social complexities are collapsed down into a set of binary conditions, fenced in by the biases and experiences of their designers. These systems are suspicious of their users, designed to prevent "cheating," and they treat attempts to straddle their rigid categorical lines as evidence of dishonesty -- not as evidence that the system is too narrow to accommodate its users' lived experience.

One such example is CPCM, the "Content Protection and Copy Management component of DVB, a standard for digital television broadcasts used all over the world.

CPCM relies on the concept of an "authorized domain" that serves as a proxy for a single family. Devices designated as belonging to an "authorized domain" can share video recordings freely with one another, but may not share videos with people from outside the domain -- that is, with people who are not part of their family.

The committee that designed the authorized domain was composed almost exclusively of European and US technology, broadcast, and media executives, and they took pains to design a system that was flexible enough to accommodate their lived experience.

If you have a private boat, or a luxury car with its own internal entertainment system, or a summer house in another country, the Authorized Domain is smart enough to understand that all these are part of a single family and will permit content to move seamlessly between them.

But the Authorized Domain is far less forgiving to families that have members who live abroad as migrant workers, or who are part of the informal economy in another state or country, or nomads who travel through the year with a harvest. These "families" are not recognized as such by DVB-CPCM, even though there are far more families in their situation than there are families with summer homes in the Riviera.

All of this would add up to little more than a bad technology design, except for DMCA 1201 and other anti-circumvention laws.

Because of these laws -- including Mexico's new copyright law -- defeating CPCM in order to allow a family member to share content with you is itself a potential offense, and selling a tool to enable this is a potential criminal offense, carrying a five-year sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.

Mexico's familial relations should be defined by Mexican lawmakers and Mexican courts and the Mexican people -- not by wealthy executives from the global north meeting in board-rooms half a world away.

The Rights of People With Disabilities

Though disabilities are lumped into broad categories -- "motor disabilities," "blindness," "deafness," and so on -- the capabilities and challenges of each person with a disability are as unique as the capabilities and challenges faced by each able-bodied person.

That is why the core of accessibility isn't one-size-fits-all "accommodations" for people with disabilities; rather, it is "universal design" is "design of systems so that they can be accessed, understood and used to the greatest extent possible by all people regardless of their age, size, ability or disability."

The more a system can be altered by its user, the more accessible it is. Designers can and should build in controls and adaptations, from closed captions to the ability to magnify text or increase its contrast, but just as important is to leave the system open-ended, so that people whose needs were not anticipated during the design phase can suit them to their needs, or recruit others to do so for them.

This is incompatible with TPMs. TPMs are designed to prevent their users from modifying them. After all, if users could modify TPMs, they could subvert their controls.

Accessibility is important for people with disabilities, but it is also a great boon to able-bodied people: first, because many of us are merely "temporarily able-bodied" and will have to contend with some disability during our lives; and second, because flexible systems can accommodate use-cases that designers have not anticipated that able-bodied people also value: from the TV set with captions turned on in a noisy bar (or for language-learners) to the screen magnifiers used by people who have mislaid their glasses.

Like able-bodied people, many people with disabilities are able to effect modifications and improvements in their own tools. However, most people -- whether they are able-bodied and people with disabilities -- rely on third parties to modify the systems they rely on because they lack the skill or time to make these modifications themselves.

That is why DMCA 1201's prohibition on "trafficking in circumvention devices" is so punitive: it not only deprives programmers of the right to improve their tools, but it also deprives the rest of us of the right to benefit from those programmers' creations, and programmers who dare defy this stricture face lengthy prison sentences and giant fines if they are prosecuted.

Recent examples of TPMs interfering with disabilities reveal how confining DMCA 1201 is for people with disabilities.

In 2017, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) approved a controversial TPM for videos on the Web called Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). EME makes some affordances for people with disabilities, but it lacks other important features. For example, people with photosensitive epilepsy cannot use automated tools to identify and skip past strobing effects in videos that could trigger dangerous seizures, while color-blind people can't alter the color-palette of the videos to correct for their deficit.

A more recent example comes from the med-tech giant Abbott Labs, which used DMCA 1201 to suppress a tool that allowed people with diabetes to link their glucose monitors to their insulin pumps, in order to automatically calculate and administer doses of insulin in an "artificial pancreas."

Note that there is no copyright infringement in any of these examples: monitoring your blood sugar, skipping past seizure-inducing video effects, or changing colors to a range you can perceive do not violate anyone's rights under US copyright law. These are merely activities that are dispreferred by manufacturers.

Normally, a manufacturer's preference is subsidiary to the interests of the owner of a product, but not in this case. Once a product is designed so that you must bypass a TPM to use it in ways the manufacturer doesn't like, DMCA 1201 gives the manufacturer's preferences the force of law,

Archiving

In 1991, the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling gave a keynote address to the Game Developer's Conference in which he described the assembled game creators as practitioners without a history, whose work crumbled under their feet as fast as they could create it: "Every time a [game] platform vanishes it's like a little cultural apocalypse. And I can imagine a time when all the current platforms might vanish, and then what the hell becomes of your entire mode of expression?"

Sterling contrasted the creative context of software developers with authors: authors straddle a vast midden of historical material that they -- and everyone else -- can access. But in 1991, as computers and consoles were appearing and disappearing at bewildering speed, the software author had no history to refer to: the works of their forebears were lost to the ages, no longer accessible thanks to the disappearance of the hardware needed to run them.

Today, Sterling's characterization rings hollow. Software authors, particularly games developers, have access to the entire corpus of their industry, playable on modern computers, thanks to the rise and rise of "emulators" -- programs that simulate primitive, obsolete hardware on modern equipment that is orders of magnitude more powerful.

However, preserving the history of an otherwise ephemeral medium was not for the faint of heart. From the earliest days of commercial software, companies have deployed TPMs to prevent their customers from duplicating their products or running them without authorization. Preserving the history of software is impossible without bypassing TPMs, and bypassing TPMs is a potential felony that can send you to prison for five years and/or cost you half a million dollars if you supply a tool to do so.

That is why the US Copyright Office has repeatedly granted exemptions to DMCA 1201, permitting archivists in the United States to bypass software TPMs for preservation purposes.

Of course, it's not merely software that is routinely restricted with TPMs, frustrating the efforts of archivists: from music to movies, books to sound recordings, TPMs are routine. Needless to say, these TPMs interfere with routine, vital archiving activities just as much as they interfere with the archiving and preservation of software.

Education

Copyright systems around the world create exemptions for educational activities; U.S. copyright law specifically mentions education in the criteria for exempted use.

But educators frequently run up against the blunt, indiscriminate restrictions imposed by TPMs, whose code cannot distinguish between someone engaged in educational activities and someone engaged in noneducational activities.

Educators' conflicts with TPMs are many and varied: a teacher may build a lesson plan around an online video but be unable to act on it if the video is removed; in the absence of a TPM, the teacher could make a local copy of the video as a fallback.

For a decade, the U.S. Copyright Office has affirmed the need for educators to bypass TPMs in order to engage in normal pedagogical activities, most notably the need for film professors to bypass TPMs in order to teach their students and so that their students can analyze and edit commercial films as part of their studies.

National Resiliency

Thus far, this article has focused on the TPMs' impact on individual human rights, but human rights are dependent on the health and resiliency of the national territory in which they are exercised. Nutrition, health, and security are human rights just as surely as free speech, privacy and accessibility.

The pandemic has revealed the brittleness and transience of seemingly robust supply chains and firms. Access to replacement parts and skilled technicians has been disrupted and firms have failed, taking down their servers and leaving digital tools in unusable or partially unusable states.

But TPMs don't understand pandemics or other emergencies: they enforce restrictions irrespective of the circumstances on the ground. And where laws like DMCA 1201 prevent the development of tools and knowledge for bypassing TPMs, these indiscriminate restrictions take on the force of law and acquire a terrible durability, as few firms or even individuals are willing to risk prison and fines to supply the tools to make repairs to devices that are locked with TPMs.

Nowhere is this more visible than in agriculture, where the markets for key inputs like heavy machinery, seeds and fertilizer have grown dangerously concentrated, depriving farmers of meaningful choice from competitors with distinctive offers.

Farmers work under severe constraints: they work in rural, inaccessible territories, far from authorized service depots, and the imperatives of the living organisms they cultivate cannot be argued with. When your crop is ripe, it must be harvested -- and that goes double if there's a storm on the horizon.

That's why TPMs in tractors constitute a severe threat to national resiliency, threatening the food supply itself. Ag-tech giant John Deere has repeatedly asserted that farmers may not effect their own tractor repairs, insisting that these repairs are illegal unless they are finalized by an authorized technician who can take days to arrive (even when there isn't a pandemic), and who charge hundreds of dollars to inspect the farmer's own repairs and type an unlock code into the tractor's keyboard.

John Deere's position is that farmers are not qualified and should not be permitted to repair their own property. However, farmers have been fixing their own equipment for as long as agriculture has existed -- every farm has a workshop and sometimes even a forge. Indeed, John Deere's current designs are descended from modifications that farmers themselves made to earlier models: Deere used to dispatch field engineers to visit farms and copy farmers' innovations for future models.

This points to another key feature for national resiliency: adaptation. Just as every person has unique needs that cannot be fully predicted and accounted for by product designers, so too does every agricultural context. Every plot of land has its own biodynamics, from soil composition to climate to labor conditions, and farmers have always adapted their tools to suit their needs. Multinational ag-tech companies can profitably target the conditions of the wealthiest farmers, but if you fall too far outside the median use-case, the parameters of your tractor are unlikely to fully suit your needs. That is why farmers are so accustomed to adapting their equipment.

To be clear, John Deere's restrictions do not prevent farmers from modifying their tractors -- they merely put those farmers in legal peril. Instead, farmers have turned to black market Ukrainian replacement software for their tractors; no one knows who made this software, it comes with no guarantees, and if it contained malicious or defective code, there would be no one to sue.

And John Deere's abuse of TPMs doesn't stop at repairs. Tractors contain sophisticated sensors that can map out soil conditions to a high degree of accuracy, measuring humidity, density and other factors and plotting them on a centimeter-accurate grid. This data is automatically generated by farmers driving tractors around their own fields, but the data does not go to the farmer. Rather, John Deere harvests the data that farmers generate while harvesting their crops and builds up detailed pictures of regional soil conditions that the company sells as market intelligence to the financial markets for bets in crop futures.

That data is useful to the farmers who generated it: accurate soil data is needed for "precision agriculture," which improves crop yields by matching planting, fertilizing and watering to soil conditions. Farmers can access a small slice of that data, but only through an app that comes bundled with seed from Bayer-Monsanto. Competing seed companies, including domestic seed providers, cannot make comparable offers.

Again, this is bad enough under normal conditions, but when supply chains fail, the TPMs that enforce these restrictions prevent local suppliers from filling in the gaps.

Right to Repair

TPMs don't just interfere with ag-tech repairs: dominant firms in every sector have come to realize that repairs are a doubly lucrative nexus of control. First, companies that control repairs can extract money from their customers by charging high prices to fix their property and by forcing customers to use high-priced manufacturer-approved replacement parts in those repairs; and second, companies can unilaterally declare some consumer equipment to be beyond repair and demand that they pay to replace it.

Apple spent lavishly in 2018 on a campaign that stalled 20 state-level Right to Repair bills in the U.S.A., and, in his first shareholder address of 2019, Apple CEO Tim Cook warned that a major risk to Apple's profitability came from consumers who chose to repair, rather than replace, their old phones, tablets and laptops.

The Right to Repair is key to economic self-determination at any time, but in times of global or local crisis, when supply chains shatter, repair becomes a necessity. Alas, the sectors most committed to thwarting independent repair are also sectors whose products are most critical to weathering crises.

Take the automotive sector: manufacturers in this increasingly concentrated sector have used TPMs to prevent independent repair, from scrambling the diagnostic codes used on cars' internal communications networks to adding "security chips" to engine parts that prevent technicians from using functionally equivalent replacement parts from competing manufacturers.

The issue has simmered for a long time: in 2012, voters in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts overwhelmingly backed a ballot initiative that safeguarded the rights of drivers to choose their own mechanics, prompting the legislature to enact a right-to-repair law. However, manufacturers responded to this legal constraint by deploying TPMs that allow them to comply with the letter of the 2012 law while still preventing independent repair. The situation is so dire that Massachusetts voters have put another ballot initiative on this year's ballot, which would force automotive companies to disable TPMs in order to enable independent repair.

It's bad enough to lose your car while a pandemic has shut down public transit, but it's not just drivers who need the Right to Repair: it's also hospitals.

Medtronic is the world's largest manufacturer of ventilators. For 20 years, it has manufactured the workhorse Puritan Bennett 840 ventilator, but recently the company added a TPM to its ventilator design. The TPM prevents technicians from repairing a ventilator with a broken screen by swapping in a screen from another broken ventilator; this kind of parts-reuse is common, and authorized Medtronic technicians can refurbish a broken ventilator this way because they have the code to unlock the ventilator.

There is a thriving secondary market for broken ventilators, but refurbishers who need to transplant a monitor from one ventilator to another must bypass Medtronic's TPM. To do this, they rely on a single Polish technician who manufacturers a circumvention device and ships it to medical technicians around the world to help them with their repairs.

Medtronic strenuously objects to this practice and warns technicians that unauthorized repairs could expose patients to risk -- we assume that the patients whose lives were saved by refurbished ventilators are unimpressed by this argument. In a cruel twist of irony, the anti-repair Medtronic was founded in 1949 as a medical equipment repair business that effected unauthorized repairs.

Cybersecurity

In the security field, it's a truism that "there is no security in obscurity" -- or, as cryptographer Bruce Schneier puts it, "anyone can design a system that they can't think of a way around. That doesn't mean it's secure, it just means it's secure against people stupider than you."

Another truism in security is that "security is a process, not a product." You can never know if a system is secure -- all you can know is whether any defects have been discovered in it. Grave defects have been discovered even very mature, widely used systems that have been in use for decades.

The corollary of these two rules is that security requires that systems be open to auditing by as many third parties as possible, because the people who designed those systems are blind to their own mistakes, and because each auditor brings their own blind spots to the exercise.

But when a system has TPMs, they often interfere with security auditing, and, more importantly, security disclosures. TPMs are widely used in embedded systems to prevent competitors from creating interoperable products -- think of inkjet printers using TPMs to detect and reject third-party ink cartridges -- and when security researchers bypass these to investigate products, their reports can run afoul of DMCA 1201. Revealing a defect in a TPM, after all, can help attackers disable that TPM, and thus constitutes "circumvention" information. Recall that supplying “circumvention devices” to the public is a criminal offense under DMCA 1201.

This problem is so pronounced that in 2018, the US Copyright Office granted an exemption to DMCA 1201 for security researchers.

However, that exemption is not broad enough to encompass all security research. A coalition of security researchers is returning to the Copyright Office this rulemaking to explain again why regulators have been wrong to impose restrictions on legitimate research.

Competition

Firms use TPMs in three socially harmful ways:

Controlling customers: From limiting repairs to forcing the purchase of expensive spares and consumables to arbitrarily blocking apps, firms can use TPMs to compel their customers to behave in ways that put corporate interests above the interests of their customers;

Controlling critics: DMCA 1201 means that when a security researcher discovers a defect in a product, the manufacturer can exercise a veto over the disclosure of the defect by threatening legal action;

Controlling competitors: DMCA 1201 allows firms to unilaterally decide whether a competitor's parts, apps, features and services are available to its customers.

This concluding section delves into three key examples of TPMs' interference with competitive markets.

App Stores

In principle, there is nothing wrong with a manufacturer "curating" a collection of software for its products that are tested and certified to be of high quality. However, when devices are designed so that using a rival's app store requires bypassing a TPM, manufacturers can exercise a curator's veto, blocking rival apps on the basis that they compete with the manufacturer's own services.

The most familiar example of this is Apple's repeated decision to block rivals on the grounds that they offer alternative payment mechanisms that bypass Apple's own payment system and thus evade paying a commission to Apple. Recent high-profile examples include the HEY! email app, and the bestselling Fortnite app.

Streaming media

This plays out in other device categories as well, notably streaming video: AT&T's HBO Max is deliberately incompatible with leading video-to-TV bridges such as Amazon Fire and Roku TV, who command 70% of the market. The Fire and Roku are often integrated directly into televisions, meaning that HBO Max customers must purchase additional hardware to watch the TV they're already paying for on their own television sets. To make matters worse, HBO has cancelled its HBO Go service, which enabled people who paid for HBO over satellite and cable to watch programming on Roku and Amazon devices .

Browsers

TPMs also allow for the formation of cartels that can collude to exclude entire development methodologies from a market and to deliver control over the market to a single company. For example, the W3C's Encrypted Media Extensions (see "The Rights of People With Disabilities," above) is a standard for streaming video to web browsers.

However, EME is designed so that it does not constitute a complete technical solution: every browser vendor that implements EME must also separately license a proprietary descrambling component called a "content decryption module" (CDM).

In practice, only one company makes a licensable CDM: Google, whose "Widevine" technology must be licensed in order to display commercial videos from companies like Netflix, Amazon Prime and other market leaders in a browser.

However, Google will not license this technology to free/open source browsers except for those based on its own Chrome/Chromium browser. In standardizing a TPM for browsers, the W3C -- and Section 1201 of the DMCA -- has delivered gatekeeper status to Google, who now get to decide who may enter the browser market that it dominates; rivals that attempt to implement a CDM without Google’s permission risk prison sentences and large fines.

Conclusion

The U.S.A. has had 22 years of experience with legal protections for TPMs under Section 1201 in the DMCA. In that time, the U.S. government has repeatedly documented multiple ways in which TPMs interfere with basic human rights and the systems that permit their exercise. The Mexican Supreme Court has now taken up the question of whether Mexico can follow the U.S.'s example and establish a comparable regime in accordance with the rights recognized by the Mexican Constitution and international human rights law. In this document, we provide evidence that TPM regimes are incompatible with this goal.

The Mexican Congress -- and the U.S. Congress -- could do much to improve this situation by tying offenses under TPM law to actual acts of copyright violation. As the above has demonstrated, the most grave abuses of TPMs stem from their use to interfere with activities that do not infringe copyright.

However, rightsholders already have a remedy for copyright infringements: copyright law. A separate liability regime for TPM circumvention serves no legitimate purpose. Rather, its burden falls squarely on people who want to stay on the right side of the law and find that their important, legitimate activities and expression are put in legal peril.

Related Cases: 

Green v. U.S. Department of Justice

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/2R7wFEG

[maxwellyjordan]

Symposium: Do Blaine amendments create a public-school monopoly over moral education?

Jim Kelly is President of Solidarity Center for Law and Justice, P.C., and Founder and General Counsel of Georgia GOAL Scholarship Program, Inc., Georgia’s largest K-12 tax credit student scholarship program.

During its upcoming term, in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the Supreme Court will decide whether it violates the religion clauses or the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution to invalidate a generally available and religiously neutral student-aid program simply because the program affords students the choice of attending religious schools. In considering the case, the court will examine whether state agencies, such as Montana’s Department of Revenue, can rely on “Blaine amendments” to deny parties direct or indirect access to public funds for use in schools operated by religious groups.

Montana’s Blaine amendment is based on an 1875 proposal by U.S. Representative James Blaine of Maine to amend the U.S. Constitution to prohibit states from using money raised by taxation, or from providing public lands, for the support of schools that are under the control of religious sects or denominations. In Espinoza, Montana officials cited the state’s Blaine amendment as the basis for denying parents seeking to educate their children in the religious schools of their choice access to a K-12 scholarship program funded by state income-tax-credit-eligible contributions to private nonprofit scholarship organizations. Because there are 37 states whose constitutions contain Blaine amendments, the question raised by Espinoza has national significance.

Most likely, during its deliberations, the court will consider the deep history evidencing the anti-Catholic animus at the root of the adoption of the Blaine amendments in the second half of the 19th century. This evidence reflects a nativist fear that providing public funds for the education of millions of children from Catholic European immigrant families would embolden the anti-democratic “Papists,” who, allegedly, would be loyal to Rome, not to liberal republican values.

Of course, supporters of the Blaine amendments made it clear that any prohibitions on the use of public funds for K-12 education conducted by “sectarian” institutions would not prevent the continued moral education of public-school children in accordance with Protestant Christian teachings that, in their view, were foundational to America’s greatness and survival. Thus, by adopting Blaine amendments, state officials were not arguing against the teaching of religion in public schools – they were arguing in favor of a monopoly for the teaching of a “common,” pan-Protestant civic religion.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court made it clear that the teaching of Christian morality in government-funded public schools is unconstitutional. Since that time, educators have grappled with what many politicians and religious leaders view as the consequences of a secularized public school system, including youth anxiety, depression, substance abuse, violence, crime and trauma. To restore some semblance of moral formation in public schools, along the way, educators have called for in-school “civic education,” “values clarification,” “character education” and, lately, “social and emotional learning.” They have also facilitated “released time” for off-campus religious education and making available public-school classrooms on an after-school basis for youth groups engaged in the moral education of children.

Thus, as part of its deliberations in Espinoza, the court may consider whether reliance on Blaine amendments is enabling states like Montana to engage in moral education that, to use Justice Clarence Thomas’ phrasing from the Supreme Court’s opinion in Good News Club v. Milford Central Schools, is not logically different in kind from the Christian moral education provided in the private religious schools in which Kendra Espinoza and the other petitioners are educating their children. Montana’s reliance on the Blaine amendment to discriminate against Christian and other religious schools engaged in the moral education of students, in favor of the “social and emotional learning,” known as SEL, in which Montana public schools are engaging, raises serious First Amendment and equal protection concerns.

Montana public schools are teaching mental and behavioral health and social and emotional thoughts, beliefs, attitudes and practices to students in their classrooms all day, every day. In 1995, Montana developed the Montana Behavioral Initiative, which school officials describe as “a proactive approach in creating behavioral supports and a social culture that establishes social, emotional, and academic success for all students.” The MBI components are designed “to assist educators, parents, and other community members in developing the attitudes, skills, and systems necessary to ensure that each student, regardless of ability or disability, leaves public education and enters the community with social and academic competence.”

Further evidencing the natural, nontheistic (as opposed to supernatural, theistic) religious nature of SEL, in July 2016, the Montana Office of Public Instruction published the Montana Health Enhancement Standards Model Curriculum Guide for K-12 Health and Physical Education. For grades 9-12, the Montana Guide provides for the thorough inculcation of children in thoughts, beliefs, attitudes and practices pertaining to their mental and behavioral health, including their social and emotional well-being. The Performance Indicators and Health Goals applicable to students in grades 9-12 include many private and sensitive subjects about which parents have the primary right to teach their children. These include, but are not limited to, life skills, good character traits and behaviors, self-esteem, self-respect, social-emotional environment, societal norms and health, personal values and beliefs, responsible decision-making, building resistance skills, conflict avoidance, conflict resolution, mind-body connection, depression, loss and grief, co-dependence, marriage, parenting, sexual attitudes and conduct, friendship, mental health and disorders, suicide, adjusting to family changes, coping with stressful life changes and dating skills.

The recent transformation of K-12 public education from a purely academic undertaking into a holistic religious naturalist model for the social, emotional and academic training of students is a national phenomenon, in which most states are engaged. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, a leading proponent of SEL across the country, has recognized five “core competencies” that schools should include in their SEL programs: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making.

The transformation is also a global trend, which the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and its affiliated Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development are leading. In order to “transform education for humanity”, the UNESCO-MGIEP programs “are designed to mainstream SEL in education systems, innovate digital pedagogies, and put youth as global citizens at the center of the 2030 agenda for Sustainable Development.”

In Good News Club, the Supreme Court held that denying the Good News Club, a Christian youth-development organization, after-school access to a public-school cafeteria constituted impermissible viewpoint discrimination against the “purely” religious approach the club took toward the moral and character education of children. Montana public school officials have determined that, throughout each school day, they will teach students mental and behavioral health and social and emotional thoughts, beliefs, attitudes and practices consistent with a religious naturalism. Yet, Montana is denying the petitioners equal access to a scholarship program funded by contributions for which taxpayers receive a state income-tax credit. In light of the court’s decision in Good News Club, Montana should not be able to discriminate against petitioners by denying them equal access to generally available K-12 student aid to communicate their preferred viewpoints about mental and behavioral health and social and emotional thoughts, beliefs, attitudes and practices to their children at the accredited nonpublic Christian schools of their choice. Hopefully, in Espinoza, the court will consider this unique, but critical, aspect of the case.

The post Symposium: Do Blaine amendments create a public-school monopoly over moral education? appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

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[clubofinfo]

Expert: In a sense, blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows. Although people usually know what they have sown, our national experience of blowback is seldom imagined in such terms because so much of what the managers of the American empire have sown has been kept secret. It is time to realize, however, that the real dangers to America today come not from the newly rich people of East Asia but from our own ideological rigidity, our deep-seated belief in our own propaganda. ― Chalmers Johnson, Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire There are no more leaps of faith, or get out of jail cards left anymore. The first casualty of war is truth. Lofty heights of defining the first amendment are just overlooks onto the crumbling mythology of a democracy, where the people – citizens — vote for laws directly. We have a republic, a faulty one, the source of which is the power derived from billionaires, financiers, arms merchants, K-Streeters and the attendant moles allowing the government to break every charter of human concern. So, in that regard, we in this corptocracy have the right to be fooled every minute, suckered to not know a goddamned thing about democracy in big quotes. The very concept of manufactured consent and a controlled opposition destroys much of the power of agency and so-called freedom of assembly, association and travel. The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. ― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves. ― Vladimir Lenin But, alas, we have blokes who see the world not as a black and white dichotomous illusion of the for v. against bifurcation, but a world of flowing back to what words should mean, a world that allows the filters to be smashed like high polished glass and instead deploying a magnifying glass to point toward the very source of the blasphemies and strong arm robberies that have been occurring in the Republic the very first moment the beaver hat was put on and the first treaty scripted by the powdered wigs of Washingtonian Fathers and broken, ripped to shreds, seeded with the dark force that is the white race. Here comes Tools for Transparency into the mix of triage to uphold the declaration of independence, and the few tenets of the constitution that are supremely directed to we-by-for-because of the people, AND not the corporation, monopoly, Military-Retail-Finance-Ag-Energy-Pharma-Prison-Medical-Toxins-IT-Surveillance-Legal Complex. This project is the brainchild of a former Marine who “came to life late in the world” of pure skepticism about the powers that be and his own questioning of the motivations and machinations of his government and political representatives. Sometimes it’s hard to don and doff the uniform of a trained/manipulated/choregraphed killer and make any sense of the orders belted out and campaigns designed with no benefit to the invaded peoples other than the demented good (bad) for that gluttonous octopus parasite called capitalism as it entangles its tentacles on each invaded country’s birthright, history, natural resources, land and people through the power of the high explosives bomb and the usury bond. “Heck, before starting this project, I didn’t even know we had 535 representatives in Congress,” states Brian Hanson. So goes the beginning of this start up, Tools for Transparency, an on-line clearing house for what Hanson hopes will be a light shed onto all the backroom dealings we as consumers of news just aren’t privy to. Or that’s at least what Brian Hanson is shooting for in this atmosphere of “fake” news, “really fake” news, “non” news, “no” news, “distracting” news “manufactured” news, “rabbit hole” news, “lies are truths” news, or newspeak. The Beaverton, Oregon, resident is the father of this platform which is still in its infancy, as the former Marine throws his all into the project. The 37-year-old Hanson is a Pacific Northwest product, having dropped out of traditional high school and landing up in an alternative high school where the instructors were outside the box. He recalls reading Shakespeare, doing two weeks of study on the Nez Perce peoples, and a class report on the Battle of Wounded Knee. With gusto, he told me that his class made a video of the trail of tears and presented it to the local Shriners. For this father of a special needs daughter, he easily lets roll off his tongue, “black sheep,” both an emblematic moniker and symbolic of his travails, having stuck with him throughout his life, from high school, to the Marines (“where I learned to get responsible”) to today: divorced, single dad, precarious income stream. On top of that, he’s living in his elderly parents’ garage/converted small studio apartment. After the Marines, where he specialized in communications, and field wiring, he worked on a community college degree, eventually ending up with a BA from Portland State University in psychology. The disciplines of cognitive behavior therapy and behavior analysis “got to me” first in college, initially through the inspiring teaching of a San Bernardino community college instructor who helped the young Hanson stick it out after Hanson smashed up bones in a motorcycle accident: a spill that caused him to miss half the classes. This faculty member went the extra mile, Hanson says, allowing him to do outside work and test make-ups. I was fresh out of the military and had no idea what I was doing. This professor missed dinners with his family, missed his kids’ recitals, to allow me to make up tests. . . . I’ve been a lifelong feminist because of this man, who instructed me on his own philosophy tied to feminism. I never had a male role model like that before. Hanson kicked around, came back to Beaverton, worked with developmental disabled youth and then foster youth, where I met him when we were both case managers for 16-to 21-year-old foster youth. We talk a lot about consumable information, as Hanson explains his gambit with his new information web company. It’s an age-old conundrum, what George Lakoff puts down as narrative framing. That was a big issue in the Bush Junior (W) election cycle, how born-with-a-silver-spoon George W had snookered Joe Six-Pack and NASCAR country with his Yale education, dicey National Air Guard record and Bush’s rich charmed life, getting a professional baseball team (Texas Rangers) as part of the family bargain. The illustration is dramatic to both Hanson and myself, as we talked about Mad Men, the Edward Bernays and Milton Friedman schools of propaganda, framing stories (lies) and setting out to paint good people as bad, heroic politicians like Salvador Allende of Chile as Commie Baby Killers. Even now, Bush, the instigator of chaos in the Middle East, with all the cooked up lies and distractions of his own stupidity (like Trump), and, bam, W is reclaimed (in the mainstream mush media) as something of a good president, and especially by the likes of the Democratic Party misleadership. Bush, millionaire, entitled, crude, racist, and, bam again, we have dirt poor kids from Appalachia or Akron joining up through the economic draft of standing down the armies of burger flippers to fight illegal wars, and then to come home creaking decrepit shells of their old young selves to fight for oil and geopolitical checkmate brinkmanship of the World Bank and Goldman Sachs order. Here we have an old Connecticut political family, from Prescott Bush, putting the grandson out on tens of thousands of acres of scrub brush near Waco, Texas, with 4×4 hefty pick-up trucks and chainsaws (George is deathly afraid of horses), and we’re all good to call him a man’s man, roughing it West Texas. Honest George or Rough-rider Teddy or Ahh Shucks Reagan, Yes We Can/Si Se Puede Obama, One Thousand Points of Light Bush Sr., Make America Great Again Trump — the news isn’t the news, and patriotism is the graveyard of scoundrels and their bromides. A huge turning point for Brian was this last election cycle, with Trump getting guffaws and trounced in the court of public opinion as a wimp, liar, cheat, misogamist, racist, buffoon, narcissist, from people all over the political spectrum, during the beginning of the election cycle. But then once Trump got in, family feuds and friendship breaks occurred: “How was it that this relationship I had with a male buddy, a true friend, going on 27 years, just gets dumped because I was questioning Trump as a viable candidate and questioning his integrity?” The age-old battle – turning blue in the face trying to explain to a friend, or anyone, that candidate x is this and that, based on the historical record. In Trump’s case, there is a long written, legal, quotable/citable record of this guy’s dirty dealings, bad business decisions, his lechery, racism, sexism, blatant unmitigated arrogance, criminality. For Hanson, it’s a no-brainer that anyone in their right mind might question Trump’s validity and viable character when he threw his toupee into the ring. A great friend just dropped Brian. Took him off social media, stopped socializing, screen to black, and this broken friendship was racing through Hanson’s mind because of the new normal: the targeted toxicity of social media feeds, and the social and psychological conditioning which this huge chasm between red state/blue state ideology has meted out to an already bifurcated flagging American consumerist society. Even having a respectable, clean and thorough debate about Trump is almost impossible, Hanson said while we talked over beers at the Yukon Bar in Sellwood. This huge cultural divide exists as far as individuals’ skills sets and critical thinking skills. The more technical the stuff like climate change or the deep state military industrial complex, people’s world views get challenged. They just don’t have the tools to dig deep into a bill passed (and endorsed) by their local representatives. Again, “consumable” as a tool to enlightenment or at least knowledge comes up in our conversation, and Hanson has done the following thought experiment literally hundreds of times – “I hear an opinion in the news – FOX, MSNBC, the Young Turks – and I can spend four hours digging up truths, and how that opinion got to us.” What he’s found is the consumable stuff the typical news consumer gets is absolutely counter to the reality of that news’ origins, facts and context. His Tools for Transparency cuts through the opinion, and as he proposes, makes the world news and the even more Byzantine and elaborate proposed legislation and lobbying groups behind “the news” approachable, again, consumable. He taps into his college days taking courses in industrial organizational psychology, seemingly benign when the American Psychological Association gets to mash the term into a three-fold brochure by defining it for prospective students as business as usual for corporations, and humanity is better because of this sort of manipulative psychology, but . . . In reality, it’s the science of behavior in the workplace, organizational development, attitudes, career development, decision theory, human performance, human factors, consumer behavior, small group theory and process, criterion theory and development and job and task analysis and individual assessment. It’s a set of tools to keep workers down spiritually and organizationally, disconnected, fearful, confused and ineffectual as thinkers and resisters, and inept at countering the abuse of power companies or bureaucracies wield over a misinformed workforce. The shape of corporations’ unethical behavior, their sociopathic and the draconian workplace conditions today are largely sculpted and defined by these behavior shapers to include the marketers and the Edward Bernays-inspired manipulators of facts and brain functioning. This begs the question for Hanson, just what are today’s hierarchy of needs for the average American? Physiological; Safety; Love/Belonging; Esteem; Self-Actualization. Of course, Maslow added human’s innate drive toward curiosity. Ironically, the lower scaffolds of the pyramid are deemed primitive – eating, sleeping, drinking, as are the safety needs and social needs such as friendship and sexual intimacy. In one sense, we see it played out – one cannot philosophize on an empty stomach and for Aristotle, his observation is prescient – ‘all paid work absorbs and degrades the mind.’ Hanson and I talk about the existential threats of climate change, terrorists, war, and our own mortality. We are in that hyper-speed moment in history when technology changes at breakneck speed, and disruptive technologies’ create disruptive economies which in turn give us disruptive communities. We are avoiding the inevitability of collapse, peak oil, peak everything, so we construct comforting (read: dopamine-triggering and sedating) realities, tied to bourgeois values, consumeristic habits, customs, degraded culture, moral codes that are antithetical to our own agency, and, then, religious fervor. Hanson states: How do they get us to take actions against our beliefs? This conditioning now is based on not just ‘buy my product’ to attain unattainable standards. Today, we, as a society, are terrified if we can’t attain that level of status or standard, Hanson’s singular (one of several) bottom lines is that his Tools for Transparency has to find a way to be consumable, and a second one Hanson repeats posits the solutions to our problems have to be profitable: “How can he create a market for alternative information profitable?” Tools for Transparency uses the platform Patreon, founded five years ago as a platform that allows patrons to pay a set amount of money every time an artist creates a work of art. Hanson’s web site and service, then depends on loyalty, fee-paying patrons. The result thus far for Hanson is nascent, but growing. I asked him how his daily routine tied to this dream can be synthesized in a nutshell: My daily routine is actually starting to wrap up at this point, it has never been very consistent as a single start-up founder anyways. For the most part my site is not sophisticated enough to continue in perpetuity yet. Too many requirements for data and input that cannot be done on a static basis. So I am mostly working on a static prototype I can display, build an audience with. For the most part I have been diving headfirst into legislative bulk data sets. Making connections between publications, finding creative ways to link (intentionally I think) differently formatted data together. Working to construct cohesive and understandable information. When I get tired of staring at data sheets, I will work to develop relationships with business people, work on marketing techniques, reaching out to colleges and programs, learning about business development, corporate securities, federal regulations pertaining to my business, or some general outreach (mostly family right now, you’re the first real contact outside my main family I am working with). There really isn’t anything routine about what I am doing, because it is mostly just me and a single developer friend working on the site. We talked about other issues tied the militarization of society, and I posed some long-winded questions cut and pasted below: 1. What makes what you are doing relevant to the click bait/screen addicted generation? 2. You say you were terrified for the lives of the family members, the country. Blacks and Hispanics tell me that finally, the whites get what we have been experiencing for decades, since the beginning of the country. Speak to that reality. This has been and is a white supremacist country, and with that operating procedure/system, poor people, disenfranchised people, people of color especially, are on the chopping block for those white elitists and the militarized mentality of law enforcement and even our daily lives as a renter class. He and I talk much about Black Lives Matter, and why this new movement is relevant in 2018 as it would have been in 1950 USA or 1850 America. And I do not for a second believe it has ever not been exactly this way. Every regime has to have a solider class that it uses to enforce the social hierarchy. And the solider class is always expected to use violence to enforce ideology. The threats are always transient, ever shifting, but the response is doggedly the same. Authoritarianism flourishes in this environment, we sacrifice freedoms for security, and our world shrinks a little more. Brian believes there is an awakening today in this country, and that the examples of movements such as those in Portland where youth are out yelling against the police state, and then how we are seeing individual officers returning firing with violence against those youth: The viral video of an officer drawing his pistol on a group of school age children is terrifying. We talk a lot about the devaluing of language and intentional discourse which includes the abilities of a society to engage in lively and cogent debate. For me, I know the forces of propaganda are multi-headed, multi-variant, with so much of American life seeded with lies, half-truths, duplicitous and twisted concepts, as well as inaccurate and spin-doctored history, which has contaminated a large portion of our society, up and down the economic ladder, with mind control. Unfortunately, our language now is inextricably tied to emotions, as we see leftists (what’s that?) and so-called progressives screaming at the top of their lungs how Trump is the worst president ever. Black so-called activists, journalists, stating how the empire (sky) is falling because Trump talked with Putin. Imagine, imagine, all those millions upon millions of people killed because of all the other presidents’ and their thugs’ policies eviscerating societies, all those elections smeared, all those democracies mauled, all those citizens in the other part of the world hobbled by America’s policies, read “wars, occupations, embargoes, structural violence.” It is a daily reminder for us all that today, as was true yesterday, that we are ruled by masters of self-deception and our collective society having a feel good party every day while we plunder the world. Doublethink. Here: Orwell’s point: To tell deliberate lives while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. Herein lies the problem – vaunting past presidents on pedestals while attacking this current deplorable, Donald Trump. The reality is the US has been run by an elite group of militarists, and by no means is Trump the worst of the worst, which is both illogical and unsupported by facts: Yet, we have to mark the words and wisdom of those of us who have been marking this empire’s crimes, both internal and external, for years. Here, Paul Edwards over at Counterpunch hits a bulls-eye on the heart of the matter: After decades of proven bald-faced crime, deceit and the dirtiest pool at home and abroad, the CIA, FBI, NSA, the Justice Department and the whole fetid nomenklatura of sociopathic rats, are portrayed as white knights of virtue dispensing verity as holy writ. And “progressives” buy it. These are the vermin that gave us Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, Chile, the Contras, Iraq’s WMD, and along the way managed to miss the falls of the Shah and Communism. Truly an Orwellian clusterfuck, this. War Party Dems misleading naive liberal souls sickened by Trump into embracing the dirty, vicious lunacy Hillary peddled to her fans, the bankers, brokers, and CEOs of the War Machine. Trump is a fool who may yet blunder us into war; the Dems and the Deep State cabal would give us war by design. In an innocent way, Brian Hanson is hoping to dig into that “objective reality,” with his Tools for Transparency. He might be unconsciously adhering to Mark Twain’s admonition: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Maybe Tools for Transparency will get under the onion peels of deceit, a consumeristic and kleptocratic debt-ridden society to expose those culprits’ origins – where or where and how and why did something like the Flint, Michigan, poisoning of people’s water happen? Who signed off? How did it, the deceit (felonies), weave its way through a supposedly checked and triple-checked “democracy”? As we parted from a free jazz concert in Portland, he has some pointed words for me: “I will keep working on you Paul to get some hope about society, about the world. I’m going to keep on you.” http://clubof.info/

[gwanth1002]

Anthropology 1002 Syllabus

Anth 1002.11 Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology

Spring 2017: Hybrid Version

Professor Barbara Miller, barbaramillergw@gmail.com

Office hours: Friday 11:30am-1pm (please email in advance to confirm)

Email and phone availability (cell 202-420-1002, for emergency)

 Hybrid course mission:

A so-called hybrid course involves less time in a traditional classroom setting and requires more independent, self-monitored work by the student outside of class. In this case, class time will not be devoted to lectures or watching full-length documentary films. Instead, class time will be used for structured discussion of readings, film viewings, and independent research projects. Given the altered course delivery, evaluations of student achievement will not be based on the traditional testing model. In all, the class will consider students to constitute a community of scholars, working toward the common goal of learning a lot about sociocultural anthropology and how it connects to our everyday lives through reading, viewing, sharing, and independent observational research and analysis.

Given GW guidelines about expected class time per week:

► Students will spend 90 minutes a week in class (attendance is required; please see below for details).

► Students are expected to devote at least six hours a week, on average, outside of class to this course.

 Expectations – students will:

Do the assigned reading, watch the assigned films, and be prepared to discuss them in class and participate in Blackboard discussions about them

Conduct and present 6 of the “Anthropology in Everyday Life” Research Exercises; review classmates’ presentations on Tumblr, and be prepared to comment on them in class.

Take a turn being a class note-taker for one-half of a class session (45 minutes); thus each student will have an opportunity. There will be a list/sign-up sheet; if something goes wrong and you cannot take notes at your assigned time, it is your responsibility to swap a time with another student (social capital at work). Class notes will be posted on a thread on Discussion Board on a weekly basis so that we build an archive.

Participate in class discussion in person and on Discussion Board (ONE thoughtful post each week, either a novel post or a post in response to another student’s post; posts should be about 100 words on average, thoughtful, well-crafted, and perhaps drawing on other class readings/learning); individual introductions at the beginning of class do not count).

  Learning objectives:

► Awareness of concepts and theories in sociocultural anthropology and awareness of world ethnographic variation

► Understanding of ethical responsibilities and challenges in fieldwork; learn of the value and limitation of purely optical research

► Facility with critical thinking in assessing anthropology’s approaches and findings

► Practicing close observation, note-taking, and reflexivity

► Writing short reports and visual presentation on Tumblr

► Preparing and presenting short oral reports on research (6 in all) including required overview during the last class

► Appreciation of value of peer learning through “Community of Scholars” approach

 Grading:

As of the first class, everyone starts with an “A” grade. I will be your coach, guiding you to achieving learning objectives. There are no exams.

Draft rubric:

 Task

 Midpoint

 End of Course

 Misc.

 % of Grade

Attendance

      20

Discussion Board

      30

Tumblr

      50

                                        TOTAL

      100 percent

 Required Books (on sale in the GW bookstore; 2-hour reserve in Gelman Library):

Barbara D. Miller, Cultural Anthropology (2017, 8th edition). ISBN 978-0-13-44190-7 [My Anthro Lab not required].

James Spradley and David W. McCurdy, eds., Conformity and Conflict (2016, 15th edition); referred to below as C&C.  ISBN 13-978-0-205-98079-5 [selected chapters].

Elizabeth Thomas, The Old Way: A Story of the First People (2006, any edition].

Seth Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (2013).

Jon D. Holtzman, Nuer Journeys, Nuer Lives: Sudanese Refugees in Minnesota (2000, any edition).

 GW support for students:

► Instructional Technology Help Desk open every day 24 hours:  Tel. 202-994-4948; ithelp@gwu.edu

►Disability Support Services (DSS): Marvin Center 242, telephone 994-8250; http://gwired.gwu.edu/dss

►Mental Health Services, counsellors available all day, every day at 202-994-5300; https://counselingcenter.gwu.edu/

 In case of an emergency:

Our class meets in the seminar room, 2nd floor, of 2110 G Street, the main anthropology department building. It is a historic row house and has no elevator. In case of an emergency, we will follow general GW instructions about evacuating the building, as needed, or “sheltering in place.”

 Week- by-Week

Week 1. January 27.  Introductions and orientation

Introductions around the room (also posted on Blackboard in more detail)

Discussion of creating a Tumblr site for the class research presentations: need to decide on its name and draft a mini-description [Nicole volunteered to set it up]

 Week 2. February 3. What are goals and scope of anthropology and how to the four fields contribute to a broad and deep view of humanity?  

Class discussion: Review of student comments to topics on Discussion Board Week 2

Readings for Week 2 discussion:

Miller Chapters 1 & 2

C&C Chapter 31 "Body Ritual among the Nacirema”

Start reading Thomas

Viewing for Week 2: two films: Nanook of the North (YouTube) and The Fast Runner    

Discussion Board

Exercise 1 due by midnight Sunday, Feb 5 on Tumblr: choose two Key Concepts (listed at the end of the chapter) from Chapters 1-2; take a photo from your daily experiences connecting to your chosen concepts, write 100-150 words about each concept and post the text and photos on Tumblr as part of your growing research archive.

 Week 3. February 10.  Research methods: truth, objectivity, intersubjectivity; and Economic systems: working, eating, sharing, exclusion

Class presentation by each student about their posts for Exercise 1 and comments on classmates’ post.

Readings for Week 3 discussion:

Miller Chapter 3, 4 & 5

C&C Chapter 3 "Fieldwork on Prostitution in the Era of AIDS"

C&C Chapter 4 "Nice Girls Don't Talk to Rastas"

C&C Chapter 13 "Poverty at Work: Office Employment and the Crack Alternative"

C&C Chapter 14 "Women in the Mine"

C&C Chapter 2 "Eating Christmas in the Kalahari"

Continue reading Thomas

Discussion Board

Read Tumblr posts and be prepared to comment in class next week

Exercise 2 due by midnight Sunday February 12 on Tumblr: choose two Key Concepts from Chapters 3-5 including a related photo from your daily experiences connecting to your chosen concepts, write 100-150 words about each concept, and post on Tumblr

 Week 4. February 17: Reproduction, the life cycle, and well-being

Class discussion of one’s own posts for Exercise 2 and comments on classmates’ posts

Readings for Week 4 discussion: Miller Chapter 6 & 7

C&C Chapter 16 “Mother’s Love: Death without Weeping”

C&C Chapter 37 "Medical Anthropology: Improving Nutrition in Malawi"

C&C Chapter 38 "Public Interest Ethnography: Women's Prisons and Health Care in California"

Finish reading Thomas

Viewing: Maasai Women (e-reserves streaming video)

Discussion Board: Questions will focus on The Old Way

Read Tumblr posts and be prepared to comment in class next week

Exercise 3 due by midnight Sunday February 19 on Tumblr: choose two Key Concepts from Chapter 6 or Chapter 7 and take a photo from your daily experiences connecting to each of them, write 100-150 words about each concept, and post on Tumblr

 Week 5. February 24: People related  

Presentation and class discussion of posts for Exercise 3

Readings for Week 5 discussion: Miller Chapter 8

C&C Chapter 18 "Polyandry: When Brothers Take a Wife,"

C&C Chapter 19, “Marriage and Adulthood in West Africa”

Start reading Holmes

Viewing: Dadi’s Family (e-reserves streaming video)

Discussion Board: Questions will cover Weeks 4 and 5 textbook topics and C&C readings

Read Tumblr posts and be prepared to comment in class next week

Exercise 4 due by midnight Sunday February 26 on Tumblr: choose two Key Concepts from Chapter 8 and take a photo from your daily experiences connecting to your chosen concept, write 100-150 words about each concept, and post on Tumblr

 Week 6. March 3 Groups

Presentation and class discussion of Exercise 4

Readings for Week 6 discussion: Miller Chapter 9

C&C Chapter 22 "Mixed Blood"

Finish reading Holmes

No viewing

Discussion Board

Read Tumblr posts and be prepared to comment in class next week

Exercise 5 due by midnight Sunday March 5 on Tumblr: choose two Key Concepts from Chapter 9 and take a photo for each from your daily experiences connecting to your chosen concepts, write 100-150 words about each concept and post on Tumblr

 Week 7. March 10 Power and politics

Presentation and class discussion of Exercise 5

Readings for Week 7 discussion: Miller Chapter 10

C&C Chapter 24 "Cross-Cultural Law: The Case of the Gypsy Offender"

C&C Chapter 6 “Manipulating Meaning: The Military Name Game”

Viewing: Kawelka—Ongka’s Big Moka (e-reserves streaming video)

Exercise 6 due by midnight Sunday March 12 on Tumblr: choose a Key Concept from Chapter 10 and take a photo from your daily experiences connecting to your chosen concept, write 100-150 words about each concept and post on Tumblr

Discussion Board: Questions will focus on Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies

Read Tumblr posts and be prepared to comment in class next week

Mid-point assessment: The professor will review and comment on the students’ two files (Discussion Board posts and Tumblr photos/posts, provided on Blackboard/Assignment no later than midnight March 10; post as much as you have done by the deadline).

 Week 8 SPRING BREAK

 Week 9.  March 24 Communication

Class discussion of one’s own post for Exercise 6 and comments on classmates’ post

Readings for week 9 discussion: Miller Chapter 11

C&C Chapter 7 "Conversation Style: Talking on the Job"

Start reading Holtzman

Exercise 7 due by midnight Sunday March 19 on Tumblr: choose two Key Concepts from Chapter 11 and take a photo from your daily experiences connecting to your chosen concepts, write 100-150 words about each concept and post on Tumblr

Discussion Board: Questions will cover week & and week 9

Read Tumblr posts and be prepared to comment in class next week

 Week 10 March 31 Religion and beliefs

Class discussion of one’s own post for Exercise 7 and comments on classmates’ post

Readings for week 10 discussion: Miller Chapter 12

C&C Chapter 29 "Baseball Magic"

C&C Chapter 30 "Run for the Wall: An American Pilgrimage"

Continue reading Holtzman

Exercise 8 due by midnight Sunday March 26 on Tumblr: choose two Key Concepts from Chapter 12 and take a photo from your daily experiences connecting to your chosen concepts, write 100-150 words about each concept and post on Tumblr

 Week 11. April 7 Expressive culture

Class discussion of one’s own post for Exercise 8 and comments on classmates’ post

Readings for week 11 discussion: Miller Chapter 13

C&C Chapter 32 "How Sushi Went Global

C&C Chapter 33 "Village Walks: Tourism and Globalization among the Tharu of Nepal"

Finish reading Holtzman

No viewing

Exercise 9 due by midnight Sunday April 2 on Tumblr: choose two Key Concepts from Chapter 13 and take a photo from your daily experiences connecting to your chosen concepts, write 100-150 words about each concept and post on Tumblr

Discussion Board

Read Tumblr posts and be prepared to comment in class next week

 Week 12. April 14 People on the move

Class discussion of one’s own post for Exercise 9 and comments on classmates’ post

Readings for week 12 discussion:  Miller Chapter 14

Viewing “First Contact” (e-reserves on Blackboard)

Exercise 10 due by midnight Sunday April 9 on Tumblr: choose two Key Concepts from Chapter 14 and take a photo from your daily experiences connecting to your chosen concepts, write 100-150 words about each concept and post on Tumblr

Discussion Board

Read Tumblr posts and be prepared to comment in class next week

 Week 13 April 21 People (re)defining development

Class discussion of one’s own post for Exercise 10 and comments on classmates’ post

Readings for week 13 discussion: Miller Chapter 15

C&C Chapter 11 "Forest Development the Indian Way"

C&C Chapter 36 "Advice for Developers: Peace Corps Problems in Botswana"

C&C Chapter 39 "Using Anthropology"

Viewing: Kayapo: Out of the Rainforest (e-reserves on Blackboard)

Discussion Board: final posts due by  

Read Tumblr posts and be prepared to comment in class next week

Exercise 11 due by midnight Sunday April 23 on Tumblr: choose two Key Concepts from Chapter 15 and take a photo from your daily experiences connecting to your chosen concepts, write 100-150 words about each concept and post on Tumblr

 Week 14 TUESDAY May 2 Class round-up

Following the guiding principle of this class as being formed by a “community of scholars,” we will devote this final class meeting to discussing the format of the class in terms of its learning objectives. We will consider expectations, work load, research assignment details, and student accountability in terms of Discussion Board, Tumblr, and class participation.

 Second-half assessment: The professor will review and comment on the students’ two files (Discussion Board posts and Tumblr photos/posts, provided on Blackboard/Assignment no later than April 30; post your work since the mid-point assessment, March 10, following instructions on Blackboard).