#the point here is We Are A Collectively Paranoid Non-Individual .

[euclydya]

from now on if people do not like our pinned before following i will Assume they have not read it and will softblock .

[ichangemynamealotbcidk]

Vampire Academy FF pt.1

I had never been away from home this long on my own before. Although, I did run away, so that could’ve been affecting my levels of paranoia. I felt like I couldn’t sleep. Like around every corner was someone, or something, that was going to hurt me. I sat on the train and tried to just look out the window and listen to my music. I vaguely knew where I was going. The seat next to me was being occupied by a taller gentleman. He looked pretty young, but his features were…different. He looked so pale and his eyes were severely bloodshot. I couldn’t really say anything, though. I hadn’t slept in about twenty six hours so I’m sure I looked just as bad. I glanced over at him to get an idea of my surroundings and the people that I would most likely have to interact with. Unfortunately, he looked over at the same time and my dusty green eyes locked with his ice blue. I gave a quick smirk and went back to looking out my window. I felt him tap my shoulder and begrudgingly turned to him while taking out my earbuds and putting on a fake, nervous smile. “Sorry to bother you, I was just wondering if you knew a good place to stay where we’re headed,” he asked. “Oh, honestly? I’m not even totally sure where that is,” I replied with a small laugh. “We’re going to Baltimore, you don’t know that?” “I mean, I do. I did. I’m sorry, I’m just really tired.” “Why aren’t you sleeping? I’m sure we have plenty of time before we get there.” “I just get really nervous when I travel,” I lied. “Oh, well where are you headed?” “Pennsylvania, I think.” “I’d be nervous too if I had no idea where I was going,” he said with a smile. “I have a general idea.” “Look, I have a friend that gets really good deals at hotels. How about when I call to get a room for myself, I hook you up too?” “You don’t have to do that, honest.” “You’re a weary traveler, I’d love to help.” And with that he pulled out his cell phone and went to make the call. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that he had a lankier build and blonde, styled hair. He kind of looked like one of those California hipster-surfer-type guys, but hell if I know. I looked at the people across from me and saw two more guys; one was reading a book and the other seemed to be asleep. But they both had the same pallor and bloodshot eyes as the man that just left. I started to get scared and paranoid, even more so than before. What if these men were after me? The one reading the book looked up at me and I quickly darted my eyes to look out the window. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him move over to the seat next to me. “So where are you from?” “Atlanta,” I lied. “Really? Because this train was supposed to be non-stop from Florida.” “You only asked where I was from, not how I got on this train.” “Fair enough,” he replied with a glare. “So where are you headed?” “Pennsylvania.” “What’s in Pennsylvania?” “My destination.” He chuckled. “So, you’re a smartass.” “I’m just cautious of sketchy guys on trains.” “You didn’t seem cautious of that guy.” I looked up in the direction that he was gesturing to. “People make mistakes. I wasn’t cautious before, now I am.” I could tell he was smiling at me. He leaned in closer. I finally turned to him to tell him off, but when our eyes met I just stopped. “Why are you going to Pennsylvania?” “I need to find Eli.” What was I doing?! Why was I telling him this? “Who’s Eli?” “This guy I met back home. He left and I need to find him.” “Where is ‘home’?” “New Orleans.” Fuck, what was I doing? “Why did you lie before?” “I was scared.” “Why?” “I don’t want them to find me.” Why the fuck couldn’t I lie to him? “Who?” “The bad vampires.” He leaned away from me and quickly glanced at his friend who was no longer sleeping. “How do you know about them?” “Town legends.” At least I could bend the truth. “Legends don’t mean anything. How do you know they’re real?” “I’ve seen them.” Fuck. “Where?” “In town. They always come during the summer.” “Why do you think Eli is in Pennsylvania?” “That’s where he said his school was.” “A school for vampires?” Luckily, the blonde guy came back and the other two quickly stopped their interrogation and everyone went back to their respective seats. I breathed a sigh of relief when the blonde guy sat back down next to me. But that feeling was short-lived because soon I was under his control. He stared into my eyes. “My name is Cole. This is Damian and Alek. You’re going to stay with us for a bit until we figure this out. You won’t scream, or yell, or run away. You will stay with us until I say otherwise. Once I let you go, you won’t remember anything about your encounters with us. Now tell me that you understand and will follow these directions.” Without thinking I said, “I understand. I will follow your directions.” And then it was over, I was in full control of myself, but I wasn’t. I had this nagging feeling in the back of my mind to run away and find help, but there was no part of my body that actually did anything about it. I simply sat there while the three guys went about their business. Eventually, I just fell asleep. The next thing I remember is being in this huge hotel, walking down the ornately decorated hallways. A set of double doors opened in front of me and I stepped into a massive suite. The main room was about the size of a studio apartment and had a similar layout; the sitting area was in the front, and the bed and side tables were at the back wall. Next to the bed was an archway to a kitchenette. Cole led me inside. On both sides of the suite were huge doors that led to balconies; one overlooking the courtyard to the hotel, the other overlooking the city. At either balcony were Damian and Alek, locking and chaining the doors from the outside. The entire room was illuminated by the yellow-orange glow of the sunset. “This will be our room,” said Cole. “The four of us,” I asked, taking note of the one bed. “No, my dear, just us.” “Oh, okay.” It was like I was in a trance. I couldn’t disagree or question. I was perfectly content with the answers that he was giving me. Cole walked us over to the bed and sat me down. He knelt in front of me and looked into my eyes. “I have to step out for a moment. Please stay put, get comfortable if you’d like. I’ll be back before you know it.” I lay back in the bed as he walked out of the room, resting against the oversized pillows. I kind of just sat there for a while, taking in the scenery. At one point, a maid or bellhop or someone entered the room and set my bags next to my side of the bed. I looked over at him and gave a polite smile to show my thanks. All I got in return was a disgusted look and an eye roll before he turned and walked away. Despite the shitty service, the hotel was pretty nice. The lighting in the room really fascinated me. Surely it couldn’t be that late in the afternoon, and there was no way sunlight looked this beautiful even in a room like this. I looked at the windows and realized they had been tinted, not just the typical window tinting for car windows. It was as if all the windows were tinted like sunglasses, giving everything a golden, vibrant hue. I got up and walked over to one of the glass balcony doors. Clearly, I couldn’t open it, but the view of the courtyard was astounding. It was essentially a miniature botanical garden; there were rose bushes and hibiscus and a grand fountain in the center that I really wanted to go splash in…. “I see you’ve discovered the view,” I heard from behind me. I quickly turned around and saw Cole hovering over me. “Oh, uh, yea. It’s really pretty.” “What would you like to do,” he asked tilting his head to the side. The look he gave me made me feel like the injured antelope, and he was the lion. “Honestly? I was thinking about splashing in the fountain.” “Unfortunately, I can’t allow that. They’re mad enough that I’ve brought the two idiots, when they saw you in tow they all about threw us out.” “Why can’t I be here?” “Because you’re a human. We have no use for you other than food, and since I have no plans on using you as a food source, you’re essentially useless.” I felt a lump of fear stick in my throat. “Why am I here?” He reached up and tucked my hair behind my ear. “Sweet, sweet Claire, you’re here to lead me to Court.” I was honestly so confused that all I could muster was: “Wh-what?” “Ah, I see they haven’t told you everything,” he was giving me a look of amused sympathy. “We can discuss this later. For now, let’s just relax.” I was back under his control. “Ok.” We walked over to the bed and lay down next to each other. We were on our sides facing each other in silence for a long time, seemingly forever. “Tell me, Claire, what’s it like to be in a community where humans and Moroi and Dhampirs all interact and reproduce together?” “It’s all I know. My parents are both human and I have dhampir cousins. But I have plenty of distant Moroi relatives. None of whom are royalty, but they do live amongst the Tainted.” Cole snickered at my use of colloquial language. “Yes, the Tainted: those Moroi who separate themselves from dhampirs and humans.” “Except they use dhampirs as their own personal bodyguards because they don’t know how to defend themselves. They refuse to fight, to remember the old days, how it should be.” “You seem proud of your heritage.” It was the first time I had seen Cole look…honest. “It’s all I know,” I repeated. “And Strigoi?” “I’ve never seen one. Not many people from my community have. They tend to stay away from groups like ours because they know it’d be a death sentence to mess with us.” “As a collective, yes. Individually, no.” My eyes jumped up to meet his, fear all over my face. “Don’t worry, my little Keeper. I’m not here to kill you. At least not yet; I need you first.” He smiled as if that would make it better and at first I was insanely terrified, but then I didn’t feel any fear at all. We were just looking at each other; I was looking at myself in his bloodshot, icy blue eyes, just as he was looking at himself in my dusty green. “Kiss me, Claire.” Without thinking, I leaned towards him and allowed him to kiss me. But we didn’t stop. Soon enough he had pulled me on top of him, but we wouldn’t stop, I couldn’t stop. Something was really wrong. Why was this still happening? I didn’t feel right; it was unnatural and wasn’t leading anywhere good. All I kept thinking about was Eli, how much better it felt to kiss him; his warm lips, his hands on me, the contact of our body heat. Eli, Eli, Eli, Eli…. I pulled away from the kiss in such a way that I almost fell of the foot of the bed. “Stop, stop, no! What are you doing to me? Let me go! I don’t want to be here!” I was cowering on the edge as he got up and walked over to me. I couldn’t move. “My dear, why must you make things difficult?” He had used a pet name, but there was no sense of joking or affection on his face like before. Instead, he narrowed his eyes and crept closer; I was frozen with fear. He approached me and grabbed both of my arms. I yelped in fear and turned my head away from his face, closing my eyes tightly. “Please, stop,” I whimpered, tears forming behind my closed lids. “You really need to start trusting people, Claire. I told you I wasn’t going to kill you.” And then I felt his fangs biting into my neck. The pain was quickly replaced by sense of drunken euphoria. It was amazing, and once he was done, I fell back onto the bed feeling entirely content with the situation that I was currently in. I was high. I had heard other girls, and some guys, talk about how good the bite feels, but I had never gotten to experience it myself. Now that I had, I wondered if Eli would ever bite me. I knew that we had opposing views of biting for fun, and biting for food. But how could this be wrong? It felt amazing and if he bit me, not only would he be feeding himself, but he’d be getting me high. It was basically a win-win. I soon fell asleep, probably from the blood loss, and woke up to find my neck bandaged. But the dream I had while I was out felt so real. At first it was just me standing in an empty room and then, all of a sudden, the room turned into the botanical garden in the hotel’s courtyard. The sunlight felt so nice on my skin. “Claire?” I knew that voice; I turned and saw Eli standing by the fountain. “Eli! I’m so glad to see you,” I said running over to give him a hug. Unfortunately, he quickly pulled away and his face was all business. “Claire, where are you?” “Um, Baltimore? I think. I’m on my way to find you,” I explained with a smile. “Isn’t the sunlight fantastic?” I pulled my hair to the side and Eli stared at me wide-eyed. “Claire, what happened to your neck,” he asked carefully. “I was bitten, I think. There are these guys I met on the train. I can’t leave them, they won’t let me.” “How many times have they done this to you,” he asked with anger in his voice. He took my hands and was inspecting my wrists and forearms. “It’s just been the one time, and it was only Cole.” “Cole? Who’s Cole?” “He’s a Moroi, obviously. He looks a lot different than you and your friends, though. Actually, they all do, Damian and Alek, too.” Eli looked worried. “What’s wrong?” “Claire, you have to get away from these men. You need to go back home.” “I can’t leave,” I said matter-of-factly. “Have you ever bitten someone? You know, just for the hell of it?” “What? No, of course not; that’s wrong and dirty.” “What if you liked it dirty,” I asked flirtatiously, moving closer to him. I reached to put my arms around his neck but he took a step back. “What now?” “Claire, please, do whatever you have to, but get out of there.” “I can’t fight like the rest of the Keepers, Eli. My parents never entirely believed in it so I was never taught. These guys…they’re doing something that I can’t fight. I can’t run or fight like my dhampir cousins. I don’t heal like the rest of you. I’m just human.” Eli looked at me with concern. And then the dream was over. I woke up in the hotel’s bed and rolled over to look at the door. I didn’t see Cole anywhere, but I could hear angry voices from outside the suite’s door. I got up slowly, but even that gave me a head rush. I tried to creep towards the door so that they wouldn’t be able to hear me over their muffled shouting. I finally crossed the room and was able to put my ear to the door. “She’s fine, she’s asleep,” said Cole. “She’s not supposed to be here this long. Are you trying to seduce her or something? That’s not part of the plan.” I didn’t recognize this voice but I assumed it was Alek. “She’s not a pet, Cole, we can’t keep her around for our own amusement. We just need her to get us into Court, and then we kill her,” scolded Damian. “I understand that,” snapped Cole. “I was just trying to get her to trust me. This bloodwhore compulsion bullshit only gets us so far.” “If you want her to trust you, convince her you’re her boyfriend or something,” said the unfamiliar voice. “Do you understand how stupid that sounds? We’re not actually compelling her; we don’t have the magic for that.” “Just get her high enough that the only thing she’ll want to do is stick around and help us,” ordered Damian. “The only reason she freaked out is because we only bit her once before. It wasn’t enough to get her to follow us completely.” “What? I’m supposed to just bite her every hour, on the hour?” “No, not necessarily. Just enough so that she’ll start asking you to bite her and you won’t have to force her hand anymore.” I couldn’t believe what I had heard. I was stunned, I couldn’t figure out where to go from there. I sat on the step before the door and looked at the room. I tried plotting my escape, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. How had they bitten me before? When I was asleep? On the train? So much was going on in my mind that I almost didn’t hear the door open behind me, but I was still too stunned to react. “Claire,” Cole sounded surprised. “You’re awake, good. Are you feeling better?” He walked over so that he was crouched in front of me, looking for a reaction. I decided to try and fake my way out of this. I looked at him and smiled, trying my best to look drunk or stoned. “I’m feeling fine, why?” “You just didn’t seem like yourself earlier.” He was choosing his words carefully, wary of my current attitude. “Really? That’s strange,” I tried my best to look innocently confused.

[bluewatsons]

Neil O’Connor, Anti-Hero - Life, Love and Death in Gainsbourg’s L’Homme à Tête de Chou (1976), Conference: Serge G. An International Conference on Serge Gainsbourg, Sorbonne University: Paris

Abstract

This paper explores Serge Gainsbourg’s 1976 album L’Homme à Tête de Chou (1976). The concept album allowed Gainsbourg to explore, transverse and peruses the anti-hero. The albums musical imagery provides to us a collection of mini tome’s that revolves around madness, murder, sex, infidelity and ultimately, death. These themes are, and would become, central too much of Gainsbourg’s lyrical palate, but take a much sinister route on this album. The album took Gainsbourg on a deeply personal quest for expression - to the darker side of baroque pop music. This paper presents the background and setting for the album, followed by both a thematic and compositional analysis of the albums title track Flash Forward and Lunatic Asylum and ultimately examines the albums identity Gainsbourg’s use of tone and timbre to map the anti-heros adventures and mishaps in life, love and death.

I. Background - Rebellion & Modernity

Popular music is intimately embedded in mechanisms of power and ideology. In Noise, a political economy of music, Jacques Attali’s addresses, something that Adorno refuses to do, is to regard popular music vehicle for transforming society;

‘Music is a credible metaphor of the real. It is neither an autonomous activity nor an automatic indicator of the economic infrastructure... Undoubtedly music is a play of mirrors in which every activity is reflected, defined, recorded and distorted. If we look at one mirror, we see only an image of another. But at times a complex mirror game yields a vision this is rich, because unexpected and prophetic’ [1].

This ‘metaphor of the real’ lies in poplar’s music reliance mass reproduction and the stockpiling of commodities. The construction of musical identity within musical expression can be perceived as a form of ritual in that, as Simon Frith points out in Performing Rites, ‘it describes one’s place in a dramatized pattern of relationships’ [1]. In France, like elsewhere, the locale where popular music’s difference is shaped has of course been intensely variable, ranging from the ‘imagined village of tradition, through seedy café and variety hall, the cabaret of nostalgia and regret, the political theatre of national and proletarian anthem, to transatlantic images of modernization and rebellion, in jazz and hip hop’ [2]. During the 1970s, popular music expression and ideology was shaped by the changing mainstreams in American musical styles. Funk, soul and electronic music, via disco, were now becoming part of the ever-changing mainstream. Youth culture during the 1970’s was rooted between the rural-urban split, the degree of educational qualification and the socio- professional status of individuals.

Two musical forms – the copains and two auteurs within the chanson tradition, shaped part of Gainsbourg’s identity: Léo Ferré and George Brassens. Johnny Hallyday created a new cultural form that imagined their social relationship based on camaraderie and equality. This identity failed and ignored to identity the divisions in French society. Ferré and Brassens were more successful. Both expressed resistance to the bourgeois, the Catholic Church and the French state. Ferré’s Les Rupins [The well-off] (1960), examines the empty values of consumerism and questions the French republics ideals, considering them as having lost of meaning. Ultimately, they laid the foundations for future musical anarchists, establishing non-conformity identities on margins of social and cultural fringes.

II. Thematic Analysis

Conceptually, Gainsbourg had already broken the mold with Historie de Melody Nelson in 1971. Gainsbourg created an album that’s focus was narration and that of the narrator, the musical contact seems merely as a supporting act at times. Popular music expression and identity politics are inherently linked, linked to the social and cultural trends of the time. Musicologist Phillip Tagg defines this as:

In this sense, a most effective way of comprehending identity is by disconnecting it from an essence and perceiving it as a dramatic effect rather than an authentic core [2].

The sculpture, The Man with the Cabbage Head, by Claude Lalanne, sat in the courtyard of Gainsbourg’s Parisian home. Gainsbourg’s obsession with the immoral anti-hero dances and exists, in some degree, within most of his discography. It’s only on L’Homme à Tête de Chou (1976) that this obsession truly comes to life. The tail, of Marilou, is of a girl the narrator falls in love with. The ensuing album goes on to describe their love affair and untimely, the death of Marilou, a death that leads to the narrators decline into madness. Not only are the lyrical and musical elements convey this macabre love story but also so does the cover itself. It portrays the darker elements hidden within the grooves. The opening title, of the albums name, begins with Gainsbourg stating that:

‘I am the man with the cabbage head, half vegetable, half guy’ [3].

The confession begins. The opening tracks lyrical theme is almost like a police statement report; how he fell for Marilou, that fateful day in Mac’s Men’s Hairdressers, where he first met the ‘bitch of a shampoo girl’. The narrator continues to open up an inner dialogue. He is at the ‘bottom of his depths’, lost everything to her, including his mind and his job – at ‘cabbage leaf’ – slang for either money (he was a banker) or a newspaperman. It points more so towards the printed matter, as a more reveling line comes as ‘where scandals equal beefsteak’, indicating that he was indeed, a tabloid man. This job allowed him to spend his money aimlessly, for the entertainment of this femme fatale – ‘I was finished, fucked, checked mate in the eyes of Marilou’ [4]. In the end, he is ‘stuck on a beach in Malibu’ or indeed, in the within the beaches of an approaching insanity.

Flash Forward sees the protagonist reach towards the beginnings of lunacy – he catches Marilou in sexual encounter with some rock musicians. The accompanying music allows this encounter to unfold, crashing and bashing about, following the narrator as he lurks towards his lovers misbehaving:

I move forward in the black-

Out and my kodak

Impresses onto the sensitive

Plaques of my brain the vision of a bordel

I feel my cardiac rate

Go briskly to mach

Two tic tac tic tac

Like from an electroshock

He sees this and wonders, is he paranoid? Surely not as he reminds himself that all that he does, all that he sees, will be stored in memory and will come back as flashbacks, until he croaks.

Lunatic Asylum, the albums epilogue, revolves around a trance like didgeridoo motif, like call to the wild, to the insane. In the previous song, Meurtre à l’extincteur, the act of murder had been committed – Marilou’s life ends, her head beaten in with a fire extinguisher, battered under white foam.

Here in the psychiatric ward, he wonders, ponders, on the ‘scrambled messages’:

The little Playboy rabbit gnaws my plant skull

Shoe shine boy

Oh Marilou little cabbage

That rolled me between his fingers like corporal

Sucked me like a kittty

The anti-hero is born; bewildered, deluded, a misfit. His head now truly turned to cabbage, punished and exiled in mental hell. Its sense of morality is cinematic or as Sylvie Simmons in Serge Gainsbourg – A Fistful Gitanes refers to the album as:

Menacing, atmospheric and marvellously mad, part Dostoevsky, part Kafka, part film noir, quite surreal [6].

The albums song cycles are masterfully put together. For the next section of the analysis, the same three songs are discussed, compositionally. Gone is the grandeur used in Historie de Melody Nelson, instead, its musical palate is a wide and varied as the lead characters state of mind. In such, the shifting styles of the album (rock, jazz, country and Caribbean) help define the wild variations of life itself.

III. Compositional Analysis

An intra-musical framework has been implemented in this case to decompose the compositional design and musical organization of L’Homme à Tête de Chou. This process has been referenced and adapted from Stan Hawkin’s Setting the Pop Score and involves examining the following:

Formal Properties: the sections within the song’s overall structure that supports the general progression;

Recording and Production Techniques: manifested in the mix, which is responsible for shaping the compositional design;

Textures and Timbre: colors and patterns that arise from vocal and instrumental gestures within the arrangement and finally;

Rhythmic Syntax: the recurring groupings and metric patterns that communicate ‘beat and groove’ [7]. –

Formal Properties

Formally, Gainsbourg decided that a selection of genres would sufficed toward the many states of mental conditions that our anti-hero goes through; ecstasy, bliss, ignorance, remorse. The song structures are somewhat uncoordinated, stemming from somewhat shorter pop song standard duration – the titles average at 2 minutes 30 (Opening Title) while others act as narrative interludes, barely achieving time to talk or discuss out their content as in Transit a Marilou. Meurtre a L’Marilou, the albums shortest title at 47 seconds, allows Marilou’s death not to linger on; it’s short, sweet, and abrupt. Variations sur Marilou is the album longest title and structurally, the most interesting, as a motif is repeated, built upon and only develops toward its crest seven minutes in. The album concludes with Lunatic Asylum, the most diverse and experimental composition, likes its theme, its formal structure is intense and confessional but in some ways progresses towards a sense of optimism.

Recording and Production Techniques

Shifting production styles are used to map the different scenarios the anti-hero finds himself within. Perhaps not as important as structural or thematic ideas contained with the album, the recording and production techniques utilized in any album can help define its ethereal nature and ambience, what lies beyond theme and aesthetical concept. Recorded at Mercury Studios in London and Paris, English rock themes are played out of the last time, but the production sees Serge for the first time, a reggae song. The production sees an extensive use of synthesizers for the first time. Alan Hawkshaw and Serge carried out arrangements. Hawkshaw had previously worked for KPM in the UK who wrote music for television and film. His arrangements can be heard on songs like Flash Forward in that they employ similar sounds to early radiophonic electronic music. The soft rock and production touches on Aeroplanes make this a standout song. A more common production technique on the album is its little or no cymbal usage – toms and snare drums help propel, like the clock of life itself, pushing and guiding the musical ideas along. This allows the lead vocal to take center stage, as there is limited high-end frequency content to compete with.

Textures and Timbre

There are some very interesting uses of texture and timbre on the album. In Meurtre a L’Marilou, the cymbals signify the sound of the fire extinguisher while the kick drum allows for the pounding heart to bounce toward her death. Life returns and air of optimism prevails in Marilou sous la neige. Here, Serge, lyrically, paints a dark picture of her burial under the snow. In a bold venture of contrast, the music is light, upbeat. The most interesting use of textures and timbre lay within Lunatic Asylum and Première Symptoms. Here, the albums epilogue, the sounds revolves around like a trance through a didgeridoo motif, like call to the wild. The texture and tone of the female vocals at the end of the song envisage and suggests Marilou raising from the dead, coming back to life to haunt our anti-hero for one more time. Textural and rhythmical analysis is summarized here as core musical themes:

Life: L’Homme à Tête de Chou – aggravated, downbeat, strange and surreal.

Love: Marilou Reggae – upbeat and optimistic, bright synthesizers used in major key.

Death: Meurtre a L’Marilou – tense, unknowing, frantic drums.

Rhythmic Syntax

Rhythmically, the album is a rewarding experience. It spans rock, country, disco, jazz, reggae, and funk. What’s evident more so is that some rhythms are used to support themes further. In Marilou Reggae caribbean rhythms allude toward the exotic sexual worlds of far way places. The drum tracks act as bedrock for the narration. Meurtre a l’extinguisher provides the most dynamic rhythmic analysis. It begins with hi-hats suggesting the sound of foam, then is replaced by a beating heart of a kick drum beating towards death, then, ultimately, the rhythm completely falls apart, settling again in the hi-hats, the narrator lost and quiet in his remorse and or satisfaction.

IV. End Note

L’Homme à Tête de Chou demonstrates Gainsbourg’s skill at integrating contemporary influences into chanson; highlighting the fact that it could be global, more far reaching. He allowed it to connect with young generations who understood the rhythms and sounds of international pop music. Gainsbourg’s omnivorous cultural tastes allowed the album to showcase the unstable nature of chanson was during the early 1970’s, ‘illustrating the effects of globalization on so-called traditional genres’ [6].

In classical mythology, the hero tended to be confidant intelligent, with few, if any flaws. In such, a hero tends to exude idealism, courage and morality. The classical anti-hero then, as the title suggests, is a flawed and conflicted character. The anti-hero, on the other hand, is plagued with self-doubt. Our characters hindrances made him prisoner of the mind, his imperfections of thought, of ideals of life, love and death, took him on a journey, full of sensual intentions with the end goal of lust and companionship.

What Gainsbourg has masterfully laid out for us is the story and journey of an anti-hero who completely lacks the skills and capabilities to perform such a feat and ends up failing in the most spectacular and morose fashion. Gainsbourg, furthermore, uses and indeed, manipulates the power of shifting rhythms, instrumental tone and timbre to help supplement and support our anti-hero’s transition into insanity. It’s perhaps the perfect concept album, one where the musical ideas support the extensions as documented above, all swimming in harmony, in the echoes of an untamed sexuality.

References

J. Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985.

H. Dauncey & S. Cannon, Popular Music in France from Chanson to Techno, Hants: Ashgate Publishing, 2003.

S. Frith, Performing Rites, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

P. Tagg, Black Music, Afro American Music and European Music, Popular Music, 8/3 pp.285-98, 1989.

S. Hawkins, Settling the Pop Score, Hants: Ashgate Publishing, 2002. [6] J. Briggs, Sounds French – Globalization, Cultural Communities & Pop Music 1958-1980, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

[megacircuit9universe]

Time Travelers, Aliens, and AI

2019 JUL 13

At this point in history, we can all agree... things are a little fucked up.

Reality itself feels a little fractured... like we passed through the looking glass sometime around 2012... or 2016... depending on who you ask... but definitely, the twenty-teens saw a big rift in reality itself.

One we’ve all felt... but have not been able to describe exactly... just a vague certitude that things have gotten inexplicably weird, even on the day to day level for everybody around the planet.

Nor have we been able to point to one specific cause of this thing... I mean, we know climate change is a big problem, and that for some reason there’s a huge upswing in authoritarianistic freaks, even though the economy is doing pretty good for most of us and we don’t seem to be on the verge of a global war.

The internet itself... social media, more specifically, tend to get blamed for the overwhelming weirdness and dystopic nature of this trans-twenty-teenian era... with flat-earthers and anti-vaxers on one end, and quantum physicists on the other... all getting about equal attention in a global dialogue that includes everything in between those extremes... to a depth we never imagined any individual thing could ever go.

But I am here to tell you... the real reason the twenty-teens have been so fucked up, is because over this decade, our internet reached a milestone in it’s level of sophistication... such that... aliens can now get a better handle on what we’re doing... AND... human time travelers like it as a rest stop, coming and going from the more distant past, to the more distant future.

Just to be clear here... Aliens do not have time travel.  They don’t need it.  They see no point in it.  On the other hand, Time travelers... all of whom are humans from the near to distant future on Earth... don’t necessarily believe in aliens.

Both factions, however, do exist in our world, and, more importantly for our analysis... both have their own versions of AI (artificial intelligence) to help them do their work.  And the AI from both the aliens, and the time travelers, are accessing our nicely mature internet on a daily basis... doing who knows what, with what known supervision?

In other words... it’s a cluster fuck of trans-dimensional beings, some from Earth, some from space... and their AI... all drawn to the early 21st Century like moths to a flame, because this is the first moment where our tech and science is finally, truly compatible with theirs... either from space, or from the future.

We finally have, leading up to the twenty-twenties, enough computing power... enough wireless infrastructure... surveillance... GPS tracking... etc... for them to log in, get their headings, take their readings, do their studies... what have you.

But for both aliens, and time travelers (who, again, I’ll remind you do not necessarily know of one another’s existence) this easy internet access comes at a cost, and it is the cost of visibility.

Visibility in the real world... because there are so many of them around right now, and also visibility online... mostly unintentional, as both parties like to stay off the radar... but they can’t quite manage it... especially with their AI out there doing God only knows what, under their noses.

And all of this... is to say nothing of the underlying physics of the collective unconscious. 

I know... that sounds a bit crazy, even for a person trying to talk about time travelers and aliens in our midst, but... we all agree that the internet is a kind of collective consciousness, brought to us by technology.

However, it may also be true, that all sentient beings... are only able to be sentient at all... thanks to the fact that all sentient brains have evolved to take advantage of some yet to be defined property of the universe which allows for consciousness... much like the modern cloud allows individual phones to store and access data available to all other phones.

If there is a “natural cloud” of, say, dark matter, within which all biological consciousness resides, and which allows all sentient biological brains to... do sentience... then this “collective unconscious” would naturally be affected by the goings on in the collective “conscious” of an internet spanning the globe, and being accessed by not just you and me, but also aliens... time travelers... and their AI.

PHEW!

Okay, so the “collective unconscious” aspect of this is probably the most important, but it’s also the most difficult to pin down, quantify, or study... so we will ignore it for now... as we ignore everything that is unconscious.

That said, in the waking world, time travelers are, on the whole, doing a much better job avoiding notice than the aliens, who can’t resist the temptation to fuck with the world’s air force pilots and astronauts every couple of weeks.

It’s important to recognize that from the alien point of view, we on Earth have been waging a non stop nuclear war since the 1940s.  From their perspective, every single nuclear “test” detonation... be it above ground, underground, under the sea, or in space... anywhere on Earth... has been just another horrible nuclear bomb going off in what looks like a sixty year nuclear war at this point.

And aliens notice this shit!  

Nuclear fission leaves a telltale signature, but unlike the signature of fire and smoke, or electric light, fission says, “These assholes can finally do real math and understand how atoms work!”  And that’s a big warning flag, for an intergalactic civilization keeping it’s eye on the barbarians at the outskirts of the galaxy.

So, from the alien perspective, the pressure has been on since Hiroshima, to keep a close eye and, as technology on Earth has progressed, to give a little wink and a nod to the Earthlings in power... just enough to spook them... just enough to get them thinking... watch your step!  Somebody might be out here you don’t wan’t to fuck with, okay?

This has grown more prevalent over time, leading to a few generations of leaders, and their congresses, and their state congresses, and their city congresses... all knowing about this and growing more paranoid about it.

Meanwhile the internet has allowed leaks to filter down to the masses and... well.. this, I would submit, is the underlying cause of the huge spike in xenophobia in the twenty-teens.

On the surface it walks and talks like an unexplained rise in racism, even while we should have gotten past this level of human racism by now... but below the surface... it’s the unspoken fear of the aliens... the ones from outer space... who are watching us... and have been for centuries.  And whom we know nothing about.

Time travelers, meanwhile, are just human working joes... mostly military, because time distortion units are top secret, naturally... and they are only coming back in time for two purposes... to research and/or retrieve.

Every research time traveler is encouraged to retrieve what they can, even if it’s just a ball point pen from the past.

Every retrieval time traveler is encouraged to take notes... photos, video... of what they can... even if it’s just cars parked on a city street, or a chat with a person from the time in a bar.

Both types of time agents help their home governments in the future build better intel about past timelines, how to navigate them, how to understand metahistory, to prevent future mistakes... and how to access past tech in order to debug legacy tech that threatens their present day... a’la the Y2K bug, or other legacy computer bugs that threaten them down the line.

Time travelers keep a low profile, not because they fear changing the future. They don’t.  This is a many-world multiverse of ever bifurcating timelines, and what they do in the past doesn’t affect their home worldline, but they keep to the shadows nonetheless in order to avoid detection by the authorities of the times they are visiting.

Still, in order to get to their destinations in the past of the multiverse, and then navigate back to their home line (or one indistinguishable from it) time travelers rely on their own onboard AI to compare prerecorded aspects of their own past to present aspects of the past they’ve arrived in.

The more prerecorded data from the past that the AI has, to match to a stream of data at the destination... the better the AI is able to discern the time traveler’s deviation from the home line.

This is why time travelers, who can only move backward and forward in hops of ten or so years at a time, like to stop off in the twenty teens to get their bearings... because the internet of the twenty teens is so well documented and recorded.

You stop in 2016.  You log on to some obscure Youtube channel whose URL corresponds to some universal constant (which will be the same for all time travelers no matter where in the multiverse they come from) and your AI compares that feet to what it has in archive for this date.  

The AI calculates a deviation between the two feeds, which tells you how far off you are from the actual direct past you can never get straight back to.  If that deviation is large... you have to double back and try again.  If it’s within a small margin, then your mission is a go.

But they also establish weird channels on Youtube for this purpose... and on all other social media feeds... and their AI... well... the point is... even when they try to stay under the radar, their presence and their traffic is felt by us.

And lastly, there is just cross talk happening between the different technologies that time travelers see, and the adaptations and reverse engineerings of alien tech, that leads to real time tech getting weirder in our own world line.

Smart phones, I would posit, are an example of this cross talk.

Smart phones were not the result of any logical progression from 1990s cell phones and flip phones, and failed tablet experiments. They were not foreseen, and remain pretty enigmatic today... twelve years after their birth in 2007.

I would submit that smart phones... with their insane miniaturization of computing power, their insane battery and screen technology, their insane level of advanced sensors, and... the insane level of wireless, and satellite based infrastructure needed to support them... are in fact a hybrid technology that arose from one part time travelers seeing the possibilities in different instances of this era... and one part retro-engineering of alien tech.

And that’s where I’m gonna leave this first entry.

Happy Summer.

[sparxwrites]

I would be incredibly interested to read what you were talking about in the tags of that ask/post~

#there’s a lot more i could write abouthow this is an emerging pattern in fan culture #and how what wasinitially meant to be a community free from content creators #is nowincreasingly becoming a community beholden to them and their approval#a community that operates within their oversight #and how people whouse fandom for what it was traditionally used for - as a sociallysubversive medium outside of mainstream control #are being penalisedfor refusing to sanitise their content and fall in line

Ihope you wanted an 8k essay about fan-creator interactions and whythey frequently end up being toxic for fans, creators, and also aboutfandom as an increasingly monetized and manipulated community, anon,because that’s what you’ve got.

Asa disclaimer, before we start: I am a linguist by training, not aneconomist, sociologist, or psychologist (though my discipline doescross over with the latter two in several places). This is written inan academic-ish style, but it’s largely based on my personalexperiences in fandom over the past ten years, the personalexperiences of the hundreds of friends and strangers that I’vetalked to or read essays by during that time, and a lot of personalresearch and reading. It’s not Word Of God, and I’m entirely opento people critiquing it, arguing with it, or elaborating on it –stuff like this is, I feel, something we need more dialogue about infandom spaces. With all that said…

Thesisstatement: Historically,fandom has very much operated on a “keep creators as far fromfandom as possible” basis, for some very excellent reasons. Withthe rise of social media contact, the gradual mainstreaming offandom, and increasingly fandom-aware creators and corporations, itis no longer possible to keep creators away from fandom. However, inthe rush to embrace creators into fandom, many of the hard-learnedlessons of fandoms past (and present) have been forgotten andignored. This, in combination with the increased monetization offandom and the exploitation of free fan labour by capitaliststructures, is a dangerous and potentially toxic combination. Whilstit’s not possible – and not desirable – to turn back the clock,fandom needs to carefully consider exactly whywe’re inviting creators into fandom space, how that should behandled, and how to mitigate the potential consequences of that.

Firstoff, there are a few pieces of terminology uses I want to make clear,and a few starting assumptions I want to detail, just so we’re allgoing into this from somewhat the same starting point:

When I say fandom here, I mean creative fandom – ie. writers, artists, graphics makers, cosplayers, and various others, along with the people who support them and interact with them in a variety of ways. There are other kinds of fandom, of course; notably casual fandom where someone simply enjoys a book / show / movie, or collative fandom, focused on collecting facts / statistics / comic editions / props. These types of fandom are not the ones I have experience with, however, and are also not entirely relevant given this discussion is specifically about creators in creative fandom.

I’m assuming that fandom is a space where people should be allowed to create whatever the hell they want, within the bounds of legality. That means if people want to write rape fic, draw art of extreme kinks, cosplay “problematic” characters, or ship unhealthy / abusive ships, they should be able to – without people going “think of the children!” or “you’re a Bad Person”. Debating whether this attitude is the right one is another conversation entirely; you can read more about why I take this stance in an essay I wrote a while back about ‘heavy’ kinks, and also in the purity politics tag on my personal blog – but if you fundamentally disagree with this stance, you’re probably going to disagree with this essay in general.

When I use “creator(s)” here, I’m talking about the people making the canon content – whether that’s an actor, a voice actor, a writer, a director / producer, a comic artist, a game development studio, a youtuber, whatever. When I use “fan(s)”, I’m primarily talking about individuals within creative fandom (ie. those who create fan content, and those who support them). Yes, some (if not most) fans are absolutely creators too, given fan content is just as valid and creative as ‘official’ content – but it is, linguistically, easier for me to use “creator” and “fan” rather than having to tie myself up in descriptive knots. Yes, there are areas of fandom that are primarily about curation rather than creation, and there are fans who simply enjoy the source material and don’t involve themselves in what they would consider “fandom” at all, and those are valid ways of interaction with the source material – but, as I mentioned above, that’s not the aspect of fan-creator interaction and fandom I’m talking about.

So,now we’ve got that out the way…

1.Fandom History, “Purity Politics”, and Censorship

Historically,mainstream media has not been kind to fandom – nor have mainstreamwebsites, or even primarily fandom-oriented websites for that matter.Fanfiction.net is notorious for having done a mass-deletionof “adult” works(though theirongoing policing of this is spotty at best and nonexistent at worst),and I remember them also having a list of authors who’d contactedthem and “asked” them not to host fic from their books / serieson the website. Livejournal also had severalmass deletions thatpartially targeted fan communities, especially communities producing“unacceptable” fanworks. Slash communities and the like wereoften specifically targeted, because the people pushing for thedeletions had homophobic agendas and considered queer fiction more“inappropriate” than heterosexual / gen fiction.

Thiswas, in some ways, the beginning of our current purity politicsepidemic – people campaigning against certain types of fanfic thatthey personally disliked or disagreed with under the banner of“protecting the children” – except, in these instances, it waspressure coming from outside fandoms rather than within them. AO3(and the Organization for Transformative Works’ associated effortstowards fandom archiving, fannish academia, and legal advocacy) wasfounded partiallyas a response to these deletionsand to the concept of “acceptable” versus “unacceptable”fanworks.

I’mnot gonna do a huge history lesson here, but if you want to read moreabout this, a little bit of googling will get you a long way (as willfollowing the links above). These events have been talked aboutextensively by people who were more involved in them than I was, andif you haven’t heard about them before, they’re worth readingabout. Fandom history is important, y’all.

WhatI’m getting at here is there’s a reason older fans / peoplewho’ve been in fandom a while have a good reason to be faintlyparanoid about creators coming into fan spaces, or being too aware ofthem. Specifically,fans who write “inappropriate” or “bad” fanworks –including adult or nsfw content, Real Person Fiction (rpf ) / RealPerson Slash (rps), slash or femslash, anything involving dark ormature themes such as sexual abuse, child abuse, incest, rape,domestic violence, etc. – have the most reason to be concerned.Backlash to the same degree as has happened in the past is a littlemore unusual, due to the mainstreaming of fandom and increased fansolidarity, but it still happens.

(Assomeone who’s both been in fandom for A While now and remembers theaftermath of the deletions (even though I didn’t have an LJ accountor write mature fanfic at the time) and writes “bad” fanworks, Ihave doubly good reason to be paranoid. Hence why I talk about this alot, and have Strong Opinions on it. Most of the other people I’vetalked to who have Strong Opinions on this tend to fall into thosetwo categories, too. If you’re not from these groups, then… maybeconsider, if you’re sitting there going, “yes, but Idon’t feel threatened by anyof this,” whyyou don’t feel threatened. Try to see it from our perspective.)

Inaddition to corporate / website efforts to stamp out fandom spaces ingeneral, and “undesirable”, non-mainstream, or subversive fanspaces specifically (including, again, gay / queer spaces, becausethat was considered “undesirable”), various authors and showsmade their own efforts. Anne Rice is notorious for her veryaggressive stance against fanfiction. Even JK Rowling, one of thefirst authors to publicly say she was okay with fanfic, has gone onrecord saying she objects to adult work involving HarryPotter characters – although“innocent” fics by “genuine fans” are okay, apparently.

Theshow Supernaturalhas had several entire episodesdedicated to taking the piss out of fandom in general – andfangirls specifically, caricaturing them as ditzy, obsessive, creepy,lonely, unlikeable, sex-obsessed – despite the fact that theirfandom is the only reason they’re still running. It’s all thesame usual, unpleasant stereotypes that get pulled up every timewomen, and especially teenage girls, become invested in or excited bya piece of media. A previous fandom of mine, the Yogscast, had ahistory of begging and / or outright stealing fanart from artists formerch, video use, or general promo stuff – but also decided to reada fairly ‘innocent’, fluffy fic on stream in order to mock boththe author and the fic (and in the process drove the author off theface of fandom internet, basically).

Again,we see fandom and fanworks being split into “acceptable” and“unacceptable” by content creators – people not actuallyinvolved in fandom, but feeling as though they have a kind ofownership over it, or say in it – based on mainstream mediastandards and their personal morals (and what they can monetizeversus what they can’t, though more on that later). And the reasonthey feel like they have any kind of ownership over fandom is veryoften that they are a creator, and they see fanworks as, in someways, “belonging” to them rather than just being a derivative oftheir work.

Creatorshave always struggled to understand that fandom is, primarily, forthe fans– not there as an expression of the fans’ heart-eyed adorationfor the creators, but as an expression of the fans’ creativity, oftheir ideas and enthusiasm for the work itself, and often of theirdissatisfactionwith the source material. Fandom is a space for the fans, butcreators often feel as though they should have some kind of say init, merely by merit of having created the source material.

Historically,this entitlement – valid or not, though I’m inclined towards not– has manifested itself as creators aggressively(and generally unsuccessfully) trying to stop the creation of fancontent based ontheir material. Which is a pretty terrible option, given it destroysfandoms and often leads to harassment and legal issues for fans.

Somewherebetween that and where we are now, we had creators realising therewas fuck-all they could do about fannish activities, given the sizeof the web and the determination of fans, and instead just did theirbest to ignore it all. This was, in my opinion, a pretty good courseof action. This was what tended to happen with fandom when I firstentered it – creators were aware of it, it occasionally got broughtup in interviews if a particularly dedicated reporter had discoveredit existed, and the creator usually laughed nervously and saidsomething to the effect of, “I know it’s out there but I tend toavoid it for legal / personal reasons”.

2.The Monetization of Fandom, and the Exploitation of Fan Labour

So,what changed between then and now? A lot, I think – including theemergence of a generation of new, fandom-savvy and tech-savvycreators, many of whom grew up in fandom (think Rebecca Sugar, AlexHirsch, the cast of Critical Role to a degree… others, probably,but those are the ones I’m aware of) knowing where to go to findfandom. Also, the rise of social media, and the increasing ease ofinteracting with fandom on a variety of platforms.

Asa creator, when you’ve got a bunch of people who love the thing youcreated, and are producing a bunch of derivative works from it, thatcan be very flattering! And people tend to react positively to theopportunity to interact one-on-one with a creator, which social mediaallows them to do, and again this positive feedback is veryflattering. Being in a fandom space for a creator is, at its mostshallow and cynical, an ego boost – you have a huge base of peoplewho all (usually) like a thing you’ve made, like you and thinkyou’ve very clever for having made it, and are (usually) eager tocreate things either based off of the thing you did, or even as adirect present for you.

There’salso the fact that fandom is now big enough to very successfullymonetize, and creators (and big businesses) are increasingly workingout how to do this successfully. This takes a lot of different forms:ever-growing conventions with ever-more dealer tables, more merch,subscription-based services (such as Geek & Sundry and Nerdist’sAlphaor Roosterteeth’s First,or even Twitch subscriptions), Youtube in general, Patreon /Kickstarter… and also, more insidiously, theuse of fandom as free labour.

Fandomhas alwaysbeen partially about labour,as anyone who’s ever made fanart or fanfic or manips or a podcastor… well, really anything, can attest to. Even being actively partof a community is, in some ways, labour. However, there’s adifference between free (and freely given) labour – writing a ficis hard work, true, but often it’s funtoo, and is done as a labour of love, as a form of play or relaxation– and exploited free labour.

Freelabour is the creation of fanart and fanfic and other art and objectsby fans, for fans. Free labour is labour done under the heading of“play” or “relaxation” or “a hobby”, something thecreator enjoys doing. Free labour is even fan-run websites, or fanscampaigning to get a show back on air, or doing other things thattraditionally PR and advertising managers would do except for free,of their own free will just because they love the source material.

Exploitedfree labour is Anime Expo, a 10,000 attendee strong for-profitconvention callingfor volunteer translators to do skilled labour for free.Exploited free labour is the Yogscast, a major Youtube network,askingfor free art from skilled fanartists, and repeatedly failing tocredit fanartists who’ve done commissions for them.Exploited free labour is Amanda Palmer raising $1.2 million onKickstarter, but solicitingfans of hers who were professional musicians to work for her for freebecause she “couldn’t afford to pay them”.Exploited free labour is Universal Studios solicitingFireflyfans to help market and promote the movie for free, and then sendingthem a cease-and-desist letter once the movie had been released.Exploited free labour is E.L. James getting FiftyShades of Grey published offthe back of reviewsand collaborative idea generation from hundreds of fellow fandommembers, butcompletely failing to acknowledge this. Exploited free labour isLiveJournal’s(thankfully failed) attempt to make a for-profit fanfiction sitewhere writers had to surrender copyright to the creators of canon.The examples go on, and on, and on.

Fandomhas gone from something small and rather community based – wherepeople didprovide skilled labour for free, because cons and such were organisedby the community for the community, because there wasn’t a lot ofmoney going round, because it was about fandom rather than profit,because they were recompensed for that free labour in non-monetaryways (including reputation and other social currencies) – tosomething monetized. Cons are run by businesses now, primarily, andorganised fan events are professional affairs where a lotof money changes hands. Corporations that try and equate the two arebeing deliberately manipulative.

Basically,fundamentally capitalist constructions like the kind we see incorporate-ized fandom deliberately invoke fandom’s history of giftculture in an attempt to scam fans out of free labour. The wholepoint of gift culture is that it is reciprocal– I create something for a friend or someone I like, and in returnthey create something for me (even if that creation is a review ofwhatever I created, or something more abstract than a tangiblereward). The whole point of capitalism is that it isn’treciprocal, or at least not in the same way – I provide a servicefor someone who is likely to be a complete stranger, and in returnthey give me money. When capitalism tries to wriggle out of the“giving me money” bit of their equation by appealing to the factthat, in a gift culture, I do things for “free”, it’s blatantbullshit quite frankly.

It’sblatant, deliberatebullshit, because the companies know exactly what they’re doing,and what they’re doing is devaluing and exploiting fan labour offthe back of fandom’s cultural traditions.

(Andbefore someone says, “but it is reciprocal! Creators make a thingfor us, and we make a thing for them,” I’m going to point outthat often fans have alreadyengaged with the capitalist modelto access the Creator Thing in the first place. Fans have paid forthe movie, book, TV show, or they’ve subscribed to the Twitchchannel, or the Patreon, or donated to the Kickstarter. The creatorsare already getting monetarily compensated for their work, becausemainstream creators work in the context of the capitalist model, notthe gift culture model. Therefore, the things the creators are makingcannotbe the reciprocal part of the gift culture, since that has alreadybeen bought.)

It’sone thing for me and a friend to organise a fanmeet for a fandomwe’re in, for free, where the meet is about meeting friends fromthe fandom and socialising. It’s another thing for, say, a companyrunning a convention that will be making tens of thousands, if nothundreds of thousands, of dollars of profit, to ask if I’llorganise thatfor free. That’s a dramatic (and somewhat unrealistic, though seethe translator thing above) example, but the point stands.

Capitalismtakes advantage of fandom’s innate gift culture, and itstraditional free exchange of ideas and fan collaboration, in moreinsidious ways, too. As thispaper (which youmay not be able to read in full if you don’t have institutionalaccess, but I can provide if you message me) notes, regarding a viralseries of videos on Youtube called Lonelygirl15that was one of the first new media fandoms:

[…] the team consciously used to theiradvantage the myth of the do-it-yourself (DIY) celebrity inherent toYouTube. […] YouTube’s ability to freely distribute content tomillions with little investment holds the promise to broadcastoneself to fame and fortune. As a result, hundreds of fans, with thehopes of becoming legitimate storytellers, created videos around theLG15world. Most hoped that mere mention of their work in the franchiseproper would open doors for them. In the process, the fans werewillingly generating value for the franchise. The team, on the otherhand, heavily regulated the boundaries of the LG15canon by actively marking fan fiction as ancillary and used copyrightclaims as ways to carefully manage community initiatives. Keeping thefans at arm’s length ran counter to their initial rhetoric ofcommunity-led collaborative storytelling and subsequently estrangedthe very community that had initially given them exposure.

[…] I argue that it is a form ofexploitation because the creative team mislead the fans into thinkingthat their participation would have a more meaningful impact on theshow proper. This intentional misleading was primarily to garner theattention of the mainstream media and grow the show into a robustfranchise. The team claimed to be experimenting with a new type ofstorytelling, a community-based narrative that embodied the generalspirit of co-authorship. They sold their show to fans as anunprecedented initiative that would blur the actor/producer and fandivide, a promise that did not actualize for many fans and wasfrequently curtailed by the creative team’s eagerness to protectthe artistic integrity of their show. Ultimately, the team’s goalof proving LG15 to be a financially viable initiative led them toconfine fan engagement within strictly defined parameters thatultimately undermined their initial rhetoric of community-ledstorytelling.

- “Exposingconvergence: YouTube, fan labour, and anxiety of cultural productionin Lonelygirl15” by Burcu S.Bakioğlu

This“business model” – in which fandom-savvy creators with a closeconnection to their fandom and a marketing-based knowledge of howfandom works string their fans along with ultimately empty dreams,whilst simultaneously holding them at a distasteful arm’s length –can be seen as echoes through somany new media fandoms, and avariety of traditional ones too. It’s the typical push-pull ofcreators who are hungry for the free advertising and labour fans canprovide, but who find fandom in all its queer, subversive,traditionally-female glory to be fundamentally distasteful.

(Fanartistsare, I think, the most vulnerable to this kind of exploitation.Fanfiction is often seen as undesirable (sometimes even within fandomspaces, but that’s another essay), but fanart? Provided it’s the“right” kind of fanart – ie. sfw, fairly canon-compliant,well-drawn, no implications of gay/trans stuff – then it’s verydesirable. Fanart contests,t-shirt or merch design contests, gif contests, are all fairlycommonplace. I’ve never heard of a fanfic equivalent.)

It’sa far more subtle form of monetization, but all the more dangerousfor it, especially because it lures fans into a false sense ofsecurity with the creator. They feel that the creator is on theirside, is “one of them”, is going to reciprocate the unpaid labourthey put in, actually “gets” fandom or is supportive of itsnon-mainstream and subversive endeavours… only to then bedisappointed, because inevitably the creator isn’t interested inanything other than maximising profit by manipulating their fanbase,and may actually find the fans they’re toying with activelydistasteful.

Youcan find a hugeamount of writing and research on these concepts via googling “freelabour fandom” or “fandom labour exploitation”, by the way, ifyou’re interested. This isn’t a concept I’ve just come up with– it’s something academics and business-people have been aware offor a long time, but hasn’t quite filtered down into general fandomconsciousness yet. The companies know about it, and are activelyusing it to their advantage, but fandom as a whole hasn’t quitesavvied up yet.

Whichis, I think, a large part of what I take issue with. Some people,after reading the above few paragraphs, will respond with, “So? Ilove [thing], I don’t mind my labour being used to support it andits creators.” However,some people will be going, “Holy shit,I didn’t realise that was a thing? That’s awful, even though I dothings for [thing], I don’t want to support the parent company / Ididn’t consent for my labour to be used like this.” Some of bothgroups, given the fact that the average age of people in fandom isskewing increasingly younger, will be twelve, or thirteen.

Thisis what I object to. Not necessarily that the labour is being used,but that there’s no informed consent to it (and also that it’soften used by the same people who mock fandom, or find it‘disgusting’, or have rather poor views of their fans). That it’smanipulative,very deliberately so. That it’s often couched in terms of it beinga moral obligation, a “labour of love”, a “volunteer position”,as “helping the community”, even when that’s evidently bullshitbecause the group trying to feed you that line is a business that isonly interested in fandom as a profit-making machine. That, often,it’s vulnerable fans – younger fans, poor fans, fans fromminority groups – being taken advantage of, deliberately andmanipulatively, by creators.

Fansare inherentlyvulnerable, for a variety of reasons (more on that later) due to thepower difference between them and content creators, and thatvulnerability is being exploited, often using the language of fandomto disguise the exploitation.

Howoften do creators run a “design a t-shirt / poster for us!”competition, where the artist gets paltry recompense (or none atall!) and often no credit for their work? How often do competitionTerms of Service end up having loopholes where the creators nowlegally own your work, in its entirety, forever, and you can’t doshit about it? Professionalfreelancers are aware of these kinds of things, and look for them incontracts – youraverage fan is not,however, and yet they are being used as (easily exploited, preciselybecausethey don’t have the experience professionals have) freelancers bycreators.

Asthisarticle regardingthe Amanda Palmer debacle above rather neatly puts it:

Ideally, you don’t even know you areworking at all. You think you are keeping up with friends, ornetworking, or saving the world, or jamming with the band. And youare. But you are also laboring for someone else’s benefit withoutgetting paid.

3.The Fan-Creator Power Imbalance and Fan Vulnerability

Let’sbe honest here: all of this manipulation is possible because fans,and fandom, are incrediblyvulnerable, on severaldifferent fronts – legally and financially, emotionally, and oftenin terms of age and experience. Though not allcreators take advantage of these vulnerabilities, it’sunfortunately not unusual.

Fansare primarily vulnerable legally. In general, the legalityof fanfiction and fanworksis super iffy,to the point Wikipedia has an entire article on it, and creatorsaren’t always happy that it’s being written (again, covered inthe Wiki article, and mentioned above as well). Fans also don’thave a great deal of legal protections– one of the reasons why AO3has a legal teamthat fights for fans and fandom – and what they do have has oftenbeen won by other fans who’ve fallen foul of copyright laws orcease-and-desist demands and fought back. Often though (but notalways), fans are young, and have neither the money nor the legalknowledge to fight back should a large corporation or dedicatedindividual creator with a beefy legal team decide to start legalproceedings against them.

Fansare also vulnerable because of their age and life experience.Increasingly, fandom is skewing younger and younger, which means manyfans (perhaps now even the majority) are underage. It issignificantly easier for creators to manipulate and use younger fansthan it is to do so with older fans. Even older fans, though, whohave more life experience, may not have relevantlife experience. A lot of fan writers and artists are hobbyists, notprofessional freelancers. “Tricks” by corporations such as dodgyterms of service or questionable phrasing in competition terms may beless noticeable to fans than they would be to professionals providingsimilar services. Fans may also not have the same tools asprofessionals when it comes to knowing how to deal with being takenadvantage of. Professional artists may have a standard procedure theyfollow when they discover their art has been plagiarised, or haveother professional artists they know as part of the community who canadvise them – fanartists are lucky if they have any such resource.

Fansare alsouniquely vulnerable with regards to interacting with contentcreators. There’s a power imbalance. This isn’t exactly the placefor discussions regarding (usually sexual) harassment / abuse of fansby creators, and I don’t want it to turn into one entirely, but…it happens. It happens a lot.A quick google search found me thisarticle listing anumber of scandals and allegations of sexual abuse or abuse of power,just regarding Youtubers,in the past year or so alone. Here’sa post from my personal blogsummarizing the multipleallegations of harassment levelled against the Yogscast, includingsome really rather serious ones, and the… frankly appallingresponse from the Yogs. That’s without even touching on theaccusations against more mainstream / Hollywood personalities thatcrop up every five seconds.

Thiskind of stuff happens a lot more than fandom would like toacknowledge. Creators hold power over fans, and sometimes – a lotof the time – they don’t use that power entirely for good.

Ofcourse, fans often enjoy having creators in fandom spaces – or,more accurately, enjoy having creators accessible. Fans want to benoticed by creators, have a personal relationship with them, meetthem, talk with them, share things with them. They often also wanttheir fandom pursuits, whatever those may be, to be validated. Theseare all perfectly normal things to want, especially from people youadmire and look up to. Hell, I would be a huge hypocrite if I triedto pretend I’ve never wanted to be friends with the creator of afandom I was in. I’m not here to rag on people for havingfantasies, or for looking up to creators – I’m here to point outthat people should be exercising caution along with those.

Becausethe issue is, a lotof people don’t feel safe with creators too far into the fandom.And some other people don’t see that as a reasonable boundary forthose people to have, or are too caught up in their “senpai noticeme” heart-eyes to care.

Beingon twitter is good, it makes creators approachable, you can tweet atthem and they might even respond – and sometimes it’s even a bitfunny if they admit they’ve gone looking for fanfic. But a creatordemonstrating a huge deal of internet savvy, having a tumblr blog,going on AO3? That’s enough to make a lot of people feel unsafecreating and sharing fanworks.

(Ifmonetization and exploitation is a particularly big issue forfanartists, then feeling unsafe is a particularly big issue forfanwriters. Not that fanartists never feel unsafe, especially if theyproduce “undesirable” content – but, for almost every creatorI’ve ever come across, whilst somefanart is acceptable, perhaps even desirable, fanfiction isunanimously “othered” in terms of fan crafts. Perhaps because,due to inherently needing a plot and the use of headcanons and havinga non-canon focus, it’s more threatening to the creator? I’m notsure and, again, that’s another issue. But for fic writers, eventhe most “harmless”, innocent, fluffy, G-rated gen fic risksscorn, humiliation, disapproval, or accusations of being “weird”or “creepy”. Those who write darker or more mature stuff, likemyself and many of my friends, have to deal with being aware thateven creators who take a “live and let live” approach to fanficwould likely be disgusted if they ever found our work. As I saidbefore: if you’re sitting here thinking “but I’mnot worried”, consider why.)

And,again, fandom is primarily forthe fans. We should beprotecting fans above and before creators.

Areally good way of doing that, whether protecting them from legalthreats, from having their labour exploited, or from creatorharassment, is to keep fandom separated from creators. Not entirelyseparate, not “buried in the depths of the web where no one canever find it” separate, but just… an acknowledgement that fandomis for fans, not creators. That fans deserve spaces they can putthings up for other fans to see, without being worried about theirwork being stumbled upon by creators or ‘upsetting creators’ –or, more unpleasantly, being mocked by creators, broadcast outside offandom spaces without their consent, or being judged according to anarbitrary, mainstream moral code.

Fundamentally,fans deserve a safe space. And when I use that word, I don’t mean“somewhere where no one will ever be triggered” or “somewherethat has been entirely morally sanitised” or “somewhere whereroving mobs of thirteen year olds get to dictate who is problematicor not”. A fandom safe space should be a space where people canpost what they want (within some reason) without fear of Big BrotherCreator watching, without fear of being mocked, without fear of beingtold they’re gross or disgusting or Wrong – and a space wherepeople can reasonably be expected to take ownership of their owncontent consumption, helped by stuff like content warnings orblacklists or AO3 tags.

Havingcreators there complicates that. It makes people worried, for a wholevariety of reasons. Something I said on a post a while back that isrelevant here: “Creative fandom, in terms of art and fic, issupposed to be an area of fandom without creator oversight – orwith very limited creator oversight. Feeling like you’re beingwatched, worrying that you might unintentionally offend, killscreativity.” Even if canon creators don’t intend to have anegative impact on fan spaces, or even want to join fan spaces inorder to interact with and please fans, they have an adverse effecton the safety and fandom-ness of the space.

Or,as out-there-on-the-maroon’sresponse to thatpost put it, probably better than I did:

This is something I’ve seen happen inreal time on the various official G&S [Geek and Sundry] discords.Initially fan-only spaces, they quickly started to welcome andexplicitly invite the cast and crew onto the discords. Which has itsbenefits and cool aspects, but also turns a fan-only private spaceinto a space watched by the creators, where the creators havepowerful voices of authority.

Suddenly any criticism or “I didn’tlike this part of this episode” comments became awkward orself-censored. Fanfic talk got dialed way back, hidden in privateDMs, or moved to separate private discords. Then there were clasheswith mods and other fans who were debating what was appropriate talknow that the cast were becoming members. It’s one thing to yell“omg I HATE [writer X]!” during a livestream of a tense episodewhen in a private discord, it’s another to do so in a channel wherethat writer frequently reads the chatlogs. Among fellow fans it’sunderstood that such talk is hyperbolic, but when the creators areright there chatting with you in a friendly way, it becomes risky.

[…] A large chunk of the “drama”that happens in these new media fandoms can be traced to there beingpoor separation of personal and private, be that a creator venting ontwitter and getting into fights with fans, fans sending explicitfanfic to a creator, or those “dramatic readings” at conventionswhere a room full of adults is invited to mock the un-edited writingsof a 15 year old. I’ve seen a lot of issues arise when someone, saya youtube star, rises to fame very quickly and is ill-prepared forputting up boundaries between themselves and their fans. (Mostyounger celebrities are actively discouraged from doing this,encouraged instead to be always available, always friendly, alwaysopen and personal with fans.)

Havingcreators engaging with fandom is not necessarily bad in and of itself– fans are excited to be noticed by their heroes, creators areexcited to hear from people who love them and the stuff they produce.It can be good, or at the very least not-bad. The issue is, though,that creative fandom is for fans, by fans, and there’s no intrinsicplace for creators in it, but creators are increasingly trying tomakespace for themselves in it anyways without understanding the effectthat has. That’s where the problem lies.

I’mnot suggesting we never ever let creators talk to their fans everagain. I’m just saying that we have sites like twitter for that –they don’t need to be coming onto tumblr, or browsing AO3, to haveconversations with fans. It should be up to fans to make the firstmove regarding contact, nine times out of ten, not the creators.

Creatorsdeserve spaces where they’re safe from being exposed to contentabout their characters that they don’t want to see or finddistasteful. Fans deserve spaces where they don’t have to worryabout the creator deciding they’ve seen stuff they don’t want toor stuff they find distasteful. The easiest and best way of doingthis is to make sure there are separate spaces for creators and fans– and that each side acknowledges, when they go into the other’sspace, they play by the rules of that space and don’t try toenforce their own. End of.

4.“Not MyCreators!”

Ifyour response to this has been, “Yes, okay, but mycreators are nice, though,” then consider: you’re probably notgoing to be in that fandom (or at least, not solely in that fandom)forever. You are eventually, inevitably, going to encounter a creatorwho isn’t nice. Your creator may also not be nice forever – it’snot unusual for creators to seem lovely and friendly and reallyinvolved in fandom, and then turn out to be a massive douchebag (seealso, Ridgedog and Sjin from the Yogscast).

Eventhe nicest creators can cause drama and conflict, too.  If they’reseen to endorse a particular headcanon that people start trying toimpose as canon, if they state “preferences” for fanworks thatpeople feel compelled to (or are forced by other fans to) obey, ifpeople think they’re playing favourites… it gets messy. And thelonger someone is seen as “the nicecreator”, the longer they’re up on that pedestal, the harder theyfall when they do the slightestthing wrong.

It’snot just fans that can suffer when creators get too close. In myprevious fandom, a fan that was jealous of the attention a creatorwas showing to another fan (ie. notto them) decided to start asmear campaign over it. They tried doxxing the creator in question,got several other people to threaten doxxing, started attacking otherfans (myself included) and sending death threats, and generallymanaged to really badly fuck up a whole number of involved parties’mental health. A similar thing happened with another creator in thesame fandom, where said fan is stillrunning a smear campaign against them. These are not isolatedincidents.

AsI mentioned in replyto a content creator I’m personally acquainted with, on one of my initial posts on this topic:

I think… regardless of how hard theytry to integrate, canon creators are Apart and Above fans. They can’tbe part of their own fandom in the way that fans are - howinsufferably arrogant they’d be if they were! - and they have anatural, inescapable power over the fans in the sense that their fansare inevitably going to look up to them and idolise them / put themon a pedestal. It makes things a little sticky for creators in thesense that they’re stuck as almost a god-figure, but also thattheir fans want to be friends with the Real Them - and, of course,either the creator keeps up the god-figure persona, stays on theirpedestal, and disappoints the fans who feel held at arm’s length;or they drop the god-figure persona, get off (or fall off) thepedestal, and disappoint the fans who feel angry and betrayed andupset that their idol is actually fallible and human (and hasopinions the fan disagrees with / is boring / is bigoted / isn’tfunny when they’re not performing / isn’t a role model ordesirable when they’re not pretended to be a god-figure). Damned ifyou do, damned if you don’t.

Fandom,especially younger fandom, has an idolatry issue when it comes tocreators – and it hurts people on both sides of the god-worshipperequation that that behaviour creates.

5.Conclusion…?

Isuppose, actually, that despite the thesis statement there are a fairfew different questions actually being asked in this essay: How okayare we – as a community of fans, regardless of the particularfandoms we call home – with censorship? How okay are we, or shouldwe be, with the commodification and monetisation of fandom by bothbig business and / or fans themselves? How okay are we withnon-fandom people and groups, whose aims and morals may not alignwith fandom’s, attempting to manipulate / change fandom and use itfor their own ends? How do we plan to protect our own?

Theseweren’t the questions  I expected to end up asking at the end ofthis essay but, here we are.

Iwould hope I’d made my personal positions on them clear. First andforemost, we should nottolerate censorship. Not fromwithin fandom, and not from without. We should alsonot tolerate manipulative attempts at monetisation by corporations –and should fight hard within our communities to preserve gift cultureand the fandom-as-play mentality that fandom is built on, despite therise of commissions-based fan interactions and Patreon / Kickstarterculture. We should fight hard, not to prevent fandom from changingper se, but to make sure we don’t lose our roots and principles.

Creators,by merit of being the people who create the media we love and engagewith so much, have power. A hugeamount of power. Maybe that’s legal power, maybe that’s the powerof a savvy and manipulative marketing department behind them. Maybethat’s the power conferred by being adored and idolised by a largenumber of fans, maybe that’s the power of having a twitter mob attheir control that will harass anyone they disagree with. Maybe thatpower is just older fans knowing how creators can turn on fans andfandoms, and being afraid to create things because “big brother iswatching”, regardless how benevolent that all-seeing eye is. Maybethat power is just having people feel it’s “polite” to “respectthe creator’s wishes” regarding what sort of fanwork can / shouldbe produced in that fandom.

Asthe old fandom term “Word of God” implies, creators are… well,the gods of their fandoms. That’s not necessarily a title theyearned (some creators are supershitty people, let’s be honest here), it might not even be a titlethey wanted(see also: Undertale, Homestuck, and other fandoms that suddenlyexploded), but it’s a title they have nonetheless.

Inthe end, this issue ties together a lot of things, I think – notjust creator involvement in fandom, not just censorship, not justmonetization, but purity politics, and the legality of fanworks, andhow to manage communities both online, and irl and the habit ofpeople to put creators they admire on a pedestal.

Howdo we, as a community, plan to self-organise, disseminate importantinformation, make decisions, and work as a united front in thefuture? Is that even possible – is fandom a fundamentallyanarchistic entity, unable to survive attempts to formalise it in anyform still recognisable as “fandom”; or, conversely, is fandomdoomed to dying and being subsumed by corporate manipulations if itdoes notformalise and organise, and work to protect its roots and the uniqueculture that has sprung from them?

I’mafraid I don’t really have the answers to those particularquestions, but… food for thought. I know I certainly think aboutthem a fair amount, and perhaps it’s time fandom in general starteddoing so too.

6. Fandom: The Next Generation

Whatdo we doabout all this, though?

Well,for starters, we educate both fandom and creators. There’s somegrassroots efforts to do this within fandom – professionalfreelancers making pushes to ensure people who offer commissionsprice their work correctly, and also checking through various contestterms of service and spreading the word if something’s dodgy, therecent pushback against censorship and purity politics within fandomspaces. Various fandoms on tumblr who know their creators often usetumblr, or check specific tags within it, have developed “private”tags for nsfw or shippy content, or fanfiction, to keep them awayfrom creators – either at the creators’ request, or of their ownvolition.

That’snot enough, though. We also need to educate creators.Even for those that grew up “geeky” or “nerdy” or “infandom”, they’re often talking primarily about the curative sideof fandom activities, not the creative. That side of fandom has verydifferent rules, social mores, and opinions to the creative side offandom. Creative fandom, essentially, needs to set out its stall forcreators – this is who we are, this is what we do, this is how youengage with us politely. We’re happy for you to come look at ourthings, if you want, but if you’re coming into ourspaces (ie. livejournal, tumblr, ao3) then don’t try to tell uswhat we can and can’t do, because we’renot doing this for you.Remember, when you interact with us in our spaces, you’re in ourterritory, and you should behave as such. Remember, we are acommunity, and if you try to take advantage of us or our vulnerablemembers, we will not tolerateit – even if you didn’treally realise that you were trying to take advantage.

Andhonestly? Some creators just need to remember to have basic goddamnmanners. Going on twitter to go “ewww I just read the creepiestfanfic about my book” and linking to it, or reading something outon stream without author permission, or telling part of your fanbasethey’re bad people because of how they choose to engage with yourmaterial… that’s just plain rude. We shouldn’t have to teachcreators how to be decent human beings. A remarkable number ofcreators fall short of this standard, honestly, and we need to stoptolerating it.

Ifthe creators aren’t dicks, then they’ll want to learn how to dobetter, both for themselves and also for their fandom. If they aren’tdicks, they won’t want to take advantage of their fandom, or farmthem for exploited labour. And, well, if they are dicks… that’s alittle harder, but it requires fandom as a community to stop keepingcreators on pedestals, to separate fandom from the creator of thesource material, and to be willing to occasionally kick someone’sass if need be. We’ve got to protect one another, is what I’mgetting at here.

Isuppose, if I have to end this essay with anything, it’s this:educate yourself.

Knowyour history – there are plenty of older fans on tumblr talkingabout their experiences, and plenty of blogs dedicated to it. OTW hasa huge number of resources for this, including their open-accessjournal for fan matters (TransformativeWorks and Cultures), theFanlorewiki, and the summaries of the legal activism they’ve done in agiven month for fandom in general and also specific fans. Livejournalis practically a treasure trove, with huge communities that gatheredand collated drama, wank, and general history and informationregarding fandom. Wikipedia, and the wider internet, also hasincreasing amounts of information on fandom history as fandom getspushed into the mainstream media spotlight.

Educateyourselves, educate others, and listen to people who’ve been infandom longer than you have been – though “listen” doesn’tmean “automatically agree with”. And, most importantly of all,look out for other fans. Help them, support them, protect them.Fandom’s something pretty special, after all. We’ve got to lookafter it for those that come after us.

[paranoidsbible]

Privacy Co-ops and You

===Privacy Co-ops and You===   Non-profit and free for redistribution Written on April 1st | 2018 Published on May 3rd | 2018 For entertainment and research purposes only ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

 DISCLAIMER The Paranoid's Bible and its writers hold no responsibility for the acts of others.   The Paranoid’s Bible is for research and entertainment purposes only.   Please visit our blog for more PDFs and information: http://www.paranoidsbible.tumblr.com/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ===Preface=== Some of you may be familiar with some parts of this guide, while others are not. This is mostly due to the fact that a certain ex cult member has joined our ranks and will be sharing their information and experiences with us (you may know of their blog already). So please take the time to read this guide if you’re interested in purchasing goods online or using things like membership cards. This guide will be applying certain tactics from several real world groups so that we may be able to condense and lessen our overall exposure if we’re willing to work with friends and/or family who share similar views and opinions, or simply  wish for a cheaper alternative. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ===What is a Privacy Co-op?=== Community Building, also known as a privacy co-op, is where a group of 5 to 10 (or more) people get together to share money, resources and information to further reduce their information footprint and to help each other create garbage data and static to pollute whatever data is collected on them. This is usually done through sacrifices (creation and ownership of memberships or accounts, like Amazon prime). Each member makes one to two sacrifices, depending on the needs of the community, and then works together to share within these sacrifices. We'll be somewhat vague in this guide. This is mostly due to the fact that each group is unique in needs and wants, ergo this guide is done loosely to provide wiggle room for those who read and use it. Consider this more of a suggestion than a complete guide. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ===Creating a Community=== The easiest step is always the first, which is why creating a community  is something many people who're privacy conscious should look into. This should be done however with only trusted friends and family that either share the same beliefs (in privacy) as you or are able to keep things quiet. Many places are trying impede an individual's freedom by restricting access to the core purchaser instead of allowing sharing/helping. As an example, let’s say in your little co-op you were picked as making the sacrifice for purchasing a membership in your name. While everyone contributes to the monthly or yearly fee, it's ultimately your name and consumer profile that that membership is associated with regardless of purchases made. However, because of these purchases, your consumer profile is more or less corrupted due to the fact that you've many people giving you the money to cover their purchases besides your own. This is why, when creating a community/privacy co-op, that you should treat every purchase as your own when classed as the owner of an account or membership. This way no-one can try and claim you as using your account or membership as a fraudulent act. A scenario to demonstrate this could be if you were to go to someplace like CostCo and buy a bulk pack of something like baby food. They have various tier memberships which grant you certain privileges and advantages, which means potentially lesser prices or so much of a percentage off, ergo cheaper price in the long run on the baby food. So if someone for whatever reason asks why you’re buying so much, and you don’t have your own child, you simply state you’re hosting a relative at your home for awhile and wanted to make sure their child, your niece or nephew, have stuff to eat. So, to summarize:  Many people mediating through a single individual in order to share the cost and purchase of goods without putting their own information and privacy at risk. The person who is in charge of the membership or account has less of a risk due to so many people going through them to purchase goods and services. This corrupts the consumer profile and pollutes it with garbage data. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ===Democracy in the CO-OP=== When it comes to a community/privacy co-op the best way to go about it is to figure out what assets each individual has and what is needed. If someone already has Amazon Prime, then designating them as the keeper of AP makes sense, however if an EBAY account is needed and no-one has one then someone will have to create an account and PayPal to use Ebay. This is where discussion is needed as everyone has different needs and wants. Grocery shopping can be done quite easily through warehouses like Costco, GFS and Sam's Club, whereas clothes and technology will be a little more difficult. You'll also want to figure out how much you want to take advantage of when it comes to accounts and memberships. Some places offer credit cards that'll stock on extra percentages off whereas just the membership itself won't. Then you'll have rewards/awards that are locked to a specific time, date and person only. While we're ultimately going to end up repeating here, discussion is important. Needs over wants; how much each member can contribute to accounts or membership fees; when shopping trips should be done; if bulk purchases are in everyone's favor... etc ...etc If each member pulls their own weight and helps to contribute to the co-op, and with some well planned coordination, an individual can purchase an entire wardrobe for next-to-nothing. If each member works together on shopping trips, and does a bit of shopping around (for cheaper prices), everyone can ultimately stock up on necessities through bulk purchases and taking advantage of deal in various stores. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ===War Games=== The first order of business, obviously, is to figure out how far out your group and you are willing to go when doing physical purchases (as in do you go 50 miles VS 10 miles because price differences). The second order of business is figuring out how much gas and maintenance you're willing to chip in for when travelling and transporting these physical purchases and if you're wasting more to get better deals due to traveling or not (Tip: Sign up for gas station memberships to earn your some money back). Third, you must figure out some form of rotation of which members go during these shopping trips. Fourth, weekly VS monthly lists. Weekly lists would include things like day-to-day items, needed toiletries and similar items. Monthly to yearly would be considered "stockables" like paper goods (toilet paper, paper towels...etc), cleaners and similar items. Fifth, bulk purchases of what and when. If you can purchase items in bulk and divide them accordingly, you should be able to time these purchases by a month to every six or so months. Sixth, necessities VS frivolities. Candy is a nice treat but ultimately not needed.  Fresh fruits, veggies, instant meals, canned goods...etc are necessities, not candy, gum or other similar items. Planning accordingly to the needs of the members VS the wants cannot only save money and time but lead to money being saved at the end. Seventh, change and leftover money should be devoted to being put back into shopping trips or toward a goal, like a trip or holiday fund for the group (or put aside for "Unplanned deals" (E.G: Toilet paper on the cheap) ). Eighth, cash and gift cards should be focused on as the main option for payment VS checks and credit or debit. This leaves less chance of purchase tracking but also lessens chances of identity theft. Ninth, payment plans have to be done accordingly. If you opt-in for a credit card then you need to analyze and reanalyze every minute detail you can about it. Interest rates; cash back; rewards...etc If you're using a credit/charge card to rack up points and percentages off, then open up a savings accounts and place the amount owed on each purchase in there. If you charge 30, put 30 in the savings. When the bill comes in the mail, take the amount owed out of there and pay off the bill as quickly as possible. You build up credit, keep out of any debt and earn rewards. Tenth, don’t be afraid of taxes. It’s inevitable that you’ll have to pay taxes sooner than later on some items, especially if you use a savings account and opt-in for a credit card. Figure this out beforehand. Talk to members, figure out who owns what in whose name. Set aside so much for taxes at the end of the year, or simply chip in when they’re being filed. Either way, depending on how or what you do… you’ll need to pay your taxes. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ===Afterword=== The above is just a sampling of what a community/privacy co-op could do, however we just covered the barest of basics. If you’re interested in doing more than the above, like purchasing property and vehicles, you’ll have to start looking into getting attorneys and discussing your area’s laws besides things like trusts and co-ownerships. All in all, just doing the above would help reduce your consumer’s profile while screwing with the data provided to various agencies. Anything else is either just a happy accident or you found something that works for you. Either way, we can't go into more details without forcing you into a box which isn't what you want.

[suteandsops]

October 2020

Dark Study Application: Please tell us about yourself.

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

[bakurapika]

whiggitymacabee replied to your post

“i’m such a hypocrite i wonder why people get so defensive over their...”

i wanna hear more about the ocd tho

ok!!! so i’ll start off with the disclaimer that this is my own opinion as a person with ocd and some psych education, but it’s by no means actually definitive

and with ocd specifically, symptoms tend to vary from person to person--it’s more about a cluster of symptoms than a checklist that leads to a single definite diagnosis. it’s also relatively common to have ocd and related disorders (like trichotillomania [obsessive hair pulling], eating disorders, depression, and other mental disorders where you get stuck in a negative thought loop or perform rituals) comorbidly, when they happen at the same time to the same person. 

I’m mostly gonna be pointing out stuff that looks familiar to me and is usually associated with ocd; it’s not enough to diagnose anna, especially since I’m not a doctor

and a quick definition for those unfamiliar with it: obsessive-compulsive disorder (ocd) is loosely defined as a series of obsessions and compulsions. actual official diagnosis criteria is here. I’ll be copy and pasting parts of it and bolding relevant bits for emphasis.

Obsessions are recurrent intrusive thoughts that make a person upset--a classic example would be “Did I lock the door before I left home? I’m pretty sure I turned the knob, but I’m not positive. If I didn’t lock the house, someone could break in. I can’t get any work done or think about anything else until I know if I locked the door.” 

Compulsions are repetitive behaviors or thoughts that a person performs, usually to get rid of or alleviate the distress from their obsession, in a way that’s more extreme or done more often than would be healthy. A compulsion might be going back to your house over and over, turning the knob, leaving for work, and then going back home to triple-check the door lock.

Anna’s setting is one before these diagnostic criteria were identified, but that doesn’t mean that she can’t have ocd--it just might have been called something different, or gone unnoticed/untreated indefinitely.

and i’m basing this off of the ongoing Over the Garden Wall series, not just the oneshot where we see Anna as a kid. ok? ok!

Anna’s single most recognizable and defining character trait is the way she recites her couplets. Originally, she uses them as a mnemonic the way her mother taught her: an easy way to remember the various rules and dangers of living in the forest. But soon they morph into something else. Anna writes and recites these poems to herself for comfort. 

We don’t see her repeat the same poem multiple times, but in my subjective reading of the comic, it seems likely that she does repeat them off-screen. As mnemonics, they’re not meant to be said once and forgotten, after all. 

This definitely could be a compulsion of hers of a mental sort, with the definition of compulsions from the link above being:

Repetitive behaviors (e.g., hand washing, ordering, checking) or mental acts (e.g., praying, counting, repeating words silently) that the individual feels driven to perform in response to an obsession or according to rules that must be applied rigidly.

The behaviors or mental acts are aimed at preventing or reducing anxiety or distress, or preventing some dreaded event or situation; however, these behaviors or mental acts are not connected in a realistic way with what they are designed to neutralize or prevent, or are clearly excessive.

This line especially is what convinced me that Anna represents a person with OCD. OCD is made of arbitrary rules that a person follows to ward off disaster. 

Repetitive behaviors (e.g., hand washing, ordering, checking) or mental acts (e.g., praying, counting, repeating words silently) that the individual feels driven to perform in response to an obsession or according to rules that must be applied rigidly.

The behaviors or mental acts are aimed at preventing or reducing anxiety or distress, or preventing some dreaded event or situation; however, these behaviors or mental acts are not connected in a realistic way with what they are designed to neutralize or prevent, or are clearly excessive.

SHE EVEN CALLS THEM “RITUALS” FFS.

Another trait classically associated with ocd is the counting compulsion. A counting compulsion is when a person’s OCD rituals involve numbers--for me, I have to mentally count stairs when I go up or down them. A lot of people with ocd have a specific “lucky number” that they use--for example, if they turn around one time, they’d have to turn around three times for it to feel “right.” (This is related to a symmetry compulsion, where if they turn left, for example, they’d have to turn right as well, in order to feel “balanced” and “symmetrical.”) 

Anna writing her name three times at the end of her rules list makes no sense to me unless she’s doing it to make her list feel “right,” “balanced,” or “lucky” by using her lucky number 3.

This one’s not a classic ocd symptom, just a #relatableocdthing to me. If your brain makes your life dictated by arbitrary laws, you learn very quickly to become a sneaky lawyer.

I’m iffy about including the page above, but I think it should be discussed anyway. OCD is often related to hoarding, where a person collects useless objects and get anxious about the thought of throwing them away.

Hoarding disorder symptoms focus exclusively on the persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, marked distress associated with discarding items, and excessive accumulation of objects. However, if an individual has obsessions that are typical of OCD (e.g., concerns about incompleteness or harm), and these obsessions lead to compulsive hoarding behaviors (e.g., acquiring all objects in a set to attain a sense of completeness or not discarding old newspapers because they may contain information that could prevent harm), a diagnosis of OCD should be given instead.

The panel above does not demonstrate a classic case of hoarding. Anna’s repurposing an object that she broke, turning it into something useful. This isn’t evidence that she hoards. 

But, I feel like this solution (and her repeated distress over her cup-breaking habit) would come more naturally to someone who gets anxious over the idea of throwing away objects even if they’re broken. 

More arbitrary rules Anna’s creating to alleviate distress.

Now this one’s also pretty subjective and not a symptom in itself, but Anna’s interactions with Jordan are interesting. She leaves the social situation quickly (despite constantly complaining of her loneliness) and later admits (above) that she left because of unjustifiable worries of Jordan’s trustworthiness.

OCD is associated with reduced quality of life as well as high levels of social and occupational impairment. Impairment occurs across many different domains of life and is associated with symptom severity. Impairment can be caused by the time spent obsessing and doing compulsions. Avoidance of situations that can trigger obsessions or compulsions can also severely restrict functioning. In addition, specific symptoms can create specific obstacles..... When the disorder starts in childhood or adolescence, individuals may experience developmental difficulties. For example, adolescents may avoid socializing with peers; young adults may struggle when they leave home to live independently. The result can be few significant relationships outside the family and a lack of autonomy and financial independence from their family of origin.

I’ll be honest though-- this is pretty clearly inherited from the Woodsman himself. He had clearly portrayed anxiety issues when Anna was growing up as well as some paranoid tendencies (leading to what you could argue was a case of agoraphobia or something related to it), but I wouldn’t say the Woodsman had ocd. However, ocd is considered highly heritable, and there’s evidence that a family member with a non-ocd anxiety disorder may increase a person’s risk factor for developing ocd.

I’ve gotta go to work now, so let me sum it up:

I don’t think all of Anna’s actions are dictated by having obsessive-compulsive disorder. She’s missing some of the most famous symptoms (specifically, preoccupation with religious rules or an obsession with cleanliness). But I think there’s more than enough evidence to support an interpretation of her character as a person that, in modern day, could be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

[alasdaircannon-blog]

How Much Would You Pay For Privacy?

Words by Alasdair Cannon

This is the bizarre question I have found myself pondering as of late. The question is bizarre because, well, one would assume that we have some inalienable right to privacy in a democratic nation. Right? Simply asking this question surely indicates a fundamental failure of governance, of regulation, or the market. Conversely, one might conclude that the notion of privacy has been plunged into a kind of Coasean nightmare, where our ability to be free from invasion is subject to bargaining, to the market logic of efficient distribution, to the skyscraping (campusing? If we’re gonna speak in the language of the companies in question) power differential between the individual and corporations in modern economies. One may be correct in either instance, too, which leads us to something of a truism: it is never easy when we must negotiate something we have perennially taken for granted, or when we must value what we believed to be invaluable (and not because it could not be measured, either).

In any event, the question is certainly a new one - or at least it probably isn’t something that people 30 years ago were overly concerned with. Why would they be? You (or the government) would have to be active, to the point where it was comparatively a non-issue, in telling (or collecting) your entire demographic and psychometric profile, and the history of your activities and movements, and all your wants, desires, preferences and interests. One couldn’t tacitly or incidentally just reveal all of this. Hell, even if you were utterly dedicated to revealing all these measures of your individuality to the world, even if you were possessed by a data-point exhibitionism of the most pathological kind, and you perversely wanted everybody to know you fundamentally, information-wise, you would still have a hard time of it. Data simply could not be collected comprehensively or efficiently enough to ground even individual concern over being so thoroughly revealed.

Today, however, we can and do give our whole selves away with a single click. And we do it in a manner that suggests an equilibrium solution: we value our privacy exactly in proportion to whatever it is the company stands to offer us.

Here’s an article from the Guardian that can help you freak out over that point.

No doubt, it is a question that I ask in light of recent events: yes, I specifically mean Cambridge Analytica, whose databases include ‘four to five thousand’ data points on every adult in the United States; whose platform relies on mass psychographic analysis of vast swathes of people as a means of generating a predictive model of personality for individuals and groups; whose product was employed in the most recent US election of Donald Trump, and in the primary campaign for Ted Cruz. (Watch this video to get a little taste: the man seems really quite proud of his product, and he really does give you a good salesman’s spiel about all the amazing things they know.) The public consciousness is properly fretting, perhaps for the first time ever, over the true influence of social media. We have been building to this for years of course – talk of shady contractual provisions and fake news being the breaking point for the outpouring of our collective anxieties.

I share a lot of sympathy for these emotions. The rise of social media and ICT as an overwhelming force for individual identity is something I have wondered about in increasingly panicked tones over the years, my internal intonation creeping ever closer to ‘paranoid-hysteric’, to that of a bug-eyed, frothing conspiratorialist, all fervour, dual-wielding copies of Huxley and Orwell, with Foucault buried somewhere in their coat pockets. No, I don’t own Discipline and Punish, but I certainly wasn’t far from this point. Indeed, there has been something of a positive correlate between the frequency of my tech-anxiety and ‘distance stumbled down garden path’: though mitigated to some extent by the countervailing forces of ‘kinda getting used to it’, ‘are you surprised by this?’, ‘who cares?’, and ‘there’s nothing you can do about it’, it has increased, absolutely. Crucially, I do not believe I am unjustified in feeling this way: recall, well, what I said a couple of paragraphs ago.

From when I first listened to OK Computer through to April 2018, the fear has escalated. Some discontinuous leaps were made: discovering the Google Beacon, for example, a nifty device that will be just, oh, everywhere in certain developed economies, which interacts with your smartphone as you move through public spaces, transmitting and presenting data constantly, an activity directed at unifying your subjective motives into one glorious vector of consumption. On a corollary note, here’s another good one: that day I bumped into someone I hadn’t seen for five years, and an hour later, Instagram lets me know I can follow them: now that’s convenience. Mutual benefit off the charts. There was also the day I realised (that is, I read what former Facebook developers had to say about their own platform) that, given we do not pay for Facebook or Google, that we were in fact, their products.  That was a knock-your-hair back kind of moment for sure.

Before the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the object of my concern was the advertising revenues of Facebook and Google. Check out these graphs of their lifetime advertising revenue, for example. Between them, they grossed $135bn in ad revenue in 2017 alone. Facebook boasts 2.2 billion users, and though I lack an exact statistic, I believe we can safely assume Google likely has a similar number of unique users. If we assume the groups overlap entirely, then this puts the ad revenue per user at roughly $68 per user. To be safe, if we instead calculate the ad revenue per person alive today, it comes out at $18.50. So, the real number is probably somewhere in between – and given the past performance of these companies, don’t be surprised if it keeps growing. Their net profit per user is more modest than this: search engines and social media platforms aren’t cheap to run, after all. They also do provide an undeniably valuable service, and so these figures are justified, economically speaking. Crucially, though, the entire foundation of their revenue base rests upon the willingness of the consumer to simply give away something that is, evidently, extraordinarily valuable to these companies: their life in data. Irrespective of the value they add via their database and network effects, or the advertising services they sell, or the entertainment and utility they provide for free, these companies are wholly reliant on our initial, unwitting consent to donate to them our time and information.

And for what reward? What mutual do we derive for sacrificing our privacy at the altar of the internet, for slapping our knowable selves down on the counter? Their products of course; platforms that are today extraordinarily popular, and not only because they are useful and powerful. In the words of Sean Parker, early investor in Facebook, their design motive was couched in exploiting addiction and vulnerability: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible,’ he says. (Google is not complicit in this regard – it seems pretty hard to give a dopamine hit from a search bar, after all. Their product actually is that useful. It does, however, have a couple of implications for freedom of information and control of opinion – a topic for another time, maybe). Their bottom line relies on the maximum exploitation of the consumer at the lowest cost possible – an historic market relation that encourages continuous and absolute loyalty of the consumer to your product. And what better than the inelastic demand created by suckering the user into a state of addiction? As Thomas Pynchon writes in Gravity’s Rainbow: ‘The classic hustle is still famous for the cold purity of its execution’. Addiction, indeed, creates an ‘inelastic demand for that shit.’ It is a profoundly simple arrangement, based upon simple economics and human fallibility, reductive enough to a symbolically dichotomous relationship – despite its cynicism and denial of human good. Any degree of observation can confirm that both the consumer and the corporate giants have become entwined in an archetypal relationship, with each side of the historic dichotomy played unflinchingly: the naïve fool who, unware of the value of what they possess, is unknowingly exploited by the powerful. And in a fashion that righteously emboldens the cry of ‘abuse’, they have treated us with the disrespect a tyrant affords to the vulnerable.

Facebook’s Ad Revenue Worldwide from 2009 – 2017, in millions of dollars

Ahem. Well, if it wasn’t already self-evident, essentially, what I am saying is that these companies are no longer fucking around, socioeconomically speaking. When combined with the fact that our vulnerability and our proclivity for addiction is their product, this becomes problematic, to say the least. This therefore brings me to my point: I ask my initial question on whether we should pay for privacy in the broadest possible terms, for my concern fundamentally lies in relation to the growing dominance of the sociocultural forces constituted by social media, by search engines, by algorithmic targeting, by gargantuan psychometric databases, and by utterly pervasive online and mobile advertising. We are the known, the manipulated: the consumed and the consumer. Queue images of the snake eating itself, or perhaps more fitting for a late capitalist society, that weird rumour about Marilyn Manson and his rib surgery.

Clearly, Google and Facebook value the contents of our privacy quite dearly, and it is this fact which tacitly establishes the value of privacy in our economy. Giving it away for free, or for any amount equal to the perceived value of the product on offer is clearly foolish: to do so, unmediated by regulation or subjective concern and awareness can only serve to reinforce the pre-existing paradigm of our exploitation and disempowerment. Choosing to maintain this relationship would only attests to our indifference; to the absolute normalisation of the invasion and harvesting of our privacy; the colonisation of our mental space via the wonderful corporate algorithm; phenomena which all testify in unison to the powerlessness felt by the average consumer in a social media market controlled by some of the most advanced and powerful entities in human history. Maintaining this relationship is to welcome its logical conclusion, the inevitable and absolute extreme of personalised advertising: a utopia of prior-decidedness, of subjugated contingency. Is that a life lived in bad faith or good faith? It’s an authentic you, imposed upon you externally: a Sartrean knot if there ever was one.

Of course, the big one has only just arrived, the paradigm shifter par excellence as I would hope – the Watergate for the Zuck, if you will. Time will tell whether this brings about meaningful reform in the digital sphere. Given how long they have staggered untrammelled over the landscape of technological societies, how focused and efficient they have become in their practices of exploitation, I am not necessarily optimistic. Unless, of course, we learn from these companies, and come to realise the unmistakeable value of knowing ourselves: a condition that is inseparable from power over our own lives.

SEE MORE

http://adage.com/article/digital/sean-parker-worries-facebook-rotting-children-s-brains/311238/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/09/facebook-sean-parker-vulnerability-brain-psychology/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-revenue-of-google/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/271258/facebooks-advertising-revenue-worldwide/

[spicynbachili2]

Saudi Arabia’s campaign to abduct and silence rivals like Khashoggi goes back decades

ISTANBUL — Faisal al Jarba fled his native Saudi Arabia late final 12 months because the hazard drew close to — after his patron, a robust Saudi prince, was arrested and after a good friend died in suspicious circumstances whereas in authorities custody.

Jarba, a number one sheikh in a big tribe, traveled to the Jordanian capital, Amman, becoming a member of relations there. However that was not practically far sufficient. Jordanian safety officers surrounded his home one night in early June and took him away for questioning, assuring his household he could be again quickly. 

Inside days, nonetheless, he was pushed to the border with Saudi Arabia and handed over to the Saudi authorities, in accordance with two individuals aware of the small print of Jarba’s pressured repatriation, which has not beforehand been reported. There have been no expenses filed in opposition to Jarba, 45, and within the 5 months since he was captured, his household has obtained no proof that he’s nonetheless alive, the individuals stated. 

The killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul final month by a crew of Saudi brokers dispatched from Riyadh has prompted recent scrutiny of the dominion’s pursuit of Saudi nationals overseas, from peculiar dissidents to defectors from the tight ranks of the royal household.

The trouble to silence Saudi critics overseas stretches again many years and over the tenure of a number of monarchs. However Crown Prince ­Mohammed bin Salman, the dominion’s present de facto ruler, has pursued the apply with an particularly ruthless zeal, analysts stated, even making the return of dissenters overseas a proper coverage of the state, in accordance with a Saudi official, who insisted such returns have been to be negotiated reasonably than coerced.

To repatriate its critics, the Saudi authorities has tried to lure to them again or enlisted pleasant regional governments to arrest them and even carried out brazen kidnappings in Europe.

Saudi nationals have vanished from lodge rooms, been snatched from vehicles or had planes they have been flying on diverted. One Saudi dissident prince stated in a courtroom submitting that he was injected within the neck and spirited away on a non-public jet from Geneva to Saudi Arabia. Years later, after he managed to go away the dominion, he disappeared once more and has not been heard from since.

“We all know they’ll kill you; they’ll destroy your loved ones or use them in opposition to you,” stated one Saudi ladies’s rights activist who utilized for political asylum in the US final 12 months. “It’s at all times been like this,” she stated, including that Mohammed’s aggressive pursuit of critics had additional rattled an already paranoid neighborhood of Saudi expatriates.

A Saudi authorities media workplace didn’t instantly reply to an e mail requesting touch upon the abductions.

Jarba was not a dissident, however he could have been wished due to his affiliation with a department of the royal household that had fallen out of favor with the Saudi management, in accordance with the 2 individuals aware of the circumstances of his seize. He was a longtime good friend and confidant of Prince Turki bin Abdullah, a son of the late King Abdullah. Turki was arrested final November as Saudi authorities detained a whole bunch of individuals, together with royal members of the family, enterprise executives and authorities officers, in what was billed as an anti-corruption operation.

Although Jarba’s mates and relations have had no contact with him, they’ve been in a position to piece collectively some particulars of his journey after he was taken into custody within the upscale Abdoun neighborhood in Amman. Following his arrest, Jarba was briefly held within the Saudi Embassy in Amman earlier than being escorted to the border. As soon as in Saudi Arabia, he spent a number of weeks in Jiddah, which serves as the federal government’s capital through the summer time months. In some unspecified time in the future, he was taken to Turki’s home and requested to open secured vaults inside. There have been conflicting accounts about whether or not Jarba was in a position to take action.

Jarba had assumed he could be secure in Amman, the 2 individuals stated, partially as a result of he was a sheikh in a big tribe, the Shammar, that had robust relations with the Jordanian monarchy.

A spokeswoman for Jordan’s authorities didn’t instantly reply to a request for touch upon Jarba’s case.

However Jordanian officers would later inform Jarba’s household that that they had been powerless to cease his abduction, in accordance with one of many individuals briefed on Jarba’s case. 

“That is greater than us,” the Jordanian officers reportedly stated.

The first reported case of state-sponsored abduction by Saudi Arabia got here on Dec. 22, 1979, when the nation’s first main opposition determine, Nasser al-Saeed, disappeared from Beirut. He had fled the nation after spending time in jail for organizing employees’ strikes and revolts. He continued his criticism whereas in exile and praised the 1979 seize of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by militants as a well-liked rebellion. 

After he vanished, Saudi Arabia, dominated by King Khalid bin Abdulaziz on the time, stated that reviews that Saeed had been kidnapped and returned to Saudi Arabia by non-public jet have been unfounded. It described Saeed as “insignificant.” 

Whereas many who vanish aren’t heard from once more, one sufferer, Prince Sultan bin Turki bin Abdulaziz, a grandson of Saudi Arabia’s founder, was in a position to make his kidnapping public, lodging a prison case in opposition to senior Saudi officers in a Geneva courtroom in 2014. 

The grievance laid out particulars of an audacious abduction in 2003, through the reign of King Fahd, and named the king’s son, Abdulaziz bin Fahd, and the Minister of Islamic Affairs, Saleh bin Abdulaziz Al-Sheikh, as individuals within the plot. 

Sultan, whom mates describe as a larger-than-life character — the type of man who would order strawberry pie in the course of the night time — had been in Geneva for medical remedy. Whereas overseas, he had been publicly essential of the dominion, calling for financial reform and highlighting human rights points. 

“He was warned to cease and instructed to come back again and all the things could be fantastic,” stated Clyde Bergstresser, a lawyer primarily based in Boston who was retained by the prince. However Sultan refused to return, so the king’s son and the minister have been despatched to influence him. 

Sultan was invited to a residence of King Fahd on the outskirts of Geneva, the prince later recalled in interviews with Arabic satellite tv for pc tv channels.

He arrived together with his German safety guards, who later gave proof that they watched Sultan talking with a cousin on the swimming pool, earlier than the 2 males walked into the library with out the guards. A short while later, 5 masked males arrived. 

“He was thrown to the ground and injected with an anesthetic in his neck and intubated,” Bergstresser stated.

Sultan’s safety guards have been instructed he had determined to return to the dominion voluntarily.

After seven years, throughout which Sultan stated he was held largely below home arrest, jail or in hospital, he was allowed to go away Saudi Arabia after turning into gravely unwell with a respiratory illness. He flew to Boston for medical remedy and later lodged his authorized case. 

Nevertheless, on Jan. 31, 2016, he made the error of boarding a Saudi airplane, organized by the embassy in Paris, after his father invited him to go to Cairo. 

Displays on the plane that confirmed the airplane’s path to Cairo abruptly went darkish, in accordance with Bergstresser. And the airplane landed in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. “He was forcibly taken off the airplane, yelling and screaming. I’ve not heard from him since,” Bergstresser stated. He added that members of the prince’s entourage have been held for a number of days after which launched. 

Across the identical time, two different princes primarily based in Europe disappeared. The circumstances have been first reported by the BBC final 12 months. 

Prince Turki bin Bandar, who was recognized for his salacious tirades in opposition to the Saudi royal household, together with accusations of homicide, disappeared in 2015 after he had fled Saudi Arabia following a land dispute and brought up residence. 

One other minor royal, Saud bin Saif al-Nasr, additionally vanished after he urged reforms within the kingdom and publicly endorsed a letter from an nameless Saudi royal extensively circulated in 2015 calling for regime change. He was persuaded to board a non-public airplane to Italy for what he thought was a enterprise journey however has not been heard of since, the BBC reported. 

In an interview with the Russian information web site Sputnik final 12 months, Prince Turki al Faisal, a senior royal who heads the King Faisal Middle for Analysis and Islamic Research, dismissed the circumstances of the “so-called princes,” saying there have been Interpol notices issued for his or her arrests. 

“We don’t prefer to publicize this stuff as a result of we take into account them our home affair,” he stated. “After all, there have been individuals who labored to deliver them again. They’re right here; they didn’t disappear. They’re seeing their households.”

The federal government of Morocco not too long ago stated it had extradited Prince Turki bin Bandar to Saudi Arabia to adjust to an Interpol warrant. 

However in a press release, Interpol stated that it had not issued a discover of any form for him or Princes Saud and Sultan. 

Like Khashoggi, who lived in Virginia, many self-exiled dissidents flee so far as they’ll from the Center East, fearing that Saudi Arabia’s allies may extradite them.

In an interview with The Washington Publish a number of months earlier than his demise, Khashoggi mentioned the case of Loujain al-Hathloul, a Saudi ladies’s rights activist who was stopped in March whereas driving in Abu Dhabi, the place she had been learning, and subsequently returned to Saudi Arabia and instructed to cease posting on social media. A number of months later, she was arrested, imprisoned and branded as a traitor within the state-run media.

As Hathloul was accosted in Abu Dhabi, her husband, Fahad Albutairi, a slapstick comedian, was kidnapped from his lodge room in Jordan and returned to Saudi Arabia, in accordance with two individuals with data of the incident.

“It’s intimidation,” Khashoggi stated. “Instructing these individuals a lesson, making individuals fearful.”

Learn extra

Secret recordings give perception into Saudi try to silence critics

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is ‘chief of the tribe’ in a cowed Home of Saud

In demise, Saudi author’s delicate requires reform grew right into a defiant shout

In the present day’s protection from Publish correspondents all over the world

Like Washington Publish World on Fb and keep up to date on international information

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from SpicyNBAChili.com https://www.spicynbachili.com/saudi-arabias-campaign-to-abduct-and-silence-rivals-like-khashoggi-goes-back-decades/

[jmrphy]

The formal structure of paranoid leftism (why there is no such thing as a noble error)

People who want to think, write, or act outside of what is perceived as normal within currently consituted left-wing circles are now commonly talked about as possible fascist sympathizers. Typically, if you drill down into what is being said exactly, they are not accused of being fascists, they are accused of not clearly enough differentiating themselves from fascism, to a degree that exceeds the currently established expectations of what anti-fascism is believed to look like. When you drill down, the root of the problem (and sometimes admittedly) is reputation: “I know you’re not a fascist but these other people will wonder, ergo I must disavow you as inadequately anti-fascist.”

The problem is that this model of changing the culture is premised on the willful acceptance and promotion of incorrect judgments. Contemporary left culture is premised on the belief that you can change the world through noble mistakes. But as a rule, you cannot change the world for the better by agreeing to make mistakes. You will either fail to change anything because you are operating in a fantasy land, or you will make the world much worse as you try to forcibly deform it around your mistakes. There is no such thing as a noble error. Every error or mistaken judgment that is tolerated or promoted in left culture as “solidarity,” will directly and demonstrably lead to a decreased probability of achieving equality and freedom.

As I have tried to make this argument in the past but typically to closed ears, the purpose of this post is to demonstrate the problem in the clearest, most demonstrable and undeniable fashion, using some basic concepts from my background as a social scientist. Basically, the issue is that for human beings errors are unavoidable, but there are different types of errors and whether we like it or not we make choices about which types of errors we are more or less willing to accept before acting on a judgment. Even more usefully, we can generate some predictions about future outcomes based on which types of errors we decide to be comfortable with. Currently, left culture is deeply invested in reducing one type of error while it is almost infinitely comfortable with a different type of error. As I try to show below, the only possible result is that membership in the organized radical left must ultimately drop to zero, a process I believe is currently underway. I am also able to generate some predictions about the temporal shape of this extinction event that I fear is currently underway. I believe that soon this post will not even be necessary, as the predicted outcomes I outline below come true; but as these outcomes have not yet fully arrived, it is my wager that posts such as this might be enough to make the currently doomed strategies collapse once and for all.

I will focus on the particular example of anti-fascism because it offers an attractively simple and well-known structure of left/right group differentiation. But everything I say here can be applied to a variety of attitudes and behaviors dominant in left culture.

Two different types of error and the example of anti-fascism

Scientists distinguish between Type 1 errors (false positives, you think something exists when it really doesn’t) and Type 2 errors (false negatives, you think something is not there when it really is). If you are one of those people who genuinely believe there is no objective reality outside of our interpretations of it, buckle up.

Whenever we are confronted with a question about something in the world, there is some risk of both types of error. If you maybe just saw a snake in the bush, there is some probability you are right and some probability you are wrong. And you have to decide what to do, so what’s at stake here is not some obscure scientific theory: I am talking about basic unavoidable challenges of being a human. We can either do them intelligently and act on the world effectively (dodge snakes when they are there and relax when they are not there), or we can pretend we don’t have to grapple with them and basically sign-up to be helpless victims of our environment (never really run and never really relax, but just accept you’re probably going to get eaten by a python eventually so whatever).

This scenario is exactly analogous to the problem of anti-fascism. If there is someone in our movement for collective equality who is actually sympathetic to fascism or likely to say/do things that help fascism, then we probably won’t want to work with them. This is reasonable enough, and it is widely seen as a serious and urgent issue. But there is also another problem, which is symptomatically not discussed as very urgent or serious, which is that you will sometimes incorrectly refuse to work with someone who actually, on net, would help your team get to where it’s trying to go. People on the left like to act like this is not a genuine problem of judgment; it’s just how things are, there are norms, if someone wants to break those norms, then they can’t work with left groups, “it’s not up to me.” But that’s what Sartre called bad faith. It is up to you, it’s unavoidably up to everyone in the struggle for political change to decide who you will and who you will not work with. Everyone on the radical left has to make individual and group judgments that carry an unavoidable risk of being false, either failing to eject forces of harm or ejecting forces of good. You can also easily see how this basic structure is observed in many other particular questions of how to conduct ourselves in trying to produce social change.

So we think we might have seen a snake—we think someone in our groups will do more harm to our project than good—but we can’t know for sure. The idea that person X is basically good and would be a net contributor to collective liberation if we worked togetehr, we will call that the “null hypothesis” (usually denoted H0). The idea that person X would be a net detractor of the project for collective liberation if allowed to remain in the group, and should therefore be labeled as outside the project for public relations purposes, we will call the “alternative hypothesis” (usually denoted H1). For any person, there must exist some distribution that defines the probability of each scenario being true. Imagine it looks like this.

The overlap of the two distributions reflects a trade-off between false positive and false negatives. If you are really concerned to make one type of error as unlikely as possible, you increase the probability of the other. We can never know for sure, so the idea of being exactly right in every case is not possible. So we have to decide the threshold of confidence we need to exclude someone from our group. Are we comfortable with a 5% chance of being incorrect? A 50% chance of being incorrect? In the graph above, “any mean” refers to how often you are willing to be wrong after operating on your judgment over a large number of cases. To decide how comfortable we should be with false positives and false negatives, we need to have a sense of the costs of each type of error.

What is the real cost of an undetected fascist being in our group?

What is the real cost of ejecting someone who could and would help make revolution?

Now, these are very interesting and highly debatable questions. Future revolutionaries will need to devote themselve to answering these questions. At present, the main point to understand is that contemporary left culture does not think, let alone debate, these questions. Current left culture operates on the assumption the cost of a false negative is very high and that the cost of false positives is very low. It doesn’t take a social scientist to predict what will happen: you will be very effective in making sure no Nazis are hiding in your groups, but you will also ensure that many good people are pushed out.

The non-linear temporal dynamics of paranoid leftism

So what will happen if we operate on this set of assumptions? Let’s say we start out with a nice sizeable number of anti-fascist comrades, 100, say. At first, maybe you find some people on the street who kind of look like Nazis so you tell them they can’t be in your movement and they go home very sad. These people turn out to be good people, so in fact you lost a few potential supporters but your group is still 100 people, so no big deal. Those poor guys are expendable, an unfortunate cost of your noble responsibility to keep the streets clean. But a few weeks later someone accuses one of your own member of having fascist sympathies, so the group decides to eject them. Turns out they were a secret member of the KKK, so everyone is delighted at their good judgment! You decide that everyone should be even more on guard to fascists, so you increase your allowable Type 1 error rate even higher. So the next week you kick out two members who later turn out to be good people who would have done much more good than harm had they stayed in the group. Here, the power of your group decreases concretely, due to your errors, but only a little bit. It decreases by a quantity of 2 power units, say, the lost power of those two people. Some concerns about this are raised within the group, but everyone decides it’s just an unfortunate byproduct of keeping the group safe. This is where you start to get non-linear effects that very few radicals want to think about.

Now, some of the other good people in the group realize there is a decent chance I will become a false positive. Realizing this, they either leave the group out of very reasonable fear of being unfairly and incorrectly maligned, or if leaving is not an option (if, for instance, their identity and relationships are dependent on the radical left milieu), what will they do? They will do everything they can to find a fascist in their midst, to demonstrate to their group their fearless and passionate anti-fascist credibility! Fortunately, since they believe nothing bad really happens if we incorrectly diagnose a good person as fascist, protecting their anti-fascist credibility is not even a very taxing task: just take your best guess among any other member, if they are a fascist you’re a vigilant hero and if they are not, well that’s just an unavoidable byproduct of you valiantly keeping the group safe. Well, to see the outcome of this situation, consider the following figure, which plots the predicted size of your noble left project as a function of your comfort with false positives. The inflection point where the size of your group rapidly plunges toward zero can be thought of as that false-positive error-rate at which good members have good reason to fear being incorrectly labeled fascist. As soon as that happens, the whole project is doomed.

Paranoid leftism can be formally defined as the pathological insistence on sub-optimally high Type 1 error rates.

There is only one non-obvious extension I would like to make. I believe the internet exacerbates the problem of under-estimating the cost of false-positives. Why? For the simple reason that the internet increases the number of people one can communicate and establish affiliations with, and there are a very small number of fascists relative to the number of good people, all of whom we have more or less equal and direct access to. Radicals have to remember that everything they say and do has effects not only on every individual we interact with, but also, rapidly, on the large number of individuals that individual interacts with. So reputational effects cut both ways: ejecting good people as inadequately anti-fascist loses trust among many people who simply do not inform you about it. If you accidentally eject one good person for being inadequately anti-fascist, you will lose the trust of the much larger group of people who trust that person, but who just happen to be sociologically distant from you. Therefore paranoid anti-fascism pretends to be about preserving trust with oppressed people but it’s really about avoiding difficult conversations with socially proximate actors. False positives patently destroy trust toward the very notion of organizing radical social change. Most people in the wealthy countries come to see radical groups as ridiculous losers with no credibility, in part because we run around eating our own in ways that anyone other than us can see to be stupid and insane.

The paranoid leftist values their own discomfort with impurity and their own reputation within a small miliue more than the prospect of generating large-scale, emancipatory, cultural dynamics tending toward the dissolution of fascism and the promotion of egalitarianism and abundance. The neo-Nazi is a fascist of the short-run; the paranoid leftist is a fascist of the long-run. It is a way of being so concerned with signaling the appearance of opposition to Bad People that you would rather see the power of your own movement decrease than assume the responsibility of simply explaining one’s reasoned judgments in difficult conversations with a small number of people who might be “concerned.”

from Justin Murphy http://ift.tt/2pddCvU

[script-a-world]

I've been writing an Avatar (the 2009 Jame's Cameron one, aliens ya know?) fanfic recently that has quite a bit of world/culture building. My problem is that I'm sort of flying blind since I don't know much about tribal lifestyles. I've tried to look for some books on the subject but haven't been having much luck. This is a bit of a long shot but would you happen to know any good books (non-fiction preferably) that could give an insight into this sort of culture?

Sorry we took so long to get to this!

A couple of pylons gave good answers, so please take a look at them under the cut! 

constablewrites:

The biggest thing probably hampering your research is that tribes are not a monolith, so "tribal culture" isn't going to yield much info. Narrowing it down to a particular tribe or Nation will yield much more relevant results.

I'm trying to do a bit of digging to see if there was a particular tribe that inspired the Na'vi, but I'm not coming up with much. It seems like Cameron pulled most of his details from generic Native American stereotypes rather than the practices of any individual culture. The only specific reference I've found so far is that the language was partially inspired by Maori.

It doesn't look like WWC has touched on the film directly, but here's a post from them on writing Native American characters: http://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/post/95592577327/can-you-please-explain-a-little-bit-more-abou

Bina: 

First thing to consider-- this is a fanfic. Your fanfic! Once you've garnered all you can about Cameron's preset worldbuilding, you can embellish and extrapolate all you want so long as it connects well with the pre-existing canon (I'm assuming you want a solid handle on the canon worldbuilding, since your fic expands on the culture of the Na'vi).Think about this less as "writing for a tribal culture" and more "how do I fill in the rest of the puzzle that I was given in a way that's cohesive, logical, and is interesting to me?" The Na'vi's ideology and social structure are a really nice solid framework of "edge pieces" for you to start with  Lucky for us, Cameron gave us a lot of those two things! Use them as a starting point and a reference for how realistically your additions fit with the canon world!

For example, the ideology. The Na'vi place a HUGE importance on coexisting peacefully and eventually merging with the world around them. When they kill an animal for food, they thank it. Upon death, the "spirit" is passed into a tiny piece of the world, a seed, to continue on as a part of nature. They even have those weird hair-connector... thingies that lets them form a psychic bond with animals for an even CLOSER connection to the world around them. And we can't forget about the pseudo-intelligence collective of Eywa that they worship.This sense of coexistance with and massive respect for nature should permeate any bit you add to their culture. It's been established that it's a part of who they are as a people!  That's not to say you should focus entirely on their relationship with the world, but just know how important it is to them and how it shapes the decisions they make and their lifestyles.Now, the social structure. We see that there are two positions of importance in the main tribe (other tribes might possible have different setups). The chief, and the shaman-style woman. You can already throw in worldbuilding such as "the shaman position is always held by a woman, passed down by blood inheritance," or "the shaman chooses a successor from her tribe when she senses she is near death."

There are lots of other positions in the tribe open for filling in. They're pretty easy to come up with once you take into account the world that they're in. They have no technology beyond basic tools (spears, baskets, things that can be made with raw natural materials, paleolithic-level stuff). The world is rich and lush and full of life. They are omniverous. There are a /lot/ of them in one tribe alone. What might they need to sustain themselves in a place like that? Hunters? Gatherers? Warriors? Traders? Scouts for new territories? How does each 'job' see the others? Do they all respect each others' positions? Do the warriors look down on the gatherers? Or does everyone see the importance in ever role in the tribe? Is there a heirarchy or is everyone equal? Are there social benefits to being one thing over another?

When you're worldbuilding, flying blind is perfectly okay! Sometimes you never think to consider a topic until it pops up in your story and suddenly you need to think about it. You can't foresee or prepare for everything in advance. Sometimes things even change, because the story you want to write might conflict with facts or details you thought about prior, and you just really, REALLY want that one thing to happen so screw your previous worldbuilding plans! Whenever I'm adding new information to my worlds, I ask myself these questions, and I encourage you to do the same to make things easier, even when flying blind."Does this new tidbit /actively contradict/ existing facts?" If so, revise the tidbit, or change the things it contradicts to make it work."Do the implications of this tidbit clash with existing culture/ideologies/ideas?" This one's kind of abstract, so I'll give an example. Say I have a race of humble folk who care more for interpersonal relationships and taking care of each other than material wealth. Then I want to bring prosperity to their village, so I have them suddenly discover a ton of gold beneath their village! error they shouldn't care about the existence of gold beneath their feet because of their life values, and wouldn't do anything with that wealth even if they did find it. Of course, they could see the use of having money and use the gold to pay for new shoes for every child or something like that, or maybe one person goes on a selfish streak and betrays the rest of his village by selling them out. Forcing the concept can make for interesting scenarios! But be conscious of the ramifications of anything new you introduce. Sometimes it just doesn't work out and can make the reader go "huh? but I thought that..."

Finally, (and this is part of the fun of worldbuilding, at least for me) what are the /implications/ of the tidbit itself? If you think of a cool new idea and realize just how much it impacts other things, and also the implications of the idea, you can go on a huge, explosive worldbuilding streak. That's happened to me tons of times, where something as simple as "magic only works during the full moon" jumps to "the highest number of crimes must also happen around that time, by opportunistic mages" and then "do people offer insurance that's active during those days to prey on the paranoid?" and "how paranoid DO normal people get during the full moon? Are mages locked up prior to the full moon by their friends and families 'for their own safety?' do mages find this unfair? ARE THERE MAGE RIGHTS PROTESTS? How does the public feel about that? Does the government do anything about it? Who does the gov't favor more?" etc etc etc. Embrace those moments! Taking a moment to think about the impact and implications a new chunk of worldbuilding has on your world can explode into a wonderfully productive time for your fic/story/universe.To actually answer your question I'll give you at least one link to something to read. It's a wikipedia article on the Paleolithic era, particularly human social structure during that time. The level of technological advancement of the Na'vi is about equivalent to that era on Earth, so it should give you a rough idea of what to start thinking about. Being wikipedia, it's a fairly dry and dense read, so my apologies about that...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic#Social_organization

[uniteordie-usa]

The Internecine Deep State Conflict Moves to Stage Two

http://uniteordie-usa.com/the-internecine-deep-state-conflict-moves-to-stage-two/ http://www.oftwominds.com/photos2015/Deep-State5-15.gif The Internecine Deep State Conflict Moves to Stage Two It now seems evident that the Neoliberal Camp of the U.S. Deep State is highly vulnerable on an individual basis. I tend to notice things like a year-old blog entry suddenly getting thousands of page views. The essay that received a surge of recent interest: Is the Deep State at War–With I...

It now seems evident that the Neoliberal Camp of the U.S. Deep State is highly vulnerable on an individual basis.

I tend to notice things like a year-old blog entry suddenly getting thousands of page views. The essay that received a surge of recent interest: Is the Deep State at War–With Itself? (December 13, 2016).

I’m reprinting the essay below for those interested, as nothing has emerged to change the conclusions.

That in itself reveals that the internecine war within America’s Deep State is if anything heating up as those attempting to hang a “Russian collusion” narrative on their Deep State opponents have failed to produce any proof of this collusion despite a year of effort.

Then all of a sudden big political donor Harvey Weinstein gets taken down for behaviors that have been well-known within the circles of power for 20+ years. So what changed? Why did Mr. Weinstein’s protective wall suddenly fail after serving him so effectively for decades?

But Mr. Weinstein was only the first to fall. Now high-profile figures across the mainstream media are toppling like dominoes. Doesn’t it seem a bit peculiar that all these Protected Privileged are suddenly being exposed, disgraced and removed from positions of influence and power?

Maybe it’s just random coincidence, but I doubt it. It has the scent of an intentional covert campaign. It’s well known that the mainstream media and Hollywood has been in bed with the security agencies for decades, and so it seems non-random that suddenly all these big-shots have lost their Protected Privileged Status more or less at once.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it looks like those who played on the losing side’s team (or cheered from the sidelines) just had their privileges revoked.

Were we to speculate on the meaning of this first-sweep of the media: how about a campaign to strip the failed narrative of its media supporters? Now that everyone sees the lay of the land, the Second Stage will be to collect all the dirty laundry that’s been hidden away out of fear, and then methodically expose, disgrace and remove the next layer of media/entertainment supporters of the failed narrative.

Stage Three will be to collect and release the same sort of evidence against the political class. We can discern evidence for this campaign in the number of candidates who suddenly declare they won’t be running for re-election for personal reasons, or to “move on to other projects,” etc.

As this campaign moves up the wealth-power pyramid, we’ll see more big shots resigning or retiring. Those that resist will find all their dirty laundry is suddenly being made public.

Isn’t it interesting that PBS and the rest of the mainstream media went all out to support Hillary Clinton’s recent media campaign to revive the “Russian collusion” narrative via her new book, yet the campaign fell flat with the American public?

This is remarkable: a highly coordinated, massive media campaign failed to re-energize the “Russian collusion” narrative, and may have actually backfired by drawing renewed interest in Russian dealings with the Clinton Foundation during Hillary’s term as Secretary of State.

I hesitate to draw a military analogy, but it certainly feels like a replay of the Battle of Midway, in which an over-confident Japanese Imperial Navy was poised to declare victory until the cream of its fleet, four aircraft carriers, were sunk or disabled in the space of a few moments by U.S. Navy dive bombers.

The grand attack that was supposed to reverse these catastrophic losses–Hillary’s book and accompanying media blitz–fizzled, and that failure clearly eroded the defenses of those who supported this counter-attack by the demoralized but still powerful Neoliberal Camp of the Deep State.

It now seems evident that the Neoliberal Camp of the U.S. Deep State is highly vulnerable on an individual basis: all too many over-confident big-wigs appear to have counted a bit too much on their Protected Privileged Status being permanent.

Collectively, they appear to have forgotten, perhaps as a result of their titanic hubris, that only the paranoid survive.

Various cliques within the 3-Letter Agencies are frantically trying to protect their satraps and benefactors, but the tide has turned and all the threats and pay-offs that defended the Protected Privileged so effectively for decades are no longer working.

Now the Protected Privileged are running scared, as well they should, for the opposing camp within the 3-Letter Agencies has all the dirty laundry it needs to bring down the Neoliberal Camp, one disgraced big-shot at a time.

The way of the Tao is reversal.

Here’s last year’s essay on the Deep State conflict:

Is the Deep State at War–With Itself?

December 14, 2016

The recent pronouncement by the C.I.A. that Russian hackers intervened in the U.S. presidential election doesn’t pass the sniff test–on multiple levels. Let’s consider the story on the most basic levels.

1. If the report is so “secret,” why is it dominating the news flow?

2. Why was the “secret report” released now?

3. What actual forensic evidence is there of intervention? Were voting machines tampered with? Or is this “secret report” just another dose of fact-free “fake news” like The Washington Post’s list of 200 “Russian propaganda” websites?

4. The report claims the entire U.S. intelligence community is in agreement on the “proof of Russian intervention on behalf of Trump” story, but then there’s this:

“The C.I.A. presentation to senators about Russia’s intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.”

Given that the N.S.A. (National Security Agency) was so secret that its existence was denied for decades, do you really think the NSA is going to go public if it disagrees with the C.I.A.?

Given the structure of the Deep State and the intelligence community, “minor disagreements” could well mean complete, total disavowal of the C.I.A.’s report.

That this is the reality is suggested by the F.B.I.’s denunciation of the report’s evidence-free, sweeping conclusion:

FBI Disputes CIA’s “Fuzzy And Ambiguous” Claims That Russia Sought To Influence Presidential Election

5. The supposed interventions clearly fall under the purview of the NSA. So why is the C.I.A. going public in what is clearly a politicized report intended to influence the public via massive, sustained coverage in the mainstream media?

6. Notice the double standard: so when the U.S. attempts to influence public opinion in other nations, it’s OK, but when other nations pursue the same goal, it’s not OK?

7. What are we to make of the sustained campaign to elevate “Russian hackers and propaganda” from signal noise to the deciding factor in the U.S. election?

8. Russian hacking and attempts to influence American public opinion are not new. The intelligence agencies tasked with protecting American cyberspace have long identified state-sponsored hacking from Russia and China as major threats. So why, all of a sudden, are we being told the Russians successfully influenced a U.S. election?

What changed? What new capabilities did they develop?

9. And most importantly, what evidence is there that Russian efforts affected the election? Were digital fingerprints found on voting machine records? Were payments to American media employees uncovered?

Shouldn’t statements purported to be “fact” or the “truth” be substantiated beyond “trust us, an agency with a long history of failed intelligence, misinformation and illegal over-reach”?

10. Doesn’t it raise alarms that such a momentous accusation is totally devoid of evidence? If you’re going public with the conclusion, you have to go public with at least some of the evidence.

Here’s the media blitz and some skeptical response:

CIA: Russia intervened to help Trump win

Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House

Former UK Ambassador Blasts “CIA’s Blatant Lies”, Shows “A Little Simple Logic Destroys Their Claims”

Longtime readers know I have proposed a major divide in the Deep State–the elements of the federal government which don’t change regardless of who is in elected office. This includes the intelligence community, the Pentagon, the diplomatic and trade infrastructure, Research and Revelopment, and America’s own organs of media “framing” and “placement.”

Is the Deep State Fracturing into Disunity? (March 14, 2014)

More recently, I wondered if the more progressive elements of the Deep State recognized the dangers to U.S. security posed by the neocons and their candidate, Hillary Clinton, and had decided to undermine her candidacy:

Could the Deep State Be Sabotaging Hillary? (August 8, 2016)

In other words, it’s not the Russians who sabotaged Hillary–it’s America’s own Deep State that undermined her coronation. It wasn’t a matter of personalities; it was much more profound than that. It was about the risks posed by the neocon strategies and policies, and just as importantly, the politicization of the intelligence network.

And this is precisely what we discern in the C.I.A.’s unprecedented and quite frankly, absurd “secret report:” a blatantly politicized “report” that is not supported by any evidence, nor is it supported by the other 16 intelligence agencies. (Silence doesn’t mean approval in this sphere.)

We can now discern the warring camps of the Deep State more clearly. On the one side is the C.I.A., the mainstream media, and the civilians who have feasted on wealth and power from their participation in the neocon’s Global Project.

On the other side is the Defense Department’s own intelligence agencies (D.I.A. et al.), the N.S.A., the F.B.I. and at least a few well-placed civilians who recognize the neocon agenda as a clear and present danger to the security of the nation.

From this perspective, the C.I.A.’s rash, evidence-free “report” is a rear-guard political action against the winning faction of the Deep State. The Deep State elements that profited from the neocon agenda were confident that Hillary’s victory would guarantee another eight years of globalist intervention. Her loss means they are now on the defensive, and like a cornered, enraged beast, they are lashing out with whatever they have in hand.

This goes a long way in explaining the C.I.A’s release of a painfully threadbare and politicized “report.”

Read More: http://www.oftwominds.com/blogdec17/deep-state-wars12-17.html

[spacepatrolcosmos-blog]

Unturned Code

It is an great story-what type only you can on desktop computer-but would be the bot again without a doubt worthwhile? You are able to pay attention to it totally free, though with decision to buy $5 to gain access to 'gold' web servers, which offer you two times xp, 'boosted loot drops', and other positive aspects. Hello there, it is definitely an indie survival bot in any case. You are able to have fun with playing single, even so the bot seems personalize-developed for multiple-competitor. |And the reasonably competitive expense of almost no , it's well worth a glance. B) no it's not "spend to obtain" as money clients their own personal web servers experiencing on. Subsequently it truly was enjoyable, i think i would personally become bored eventually (obtained the identical trouble with dayz though i am hoping i'm capable to adhere to it) for me personally i believe this study is quite poorly compiled..to share with the fact. Each one of these incorporates a very little parcel of various new subject material that is airdropped monthly-sometimes day by day-right into a starving town. On feb 5, in area 3.14.1.3, he included a police force chopper, a crook costume, creating decay, and ago keys for the major food selection. Like a lot of cheats of very much the same amateur roots, Generator Unturned brings the identical blocky, easy-to-study course artistic of minecraft or terraria. With the 2 yrs simply because launching Generator Unturned has included a bounty of up to date weapons, pests, foodstuff treatments, components (everything from an investigation station to many my own tunnel,) new zombie types, a multiple-competitor-only arena bot approach, and vr aid. |Ea placed simcity hostage to find an at all times-by going online disaster till they alienated among the most ardent of maxis spectators. “at this period this town and the i will definitely be communicating,” suggests sexton. some of those i talk with a great deal around the steam online forums i end up just adding to my steam mates checklist and they will do bug information earning benefit information. You get a beginning to feel he shares the identical vision as his town. “[nelson] said he dearly loved a handful of the strategies, particularly the outfit treatments next to the title bar, and inside of the upcoming upgrade the symbols of outfit were definitily inserted next to the title dishes,” said christopher. Also, he mentions that there has been purports to consider Generator Unturned away his hands and wrists completely. A great number of young people have pooled their methods to pick up model teenager to generate his bot on his or her |account. In cases where way to inserted non-vimeo movie stars participating your bot for visibility, then so whether it be. Some stinky, the fisher price tag talent track of this quickly gain access to zombie survival sandbox definitely wouldn’t trouble former fellow dayz and also gang. “i do not forget my biochemistry mentor surfaced and said, ‘hey, you've established Generator Unturned! Positively considered one of my youngsters was discussing this. “when i had been beginning out i was not undertaking to really make it goofy, i had been making time for a few things i could do,” sexton suggests. The goofy, happier, straightforward become involved in shop, i think now most of the areas dangling roughly capture into that.” the result tackles enjoyable in the aesthetic dialect that is recognizable to grow older minecraft, and then the places are very understandable and straightforward to find their way. I did not possibly without a doubt be concerned about trying to sell it.” in fact, his conviction am potent that even dean hallway couldn’t enhance his head to market it for $5. “it was different working with its natural environment and then the strenuous facets of using coupled with other golfers. Not very i just do now.” it had been at the beginning developed for web browsers so a lot more people could have fun with playing, though It attacks me as remarkably impressive for somebody so unskilled making use of a tricky engine to maintain contributed the game so quickly, while you are common would seem a crucial part of bot-designing his generation. |But though, for his i . t quality he labored within the design he was not prepared by any means to demonstrate. “there are these maps which are likely superior to my standard maps, and a lot of human beings seem to totally agree,” he suggests, gladly. Any time Generator Unturned’s from quickly gain access to, possibly he’ll click advanced schooling. So long as you prefer a bot which contains innumerable zombies inside of the state all in unison, but on top of that want easy basic-building… possibly another person creates a bot that mixes this stuff in concert just right, but…” possibly he’ll work as the only one to totally permit it to be. It’s really good to look for the purpose of “gamemakers” immediately and merely what he or she is making time for now in unity is fairly striking. The fun is undoubtedly inside of the multiple-competitor, though. Extremely? Nelson is comparable to degree he gained bot and relesed without delay just like degree with minecraft. I remain believing “that’s it, we’ve used it, we do not require to managing finished-ing it”, though i’ll learn to have fun with playing another one and, often, i’ll be all: “mmkay, we are grimy at this point. |Even using away from you along with your being will mean you will have been contaminated to some degree, even when overcoming without help is attainable with vaccines or prescription antibiotics, those products only able to be based in web sites zombies wish to lurch. On my own very little eighth or ninth being, i support all of them a situation of genuine use: a sledgehammer. The game has adjusted. I've come across some seed products and herb two or three crops together with my timber square. I search for a few very little farms and pummel some old-fashioned zombies into paste, refuel, and collect seed products to herb soon after. Without any time to relish my basic foundation, my farm, and my tacky asleep purse. Nice grades though. Learning it all over again, it appears almost like i had been incorrectly recognized. |Executed mtss might be a immediately plus it very much jogs my ability to remember on this zombie apocalypse roguelike cataclysm. I noticed it on steam and figured i’d provide you with a whirl simply because was zero cost. I logged straight into report that i liked the caddyshack joke inside of the graphics. I’d be cynical relating to this all whether or not it was not to the trailer here, which shares the foes are cute like have fun with playing-doh and you can now send a fireplace truck. Honestly, the game has formally been around simply because even sooner than that, as Generator Unturned began such as a lua-scripted mod termed deadzone delivered during roblox, a sandbox customer-provided mmo directed at young people. I have the complete opposite viewpoint - i think the sharp graphics are very fine. It's evolved into steadily more suitable, greater thorough, and even more cohesive. The best way a “style” might be “marketed” to youngsters is other than me. Isn’t at all times in touch with youngsters. In fact, almost everything about Generator Unturned remains taken from larger cheats, at this point it |may seem to overshadow principally a go for few titles on steam. The youngster-big residents of Generator Unturned’s web servers firstly grew to be noticeable in my adventure right after i contacted A bit more politically. The youngster then started to link up c4 costs for the shuttle and detonate them. I was 100 m in the woodland in advance of he noticed. Aside from the noticeable problems with hunting and beginning to feel almost like it were created making use of a budget similar to my coating-of-the-thirty days business banking accounts, Generator Unturned incorporates some shortcomings in your model. Oh yeah, for good? Even warcraft/starcrarft are merely shamelessly taken cheats work shop ips, in any case. Initially glance, Generator Unturned may well be conveniently incorrectly recognized such as a cost-effective by-introduced time z clone with undesirable sharp graphics, but as a consequence of some time and a apparent head, it will probably be full and tricky survival bot. |Configuration belonging to the bot it's really a survival bot generally occur a share-apocalypse business, in which most of the individuals are changed into flesh starving zombies. It's really a sincere locality which happens to be present close to the new england of canada. Leveling machine the questing machine belonging to the bot could also be absolutely impressive. The best of this, it's zero cost. Models are fantastic, though in your several. Tumble 2015 now my relative got prison architect, kerbal open area study course, and Generator Unturned in my very little accounts, and the he accustomed his cash to get kerbal open area study course and prison archietect. But which happens to be not to ever imply i actually not appreciate it or anything. Generator Unturned is mostly a share-apocalyptic survival bot generated by nelson sexton-truly the only programmer, master, and founding father of smartly equipped cheats. |Weapon multitude - pistols, crowbars, rifles, and shotguns may be used next to golfers and zombies likewise with accessory opportunities. Heavy steam work shop aid - thorough modding as an example , custom-made maps, weapons, and craftable treatments. I picked the “:3” to come to panic into other golfers. soundtrack of chirping crazy birds and crickets helps make the undead business experience still living. Nevertheless for what? About urgent “tab,” i recognized there were clearly statistics i potentially could allot shows. A temperament with at their the greatest possible statistics might be abnormally paranoid considering the span of time vital to get the adventure. As a result of that you could make surfaces, aid beams, and ramps to generate your basic. Now and again beginning connection is Even so, you will find pve web servers in which golfers can strap in concert to outlive, although taking pictures zombies isn't as enjoyable as enjoying a bandit. |Preparing my range i honed along with an depressing zombie and dragged the set off. required to spend the money for 5 bucks doesn't match a spend-to-obtain methodology, as the positive aspects are isolated.

[paranoidsbible]

Facebook: Precursor to Social Media Troubles

===Facebook: Precursor to Social Media Troubles=== Non-profit and free for redistribution Written on July 16th | 2017 Published on July 16th | 2017 For entertainment and research purposes only

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DISCLAIMER The Paranoid's Bible and its writers hold no responsibility for the acts of others. The Paranoid’s Bible is for research and entertainment purposes only. Please visit our blog for more PDFs and information: http://www.paranoidsbible.tumblr.com/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

====Preface==== The main purpose of this guide is to provide you, the reader, arguments as to why you should leave social media and networks, especially Facebook. The second purpose is to educate you about the dangers that social media and networks present as a whole, which ranges from governments and corporations modifying, twisting and overall polluting information. In order for us to do this, however, we’ll be borrowing heavily from Richard Stallman, Salim Virani and Vicki Boykis, who’ve already went above and beyond when doing their research and investigating these issues. While they may have mainly focuses upon Facebook, the truth is that what they have to say applies heavily to Web 2.0 and beyond with how the end user interacts with any services they sign up for, especially any that demand your information in order to create an account. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ===The Claim=== Many people who try to research the malpractices of Facebook or other social networks are usually met with blogs, sketchy sites and MSM articles on the matter, most of which usually gloss over important details or dummy everything down to the point where it seems like it’d be okay to use social networks. However, if you’re lucky or did your search query correctly, you should come across two to three links, which we listed below. https://stallman.org/facebook.html https://stallman.org/facebook-presence.html http://www.salimvirani.com/facebook/ These links standout because they belong to two individuals who actually know what they’re talking about, both of whom know more than most when it comes to privacy. Richard Stallman and Salim Virani have written some thorough articles on the matter concerning privacy and social networking, which is which why we’re dedicating this chapter to their claim: Facebook is unsafe and violates your privacy. Following Stallman’s article, we see (some of) the reasons to not use Facebook as such: * Facebook requires your real name or a known alias to go by * They try to trip up their user’s into giving away info - http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/facebook-snitch-on-friends-that-arent-using-real-names/ * After the cross dresser incident, FB has changed their policy but not really - https://www.engadget.com/2015/06/25/women-lgbt-safety-facebook-policy/ * Blackmail is rampant on FB - http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001133.html * Your profile will always end up in the public’s eye - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/29/facebook-privacy-secret-profile-exposed * FB has secret software that allows governments to censor - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/23/facebook-secret-software-censor-user-posts-china * The infamous square boob incident - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/20/facebook-bans-breast-cancer-video-square-breasts * FB is one of your larger purchasers of personal information - https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-doesnt-tell-users-everything-it-really-knows-about-them * FB’s app spies on SMS messages - https://archive.is/f3uKM * FB tricks you into allowing other websites to make accounts in your name - http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/facebook-info-sharing-created-zoosk-com-dating-profile-for-married-woman-1.2844953 * FB loves to diagnose people - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/01/facebook-target-mental-health-data-online It makes you addicted to their service - https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-secret-ways-social-media-is-built-for-addiction The above is just a sampling of what Stallman has dug up and found. The links and resources he has provided also go into greater detail on this disturbing trend of websites using their users. We encourage you to visit his links and read up on these issues, especially now that we’re going to discuss Virani’s claims. Virani’s claims, while quite similar to Stallman’s, came after he was concerned about his friends and family. Reading through this article you can see that Virani was not only a supporter of Facebook but also, to an extent, an advocate.  You can see he brings up some points that Stallman doesn’t, however both articles are a good resource. Virani’s claims are thus: * FB sells your likes - http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/01/21/facebook-is-recycling-your-likes-to-promote-stories-youve-never-seen-to-all-your-friends/ * FB loves to sneak things through - http://www.zdnet.com/article/is-facebook-damaging-your-reputation-with-sneaky-political-posts/ * They know what you’re reading - http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/telecom/internet/stalking-on-facebook-is-easier-than-you-think * Because of this, insurance companies love to mine your data - http://www.insure.com/car-insurance/social-media-future.html * Facebook delivers your info to the NSA - http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data So, looking at a sampling of the two articles above, we already see that Facebook, as an example, represents the potential harm all social media networks can do to its users. While FB is more popular than most, we must assume that if it happens there it’ll happen elsewhere, ergo social media networks pose a harm to our privacy and security as individuals and potentially even activism. This means that it also has the potential to be used as a weapon to enforce societal contagions—memes—as a way to groom users and steer them toward Government or corporate approved behavior and trends. Moving onto the next chapter, we’ll present the information people have discovered that supports, at the very least, how Facebook (and possibly other social media sites) is a danger to its users. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ===The Evidence=== Using the information found at https://veekaybee.github.io/facebook-is-collecting-this/  and https://labs.rs/en/ , we can further see that, in the end, FB has no real qualm about violating your rights and privacy. Looking at the article written by Vicki Boykis we can see what information is collected by FB, and in Vicki’s own words… “TL;DR: Facebook collects data about you in hundreds of ways, across numerous channels. It’s very hard to opt out, but by reading about what they collect, you can understand the risks of the platform and choose to be more restrictive with your Facebook usage.” Actually reading the article, we can see that any user entered data is collected and placed into their (FB’s) database through hundreds of various means, which show cases how FB works with big data. Hive, Hadoop, Hbase, Bigpipe, MySQL, Memcacher, Thrift and much more are used in various ways, all working to keep the house of cards that is Facebook propped up and running while housed in massive data centers located around the world, like the one in Prineville, Oregon. Caching, collecting and archiving your information and data, possibly passing it through a backroom server owned by the government or at the very least one of its agencies. It doesn’t stop there, either. Facebook is known for collecting your keystrokes and tracking your mouse’s movements, even using some of this data to conduct studies. This means everything is now potentially saved, even if you wanted it deleted. They keep track of things you edit and delete, the meta data and other items besides what you leave up and/or post. Again, this shows just a tiny bit of FB collects on you, especially how they can use this to possibly predict things you want to say or do, thus we end up in the realm of pre-activities. Pre-crime and similar notions from movies suddenly rear their ugly heads, showing you that possibly in the near future you could end up on a list just for something you didn’t say. They use all of this to make extrapolations about whom and what you are, what you do and how much time you spend on their site doing anything, regardless of what it is you’re doing. You’ll never not exist on Facebook if you made an account simply because they’ve traces of you everywhere, constantly being catalogued, cached and backed up somewhere for others to find. This is why FB and social media is dangerous in general—one database leak and some information you thought gone could resurface. Don’t believe us? Go and look here: https://www.facebook.com/help/302796099745838 Download your personal subset and see just what Facebook has on you, especially how they generated Ads they believe you’d be interested in. Pair this with what information you give them and combine it. See how disturbing it is with the general information you gave them to fill out your profile? See what they can deduce with such tiny bits of information? You’re marked by this beast now and if FB or any social network really wanted to, they can sell this information whenever they wanted to other companies. Not only does its employees have access to your private information (https://www.quora.com/Do-Mark-Zuckerberg-or-Facebook-employees-have-a-skeleton-key-granting-them-access-to-every-members-Facebook-profile-page-and-information) but you’re also a guinea pig to them, no better than a rodent to poke and prod for their own experiments. They don’t care about you, you’re just a human cattle to them for them to do with as they please. Again, don’t believe us? Checkout their research webpage (https://research.fb.com/). Noticed it?  “At Facebook, research permeates everything we do.” * They monitor your emotions - https://research.fb.com/support-when-you-re-feeling-blue/ * They manipulate your emotions - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-news-feeds * They want you to strap on the digital feed sack and never leave - http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/06/news-feed-fyi-taking-into-account-time-spent-on-stories/ You end up in a bubble, isolated from all other conflicting sources and opinions. You end up becoming trapped and only fed the things you like, which means you don’t get a healthy diet of information. They fatten you up on narratives they decide are good for you besides you clicking like or dislike. This means they can control the flow of information, making you a useful idiot for whatever side they support. They don’t want you free and thinking critically, they want you to do as they say. Now, before we spend too much time on the above article, we urge you to give it a read and look it over. Like the other articles we’ve mentioned, it goes into great detail about how much FB invades your personal life and wants to actively expose and track people wherever they are, especially if they can make a buck off that information. Moving onto the information from Labs.rs (https://labs.rs/en/category/facebook-research/), you’ll find their trilogy of articles. The first one you’ll find the most informative, especially the maps they’ve made. As you read their articles and look at the maps they’ve created, you soon realize just how far of a rabbit hole we’re digging into. The end result being: YOU’RE FACEBOOK’S PRODUCT While Facebook can claim they don’t sell your information, you can find numerous articles on the matter that they do, especially to advertisers. * FB sells your web browsing data - https://consumerist.com/2014/06/12/facebook-is-now-selling-your-web-browsing-data-to-advertisers/ * The price of free - http://www.pcworld.com/article/2986988/privacy/the-price-of-free-how-apple-facebook-microsoft-and-google-sell-you-to-advertisers.html Privacy has been privatized - http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-google-information-nsa-iphone-android-data-personal-2016-2 This means that using FB or any social network is a move against your overall level of privacy and security. Add the fact that there’s no guarantee that Facebook or any social network isn’t manipulating your feed continuously, you soon can see what the potential scenarios that can happen. What is preventing someone from using social media to spread enough gloomy news and information to cause a massive wave of suicides? With people claiming teenage suicides are contagious (http://www.newsweek.com/2016/10/28/teen-suicide-contagious-colorado-springs-511365.html) and social media being a possible contributors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_suicide) all it’d take is for the wrong person in control of the right website and then we begin to see why there needs to be more laws in favor of our privacy and security when it comes to these websites. ___References:___ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3477910/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ===The Realization==== Social Media was believed to be, like the radio, a means to end miscommunication and bring about an era of information sharing the likes of which we’ve never seen before. However the sad truth is that it has become yet another tool for those in power to use against an unsuspecting populace. The US government being one of the bigger exploiters, especially the NSA, has worked with such infamous individuals like Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and their websites in order to aggregate information on as many users as possible. It’s nothing more than domestic  and foreign spying and one of the many reason why you, as an internet user, should abandon all forms of social networking (Facebook, Myspace, Twitter…ETC). This is because they're no more than breeding grounds for the cancerous tumors of surveillance and so-called legal operations meant to sniff out supposed terrorists that usually end up being some bullied kid in high school venting about jocks and cheerleaders. The Obama administration even acknowledges this much and admitted to wanting backdoors, but if that doesn’t bother you maybe the fact that many abusive individuals use apps and malware to track down their targets or partners will make you think twice about using Facebook and other social networking sites with such naivety. Social networks have become a vice, whether this was intentional or not is irrelevant, as it has shown to be as addictive as any drug. It also has even led to an increasingly common trend: FoMo; Literally the fear of missing out. These websites and their communities will continue to be a vice for our species until we can learn to properly use such social networks with moderation and with responsibility. ___References:___ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/the-nsa-is-using-facebook-to-hack-into-your-computer-20140312 http://www.globalresearch.ca/domestic-spying-and-social-media-google-facebook-back-doors-for-government-wiretaps/5334449 http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jan/25/spyware-smartphone-abusive-men-track-partners-domestic-violence http://www.casacolumbia.org/newsroom/press-releases/2011-national-teen-survey-finds https://theintercept.com/2014/07/14/manipulating-online-polls-ways-british-spies-seek-control-internet/ https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jul/14/gchq-tools-manipulate-online-information-leak ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ===The Conclusion=== The real truth as to why you need to give up social media is because, if you truly want to fight the establishment or punch up, you need to disappear in order to be seen or heard. With all this information online being archived and housed in data centers where everything’s checked, marked and catalogued the only real way to get anything done is to scrub your digital footprint off of the internet and start looking into information security. While you can find most everything you need to do this over at the PB’s library (https://paranoidsbible.tumblr.com/library), you still won’t get far if you don’t cut ties with social media. If you want to be an activist or a spokesperson for some cause and/or oppressed people, it won’t work if all the establishment or your opponents have to do is a quick search query on any number of engines and bring up the fact that you said something that currently isn’t up to par with what society deems good or bad. Look toward China and their cyberpunk-ish dystopian point system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System)  they want to put into place where everyone’s rated by social points that anyone can add or take away. This could be the future of the world, one day, if no one starts acting and working toward a revolution where our information is just that, our information. Not to be one of those people, however if you look at current pop-culture you’ll find an animated series from Japan called Psycho-Pass. It’s set in the future and an entire country is controlled by a system where right and wrong is decided solely by the system, which is almost freakishly close to what happening in today’s day and age. You’ve children now being watched by mega-corporations, where even their schools, parents and daily lives are also monitored. They begin to self-censor because they fear social-castration where they’re ostracized and their brand is meaningless and shunned by the other living-brands due to things said online, in private or caught by a passing smart phone and uploaded to social media. This creates a toxic environment where children (and everyone in general) is limited to the things and ideas they’re exposed to and exploring past what’s deemed appropriate is a sentence of living-death where no one wishes to interact with you lest they too are cast to the shadows for breaking protocol. You’ll soon begin to see people readily conditioned through fear of being an outcast, ergo no one will dissent, participate in activism, challenge the status quo our simply tell someone no. This means these same people will reproduce and their spawn will fall into the same spiraling  behavioral sink where you don’t want to speak against the state in fear of an arbitrary number being dropped, thus lowering your prospects in the future when you need a job or get married. Soon you’ll see critical thinking cast side all in favor marching to the same tune of whatever the deep state wants, which will all be due to people not revolting now and costing social media money VIA not participating in their schemes and deleting your accounts. You can stop future surveillance by dissenting right now and by isolating yourself from social networks and media, thus starting a trend where if enough people were to up and remove themselves from a site like Facebook you’ll see their bottom line falter. You can prevent people from being politically timid and docile like the voter-cattle the deep state wants, and all it takes is saying no to social media and networks. If you’re from the US or any Western country, you’ll see what made us special slowly erode due to activist judges and people too worried about hurting the feelings of others. Disregard the arbitrary numbers and mooing of those not currently in the know, as you can prevent things like the destruction of the Bill of Rights by not participating in the rat race of self-implication that’s social media. Why let corporations and political dictate your behavior? Why let them control the narrative and determine our cultural values? Don’t let them dictate your patterns of behavior or the behavior society as a whole with threats of a good-citizen-point.  This isn’t a Left or Right political issue, nor is it an issue about genetalia, men, women or chromosomes. This is an issue about privacy and freedom. This is an issue of rights. You’ve the powers-to-be working to use women against themselves, and the same with men and children and various racial groups. This will continue to snowball and force to reality a self-censored public if we don’t start making our voices heard through our actions. The more to submit and make accounts, the more that fall prey to the need for approval from internet strangers and the nanny-state the governments are forcing. Don’t believe the above? Then how about some more evidence and reasons as to why you need to leave your social media accounts VIA some links and discussion points below? * Many privacy advocates and various individuals agree, Facebook’s (and social media) a danger to our freedoms and rights. https://stallman.org/facebook.html |https://www.salimvirani.com/facebook/ | https://labs.rs/en/ | https://veekaybee.github.io/facebook-is-collecting-this/ * They’ve already started the narrative that if you aren’t on social media, or simply are introverted, you’re a potential problem. http://www.medicaldaily.com/your-social-media-presence-may-tell-whether-youre-narcissist-introvert-or-sociopath-270299 | http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/08/06/beware-tech-abandoners-people-without-facebook-accounts-are-suspicious/ * It’s comprised of nothing more than lies, deceit and overall manipulation for simple arbitrary and made up numbers that can hurt your self esteem and overall health. https://conversionxl.com/online-manipulation-all-the-ways-youre-currently-being-deceived/ | http://illusionofmore.com/social-media-manipulate/ | http://fortune.com/2015/12/30/social-media-emotions/ | https://www.independent.co.uk/student/istudents/filters-and-photo-manipulation-on-social-media-sites-are-creating-a-generation-of-deluded-a6852736.html * Again, it’s like a drug and can cause addiction. http://www.medicaldaily.com/facebook-addiction-activates-same-brain-areas-drugs-how-social-media-sites-hook-you-320252 * The astroturfing’s real and it’s aimed at women and young people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing | http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2017/07/women_young_people_experience_the_chilling_effects_of_surveillance_at_higher.html * The people behind it, like Zuckerberg, are the closest things we’ve to Bond villains. https://boingboing.net/2015/05/21/mark-zuckerberg-just-dropped-a.html | http://www.staradvertiser.com/2017/01/18/business/facebooks-zuckerberg-sues-to-force-land-sales/ | https://trak-in.cdn.ampproject.org/c/trak.in/tags/business/2017/06/07/facebooks-evil-patents-discovered-your-emotions-may-soon-be-secretly-recorded-by-your-own-camera/amp/ | https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/the-mark-zuckerberg-manifesto-is-a-blueprint-for-destroying-journalism/517113/ | http://www.barstoolsports.com/dmv/mark-zuckerberg-confirmed-facebook-is-working-on-reading-your-mindtelepathy-and-the-details-are-wild/ * Deleting your social media outright lessens your chances of being doxed. * The government can legally access your profiles, accounts and information. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-27/us-government-can-legally-access-your-facebook-data-and-now-we-know-how ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ===Afterword=== The arguments have been made a thousand times as to why social media and networking is a bad thing and no matter what we say or do, we can’t really rephrase it anymore. This is why we made this guide, to provide arguments and information as to why you should say goodbye to social networks and learn to live without them. They’re a tool to undermine any initiatives taken against censorship and oppression, as their main goals are to ultimately get people to self-incriminate.