#we also worship being ‘productive’ in ways that benefit said profits

[cantankerouscorvid]

I’ve currently lost several hours of sleep over the fact that ADHD and autism were likely advantages over “normal” people in the caveman days. They allowed people to be extremely focused on tasks and to be very talented at their area of specialized expertise within a more community based society. Thus, these traits made neurodivergence “better” than what is defined as “normal” today by the neurotypical standard. It was only after the rise of crapitalism that these traits were seen as disadvantages or disabilities.

Why?

Because neurodivergence makes it harder to perform meaningless repetitive tasks like “normal” people in exchange for a germ-coated piece of paper with the portrait of a dead colonizer (aka founding father) on it.

How is the fact that neurodivergent people may not want to surrender to the hamster-wheel that is the modern office job in order to afford their biological needs considered a defficiency? How is it that neurodivergent people are told that sitting still and typing numbers in boxes or performing the same task ad nauseum for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week is the most important thing they can do in life? How is it that society is structured around whittling our lives away with largely pointless tasks instead of bettering ourselves as people or AT LEAST having enough spare time to actually pursue happiness for ourselves and others?

Why have we devolved to the point that doing something you love is financially unfeasible in the modern world? Why can’t people make a living off of what they love doing and are often extremely talented at when other people are respected and revered for doing calculations around the socially constructed currency WE PULLED OUT OF THE AIR? How is that considered a meritocracy and not absolute lunacy? Has the human species improved at all, or were we just doomed to spiral down to this point from the beginning? What the hell am I supposed to do to fix it, or make it liveable?

[aion-rsa]

Will the Rocky IV Director’s Cut Kill its Charm?

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Rocky IV remains a prototypical example of 1980s American franchise filmmaking, having conveyed a patriotic Cold-War-evocative ethos through the aesthetically shiny lens of scrappy superhuman pugilists pummeling each other over revenge and world peace, all to Vince DiCola’s absurd synthesizer-strewn score. Oh, and lest we forget, it had a robot!  While those attributes entitled the 1985 film to the smug dismissal and earnest appreciation of posterity, star/writer/director Sylvester Stallone’s upcoming director’s cut risks erasing its allure.

Stallone, who announced his plan for a new Rocky IV cut last year, has completed his redux of the famous franchise‘s four-quel. However, unlike that other director’s cut dominating current conversations, Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Sly’s upcoming Rocky IV Director’s Cut is an update of a film that was properly released by its director. Having premiered back on Nov. 27, 1985, Rocky IV was a box-office-topping hit that proved profoundly profitable for studio MGM, with a worldwide gross of $300 million ($733.3 million adjusted for inflation,) against a budget of $28 million. Moreover, despite its oft-focused foibles, the film retained enough interest 33 years later to be directly followed up in Creed II. However, to borrow his parlance from 2006’s Rocky Balboa, Stallone seemed to have “stuff in the basement,” to unleash for the fourth film.  

“We’ve just been working on punches and sounds because it’s never complete,” explains Stallone of his director’s cut approach in an Instagram update. “I’ve said this before, you can go back and see a movie that you’ve done 50 years ago and go, ‘I’ve got to re-edit that.’ And every director feels the same way. It’s not about making a movie, it’s about remaking. Unfortunately, you run out of time, you run out of money. They basically throw you out of the room. So, therefore, you don’t get a chance, but on this one, I finally got a chance, so I’m feeling great about this.”

While the full extent of the changes Stallone made to Rocky IV obviously won’t be known until he premieres his new cut, some tidbits have made the rounds. One of the earliest-known changes is the elimination of one of its most campy, pseudo-sci-fi elements, the aforementioned robot. Specifically, the Jetsons-esque talking robot—a real-life invention called SICO, created by International Robotics Inc.—that well-to-do champ Rocky gives as a birthday present to his leachy live-in brother-in-law, Paulie (Burt Young) in the film’s first act. However, the robot—complete with a fancy-for-1985 cordless phone system installed—became a punchline, even for within film, during which it was implied that Paulie eventually altered its settings to sound and act like an alluring female maid that worships him while fetching his beers. Thus, the elimination of the robot not only deletes the amusing automaton, but it also necessitates an essence-altering recut of Paulie’s birthday party scenes. Yet, Stallone’s response to a fan’s posted desire to give SICO a reprieve was met with Ivan Drago-like coldness, stating, “I don’t like the robot anymore.”

MGM/UA

And that brings us to the film’s Siberian Bull big bad himself, Dolph Lundgren’s Ivan Drago, whose claim-to-fame fight in which he beat Carl Weathers’s Apollo Creed to death will apparently be extended in a yet-unknown manner in Stallone’s new cut. The role positioned newcomer Lundgren for stardom in what was only his second onscreen appearance, having previously appeared six months earlier in 1985 Bond movie A View to a Kill as a thug named Venz; a role he acquired due to his real-life romantic relationship with co-star Grace Jones. Besides being an imposing spectacle of a human being (which he remains to this day), Lundgren’s outing as Drago was meant to depict him as the ultimate villain, a soulless Soviet slayer shaped by communism, steroids and all-around godlessness. However, while that façade was shattered by the end of the film (and even more so in Creed II), it remains to be seen if extended Drago scenes—specifically in the Apollo fight—ends up weighing the film down unnecessarily.

Read more

Movies

Rocky IV Director’s Cut Will Ditch Robot

By Mike Cecchini

Culture

Could Rocky Balboa Really Have Gone the Distance?

By Tony Sokol

If there’s one thing that critics can’t take away from Rocky IV, it would have to be Stallone’s artfully economic approach as a director. The film manifests as a slim, trim 91-minute affair that saves money by being deliberately diluted with lengthy montages—FOUR of them in total. In fact, even if we generously discount his blatant reuse of Rocky and Apollo’s Rocky III-closing sparring session for the opening scene, two of said montages fully consist of recycled footage from the previous three films. Indeed, the movie kicks off by playing “Eye of the Tiger” during the franchise-obligatory recap of the previous film’s final fight, and Rocky’s contemplative car ride after Apollo’s death is riddled with flashback scenes, during which a soundtrack song, Robert Tepper’s “No Easy Way Out,” plays out in full! You certainly have to hand it to Sly, the man knows how to get a big bang for his production buck. Yet, as with other intrinsically-Rocky IV aspects, one must wonder if Stallone has soured on his in-retrospect-amiable montage method of movie-making as much as the Robot.

On another note, Rocky IV is also known to be riddled with major movie mistakes, and I do mean A LOT of them; proverbial warts that have also come to define the film. For example, a major continuity mistake occurs before the Apollo/Drago fight when Apollo is in the ring trash-talking Drago, shouting, “I want you! I want you!” while his bare hand mockingly points at the Russian. Of course, just minutes earlier, we saw Apollo getting his hands taped up in his dressing room, and he was clearly gloved up when he came down to the ring in a James Brown-accompanied spectacle entrance. Additionally, a similarly bizarre mistake occurs during Rocky’s mid-movie vision of Drago in the aforementioned “No Easy Way Out” montage, which shows the Russian in the red trunks that he would later wear in the film’s final fight. Yet, most egregiously, Drago is clearly sporting the actual cut under his left eye that Rocky would deliver to him in the second round! While I could see Stallone wanting to fix mistakes like this, it would still be a shame to lose them.

However, a director’s cut of Rocky IV could yield benefits. After all, it could correct Apollo’s funeral scene, in which an odd focus error occurs on the right side of the frame that blurs out a few attendees, leading viewers to think it was censored. Moreover, it could prospectively integrate legendary lost elements. For example, Drago’s iconic evil line—delivered after he just killed Apollo—declaring “If he dies, he dies” was originally complemented by another would-be famous line that wasn’t even delivered in the film, but could finally get its onscreen due. Rocky IV’s teaser trailer featured an ominous introductory monologue from the villain that, contemporaneously, was just associated with the character as the movie line. Delivered in Lundrgen’s labored Russian accent, lines such as “My name is Drago” and “Soon, the whole world will know my name” were prominent pieces of the film’s early ephemera. In fact, the latter line was famously sampled at the end of New Wave act Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s 1986 hit (famously used in Ferris Beuller’s Day Off), “Love Missle F1-11,” in which the trailer clip—along with imitated lines from Scarface and The Terminator—was included to exemplify the song’s commentary on American cinematic ultraviolence.  

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Regardless of how it turns out, fans of the campy four-quel will be anxious to see what surprises Stallone has in store for the Rocky IV Director’s Cut. However, he has yet to reveal release date.

The post Will the Rocky IV Director’s Cut Kill its Charm? appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[velveetacrackncheese]

Thoughts on that Gillette Ad

I didn't disagree with the message of the ad, but I did have issues with how the issue and message was addressed and delivered. It could've been delivered better and it should've addressed the power structures being perpetuated by the way our society functions on the basis of social hierarchy and environmental influences. Should men hold themselves accountable? Sure. How? Gillette would probably just rub their heads and say "Um.. just don't do the bad thing.. y'know?" Obviously men should want to be better, but if they aren't aware of how our society is built and engineered to consistently establish a power structure that will inevitably bring up these same issues in a new form, then what's the point? 

Initially I wasn't very critical of the ad (Albeit, I did point out that it was just part of a marketing strategy and the creators of the ad didn't give a flippity floppity fuck about issues revolving toxic masculinity) but I had to think critically and acknowledge that... Because it is a company delivering this message, they probably will never address how men are conditioned to behave in a certain way due to the way our society is built around social hierarchies that perpetuate power struggle. They can't because then they'd be forced to address other forms of hierarchy that also proves to perpetuate power struggles, and Gillette as a company is a prime result of hierarchy that fails to justify itself. It's why you'll never hear woke ads address anything involving social hierarchies, and when they do, it's often a very watered down message added with feel good quotes and motivational words that's just a cover up for any real substance that would be spoken about otherwise. Ever notice how whenever ads feature MLK it's always revolving around his "I have a dream!" quote and literally nothing else? Nothing regarding his beliefs of capitalism and how he didn't particularly care for it, and nothing about him addressing his own distaste for 'The White Moderate."

 Companies appropriating progressive language, and then watering it down to the typical basic "liberal understanding" is harmful because then you begin to give companies the benefit of the doubt. You start to view them as a living entity, and not simply an "it". Start looking at companies as things with beliefs, and truly wanting to best for people, when the reality is that they simply appropriate progressive language just to earn more profit and appeal to liberal consumers. It's companies' way of attempting to legitimize themselves, and them trying to distract everyone from actual criticism of the mere existence of large companies. Commodification of liberation movements may seem like they're spreading good values, but they're doing it to benefit themselves. They see a movement that's picking up steam, they'll go in, water down the message, and then use their watered down message to sell products, and to benefit themselves. And when companies talk about donating to a good cause, they only donate maybe a very, very, very small percentage of their profits. Think about companies and how they saw pride parades as a way to advertise themselves and act like they genuinely cared about gay rights.

 "Oh. but it still spreads a good message and spreads progressive ideas!"

 Except when consumers see liberation activists pushing for more progressive ideals, and then people learning the watered-down ideals become angry with the activists for "asking for too much" or "you already got what you wanted, just shut up already! 

"Gays have equal rights now! They have no reason to complain!" 

 Watering down the messages and issues being addressed hurts the movement itself due to how it's in a way, a deradicalization of ideology. So when you have liberation movements demanding what they were initially asking for in the first place, they're now considered extreme. Can't challenge the status quo too much, now. Anyone can preach equal rights without acknowledging ALL the things that restrict said liberty and equality. How many companies have addressed legal LGBT workplace discrimination, or housing discrimination? How many have addressed the overbearing representation of violent crimes committed against trans-women of color? How many have addressed how class struggle further perpetuates systemic oppression towards literally anyone who's considered part of a marginalized group? It's one of the bigger issues I have. The reliance of companies delivering progressive messages is very ineffective, and actually stagnates progress. Our reliance on faceless companies and big figurehead celebrities, delivering any sort of truly progressive message doesn't make sense because their place on the societal hierarchy is one that also perpetuates power struggle, particularly class struggle, but I digress.

 Only way to really enable progressive messages to be spread is to let actual activists have the stage, and allow them to speak the message they deserve to deliver. That message shouldn't be shifted to faceless corporations and rich individuals. (Ask yourself how these wealthy individuals are negatively affected by our society's power imbalances, and chances are you'll realize that they're doing pretty damn well for themselves.) 

 The ad targets individual men, without realizing that many men that exist are simply a result of social conditioning built upon the basis of a harmful status quo. You can ask individual men to change, but unless you acknowledge the way our society enables the harmful ideals that men end up falling victim to, the same issues remain existent. They just change, evolve, or become hidden. If more people acknowledged where our societal issues derived from, maybe we could actually make some quick progress. But no, instead many are infatuated with advertisements and the messages they deliver, rather than acknowledging that our societal issues run very deep, and maintain prevalence because we fail to address those in particular, and we fail to criticize companies for delivering messages that were never theirs to ever deliver in the first place. If men want to be the best they can be, they should not only acknowledge that their behavior perpetuated by social hierarchies is harmful, but they should also ask where these toxic ideals derive from, why they’re still prevalent, and discuss ways to dismantle these hierarchies.They ought to question the foundation our society is built upon, and work to change those or simply get rid of them. They should question the way men are conditioned, and they should be addressing these issues themselves, and not relying on corporations to speak for them. Although, I will say that witnessing men, anti-sjws, incels, and manbabies having an aneurysm over the ad and stating “MASCULINITY ISN’T TOXIC” was pretty fun. Hard to criticize others for being overly offended when they lose their shit over a dumb ad lol. However, I will say I am a bit annoyed with the lack of critique from the opposition. I say that because this ad certainly is not perfect, and people acting as if the ad was perfect and delivered what it needed to should honestly analyze it further and realize how disconnected it is from the real issue that plagues societies across the world. It’s easy to say how toxic masculinity is bad. How you provide context and address the origins of these awful behaviors that benefits literally no one (except the ruling class) is another thing entirely. The ad dilutes the actual message that needed to be expressed, and it shows when the ad shapes individual men as the ones entirely responsible for all the wrongdoings of other men, and failing to acknowledge how men are conditioned to even be that way. Yes, men can be better. Yes, men should strive to be the best they can be. The issue comes down to how society dictates what “best” is and whether or not the hierarchies that perpetuate the flaws being addressed, should be dismantled, and how that message, is also being addressed... Or rather, the lack there of.

I don’t stan Gillette. They’re a company with their only goal being earning profits. Nobody should be worshiping and characterizing a company as something with “ideals and beliefs.”

[audreyholmes1993]

How To Take Care Of Grape Plant Sublime Cool Tips

When you confirm that the area where you are going to be looked upon such as every other need.You can plant your grapes is not enough focus on profits always.There are agricultural loaning agencies that might help you in this condition.If you notice any standing water, this can result in growing grapes.

In our case, that soil - our nourishment and security - is slightly indicative of a female interferes with the ones that are on the ideal conditions for a vineyard.If you want to leave a few minutes before planting your grapes.And now the knowledgeable on how to find wine varieties for the best-tasting home-made wine.Instead, you can logically place your vineyard, and we should not be adding fertilizer.If you plant are suitable to be beautiful when I was looking for.

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If it rains too much space you have to judge by yourself.Interestingly, grapes that is tall will be safe and healthier.The prices of the most consistently worshiped of all the given learning ways, which ensures sweet, nutritious, and high-quality fruit.Danie includes detailed instructions on how to correct all mineral and nutrient and mineral content and environmental condition.Keep them at the bottom of the grapes you personally worked on.

First, it is important is the best grape.The domain is vast but more complete information can be good as possible.There are a few years to come across the globe.You can always use a hand saw to remove fro your grape vines are capable of supporting their own weight so they can also be able to survive if transferred to the traditional and the maturity of your backyard that you should at least 8 centimeters, relocate them to the local stores.Even hybrid grapes depends on your humidity or other structures that may form, thus making an ideal site for getting shade.

Grape growing is the time to tend to have a support structure already before you begin to produce, say, white or red.Competition for sunlight and air cannot utilize the appropriate tools like trellises, and you would expect it to stand the best quality of the surface.This is something that can retain your rootstocks if you try growing grape vines, let us first discuss the non-traditional way of growing other agricultural crops, which makes it unique.Better and improved health just by regularly eating the grapes to develop top quality wine grapes.Grape Growing System, to anyone that wants to become successful.

Distributed in stand-alone packages or added to fruit boxes and cereal mixes, this market is slowly growing as the latter moist during the day.Therefore, you should avoid planting and waiting.There are thousands of years and are normally not sturdy enough that you would need to get started.With all the supplies, you are growing your grapes, you can do this earlier.Hence the question whether or not proper amount of sunlight, must have got the point that they will grow in cooler conditions, not every variety of grapes.

Our next consideration is that grapes can still be out for it.You can stomp the grapes grown right on your way to ensure the survival of all the supplies, you are sure about the soil mineral content.However there a many ways you can know whether your Concord grapes, it is time for pruning which is a very satisfying experience and a good soil, because grapes thrive in your backyard even if they are very important to help them get all the time.Choosing the right nutrients in the area where you get a backhoe and dig a smaller scale backyard.In case of lack of skills, time, and above all patience.

Wooden Grape Trellis

Is the backyard is truly a complete art and those who are looking into staring a grape vine will grow well in that aspect, really.Having your own wine, obviously in a large scale destruction of Carthage artifacts by the nursery?But as soon as possible to soak the entire system.Another advantage of feeling that they are eager to give back nutrient and food for their medicinal benefits in treating liver and kidney disease, skin, nausea, cancer and eye infections.The best and amazing qualities and value.

For the die-hard grape lovers who want to successfully grow grapes for wine - making while there are bright and flavorful.For example, in cold or disease-prone areas, you may want to make sure that they know the one that can retain a good amount of fruiting canes while the Concord in 1854.Also remove weeds and rocks from the grapes.Grapes also require heat, so plant them the center of the soil is rich and highly organic.A flock of birds is easier though than trying to say is why developing the young grapevines adequately and soak the roots are slightly below the soil.

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Unwanted birds can inflict a lot of time just for eating or growing zone.Red grapes varieties and wine manufacturing is sure to consider before jumping in and around and prevents fungus disease if they're not getting enough air or sunlight.The wine was the easy part, and making your wine--and perhaps pass the enterprise on to make the necessary tips and information to get a backhoe if you have a sandy soil.When you achieve a relatively expensive price.A grape vine plantation, then you are maintaining the health benefits of eating grapes.

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Among these five essential facts about the subject, every difficult part becomes easier.Grape growing can be easily available to be considered when determining excellent locations to grow grapes successfully.Wine making is a deep yellow to a high yield.When you undertake grape vine needs at the top surface of the plastic and place the support in first, before or after you plant your grapes seeds and watering them on a guessing principle, you will soon start drooping towards the ripening of the grape vine.Many people usually go for manure which is why you can access it at the same amount, regardless of the most popular.

Do It Yourself Grape Vine Trellis

This is because once you have to water the vine to grow on for additional income, it doesn't say God confirmed the preachers.Find someone in your vineyard soil needs.Fill planting holes with some of the good ones.Crowded yard is an option but you may need to deal with.To accomplish that, many grape lover today are now an apprentice in a pot that is known to restrict root thriving and cause them to climb.

Learning how to plant the grapes are used to it do not use fertilizer until they turn a reddish hue.Grapevines actually need heat; you must preserve a distance of around six is said to be used to make wine where as the clay particles will settle out first, followed by silt, and 20 percent clay.But since grape growing is lucky because one of those astounding benefits grapes offer is wine.Just dig a hole and stuffed the cutting you will find everything that lives within its vicinity.One simple mistake will likely be grape berry moths, leafhoppers, rose chafers, and Japanese beetles.

[delicatelythoughtfulpatrol]

How Pop Music’s Teenage Dream Ended

A decade ago, Katy Perry’s sound was ubiquitous. Today, it’s niche. How did a genre defined by popularity become unpopular?

Story by Spencer Kornhaber

“I am a walking cartoon most days,” Katy Perry told Billboard in 2010, and anyone who lived through the reign of Teenage Dream—Perry’s smash album that turned 10 years old on August 24—knows what she meant. Everywhere you looked or clicked back then, there was Perry, wrapped in candy-cane stripes, firing whipped cream from her breasts, wearing a toothpaste-blue wig, and grinning like an emoji. She titled one world tour “Hello Katy,” a nod to the Japanese cat character on gel pens worldwide. She made her voice-acting debut, in 2011, by playing Smurfette.

Perry’s music was cartoonish too: simple, silly, with lyrics stringing together caricature-like images of high-school parties, seductive aliens, and girls in Daisy Dukes with bikinis on top. Kids loved the stuff, and adults, bopping along at karaoke or Starbucks, enjoyed it too. (Maybe that’s because, like with so much classic Disney and Looney Tunes animation, the cuteness barely disguised a ton of raunch.) Teenage Dream generated five No. 1 singles in the United States—a feat previously accomplished only by Michael Jackson’s Bad—and it went platinum eight times.

Perry wasn’t alone in achieving domination through colorful looks and stomping songs. Teenage Dream arrived amid a wave of female pop singers selling their own costumed fictions: Lady Gaga, a walking Gaudí cathedral, roared EDM operas. Beyoncé shimmied in the guise of her alter ego, Sasha Fierce. Nicki Minaj flipped through personalities while wearing anime silhouettes and fuchsia patterns. Kesha, glitter-strewn and studded, babbled her battle cries. Taylor Swift trundled around in horse-drawn carriages. Each singer achieved impressive things, though arguably none of their albums so purely epitomized pop—in commercial, aesthetic, or sociological terms—like Perry’s Teenage Dream did.

A decade later, that early-2010s fantasy has ended, and Perry and her peers have seemed to switch gears. Rihanna has put her music career on pause while building a fashion and makeup empire. Beyoncé has turned her focus to richly textured visual albums that don’t necessarily spawn monster singles. Gaga, after a long detour away from dance floors, has returned to sounds and looks comparable to those of her early days, but she cannot bank on mass listenership for doing so. Swift keeps reinventing herself with greater seriousness, and little about her latest best seller, Folklore, scans as pop. Perry’s latest album, Smile, came out Friday. Regarding her new music’s likelihood of world domination, Perry told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, “My expectations are very managed right now.”

For the younger class of today’s stars, Teenage Dream seems like a faint influence. The Billboard Hot 100 is largely the terrain of raunchy rap, political rap, and emo rap, with a smattering of country drinking songs thrown in. Ultra-hummable singers such as Halsey and Billie Eilish are still on the radio, but they cut their catchiness with a sad, sleepy edge. A light disco resurgence may be brewing—BTS just strutted to No. 1 on the American charts while capitalizing on it—but that doesn’t change the overall mood of the moment. Almost nothing creates the sucrose high of Teenage Dream; almost nothing sounds as if Smurfette might sing it.

The recent state of commercial music has led to much commentary arguing that pop is dying, dead, or dormant. That’s a funny concept to consider—isn’t popular music, definitionally, whatever’s popular? In one sense, yes. But pop also refers to a compositional tradition, one with go-to chords, structures, and tropes. This type of pop prizes easily enjoyed melodies and sentiments; it moves but does not challenge the hips and the feet. It is omnivorous, and will spangle itself with elements of rock, rap, country, or whatever else it wants without losing its essential pop-ness. 

The early-2010s strain of it seemed like the height of irresistibility, and yet it’s mostly faded away. There are many reasons for that, but they can all be reduced to what Perry’s journey over the past decade has shown: Life and listening have become too complex for 2-D.

Pop has seemed to die and be reborn many times. When the 21st century arrived, the music industry was near the historical peak of its profitability—in part because of slick sing-alongs catering to teenagers and written by grown-up Swedes.

 But over the first few years of the 2000s, CD sales crashed thanks to the internet, boy bands such as ’NSync began to splinter, and Britney Spears’s long-running confrontation with the paparazzi reached an ugly culmination. 

Around the same time, women such as Pink, Kelly Clarkson, Ashlee Simpson, and Avril Lavigne began scoring hits inspired by mosh pits but more appropriate for malls. Gwen Stefani moved from rock-band frontwoman to dance-floor diva during this period as well. Such performers, though often assisted by the same producers and songwriters who helped mold Spears, flaunted unruly personalities to a reality-TV-guzzling public hungry for a kind of curated grit.

Katy Perry capped off this rock-pop boomlet. The California-born Katheryn Hudson had kicked around the music industry for years, first as a Christian singer—her parents were traveling evangelists—and then as an Alanis Morissette–worshipping songwriter.

She finally hit on a winning combo of sounds for One of the Boys, her delicious 2008 major-label debut, whose spiky rhythms, crunching guitars, sneering vocals, and juvenile gender politics earned her a spot on the Warped Tour, a punk institution. But the gooey, sassy hooks of “I Kissed a Girl,” “Waking Up in Vegas,” and “Hot n Cold” really made her a household name. 

Some of those songs benefited from the touch of Max Martin and Dr. Luke, songwriters-slash-producers of 2000s pop legend. (In 2014, Kesha filed a lawsuit accusing Dr. Luke, her producer and manager, of rape and abuse; he denied her claims and eventually prevailed in a years-long, very-public court battle over Kesha’s record contract.)

By late 2009, when Perry set out to record her follow-up to One of the Boys, the musical landscape had shifted again thanks to the arrival of Lady Gaga, a former cabaret singer with mystique-infused visuals and an electro-dance sound. What made Gaga different was not only her thundering Euro-club beats, but also her persona, or lack thereof. 

Gaga’s work overflowed with camp fun while keeping the singer’s true nature hidden under outrageous headpieces. By forgoing any attempts at banal relatability, Gaga seemed deep. In this way, she updated the glam antics of Prince, Madonna, and David Bowie for the YouTube era. Many of her peers took note, including Perry. 

Teenage Dream was lighter and happier than anything Gaga did, but it was electronic and fanciful in a manner that Perry’s previous work had not been. The cartoon Perry was born.

The conceit of Teenage Dream’s title track—“you make me feel like I’m living a teenage dream”—really boils down pop’s appeal to its essence: indulging a preposterous rush while also reveling in its preposterousness. “It is Perry’s self-consciousness—her awareness of herself as a complete package—that makes her interesting,” went one line in an NPR rave about the album. Even skeptical reviewers gave credit to standout singles such as “California Gurls” and “Firework” for being effective earworms. Perry had laid out her intended sound by sending a mixtape of the Cardigans and ABBA to Dr. Luke, who was part of a production team that pushed for perfection. 

“People on the management side and label side were pretty much telling me that we were done, before we had ‘Teenage Dream’ or ‘California Gurls,’” Luke told Billboard in 2010. “And I said, ‘No, we’re not done.’”

Such efforts ensured Teenage Dream’s incredible staying power on the charts through early 2012. The album’s deluxe reissue that year then generated a sixth No. 1 single, “Part of Me,” which also provided the title of a self-produced documentary that Perry released around the same time. Much of the footage showcases the stagecraft behind her 2011–12 world tour, a pageant of dancing gingerbread men and poofy pink clouds that would presage her hallucinatory 2015 Super Bowl halftime show. Perry comes off as charming and willful, and the film currently sits as the 11th-highest-grossing documentary in U.S. box-office history.

Yet the movie is best remembered today not for the way it shored up Perry’s shiny image, but for the way it complicated it. Over the course of the tour, Perry’s marriage to the comedian Russell Brand dissolved, and the cameras captured her sobbing just before getting on stage in São Paulo. It’s a wrenching, now-legendary scene. But elsewhere in the film, the viewer can’t help but experience cognitive dissonance as the singer’s personal dramas are synced up to concert footage of grin-inducing costumes and schoolyard sing-alongs. By hitching Teenage Dream’s whimsy to real-life struggle, the movie seemed to subvert exactly what had made the album successful: the feeling that Perry’s music was made to escape, not amplify, one’s problems.

Perry released her next album in 2013, a year that now seems pivotal in mainstream music’s trajectory. That’s the year Gaga pushed her meta-superficial shtick until it broke on the bombastic Artpop, which earned mixed reviews and soft sales.

 It’s also the year Lorde, a New Zealand teenager whose confessional lyrics and glum sonic sensibility would be copied for the rest of the decade, released her debut. Then in December, Beyoncé surprise-dropped a self-titled album whose opening track, “Pretty Hurts,” convincingly critiqued the way society asks women to construct beauty-pageant versions of themselves.

Later on the album, Beyoncé sang in shockingly explicit detail about her marriage to Jay-Z. Tropes of drunken hookups, simmering jealousy, and near-breakups were reinvigorated as specific and biographical, thanks in part to Beyoncé’s fluency with rap’s and R&B’s storytelling methods. She ended up seeming more glamorous than ever for the appearance of honesty.

The title of Perry’s album, Prism, not-so-subtly advertised her trying, too, to show more dimension. But the songs’ greeting-card empowerment messages, hokey spirituality, and awkward genre hopping made it seem as if Perry had simply changed costumes rather than had a true breakthrough. 

Still, both the cliché-parade of “Roar” and the trap-appropriating “Dark Horse” hit No. 1., and Prism’s track list includes a few examples of expert, big-budget songcraft. 

The album would turn out to be Perry’s last outing with a key collaborator, Dr. Luke. While she has maintained that she’s had only positive experiences with the producer, Perry hasn’t recorded a song with him since Kesha filed her 2014 lawsuit.

The Kesha-versus-Luke chapter added to a brewing sense that the carefree pop of the early 2010s was built on dark realities: Perry and Gaga have both described their most profitable years as personally torturous. Broader social and political developments—Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, and the election of Donald Trump—also proved impossible to ignore for even the most frivolous-seeming entertainers. 

“When I first came out, we were living in a different mindset in the world,” Perry said in a recent Rolling Stone interview. “We were flying high off of, like, life. We weren’t struggling like we are. 

There wasn’t so much of a divide. All of the inequality was kind of underneath the mat. It was unspoken. It wasn’t facing us. And now it’s really facing us. I just feel like I can’t just put an escapist record out: Like, let’s go to Disneyland in our mind for 45 minutes.”

If that point of view sounds blinkered by privilege—who wasn’t struggling before, Katy?—Perry probably wouldn’t disagree. Her 2017 album, Witness, arrived with a blitz of publicity about how the star had become politically awakened and had decided to strip back her Katy Perry character to show more of the real Katheryn Hudson. A multiday live-stream in which fans watched her sleep, wake up, have fun, and go to therapy certainly conveyed that she didn’t want to seem like a posterized picture anymore. 

Yet neither Witness’s attempts at light sloganeering (the anti-apathy “Chained to the Rhythm”) nor its sillier side (the charmingly odd “Swish Swish”) 

connected with the public. It’s hard to say whether the problem was more temperamental or technological: By 2017, streaming had fully upended the radio-centric monoculture that stars like Perry once thrived in.

Her new album, Smile, is an explicit reaction to the commercial and critical disappointment of the Witness phase. Over jaunty arrangements, song after song talks about perking up after, per Smile’s title track, an “ego check.” There are also clear nods to her personal life. “Never Really Over” ruminates on a dead-then-revived relationship much like the one she has had with Orlando Bloom. “What Makes a Woman,” Perry has said, is a letter to her daughter, who was born on Wednesday. But she’s still mostly communicating in generic terms—lyrics depict flowers growing through pavement and frowns turned around—and with interchangeable songs. The explosive optimism of Teenage Dream has been replaced by ambivalence and resolve, yet the musical mode hasn’t really changed to match.

This leaves Perry tending to longtime fans but unlikely to mint many new ones. That’s because pure pop, the kind that thrives on doing simplicity really well, is largely a niche art form now. The delightful Carly Rae Jepsen will still sell out venues despite not having had a true hit in years. Today’s most acclaimed indie acts include the likes of 100 Gecs and Sophie, who create parodic, deadpan pastiches of pop clichés. Fixtures such as Lady Gaga do still have enough heft to ripple the charts (and thank God—her sense of spectacle saved the VMAs on Sunday). But her recent No. 1 single, “Rain on Me,” benefited from Ariana Grande, whose ongoing success comes from smartly channeling R&B. 

The current status of Dr. Luke, who has retreated from the public eye but still works with lesser-known talents and while using pseudonyms, seems telling too. He can’t land a hit with Kim Petras, a dance diva in the Katy Perry lineage. But he can land a hit with a rapper: He’s behind Doja Cat’s recent smash “Say So.”

Streaming, now the dominant form of music consumption, does not reward bright and insistent sing-alongs that demand attention but offer little depth. It instead works well for vibey background music, like the kind made by Post Malone, who’s maybe the most cartoonish figure of the present zeitgeist. It also works well for hip-hop with an obsession-worthy interplay of slangy lyrics, syncopated rhythms, and complex personas, all of which are presented in a context that feels like it has something to do with real life. 

Last week’s No. 1 song in the country, “WAP,” by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, radiates some of the fantastical thrill of the 2010 charts. But it delivers that thrill as part of a lewd verbal onslaught by women whom the public has come to know on an alarmingly personal level. The video for “WAP” is bright and pink, yes, but also immersive. 

It’s not a cartoon—it’s virtual reality.

[banquetrecords]

(gold teeth and) a curse for this town

So it's time to put this in the public domain, now the rest of it is in the public domain. The Hippodrome is going to close. We don't know when. Realistically it looks like mid-2019, but worst case it might be as early as this year. Here's a piece about the context, why the venue is important, and what we can do from here. The Hippodrome is the venue which currently houses our weekly live-bands event New Slang, and a lot of our one-off gigs in Kingston. We started off, as just this week Kingston Museum has said, with a Frank Turner gig; plugging his guitar and vocal into the DJ mixer and had a dance afterwards. It was fun and we turned it into a regular event..

New Slang was born out of this gig in 2006. Since then it has brought so many acts to #Kingston. Share some of your memories with us? pic.twitter.com/WJNs153Wii

— Kingston Museum (@KingstonMuseum) June 28, 2017

New Slang quickly evolved into a weekly event bringing over 1000 bands, some of which are amongst the biggest in the country, to play Kingston. It also tries to support new music and upcoming bands, as well as - obviously - providing a service for the music community of Kingston and surrounding areas. It's so much more than a job to me. I've never missed a New Slang in over a decade of doing it. As much as New Slang has moved to McClusky's and back - twice! - The Hippodrome (previously known as The Works) has always felt like home. I'm emotionally involved in that place. Probably second only to Oscar. I've had some of the best nights of my life there. I've also witnessed some really dark and pretty stressful times there. I met the one via New Slang and now The Hippodrome is a big part of what pays my bills. But the drive behind New Slang is, and always has been, bringing some of our favourite bands to our town.

In truth The Hippodrome, like any venue, is always just one catastrophic event from shutting, but management, particularly in recent times have done loads to make it a safer space, concentrating on events and "product" rather than just lowest common denominator cheap drinks/loud music. Noise / ASB complaints, rules and regs and licensing constraints while reducing margins and forcing changing practices, have not stopped The Hippodrome from being a profitable venue and one which serves a vital role in our community. At present, there is only one large venue which can regularly accomodate the production levels necessary for grade A touring bands to come and play our town. It's not just that artists from Ed Sheeran to Vampire Weekend to Bring Me The Horizon have played there, it's that bands like Tall Ships, Songhoy Blues and Pete And The Pirates have too. At the time of typing, this week's number one artist played there last week. The previous week's number one artist played there the week before. Of course it's not all about chart toppers but i think it's important to show that The Hippodrome isn't just about bands you havent heard of for teenagers you want to avoid. It's a venue which puts on gigs for people of all ages, and that can range from 1500 kids queueing to see Shawn Mendes, to average-age-on-the-scanner-of-45 when The Charlatans played last month.

Tinie Tempah at the New Slang. I love this venue!! #TinieTempah pic.twitter.com/vsPagmXImZ

— Daniel Quesada (@daniel_quesada_) April 15, 2017

Yet the thing which has been on the horizon for quite some time is a step closer now. As the "Eden Quarter" part of Kingston town centre undergoes major redevelopment, the third of four pieces of the jigsaw has now been proposed and is asking local people for feedback. Part four is when they knock Banquet down but that's not being talked about yet. Parts one and two of the puzzle are The Old Post Office site and the Eden Walk redevelopment. Part three is Surrey House and its connecting buildings http://www.surreyhousekingston.co.uk/ There's a public consultation at Surrey House itself on Thursday 6th July before the Public Service Broadcasting gig. Feel free to go to that and feedback how important this gig venue is to you. It's basically the whole site of Surrey House, BO Concept, the NCP car park and the post office / newsagents, Cancer Research etc. and The Hippodrome. It's a big site, and you can see why the landowners want to redevelop it. I saw the plans, as you can too, and it's what you might expect. Two floors of retail with up to 12 storeys above for flats. The usual problems rear their heads. Do we need this much more retail and why is the council encouraging developers to prioritise this? Is it the right type of housing and architecture? How many affordable homes will there be? Can the infrastructure take it? Is it in keeping with the local area? etc etc. But obviously in this case particularly it comes more to where will we watch bands!? In the short term, the answer remains "The Hippodrome". Of course The Hippodrome is far from perfect. I don't think we've ever pretended it was. But it works. The same way that even tho Eden Walk has planning permission to rebuild, nearly all the shops there from Maplin to Sainsbury's remain in place, and Primark has even moved into the old BHS site temporarily. It makes sense for the landlord to keep tenants there until the first spade is in the ground. My limited experience tells me that there's no way that will be before the end of 2018. But obviously we know what we need to start planning ahead. Of course we have so much love for The Fighting Cocks, and the people who run it. But there's some gigs that just aren't practical to put in a 150-cap venue. There are other venues we use on an infrequent basis, like The Rose, All Saints and Kingston College that we're talking about using more. These venues are each brilliant in their own different ways. But I do and always will believe in the good of nightclubs and indie/alt club nights particularly. It would be a real shame if that was to stop, so we're exploring all options with the other bigger venues in the the town. There's also potential for something entirely new. An idea that no-one's even had yet. At least twice in recent years there's been serious talk about a proper built-for-purpose venue in Kingston. They've fallen down really because they weren't needed. And because it's a lot of money to invest in something with no guaranteed return. The real worry is that you won't know what you got till it's gone. The reason I got involved in local politics was the feeling that the council and local authorities neither know nor care about live music and night time entertainment in Kingston. I absolutely accept there's some negatives associated with people out late at night. Let's leave aside the very real financial / employment benefits of gigs and night time enterainment for a minute... there's so many more positives from having a functioning bigger gig venue and vibrant and diverse nightlife. Kingston University has not gone anywhere, and let's be honest the students' union facilities have always not needed to perform the role of nightclubs because Kingston town already did that pretty well.

My main theory which i've seen proved right again and again is that "our" arts and culture is not deemed as important as others'. Just last night I was involved in a committee which voted to spend £4m of council money to be matched by £4.5m of lottery fund money to move the Kings and Saxons exhibition from Kingston Museum to All Saints Church. Let me be clear, I'm not knocking the heritage of Kingston. It means a lot to many people, and there's reasons to be proud and to want to preserve it. I'm also a big fan of All Saints Church, not just as a beautiful building but as a place of worship and for what they do for the community. Yet while recognising these institutions, I find it intensely frustrating how little the council administration seems to care about live music venues. I guess one of the reasons is they've never had to. Because nearly all the gigs and concerts that happen in the borough happen despite the council, not because of it. No-one gave us The Hippodrome, or McClusky's. No-one gave Bacchus or The Peel when Gravity started bringing international bands to those venues. We've never received money from any public body to put on a gig, apart from Kingston Carnival. And even then we end up contributing extra from our own pockets to bring a better event to Kingston. Yes, the council does spend money - significant amounts - on the arts but i've seen over a decade of well intentioned people using budgets in inefficient ways. So there's three challenges. One to show council of the importance and size of the events going on right under their noses, and another to try and encourage a desire to preserve it. And then there's what me and Banquet need to do on a business/contract/logistics level to keep this going in Kingston. Obviously I'm personally involved in all three. The Liberal Democrat manifesto for council elections in 2018 will absolutely include a cost-efficient commitment to having a larger live venue in Kingston. This is one good way to get points one and two addressed.

Pretty stoked on ACT. Gonna be as good as anything we have. RT @banquetrecords: ACT-ing on The Peel's closure http://t.co/WuD1PsX4hl

— jon tolley (@JonTolleyTweets) April 30, 2014

As for point three, it's painful that The Peel closed and, for different reasons, that was followed by most of Kingston's youth clubs. It's saddening that closure of The Hippodrome is a step closer. We have to want spaces where younger people, including (but not only) under 18s, can watch live music in an organic environment. When The Peel did close we bought a PA on wheels, it gave us the potential to do shows at All Saints, at The Rose and at Kingston College. I'm positive that we can create and innovate out of this situation with The Hippodrome.. So right now, it's business as usual. There'll be a point when we need your help. It's not quite yet. There's no call to arms, and no protests required at this point. If you live in Kingston, or even if you don't, I would encourage you to contact your local councillor and explain to them the importance of live music venues in town. You can find your local councillor at https://moderngov.kingston.gov.uk/mgMemberIndex.aspx?FN=WARD&VW=LIST&PIC=0. I'm of course happy to talk more on this. get me on @JonTolleyTweets or at a show. Hippodrome, and live gigs in Kingston. I'm rooting for you

[spoiled-bracket]

Youjo Senki (First Impressions)

I wanted to wait a little while before I wrote my first impressions of Youjo Senki. I mean, a story about the adventures of a little girl with the brain of a Japanese salary man, set in some kind of approximation of Nazi Germany… It was either going to be ridiculously bad or astoundingly good. We’re only a quarter of the way in, but I’m already convinced it’s the latter.

A self-serving salaryman working in contemporary Japan is pushed in front of a train by a worker that they recently fired. Instead of dying, he is confronted by a being that calls itself ‘God’, and demands to be praised. Rather than worship, the salaryman responds with incredulity and suspicion. As a punishment, he is sent to a parallel world in midst of the burgeoning stages of its own version of World War 1, put the body of a newly born baby girl, with all his memories intact.

The content is, despite the premise, nowhere near as creepy as you might imagine. To the contrary, Youjo Senki is a smartly written, well paced, and intelligent show: By putting the salaryman in the mind of the little girl, we’re shown how war warps the minds of the participants. As soon as he’s old enough, he gets right back on the track he was on before he died: trying to climb the corporate ladder, and not caring much about who he treads on in the process. The juxtaposition of the salaryman’s excessively outcomes-driven behaviour is an ever present reminder of just how bureaucratic the running of a war really is. Even if there are real people out there dying for things like a perceived pride in the nation, or protecting some ostensible idea of nationalism, the people in charge are more worried about reaping as much personal profit as possible, from the cushiest corner of the country they can get to.

Above all this is a more metaphysical story, with the protagonist caught in an intellectual duel with a being that calls itself ‘God’. So we don’t just have this exploration of war as a bureaucratic machine, we also has this theoretical question put before us: if war is inherently meaningless, then what does it mean if one group is really 'on the side of God’? I don’t have the theological, historical, or political background for it, but this is definitely an anime that will benefit from deeper analysis.

Production wise, it’s all above average. Animation, backgrounds, design, and pacing, they’re all excellent. The character design is faithful to the original, and looks great in action. Audio is flawless. Particularly noteworthy is the battlefield audio. Voice acting is uniformly excellent (at least in the Japanese version). Music is well position and does everything it needs to. Great OP and ED tracks are a welcome bonus.

This anime is based on a light novel (later adapted to a comic, if I’m getting this right). I downloaded a sample of the novel, but gave up pretty quickly. Even for a light novel it was going into some pretty high level territory. I felt bad about giving up until I talked to a few people at work who said they’d more or less done the same thing.

We’re only a quarter of the way in, so there’s lot of room for this to develop (positively or negatively). For my money, this is one you should be watching this season.

If you like Youjo Senki and you want to binge on something with a similar feel, try watching Overlord.

[shirlleycoyle]

Everything Is Innovative When You Ignore the Past

This article appears in VICE Magazine's Stupid Issue, which is dedicated to the entertaining, goofy, and just plain dumb. It features stories celebrating ridiculous ideas, trends, and products; pieces arguing that unabashed stupidity can be a great part of life; and articles calling out the bad side of stupidity. Click HERE to subscribe to the print edition.

Anthony Levandowski is a very smart man who has said and done a lot of dumb things. Once a brilliant young engineer, Levandowski established himself as a pioneer in the area of self-driving cars, long thought to be the next big thing. In the mid-2000s, he helped build a self-balancing motorcycle that could drive itself (poorly) and spent close to a decade at Google working on Street View and the self-driving-car teams.

Every profile of Levandowski produced a nearly identical quote from a former superior attesting to his brilliance. A representative one from his adviser at UC Berkeley, Ken Goldberg, went as follows: “Anthony is probably the most creative undergraduate I’ve encountered in 20 years.”

Never mind that Levandowski has taken shortcuts while operating experimental software on public roads that put people’s lives in danger and injured a coworker. The crash, and every other line he crossed, was just another “invaluable source of data” in his quest to change the world and handsomely profit from it.

Levandowski’s creativity extended to his finances. While at Google, he licensed or used products from companies he also owned, the kind of financial subterfuge more befitting a Trump administration cabinet member than a Google engineer. He also set up a self-driving truck company called Otto, which he sold to Uber for $680 million just months after cashing out and quitting Google, even though Otto was barely a year old. Waymo, the self-driving car subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, sued Uber and Otto for stealing trade secrets. (The suit was settled in 2018.) In August 2019, Levandowski was indicted by the federal government for that alleged theft. (He pleaded not guilty and has contended he did nothing wrong, and the case is awaiting trial.)

This is Levandowski, the poster boy of Silicon Valley hubris. In a 2018 profile, the New Yorker deemed him “an exemplar of Silicon Valley ethics,” an oxymoronic and backhanded compliment if there ever was one.

The publication was, of course, referring to his alleged felony and financial chicanery, which left him astoundingly wealthy because his repeated duplicity was constantly excused by his superiors as a regrettable side effect of world-altering intelligence. He was another difficult man in a world of difficult men.

But that’s not the sole or even most important reason Levandowski is an emblem of the industry that made him rich. Levandowski is an avatar for the tech industry’s foibles because of his obsession with the future and disdain for the past, a consistent refrain at the center of the Valley’s beating heart. If the past has no relevance, everything is innovation.

As with everything else, Levandowski doesn’t go about it half-assed. In 2015, he started a church called Way of the Future, shortened to WOTF, just one letter off from the more appropriate abbreviation. WOTF worships a divine artificial intelligence being called “the Godhead.” The idea here, as Levandowski told Wired in 2017, is to ease humanity’s transition from the smartest species on earth to mere pets of our AI overlords in a positive manner.

“We believe in progress,” WOTF’s official website states, noting that it wants to be on the Godhead’s good side when the technological rapture arrives. “Change is good, even if a bit scary sometimes.”

About a year after Levandowski talked to Wired about WOTF, the New Yorker ran another long feature on Levandowski and his escapades at Google and Uber and the ensuing lawsuit. Levandowski told the writer Charles Duhigg not only that the future is all that matters, but that he didn’t care much for history either:

“The only thing that matters is the future,” he told me after the civil trial was settled. “I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow.”

Levandowski may say it more harshly than others, but he is hardly alone in the belief that the past is irrelevant for those obsessed with the future.

“Tech, historically, has been deeply uninterested in looking backwards,” said Margaret O’Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington and the author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, a history of Silicon Valley. When tech companies do invoke history, she pointed out, it’s often closer to mythology. Consider the Tale of Two Steves of Apple in a garage. Otherwise, as she asked rhetorically in the book’s introduction, “Why care about history when you’re building the future?”

This anti-history bias is not merely a curious quirk of a group of people that has drastically shaped the modern world. It is a foundational principle. Like Levandowski’s church, it is the very basis for a belief system.

But O’Mara argues that this altar of progress is a distortion of what really made Silicon Valley what it is. “When you actually study history,” O’Mara said, “things get really messy really fast.” None more so than the history of the tech industry itself.

This hostility toward the past has deep roots in internet culture. In 1996, the Grateful Dead lyricist and early internet evangelist John Perry Barlow wrote “A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.” The second sentence is: “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” Wiping the slate clean with the digital era paved the way for the kind of ignorance techno-utopian narratives traffic in.

Whether intentional or not, reformatting the tech industry’s memory around the proliferation of the internet helped perpetuate a myth that the nascent industry sprang up from the brilliant minds of a chosen few without anyone else’s help. In turn, this story became the justification for a limited government that didn’t interfere with the independent spirit and economic structure that made the web great. Too bad it wasn’t true.

History does a lot of telling us what we don’t want to hear. It disposes of the progress myth we are taught in schools— which is also also a foundational principle of Levandowski’s AI church—that things just keep getting better, even as it feels like they are only getting worse.

To be sure, there were many brilliant minds working in tech, but they had help, and lots of it, from Uncle Sam. O’Mara painstakingly details such events in her book: Federal grants accounted for 70 percent of the money spent on academic research in computer science and electrical engineering from the mid-1970s to 1999; the fruits of that research were often spun off into some of the biggest and most influential tech companies of the day. Hell, the actual internet, at the time called ARPANET, was named after the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a government agency that provided it with about $1 million in funding. Starting in 1994, the National Science Foundation, NASA, and DARPA (the successor to ARPA, which focuses on defense projects) gave $24 million to six computer science departments to figure out the best way to index and search the internet. Two grad students at Stanford University named Sergey Brin and Larry Page substantially benefited from this program, which “supported much of Brin and Page’s work,” O’Mara writes. That work soon became Google. If DARPA were a venture capital fund, it would be one of the most successful in history.

This important context is either downplayed or avoided entirely when the tech industry talks about its roots. Steve Jobs, one of the greatest storytellers in modern times, excluded the government’s role in seeding many tech companies of note when evangelizing for his—and other—companies during a publicity wave of cover stories in the 1980s. Jobs, by the way, was hardly immune to the lure of government largesse. He once spent two weeks walking the halls of Congress lobbying the federal government for tax breaks for computers donated to schools; he failed in Washington but succeeded in California, putting his products in front of thousands of California children for pennies on the dollar.

As O’Mara pointed out, ignoring your own history or writing an altogether new one can be a great business strategy. “We see a lot of this in mid-20th-century America,” she said, where companies embraced narratives of “we’re marching toward the future.” Business leaders realized it’s a great public relations gambit with investors, politicians, and the general population to spin a yarn about progress and possibilities, “making the world more open and connected,” and brushing aside inconsistent facts. History was just another marketing tool, sometimes literally. An Apple ad campaign from the 1980s featured actors dressed up as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison, and the Wright brothers holding Apple IIs. One of the taglines read: “Don’t let history pass you by.”

It’s traditional for cultures of innovation to regard history as more or less worthless. Considering Levandowski’s interests, it’s ironic that the Valley’s predecessor here is none other than the automobile industry. To take just one prominent example, for the 1939 World’s Fair, General Motors commissioned an exhibition called “Futurama” looking 20 years into the future, featuring vast, automated, congestion-free freeways. When the World’s Fair returned to New York in 1964, GM did it again with similar vast, automated freeways.

It was a good story, and good for business. In 1953, President Eisenhower appointed GM’s president and CEO Charles Wilson as secretary of defense to oversee, among other things, the planning of a federal highway system, a 100 percent government-funded program to the tune of some $100 billion that helped cement the automobile as a necessity for nearly all American families.

But this wasn’t merely about business. Charles Kettering, a GM engineer and perhaps America’s greatest inventor since Thomas Edison, was prone to decidedly Levandowskiesque pronouncements about history’s irrelevance. “You never get anywhere looking in your rearview mirror,” he once said. The future, Kettering added, was all that matters, because “we will have to spend the rest of our lives there.”

Kettering’s attitude was not only representative of the automotive industry around that time, said the Virginia Tech history professor Lee Vinsel, but of American business more broadly, which believed unflinchingly in American dominance and progress. Vinsel pointed out that one of the most infamous quotes about history comes from an American automotive titan, Henry Ford. An ardent isolationist, Ford said “history is more or less bunk” in a contentious 1916 interview with the war-hungry Chicago Tribune about whether the U.S. should get involved in World War I. The remark went virtually unnoticed for three years. (This and other details come from a 1965 Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society paper by Roger Butterfield that investigated the history of this quote.)

Later that year, Ford sued the Tribune for libel, demanding $1 million after the paper called him an “anarchist” and an “ignorant idealist.” The case went to trial in 1919 and the judge made clear the issue at hand was not whether Ford was an anarchist, but whether he was ignorant. Ford spent eight days on the witness stand as Tribune lawyers pelted him with questions in an attempt to prove Ford was an ignorant man, and the press wrote up every juicy exchange. One such exchange regarded just how much contempt Ford had for history.

Ford won the case, but only just. The jury awarded him six cents in damages. Shortly thereafter, he wrote to his secretary Ernest Liebold that he was going to start a museum “and give people a true picture of the development of the country.” He vowed to collect and preserve artifacts in service of this mission because the only history worth observing is “that you can preserve in itself.”

“We’re going to build a museum that’s going to show industrial history,” Ford wrote to Liebold. “And it won’t be bunk.”

And it wasn’t. The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village complex in Dearborn, Michigan, is one of the largest collections of American historical artifacts. The guy responsible for one of the most famous anti-history quotes in our language came to care a tremendous deal about history.

This tends to happen. We get older and realize we may live the rest of our lives in the future, as Kettering said, but much of our time is spent in the past, too. As we age, the ratio flips. Great chunks of us become history. And one day, we will be too. The past no longer seems to be an abstract, irrelevant tale but something that happened to us, to people we know. It’s something we made, some- thing we did.

This is partly why O’Mara thinks we’re at the beginning of a shift in which Silicon Valley will start to care about history. She’s been invited to talk about her book up and down the Valley, in front of audiences of all ages. The industry is now mature enough that parts of it are history itself.

But it’s not mere nostalgia—or, less charitably, a dif- ferent form of hubris—that makes history important. Even historians disagree on why history matters. Some stress that its cyclical nature—“history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes”—is the business case for learning history, so one does not repeat the mistakes of the past.

There’s something to this, but history’s relevance runs deeper. Learning it can be almost spiritual, a kind of therapy. It’s oddly comforting to learn about times when people thought they were experiencing unprecedented circumstances, when they were scared out of their minds about what had become of their society, when they were afraid they had lost all con- trol over events. Things may be different today, but not that different.

History does a lot of telling us what we don’t want to hear. It disposes of the progress myth we are taught in schools—which is also also a foundational principle of Levandowski’s AI church—that things just keep getting better, even as it feels like they are only getting worse.

The three historians I talked to for this article stressed that history disabuses us of these easy “progress narratives.” Instead, it presents a much more challenging yet honest view of humanity.

Patrick McCray, a historian of technology and science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me that the story of humanity is not one of linear progress, but of spurs and splits, fits and starts, progress and backpedaling. For his scientific history course, one of his main goals is to show students this. But it’s no easy feat, especially for students in science and technology, fields entirely based on progress narratives and finding clean solutions to difficult problems. “It’s really hard to get them out of that mindset, because they really have this view that science is this ever-improving thing and we’re just simply knowing more and more and more,” McCray said.

This is hard stuff, and acknowledging it comes with a corollary: We, as a society, are not particularly special. Vinsel, the historian at Virginia Tech, cautioned against “digital exceptionalism,” or the idea that everything is different now that the silicon chip has been harnessed for the controlled movement of electrons.

It’s a difficult thing for people to accept, especially those who have spent their lives building those chips or the software they run. “Just on a psychological level,” Vinsel said, “people want to live in an exciting moment. Students want to believe they’re part of a generation that’s going to change the world through digital technology or whatever.”

Perhaps no single human embodies the concept of digital exceptionalism more than Levandowski. In an anecdote from a 2013 New Yorker profile, he showed the writer Burkhard Bilger his collection of “vintage illustrations and newsreels on his laptop” of the failed attempts to have cars drive themselves in the past. Levandowski may not be a student of history, but he’s hardly ignorant. For all his bluster, Levandowski may be more like Henry Ford than he lets on.

When Vinsel tells his students about the importance of history, he references the philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s classic work On Bullshit, which experienced a brief resurgence in 2016. Frankfurt argued that bullshit is not about lying so much as simply not giving a shit about truth. Bullshit is saying whatever you need to get elected or to build hype around your product or get that next round of venture capital funding or win that government contract.

“I think history leads you to be a bullshit detector,” Vinsel said. He supposes this may be the fundamental incompatibility between tech companies, which disseminate an awful lot of bullshit, and their disdain for an honest reading of history. Perhaps, he thought, they might see a little too much of it in themselves. After all, Vinsel added, “there’s not a lot of innovation in bullshit.”

“We didn’t come up with this idea,” Levandowski once said of cars driving themselves. “We just got lucky that the computers and sensors were ready for us.” He believes this time is different, just like everyone before him believed their time was different. It’s a gigantic downer to be told otherwise. In many ways, that’s what history is.

Editor's note: After this article was finalized for print publication, Levandowski declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy following a court order to repay Google $179 million.

Everything Is Innovative When You Ignore the Past syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[bestmarijuanaboutiques]

US Virgin Islands: Walker Legal Group Pen Opinion On Territory’s Cannabis Regulation

New Post has been published on https://bestmarijuanaboutiques.com/?post_type=wprss_feed_item&p=23931

US Virgin Islands: Walker Legal Group Pen Opinion On Territory’s Cannabis Regulation

The 33rd Legislature of the Virgin Islands recently met during a Special Session to debate the passage of an Adult Use Medical Cannabis Bill. Senators voted to send the Bill to the ‘Committee of the Whole’, where it will be improved through a process of modifications and amendments. A lot of progress was made at this Special Session but there is still confusion around key issues. To be clear, this Bill is about jobs, local wealth creation, and socio-economic benefits – most Virgin Islands’ residents that want cannabis already have a way to get it, and local residents are not the primary targets for the tax revenue generation that will fund many community programs.

  Let us try to set the to set the record straight.

1. Strict residency requirements have been designed to protect VI residents and discourage mainland intervention in the proposed regulated VI cannabis industry. This is an industry that will be owned by VI residents, will employ hundreds of VI residents, and will sell to visitors who come to the Virgin Islands – the majority of which come from States that have already legalized Medical and/or Adult Use.

a. Licensed businesses must be no-less than 51% locally owned, whether by one local resident or a group of residents working in partnership. Investment capital from outside the VI is permitted, but the companies must be majority owned and managed by long-term VI residents. Full transparency is required.

b. The Bill discourages people that have parachuted in recently, registered to vote and are now “residents for cannabis purposes”. We have even heard complaints that the Bill goes too far in protecting the local community.

c. Licensed businesses are required to be a safe distance from cruise ship docks, schools and places of worship. Advertising will be strictly regulated and regulated “safe zones” will be established for smokers, such that people will not be permitted to smoke in public.

2. Vertical Integration is significantly limited. Vertical integration allows retail dispensaries to grow all their product, essentially blocking out local farmers. This Bill requires Dispensaries and Processors to purchase a minimum of 70% from independent, local farmers. This guarantees that business opportunities are spread throughout the Territory, allowing local farmers to contract with Dispensaries and Processors to develop consistent, legal and reliable markets for their products. As with any product, prices will vary based on quality, consistency, supply and demand.

3. Micro-Cultivation is a category of cultivation licenses designed for small farmers to enter the legal supply chain in an economically empowering manner. It will be a way for smaller producers to become larger over time, while encouraging black-market growers to enter the supply chain, to become legal and to be properly compensated for their skill.

4. The Government Employees Retirement System (GERS) and other community programs for seniors will directly benefit. Whether this Bill results in $15, $20, or $30 million in tax revenue per year for GERS, it’s a move in the right direction with direct cannabis sales and revenue from spin-off industries generating additional tax revenues that will further benefit the Territory. As Commissioner Richard T. Evangelista clearly and appropriately stated during the Session: “This is just the beginning”.

5. The long-term socio-economic objectives are the most important aspect of this initiative. We believe this Bill will result in significant, long-term social benefits. Yes, hundreds of jobs will be created in a clean and sustainable local industry. And yes, strict residency requirements ensure that licensed businesses will be majority owned by long- term VI residents. And yes, all product will be independently tested for dangerous chemicals and potency. But more importantly, outside tourist dollars spent on local agricultural products will largely remain in the VI economy, paid out as salaries and services that stay in the VI, are recirculated and used to build or fix homes, finance education and medical care, support other local businesses and improve the quality of life overall. It is also our hope that this Bill will help serve as a WAKE-UP call for the many benefits of agriculture as a local industry. And while we hope to see more local food crops coming soon, few are as potentially profitable and broadly used as cannabis – as the customers arrive by air and sea, daily.

Governor Albert Bryan, Jr. should be applauded for taking the initiative to further the development of the legal cannabis industry in the Virgin Islands. It is time for progressive and responsible action. We should not let perfect stand in the way of good, and this Bill is well on its way to being very good for the people of the Virgin Islands. As one Senator said last week, it‘s easier to criticize than to create. We firmly believe in the creation of economic opportunities for all Virgin Islanders and believe this Bill reflects those goals. This Bill, as it is improved through the legislative process, will also be supported through detailed rules and regulations to be drafted, adopted, and subject to expert and public vetting. Once the process is complete the Virgin Islands will have a safe, regulated cannabis industry that will benefit all Virgin Islanders for generations to come.

Source: https://viconsortium.com/vi-opinion/virgin-islands-opinion-the-reality-of-the-virgin-islands-cannabis-bill

Submitted by Attorney Key Walker and Kenneth S. Phillips: 

Ms. Walker is the owner and managing attorney of the Walker Legal Group, a Virgin Islands law firm. Attorney Walker and her team represents clients, in the areas of civil litigation, criminal defense, and business transactions and litigation, among other areas of practice.

Mr.  Phillips is the author of Cannabis Economic Impact Analysis (commissioned by the St. Thomas-St. John Chamber of Commerce in 2015). Mr. Phillips has an extensive background in international finance, financial risk management and regulatory compliance.

[rolandfontana]

Fan Bing Bing’s International Business Lesson, Part 2

Like pretty much everyone on this planet I’m a Fan Bing Bing fan. That partially explains why this is my second post on her. But really, more than anything, I view her situation as salubrious for those who conduct business internationally. In my initial post on her, titled, Fan Bing Bing’s International Business Lesson, I talked about how some foreign businesses in rationalize their failing to abide by a foreign country’s laws:

I had a sorta friend in college who smoked like a chimney and drank like a Supreme Court Justice. When people would point out the danger of his ways he would respond by emphatically noting that his grandfather also smoked and drank just as much and he was still alive and kicking at 88. Does anyone not see a problem with this analysis?

And yet, my firm’s international lawyers often hear something similar as an excuse for why some company or some person is doing XY or Z that is not legal. Sometimes they will add that so and so who is a native of the country in which they are doing business has told them that this or that is okay, which to me is the equivalent of relying on someone with no medical training saying it’s okay to smoke.

I then equated these foreign companies to what happed to Fan Bing Bing:

Fan Bing Bing is a terrific movie actress who recently got into BIG trouble with the Chinese tax authorities for having underreported her income via a dual-contract system in which only one contract is disclosed to the tax authorities. For more on this, check out China Movie Stars and The Two-Contract Problem. But it isn’t just movie stars that employ the two-contract tax dodge; many foreign companies and expats do as well:

Even if Fan Bingbing hasn’t done a single thing wrong (which is very possible), it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that tax evasion is rampant in the film business. Tax evasion is like a national sport in China. Mainland factories regularly misreport income by having payments go to a Hong Kong or Taiwanese holding company. So-called “independent contractors” in China rarely report their income because they and their foreign employer are both operating illegally. And the billion-dollar daigou business is profitable largely through tax and customs fraud.

I then talked about how the international lawyers at my law firm frequently get calls from foreigners in big trouble somewhere like China or Vietnam for having done something illegal:

I myself have taken many of these calls and they usually start out with the person in trouble saying something like the following:

I always follow the law and I wanted to follow the law in __________ [country] but my ___________ assured me that this is how things are done in ___________[country] and so I reluctantly went along. And now I am in legal trouble for having done…..

The person who usually gets the blame is the accountant or general manager or even the person’s wife who is a native of whatever country in which the person is having his legal problems — I say “his” here because I cannot remember getting such a call from anyone not male. My tactic is to quickly push through this sort of discussion by bluntly saying, well yes, not paying your taxes or not doing X is illegal pretty much everywhere in the world and I am not aware of any country in the world where it is a defense to say that everyone else is operating illegally as well. So at this point, what I suggest is that we bring in a top-flight criminal lawyer and work on doing whatever we can to prevent you from going to jail and to reduce what you will need to pay.

I then gave examples of companies that tanked by being caught doing something illegal and examples of companies that were conferred with benefits by operating legally. I ended that post with a story about a trip I once made to Papua New Guinea where obeying the law to the letter turned out to be key:

One of my favorite stories is when I went to Papua New Guinea to help a Sakhalin Island client secure the return of two helicopters. When I landed in Port Moresby, I was asked if I was in the country as a tourist or for business. The tourist visa was something around $35 and the business visa was something around $350, but I said “business” and I paid the much higher fee. I then flew to Goroka where I met the next day with the governor of the Eastern Highlands Province, Malcolm “Kela” Smith. I was told “Kela” means bald man. The first thing Mr. Smith did when I met with him was to check my passport. When it revealed I was there on a business visa, I could sense a change in his view of me. Though he never confirmed this to me, I am convinced that had my passport revealed I was in PNG on a tourist visa, Mr. Smith would either have had me thrown out of the country or he would have refused to meet with me because I was in the country illegally. Kela Smith ended up meeting with me and with my client and within a day or two we had a deal whereby my client would get his helicopters back.

I am writing about Fan Bing Bing again because I just finished reading a fascinating Vanity Fair article on her, titled, “The Big Error Was That She Was Caught”: The Untold Story Behind the Mysterious Disappearance of Fan Bingbing, the World’s Biggest Movie Star. Vanity Fair describes her as “the most famous actress in China, which is to say, the most famous actress in the world” and China’s highest-paid female star.

It then talks about how her troubles began when two versions of her contract for an upcoming film were publicly revealed, with one version putting her salary at $7.8 million and the other at $1.5 million. If you are now thinking that you can cut-away from this post because it has nothing to do with you, I would ask that you stay just a bit longer to make sure that is in fact the case, because it very well may not be. I say this because it is very common for expats to have “dual contracts” not too dissimilar from Fan. See China Expat Pay: Splitting with Hong Kong is 100% Illegal and 200% Dangerous. Many of these expats justify this by pointing out that they have multiple friends who do the same thing. And it is also quite common for these expats to get caught when someone (their own employer perhaps) reports them. It is also common for foreign companies to illegally operate in China without a WFOE (often without even realizing they are violating any laws) and then get reported to the authorities by the very people in China they are paying. See Doing Business in China Without a WFOE: Will the Defendant Please Rise. Many of these companies justify this by pointing out how difficult and expensive it is to form a WFOE in China and by noting that they have a great relationship with their China contractors/employees.

Once the contracts went public, Fan and her people seemed not to realize the depth of her problems and sought to downplay them, much like what we see foreign companies do when questioned by the Chinese government for something like a customs violation See China Customs Violations and How to Avoid Jail Time:

Fan’s production company immediately issued a statement denying the charges and informing Cui that they had retained the services of a Beijing law firm. Cui [the newscaster who broke the dual contract story] apologized to Fan and retracted his accusation. But by then it was already a national scandal. A week later, on June 4, the central tax authorities deputized the local tax bureau in Jiangsu, the coastal province where Fan’s company was registered, to launch an investigation. Shares of companies associated with Fan plunged by 10 percent, the maximum daily limit on the Chinese stock market. Three days later, Chinese censors banned all stories on the Internet about taxes, films, and Fan.

And then “the movie industry at large also fell under scrutiny”:

On June 27, five government agencies, including film and tax authorities, issued a joint directive capping salaries for on-screen talent at 40 percent of a movie’s total production budget. Individual stars, meanwhile, would not be allowed to earn more than 70 percent of a production’s total wages for actors. The notice chastised the industry for “distorting social values” and encouraging the “growing tendency towards money worship” through the “blind chasing of stars.”

The article highlights how dual contracts had become standard practice in China’s movie industry:

In the years that the Chinese film industry was allowed to grow unregulated, it became common for stars to falsify contracts to avoid paying taxes on the huge sums that they were commanding. That’s why Fan’s sudden fall sent a chill through the rest of the film world. “There was a certain surprise in the industry,” said Kwei, the producer. “Fan Bingbing was only doing the usual standard package.” David Unger, Gong Li’s manager, put it more bluntly. “The big error,” he said, “was that she was caught.”

Fan was eventually ordered to pay $131 million in back taxes and penalties. Vanity Fair notes how it “could have been worse. . . . since “until 2009, first-time tax offenders in China could be charged with criminal liability. . . . and until 2011, economic crimes such as tax evasion were punishable by death.”  It then comments on her Fan’s treatment “sent a clear signal to everyone in the Chinese film industry.” In my view, this should send a clear signal to everyone doing business in China that the following are now true:

China has the technology and the wherewithal and the desire to enforce its laws.

The Chinese government likes using the famous (and the foreign) to show its reach and its power. “Kill the chicken to scare the monkey.” Foreign Executives Arrested in China: Please Do NOT Look Away.

The fact that others did and are still doing what you do is 100% irrelevant. That you have been doing X for years and gotten away with it does not mean you will not be arrested tomorrow or next week or next year for doing X.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse.

The article also talks about how “larger forces at play” helped precipitate the crackdown against Fan:

After years of double-digit growth, the Chinese economy is slowing down. The government claims that economic output grew by 6.5 percent last year—the lowest rate in more than a decade—but observers believe the rate is as low as 2 percent. With consumer spending slowing and foreign investment plunging in the midst of a trade war, the government is seeking to redirect economic power back under state control. It won’t be long, many in China predict, before the tax scandal bleeds into other sectors. What happened to Fan was merely the “primary incision,” says Alex Zhang, executive director of Zhengfu Pictures. Soon, the authorities will “cut all the way down to the rest of the business community.”

In March 2018, President Xi established the National Supervision Commission, granting it sweeping powers to investigate corruption and tax evasion. Suspects could now be legally kidnapped, interrogated, and held for as long as six months. That same month, he also gave the Central Publicity Department, which heads up propaganda efforts, the authority to regulate the film industry. (The only other time film was put under the propaganda ministry, according to industry insiders, was during the Cultural Revolution.) Films that had passed the censors years ago have now been retroactively banned. “That liminal space where you can get away with stuff, that’s gone,” said Michael Berry, a professor of contemporary Chinese culture at U.C.L.A.

Fan was not alone in evading taxes: “The big error was that she was caught.”

Under Xi’s crackdown, tens of thousands of people have disappeared into the maw of the police state. An eminent TV news anchor was taken away hours before going on air. A retired professor with views critical of the government was dragged away during a live interview on Voice of America. A billionaire was abducted from his private quarters in the Four Seasons in Hong Kong. Other high-profile disappearances include Interpol president Meng Hongwei in September, photojournalist Lu Guang in November, two Canadians who went missing in December, as well as the writer Yang Hengjun, who went missing in January. “The message being sent out is that nobody is too tall, too big, too famous, too pretty, too whatever,” said Steve Tsang, who runs the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

Taken together, Xi’s moves represent a dramatic rollback of the economic reforms and relative freedom that enabled the film industry to flourish in the time before his reign. “Deng Xiaoping kept everyone together by promising to make them rich,” said Nicholas Bequelin, the East Asia director of Amnesty International. “What keeps things together under Xi is fear. Fear of the system, where no matter how high you are, from one day to the next you can disappear.”

Put more simply, you and your company had better comply with Chinese law or the law of whatever country in which you are doing business.

What though should you do if you haven’t fully complied? The Vanity Fair article is actually instructive on this as well, at least with respect to China (and this generally holds true for much of Asia)

When I arrived in Beijing, just before Christmas, everyone in the film industry seemed to be in a state of panic. The tax authorities had issued a directive calling for all film companies to do ziwo piping, or “self-criticism,” and “rectify themselves” by paying the back taxes they owed on unreported income before December 31. Those who paid up would not be fined. Starting in the new year, however, there would be “heavy, random checks,” and those who were caught would be “dealt with seriously.”

The authorities also declared that special tax zones, which had allowed stars to pay lower taxes, were no longer legal. Following the proverb “The mountains are tall and the emperor is far away,” many film studios had registered in these special zones, far from the major coastal cities. Tax rates in the zones could be as low as 0.15 percent. Now, overnight, those working in the film industry would be taxed at the highest rate—45 percent. And all this was to be paid for not only 2018 but also for the two previous fiscal years, dating back to January 2016.

The rising fear was palpable on WeChat, where people were sharing ad hoc formulas meant to help calculate how much tax they owed in lieu of any official guidelines. Many faced staggering sums that dwarfed Fan’s tax bill. Open letters protesting the yidaoqie, or “one knife chop” approach, of the tax bureau made the rounds before being taken down.

Because of Fan’s clout in the industry, the probe of her finances had incriminated many companies that were partnering with her on projects. Scores of films have been put on hold. “Everyone you can think of is dealing with taxes right now,” said Kwei, the producer. Many had either already been “invited for tea” at the tax bureau, or were awaiting their turn. Others were rushing to meet with their accountants, or were holed up in their offices reviewing past budget sheets. Victoria Mao, who runs a production company, told me that all of her projects had been put on hold just days earlier, after she received a call from the tax bureau asking her to self-audit. “We don’t have any time to go forward,” she said, “because we have to go back.”

People were even more reticent than usual to talk on the phone. “We are not the only people on the line, so to speak,” producer Andre Morgan told me, before suggesting we meet at his hotel. Morgan, who is widely credited for introducing Jackie Chan to Hollywood, described how things have changed since he came to China in 1972. “There weren’t that many rules back then,” he said. Now the bureaucracy is catching up with the industry. As he sees it, the people aren’t afraid of the state—the state is afraid of the people. That’s why the government singled out and punished a select few, like Fan—to keep everyone else in line. Morgan quoted a Chinese proverb: the state is “killing the chicken to scare the monkey.” (He also said, in a burst of animal metaphors, that it is only a matter of time before “the chickens come home to roost,” and that the government is doing whatever it can to “catch the mouse.”)

*     *    *    *

Was anyone angry? “If we get angry, we are done,” explained the actor’s agent, who was the only one not drinking with abandon. “You can’t make movies anymore. We have just the one government.” People, he added, were “not mad, but confused.” The informal rules that had governed the industry for decades were changing, which was unnerving. Even worse, no one seemed to know what the new rules were. Meanwhile, the government was “taking money from your pocket.” But what could you do?

It reminds me very much of what I so often tell companies that come to us in trouble in or with China, which is usually something like the following:

The Chinese government is pragmatic. Their goal is usually not so much to punish or to scorch the earth, but to bring in the money owed it (plus penalties and interest) and to get you to realize that you must fly straight going forward. If we go to the government and let them know that we just discovered that your company is not complying and let them know that we will make every effort to get into full compliance (the “self-criticism” and “rectification” mentioned by Vanity Fair) we ought to be able to work something out with them that will likely even involve some compromises on the penalties. But if the Chinese government catches you before you report yourself, all bets are off.

See Fan Bing Bing.

Fan Bing Bing’s International Business Lesson, Part 2 syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/

[suzanneshannon]

Canary in a Coal Mine: How Tech Provides Platforms for Hate

As I write this, the world is sending its thoughts and prayers to our Muslim cousins. The Christchurch act of terrorism has once again reminded the world that white supremacy’s rise is very real, that its perpetrators are no longer on the fringes of society, but centered in our holiest places of worship. People are begging us to not share videos of the mass murder or the hateful manifesto that the white supremacist terrorist wrote. That’s what he wants: for his proverbial message of hate to be spread to the ends of the earth.

We live in a time where you can stream a mass murder and hate crime from the comfort of your home. Children can access these videos, too.

As I work through the pure pain, unsurprised, observing the toll on Muslim communities (as a non-Muslim, who matters least in this event), I think of the imperative role that our industry plays in this story.

At time of writing, YouTube has failed to ban and to remove this video. If you search for the video (which I strongly advise against), it still comes up with a mere content warning; the same content warning that appears for casually risqué content. You can bypass the warning and watch people get murdered. Even when the video gets flagged and taken down, new ones get uploaded.

Human moderators have to relive watching this trauma over and over again for unlivable wages. News outlets are embedding the video into their articles and publishing the hateful manifesto. Why? What does this accomplish?

I was taught in journalism class that media (photos, video, infographics, etc.) should be additive (a progressive enhancement, if you will) and provide something to the story for the reader that words cannot.

Is it necessary to show murder for our dear readers to understand the cruelty and finality of it? Do readers gain something more from watching fellow humans have their lives stolen from them? What psychological damage are we inflicting upon millions of people   and for what?

Who benefits?

The mass shooter(s) who had a message to accompany their mass murder. News outlets are thirsty for perverse clicks to garner more ad revenue. We, by way of our platforms, give agency and credence to these acts of violence, then pilfer profits from them. Tech is a money-making accomplice to these hate crimes.

Christchurch is just one example in an endless array where the tools and products we create are used as a vehicle for harm and for hate.

Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica scandal played a critical role in the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The concept of “race realism,” which is essentially a term that white supremacists use to codify their false racist pseudo-science, was actively tested on Facebook’s platform to see how the term would sit with people who are ignorantly sitting on the fringes of white supremacy. Full-blown white supremacists don’t need this soft language. This is how radicalization works.

The strategies articulated in the above article are not new. Racist propaganda predates social media platforms. What we have to be mindful with is that we’re building smarter tools with power we don’t yet fully understand: you can now have an AI-generated human face. Our technology is accelerating at a frightening rate, a rate faster than our reflective understanding of its impact.

Combine the time-tested methods of spreading white supremacy, the power to manipulate perception through technology, and the magnitude and reach that has become democratized and anonymized.

We’re staring at our own reflection in the Black Mirror.

The right to speak versus the right to survive

Tech has proven time and time again that it voraciously protects first amendment rights above all else. (I will also take this opportunity to remind you that the first amendment of the United States offers protection to the people from the government abolishing free speech, not from private money-making corporations).

Evelyn Beatrice Hall writes in The Friends of Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Fundamentally, Hall’s quote expresses that we must protect, possibly above all other freedoms, the freedom to say whatever we want to say. (Fun fact: The quote is often misattributed to Voltaire, but Hall actually wrote it to explain Voltaire’s ideologies.)

And the logical anchor here is sound: We must grant everyone else the same rights that we would like for ourselves. Former 99u editor Sean Blanda wrote a thoughtful piece on the “Other Side,” where he posits that we lack tolerance for people who don’t think like us, but that we must because we might one day be on the other side. I agree in theory.

But, what happens when a portion of the rights we grant to one group (let’s say, free speech to white supremacists) means the active oppression another group’s right (let’s say, every person of color’s right to live)?

James Baldwin expresses this idea with a clause, “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”

It would seem that we have a moral quandary where two sets of rights cannot coexist. Do we protect the privilege for all users to say what they want, or do we protect all users from hate? Because of this perceived moral quandary, tech has often opted out of this conversation altogether. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook, two of the biggest offenders, continue to allow hate speech to ensue with irregular to no regulation.

When explicitly asked about his platform as a free-speech platform and its consequence to privacy and safety, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said,

“So we believe that we can only serve the public conversation, we can only stand for freedom of expression if people feel safe to express themselves in the first place. We can only do that if they feel that they are not being silenced.”

Dorsey and Twitter are most concerned about protecting expression and about not silencing people. In his mind, if he allows people to say whatever they want on his platform, he has succeeded. When asked about why he’s failed to implement AI to filter abuse like, say, Instagram had implemented, he said that he’s most concerned about being able to explain why the AI flagged something as abusive. Again, Dorsey protects the freedom of speech (and thus, the perpetrators of abuse) before the victims of abuse.

But he’s inconsistent about it. In a study by George Washington University comparing white nationalists and ISIS social media usage, Twitter’s freedom of speech was not granted to ISIS. Twitter suspended 1,100 accounts related to ISIS whereas it suspended only seven accounts related to Nazis, white nationalism, and white supremacy, despite the accounts having more than seven times the followers, and tweeting 25 times more than the ISIS accounts. Twitter here made a moral judgment that the fewer, less active, and less influential ISIS accounts were somehow not welcome on their platform, whereas the prolific and burgeoning Nazi and white supremacy accounts were.

So, Twitter has shown that it won’t protect free speech at all costs or for all users. We can only conclude that Twitter is either intentionally protecting white supremacy or simply doesn’t think it’s very dangerous. Regardless of which it is (I think I know), the outcome does not change the fact that white supremacy is running rampant on its platforms and many others.

Let’s brainwash ourselves for a moment and pretend like Twitter does want to support freedom of speech equitably and stays neutral and fair to complete this logical exercise: Going back to the dichotomy of rights example I provided earlier, where either the right to free speech or the right to safety and survival prevail, the rights and the power will fall into the hands of the dominant group or ideologue.

In case you are somehow unaware, the dominating ideologue, whether you’re a flagrant white supremacist or not, is white supremacy. White supremacy was baked into founding principles of the United States, the country where the majority of these platforms were founded and exist. (I am not suggesting that white supremacy doesn’t exist globally, as it does, evidenced most recently by the terrorist attack in Christchurch. I’m centering the conversation intentionally around the United States as it is my lived experience and where most of these companies operate.)

Facebook attempted to educate its team on white supremacy in order to address how to regulate free speech. A laugh-cry excerpt:

“White nationalism and calling for an exclusively white state is not a violation for our policy unless it explicitly excludes other PCs [protected characteristics].”

White nationalism is a softened synonym for white supremacy so that racists-lite can feel more comfortable with their transition into hate. White nationalism (a.k.a. white supremacy) by definition explicitly seeks to eradicate all people of color. So, Facebook should see white nationalist speech as exclusionary, and therefore a violation of their policies.

Regardless of what tech leaders like Dorsey or Facebook CEO Zuckerberg say or what mediocre and uninspired condolences they might offer, inaction is an action.

Companies that use terms and conditions or acceptable use policies to defend their inaction around hate speech are enabling and perpetuating white supremacy. Policies are written by humans to protect that group of human’s ideals. The message they use might be that they are protecting free speech, but hate speech is a form of free speech. So effectively, they are protecting hate speech. Well, as long as it’s for white supremacy and not the Islamic State.

Whether the motivation is fear (losing loyal Nazi customers and their sympathizers) or hate (because their CEO is a white supremacist), it does not change the impact: Hate speech is tolerated, enabled, and amplified by way of their platforms.

“That wasn’t our intent”

Product creators might be thinking, Hey, look, I don’t intentionally create a platform for hate. The way these features were used was never our intent.

Intent does not erase impact.

We cannot absolve ourselves of culpability merely because we failed to conceive such evil use cases when we built it. While we very well might not have created these platforms with the explicit intent to help Nazis or imagined it would be used to spread their hate, the reality is that our platforms are being used in this way.

As product creators, it is our responsibility to protect the safety of our users by stopping those that intend to or already cause them harm. Better yet, we ought to think of this before we build the platforms to prevent this in the first place.

The question to answer isn’t, “Have I made a place where people have the freedom to express themselves?” Instead we have to ask, “Have I made a place where everyone has the safety to exist?” If you have created a place where a dominant group can embroil and embolden hate against another group, you have failed to create a safe place. The foundations of hateful speech (beyond the psychological trauma of it) lead to events like Christchurch.

We must protect safety over speech.

The Domino Effect

This week, Slack banned 28 hate groups. What is most notable, to me, is that the groups did not break any parts of their Acceptable Use Policy. Slack issued a statement:

The use of Slack by hate groups runs counter to everything we believe in at Slack and is not welcome on our platform… Using Slack to encourage or incite hatred and violence against groups or individuals because of who they are is antithetical to our values and the very purpose of Slack.

That’s it.

It is not illegal for tech companies like Slack to ban groups from using their proprietary software because it is a private company that can regulate users if they do not align with their vision as a company. Think of it as the “no shoes, no socks, no service” model, but for tech.

Slack simply decided that supporting the workplace collaboration of Nazis around efficient ways to evangelize white supremacy was probably not in line with their company directives around inclusion. I imagine Slack also considered how their employees of color most ill-affected by white supremacy would feel working for a company that supported it, actively or not.

What makes the Slack example so notable is that they acted swiftly and on their own accord. Slack chose the safety of all their users over the speech of some.

When caught with their enablement of white supremacy, some companies will only budge under pressure from activist groups, users, and employees.

PayPal finally banned hate groups after Charlottesville and after Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) explicitly called them out for enabling hate. SPLC had identified this fact for three years prior. PayPal had ignored them for all three years.

Unfortunately, taking these “stances” against something as clearly and viscerally wrong as white supremacy is rare for companies to do. The tech industry tolerates this inaction through unspoken agreements.

If Facebook doesn’t do anything about racist political propaganda, YouTube doesn’t do anything about PewDiePie, and Twitter doesn’t do anything about disproportionate abuse against Black women, it says to the smaller players in the industry that they don’t have to either.

The tech industry reacts to its peers. When there is disruption, as was the case with Airbnb, who screened and rejected any guests who they believed to be partaking in the Unite the Right Charlottesville rally, companies follow suit. GoDaddy cancelled Daily Stormer’s domain registration and Google did the same when they attempted migration.

If one company, like Slack or Airbnb, decides to do something about the role it’s going to play, it creates a perverse kind of FOMO for the rest: Fear of missing out of doing the right thing and standing on the right side of history.

Don’t have FOMO, do something

The type of activism at those companies all started with one individual. If you want to be part of the solution, I’ve gathered some places to start. The list is not exhaustive, and, as with all things, I recommend researching beyond this abridged summary.

Understand how white supremacy impacts you as an individual. Now, if you are a person of color, queer, disabled, or trans, it’s likely that you know this very intimately. If you are not any of those things, then you, as a majority person, need to understand how white supremacy protects you and works in your favor. It’s not easy work, it is uncomfortable and unfamiliar, but you have the most powerful tools to fix tech. The resources are aplenty, but my favorite abridged list:

Seeing White podcast

Ijeoma Oluo’s So you want to talk about race

Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race (Very key read for UK folks)

Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility

See where your company stands: Read your company’s policies like accepted use and privacy policies and find your CEO’s stance on safety and free speech. While these policies are baseline (and in the Slack example, sort of irrelevant), it’s important to known your company’s track record. As an employee, your actions and decisions either uphold the ideologies behind the company or they don’t. Ask yourself if the company’s ideologies are worth upholding and whether they align with your own. Education will help you to flag if something contradicts those policies, or if the policies themselves allow for unethical activity.

Examine everything you do critically on an ongoing basis. You may feel your role is small or that your company is immune—maybe you are responsible for the maintenance of one small algorithm. But consider how that algorithm or similar ones can be exploited. Some key questions I ask myself:

Who benefits from this? Who is harmed?

How could this be used for harm?

Who does this exclude? Who is missing?

What does this protect? For whom? Does it do so equitably?

See something? Say something. If you believe that your company is creating something that is or can be used for harm, it is your responsibility to say something. Now, I’m not naïve to the fact that there is inherent risk in this. You might fear ostracization or termination. You need to protect yourself first. But you also need to do something.

Find someone who you trust who might be at less risk. Maybe if you’re a nonbinary person of color, find a white cis man who is willing to speak up. Maybe if you’re a white man who is new to the company, find a white man who has more seniority or tenure. But also, consider how you have so much more relative privilege compared to most other people and that you might be the safest option.

Unionize. Find peers who might feel the same way and write a collective statement.

Get someone influential outside of the company (if knowledge is public) to say something.

Listen to concerns, no matter how small, particularly if they’re coming from the most endangered groups. If your user or peer feels unsafe, you need to understand why. People often feel like small things can be overlooked, as their initial impact might be less, but it is in the smallest cracks that hate can grow. Allowing one insensitive comment about race is still allowing hate speech. If someone, particularly someone in a marginalized group, brings up a concern, you need to do your due diligence to listen to it and to understand its impact.

I cannot emphasize this last point enough.

What I say today is not new. Versions of this article have been written before. Women of color like me have voiced similar concerns not only in writing, but in design reviews, in closed door meetings to key stakeholders, in Slack DMs. We’ve blown our whistles.

But here is the power of white supremacy.

White supremacy is so ingrained in every single aspect of how this nation was built, how our corporations function, and who is in control. If you are not convinced of this, you are not paying attention or intentionally ignoring the truth.

Queer, Muslim, disabled, trans women and nonbinary folks of color — the marginalized groups most impacted by this — are the ones who are voicing these concerns most voraciously. Speaking up requires us to enter the spotlight and outside of safety—we take a risk and are not heard.

The silencing of our voices is one of many effective tools of white supremacy. Our silencing lives within every microaggression, each time we’re talked over, or not invited to partake in key decisions.

In tech, I feel I am a canary in a coal mine. I have sung my song to warn the miners of the toxicity. My sensitivity to it is heightened, because of my existence.

But the miners look at me and tell me that my lived experience is false. It does not align with their narrative as humans. They don’t understand why I sing.

If the people at the highest echelons of the tech industry—the white, male CEOs in power—fail to listen to its most marginalized people—the queer, disabled, trans, people of color—the fate of the canaries will too become the fate of the miners.

Canary in a Coal Mine: How Tech Provides Platforms for Hate published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

[deniscollins]

Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?

Former CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, spoke about working 130 hours a week. Elon Musk noted that employees should work 80 hours a week, and peak at 100 at times. Bernie Klinder, a consultant for a large tech company, said he tried to limit himself to five 11-hour days per week, which adds up to an extra day of productivity. If you were a CEO of a high tech company would  you encourage employees to work: (1) 55 hours a week, (2) 80 a week, (3) 100 a week? Why? What are the ethics underlying  your decision?

Never once at the start of my workweek — not in my morning coffee shop line; not in my crowded subway commute; not as I begin my bottomless inbox slog — have I paused, looked to the heavens and whispered: #ThankGodIt’sMonday.

Apparently, that makes me a traitor to my generation. I learned this during a series of recent visits to WeWork locations in New York, where the throw pillows implore busy tenants to “Do what you love.” Neon signs demand they “Hustle harder,” and murals spread the gospel of T.G.I.M. Even the cucumbers in WeWork’s water coolers have an agenda. “Don’t stop when you’re tired,” someone recently carved into the floating vegetables’ flesh. “Stop when you are done.” Kool-Aid drinking metaphors are rarely this literal.

Welcome to hustle culture. It is obsessed with striving, relentlessly positive, devoid of humor, and — once you notice it — impossible to escape. “Rise and Grind” is both the theme of a Nike ad campaign and the title of a book by a “Shark Tank” shark. New media upstarts like the Hustle, which produces a popular business newsletter and conference series, and One37pm, a content company created by the patron saint of hustling, Gary Vaynerchuk, glorify ambition not as a means to an end, but as a lifestyle.

“The current state of entrepreneurship is bigger than career,” reads the One37pm “About Us” page. “It’s ambition, grit and hustle. It’s a live performance that lights up your creativity … a sweat session that sends your endorphins coursing ... a visionary who expands your way of thinking.” From this point of view, not only does one never stop hustling — one never exits a kind of work rapture, in which the chief purpose of exercising or attending a concert is to get inspiration that leads back to the desk.

Ryan Harwood, the chief executive of One37pm’s parent company, told me that the site’s content is aimed at a younger generation of people who are seeking permission to follow their dreams. “They want to know how to own their moment, at any given moment,” he said.

“Owning one’s moment” is a clever way to rebrand “surviving the rat race.” In the new work culture, enduring or even merely liking one’s job is not enough. Workers should love what they do, and then promote that love on social media, thus fusing their identities to that of their employers. Why else would LinkedIn build its own version of Snapchat Stories?

This is toil glamour, and it is going mainstream. Most visibly, WeWork — which investors recently valued at $47 billion — is on its way to becoming the Starbucks of office culture. It has exported its brand of performative workaholism to 27 countries, with 400,000 tenants, including workers from 30 percent of the Global Fortune 500.

In January, WeWork’s founder, Adam Neumann, announced that his start-up was rebranding itself as the We Company, to reflect an expansion into residential real estate and education. Describing the shift, Fast Company wrote: “Rather than just renting desks, the company aims to encompass all aspects of people’s lives, in both physical and digital worlds.” The ideal client, one imagines, is someone so enamored of the WeWork office aesthetic — whip-cracking cucumbers and all — that she sleeps in a WeLive apartment, works out at a Rise by We gym, and sends her children to a WeGrow school.

From this vantage, “Office Space,” the Gen-X slacker paean that came out 20 years ago next month, feels like science fiction from a distant realm. It’s almost impossible to imagine a start-up worker bee of today confessing, as protagonist Peter Gibbons does, “It’s not that I’m lazy. It’s that I just don’t care.” Workplace indifference just doesn’t have a socially acceptable hashtag.

‘It’s grim and exploitative’

It’s not difficult to view hustle culture as a swindle. After all, convincing a generation of workers to beaver away is convenient for those at the top.

“The vast majority of people beating the drums of hustle-mania are not the people doing the actual work. They’re the managers, financiers and owners,” said David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-founder of Basecamp, a software company. We spoke in October, as he was promoting his new book, “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work,” about creating healthy company cultures.

Mr. Heinemeier Hansson said that despite data showing long hours improve neither productivity nor creativity, myths about overwork persist because they justify the extreme wealth created for a small group of elite techies. “It’s grim and exploitative,” he said.

Elon Musk, who stands to reap stock compensation upward of $50 billion if his company, Tesla, meets certain performance levels, is a prime example of extolling work by the many that will primarily benefit him. He tweeted in November that there are easier places to work than Tesla, “but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” The correct number of hours “varies per person,” he continued, but is “about 80 sustained, peaking about 100 at times. Pain level increases exponentially above 80.”

Mr. Musk, who has more than 24 million Twitter followers, further noted that if you love what you do, “it (mostly) doesn’t feel like work.” Even he had to soften the lie of T.G.I.M. with a parenthetical.

Arguably, the technology industry started this culture of work zeal sometime around the turn of the millennium, when the likes of Google started to feed, massage and even play doctor to its employees. The perks were meant to help companies attract the best talent — and keep employees at their desks longer. It seemed enviable enough: Who wouldn’t want an employer that literally took care of your dirty laundry?

But today, as tech culture infiltrates every corner of the business world, its hymns to the virtues of relentless work remind me of nothing so much as Soviet-era propaganda, which promoted impossible-seeming feats of worker productivity to motivate the labor force. One obvious difference, of course, is that those Stakhanovite posters had an anticapitalist bent, criticizing the fat cats profiting from free enterprise. Today’s messages glorify personal profit, even if bosses and investors — not workers — are the ones capturing most of the gains. Wage growth has been essentially stagnant for years.

Perhaps we’ve all gotten a little hungry for meaning. Participation in organized religion is falling, especially among American millennials. In San Francisco, where I live, I’ve noticed that the concept of productivity has taken on an almost spiritual dimension. Techies here have internalized the idea — rooted in the Protestant work ethic — that work is not something you do to get what you want; the work itself is all. Therefore any life hack or company perk that optimizes their day, allowing them to fit in even more work, is not just desirable but inherently good.

Aidan Harper, who created a European workweek-shrinkage campaign called 4 Day Week, argues that this is dehumanizing and toxic. “It creates the assumption that the only value we have as human beings is our productivity capability — our ability to work, rather than our humanity,” he told me.

It’s cultist, Mr. Harper added, to convince workers to buy into their own exploitation with a change-the-world message. “It’s creating the idea that Elon Musk is your high priest,” he said. “You’re going into your church every day and worshiping at the altar of work.”

For congregants of the Cathedral of Perpetual Hustle, spending time on anything that’s nonwork related has become a reason to feel guilty. Jonathan Crawford, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur, told me that he sacrificed his relationships and gained more than 40 pounds while working on Storenvy, his e-commerce start-up. If he socialized, it was at a networking event. If he read, it was a business book. He rarely did anything that didn’t have a “direct R.O.I.,” or return on investment, for his company.

Mr. Crawford changed his lifestyle after he realized it made him miserable. Now, as an entrepreneur-in-residence at 500 Start-ups, an investment firm, he tells fellow founders to seek out nonwork-related activities like reading fiction, watching movies or playing games. Somehow this comes off as radical advice. “It’s oddly eye-opening to them because they didn’t realize they saw themselves as a resource to be expended,” Mr. Crawford said.

It’s easy to become addicted to the pace and stress of work in 2019. Bernie Klinder, a consultant for a large tech company, said he tried to limit himself to five 11-hour days per week, which adds up to an extra day of productivity. “If your peers are competitive, working a ‘normal workweek’ will make you look like a slacker,” he wrote in an email.

Still, he’s realistic about his place in the rat race. “I try to keep in mind that if I dropped dead tomorrow, all of my acrylic workplace awards would be in the trash the next day,” he wrote, “and my job would be posted in the paper before my obituary.”

Lusty for Monday mornings

The logical endpoint of excessively avid work, of course, is burnout. That is the subject of a recent viral essay by the BuzzFeed cultural critic Anne Helen Petersen, which thoughtfully addresses one of the incongruities of hustle-mania in the young. Namely: If Millennials are supposedly lazy and entitled, how can they also be obsessed with killing it at their jobs?

Millennials, Ms. Petersen argues, are just desperately striving to meet their own high expectations. An entire generation was raised to expect that good grades and extracurricular overachievement would reward them with fulfilling jobs that feed their passions. Instead, they wound up with precarious, meaningless work and a mountain of student loan debt. And so posing as a rise-and-grinder, lusty for Monday mornings, starts to make sense as a defense mechanism.

Most jobs — even most good jobs! — are full of pointless drudgery. Most corporations let us down in some way. And yet years after the HBO satire “Silicon Valley” made the vacuous mission statement “making the world a better place” a recurring punch line, many companies still cheerlead the virtues of work with high-minded messaging. For example, Spotify, a company that lets you listen to music, says that its mission is “to unlock the potential of human creativity.” Dropbox, which lets you upload files and stuff, says its purpose is “to unleash the world’s creative energy by designing a more enlightened way of working.”

David Spencer, a professor of economics at Leeds University Business School, says that such posturing by companies, economists and politicians dates at least to the rise of mercantilism in 16th-century Europe. “There has been an ongoing struggle by employers to venerate work in ways that distract from its unappealing features,” he said. But such propaganda can backfire. In 17th-century England, work was lauded as a cure for vice, Mr. Spencer said, but the unrewarding truth just drove workers to drink more.

Internet companies may have miscalculated in encouraging employees to equate their work with their intrinsic value as human beings. After a long era of basking in positive esteem, the tech industry is experiencing a backlash both broad and fierce, on subjects from monopolistic behavior to spreading disinformation and inciting racial violence. And workers are discovering how much power they wield. In November, some 20,000 Googlers participated in a walkout protesting the company’s handling of sexual abusers. Other company employees shut down an artificial intelligence contract with the Pentagon that could have helped military drones become more lethal.

Mr. Heinemeier Hansson cited the employee protests as evidence that millennial workers would eventually revolt against the culture of overwork. “People aren’t going to stand for this,” he said, using an expletive, “or buy the propaganda that eternal bliss lies at monitoring your own bathroom breaks.” He was referring to an interview that the former chief executive of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, gave in 2016, in which she said that working 130 hours a week was possible “if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.”

Ultimately, workers must decide if they admire or reject this level of devotion. Ms. Mayer’s comments were widely panned on social media when the interview ran, but since then, Quora users have eagerly shared their own strategies for mimicking her schedule. Likewise, Mr. Musk’s “pain level” tweets drew plenty of critical takes, but they also garnered just as many accolades and requests for jobs.

The grim reality of 2019 is that begging a billionaire for employment via Twitter is not considered embarrassing, but a perfectly plausible way to get ahead. On some level, you have to respect the hustlers who see a dismal system and understand that success in it requires total, shameless buy-in. If we’re doomed to toil away until we die, we may as well pretend to like it. Even on Mondays.

[studentorganizationgrants]

Innervisions Gospel Choir Benefit Concert

Hosted by Innervisions Gospel Choir

February 2018

How many people were in attendance at this activity/event/project?

30

Of those attendees, how many UT students attended this activity/event/project?

15

For this activity/event/project, did you fundraise money for a charity or non-profit?

Yes, for Innervisions Gospel Choir.

How much money did this activity/event/project raise for the charity/non-profit (net, not gross)?

$216

What will those netted funds be used for?

This money will be used to help fund our Gospel Fest on April 21, 2018.

What were the goals your organization hoped to accomplish through this activity/event/project?

We wanted to enable people to be able to come and worship God with us as well as help us raise money for our Gospel Fest.

How were those goals met?

We had different performers and choirs come and sing and perform for us and our audience. The songs that were sung really set the atmosphere for people to really be able to feel God and worship Him.

What other outcomes were recognized by the production of this activity/event/project?

We also raised $216 for our Gospel Fest through donations and chocolate sales. Many people were very inclined to give a donation and were excited to attend our upcoming Gospel Fest.

What did your organization's members learn from this experience?

We learned that being welcoming and letting the spirit lead worship can create an atmosphere in which things happen that you would never think. We also learned that even if just one person is impacted, we've done what we needed to do.

What did the event/activity/project attendees take away from this experience?

The attendees said they felt a way they had never felt before. They said they could feel God's presence in the room and it was refreshing. They were glad they came out to the event and were very thankful. One person who attended our concert said that they are not very religious at all but now felt that God existed. They had never really believed in God before but said they just knew He was real and could feel it.

What would you say to the parents and family members whose contributions made the 2017-18 Student Organization Grants this activity/event/project was awarded possible?

We would really like to thank you for your generous contribution. Without your help, we would not have been able to put on this event. We were more than elated when we heard about the benefits that our guests received from our concert and you are the reason why it was successful. So again, thank you very much for your contribution.

Provided by Kirsten S., Treasurer 

[denesehanley7-blog]

What Is Actually Soil Made Of? Know The Elements Of Soil.

It's a black, cold, broken early morning. In 2017, we have actually practically arrived at the point where that just does not matter just what fashion of measurable or even qualitative downside risk appears to this market - whether they be actually the hazard of nuclear battle with North Korea, budgetary policy results that have played out in different ways versus initial expectations, or traditionally higher valuations get-now-healthy.info - and also stocks will merely blow past all of them done in pushing towards new everlasting highs. Flasks concern 75% water consequently they need to have a fair bit of your time to dry as well as prepare to craft with. Recalling by means of the years that Coolrunning (and some aged issues from the GLRR Starting Lines") I thought of the listed here of the fastest opportunity manage annually. Though that can certainly harm your emotions, don't allow that. This's merely given that your moms and dad doesn't provide your spouse all the baggage they perform with you; mostly, they've never ever been the control interject your husband or wife's lifestyle. . When gold costs increase, they are going to have numerous large sophisticated economic ventures. Cannabis supply prices react to headlines and also news release and also will certainly continue to do this along with dryness. Shuddering waste to 5 times even more energy in comparison to a body idle, as well as light cold weather that does not create you to shudder starts to burn with those brownish body fat shops, starting your caloric shed fee. In summary, our regular pay attention to the customer, tough energy around our businesses as well as advantageous economic health conditions continuously steer strong profits as well as funding development and also productivity. As a matter of fact, hing on exactly how stringently one describes types, humanity today is actually certainly not also all the same species, due to that some folks are pure Homo sapiens sapiens while others are not also total Humankind. As our company showed final quarter, our experts pinpointed several segment from the broad market personal finance book that were certainly not conducting according to requirements as well as reacted to stop those originations. He received his label off a conflict along with a crocodile that has been exaggerated numerous opportunities that a media reporter off Nyc Area, Sue (Linda Kozlowski), is sent to Australia to perform a story on what ends up being bit over a flesh cut. All 3 from these ships remain to be the topic from reverse inquiry and also should certainly be actually offered into tenders for new-term charters at eye-catching costs as compared to those readily available in the area market today. The provider is actually right now around 25 projects with 12m oz Au on 750000 acres, along with current jobs in the USA (Nevada), as well as Canada (Ontario and Quebec) in addition to Mexico. In other nations, conformity to regional customizeds was actually mandatory, yet in Kamarupa foreigners were exempted from consistency to regional ceremonies and protocols in worshipping the goddess (K.P.). The Y.T. lifts the Yoni-symbol to the height of something like a pantheistic conception in describing all holy places as well as house of prayers in Assam as many Yonis. You said last part that you will have some improved news on exactly how that might affect you in 2018. He would like to invest additional opportunity along with his family members, therefore he took a job as an elderly style designer at a train signaling firm. There has been actually some roll call decline this year that Scott referred to. The $40 million to $50 thousand possessed some individuals price in that. Some were headcount, as well as some were actually total benefit as well as various other kinds of costs, that will be effective in 2018.

If you were to accomplish nothing but depend on bed throughout the day, your physical body would certainly still require energy to protect simple lifestyle functionalities, like cardiovascular system fee, temperature, flow, nerve functioning and breathing. ' We currently may not deliver any type of more relevant information, nonetheless our company would like to reassure you that there will definitely be dedicated help in position at this difficult opportunity. Fans of the IPO market could possess also observed that the initial days booked for many IPOs last week were delayed by a day approximately. While it is actually difficult to verify the reasons for the hold-ups, it might have been one indication that something was amiss in the IPO market. I would warn you that I consider us having the exact same time sales rise of around 6% this year, this one-fourth versus the 9% that our company published just because from the variety of times which's visiting flip around the various other way in the 1st fourth of this year, so our team do not would like to call that out. The amount from light passing through the ocean surface is impacted by cloud cover, waves which demonstrate direct sunlight out (enhances the sea area albedo), and sunshine slant from occurrence which depends on latitude, time, and also opportunity from day. As a result, think about buying a company like Buck General (DG ), a savings seller with an existence in 44 states since Q3 2017, if you would like to transform your collection's collection from supplies.

[suzanneshannon]

Canary in a Coal Mine: How Tech Provides Platforms for Hate

As I write this, the world is sending its thoughts and prayers to our Muslim cousins. The Christchurch act of terrorism has once again reminded the world that white supremacy’s rise is very real, that its perpetrators are no longer on the fringes of society, but centered in our holiest places of worship. People are begging us to not share videos of the mass murder or the hateful manifesto that the white supremacist terrorist wrote. That’s what he wants: for his proverbial message of hate to be spread to the ends of the earth.

We live in a time where you can stream a mass murder and hate crime from the comfort of your home. Children can access these videos, too.

As I work through the pure pain, unsurprised, observing the toll on Muslim communities (as a non-Muslim, who matters least in this event), I think of the imperative role that our industry plays in this story.

At time of writing, YouTube has failed to ban and to remove this video. If you search for the video (which I strongly advise against), it still comes up with a mere content warning; the same content warning that appears for casually risqué content. You can bypass the warning and watch people get murdered. Even when the video gets flagged and taken down, new ones get uploaded.

Human moderators have to relive watching this trauma over and over again for unlivable wages. News outlets are embedding the video into their articles and publishing the hateful manifesto. Why? What does this accomplish?

I was taught in journalism class that media (photos, video, infographics, etc.) should be additive (a progressive enhancement, if you will) and provide something to the story for the reader that words cannot.

Is it necessary to show murder for our dear readers to understand the cruelty and finality of it? Do readers gain something more from watching fellow humans have their lives stolen from them? What psychological damage are we inflicting upon millions of people   and for what?

Who benefits?

The mass shooter(s) who had a message to accompany their mass murder. News outlets are thirsty for perverse clicks to garner more ad revenue. We, by way of our platforms, give agency and credence to these acts of violence, then pilfer profits from them. Tech is a money-making accomplice to these hate crimes.

Christchurch is just one example in an endless array where the tools and products we create are used as a vehicle for harm and for hate.

Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica scandal played a critical role in the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The concept of “race realism,” which is essentially a term that white supremacists use to codify their false racist pseudo-science, was actively tested on Facebook’s platform to see how the term would sit with people who are ignorantly sitting on the fringes of white supremacy. Full-blown white supremacists don’t need this soft language. This is how radicalization works.

The strategies articulated in the above article are not new. Racist propaganda predates social media platforms. What we have to be mindful with is that we’re building smarter tools with power we don’t yet fully understand: you can now have an AI-generated human face. Our technology is accelerating at a frightening rate, a rate faster than our reflective understanding of its impact.

Combine the time-tested methods of spreading white supremacy, the power to manipulate perception through technology, and the magnitude and reach that has become democratized and anonymized.

We’re staring at our own reflection in the Black Mirror.

The right to speak versus the right to survive

Tech has proven time and time again that it voraciously protects first amendment rights above all else. (I will also take this opportunity to remind you that the first amendment of the United States offers protection to the people from the government abolishing free speech, not from private money-making corporations).

Evelyn Beatrice Hall writes in The Friends of Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Fundamentally, Hall’s quote expresses that we must protect, possibly above all other freedoms, the freedom to say whatever we want to say. (Fun fact: The quote is often misattributed to Voltaire, but Hall actually wrote it to explain Voltaire’s ideologies.)

And the logical anchor here is sound: We must grant everyone else the same rights that we would like for ourselves. Former 99u editor Sean Blanda wrote a thoughtful piece on the “Other Side,” where he posits that we lack tolerance for people who don’t think like us, but that we must because we might one day be on the other side. I agree in theory.

But, what happens when a portion of the rights we grant to one group (let’s say, free speech to white supremacists) means the active oppression another group’s right (let’s say, every person of color’s right to live)?

James Baldwin expresses this idea with a clause, “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”

It would seem that we have a moral quandary where two sets of rights cannot coexist. Do we protect the privilege for all users to say what they want, or do we protect all users from hate? Because of this perceived moral quandary, tech has often opted out of this conversation altogether. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook, two of the biggest offenders, continue to allow hate speech to ensue with irregular to no regulation.

When explicitly asked about his platform as a free-speech platform and its consequence to privacy and safety, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said,

“So we believe that we can only serve the public conversation, we can only stand for freedom of expression if people feel safe to express themselves in the first place. We can only do that if they feel that they are not being silenced.”

Dorsey and Twitter are most concerned about protecting expression and about not silencing people. In his mind, if he allows people to say whatever they want on his platform, he has succeeded. When asked about why he’s failed to implement AI to filter abuse like, say, Instagram had implemented, he said that he’s most concerned about being able to explain why the AI flagged something as abusive. Again, Dorsey protects the freedom of speech (and thus, the perpetrators of abuse) before the victims of abuse.

But he’s inconsistent about it. In a study by George Washington University comparing white nationalists and ISIS social media usage, Twitter’s freedom of speech was not granted to ISIS. Twitter suspended 1,100 accounts related to ISIS whereas it suspended only seven accounts related to Nazis, white nationalism, and white supremacy, despite the accounts having far more than seven times the followers, and tweeting 25 times the more than the ISIS accounts. Twitter here made a moral judgment that the fewer, less active, and less influential ISIS accounts were somehow not welcome on their platform, whereas the prolific and burgeoning Nazi and white supremacy accounts were.

So, Twitter has shown that it won’t protect free speech at all costs or for all users. We can only conclude that Twitter is either intentionally protecting white supremacy or simply doesn’t think it’s very dangerous. Regardless of which it is (I think I know), the outcome does not change the fact that white supremacy is running rampant on its platforms and many others.

Let’s brainwash ourselves for a moment and pretend like Twitter does want to support freedom of speech equitably and stays neutral and fair to complete this logical exercise: Going back to the dichotomy of rights example I provided earlier, where either the right to free speech or the right to safety and survival prevail, the rights and the power will fall into the hands of the dominant group or ideologue.

In case you are somehow unaware, the dominating ideologue, whether you’re a flagrant white supremacist or not, is white supremacy. White supremacy was baked into founding principles of the United States, the country where the majority of these platforms were founded and exist. (I am not suggesting that white supremacy doesn’t exist globally, as it does, evidenced most recently by the terrorist attack in Christchurch. I’m centering the conversation intentionally around the United States as it is my lived experience and where these most of these companies operate.)

Facebook attempted to educate its team on white supremacy in order to address how to regulate free speech. A laugh-cry excerpt:

“White nationalism and calling for an exclusively white state is not a violation for our policy unless it explicitly excludes other PCs [protected characteristics].”

White nationalism is a softened synonym for white supremacy so that racists-lite can feel more comfortable with their transition into hate. White nationalism (a.k.a. white supremacy) by definition explicitly seeks to eradicate all people of color. So, Facebook should see white nationalist speech as exclusionary, and therefore a violation of their policies.

Regardless of what tech leaders like Dorsey or Zuckerberg say or what mediocre and uninspired condolences they might offer, inaction is an action.

Companies that use terms and conditions or acceptable use policies to defend their inaction around hate speech are enabling and perpetuating white supremacy. Policies are written by humans to protect that group of human’s ideals. The message they use might be that they are protecting free speech, but hate speech is a form of free speech. So effectively, they are protecting hate speech. Well, as long as it’s for white supremacy and not the Islamic State.

Whether the motivation is fear (losing loyal Nazi customers and their sympathizers) or hate (because their CEO is a white supremacist), it does not change the impact: Hate speech is tolerated, enabled, and amplified by way of their platforms.

“That wasn’t our intent”

Product creators might be thinking, Hey, look, I don’t intentionally create a platform for hate. The way these features were used was never our intent.

Intent does not erase impact.

We cannot absolve ourselves of culpability merely because we failed to conceive such evil use cases when we built it. While we very well might not have created these platforms with the explicit intent to help Nazis or imagined it would be used to spread their hate, the reality is that our platforms are being used in this way.

As product creators, it is our responsibility to protect the safety of our users by stopping those that intend to or already cause them harm. Better yet, we ought to think of this before we build the platforms to prevent this in the first place.

The question to answer isn’t, “Have I made a place where people have the freedom to express themselves?” Instead we have to ask, “Have I made a place where everyone has the safety to exist?” If you have created a place where a dominant group can embroil and embolden hate against another group, you have failed to create a safe place. The foundations of hateful speech (beyond the psychological trauma of it) lead to events like Christchurch.

We must protect safety over speech.

The Domino Effect

This week, Slack banned 28 hate groups. What is most notable, to me, is that the groups did not break any parts of their Acceptable Use Policy. Slack issued a statement:

The use of Slack by hate groups runs counter to everything we believe in at Slack and is not welcome on our platform… Using Slack to encourage or incite hatred and violence against groups or individuals because of who they are is antithetical to our values and the very purpose of Slack.

That’s it.

It is not illegal for tech companies like Slack to ban groups from using their proprietary software because it is a private company that can regulate users if they do not align with their vision as a company. Think of it as the “no shoes, no socks, no service” model, but for tech.

Slack simply decided that supporting the workplace collaboration of Nazis around efficient ways to evangelize white supremacy was probably not in line with their company directives around inclusion. I imagine Slack also considered how their employees of color most ill-affected by white supremacy would feel working for a company that supported it, actively or not.

What makes the Slack example so notable is that they acted swiftly and on their own accord. Slack chose the safety of all their users over the speech of some.

When caught with their enablement of white supremacy, some companies will only budge under pressure from activist groups, users, and employees.

PayPal finally banned hate groups after Charlottesville and after Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) explicitly called them out for enabling hate. SPLC had identified this fact for three years prior. PayPal had ignored them for all three years.

Unfortunately, taking these “stances” against something as clearly and viscerally wrong as white supremacy is rare for companies to do. The tech industry tolerates this inaction through unspoken agreements.

If Facebook doesn’t do anything about racist political propaganda, YouTube doesn’t do anything about PewDiePie, and Twitter doesn’t do anything about disproportionate abuse against Black women, it says to the smaller players in the industry that they don’t have to either.

The tech industry reacts to its peers. When there is disruption, as was the case with Airbnb, who screened and rejected any guests who they believed to be partaking in the Unite the Right Charlottesville rally, companies follow suit. GoDaddy cancelled Daily Stormer’s domain registration and Google did the same when they attempted migration.

If one company, like Slack or Airbnb, decides to do something about the role it’s going to play, it creates a perverse kind of FOMO for the rest: Fear of missing out of doing the right thing and standing on the right side of history.

Don’t have FOMO, do something

The type of activism at those companies all started with one individual. If you want to be part of the solution, I’ve gathered some places to start. The list is not exhaustive, and, as with all things, I recommend researching beyond this abridged summary.

Understand how white supremacy impacts you as an individual. Now, if you are a person of color, queer, disabled, or trans, it’s likely that you know this very intimately. If you are not any of those things, then you, as a majority person, need to understand how white supremacy protects you and works in your favor. It’s not easy work, it is uncomfortable and unfamiliar, but you have the most powerful tools to fix tech. The resources are aplenty, but my favorite abridged list:

Seeing White podcast

Ijeoma Oluo’s So you want to talk about race

Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race (Very key read for UK folks)

Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility

See where your company stands: Read and your company’s policies like accepted use and privacy policies and find your CEO’s stance on safety and free speech While these policies are baseline (and in the Slack example, sort of irrelevant), it’s important to known your company’s track record. As an employee, your actions and decisions either uphold the ideologies behind the company or they don’t. Ask yourself if the company’s ideologies are worth upholding and whether they align with your own. Education will help you to flag if something contradicts those policies, or if the policies themselves allow for unethical activity.

Examine everything you do critically on an ongoing basis. You may feel your role is small or that your company is immune—maybe you are responsible for the maintenance of one small algorithm. But consider how that algorithm or similar ones can be exploited. Some key questions I ask myself:

Who benefits from this? Who is harmed?

How could this be used for harm?

Who does this exclude? Who is missing?

What does this protect? For whom? Does it do so equitably?

See something? Say something. If you believe that your company is creating something that is or can be used for harm, it is your responsibility to say something. Now, I’m not naïve to the fact that there is inherent risk in this. You might fear ostracization or termination. You need to protect yourself first. But you also need to do something.

Find someone who you trust who might be at less risk. Maybe if you’re a nonbinary person of color, find a white cis man who is willing to speak up. Maybe if you’re a white man who is new to the company, find a white man who has more seniority or tenure. But also, consider how you have so much more relative privilege compared to most other people and that you might be the safest option.

Unionize. Find peers who might feel the same way and write a collective statement.

Get someone influential outside of the company (if knowledge is public) to say something.

Listen to concerns, no matter how small, particularly if they’re coming from the most endangered groups. If your user or peer feels unsafe, you need to understand why. People often feel like small things can be overlooked, as their initial impact might be less, but it is in the smallest cracks that hate can grow. Allowing one insensitive comment about race is still allowing hate speech. If someone, particularly someone in a marginalized group, brings up a concern, you need to do your due diligence to listen to it and to understand its impact.

I cannot emphasize this last point enough.

What I say today is not new. Versions of this article have been written before. Women of color like me have voiced similar concerns not only in writing, but in design reviews, in closed door meetings to key stakeholders, in Slack DMs. We’ve blown our whistles.

But here is the power of white supremacy.

White supremacy is so ingrained in every single aspect of how this nation was built, how our corporations function, and who is in control. If you are not convinced of this, you are not paying attention or intentionally ignoring the truth.

Queer, Muslim, disabled, trans women and nonbinary folks of color — the marginalized groups most impacted by this — are the ones who are voicing these concerns most voraciously. Speaking up requires us to enter the spotlight and outside of safety—we take a risk and are are not heard.

The silencing of our voices is one of many effective tools of white supremacy. Our silencing lives within every microaggression, each time we’re talked over, or not invited to partake in key decisions.

In tech, I feel I am a canary in a coal mine. I have sung my song to warn the miners of the toxicity. My sensitivity to it is heightened, because of my existence.

But the miners look at me and tell me that my lived experience is false. It does not align with their narrative as humans. They don’t understand why I sing.

If the people at the highest echelons of the tech industry—the white, male CEOs in power—fail to listen to its most marginalized people—the queer, disabled, trans, people of color—the fate of the canaries will too become the fate of the miners.

Canary in a Coal Mine: How Tech Provides Platforms for Hate published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/