#today we have largely divorced the aesthetic from the political and we look at the last century and don’t fully understand it

[swallowerofdharma]

Over Casca’s naked body

Part one: A long premise

We can’t escape from our geopolitical context even when we are reading manga. We have internalized a good amount of beliefs, values, practices, even regulations from our lived experiences and various simulacra we have been exposed to, especially those in an audiovisual form.

If you grew up in the US, you know that freedom of speech is a core value there. But, while you can say mostly whatever you want within your own country, the US constitution has given the government the right to regulate what comes in from abroad. [1]

And that power has been used. Idealistically, greater access to common technologies even before the internet should have seen a redistribution of the media-creating capacity to many foreign countries outside of the US, so that people could tell their stories. But that hasn’t always been the case, with some exceptions, especially if we consider the biggest narratives that reached global popularity.

During the Cold War, anything that might be considered “communist propaganda” could be seized by the Post Office and never delivered. Books or even souvenirs from communist countries, for instance. Pamphlets criticizing US foreign policy. (…) Obviously it wasn’t totally like North Korea, plenty of foreign movies and music were allowed into the US. But the media that caught on was either already Americanized, or so plastically exotic that it doesn’t really say anything about the culture where it is from. The Beatles were British, but they got their start covering American rock and roll musicians. When John Lennon stepped out of the line, the American government made sure that he knew it. Movies imported from Japan were mostly samurai flicks, with very few movies set in the modern day. The film Ikiru is widely considered the best Japanese film ever made (…) but this existential drama about a depressed lonely man was only given a limited release in California, and the poster was edited to feature a stripper who is only in the movie for one minute. The narrow stream of European movies that made into the USA came in the form of the French New Wave cinema, movies that were stylistically inspired by American films, but also so stuffy that few audiences would ever want to watch them anyway. This was further stifled by the Hays Code, a set of extremely strict regulations that were in place from 1934 to 1968. (…) Some things that were completely banned from ever being shown in any film included: bad guys winning. All movies must end with the police outwitting the evil criminals, or the criminals causing their own demise. Any nudity. (…) Blood or dead bodies. (…) Interracial couples. White people as slaves. Criticism of religion, or of any other country. Naturally this prevented the more artistically liberal European films from being shown in American cinemas and when they did get a release, they were usually edited (…). At least until the rules were abolished in 1968 and replaced by the age rating system we have today. [1]

Even after several decades of access to the internet and foreign cultures, some attitudes have been internalized and carried on. For example, I had direct experience of the ways my own culture has been perceived and stereotyped or interpreted in terms not dissimilar from the exotic. And the same happens to me probably if I don’t keep in check my own personal beliefs about cultures that have been presented to me in similar ways. And I was surprised to see by how deeply rooted and spread are certain attitudes towards punishment or violent retribution viewed as necessary, the policing and self policing, and the expression of judgments or condemnation, and all this can complicate the understanding of different forms of narratives and the acceptance of different cultural attitudes and norms, without the expression of any opinion about morality or legitimacy.

I am reminding you that this is a long premise because I evidently don’t have the gift of brevity but this article is about Berserk and Casca.

In 1956 Anna Magnani won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her first English-speaking role in the American movie The Rose Tattoo. In 1958 Miyoshi Umeki was the first Asian born actress to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in Sayonara, a movie that despite its title was an American drama starring Marlon Brando. It isn’t hard to see in these decisions from the Academy, or the ones that followed in other categories, the willingness to build relationships between the US and specific foreign countries where the American army had a massive presence and that after WWII were ideal places for American investors, considering significant rebuilding necessary after the loss in the war. The movie industry and everything around it had instrumental roles. When it comes to the Academy Award, it is very interesting to notice that the women were the first ones to be nominated, becoming ambassadors and facilitators of the reshaping of the images of Italy and Japan from enemies to new essential strategic allies in the Cold War. And here comes the problem of the exotic, because after several decades I still see similarities in the American perception of those foreign cultures, Italian and Japanese, to those easy and friendly and intentionally constructed imaginaries of that time. Take the press around Anna Magnani or Miyoshi Umeki for example. Terms are so widely used and repeated that they are still in their Wikipedia pages in English today. For what interests me here, I am going to quote or summarize parts of the video essay listed below as [2] but I really recommend watching it entirely. It really helped me understand some of the issues I am talking about here, but it is much more than just this. And there is footage worth the time. [I know that many people here on tumblr really dislike YouTube videos. I understand why, when it comes to manga and anime, written articles have still better quality and content, in my opinion, but there are also many video essayists doing their due diligence on several other topics. And when I am busy cooking I put them on].

In the 1950s one of the problem with the new alliance with Japan was the widespread hate and racism towards Japanese people.

The government stepped in, producing educational films meant to endear Japanese culture to Americans (…) They showed off Japanese industry, introduced Americans to sushi and sumo wrestling, explained the country’s new democratic system et cetera. (…) A lot of [musical] acts that were popular with American soldiers, specifically exoticized Asian girls bands, like the Kim sisters and the Tokyo Happycoats, come over to the US and appear on television as both entertainment and a sort of cultural ambassadors, not only demonstrating America’s cultural power and dominance by performing recognizable American tunes, but also signaling to white Americans that those cultures didn’t pose a threat. (…)

It’s worth looking at this film [Sayonara] as part of a larger theme in a very specific post war moment. Gina Marchetti points out in her book Romance and the yellow peril: «Between June 22, 1947, and December 31, 1952, 10517 American citizens, principally Armed Services Personnel, married Japanese women. Over 75% of the total Americans are Caucasian». Meaning, Japanese war brides and the concept of interracial marriages was very much a conversation. (…) Sayonara must be seen as one of many films which called for a new evaluation of Japan as an enemy nation. (…) Much of the way [Miyoshi Umeki] was discussed is probably exactly how you might expect. The language journalists used to describe her was unambiguously racialized and often condescending. In the aftermath of her Oscar win, for example, Louella Parsons called her «a lovely little bit of Japanese porcelain», adding: «What a cute little thing she was in her native costume». Still, her Japanese identity also seemed to serve as a symbol, an embodiment of the new friendly Japan. In Miyoshi, Americans would find an idealized portrait of reconciliation, a woman who bore no resentment over the war, a woman who brought homesick American troops to tears by singing White Christmas, who adored American pizza, who learned English by listening to American records. She was accepted because she actively appreciated and participated in American culture. [2]

The roles offered to Miyoshi Umeki are significant in many ways. After Sayonara, she was cast to play other Asian characters besides Japanese ones. One recurring theme in those movies in particular is the contrast between modernity and tradition.

William G. Hyland writes, Flower Drum Song is a «clash between the Americanized lifestyle of the young Chinese and the traditions of their parents». (…) Miyoshi Umeki plays Mei Lee, a Chinese stowaway who arrives in the US for an arranged marriage. The more Americanized she becomes the more independent, the more willing she is to strike out on her own. [Chang-Hee] Kim writes: «[Flower Drum Song] flamboyantly shows that Asians in America were ready and willing to cast off their heritage and become real Americans in repudiation of the pre-war racial consideration of Asians as permanent aliens». I mention this not only because it’s one of Miyoshi’s major roles, but also because this theme, a supposed enlightenment via westernization, occurs again and again in her filmography, particularly in her work on television. Han [?] writes «Umeki’s representation on television is in constant oscillation between her status as a subservient Asian woman and her transformation into an assertive, modern female professional who has achieved independence through American cultural influence». [2]

Bear with me for a little longer if you can, because we are at the point where, watching the video, I experienced that sensation better translated visually in a lightbulb being turned on. I am skipping here the presentation of the story and footage from Miyoshi’s first appearance on television in The Donna Reed Show, but I once again invite readers to watch the video, which features high quality original footage. I was really struck by the “sensitive way” the American woman - Donna Reed I presumed - approaches the character played by Miyoshi, as the writers back then were well aware of the sensitive racial implications, and nevertheless a certain mentality pushes thought. Watching still, it is easier to avoid the presumption that in the 1960s “they didn’t know better” or that contemporary attitudes have improved greatly, just because we are more careful about the language we use.

The thesis statement of this episode is not subtle. The rejection of traditional Japanese customs allows her to live more fully in a democracy. Of course it isn’t really much of a choice, is it. Maintaining the customs of your culture or risking alienating your entire community. She changes her clothes, puts on a hat and goes shopping because she is an American now. Obviously these stories are told from the white American perspective, where this rejection of tradition and culture is portrayed as unambiguously positive and relatively tension free. This was not the case in Japan where the relationship between modernity and tradition were richly explored in cinema, particularly in women’s films. [2]

I would like to add that the independence that Donna’s character shows is only possible because of a series of factors, including the fact that her husband secures her a higher level of comforts, in comparison with lower classes or non-white Americans, and that domestic work is presumably done by home electrical appliances or other women, especially when you add child care and looking after the elderly to the equation. The unwillingness to consider those types of labor, traditionally carried on by women, as of equal importance to any other jobs is rarely discussed when it comes to the issue of women’s emancipation. Not to mention how, alongside this idyllic world shown on television, in the same country large numbers of women have to deal with continuous push backs in the name of different traditional values that all the same prevent many of them from achieving true equality. Those types of conversation and conflicts between traditional and modern happens at the same time in many countries and in most cases translates to continuous negotiations and compromises carried by men and women in real contexts and real situations, without necessarily white American women being aware of it or of all the necessary nuances.

Let me add this last element of conclusion about Miyoshi Umeki’s story.

In 2018 her son told Entertainment Weekly that in the 1970s she etched out her name on her Oscar and then threw the trophy away. Although he isn’t sure exactly why she did it he said: «She told me, I know who I am and I know what I did. It was a point of hers to teach me a lesson that the material things are not who she was». What Miyoshi Umeki achieved is pretty remarkable but one can’t help but feel that she could probably have done a lot more if she’d been allowed to move beyond her identity. [2]

Part two: Are we reading the same manga?

After considering all this, and more that I can possibly include in here to avoid this being even lengthier, I can’t help but wonder about the generalizations I have seen repeated vastly about portrayals of women in Japanese media, as well as misunderstanding of cultural attitudes towards nudity or the treatment of sensitive topics like sexuality and rape. There is a diffuse certain sense of entitlement, sometimes you can hear a condescending tone even, and this isn’t limited to the US. But why approach a foreign culture with a patronizing attitude instead of trying to understand the context more deeply? So many manga readers are willing to ask for clarification on translations, but not many ask about the context or the visual aspects involved in manga writing. I like to read analysis about different topics, so I look for them in English too because they are very numerous and easily accessible, but when it comes to the critique about the portrayal of women in too many cases I have to click away because of too many bias or that subtle sense of superiority of judgment. Berserk has become easily accessible and more and more popular but it is so greatly misunderstood at various degrees by a lot of its western readers - me included - and I really wanted to understand what is preventing, in most cases, a textual and contextual analysis.

The Hays Code hasn’t been around since 1968 but the sentiment that the only proper conclusion for every story is the triumph of the good guys and the punishment for the wicked is very much alive and well. There is this conviction that the only clever readers are those able to separate the heroes from the villains, or the good deeds from evil, and root for the right side to achieve retribution and satisfaction. The Hays Code hasn’t been enforced officially but it’s there in essence and every counter narrative has been rendered almost ineffective or judged poorly. As for the treatment of women, I don’t feel like we can honestly and surely compare or scrutinize Japanese media under special lenses. Nudity in comic books seems to me to be very common outside of Japan too, depending on censorship rules. I certainly notice how frequently Casca is shown naked or has been threatened with sexual violence, but I also notice that she isn’t the only one. The exaggeration of Guts’ muscles and the mutilation of his body are largely put on display. Griffith is intentionally shown fully naked, or completely covered by an elaborate armor, and he is subjected to many threats of physical and sexual violence as well. Charlotte is shown naked, but always in her bedroom, in a private environment or with a transparent cloth or a sheet of some kind to make her nudity different from the occasions when Casca’s body is publicly displayed. I am careful with my own thoughts when I read Berserk, I take the time to analyze my reactions and what I am feeling in these situations. I think that this is the reason that certain books or media are intentionally aimed to adults. I don’t feel a necessity to call to censorship or to give guidance of a moral kind but rather to make the necessary reflections. And I can’t imagine how someone can understand the story without taking their time with it. Part three: Casca’s rape

In 1973 the animation studio Mushi Production released a film called Belladonna of Sadness. I haven’t seen it yet but I know a little about it and I am planning to watch it when I feel like I can do it without being affected in a bad way. It is well known that Miura remembered this film when he designed the Eclipse. In 1975 Pier Paolo Pasolini directed the film Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, which I strongly don’t recommend to the casual viewer or anyone who felt even slightly offended by Berserk. Suffice to say that in a particular political climate and in the context of the sexual revolution of the late 1960s, in the 1970s nudity and sexuality were at the forefront of the debate and human bodies were exhibited in a symbolic way that can be misunderstood today without knowledge of the context. Gender expression was questioned and men grew their hair or refused to wear suits or to follow rigid dress codes regardless of their sexual orientation. Sexual acts were considered political acts in ways that aren’t comparable with today for many reasons. The languages, the words and the visuals we use are ever changing and actual for a moment and gone the next one or misunderstood. Many words used by queer people in the 1970s wouldn’t be received well today, because the context has been transformed. For what I understand, in films like Belladonna of Sadness and Salò rape and cruelty are preeminently used as symbols because rape and cruelty presented in a direct visual form effect greatly any type of audience and can’t go unnoticed. The sociopolitical climate in the 1970s, in the middle of the Cold War, was particularly violent, both in Italy and Japan, and the art of the time can be remarkably bleak. [Go Nagai’s Devilman was published between 1972 and 1973, Osamu Tezuka’s MW was published between 1976 and 1978, Takemiya Keiko’s Kaze to Ki no Uta was also published between 1976 and 1984].

Kentarō Miura was born in 1966, he breathed the air and grew up in that same climate and was influenced and informed by it, especially later, when he finds himself as a young man in the renewed bleakness of the 1990s. It is likely that he saw Belladonna of Sadness when he was old enough, when he started to develop the story of Berserk, and after being greatly influenced by Nagai’s Devilman. The number of sources of inspirations that Miura used for Berserk is vast, varied and multidimensional and includes books and novels and films of various genres (historical, fantasy, horror, sci-fi in particular) manga, foreign comics books, and traditional art. It is often pointed out among fans that he was also a big fan of Star Wars. Pop Culture Detective released a very interesting video essay called Predatory Romance in Harrison Ford Movies [3] that brought to my attention many things that I didn’t notice or thought about when I was seeing those films myself as a young girl [I am more or less a decade younger than Miura fyi]. Analyzing Star Wars, Indiana Jones or Blade Runner with particular attention to the relationship between the male lead, Ford, and women is an interesting exercise and helps to re-contextualize our judgment about the treatment of women across different media with arguably less reach than Star Wars. I am not inviting anyone to make comparisons and ranking which is better, or absolve Miura because he was influenced by the context around him as everyone else, but I am asking to let go of the presumption that Japanese media in particular presents problematic attitudes towards women by default. The problems are much more generalized than we’d probably like. Better analysis or methodologies are needed to make a proper assessment, and we really shouldn’t assume by default that manga (for boys and men) equals bad treatment of women.

I hope that someone is still reading after such a long time. I didn’t know how to make my point on Casca without at least presenting some of these considerations. I must say I have understood myself better, having questioned why I was feeling uncomfortable when reading Casca but not offended. I understood that Miura wanted me to feel that way, uncomfortable, horrified, and I can appreciate Berserk better [in particular as a person that wasn’t permitted to live in a female body without a certain type of violence].

As stated previously, I noticed that Casca is more exposed and shown in all her vulnerability in much extreme situations: to multiple men in very public displays, like on the battlefield or at the center of the circle of Apostles in the Eclipse. She is also shown naked and vulnerable in other moments, especially alone with Guts. Those intimate moments with Guts, during the Golden Age, are instrumental for the readers to see her in all her humanity, without the armor, or the female dress, in order to build an emotional connection with her. In the cave, Casca makes herself emotionally vulnerable in front of Guts for the first time and tells him her story, exposing her past, her goals and her true self. She tells him things about Grittith too, things that are meant to show Guts/the readers Griffith as much naked, vulnerable and human as she is. Let’s pay attention and try to recollect Guts’ reactions to her story: he is listening to her, but he is embarrassed, distracted and attracted by her nudity and he fails to see Griffith as a human being, potentially fallible and not much different from Casca or himself. Guts also fails to take away from the story the original message, something more than Casca’s infatuation with Griffith as part of her being a woman. Comparing Guts’ reactions to Casca’s nakedness, his recollections or focus on the conversation, what he takes from it and what he doesn’t: a big part of the male readership of Berserk is probably in his same situation. It isn’t till later by the waterfall, that we see Casca alone with Guts again in an intimate way. This time he is naked and vulnerable and completely exposed too. This time through the physical connection between the two, within the sexual act, Guts can’t hide himself anymore, can’t deflect from his past and his fears. I assume that that is an important moment for the male readership to start to feel emotionally invested in the connection between Guts and Casca. That emotional connection and the investment in the relationship helps them to see Casca as a human being through the Eclipse and if that didn’t work then they still can see and feel the horror of the rape of Casca through Guts. Because Miura didn’t want anyone to enjoy that scene or to be sexually aroused without at least the horror and the moral objection to it.

Casca is a woman of color, born in a disadvantaged family and community, that ended up in a mercenary group without achieving the things she wanted, never fully belonging and constantly threatened by groups of men on the enemy side with forms of violence specifically targeted and unnecessary cruel. And everything she goes through culminates or goes back to the Eclipse - before and after - and that should be taken as completely symbolic. Like the multiple instances of rape in Pasolini’s Salò, the innocent, poor and exploitable youth is violated by those in power or those who are in charge. Gambino decides that Guts is expendable or due a lesson in humility, he takes the money and coldly facilitates Guts’ rape. Gennon is rich and powerful and pretends to recreate his fantasy, a sick version of Greek ped*philia. And all he does is using money and power to horrifically exploit the youth and Griffith offers himself up and loses a fundamental part of himself in the process. But the most cruel thing in Berserk is Griffith surrendering to the call of power and doing the same thing to Casca, in the absence of lust or desire: the corruption that has been in him - and has reached Guts as well - has spread. Griffith’s surrender to the call of power, and his intolerance for more of his own pain, silences all empathy in him.

In conclusion, nudity has various narrative functions, beside the suggestion of the erotic: through each character’s naked body, male or female, we see their vulnerability and their fundamental humanity [and if I remember correctly in contrast the rapists are always dressed or covered]. And rape has a symbolic meaning, beside the literal one and the psychological exploration of trauma. Violence but in particular sexual violence is one of the most estreme and powerful tools that can be used in stories [especially in visual media], but unfortunately the overuse of it in an edulcorate format, or as a tease, or devoid of any meaning, has ceased to call for disgust and challenge us to think, has perhaps lessen the impact and the gravity around it. In the 1970s Pasolini saw the dark side of the sexual revolution and how the rich and powerful were willing to build economic empires just to have access to the youth and to the most beautiful women. But he wasn’t the only one. We should reconsider Belladonna of Sadness and the original meaning of those themes in films or later in manga like Berserk and think about it deeply and seriously and not approach every piece of art as entertainment.

Videography:

How America got so Stupid [1]

Miyoshi Umeki: The First East Asian Woman to Win an Acting Oscar [2]

Predatory Romance in Harrison Ford Movies [3]

[mollytatlisu]

White Shirt Shoot 1

In todays lecture we were given a task in order to kickstart us to produce content for our magazines. The task was to style a white shirt in a way that communicates our narrative taking the form of an informal photoshoot. The only rule was a white shirt had to be included; aside from that we could use any props, backgrounds and make up we wanted.

Before I begin to discuss each images qualities and disadvantages I am going to explain the stylistic choices I made regarding my models appearances. On my first model chloe, I styled the white shirt underneath a translucent boob tube with it half tucked into a leather mini skirt, underneath the skirt on one leg she wore a pair of pinstripe trousers, with floral pattered tights covering the other leg. I accessorised with a grommet belt around her right leg and a studded one around her waist, and two silver necklaces around her neck. Starting with the clothing, I went for the overlaying of the skirt on the trousers to mimic the DIY aesthetic that goth inherited from punk, as well the unique gender expression engrained in goth culture that I attempted to communicate by combining the skirt with the trousers; merging typical femininity and masculinity and dipping into their inherent gender blurring. The boob tube also stemmed from the DIY element, with the safety pins around the nipple acting as an expression of an average goths outward openness regarding sexuality, which is similar to why I incorporated the extra chains; I think they have loose kink connotations. Not only is the cross necklace made using a bike chain which perfectly demonstrates DIY, it indicates the respectfulness goths exhibit towards other cultures, religions and beliefs; which I first stumbled across in my research around the Visigoth’s sack of Rome; and their “politeness” towards Christian’s at that time. Aswell as this I also felt as though the cross’ unusually large size compared to typical religious crosses contributed to the extravagant, over the top style goth fashion possesses. I opted for the floral tights as one of my predictions based on my research thus far is that goth will take a much more feminine turn for all people that identity with the goth subculture; in short because of the increased awareness of the LGBTQ+ community and the development of pop culture influences such as Wednesday Addams. As for her hair and makeup, I attempted to emulate a trad goth look with heavy eyeliner, black lips and a pale complexion aswell as the exaggerated hair that I achieved through the use of back combing and hair spray. When exploring gothic rock I learnt the significance of Siouxsie Sioux and her band, so for the hair and makeup I took inspiration from her iconic look.

I think although this wasn’t my initial intention, my second model Sadie’s look is much more muted. I styled the white shirt underneath a band tee, paired with flared leather trousers, Jadon dr martens and accessories such as the grommet belt strung like a bag across her shoulder. Although the look has unusual elements such as the fingerless glove on one hand, in general it appears more put together and more resemblant of the modern goth; which I think is quite apparent when the two are stood together. I included the band t shirt to emphasis the importance of music in the development of goth, with the band “Divorce” actually being an indie / rock band from the early 2000s. I went with the dr martens because I feel as though they are a timeless staple within the goth wardrobe as well as that of many other subcultures. I feel as though the leather trousers contribute to the cleaner aesthetic this look has, and may be a material I consider to be involved in the future of goth.

Moving onto locations, I used various spots around and under the subway near my flat. Although I would’ve preferred to go further and take some photos in the oasis market to encorporate a musical background or around pigeon park to include its gothic style cathedral; the shoot was last minute and it was raining, so going to those locations would’ve comprised the hair and makeup etc. I think the most effective backgrounds are probably the overly textured walls with the graffiti on them, as the images they’re in exude almost a rebellious attitude; perfect for reflecting the anti establishment stance of goths dating back to the defeat of the Roman Empire.

[nicksthoughtsonthings]

Mad Men (☆☆☆☆)

Year: 2007 - 2014

Creator: Matthew Weiner 

Spanning the sumptuous glamour of 1960′s New York, ‘Mad Men’ impresses as an intense character study of Don Draper, the enigmatic creative director of an ad agency, as we follow his spiral into depravity, alienation and, ultimately, redemption. The series also has a multitude of colourful characters, on their own difficult moral paths, to enjoy on the way down. To the phantom reader who wishes to watch this series but doesn’t want spoilers, I’m sorry to say, but everything will be revealed from here onwards...!

There are 90+ episodes of Mad Men so there’s a lot of plot to discuss. It’s also been a long time since I’ve watched the earlier episodes so I’ll be discussing in terms of the overriding thematic elements, rather than particular plot lines, to give an essence of what the show is really about.

The show’s central tenet is identity, and coming to terms with your identity. It exposes this theme quite literally, in the fact that Don Draper is not who he says he is; he is Dick Whitman, and after a turn of events in the Korean War, he assumes the identity of a fallen comrade, Don Draper – the real Don Draper. This matter is a source of drama in the early seasons, but this idea of identity continues to be pervasive throughout the whole series, and not just for Don Draper; it overshadows every character in whichever ‘role’ they play. 

Consider Bert, the sage individual who sits as a founding partner in Sterling Cooper – as well as Sterling Cooper’s many other guises throughout the programme – and his response to this revelation: "The Japanese have a saying: a man is whatever room he is in, and right now Donald Draper is in this room". This is characteristically Bert, who provides a voice of calm and reason throughout the show. It lets Don off the hook, but it exposes the great idealogical battle in this programme: do our past actions define us, or don’t they? Don leads a double life literally, but many of the other characters have double lives in one way or another. The older characters are of the age to have fought in World War II, and the joys and comradeship, as well as fear and prejudice, continue to bubble under the surface of their characters and guide their action. 

No character exudes this more than Roger Sterling, the great wit and charmer of the series, brilliantly played by John Slattery. Sterling is a philanderer as well; a drinker, twice divorced, wealthy, insecure – not unusual traits to find in the men which inhabit the world of Mad Men. His memories of the War are fond; and despite his inexorable charm towards clients, he stands firm on rejecting the business of Honda, a Japanese company, on the basis of his fallen allies. He cannot forget who he was then, and who he still is today. The partnership status, the reputation, the money and ‘the room’ have a limited effect on who Roger Sterling is at his core. So while Bert’s words of wisdom provide a soothing balm to the viewer and to Donald Draper, we know it can only be temporary, and whatever Don has left in his past will have to be confronted for true catharsis. “for the past is never dead. It’s not even past” (I will never pass up an opportunity to use this quote).

For men of Roger’s generation this era sits in stark contrast to the horrors of war, and this provides a nice interplay between the two periods. But the beauty of the 1960′s setting – apart from the sublime aesthetics, which I will deal with later – is that each societal role was in a state of flux. It was an era of great cultural, social and political change in America. As such, the evolution in the identities of blacks, gays, hippies and women – and all other outliers in mid-century America – is traced with sensitivity throughout the programme; and even if the evolution traced is more a regression, the show has the ability to make you empathise fully with these outliers, and reveal the prejudice as both horribly old-fashioned and deeply offensive. One character who struggles against the misogyny of this era is Joan Harris, whose femininity is frequently alluded to by the men in the office, or in one important moment, used by the office to court commercial favour. She is a sad character. For all her business savvy, she will never be taken seriously. This sad realisation is captured towards the end of the series, after another callous sexual advance by a superior, and we the audience are just as exasperated as her. The 1960′s was, of course, the defining era for free-love and liberal progress, but at the same time it was still a world ultimately ran by Roger Sterling’s and Don Draper’s. The clash between these two worlds fuels a lot of the drama in this programme, and exposes many of the attitudes of the time as flawed.

Towards the end of the series one could feel jaded with the choices of Don Draper. He consistently cheats on whomever he’s with at the time; he drinks himself into a stupor regularly, and even brings down other characters with him (on this point there are too many to name, but two that stick with me are Ted Shaw and Lane Price); and finally, his credentials as an ad man are tested when his creativity seems to be dwindling. He starts out as an enigmatic, charming character, and at the end he is pitiful. As difficult as it was to watch, this was necessary. You need to feel contempt for these characters, and unfortunately this requires repetition and a certain affection for the other people he harms. Only then do you feel the weight of his personality disorders, of which there are many, and the frustration. He gives his car to a young boy whom he sees himself in in the final episodes: “Don’t waste this”. The mask is slipping, as the mistakes of Don Draper at last take their toll. This life of excess can satisfy no longer, and he goes to California, where his life as Don Draper began, for closure. 

The final scene is deeply satisfying; Don is sitting down on the grass, with a number of other lost souls, at a retreat in California. It is a moment of peace after a traumatic day of owning up to his actions to the important women of his life (on the phone with Peggy and Betty). His job is as good as gone, and his life in New York a distant memory. In this moment of calm there is a slight smile, and the screen cuts to a coke advert – apparently one of the most successful ads of all time – as a bunch of hippy types, of all races, sing with a bottle of Coke. It’s Don’s ad. In this moment of tranquility and genuine bliss, his thought is how to commodify it for Coke. At his core he’s an ad man, and it’s this which can give his life a purpose. All the excess and debauchery was, hopefully, just a poor coping strategy for a traumatic childhood. 

I think that is basically the sum of the programme. There are endless character arcs to choose but ultimately the people in this show are looking for meaning and purpose and demand the right to find this meaning on their own terms, and down whichever avenue they choose. No one gets killed, there is little melodrama outside the necessary amount for a TV show which needs people to tune in every week. It’s simply a series which confronts and displays the true drama of our personal and working lives. For this alone, it is worth watching.

N.B. From grand themes such as identity and meaning, it feels almost shallow to discuss the design of Mad Men, but this is an important part of its appeal. The sets are large and ooze that 1960′s cool. The apartments; the furniture, the cars, the suits, the restaurants; there is meticulous attention to detail ensuring the illusion of 1960′s New York is not broken. More than that, the design and textures of the interiors tell you a lot about each character. Roger Sterling has a monochrome office in later seasons which notably more thought out than others in the office. It suggests more of an interest in the luxury of the business than the business itself. Similarly, when the team leaves for McCann at the end the corridors are dark, tight and suffocating; the direct opposite of the light and airy space of Sterling Cooper, and a subliminal reminder of the enormity of McCann and the oppression of the new takeover. Overall, it’s a charming and beautiful world to spend 50 minutes in.

8/09/19

[theonyxpath]

Hi, folks, Rose here. ^_^ I’ve got two previews for you from the Storytelling chapter of Changeling: The Lost! Plus, come see us at Gen Con!

Changeling and Gen Con

Onyx Path will be at Gen Con in booth #145. If you stop by, I’d be happy to talk Changeling, as well as show you the pre-layout manuscript for the book.

We’ll also be running a “What’s Up With White Wolf RPGs?” panel at 11 AM Friday in Pennsylvania Station C, at the Crowne Plaza hotel. We’ll be talking about Changeling there, as well as Changeling-related projects like Dark Eras and a certain crossover book.

(Note: Due to the con, I’ll likely be less available on forums and our social media. Questions about today’s preview may need to wait for next week.)

Storytelling

Changeling‘s Storytelling chapter focuses on the chronicle as a collaboration between the Storyteller and all of the players. Today, I’d like to present two sections from that chapter, written by Jacqueline Bryk.

The first section is on chronicle building, featuring a system for tying together the human and supernatural elements of your game, and a series of questions to help you build an engaging group of characters.

The second is something we haven’t done much of in previous Chronicles of Darkness books: safety techniques. I don’t think it’ll surprise anybody when I say Changeling can get pretty dark. It’s a horror game that can evoke abuse and trauma, which are very real for all too many of us.

Some groups may want to avoid those elements, and some groups may want to dive as deep into them as possible. In my experience, most groups are somewhere in between: they want to explore the dark parts of the game, but don’t want to hurt the players behind the characters.

To that end, we present some discussion of the issues involved in running a Changeling game, as well as an overview of safety techniques that you can use at your table to make play an involving, but not harmful, experience.

In addition to these previews, the Storytelling chapter also covers how to build kiths, courts, Contracts, and Mantles.

Enjoy!

Building Your Chronicle

A chronicle is the tale told by the Storyteller and the players, spun out in threads of gossamer and tears. It’s the story of the player characters, their triumphs and failures, their escape from the Fae and their attempts to start a new life in a world that no longer recognizes them. While the Storyteller controls the world around the characters, it is their story. Players need to have input into designing the plots and problems their characters face throughout the chronicle. If the players all built social butterflies and the Storyteller’s chronicle is a combat-heavy slugfest, no one is going to have fun.

To build a chronicle, you first need to consider your props and themes. Once you’re finished with this part, you can move onto the Hedge Paths.

Themes

Themes are the human dramas that make your chronicle compelling. The overarching themes of Changeling: The Lost are beauty/agony, clarity/madness, and lost/found. In the tension between the opposites, one finds the game. Naturally, these aren’t going to be the only things you’ll explore — the Lost have to deal with very mundane issues in addition to being in the liminal space between humanity and Fae. Themes like “lost love,” “poverty,” and “hunger” could all work in a Changeling chronicle. Each might mean a very different thing to each character. “Loyalty,” for example, could mean protecting one’s freehold, sheltering one’s family even when they no longer claim them as kin, or hiding one’s undying fealty to one’s undying master in Arcadia.

Props

Props are the more fae parts of your chronicle, the magical weirdness that surrounds and permeates the lives of the Lost. Set pieces, scenes, and objects all fall under the heading of props. Anything from the Goblin <arkets to a specific token to a blue rose that only grows in the wall of a specific frozen Arcadian garden can be a prop.

Props can also be more mundane objects that show up throughout the chronicle. A player might choose to have her Bright One character associated with torches, for example, so any scene that revolves around her includes candles or flashlights or other small sources of bright light. Grand Princess Caesura, a lady of the Gentry who appears as a feminine form made of the absence of matter, is associated with open doors and missing keys.

Props don’t just have to be objects, either. Anything that will strongly influence the story can be a prop. A family curse, a bargain ill-made, a portal torn open, or a monarch corrupted by their own power can all be used as props. Really let your imagination run wild here — that’s what Changeling is all about, after all.

Using Props and Themes

When brainstorming your props and themes, note each one on a sticky note or a notecard. By the time you’re finished, you should have roughly one theme and one prop per player character. If there are more, that’s fine, those can be set aside as part of the secondary themes and props for the chronicle.

Lay the themes in a row on a table, then lay the props in a column perpendicular to the themes. For the intersection of each theme and prop, the players should choose a character. Ideally, this is a player character — an Ogre Gristlegrinder bouncer at the intersection of “hunger” and “the goblin market,” for example, or the Bright One above at the intersection of “torches” and “descent.” As a storyteller, this lets you know what sort of character-specific experience your players are looking for.

Free spaces are reserved for Storyteller characters. The intersection of “hunger” and “torches” might be a Huntsman coming after the player characters. Players and the Storyteller should work together to create compelling Storyteller characters that can come into the characters’ lives with some degree of commonality already established so that they better suit the overall aesthetic and feel of the chronicle.

Hedge Paths

A changeling doesn’t come into being in a vacuum. She has family, friends, a life she was pulled from, and a life she’s building. It’s important that both the Storyteller and the players know what’s going on with the troupe’s characters before the chronicle begins — otherwise they’re as lost as an escapee in the Hedge. Following the stages below will help you build well-rounded characters and connect them to the game.

The Life Before

All changelings were human before they were taken by their Keepers. Fae politics pale in comparison to the networks of family, friends, acquaintances, coworkers, petty rivalries, romances, and other connections mortal humans have on Earth. Rare is the Lost who was taken without any sort of link to other people — otherwise, why would the Fae need to make fetches?

Decide who the changeling was before they were spirited away by UFOs or invisible horses. Ideally, this should include their occupation, their home life, and any important people they may be in a relationship of any kind with. It can also include the age they were taken, any identifying marks (tattoos, moles, scars, etc.) and anything else especially relevant to their mortal life.

Example: Ben decides that his changeling character was an ESL teacher in her mortal life. He names her Jocelyn and gives her a husband but no children, a house that they rent together, a book club that meets on Sundays, and a best friend who recently moved two cities away. She has just graduated with her Master’s degree and she is a friendly, if private, person. Ben decides to put Jocelyn’s husband, David, at the intersection of a prop and a theme, “ancient books” and “unconditional love.”

Sarah decides that her character was a college student by the name of Nate. He grew up in a loving, middle-class nuclear family that hunted and cooked together and encouraged his dreams pretty regularly. Nate does not have a significant other and does not particularly want one right now. He lives in the university dorms, has a close group of friends, and enjoys target shooting and knitting equally. Sarah writes down “favorite rifle” as a prop and “growing up too fast” as a theme. She places his soon-to-be court monarch, Mens Machinae, at the intersection of these elements.

Meg decides that her character, Holly Blue, was raised in a hippie commune out in the Pacific Northwest. Her upbringing very much followed the old adage “it takes a village to raise a child” and she remembers her childhood as a time of love and warmth. Holly Blue was homeschooled until she went to college. She took a year off after her junior year to try and find out what she really wanted out of life, and went on a road trip across the U.S. with some friends. Meg writes a prop, “the old car that should have stopped working” and decides to place Holly Blue’s best friend, Nevaeh, at the intersection of that prop and the theme “unconditional love.”

Emily’s character is named Hel, and is the youngest member of a large family. She lived with her divorced mother and only really saw her father on holidays. Emotional honesty was not really prized in her household, so her upbringing was comfortable, if a bit chilly. Hel got her Master’s in Computer Science and worked as a programmer at NASA. She had several partners, but was going through a divorce of her own due to finding the same coldness in her husband as she did in her mother.

Questions to Ask: What is your name? How old are you?

Did you grow up in a nuclear family? Are your parents still together? Divorced? Never married? Single-parent household?

Were you wealthy? Middle class? Poor?

What’s your gender? Does it match your presentation? Are you okay with that? What’s your sexual orientation? Who knows? Did you have a partner — or several?

Did you graduate university? Do you have more than one degree?

What was your occupation? Where were you living? Were you owning, renting, couch surfing, or squatting? Did you have a pet? More than one?

Did you have any identifying marks, like tattoos or scarification? What were your hobbies and pastimes? Who would notice if you were gone or acting strangely?

Promises: What was the biggest promise you made before you were taken?

Sidebar: A Note on Backstory

It is expected that the Storyteller will use her players’ backstories to enrich the play experience. While they should feel free to do so, players should also communicate with the Storyteller on things they would like left untouched — and, by the same token, things they would like messed with. Storyteller torture of characters via backstory should always be consensual. This is a game, after all.

The Capture

Something had to get that changeling into the Hedge into the first place. Something had to take her to Arcadia. Something had to lock her into shackles of bronze and roses, forcing her to do its bidding. Use this section to figure out how the changeling was stolen or seduced away. You may also use it to get a preliminary outline of her Keeper.

Example: Jocelyn is levelheaded and skeptical of offers that seem too good to be true (she might not have gotten through her Master’s program otherwise), so Ben decides she didn’t make a Faustian bargain. It’s unlikely that she was seduced, so he decides that she was kidnapped and dragged through a mirror while in the bathroom at a Halloween party. He places her Keeper at the intersection of a prop and a theme, “unexpected portals” and “not who they seem.”

Sarah decides that Nate was on a hunt with his family when he got separated in pursuit of a buck. At least, he thought it was a buck. He saw a flawless rack of horns flash through the dusk in the trees and followed it. The woods got thicker and gloomier, but that’s ok, he’s used to having to wait in thickets to get at his game. Nate lost sight of the buck and turned around to go home — only to find the buck and the buck’s master waiting for him. Sarah decides to place the buck that lured him in at the intersection of the prop “the hunters hunted” and “not who they seem”.

Meg likes the idea of Holly Blue being abducted on her road trip. As she and Nevaeh drive along I-80, they see an old woman at her fruit and honey store — really, little more than a shack. They decide to stop to purchase some food. Holly Blue strikes up a conversation with the proprietor, who offers to show her some of her fresher offerings. Holly Blue follows her around the back, only to find herself in the thorns. The woman is a privateer, and she’s taking her newest acquisition to Grandmother, Grandmother (see p. XX) to adopt.

Emily comes into the chronicle a bit later than everyone else, and so her character’s abduction has to be a little different than everyone else’s. She decides that, befitting a programmer at NASA, Hel is abducted by the Three Androgynes (see pg. XX). It’s somewhat unceremonious — one moment she’s walking home from work, and the next, she’s suspended in midair in a sterile room, her limbs and mouth bound by thorns.

Questions to Ask: Were you physically dragged off? Were you deceived?

Did you offend a True Fae somehow?

Did you misstep into the Hedge?

Where were you when you were taken? What do you remember of the journey?

Promises: What promise was made to you while you were en route?

In Durance Vile

The durance is the period of a changeling’s life that shapes their biggest challenges. In a twist of cruel irony, some changelings barely remember it except in nightmares, while others are always on the verge of a flashback or panic attack, seeing their Keeper and her knives around every corner. Most are somewhere in between. Trauma is a funny thing, and for many Lost, it remains safely locked in the back of their minds, slipping out at moments of tension or vulnerability. The durance determines the kith and seeming of the changeling, and may affect what court they choose to join later.

Don’t hold back in this section (at least within limits set by the group, see “Safe Hearth, Safe Table” on p. XX). True Fae are not known for mercy or obeying the laws of physics. How might a True Fae have caused you to turn into a Mirrorskin or a Helldiver? What fell pacts were made with the realm you were imprisoned in that you could survive it? Were you the only one in your motley there?

Storytellers should feel free to do some light narration of this section before game, if their players are so inclined. See the sidebar “Narrating a Durance” for some guidelines on how to do so effectively.

Example: Jocelyn is taken to a realm of mind-numbing bureaucracy and byzantine laws. She is held in a small cell, a room that looks like an unfurnished apartment with the drywall torn out and the wires exposed, until her Keeper sends someone for her. She is taken before the True Fae, a being made entirely of paperwork and red tape. Its face is a white porcelain mask made to look like a baby’s head. Ben has already decided that Jocelyn will be a Fairest Notary, so he states that after being forced to swear fealty (in triplicate!), she is taken downstairs and has the pledge tattooed on her back by another changeling. Her Keeper, the Munificent Bureaucrat, and another True Fae watch. She is leashed and kept at her Keeper’s side to reference at will.

Sarah decides that her Ogre Artist character, Nate, was the one to tattoo Jocelyn’s back at their Keeper’s behest. Nate was taken a year before Jocelyn, and has been forced into his role as artisan of all trades. Not an artist before his durance, Nate was quick to pick up skills in order to avoid harsh punishments with chisels and pigment. He has been forced to reshape other changelings into different forms and configurations, and already he’s growing slowly deaf to their cries, for his own sanity.

Holly Blue, meanwhile, is chosen as Grandmother, Grandmother’s hardworking middle child who doesn’t get enough attention. This is not her normal state of being. She is used to love and affection from all of those around her, and is now constantly ignored and occasionally violently punished for the mischief of other changelings. She finds herself occasionally changing her voice or facial expression and sometimes outright lying to avoid Grandmother, Grandmother’s teeth and claws. Soon, she’s doing it all the time. She uses the voice and face that will keep her most safe, and in this way, Holly Blue becomes a Fairest Mirrorskin.

Hel doesn’t get much of a choice in her durance. She is kept in a zoo of changelings, occasionally taken out and vivisected and put back together again. Sometimes, she’s shown off, paraded in front of the Three Androgynes’ guests like a prized pet. She is not, however, petted and coddled like some of the others, and is subjected to an increasing parade of indignities. Her cell is immersed in the light of strange stars, and in her anger and humiliation, she begins to absorb the light as a source of comfort, becoming an Elemental Bright One.

Questions to Ask: Who is your Keeper? What is their title, or titles? How did they treat you?

What was the lightest part of your durance? The worst? The very worst? Were other members of your motley there, or was it just you?

What was the environment like? Were you mostly inside or outside? Was it hot, cold, or temperate?

What was the last straw?

Promises: What did you have to promise your Keeper to avoid punishment?

Sidebar: Narrating a Durance

If the players choose to play out their durance instead of merely having it as part of their backstory, the Storyteller should carefully consider how to carry it out. The durance is characterized by loss of autonomy, both bodily and spiritual. While the character loses their autonomy, the player should never lose hers. A durance is not an excuse for a Storyteller to torture her players outside of the boundaries of the game in the name of story. The player must always have a say in what happens in her durance. If possible, durances should be narrated in private (this can be done in text form, if that’s easier). Nothing makes a player feel more vulnerable and disrespected than playing out an intense scene, only for another player to interrupt with a joke or an off-color comment about what’s going on.

Decide between the Storyteller and the player what the character’s durance should focus on. A Bright One’s durance is probably not going to involve toiling in the mines, but she might light the way for Helldivers and Gristlegrinders instead. An Ogre is less likely than a Fairest or Darkling to be the lover of the Princess of the Red Crowns, but he might hold her lovers still while she whispers to them and lines up the hats to nail onto their heads.

The Storyteller should take careful note of what the player wants. The durance can be extremely disturbing and upsetting, and it’s important that the player is only disturbed or upset in the ways she wants to be. At any point, the Storyteller or player should be allowed to tap out or fade to black if the scene become too much for them. There’s no rush to tell the story of the durance. Suffering has no deadline.

The Escape

Some part of the enslaved changeling felt the call back to Earth. Perhaps it was the memory of their spouse’s laughter or the warmth in their chest when they held their child for the first time. It might even be a petty vendetta against a coworker left unsettled. Not all human memories are noble or loving, and that’s not the point. Memories of the mortal world are the changeling’s key out of Faerie, so if they have no memories of the world as it is now, they may not be able to make it back.

What was strong enough to bring the character back? This is the paramount question for this section. Even if none of the other questions are answered, the player should know the answer to this one. It’s a good indication of the changeling’s priorities later in the chronicle.

Example: Jocelyn’s memories of her husband and her studies see her through her durance. While reading some of the Munificent Bureaucrat’s paperwork, she finds a loophole inside of a subclause that would allow her to escape. Armed with this knowledge, she unlocks the collar around her neck and sets herself free.

Meanwhile, Nate the Artist is drawn back by thoughts of his friends and his hunts with his family. He creates a perfect likeness of himself, a statue that smiles, and flees. Nate and Jocelyn meet up in the massive air ducts of the domain, quite by accident, and agree to leave together. They both tear through the thorns of the Hedge, seeking a door to lead them home.

Holly Blue has been forced to sacrifice her emotional honesty and her happiness to survive. She is whatever Grandmother, Grandmother wants her to be, and she has not been cut in months. However, she has not forgotten Nevaeh, her best friend and latent crush. When her Keeper leaves to seal a pledge with another Kindly One, she flees through the forest she was told never to enter. The thorns open for her, and she finds herself back in the Hedge, seeking a way back to the fruit stand where she lost herself.

Finally, Hel has been subjected to one indignity too many. As the Three Androgynes bring her back to the operating theater for another procedure, she breaks free, blinding all three of them with the light of her rage. She flees down the infinite halls of their ship, and finds an escape shuttle docked in one of the many cargo bays. Her programming skills are barely a match for the byzantine controls of the shuttle, but she manages to hotwire it and flies out of the Androgynes’ massive ship. Just as she begins to despair of finding her way back to Earth, she crash-lands in the thorns, the nose of the shuttle poking out into the Air and Space Museum in D.C.

Questions to Ask: What was strong enough to bring you back?

Did you sneak out? Fight your way out? Make a bet with your Keeper? Did you not want to leave? Were you thrown out instead?

Did anyone else come with you? Did you have to leave anyone else behind?

What do you remember of your journey back? What were you searching for on your way through the thorns?

Promises: Who knew you got out? Who came with you, and who stayed behind and promised to cover your escape?

Home, But Briefly

The great tragedy of a changeling’s life is that she is forever displaced from what it used to be. Fetches take their place and families move on. Any encounter with former friends and loved ones will result in confusion — and that’s just the best-case scenario. Lost may show up thousands of miles away from their home, drawn by a memory of a favorite vacation or a proposal on a beach, or they may emerge gasping from the thorns 20 years after they were abducted — though only an hour passed in Faerie. For a newly freed slave of the Fae, this is a punch in the gut. Where will they belong? Will they ever belong?

Example: Jocelyn and Nate arrive on Earth, pulled by their shared memories of the university they attended. Jocelyn has been in Faerie for what seems like a decade — but only a week has passed on Earth. Nate has been in the clutches of the Munificent Bureaucrat for much longer, and doesn’t recognize the new buildings on campus.

They go to find Jocelyn’s husband, only to find out that he has never missed her — she’s taking a shower right now. Jocelyn desperately tries to appeal to her husband, who threatens to call the police. Nate’s family found him dead, accidentally shot by another hunter’s bullet. They’ve already mourned and buried him, and when he shows up, they accuse him of being an imposter and making fun of them. Neither family will take them in. Defeated, Jocelyn and Nate retreat to a nearby diner to grieve and figure out what’s next.

Holly Blue arrives on Earth, only to find that her friend left the stall and its nighttime in the dead of winter. Using the skills she’s learned in Faerie, she steals the visage of the privateer who stole her away, and with it, her car and wallet. Meg decides to put the privateer under “the old car that should have stopped working” and “this is mine now.” Holly Blue decides to drive out east, in the direction her friend went, hoping to discover a police report about her disappearance. However, she soon discovers that Nevaeh is not only back home, she is dating a creature with Holly Blue’s face, who had the courage to say to Nevaeh what Holly Blue herself did not. They’re getting handfasted this spring. Holly Blue finds herself alone in a university town out east, sobbing alone at a computer in a public library, unsure of what to do next.

Hel attempts to get back into the NASA headquarters at Two Independence Square, but she’s already working there. Or at least, someone wearing her face has just been fired from her job there. Hel’s clearance is deactivated and she finds herself stranded. Her partners all believe she’s gotten back with her husband and refuse to accept this new impostor, doing everything from slamming the door in her face to threatening restraining orders. She buys the ticket for the first bus she sees, determined not to panic.

Questions to Ask: Who do you seek first?

Are they still alive? Do they remember you?

Do you have a fetch? Where are they? How have they replaced you, or changed your life in a way you didn’t want?

How has your fetch lived your life in your absence? Do they know you’re there?

Promises: What promise did your fetch break to someone you love?

Freeholds and Courts

Unless the game starts with the capture and durance of the player characters, much of any given Changeling: The Lost chronicle will take place in and around the local freehold or freeholds. If any of the props and themes from earlier have gone unused, use them here. The courts of the local freehold are a key part of the story, and need to be fleshed out. The easiest way to do this is to set up the four Seasonal Courts, but see later in this chapter for guidance on building your own.

Unless a player character is beginning the game at the head of a court, creating the four seasonal kings, queens, or monarchs is a good first step. It’s easy enough to put an Ogre Bright One in charge of Summer, and definitely a good choice. However, what would it mean for a small, vulpine Darkling Hunterheart or a Wizened Artist to hold the same position? The monarchs say a lot about the local courts — and, by extension, the tone and symbolism of the chronicle itself. A Spring Court led by a Fairest Playmate is going to have a very different outlook and aesthetic than another freehold with an Elemental Snowskin Spring King.

Once the Monarchs are decided, the players can pick which courts they might have reasonably been convinced to join.

Example: Ben and Sarah decide to divide the courts between them. Ben takes Winter and Summer, and Sarah takes Autumn and Spring.

Ben decides that the Monarch of Winter is a gender-neutral Darkling Artist who goes by Mens Machinae and makes robots and animatronics — and clever constructs to fool the Fae. The Queen of Summer is a Wizened Chatelaine named Small Queen Jane. He decides that she got her position for her ability to command groups and plan tactical engagements, and not necessarily for her own personal puissance.

 Sarah, meanwhile, decides that the head of Spring is an Ogre Helldiver who goes by ghost (the G is never capitalized). ghost prefers no titles or accolades; they merely serve and stay silent until needed. The King of Autumn is a jovial Elemental Hunterheart who has an extremely even temper until his people are threatened — and then he turns into a terrifying force of nature, using illusions and threats and dreams to keep the freehold safe.

After looking at their monarchs, Ben decides that Jocelyn became a member of the Winter Court. Sarah instead decides that Nate is courtless, but sympathizes with Autumn.

Meg joined the chronicle a little later, so she doesn’t assist in creating the courts. However, she decides that Holly Blue has joined the Spring Court, in search of a balm for her broken heart. She was personally recruited by a ghost after they found her sleeping in a tent at a local cemetery. That’s where she meets Jocelyn and Nate.

Emily also joined the chronicle late, so she has no hand in creating the courts. Hel decides to join the Summer Court after they put her in protective custody for blinding a local bartender after he hit on her. The Season of Wrath best suits her slow-burning anger after being constantly disregarded, humiliated, and torn apart at other’s whims.

Questions to Ask: Who is the head of your Spring/Summer/Autumn/Winter Court? Why do they have that position?

Are there any other prominent figures in that court?

Why did you choose to join that court?

Where is the freehold located? What is it called?

Promises: What oath of fealty did you swear to your court, and how is it similar to the one you were forced to swear to your Keeper?

A Motley Crew

The motley is the core unit of changeling society, a chosen family that reaches beyond boundaries of seeming, kith, and court. Player characters are usually in a motley together and their connection should be one of the major focuses of the chronicle. Ideally, members of a motley are willing to face death for each other — but it could just as easily be a group of drinking buddies who fear being alone.

Example: Jocelyn and Nate have been through a lot together. From killing Jocelyn’s fetch with a car to showcasing Nate’s latest project at a meeting of two freeholds, they’ve supported each other through thick and thin. After they picked up Holly Blue and Hel, who are more recent escapees from the same realm, they form a motley of four. The freehold calls on them when they need delicate legal matters handled, or an important guest impressed. Unsaid, but also just as true: They are the first line of defense when they True Fae come a-knocking.

Questions to Ask: What drew you to each other?

Who is the leader, if anyone? Are any of you likely to betray the others?

Does your motley have a name? What is your common goal?

How do others in the freehold view your group? How do you view your group?

Promises: What pledge did you all make each other? How was it different from the one you were forced to swear to your Keeper? What was the pledge sworn on?

Sample Chronicle: The Blue Hen Motley

Jocelyn, Nate, Holly Blue, and Hel are all from very different backgrounds, but they all wound up in the same place. They decide to retrace Holly Blue’s road trip back to the Pacific Northwest in order to stop her fetch’s wedding to her unrequited love, Nevaeh. Along the way, they decide to stop to take out Hel’s fetch — except Hel decides to make a pledge with her fetch to not interfere in each other’s lives. Jocelyn oversees the pledge. This frees up Hel to continue on the journey. Nate and Jocelyn take out the privateer on I-80 while Holly Blue watches and smiles her inscrutable smile. Hel’s pledge gives the motley enough points of Glamour to speed up the trip, but their Keepers are all looking for their escaped slaves. The Blue Hen Motley now has to deal with Huntsmen while trying to make it in time for Holly Blue to confess her love…

Other Bonds

Many promises and connections could fit into any of the stages listed above, but aren’t tied to a specific one. Since they’re useful for fleshing out a player character, some examples of other, more general ties are listed below.

What is your single biggest regret?

When did you find true love and why was the form it took unexpected?

Who did you leave behind?

Who do you hate even more than your Keeper?

Why does one person in particular fascinate you?

Who do you dream about, then wake up shaking and sweating?

Safe Hearth, Safe Table

While it’s fun to play make believe with friends, Changeling: The Lost is, at its heart, a horror game. True, it is also funny and beautiful and wondrous — but that typically comes after being held against your will in a world of dreams and nightmares for months, years, or decades. Changelings may have their bodies altered and their minds played with. Personal autonomy is repeatedly violated by godlike entities to whom one cannot simply say “no.” The only way to make it stop is to escape and even then, that’s not a guarantee. The Gentry might find you eventually, or they might send someone to do it for them.

This can be extremely unsettling for players. While consensual fear is part of the game, the goal is not to traumatize the players outside of the play space. Rather, everyone should strive for a game that provides an engaging, terrifying, and beautiful story that gives everyone involved the sort of pleasant chills a really good horror movie leaves the audience with after the credits roll. Even if a character feels trapped and hopeless, the player should never feel the same way at the table. This is a game, after all.

What follows are some safety techniques to help both Storytellers and players maximize enjoyment without taking away any of the horror at the heart of Changeling: The Lost. Feel free to use none, some, or all of them.

Emotional Bleed

Many of the safety techniques talk about something being too uncomfortable or too intense “in a bad way.” This is for clarity of communication. Some players like being made uncomfortable or put into extremely emotionally intense situations. Such players may play horror games to cry or feel trapped as a sort of catharsis, a way to experience traumatic emotions in a low-consequence environment.

This is called emotional bleed, or just bleed for short. When a character experiences emotions the player is experiencing, that’s called bleed-in. Contrastingly, when a player experiences the emotions her character is feeling, that’s called bleed-out. Bleed itself is not bad, but it can sometimes be unpleasant for a player who wasn’t expecting it or didn’t want it. If a player is getting unreasonably frustrated or upset at a challenging circumstance, this could be a sign of bleed. Stop play and give everyone a breather before continuing if bleed begins to cause problems at your table. Bleed can absolutely enhance the play experience and add another dimension of emotional resonance, but only if everyone is on board. Check ins, occasional snack breaks, and use of the safety techniques in this chapter are extremely helpful if the table is experiencing high amounts of bleed.

Lines and Veils

A classic safety technique originally described by Ron Edwards, Lines and Veils allows players to pick and choose what they want to address in the chronicle. Before game, the Storyteller should prepare two sheets of paper. Label one “Lines” and the other “Veils.” Lines are things that will absolutely not be touched on in the chronicle, not even mentioned in passing. Veils are things that can happen, but will not be played out, and instead addressed with a “fade to black.” The Storyteller asks players what they’d like added to the lists, and notes that the lists can be edited at any time. Veils can be moved to Lines, Lines can be moved to Veils, new Veils or Lines can be added, or Veils or Lines can be taken away (with the consensus of the other players). Veils and Lines cannot be used to cut out antagonists (i.e. “I don’t want the True Fae to be a part of this chronicle at all, not even mentioned in passing”) but can be used to restrict antagonists’ actions that might be uncomfortable for some players (i.e. “I do not want the True Fae in this chronicle to use sexual violence”).

Common Lines: Sexual violence, explicit depiction of torture, force feeding, starvation, mutilation, racial slurs, gender-specific slurs, spiders, trypophobia-inducing imagery, needles, bestiality, explicit depiction of bodily functions

Common Veils: Explicit depiction of consensual sexual activity, torture, emotional abuse, physical abuse, body horror, human experimentation, dream or nightmare sequences, childhood memories, prophetic visions

Fade to Black

In a movie, when the hero is just about to get into bed with her love interest or be “forcibly interrogated,” sometimes the camera cuts away right before the action — occasionally with a moan or a scream included as appropriate. This technique is called “fade to black,” and can be used in your chronicle as appropriate. If you don’t want to narrate every caress of a love scene or the weirdness of a changeling’s personal nightmare or the agony of Faerie torments, simply fade to black and focus on another scene. A player can also request a fade to black if they are uncomfortable with what is happening at the table.

The Stoplight System

This is a relatively recent technique and was pioneered by the group Games to Gather. The Storyteller lays out three different colored circles on the table: red, yellow, and green. Each color indicates a response to different levels of intensity. Green means “yes, I am okay with and encourage the scene getting more intense.” Yellow means “the scene is fine at the intensity level it is now, and I would like it to stay here if possible.” Red means “the scene is too intense for me in a bad way and I need it to decrease or I need to tap out.” Players can tap the colored circles as appropriate to indicate to the Storyteller what they want or need at that moment.

The Storyteller can also use the stoplight system to ask the players if they’d like intensity increased or decreased as necessary without breaking the narrative flow. To do so, the Storyteller can repeatedly tap a color — green for “more intense,” yellow for “keep it here,” and red for “do you need me to stop?” The players can then touch a color in response. Players can also respond by saying the color in question out loud.

The X Card

An up-and-coming technique, especially in storytelling-game circles, the X card was designed by John Stavropolous. The X card is fairly self-explanatory. A card or sheet of paper with an “X” drawn on it is placed in the middle of the table. At any point, a player or the Storyteller may touch the X card to call a halt to any action currently making them uncomfortable in a bad way. If they would like to explain themselves, they may, but it is absolutely not necessary and the Storyteller should continue play once everyone is settled back in.

  The Door Is Always Open

This is another technique that needs very little explanation. If a player needs to stop play for any reason, they are free to do so after giving the Storyteller a heads up. The chapter (game session) is then on pause until that player either returns or leaves the premises. Storytellers should use this technique either in conjunction with other techniques, or during sessions where players may have to leave abruptly for personal reasons.

Debriefing

Debriefing is a post-game safety technique, and can be used along with any and all of the suggestions above. After the chapter is finished, the Storyteller asks the players to put away their character sheets and take some deep breaths. Soft music or snacks can also be used to assist in debriefing. Slipping into character is easy — slipping out can be a little less so. Debriefing is all about bringing the players back to the real world, back through the thorny maze of the chronicle they created with the Storyteller.

Use this time to talk about the game in a context other than first person. Players tend to refer to their characters as “I.” The Storyteller should encourage them to use the character’s names instead, and use first person only for things that they felt as players, not as characters. What did they think was the highlight of this session? What was their favorite interaction they had with another player’s character? An NPC? Is there anything the players think the Storyteller could be doing better? Are the safety techniques and chronicle-building techniques working out for everyone at the table? Should anything be changed to make the game more fun and engaging for everyone involved? These are all questions that can be asked during debriefing, though they’re not necessary. If there are other, more important topics that need to be covered, feel free to use debriefing time to cover those as well.

Debriefing does not need to last for a set amount of time. However, after a particularly intense session, it’s probably a good idea to have a longer debriefing period than normal. Changelings are forever changed by their experience with the True Fae. The players should not incur the same amount of trauma just from sitting at a gaming table. Tabletop gaming is a low-consequence environment to explore many different emotions and coping strategies in new and strange environments. To keep this space low consequence, it’s important to make sure that all players (including the Storyteller) are emotionally supported and cared for after particularly upsetting or bleed-heavy chapters.

[blueanddeepblue]

10/6

I've seen my dad once in the last seven years. We haven't spoken in the past year and a half. We're not even Facebook friends. When I came home from college one semester with a Rolling Stones CD with the song Bitch on it, he told me either the CD had to go, or I did. Before that, when I left for college, he told me I was throwing away a god-given gift by not playing college basketball. He may have been right about that one. ----- Right now A and I are sitting in the car in the middle of the Sturgeon River National Wilderness in Michigan's Upper Peninsula escaping the weather. Our tent is holding fast; it is both dry and secure, but I've spent too much of the past 24 hours losing to A at gin rummy to want to be trapped in there any longer. Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 15 is playing on the car radio, and we've reached the climax. Earlier, we ate dinner underneath a tarp in the cold and rain. Dinner was absolutely stellar. There were moments before the rain, as I got the fire going and A prepped our dinner, where the sun came out for a rare appearance, shooting light up towards the gold and red of oaks and birches and maples beginning their fall display. Our camp is along a bend in the river five miles down a dirt road, and we're the only campers here for the second night running. The solitude of the forest is immense after the din of tourists at several of our previous Michigan stops. Today when I went to rinse a dish in the river, a Bald Eagle flushed from his perch and A yelled "Up, up, up!" until I heard her above the babble of the rapids and looked to see him rise over the pines and out of sight. ----- I think some small portion of my love for birding is due to my dad. He would always point out hawks as he was driving, ducking his head so he could get a clearer vantage point beneath the windshield. I'm not sure he took much interest in birds in general, but he showed the excitement of a child whenever a hawk made a highway appearance. When he drove, he always had a toothpick to chew on, a holdover from his smoking days, which I never realized was the case until I quit smoking two and a half years ago. On the dashboard, he'd also keep a comb with all the rounded bristles knocked off so to better scratch his head as he drove. I don't remember him ever getting a traffic ticket. And one of his claims to fame was that he was never in a car accident, not even a fender bender. It's hard not to write about him in the past-tense. Sometimes I feel like the part of my life that had him in it was eons ago, and I was a different person. Now, when the family gets together for christmas, it feels whole and healthy, it doesn't feel like there's a missing piece; it feels like a weight has been lifted. But of course, there's this hole that exists, somewhere, even though I know it's better this way. This past week, talking with my uncle, I noticed, how he too, referred to his brother in the past-tense. ----- One of my favorite parts about traveling is the people you encounter. The relationships that A and I have fostered along this trip are of a certain mettle only tempered through the road. In Virginia we see my friend, Ava, and her and Mike's new baby, Onyx. They live on a farm on the bend in a creek near the Appalachian Trail with chickens and a garden and a self-built sauna and diesel powered hot-tub. They are the type of people who inspire you to do. To find ways to improve your life by your own means. To build a treehouse or learn to fly a plane. To live according to your own rules and not be bound by cultural norms. Ava and I met in undergrad, on a study abroad trip in Mexico. I've kept several friends from that study abroad trip, maybe because forging a friendship in a place outside your comfort zone helps you know that miles-between don't really matter. I remember joining Ava and her family one time at a Gary P Nunn concert in Luckenbach, Texas. I remember eating BBQ and dancing and having too many drinks and laughing at it all, every one of us crammed into the same small hotel room afterwards. I remember being struck by how her parents could still talk amicably after divorce. How they could even laugh a little at each other. How experiences could be shared because they were family. Seeing Ava and her own family is beautiful. We eat french toast and drink too much coffee. Mike is already out on the tractor, discussing methods of hauling brush with a neighbor. We leave feeling torn, lingering longer than intended, wishing we could stay to help the small community that's gathered to help cut down trees and make space for Onyx's outdoor play area. In D.C., we meet up with A's friend, Rhonda. We crash on her couch and wander the town, being tourists and visitors. Rhonda shows us the nearby farmer's market, and spoils us with drinks and stories and delicious meals. Years ago, A used to nanny Rhonda's boys, who are 16 and 14 now, all grown up with deep voices and polite manners, as driven and intent as their mother. Rhonda is a burst of constant energy, a whirlwind of goodness.The kind of person who radiates action and fortitude. As most everyone in D.C. does, Rhonda works in government, balancing home life and the nearly impossible demands of her job. In the garden, she found a caterpillar capable of devouring an entire tomato plant in one night. According to the internet, the appropriate remedy for such a pest is to cut it in half with a knife. Rhonda opts to leave him out on the sidewalk in hopes the birds will find him a tasty morsel. On a nearby leaf, a similar caterpillar is discovered, immobile, and riddled with white wasp larvae devouring it from the inside out. The best practice for a caterpillar being devoured from the inside out is to leave it alone, let nature to do its bidding. There is a theme brewing, a pattern; here, too, a father (but not a husband) stays involved with his kids, cajoles them about their homework, takes them rock climbing. ----- Later, in Pennsylvania, we stay two nights with my best friends' mom, Ann, and her husband Rocky. They live on a farm in the hills surrounded by cornfields and little villages with picturesque churches down winding country roads. When the wind blows, the corn rustles like the rattling of hollow bones, like a million wind chimes made of old newspaper. We have dinner on the patio overlooking the garden and the 100 year old barn and the next-door church and cemetery. We eat mussels and caprese and Rocky's own Golumpki recipe. Rocky and Ann regale us with stories of sailing adventures and hiking trips, tales of family and old friends, and opinions on politics and philosophy and life. I tend to wax poetic. Rocky tells good jokes. Evening on the patio turns into night and new bottles of wine keep appearing. It feels like home away from home. The next day we kayak on a nearby lake and lunch by a waterfall. The trip is also beginning to revolve around waterfalls. When we paddle back, there is a kingfisher and a little green heron and I can imagine the lake when the leaves fall. How it turns into a liquid carpet of gold and orange and red that the boat cuts through like a knife. In New York, we eat pho and gawk at passerby. Chinatown flows by, and we're mesmerized once again by the energy and the pace. New York is a city of no limits, no boundaries. In many ways, you are invisible. Always, everywhere, there is someone louder, more stylish, crazier, more artistic, or more outlandish than you. We stop to see A's friend who's opening a gallery. Later, we stay in the Bronx with my friend Jill, whose wife, Jess, is out of the country helping with hurricane relief. We share a dinner and beers and conversation, the three pillars of almost every good interaction. I fall asleep astounded at the goodness of people, at the way my life is surrounded by amazing people, humbled by the hospitality we're shown stop after stop. ----- My dad was 31 when I came along. In pictures from this era he appears rugged and handsome. He wears cut-off jean shorts and waterskis, barefoot, on some Texas lake, maybe even Canyon Lake, where I grew up. His hair is dark and wavy, and his eyes flicker a mystery, belying the thrill of speed, the roar of a powerboat, the splash of the wake against a barreled chest, strong arms. The pictures themselves have the golden tint of years past, the nostalgic glow of easy living. In one set of pictures, he sports a thick mustache and throws a football to friends. He drinks beer from the types of cans that advertisers have brought back into vogue now that enough time has lapsed, now that the trends have come full circle and they can again benefit from the aesthetics of collective memory. I did not know this version of my father. The one who lived easily among friends. The one who drank beer and waterskied and rode motorcycles and found ways to live fast and large. Or maybe I should say I did not often know this version of my father. Maybe these pictures of him are really card tricks, fanciful sleight-of-hand maneuvers that the mind plays on perception. Maybe the amber-tinged version of my dad is a mythology I've constructed, a story I've built up over the years to protect myself, to help explain why he's faded into the background of my life. Instead, I knew the version of my dad who couldn't handle it when the toothpaste wasn't rolled up from the bottom or the laundry didn't make it into the correct bin. The version who pulled us from sunday school because the message wasn't strong enough. Who changed the channel when beer commercials came on. Who had few friends that seemed to last. Who felt slighted and wronged by the world. Whose eyes shot sideways and clouded over with righteousness when he was begging to lose control. This too, is an illusion, a shifting myth tinged by the murkiness of memory. He also laughed at himself, his eyes crinkling at the corners. He took us fishing and played basketball with us, even though he grew up near Detroit, Michigan, where hockey is the sport of nobility, the sport his Texan kids would never quite comprehend. He wrestled on the floor with us or made himself into a launchpad at the pool, hurling us up and out across the water until we imagined ourselves to be birds, spaceships, shooting stars. ----- Here is a partial list of birds that A and I have seen thus far: Black-Throated Green Warbler Yellow Billed Cuckoo White Breasted Nuthatch Pileated Woodpecker Downy Woodpecker Black Buzzard Eastern Wood Peewee American Goldfinch Hooded Warbler Dark Eyed Junco Golden Crowned Kinglet Red Breasted Nuthatch Canada Goose House Sparrow Raven Grey Jay Green Heron Cedar Waxwing Blue Jay Belted Kingfisher Pine Warbler Northern Flicker Red Tailed Hawk Red Bellied Woodpecker Hairy Woodpecker American Robin Wild Turkey Crow Eastern European Starling Great Blue Heron Tufted Titmouse Brewers Blackbird Yellow Rumped Warbler Black Capped Chickadee Brown Thrasher Bald Eagle Wood Duck American Redstart Turkey Vulture White Throated Sparrow Least Flycatcher Ruby Crowned Kinglet Common Loon Hermit Thrush Northern Mockingbird Some of these are new birds, like the Hermit Thrush and American Redstart, birds that flash new color and make us hold our breath, or others that require we lean in to see the subtlety, those that mystify through the mundane. Some are as familiar as friends - a Kinglet among the underbrush. Other times, we jump to our binoculars at the flash of movement among the trees, against the sky, only to be disappointed by another mangy robin, another buzzard riding the thermals along the cliffs. We camp along every single one of the Great Lakes, marveling at the oceans of fresh water, at the gentle pulse of the waves lapping the shore or at the rainbow of color among the rounded stones. We stand underneath the falls at Niagara and on the boat that takes us in closer to where the mist shoots like needles into our eyes, where the sound is deafening as eternal thunder. Along the shores of Lake Michigan, we haul our camp chairs to the beach and look at the Milky Way among the night sky. We drink box wine and watch the fog roll in. Later, we swim in Superior, clear as glass all the way down to our toes. We emerge fresh and alive, reborn. We also run away from the biting flies, layer up to avoid the gnats, the mosquitos. Nature churns on according to its own whims. We're merely visitors here. ----- So much has gone by that I can't cram into this post. So many thoughts and feelings slipped through the cracks. Elusive. Flitted away. Things I glimpsed but that I could not identify. Ways to cinch the threads on this loose narrative. I am sitting in my sister's home in downtown Minneapolis. My niece is building blocks on the living room floor in front of me. I am aware that she is where the secret exists. That the most important person should always be the one right in front of me. That these memories I revisit and these things I chronicle are also fleeting. My sister and her husband have a wonderful family. The nieces share and play together wonderfully. Their home is wonderful and the meals we share around the table are wonderful. It's grey and rainy on the streets right now, but the warmth inside this home seems to stem from something deeper than an efficient central air system. My brothers camped with us in New York. We swam in the lake and fed spiders to the fish below the dock, watching them emerge from the depths like in the best Attenborough documentaries. We hiked around the lake. We watched a sunset explode over the hills behind us. We shared a fire and ate s'mores. We drank beers and swapped stories as the fog rolled in. I'm proud of my little brothers, who are bigger than me and have been for quite some time. I'm proud of their decisions and the people they've become - solid, thoughtful, caring, and articulate. I'm proud of their ability to grow up. Proud of their tenacity and perseverance. Proud of the kindness that seems innate. I'm proud of them. I'm proud of them all. My sister and brother back in Texas who aren't as much a part of this story merely because this trip and their paths have not yet intersected. I'm proud of the family we've become. The people we are. ----- There are no tidy endings here. No clean conclusions. Narratives seek a wrap-up, a way of putting all the pieces back together, but this is real life; it is neither as messy, nor as poetic as I make it seem in this account. I know that Dad is a part of the family we've become. I know that he, too, has much to be proud of. That he, too, should look at his grown children and see their success as part of his own. But I also know that he is broken. As all people share in brokenness. And that his brokenness keeps him from sharing in our success. Keeps him from calling, or writing, or staying meaningfully involved in any of our lives. In Michigan, we met up with Dad's brother and his wife. We kayaked down the Au Sable river and stayed at their home along the shores of Lake Huron. We slept with windows open to the sound of a lapping lake and woke to sunrises made of gold and fire. I wasn't planning on writing any of this. Not really. But somewhere along the dirt roads of the Upper Peninsula, or while passing a ski boat towed by an eager truck, or while walking on a sandy beach of Huron (all of these places of Dad's own childhood, fragments of the stories I remember him telling), or maybe even before all that, maybe before the trip began, I noticed a thread. Somewhere in all this space and beauty, somewhere in the rush of a waterfall, in the purple of a flower, somewhere between hiking-strides or in the sweep of a vista, I noticed a memory that hasn't quite yet finished playing itself out. A memory that is stranger still because it holds no finality, because there is still a chance at redemption, at a happy ending. So I'll put this here, mostly for my own benefit, like a soup simmering on low, to come back to at a later time. When I'm ready. And I'll walk with the realization that life isn't passed on, it's shared. That beauty is right in front of you, inviting you to get down and share with someone, inviting you to pick up the pieces and build something.

[circadianwolf]

realism in fiction

(in response to characterizing and dismissing a criticism of Fallout 3 as a silly concern about “scientific accuracy”)

I don't really want to talk about Fallout (I've done enough of that in the past), but on the topic in general with the various Fallout games as examples. I think the "inaccuracies" of Fallout 3's setting are incredibly relevant to the rhetorical/ideological work that the game is doing (knowingly or not). Presenting a world that seems to have existed in stasis since the bombs fell, which still lives in the junk and detritus of the Old World, is (obviously) a deliberate choice, commonly assigned to the "aesthetic" of post-apocalypse. But beyond this it serves the function of justifying a dioramic world of isolated scenes and disconnected characters, not a society but rather individual survivors and communities which form no larger network, produce nothing, and  whose labor, where it exists, is purely extractive (scavenging), mercantile, or violent. The notion of a post-apocalyptic world as a ruthless every-man-for-himself (gender deliberate) anti-society is common and dangerous; it is a fantasy of unrestrained masculine violence, in the same way zombie stories are by and large fantasies of racist genocide of thoughtless hordes by the imperiled white minorities. Fallout 3's world of tattered three-hundred-year-old clothing and squatting in three-hundred-year-old ruins and eating three-hundred-year-old canned food is one of total scarcity, in which the only gain possible is by taking from someone else.

That this is "inaccurate" is important for the reasons all stories are important: stories serve as life experiences by proxy. Our brain compiles our experiences over time into recurring patterns which become templates for our default reactions to future situations that register as similar - these are our "instincts", which are not programmed in our genetics but largely socially conditioned. Stories are a technology of information sharing, a way for humans to collectivize experiences so that we can react to experiences we have never faced ourselves with the knowledge of others' experiences. Stories are -always- didactic. But this technology opens up the opportunity for false experiences which can teach false reactions. All stories are, of course, "unreal" - even those based in reality are abstractions, even fiction set in the "real world" creates characters and situations, etc. So yes, to criticize "inaccuracies" is on a base level silly; but they are very relevant when these inaccuracies reinforce false patterns. Normally, false patterns are not promoted precisely because they teach false responses; but when culture is controlled by a minority, they can override the normal dynamics to promote stories that falsely justify power, exploitation, and oppression.

This is not just a theoretical or abstract process (as you might look at with Fallout), it is something governments and corporations actively and knowingly engage in. In the 1950s a major priority of the CIA was to promote "anti-communist" media. Perhaps the predominant example of this was the Iowa Writer's Workshop, a literary graduate program which became the model for many similar programs across the US. Its early funding included a grant from the CIA and its founder openly proclaimed his goal of creating "anti-communist" fiction, which meant the elision of "politics", relations of production, and similar structural forces and a rejection of "didacticism" in favor of a focus on individuals, psychological interiority divorced from material circumstances, and atomic social relationships. The epitome of this "anti-communist" fiction was the motto "show, don't tell". What this reflected in a larger sense was the conflict in philosophy between what is termed "idealism" and "materialism", the latter of which is fundamental to communist theory (Marx's theory is specifically termed "dialectical materialism" or "historical materialism").

Now in American culture, the interiority of "high" literature was matched by a false opposition of plot-heavy "low" culture, increasingly dominated across mediums by corporate-controlled franchises that become ever-more enmeshed within their own "canon" (a metaphor from the debates over which Christian scriptures are "true"). Alongside this was encouraged a cultural fixation of quantification, metrics, and consistency - but only of specific things. The early fan cultures which treated corporate fiction as any other mythology, as something to be interrogated, extended, transformed, and played with as people found it useful (and not coincidentally composed significantly of women) became the extensive but derided backwater of "fan fiction" while corporate media instead promoted a fan culture of obsessive cataloguing and collecting "approved" products. The only form of extra-canonical culture encouraged was/is the sort of "could a Star Destroyer beat the Enterprise" questions and "fanon" creating extensive and ridiculous justifications for existing canon - in other words, fan culture that was wholly secondary and subservient to corporate culture.

It is in response to this latter trend that we got to the modern rejection of "scientific accuracy", both in terms of complaints about a lack of accuracy and in false claims of accuracy as justification for pernicious fiction (e.g. "it's medieval Europe so of course everyone is white" which is both a false statement in itself and of course completely nonsensical when applied to fiction not even set in history). But both sides of this are largely unconcerned with "accuracy" in the sense of storytelling that does not promote harmful responses; both position themselves as "apolitical" and in so doing reify the capitalist logic underlying this entire spectrum of criticism. Complaints of "how are people feeding themselves? who is doing the work?" and similar are neither promoted by those invested in "accuracy" nor indirectly promoted by citing them when refuting the desire for such. Materialism remains by the wayside in favor of supremely individualist critiques isolated from any larger context or relevance. (As an aside: even I was surprised when I did a survey of what are today termed "simulationist" tabletop role-playing games and found that while they would spend dozens of pages on rules simulating the physics of gunshot injuries, rules for production relations and political structures were all but nonexistent in every single game. Surveying strategy video games with a global/regional setting for mechanics covering these topics is less fruitless but still incredibly rare.)

In recent years the derision of "accuracy", "realism", "plot holes", and similar has intensified as mainstream culture has become more and more, to borrow a metaphor from other criticism, pornographic. By this is not meant a proliferation of nudity and sex, but rather a structuring of fiction around crude emotional climaxes, with plot, characters, setting, tone, and other concerns set aside in order to achieve the desired climax, no matter how nonsensical. This is spectacle in the basest sense; absent the contextual girding of plot and characters, these climaxes can only move viewers (or players or w/e) to emotion by way of basic visual and audio cues: lurid violence, triumphant music, explosions. Previously this might have been derided even in mainstream criticism (look to the reception of Michael Bay's films), although there has always been exceptions; but, for example, the most recent season of Game of Thrones - which while always a white supremacist fairy tale dominated by a materially unsustainable by fascistically indulgent level of violence, at least at one point paid heed to concepts like "character motivation" and "distances of 1000 miles are significant obstacles" - seemed to deliberately give up on any pretense of its storytelling serving any function other than the delivery of "awesome moments" to be "shared" and discussed on social media the following day. Critics, beholden to the domination of the capitalist behemoth, at most offered tepid laments of the show moving too fast while continuing to celebrate it as an apex of television storytelling.

All of this is not to say that, for example, Game of Thrones would be better with context simply because context is good in itself. Rather, it is that context demands a logic and material basis; when a story undergirds itself with material logistics of how its characters eat, clothe themselves, travel, etc., even if those details are not centered or elaborated (but not if they are ignored for "dramatic purposes"), it forces the storyteller to engage with the processes and conflicts that actually drive human society, and that are therefore of import to us. One critic calculated that based on the stated land area of Game of Thrones' setting combined with the stated casualties in the various battles across the series and assumptions of medieval European population density and farm outputs, the entire continent would be suffering depopulation and famine (as a result of lack of farm laborers and devastated fields). Certainly, the assumptions based on medieval Europe are not "accurate" for the story, but they serve to demand an explanation of how -does- the continent still produce food? Why -do- the armies keep fighting rather than deserting, as many pre-modern armies did when wars stretched long and without result? Among many other unanswered questions.

The point is not that there can't be answers to these questions - c.f. "fanon" above - but that the canonical fiction bypasses them in order to tell the story it wants to tell - a story about endless violence, faceless armies, and nihilistic elites, without any interest in how such a society functions at all. That the values of a story should trump material logistics of the setting and plot is an absolute truism in American fiction and criticism, but this is not a neutral position; this is the CIA's project for anti-communist fiction having triumphed utterly, the idealist ideology of capitalism, of decontextualized individuals driven by abstract values and engaging with material reality only through the lens of violence, having been rendered so dominant that opposition is unthinkable. Similarly elevated is "show, don't tell" and its dismissal of didacticism, its explicit valorization of the elision of ideology. Lost in all this is, again, that if stories matter - and they do - then their ideology matters, and all stories teach ideology, and the rejection of materialism - the wholesale dismissal of "realism" and its ilk in favor of abstract ideals - is a pernicious ideology that works to justify capitalism and undermine anti-capitalist - which is to say, communist - education. We -need- stories about logistics and labor in order to teach ourselves how to survive and escape capitalism, to provide us with experiences we cannot yet have in reality.

[katebushwick]

In dreams, finally, individuals even in the most simple societies have found the space to refigure their social lives, live out proscribed emotional states and sensations, and see things that have then spilled over into their sense of ordinary life. All these expressions, further, have been the basis of a complex dialogue between the imagination and ritual in many human SOcieties, through which the force of ordinary social norms was somehow deepened, through inversion, irony, or the performa­ tive intensity and the collaborative work demanded by many kinds of rit­ ual. All this is the surest sort of knowledge bequeathed to us by the best of canonical anthropology over the past century.

In suggesting that the imagination in the postelectronic world plays a newly significant role, I rest my case on three distinctions. First, the imagi­ nation has broken out of the special expressive space of art, myth, and rit­ ual and has now become a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people in many societies. It has entered the logic of ordinary life from which it had largely been successfully sequestered. Of course, this has precedents in the great revolutions, cargo cults, and messianic movements of other times, in which forceful leaders implanted their visions into social life, thus creating powerful movements for social change. Now, however, it is no longer a matter of specially endowed (charismatic) individuals, inject­ ing the imagination where it does not belong. Ordinary people have begun to deploy their imaginations in the practice of their everyday lives. This fact is exemplified in the mutual contextualizing of motion and mediation.

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More people than ever before seem to imagine routinely the possibility that they or their children will live and work in places other than where they were born: this is the wellspring of the increased rates of migration at every level of social, national, and global life. Others are dragged into new settings, as the refugee camps of Thailand, Ethiopia, Tamil Nadu, and Palestine remind us. For these people, they move and must drag their imagination for new ways of living along with them. And then there are those who move in search of work, wealth, and opportunity often because their current circumstances are intolerable. Slightly transforming and ex­ tending Albert Hirschman's important terms loyalty and exit, we may speak of diasporas of hope, diasporas of terror, and diasporas of despair. But in every case, these diasporas bring the force of the imagination, as both memory and deSire, into the lives of many ordinary people, into mythographies different from the disciplines of myth and ritual of the clas­ sic sort. The key difference here is that these new mythographies are char­ ters for new social projects, and not just a counterpoint to the certainties of daily life. They move the glacial force of the habitus into the quickened beat of improvisation for large groups of people. Here the images, scripts, models, and narratives that come through mass mediation (in its realistic and fictional modes) make the difference between migration today and in the past. Those who wish to move, those who have moved, those who wish to return, and those who choose to stay rarely formulate their plans outside the sphere of radio and television, cassettes and Videos, newsprint and telephone. For migrants, both the politics of adaptation to new envi­ ronments and the stimulus to move or return are deeply affected by a mass-mediated imaginary that frequently transcends national space.

The second distinction is between imagination and fantasy. There is a large and respectable body of writing, notably by the critics of mass cul­ ture of the Frankfurt School and anticipated in the work of Max Weber, that views the modern world as growing into an iron cage and predicts that the imagination will be stunted by the forces of commoditization, in­ dustrial capitalism, and the generalized regimentation and secularization of the world. The modernization theorists of the past three decades (from Weber by way of Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils to Daniel Lerner, Alex Inkeles, and many others) largely accepted the view of the modern world as a space of shrinking religiosity (and greater scientism), less play (and in­ creasingly regimented leisure), and inhibited spontaneity at every level. There are many strands in this view, strands that link theorists as different as Norbert Elias and Robert Bell, but there is something fundamentally wrong with it. The error works on two levels. First, it is based on a prema-

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ture requiem for the death of religion and the victory of science. There is vast evidence in new religiosities of every sort that religion is not only not deadbutthatitmaybemoreconsequential thaneverin today'shighlymo­ bile and interconnected global politics. On another level, it is wrong to as­ sume that the electronic media are the opium of the masses. This view, which is only beginning to be corrected, is based on the notion that the mechanical arts of reproduction largely reprimed ordinary people for in­ dustrial work. It is far too simple.

There is growing evidence that the consumption of the mass media throughout the world often provokes resistance, irony, selectivity, and, in general, agency. Terrorists modeling themselves on Rambo-like figures (who have themselves generated a host of non-Western counterparts); housewives reading romances and soap operas as part of their efforts to construct their own lives; Muslim family gatherings listening to speeches by Islamic leaders on cassette tapes; domestic servants in South India tak­ ing packaged tours to Kashmir: these are all examples of the active way in which media are appropriated by people throughout the world. T-shirts, billboards, and graffiti as well as rap music, street dancing, and slum hous­ ing all show that the images of the media are qUickly moved into local repertoires of irony, anger, humor, and resistance.

Nor is this just a matter of Third World people reacting to American media, but it is equally true of people throughout the world reacting to their own national, electronic media. On these grounds alone, the theory of media as the opium of the people needs to be looked at with great skep­ ticism. This is not to suggest that consumers arefree agents, living happily in a world of safe malls, free lunches, and quick fixes. As I suggest in chap­ ter 4, consumption in the contemporary world is often a form of drudgery, part of the capitalist civilizing process. Nevertheless, where there is con­ sumption there is pleasure, and where there is pleasure there is agency. Freedom, on the other hand, is a rather more elusive commodity.

Further, the idea of fantasy carries with it the inescapable connotation of thought divorced from projects and actions, and it also has a private, even individualistic sound about it. The imagination, on the other hand, has a projective sense about it, the sense of being a prelude to some sort of ex­ pression, whether aesthetic or otherwise. Fantasy can dissipate (because its logic is so often autotelic), but the imagination, especially when collective, can become the fuel for action. It is the imagination, in its collective forms, that creates ideas of neighborhood and nationhood, of moral economies and unjust rule, of higher wages and foreign labor prospects. The imagina­ tion is today a staging ground for action, and not only for escape.

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The third distinction is between the individual and collective senses of the imagination. It is important to stress here that I am speaking of the imagination now as a property of collectives, and not merely as a faculty of the gifted individual (its tacit sense since the flowering of European Ro­ manticism). Part of what the mass media make possible, because of the conditions of collective reading, criticism, and pleasure, is what I have elsewhere called a "community of sentiment" (Appadurai 1990), a group that begins to imagine and feel things together. As Benedict Anderson ( 1 98 3 ) has shown so well, print capitalism can be one important way in which groups who have never been in face-to-face contact can begin to think of themselves as Indonesian or Indian or Malaysian. But other forms of electronic capitalism can have similar, and even more powerful effects, for they do not work only at the level of the nation-state. Collective expe­ riences of the mass media, especially film and video, can create sodalities of worship and charisma, such as those that formed regionally around the Indian female deity Santoshi Ma in the seventies and eighties and transna­ tionally around Ayatollah Khomeini in roughly the same period. Similar sodalities can form around sport and internationalism, as the transnational effects of the Olympics so clearly show. Tenements and bUildings house video clubs in places like Kathmandu and Bombay. Fan clubs and political followings emerge from small-town media cultures, as in South India.

These sodalities resemble what Diana Crane ( 1 972) has called "invisi­ ble colleges" in reference to the world of science, but they are more volatile, less professionalized, less subject to collectively shared criteria of pleasure, taste, or mutual relevance. They are communities in themselves but always potentially communities for themselves capable, of moving from shared imagination to collective action. Most important, as I will argue in the conclusion to this chapter, these sodalities are often trans­ national, even postnational, and they frequently operate beyond the bound­ aries of the nation. These mass-mediated sodalities have the additional complexity that, in them, diverse local experiences of taste, pleasure, and politics can crisscross with one another, thus creating the possibility of convergences in translocal social action that would otherwise be hard to imagine.

No single episode captures these realities better than the now mind­ numbing Salman Rushdie affair, involving a banned book, a religiously mandated death sentence, and an author committed to personal voice and aesthetic freedom. The Satanic Verses provoked Muslims (and others) across the world to debate the politics of reading, the cultural relevance of cen­ sorship, the dignity of religion, and the freedom of some groups to judge

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authors without independent knowledge of the text. The Rushdie affair is about a text-in-motion, whose commoditized trajectory brought it outside the safe haven of Western norms about artistic freedom and aesthetic rights into the space of religious rage and the authority of religious schol­ ars in their own transnational spheres. Here, the transnational worlds of liberal aesthetics and radical Islam met head-on, in the very different set­ tings of Bradford and Karachi, New York and New Delhi. In this episode, we can also see how global processes involving mobile texts and migrant audiences create implosive events that fold global pressures into small, al­ ready politicized arenas (see chap. 7), producing locality (chap. 9) in new, globalized ways.

This theory of a break-or rupture-with its strong emphasis on elec­ tronic mediation and mass migration, is necessarily a theory of the recent past (or the extended present) because it is only in the past two decades or so that media and migration have become so massively globalized, that is to say, active across large and irregular transnational terrains. Why do I consider this theory to be anything more than an update of older social theories of the ruptures of modernization? First, mine is not a teleological theory, with a recipe for how modernization will universally yield rational­ ity, punctuality, democracy, the free market, and a higher gross national product. Second, the pivot of my theory is not any large-scale project of social engineering (whether organized by states, international agencies, or other technocratic elites) but is the everyday cultural practice through which the work of the imagination is transformed. Third, my approach leaves entirely open the question of where the experiments with moder­ nity that electronic mediation enables might lead in terms of nationalism, violence, and social justice. Put another way, I am more deeply ambivalent about prognosis than any variant of classical modernization theory of which I am aware. Fourth, and most important, my approach to the break caused by the joint force of electronic mediation and mass migration is ex­ plicitly transnational-even postnational-as I suggest in the last part of this book. As such, it moves away dramatically from the architecture of classical modernization theory, which one might call fundamentally realist insofar as it assumes the salience, both methodological and ethical, of the nation-state.

We cannot simplify matters by imagining that the global is to space what the modern is to time. For many societies, modernity is an elsewhere, just as the global is a temporal wave that must be encountered in their pres­ ent. Globalization has shrunk the distance between elites, shifted key rela­ tions between producers and consumers, broken many links between labor

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and family life, obscured the lines between temporary locales and imagi­ nary national attachments. Modernity now seems more practical and less pedagogic, more experiential and less disciplinary than in the fifties and sixties, when it was mostly experienced (especially for those outside the national elite) through the propaganda apparatuses of the newly indepen­ dent nation-states and their great leaders, like Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah, and Sukarno. The megarhetoric of devel­ opmental modernization (economic growth, high technology, agribusi­ ness, schooling, militarization) in many countries is still with us. But it is often punctuated, interrogated, and domesticated by the micronarratives of film, television, music, and other expressive forms, which allow moder­ nity to be rewritten more as vernacular globalization and less as a conces­ sion to large-scale national and international policies. As I suggested ear­ lier, there was something of this experiential quality for those (such as myself) born into the ruling classes of the new nations in the fifties and six­ ties, but for many working people and the poor, this experiential engage­ ment with modernity is a relatively recent fact.

These subversive micronarratives also fuel oppositional movements, ranging from the Shining Path in Peru to Habitat for Humanity, from green movements in Europe to Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka, from Is­ lamic groups in Egypt to breakaway nationalist guerrillas in Chechnya. In these movements, some of which are repressive and violent while others are democratic and peaceful, we can see that electronic mass mediation and transnational mobilization have broken the monopoly of autonomous nation-states over the project of modernization. The transformation of everyday subjectivities through electronic mediation and the work of the imagination is not only a cultural fact. It is deeply connected to politics, through the new ways in which individual attachments, interests, and as­ pirations increasingly crosscut those of the nation-state.

The diasporic public spheres that such encounters create are no longer small, marginal, or exceptional. They are part of the cultural dynamic of urban life in most countries and continents, in which migration and mass mediation coconstitute a new sense of the global as modern and the mod­ ern as global. Mira Nair's film MississiPPi Masala, for example, is an epic of diaspora and race redoubled, exploring how Indians transformed and dis­ placed by race relations in Uganda deal with the intricacies of race in the American South, all the time retaining their sense of Indianness-in­ motion. The viewing of cricket matches between India and Pakistan by migrants in the Gulf states from these countries (see chap. 5) is about the peculiarities of diasporic nationalism in an emergent Indian Ocean poli-

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tics. The intense battles over the English language and about immigrant rights now heating up (again) in the United States are not just one more variant on the politics of pluralism: they are about the capability of Ameri­ can politics to contain the diasporic politics of Mexicans in Southern Cali­ fornia, Haitians in Miami, Colombians in New York, and Koreans in Los Angeles. Indeed, as I will propose in my concluding observations, it is the Widespread appearance of various kinds of diasporic public spheres that constitute one special diacritic of the global modern.

So much for the global now. There is a here to these chapters as well. They are written in part out of an encounter between my postwar Anglo­ phone upbringing and my encounter with the American social-science story of modernization as the theory of the true, the good, and the in­ evitable. They are also written from a professional perspective shaped sub­ stantially by two American research formations within which I have had the bulk of my training and in which I have spent much of my life as an academic: these are anthropology and area studies. Although this is a book about globalization, it is marked and constrained by the contests of the past two decades within both these American academic formations. Thus its epistemological anxieties are decidedly local, even if locality is no longer what it used to be (chap. 9).

The Eye ofAnthropology

Anthropology is my archive of lived actualities, found in all sorts of ethno­ graphies about peoples who have lived very different sorts of lives from my own, today and in the past. The archive of anthropology is a shadow pres­ ence in all the chapters that follow. That is not because it is inherently bet­ ter than some other disciplinary archive. Indeed, critiques of this archive have been trenchant and untiring in the past fifteen years. But it is the one I best know how to read. As an archive, it also has the advantage of re­ minding one that every similarity hides more than one difference, and that similarities and differences conceal one another indefinitely, so that the last turtle is always a matter of methodological convenience or stamina. This archive, and the sensibility that it produces in the professional an­ thropologist, predisposes me strongly toward the idea that globalization is not the story of cultural homogenization. This latter argument is the very least that I would want the reader to take away from this book. But anthro­ pology brings with it a professional tendency to privilege the cultural as the key diacritic in many practices (that to others might appear simply human, or stupid, or calculating, or patriotic, or something else). Because

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this book claims to be about the cultural dimensions of globalization, let me spell out the special force that this adjective carries in my usage.

I find myself frequently troubled by the word culture as a noun but cen­ trally attached to the adjectival form of the word, that is, cultural. When I reflect on why this is so, I realize that much of the problem with the noun form has to do with its implication that culture is some kind of object, thing, or substance, whether physical or metaphysical. This substantial­ ization seems to bring culture back into the discursive space of race, the very idea it was originally designed to combat. Implying a mental sub­ stance, the noun culture appears to privilege the sort of sharing, agreeing, and bounding that fly in the face of the facts of unequal knowledge and the differential prestige of lifestyles, and to discourage attention to the worldviews and agency of those who are marginalized or dominated. Viewed as a physical substance, culture begins to smack of any variety of biologisms, including race, which we have certainly outgrown as scientific categories. Alfred Kroeber's term 5uperorganic nicely captures both sides of this substantialism, something with which I am not in sympathy. The efforts of the past few decades, notably in American anthropology, to es­ cape this trap by looking at culture largely as a linguistic form (understood mainly in Saussurean structuralist terms) only partly avoids the dangers of such substantialism.

If culture as a noun seems to carry associations with some sort of sub­ stance in ways that appear to conceal more than they reveal, cultural the adjective moves one into a realm of differences, contrasts, and compar­ isons that is more helpful. This adjectival sense of culture, which builds on the context-sensitive, contrast-centered heart of Saussurean linguistics, seems to me one of the virtues of structuralism that we have tended to for­ get in our haste to attack it for its ahistorical, formal, binary, mentalist, and textualist associations.

The most valuable feature of the concept of culture is the concept of difference, a contrastive rather than a substantive property of certain things. Although the term difference has now taken on a vast set of associa­ tions (principally because of the special use of the term by Jacques Derrida and his followers), its main virtue is that it is a useful heuristic that can highlight points of similarity and contrast between all sorts of categories: classes, genders, roles, groups, and nations. When we therefore point to a practice, a distinction, a conception, an object, or an ideology as haVing a cultural dimension (notice the adjectival use), we stress the idea of situated difference, that is, difference in relation to something local, embodied, and Significant. This point can be summarized in the following form: culture is

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not usefully regarded as a substance but is better regarded as a dimension of phenomena, a dimension that attends to situated and embodied differ­ ence. Stressing the dimensionality of culture rather than its substantiality permits our thinking of culture less as a property of individuals and groups and more as a heuristic device that we can use to talk about difference.

But there are many kinds of differences in the world and only some of these are cultural. And here I bring in a second component of my proposal about the adjectival form of the word culture. I suggest that we regard as cultural only those differences that either express, or set the groundwork for, the mobilization of group identities. This qualification provides a brute principle of selection that focuses us on a variety of differences hav­ ing to do with group identity, both within and outside any particular social group. In putting the mobilization of group identities at the heart of the adjective cultural, I have in fact made a move that looks, at first glance, ret­ rogressive, as it appears that I am beginning to bring the word culture un­ comfortably close to the idea of ethnicity. And that gets me into some new problems that need to be unraveled.

Before I try to do the unraveling, which will allow me to move toward the idea of culturalism, let me review where we have been. Resisting ideas of culture that tempt us to think of actual social groups as cultures, I have also resisted the noun form culture and suggested an adjectival approach to culture, which stresses its contextual, heuristic, and comparative dimen­ sions and orients us to the idea of culture as difference, especially differ­ ence in the realm of group identity. I have therefore suggested that culture is a pervasive dimension of human discourse that exploits difference to generate diverse conceptions of group identity.

Having veered so close to the idea of ethnicity-the idea of naturalized group identity-it is important to be clear about the relation between cul­ ture and group identity that I seek to articulate. Culture, unmarked, can continue to be used to refer to the plethora of differences that characterize the world today, differences at various levels, with various valences, and with greater and lesser degrees of social consequence. I propose, however, that we restrict the term culture as a marked term to the subset of these dif­ ferences that has been mobilized to articulate the boundary of difference. As a boundary-maintenance question, culture then becomes a matter of group identity as constituted by some differences among others.

But is this not a way of simply equating ethnicity and culture? Yes and no. Yes, because in this usage culture would not stress simply the possession of certain attributes (material, lingUistic, or territorial) but the conscious­ ness of these attributes and their naturalization as essential to group iden-

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tity (see chap. 7). That is, rather than falling prey to the assumption, at least as old as Weber, that ethnicity rests on some sort of extension of the primordial idea of kinship (which is in turn biological and genealogical), the idea of ethnicity I propose takes the conscious and imaginative con­ struction and mobilization of differences as its core. Culture I, constitut­ ing a virtually open-ended archive of differences is consciously shaped into Culture 2, that subset of these differences that constitutes the diacrit­ ics of group identity.

But this process of mobilizing certain differences and linking them to group identity is also unlike ethnicity, at least in an older understanding, because it does not depend on the extension of primordial sentiments to larger and larger units in some sort of unidirectional process, nor does it make the mistake of supposing that larger social units simply draw on the sentiments of family and kinship to give emotional force to large-scale group identities. Thus, in chapter 5 I show that far from drawing on the ex­ isting repertoire of emotions and moving them into a larger arena, Indian cricket is a large-scale form that comes to be inscribed on the body through a variety of practices of increasingly smaller scale. This logic is just the reverse of the old primordialist (or extensionist) idea of ethnic identity.

The idea of culture as involving the naturalized organization of certain differences in the interests of group identity, through and in the historical process, and through and in the tensions between agents and structures, comes closer to what has been called the instrumental conception of eth­ nicity, as opposed to the primordial one. I have two qualifications about this convergence, qualifications that lead to my discussion of culturalism. One is that the ends to which instrumental conceptions of ethnic identity are formed may themselves be counterstructural responses to existing valorizations of difference: they may thus be value-rational rather than instrumental-rational, in Weber's sense. They may have a purely identity­ oriented instrumentality rather than an instrumentality that, as is so often implied, is extracultural (economic or political or emotional). Put another way, the mobilization of markers of group difference may itself be part of a contestation of values about difference, as distinct from the conse­ quences of difference for wealth, security, or power. My second qualifica­ tion about most instrumental accounts is that they do not explain the process by which certain criteria of difference, mobilized for group iden­ tity (in turn instrumental to other goals) are (re)inscribed into bodily sub­ jects, thus to be experienced as both natural and profoundly incendiary at the same time.

We have now moved one step further, from culture as substance to cul-

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ture as the dimension of difference, to culture as group identity based on difference, to culture as the process of naturalizing a subset of differences that have been mobilized to articulate group identity. We are at this point in a position to move to the question of culturalism.

We rarely encounter the word cultumlism by itself: it is usually hitched as a noun to certain prefixes like hi, multi, and inter, to name the most promi­ nent. But it may be useful to begin to use culturalism to designate a feature of movements involving identities consciously in the making. These move­ ments, whether in the United States or elsewhere, are usually directed at modern nation-states, which distribute various entitlements, sometimes including life and death, in accordance with classifications and policies re­ garding group identity. Throughout the world, faced with the activities of states that are concerned with encompassing their ethnic diversities into fixed and closed sets of cultural categories to which individuals are often assigned forcibly, many groups are consciously mobilizing themselves ac­ cording to identitarian criteria. Culturalism, put simply, is identity politics mobilized at the level of the nation-state.

This sort of culturalism is my principal focus in chapter 7, where I mount a sustained critique of the primordialist view of the ethnic violence of the past decade. What appears to be a worldwide rebirth of ethnic na­ tionalisms and separatisms is not really what journalists and pundits all too frequently refer to as "tribalism," implying old histories, local rivalries, and deep hatreds. Rather, the ethnic violence we see in many places is part of a wider transformation that is suggested by the term cultumlism. Cultural­ ism, as I have already suggested, is the conscious mobilization of cultural differences in the service of a larger national or transnational politics. It is frequently associated with extraterritorial histories and memories, some­ times with refugee status and exile, and almost always with struggles for stronger recognition from existing nation-states or from various transna­ tional bodies.

Culturalist movements (for they are almost always efforts to mobilize) are the most general form of the work of the imagination and draw fre­ quently on the fact or possibility of migration or secession. Most important, they are self-conscious about identity, culture, and heritage, all of which tend to be part of the deliberate vocabulary of culturalist movements as they struggle with states and other culturalist focuses and groups. It is this deliberate, strategic, and populist mobilization of cultural material that justifies calling such movements culturalist, though they may vary in many ways. Culturalist movements, whether they involve African-Americans, Pakistanis in Britain, Algerians in France, native Hawaiians, Sikhs, or French

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speakers in Canada, tend to be counternational and metacultural. In the broadest sense, as I shall suggest in the last part of this book, culturalism is the form that cultural differences tend to take in the era of mass mediation, migration, and globalization.

How Areas Get Studied

The anthropological stress on the cultural, which is the main inflection I wish to give to the debate on globalization, is in my case further sustained by my training and practice as a scholar of area studies, specifically of South Asian studies in the United States. There has not yet been a sus­ tained critical analysis of the link, in the United States, between the emer­ gence of the idea of culture areas in anthropology between the World Wars and the full-fledged formation after World War II of area studies as the major way to look at the strategically significant parts of the develop­ ing world. Yet there is little doubt that both perspectives incline one to a particular sort of map in which groups and their ways of life are marked by differences of culture, and in the area-studies formation these differ­ ences slide into a topography of national cultural differences. Thus geo­ graphical divisions, cultural differences, and national boundaries tended to become isomorphic, and there grew a strong tendency to refract world processes through this sort of national-cultural map of the world. Area studies adds to this spatial imaginary a strong, if sometimes tacit, sense of the strategic importance of information gained in this perspective. This is the reason for the often noted links between the Cold War, government funding, and university expansion in the organization of area-studies cen­ ters after World War II. Nevertheless, area studies has provided the major counterpoint to the delusions of the view from nowhere that underwrites much canonical social science. It is this aspect of my training that com­ pelled me to situate my genealogy of the global present in the area I know best: India.

There is a special anxiety that now surrounds the structures and ideolo­ gies of area studies in the United States. Recognizing that area studies is somehow deeply tied up with a strategizing world picture driven by U.S. foreign-policy needs between 1945 and 1989, leading figures in the world of universities, foundations, think tanks, and even the government have made it clear that the old way of doing area studies does not make sense in the world after 1989. Thus left-wing critics of area studies, much influ­ enced by the important work of Edward Said on orientalism, have been joined by free-marketeers and advocates of liberalization, who are impa-

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tient with what they deride as the narrowness and history fetish of area­ studies experts. Area-studies scholars are widely criticized as obstacles to the study of everything from comparison and contemporaneity to civil so­ ciety and free markets. Of course, no critique that is so sweeping and so sudden could be entirely fair, and the odd mix of its critics suggests that area-studies scholarship might be taking the rap for a wider failure in the U.s. academy to deliver a broader and more prescient picture of the world after 1989.

The area-studies tradition is a double-edged sword. In a society notori­ ously devoted to exceptionalism, and to endless preoccupation with "America," this tradition has been a tiny refuge for the serious study of for­ eign languages, alternative worldviews, and large-scale perspectives on so­ ciocultural change outside Europe and the United States. Bedeviled by a certain tendency toward philology (in the narrow, lexical sense) and a cer­ tain overidentification with the regions of its specialization, area studies has nonetheless been one of the few serious counterweights to the tireless tendency to marginalize huge parts of the world in the American academy and in American society more generally. Yet the area-studies tradition has probably grown too comfortable with its own maps of the world, too se­ cure in its own expert practices, and too insensitive to transnational processes both today and in the past. So criticism and reform are certainly in order, but how can area studies help to improve the way that world pic­ tures are generated in the United States?

From the perspective advanced here and in the rest of this book, area studies is a salutary reminder that globalization is itself a deeply historical, uneven, and even localiZing process. Globalization does not necessarily or even frequently imply homogenization or Americanization, and to the ex­ tent that different societies appropriate the materials of modernity differ­ ently, there is still ample room for the deep study of specific geographies, histories, and languages. What I discuss in chapters 3 and 4 as the rela­ tionship between history and genealogy is impossible to engage without a strong sense of the actualities of the longue duree, which always produce spe­ cific geographies, both real and imagined. If the genealogy of cultural forms is about their circulation across regions, the history of these forms is about their ongoing domestication into local practice. The very interac­ tion of historical and genealogical forms is uneven, diverse, and contin­ gent. In this sense, history, the ruthless discipline of context (in E. P. Thompson's colorful phrase), is everything. But this recognition is not a warrant for knee-jerk localism of the sort sometimes associated with area studies. In any case, area studies is a specific Western technique of re-

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search and can hardly pretend to be a simple mirror of the civilizational Other. What does need to be recognized, if the area-studies tradition is to be revitalized, is that locality itself is a historical product and that the his­ tories through which localities emerge are eventually subject to the dy­ namics of the global. This argument, which culminates in a reminder that there is nothing mere about the local, is the burden of the final chapter of this book.

This mixed review of area studies, a tradition in which I have been im­ mersed for the past twenty-five years, underlies the presence at the center of this book of two chapters about India. These chapters, on the census and on cricket, are a counterpoint to those that might otherwise seem, well, too global. But I hasten to plead that India-in this book-is not to be read as a mere case, example, or instance of something larger than itself. It is, rather a site for the examination of how locality emerges in a globaliz­ ing world, of how colonial processes underwrite contemporary politics, of how history and genealogy inflect one another, and of how global facts take local form.2 In this sense these chapters-and the frequent invoca­ tions of India throughout the book-are not about India (taken as a natural fact) but about the processes through which contemporary India has emerged. I am aware of the irony (even the contradiction) in having a nation-state be the anchoring referent of a book devoted to globalization and animated by a sense of the end of the era of the nation-state. But here my expertise and my limitations are two sides of the same coin, and I urge the reader to see India as an optic, and not as a reified social fact or a crude nationalist reflex.

I make this detour in recognition of the fact that any book about glob­ alization is a mild exercise in megalomania, especially when it is produced in the relatively privileged circumstances of the American research univer­ sity. It seems important to identify the knowledge forms through which any such megalomania comes to articulate itself. In my case, these forms­ anthropology and area studies-predispose me by habit to the fixing of practices, spaces, and countries into a map of static differences. This is, counterintuitive!y, a danger even in a book such as this, which is con­ sciously shaped by a concern with diaspora, deterritorialization, and the irregularity of the ties between nations, ideologies, and social movements.

Social Science after Patriotism

The final part of the here and now is a fact about the modern world that has exercised some of the best contemporary thinkers in the social and

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human sciences: it is the issue of the nation-state, its history, its current cri­ sis, its prospects. I did not begin to write this book with the crisis of the nation-state as my principal concern. But in the six years over which its chapters were written, I have come to be convinced that the nation-state, as a complex modern political form, is on its last legs. The evidence is by no means clear, and the returns are hardly all in. I am aware that all nation­ states are not the same in respect to the national imaginary, the appara­ tuses of the state, or the sturdiness of the hyphen between them. Yet there is some justification for what might sometimes seem like a reified view of the nation-state in this book. Nation-states, for all their important differ­ ences (and only a fool would conflate Sri Lanka with Great Britain), make sense only as parts of a system. This system (even when seen as a system of differences) appears poorly equipped to deal with the interlinked diaspo­ ras of people and images that mark the here and now. Nation-states, as units in a complex interactive system, are not very likely to be the long­ term arbiters of the relationship between globality and modernity. That is why, in my title, I imply that modernity is at large.

The idea that some nation-states are in crisis is a staple of the field of comparative politics and was in some sense the justification for much of modernization theory, especially in the sixties. The idea that some states are weak, sick, corrupt, or soft has been around for several decades (re­ member Gunnar Myrdahl?). More recently, it has become widely accept­ able to see nationalism as a disease, especially when it is somebody else's nationalism. The idea that all nation-states are to some extent bedeviled by globalized movements of arms, moneys, diseases, and ideologies is also hardly news in the era of the multinational corporation. But the idea that the very system of nation-states is in jeopardy is hardly popular. In this book, my persistent focus on the hyphen that links nation to state is part of an evolving argument that the very epoch of the nation-state is near its end. This view, which lies somewhere between a diagnosis and a progno­ sis, between an intuition and an argument, needs to be spelled out.

First, I need to distinguish between the ethical and the analytic compo­ nents of my argument. On the ethical front, I am increasingly inclined to see most modern governmental apparatuses as inclined to self-perpetuation, bloat, violence, and corruption. Here, I am in mixed company, from the left and from the right. The ethical question I am often faced with is, if the nation-state disappears, what mechanism will assure the protection of mi­ norities, the minimal distribution of democratic rights, and the reasonable possibility of the growth of civil society? My answer is that I do not know, but this admission is hardly an ethical recommendation for a system that

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seems plagued by endemic disease. As to alternative social forms and possibilities, there are actually existing social forms and arrangements that might contain the seeds of more dispersed and diverse forms of trans­ national allegiance and affiliation. This is part of the argument of chapter 8 , although I readily admit that the road from various transnational move­ ments to sustainable forms of transnational governance is hardly clear. I prefer, however, the exercise of looking for-indeed, imagining-these al­ ternative possibilities to the strategy of defining some nation-states as healthier than others and then suggesting various mechanisms of ideology transfer. This latter strategy replays modernization-cum-development pol­ icy all over again, with the same triumphalist underpinnings and the same unhealthy prospects.

If the ethical front of my argument is necessarily fuzzy, the analytic front is somewhat sharper. Even a cursory inspection of the relationships within and among the more than 1 50 nation-states that are now members of the United Nations shows that border wars, culture wars, runaway infla­ tion, massive immigrant populations, or serious flights of capital threaten sovereignty in many of them. Even where state sovereignty is apparently intact, state legitimacy is frequently insecure. Even in nation-states as ap­ parently secure as the United States, Japan, and Germany, debates about race and rights, membership and loyalty, citizenship and authority are no longer culturally peripheral. While one argument for the longevity of the nation-state form is based on these apparently secure and legitimate in­ stances, the other argument is an inverse one and bases itself on the new ethnonationalisms of the world, notably those of Eastern Europe. Bosnia­ Herzegovina is almost always pointed to in the United States as the princi­ pal symptom of the fact that nationalism is alive and sick, while the rich democracies are simultaneously invoked to show that the nation-state is alive and well.

Given the frequency with which Eastern Europe is used to show that tribalism is deeply human, that other people's nationalism is tribalism writ large, and that territorial sovereignty is still the major goal of many large ethnic groups, let me propose an alternative interpretation. In my judg­ ment, Eastern Europe has been singularly distorted in popular arguments about nationalism in the press and in the academy in the United States. Rather than being the modal instance of the complexities of all contempo­ rary ethnonationalisms, Eastern Europe, and its Serbian face in particular, has been used as a demonstration of the continued vigor of nationalisms in which land, language, religion, history, and blood are congruent, a text­ book case of what nationalism is all about. Of course, what is fascinating

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about Eastern Europe is that some of its own right-wing ideologues have convinced the liberal Western press that nationalism is a politics of pri­ mordia, whereas the real question is how it has been made to appear that way. This certainly makes Eastern Europe a fascinating and urgent case from many points of view, including the fact that we need to be skeptical when experts claim to have encountered ideal types in actual cases.

In most cases of counternationalism, secession, supranationalism, or eth­ nic revival on a large scale, the common thread is self-determination rather than territorial sovereignty as such. Even in those cases where territory seems to be a fundamental issue, such as in Palestine, it could be argued that debates about land and territory are in fact functional spin-offs of argu­ ments that are substantially about power, justice, and self-determination. In a world of people on the move, of global commoditization and states in­ capable of delivering basic rights even to their majority ethnic populations (see chap. 2), territorial sovereignty is an increasingly difficult justification for those nation-states that are increasingly dependent on foreign labor, expertise, arms, or soldiers. For counternationalist movements, territorial sovereignty is a plausible idiom for their aspirations, but it should not be mistaken for their founding logic or their ultimate concern. To do so is to commit what I would call the Bosnia Fallacy, an error that involves (a) mis­ understanding Eastern European ethnic battles as tribalist and primordial, an error in which the New York Times is the leader, and (b) compounding the mistake by taking the Eastern European case to be the modal case of all emergent nationalisms. To move away from the Bosnia Fallacy requires two difficult concessions: first, that the political systems of the wealthy northern nations may themselves be in crisis, and second, that the emer­ gent nationalisms of many parts of the world may be founded on patrio­ tisms that are not either exclusively or fundamentally territorial. Argu­ ments for making these concessions animate many of the chapters in this book. In making them, I have not always found it easy to maintain the dis­ tinction between the analytic and the ethical perspectives on the future of the nation-state, although I have tried to do so.

As the nation-state enters a terminal crisis (if my prognostications prove to be correct), we can certainly expect that the materials for a post­ national imaginary must be around us already. Here, I think we need to pay special attention to the relation between mass mediation and migra­ tion, the two facts that underpin my sense of the cultural politics of the global modern. In particular, we need to look closely at the variety of what have emerged as diasporic public spheres. Benedict Anderson did us a service in identifying the way in which certain forms of mass mediation, notably

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those involving newspapers, novels, and other print media, played a key role in imagining the nation and in facilitating the spread of this form to the colonial world in Asia and elsewhere. My general argument is that there is a similar link to be found between the work of the imagination and the emergence of a postnational political world. Without the benefit of hindsight (which we do have with respect to the global journey of the idea of the nation), it is hard to make a clear case for the role of the imagination in a postnational order. But as mass mediation becomes increasingly dom­ inated by electronic media (and thus delinked from the capacity to read and write), and as such media increasingly link producers and audiences across national boundaries, and as these audiences themselves start new conversations between those who move and those who stay, we find a growing number of diasporic public spheres.

These diasporic spheres are frequently tied up with students and other intellectuals engaging in long-distance nationalism (as with activists from the People's Republic of China). The establishment of black majority rule in South Africa opens up new kinds of discourse of racial democracy in Africa as well as in the United States and the Caribbean. The Islamic world is the most familiar example of a whole range of debates and projects that have little to do with national boundaries. Religions that were in the past resolutely national now pursue global missions and diasporic clienteles with vigor: the global Hinduism of the past decade is the single best ex­ ample of this process. Activist movements involved with the environment, women's issues, and human rights generally have created a sphere of transnational discourse, frequently resting on the moral authority of refugees, exiles, and other displaced persons. Major transnational sepa­ ratist movements like the Sikhs, the Kurds, and the Sri Lankan Tamils con­ duct their self-imagining in sites throughout the world, where they have enough members to allow for the emergence of multiple nodes in a larger diasporic public sphere.

The wave of debates about multiculturalism that has spread through the United States and Europe is surely testimony to the incapacity of states to prevent their minority populations from linking themselves to wider constituencies of religious or ethnic affiliation. These examples, and others, suggest that the era in which we could assume that viable public spheres were typically, exclusively, or necessarily national could be at an end.

Diasporic public spheres, diverse among themselves, are the crucibles of a postnational political order. The engines of their discourse are mass media (both interactive and expressive) and the movement of refugees, ac-

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tivists, students, and laborers. It may well be that the emergent postna­ tional order proves not to be a system of homogeneous units (as with the current system of nation-states) but a system based on relations between heterogeneous units (some social movements, some interest groups, some professional bodies, some nongovernmental organizations, some armed constabularies, some judicial bodies). The challenge for this emergent order will be whether such heterogeneity is consistent with some minimal conventions of norm and value, which do not require a strict adherence to the liberal social contract of the modern West. This fateful question will be answered not by academic fiat but by the negotiations (both civil and vio­ lent) between the worlds imagined by these different interests and move­ ments. In the short run, as we can see already, it is likely to be a world of increased incivility and violence. In the longer run, free of the constraints of the nation form, we may find that cultural freedom and sustainable jus­ tice in the world do not presuppose the uniform and general existence of the nation-state. This unsettling possibility could be the most exciting div­ idend of living in modernity at large.

[onlinemarketingsystemworld-blog]

Why Facebook Deserves Over $10 Billion

Yahoo! have actually remained in talks with Facebook for over a year currently as well as apparently recently got reluctant at Facebook's $1 billion asking rate but as I will certainly describe here Yahoo! have missed out on an outright deal.

Facebook have 18 million users, plenty. Nevertheless MySpace has 100 million + and sold for a simple $580 million to News Corp's in 2005. YouTube sold to Google for a reported $1.65 billion in 2006 but it offers over 100 million video clip's a day as well as has more than 25 million visitors a month. So what makes Facebook so important? It obtains relatively massive website traffic levels but out par with YouTube or MySpace. Despite currently being readily available to anyone it started life as an exclusive network for pupils (you required an academic email to register) and this is still its main customer group.

So where's the cash?

Currently Facebook displays traditional banner marketing on customers' homepages as well as picked pages through the website. Adverts are unobtrusive and random in so much as they're not targeted at any specific individual- they're simply served to the whole website on a random basis. Facebook are doing ok from this plan on the basis of the variety of page perceptions they receive, although in truth they're keeping advertising and marketing at a minimum in order to accumulate the value of the site for its eventual sale which will certainly probably happen in 2007/8. Smart guys!

The power of details

Register with Facebook and also quickly you could find yourself distributing significant quantities of useful individual info. Think about it ... Facebook understand your name, they recognize exactly how old you are (actually your D.O.B which is definitely more valuable as I'll go on to clarify), they know if you're male or female, they recognize your hometown, your postcode if you choose to give it away (although I question many individuals pick this), they know if you're single, in a connection (as well as that with), wed, divorced etc, they understand your sexual orientation. Ok so you can answer all these inquiries as honestly, dishonestly or vaguely as you like yet from what I've seen individuals gladly give exact info regarding themselves as it's their friends as well as possible buddies that are going to see it- and no person else right?

However just what else do Facebook recognize? Well they know where you mosted likely to school, where you function, more sinisterly your religious and political views. From this we can start to accumulate a rather beneficial market account. As I'm informing Facebook I could too inform you I'm Male, 22 (born in August), Straight, in a connection, conventional, atheist from Brighton, England. Mosted likely to school at Blatchington Mill Second, college at a location called BHASVIC, University at Bournemouth. From this information we can draw more assumptions- I reside in Brighton and based upon the area of my institutions catchment area we could rather accurately map areas in Brighton I find out about, visit, as well as reside in (assume Google maps API). I'm a directly; conservative from a reasonably well-off location in full time employment as a result I'm most likely white, center course with a respectable non reusable revenue.

So exactly what else? Facebook know what you resemble, they possibly know what you used to look like a few years ago too. Probably most considerably they understand that your buddies are, they recognize just how you recognize them, they understand when you speak with them, just what they appear like and also eventually they know precisely the very same information about them as they learn about you- you're interests, suches as and dislikes as well as your buddies tastes too.

They understand your email address, so they understand if you make use of Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and so on. They recognize your telephone number so they could very easily work out your phone service provider. They have your IP address so they might exercise your ISP. They recognize where you've reached the site from so they recognize what online search engine you use (get in Yahoo! As well as Google to the bidding process battle), what internet browser you're on, they know if you're aesthetically impaired or have finding out impairments from the setups on your web browser.

Facebook know when I'm visiting and also from where so they understand the hrs I work, if I'm making use of the web at the office, the web pages I leave Facebook to visit or the web pages I originate from so they understand just what other websites I check out. I could establish my present condition and inform Facebook precisely what I'm doing or really feeling right this 2nd.

Ok so you get the picture by now, one last point though, is your Facebook password the same as your email account password, your internet as well as telephone banking password, each password you utilize in your life (because until I wrote this blog post mine was!) how much even more info do you want to hand out?

What's the risk here?

Genuinely it's very slim. Facebook are a nice lot of individuals as well as a great website, I like using it as well as in spite of understanding just what I learn about info safety and so on I choose to distribute a large chunk of the info I have actually spoken about here.

Yahoo! And Facebook

So if Yahoo!, Google or god forbid Microsoft effectively purchase Facebook (as I say I'm fairly confident this will certainly occur this year) the Orwellian lucid desire recommended by this blog post ends up being a continuous headache. Imagine a firm who have actually made billions and also controlled the fastest growing market in the world by developing algorithms which creep hundreds of countless pages of arbitrary information (the web) and classify that details with the supreme goal of matching it to businesses and offering marketing.

The search algorithm let loose on Facebook

Imagine the online search engine let loose on Facebook. An algorithm tuned to choose profile details (John, born 13.08.84). Map it to search phrases in individual rate of interests i.e. football, Manchester United. Plot your location on a map i.e. Brighton, England. Comply with links to your closest pals with comparable interests i.e. Bob and also Dave who live round the corner as well as serve me an advert something like:

Pleased birthday for next week John.

Did you recognize its Dave's birthday celebration the week after?

Why not publication tickets for Brighton and also Hove Albion vs. Manchester united on 12.08.07

Visit this site to book now and obtain 3 tickets for the price of 2 (why not ask bob to find along- he sustains Brighton and also you have not talked in a while).

Schedule today as well as we'll offer you a half price limousine from your house to the video game with trashy-limo's. com.

Now that's powerful advertising as well as it's simply nearby. If Facebook has 25 million signed up individuals by the time it's sold, half of which see each day that's a minimum 12.5 million web page impressions a day. Serve the advert above at $1 a click (which is much less than its worth based upon the current AdWords CPC design) expect a click with price of as much as 10% based on the exact nature of the marketing which's $1.2 million minimum a day- virtually $ 1/2 a billion a year. Grow that individual group to 50 million (reasonable if Google or Yahoo! can use their existing individual database) and also offer advertisement room on an affiliate basis claim the football tickets at $300 with a 10% affiliate kickback and also a 10% conversion price =$ 3 per user x 25 million users =$ 75 million a day or $2737500000 in year 1! OK allows not obtain brought away individuals aren't mosting likely to spend $300 each day yet the logics there therefore the money.

Will the audience except it?

Much better quality marketing indicates much less advertising- less web sites rammed with banners so you can not discover exactly what you're looking for, much less popups, less low quality items. This is the primary driving force behind the success of search advertising programs and account based marketing is already in position with Google's individualized search returning extra targeted AdWords advertisements compared to previously possible. If it falls under the hands of Microsoft then individuals could be more careful yet with the picture of Google or Yahoo! and Facebook account details is considered as soft details as the business does not sell you products directly as well as he solution is complimentary. It's the method the internet is going and also I believe it's where we'll remain in 5 years.

Identification theft

The factor I've been making tediously through this article is that we ought to be extra mindful concerning just what information we give up and also to whom. If the net was an area it would certainly be Nazi Germany and also Facebook would certainly be the Gestapo! Social energies like Facebook are afforded the kind of fortunate details fascist federal governments everywhere would certainly and have actually killed for. We moan concerning identity cards being presented in the UK (actually there's several Facebook groups committed to the reason) but we gladly surrender personal details to a number of college geeks in the states that are ultimately intending on offering our details to the highest bidder (the value of any website is based upon the volume, top quality and quantity of info they have regarding their web traffic- however finest of good luck to them) possibly to the business that currently control the majority of world business systems with the home windows system.

This blog post is not implied to scare- it's simply an acknowledgment of the power of new web modern technologies, their possibly applications as well as to pose the inquiry- if your Facebook pals are your actual pals shouldn't they understand your birthday celebration? Are Facebook actually going to buy you a present?!