Proximity: Who Are We When We’re Alone?

“In a strange room, you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.” I am not in a strange room, but my familiar room is in a strange world, and this passage from a novel by William Faulkner haunts me.

Having lived abroad for all of my adult life, I have been thinking about the effects of distance for years. My family, several friends and I live on different continents, and most of the time we meet online, and in person only in the summer. So whenever we see each other in the flesh, we take in quietly the subtle differences between who we are and the versions of each other we’ve lived with in our heads, a little abstract for lack of contact: a tighter or more relaxed smile, a few more white hairs, children who look a little more grown-up, a pale complexion that might suggest illness, a deeper quality to someone’s silence, an averted gaze when a particular topic is mentioned… All point to the thick accumulation of days, of every day we have not been together.

Now I have to pretend that my friends here, my colleagues and students also live abroad, and that my neighbors are glass-shielded in an intangible dimension. It feels odd to live in exile from almost everybody, as if we had each been sucked through a portal to a remote island, or a distant planet.

When you empty yourself for sleep, at the end of a day populated so sparsely by actual persons, but overflowing with abstracted silhouettes—of people who have lost their jobs or who couldn’t bid a final farewell to their loved ones, of friends who wave from a screen and give you news you can’t do much about, of family far away who will remain so far in this long present—what are you?

There is hardly a reason, and often no time, to think about our everyday life when we are in it. The rituals we engage in without thinking, the distracted habits of thought; they are unfamiliar through excess of familiarity, like the shape of our shoes molded onto our feet, or the intimate space of the night table where we reach without looking.

There is something of that taken-for-granted involvement with the world in the sphere of social relations too: not only the family and friends we usually choose to hang out with, or the colleagues we work with, but all those people we might run into on a daily basis in the improvised sociability of ordinary life—people we see only from the corner of the eye, or even not at all, but whose presence gives us a sense of life unfolding.

Such presence is felt in the electrifying energy of a crowd that dissolves you—in a stadium where hundreds or thousands of gazes are tethered to a basketball, or in a concert hall, tuned with hundreds of people to the rhythm of a performance. I both know and ignore what I’m missing these days. I suspect my unease has something to do with not being able to interact with my students in person. The energy they give me in the classroom is hard to retrieve from pixelated smiles, the end of each session slightly disconcerting, given everyone’s abrupt disappearance at the push of a button.

I miss the carefree exuberance of the playgrounds where I take my daughter to play alongside other children, and the cozy cinema in my neighborhood where I used to go every now and then just to watch a movie in the quiet company of other people. It’s as if all these venues were hosting a version of John Cage’s 4’33”, rendered meaningless by the lack of closure.

A few years ago I finished working on a book called The Art of Distances, which became my baseline for trying to understand the meaning of this episode we’re all writing together, through our collective experiment in social distancing. What value can one ascribe to distance? What insights do we gain by staying away from others, and at such close quarters with ourselves?

by Corina Stan, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Evidence Found of Epic Prehistoric Pacific Voyages

New evidence has been found for epic prehistoric voyages between the Americas and eastern Polynesia.

DNA analysis suggests there was mixing between Native Americans and Polynesians around AD 1200.

The extent of potential contacts between the regions has been a hotly contested area for decades.

In 1947, Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl made a journey by raft from South America to Polynesia to demonstrate the voyage was possible.

Until now, proponents of Native American and Polynesian interaction reasoned that some common cultural elements, such as a similar word used for a common crop, hinted that the two populations had mingled before Europeans settled in South America.

Opponents pointed to studies with differing conclusions and the fact that the two groups were separated by thousands of kilometres of open ocean.

Alexander Ioannidis from Stanford University in California and his international colleagues analysed genetic data from more than 800 living indigenous inhabitants of coastal South America and French Polynesia.

They were looking for snippets of DNA that are characteristic of each population and for segments that are "identical by descent" - meaning they are inherited from the same ancestor many generations ago.

"We found identical-by-descent segments of Native American ancestry across several Polynesian islands," said Mr Ioannidis.

"It was conclusive evidence that there was a single shared contact event."

In other words, Polynesians and Native Americans met at one point in history, and during that time children with both Native American and Polynesian ancestry were born.

Statistical analyses confirmed the event occurred around AD 1200, at about the time Pacific islands were originally being settled by Polynesians.

Asked who he thought made contact first, Mr Ioannidis ventured that it may have been Polynesian navigators reaching South America.

"Because the timing is exactly at the time that the Polynesians were embarking on their longest voyages of discovery and soon after they discovered Easter Island, which is extremely remote, and also later settling New Zealand and Hawaii, they had no idea there was going to be a continent eventually and they were going to run out of islands, so I think they probably did find a continent," he said.

by BBC |  Read more:

Image: Thor Heyerdahl uncredited

Opioid Overdoses Are Skyrocketing

In West Virginia, they are bracing for the second wave.

The epidemic that hit the Appalachian state harder than any other in the US finally looked to be in retreat. Now it’s advancing again. Not coronavirus but opioid overdoses, with one scourge driving a resurgence of the other.

Covid-19 has claimed 93 lives in West Virginia over the past three months. That is only a fraction of those killed by drug overdoses, which caused nearly 1,000 deaths in the state in 2018 alone, mostly from opioids but also methamphetamine (also known as meth).

That year was better than the one before as the Appalachian state appeared to turn the tide on an epidemic that has ravaged the region for two decades, destroying lives, tearing apart families and dragging down local economies.

Now coronavirus looks to be undoing the advances made against a drug epidemic that has claimed close to 600,000 lives in the US over the past two decades. Worse, it is also laying the ground for a long-term resurgence of addiction by exacerbating many of the conditions, including unemployment, low incomes and isolation, that contributed to the rise of the opioid epidemic and “deaths of despair”.

“The number of opioid overdoses is skyrocketing and I don’t think it will be easily turned back,” said Dr Mike Brumage, former director of the West Virginia office of drug control policy.

“Once the tsunami of Covid-19 finally recedes, we’re going to be left with the social conditions that enabled the opioid crisis to emerge in the first place, and those are not going to go away.” (...)

The American Medical Association said it was “greatly concerned” at reported increases in opioid overdoses in more than 30 states although it will be months before hard data is available.

Public health officials from Kentucky to Florida, Texas and Colorado have recorded surges in opioid deaths as the economic and social anxieties created by the Covid-19 pandemic prove fertile ground for addiction. In addition, Brumage said significant numbers of people have fallen out of treatment programmes as support networks have been yanked away by social distancing orders.

“I’m a firm adherent to the idea that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection. Clearly, what we have lost with the pandemic is a loss of connection,” he said.

by Chris McGreal, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image:Uncredited/AP

[ed. And a climate crisis that's not going away, either. See also: Life after opioids: 'We have not served our patients well' (Guardian); and ‘Cries for help’: Drug overdoses are soaring during the coronavirus pandemic (Washington Post).]

This fish ladder on the Sorne in the Pichoux Gorge, Delémont, Switzerland is a prefabricated fish pass with 24 tanks and a height of 12.5 feet/3.80 m, & was built in 2008 to allow fish to migrate across elevations between the lakes & rivers. Fish swim up the gradual level between pools.

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Is Everyone Depressed?

Over the past month, Jennifer Leiferman, a researcher at the Colorado School of Public Health, has documented a tidal wave of depressive symptoms in the U.S. “The rates we’re seeing are just so much higher than normal,” she says. Leiferman’s team recently found that people in Colorado have, during the pandemic, been nine times more likely to report poor mental health than usual. About 23 percent of Coloradans have symptoms of clinical depression.

As a rough average, during pre-pandemic life, 5 to 7 percent of people met the criteria for a diagnosis of depression. Now, depending how you define the condition, orders of magnitude more people do. Robert Klitzman, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, extrapolates from a recent Lancet study in China to estimate that about 50 percent of the U.S. population is experiencing depressive symptoms. “We are witnessing the mental-health implications of massive disease and death,” he says. This has the effect of altering the social norm by which depression and other conditions are defined. Essentially, this throws off the whole definitional rubric.

Feelings of numbness, powerlessness, and hopelessness are now so common as to verge on being considered normal. But what we are seeing is far less likely an actual increase in a disease of the brain than a series of circumstances that is drawing out a similar neurochemical mix. This poses a diagnostic conundrum. Millions of people exhibiting signs of depression now have to discern ennui from temporary grieving from a medical condition. Those at home Googling symptoms need to know when to seek medical care, and when it’s safe to simply try baking more bread. Clinicians, meanwhile, need to decide how best to treat people with new or worsening symptoms: to diagnose millions of people with depression, or to more aggressively treat the social circumstances at the core of so much suffering.

Clearly articulating the meaning of medical depression is an existential challenge for the mental-health profession, and for a country that does not ensure its people health care. If we fail, the second wave of death from this pandemic will not be directly caused by the virus. It will take the people who suffered mentally from its reverberations.

Like COVID-19, depression takes erratic courses. Some predictable patterns exist, but no two cases are exactly alike. Depression can percolate for long periods then quickly become severe. Some people will barely notice it, and others will be tested in the extreme.

Andrew Solomon, the author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, groups people based on four basic ways they’re responding to the current crisis. Two are straightforward. In the first are people who are drawing on huge stockpiles of resilience and truly doing okay. When you ask how they feel and they say “eh, fine,” they actually mean it. In the second, at the opposite end of things, are people who already have a clinical diagnosis of major depressive disorder or a persistent version known as dysthymia. Right now, their symptoms are at high risk of escalating. “They develop what some clinicians call ‘double depression,’ in which the underlying disorder coexists with a new layer of fear and sorrow,” Solomon says. Such people may need higher levels of medical care than usual, and may even need to be hospitalized.

The remaining two groups constitute more of a gray area. One group consists of the millions of people now experiencing depressive symptoms in a real way, but who nonetheless will return to their baseline eventually, as long as their symptoms are addressed. People in this group are in urgent need of basic interventions that help create routine and structure. Those might involve regularizing sleep and food, minimizing alcohol and other substances, exercising, avoiding obsessions with the news, and cutting back on other aimless habits that might be easier to moderate in normal times.

The fourth group encompasses people who are starting to develop clinical depression. More than simply a wellness regimen or a Zoom with friends, they need some type of formal medical intervention. They may have seemed fine and had adequate resilience in normal times, to deal with normal difficulties, but they’ve always had a propensity to develop overt depression. Solomon describes this group as “hanging on the precipice of what could be considered pathologic.” It can be especially precarious because people in this state—what some researchers refer to as “subclinical depression”—have not dealt with depression before, and may not have the capacity or resources to proactively seek treatment. (...)

Today, depression—the clinical condition, otherwise known as major depressive disorder—is defined by the American Psychiatric Association in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a mood disorder.* To receive the diagnosis, a person must have five or more symptoms such as the following, nearly every day during a two-week period: fatigue or loss of energy, feelings of worthlessness or inappropriate guilt, reduced physical movement, indecisiveness or impaired concentration, a decreased or increased appetite, and a greatly diminished interest or pleasure in regular activities.

Experts are trained to identify exactly how much “impaired concentration” or “loss of energy” is enough to qualify for a diagnosis, and the criteria are intentionally flexible enough to factor in patients’ individual circumstances. But as the pandemic has made clear, the DSM-5 and medical model as a whole don’t provide the richness of language to account for all the nuanced ways people might look or feel depressed, even when they don’t need medical intervention. Well-meaning attempts to standardize the diagnostic process have created a false binary wherein you are a person with depression, or you are not.

Outside of medicine, depression has been most cogently defined through metaphor. As Sylvia Plath wrote: “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.” David Foster Wallace described depression as feeling that “every single atom in every single cell in your body is sick.” Even some clinical models reach for alternative ways of articulating despair beyond the conventional medical model. James Hollis, a psychodynamic analyst and the author of Living Between Worlds: Finding Resilience in Changing Times, says that depression is sometimes the result of “intrapsychic tension,” a conflict between two areas of our psyche, or identity. The tension is created, Hollis observes, “when we’re forced to try to make acquaintances with ourselves in new ways.”

by James Hamblin, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Image: Namrata Gosavi
[ed. See also: This Is Not a Normal Mental-Health Disaster (Atlantic).]

Tokyo, Japan, 1913 - 1915 (Colorized)

[ed. See also: Japan's devastating rains move north as millions told to evacuate (Guardian).]

Carl Reiner's Life Should Remind Us: If You Like Laughing, Thank FDR and The New Deal

Has Stephen Colbert ever made you laugh? Or Jordan Peele? Or Steve Carell? Or Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Keegan-Michael Key, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Amy Poehler, Cecily Strong, Chris Redd, Aidy Bryant, Jason Sudeikis, Amy Sedaris, Kristen Wiig, Adam McKay, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Bill Murray, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Elaine May, or Mike Nichols? Unless you’re way off the normal human spectrum, the answer is yes.

But here’s something few comedy fans — including some comedians themselves — realize: An incredible amount of the development of American comedy, including the training and platforms that helped start the careers of every comedian above, can be traced directly back to the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal provided government support for the arts at a level never to be repeated.

This forgotten history surfaced briefly when Carl Reiner died Monday night at age 98. By this point, Reiner is probably best known to normal people as the father of film director Rob Reiner (“The Princess Bride,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “This Is Spinal Tap”). But in the comedy world, Reiner is revered as one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. He was a writer and performer on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” in the 1950s; he created “The Dick Van Dyke Show” in the 1960s; he recorded the “2000 Year Old Man” records with Mel Brooks; he directed four of Steve Martin’s early movies, starting with “The Jerk”; and much more.

In Reiner’s memoir “My Anecdotal Life,” he wrote that “I owe my show business career to two people: Charlie Reiner” — his brother — “and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”

When Carl Reiner was 17 in 1939, he was working as a machinist’s helper, bringing sewing machines to hat factories. Then Reiner’s brother saw a small ad in the New York Daily News about free acting lessons being offered in lower Manhattan by the Works Progress Administration. Reiner had never contemplated acting before in his life, but his brother insisted, so he went.

The WPA had been established several years prior to carry out public works projects during the Great Depression, with workers put directly on the government payroll, keeping the struggling economy afloat while also expanding the infrastructure of the U.S. Its initial outlays were huge — the gross domestic product equivalent of about $1.3 trillion today. The WPA paved roads, built bridges, and constructed Camp David and the Tennessee Valley Authority. But it went beyond these physical public works to enhance America’s human infrastructure via Federal Project Number One, which employed writers, musicians, and actors. The Federal Theatre Project, part of Federal Project Number One, funded live performances and acting classes — including the ones Carl Reiner attended.

“All the good things that have happened to me in my life I can trace to that two-inch newspaper item my brother handed to me,” Reiner explained. “Had Charlie not brought it to my attention, I might very well be writing anecdotes about my life as a machinist or, more likely, not be writing anything about anything.”

But Reiner’s life was just one small aspect of the WPA’s impact. A few years earlier in Chicago, a sociologist named Neva Boyd had begun working with immigrant children by teaching them dance, movement, and improvisational games. She soon brought this work to Hull House, a progressive “settlement house” — a central place where anyone regardless of age, class, or culture could go to learn, share, engage with art, express themselves, and grow.

Boyd viewed creativity and playfulness as essential for a democratic society. “Social living cannot be maintained on the basis of destructive ideologies — domination, hate, prejudice, greed and dishonesty,” she wrote in a famous essay. “Play involves social values, as does no other behavior. The spirit of play develops social adaptability, ethics, mental and emotional control, and imagination.”

Boyd worked for the WPA during the Great Depression and recommended one of her disciples named Viola Spolin for a job as drama supervisor for the WPA’s local recreational projects. Spolin expanded on Boyd’s work, reaching poor children and adults (including recent immigrants who weren’t fluent in English) with playful stage exercises. One innovation of Spolin’s games was performers generating improvised scenes based on suggestions from the audience.

For Boyd and Spolin, the spirit of play was for all people, not just a tiny “creative” minority. “Everyone can act,” Spolin said. “Everyone can improvise. Anyone who wishes to can play in the theater and learn to become stage-worthy. We learn through experience and experiencing. … ‘Talent’ or ‘lack of talent’ has little to do with it.” Thanks to the funding from the WPA, Spolin was able to create a formal body of “Theater Games” that lay the groundwork for the improv comedy canon to this day.

by Bob Harris, Jon Schwarz, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Bob Riha Jr/Getty Images via

Mike Ryczek
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Bountygate and Afghanistan

Bountygate: Scapegoating Systemic Military Failure in Afghanistan (Consortium News)

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Our Minds Aren’t Equipped for This Kind of Reopening

Our Minds Aren’t Equipped for This Kind of Reopening (The Atlantic)

Image: Shutterstock/NIH/The Atlantic

in time of daffodils (who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why, remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so (forgetting seem)
in time of roses (who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if, remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek (forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me, remember me

~ e. e. cummings

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Eddie Vedder

[ed. Original by Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam). See also: Harold and Maude]

Mr Rogers & Officer Clemmons, 1969
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Savage Love: Kinked Gays

My new boyfriend just opened up to me about his kinks. Nothing crazy: just bondage and humiliation. While he usually meets and dates guys off kinky dating sites we met “the old fashioned way” a few months before COVID-19 slammed us here in Chicago: at a potluck dinner party thrown by a mutual straight lady friend. Your name came up during the conversation about his interests: he told me he was taking your advice and “laying his kink cards on the table” before I had made too much of an emotional commitment. What’s interesting to me, Dan, is how often this happens. My boyfriend is easily the fourth guy I’ve dated in the last few years who laid down the exact same kink cards: wants to be tied up, wants to be called names, wants to be hurt. I’m learning to tie knots and getting better at calling him names when we have sex and I actually really enjoying spanking him. But I was talking with a friend—our straight lady mutual (with the boyfriend’s okay!)—and she told me she’s never had a straight guy open up to her about wanting to be tied up abused. Are gay guys just kinkier?

Talking Over Perversions

I have a theory…

When we’re boys… before we’re ready to come out… we’re suddenly attracted to other boy. And that’s something we usually feel pretty panicked about. It would be nice that first same-sex crush was something a boy could experience without feelings of dread or terror, TOP, but that’s not how it works for most of us. We’re keenly aware that should the object of our desire realize it—if the boy we’re attracted realizes what we’re feeling, if we give ourselves away with a stray look—the odds of that boy reacting badly or even violently are high. Even if you think the boy might not react violently, even if you suspect the boy you’re crushing on might be gay himself, the stakes are too high to risk making any sort of move. So we stew with feelings of lust and fear.

Sexual desire can make anyone feel fearful and powerless—we’re literally powerless to control these feelings (while we can and must control how we act on these feelings)—but desire and fear are stirred together for us gay boys to much greater degree than they are for straight boys. We fear being found out, we fear being called names, we fear being outed, we fear being physically hurt. And the person we fear most is the person we have a crush on. A significant number of gay guys wind up imprinting on that heady and very confusing mix of desire and fear. The erotic imaginations of guys like your boyfriend seize on those fears and eroticize them. And then, in adulthood, your boyfriend want to re-experience those feelings, that heady mix of desire and fear, with a loving partner he trusts. The gay boy who feared being hurt by the person he was attracted to becomes the gay man who wants to be hurt—in a limited, controlled, consensual and safe way—by the man he’s with.

by Dan Savage, The Stranger |  Read more:
Image: Joe Newton

Inside the Invasive, Secretive “Bossware” Tracking Workers

COVID-19 has pushed millions of people to work from home, and a flock of companies offering software for tracking workers has swooped in to pitch their products to employers across the country.

The services often sound relatively innocuous. Some vendors bill their tools as “automatic time tracking” or “workplace analytics” software. Others market to companies concerned about data breaches or intellectual property theft. We’ll call these tools, collectively, “bossware.” While aimed at helping employers, bossware puts workers’ privacy and security at risk by logging every click and keystroke, covertly gathering information for lawsuits, and using other spying features that go far beyond what is necessary and proportionate to manage a workforce.

This is not OK. When a home becomes an office, it remains a home. Workers should not be subject to nonconsensual surveillance or feel pressured to be scrutinized in their own homes to keep their jobs.

What can they do?

Bossware typically lives on a computer or smartphone and has privileges to access data about everything that happens on that device. Most bossware collects, more or less, everything that the user does. We looked at marketing materials, demos, and customer reviews to get a sense of how these tools work. There are too many individual types of monitoring to list here, but we’ll try to break down the ways these products can surveil into general categories.

The broadest and most common type of surveillance is “activity monitoring.” This typically includes a log of which applications and websites workers use. It may include who they email or message—including subject lines and other metadata—and any posts they make on social media. Most bossware also records levels of input from the keyboard and mouse—for example, many tools give a minute-by-minute breakdown of how much a user types and clicks, using that as a proxy for productivity. Productivity monitoring software will attempt to assemble all of this data into simple charts or graphs that give managers a high-level view of what workers are doing.

Every product we looked at has the ability to take frequent screenshots of each worker’s device, and some provide direct, live video feeds of their screens. This raw image data is often arrayed in a timeline, so bosses can go back through a worker’s day and see what they were doing at any given point. Several products also act as a keylogger, recording every keystroke a worker makes, including unsent emails and private passwords. A couple even let administrators jump in and take over remote control of a user’s desktop. These products usually don’t distinguish between work-related activity and personal account credentials, bank data, or medical information.

Some bossware goes even further, reaching into the physical world around a worker’s device. Companies that offer software for mobile devices nearly always include location tracking using GPS data. At least two services—StaffCop Enterprise and CleverControl—let employers secretly activate webcams and microphones on worker devices. (...)

Visible monitoring (...)
Invisible monitoring (...)

How common is bossware?

The worker surveillance business is not new, and it was already quite large before the outbreak of a global pandemic. While it’s difficult to assess how common bossware is, it’s undoubtedly become much more common as workers are forced to work from home due to COVID-19. Awareness Technologies, which owns InterGuard, claimed to have grown its customer base by over 300% in just the first few weeks after the outbreak. Many of the vendors we looked at exploit COVID-19 in their marketing pitches to companies.

Some of the biggest companies in the world use bossware. Hubstaff customers include Instacart, Groupon, and Ring. Time Doctor claims 83,000 users; its customers include Allstate, Ericsson, Verizon, and Re/Max. ActivTrak is used by more than 6,500 organizations, including Arizona State University, Emory University, and the cities of Denver and Malibu. Companies like StaffCop and Teramind do not disclose information about their customers, but claim to serve clients in industries like health care, banking, fashion, manufacturing, and call centers. Customer reviews of monitoring software give more examples of how these tools are used.

We don’t know how many of these organizations choose to use invisible monitoring, since the employers themselves don’t tend to advertise it. In addition, there isn’t a reliable way for workers themselves to know, since so much invisible software is explicitly designed to evade detection. Some workers have contracts that authorize certain kinds of monitoring or prevent others. But for many workers, it may be impossible to tell whether they’re being watched. Workers who are concerned about the possibility of monitoring may be safest to assume that any employer-provided device is tracking them.

by Bennett Cyphers and Karen Gullo, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Facebook Boycott and Corporate Co-Optation

In this moment of wildcat strikes, one of the largest collective-bargaining actions in the United States is being led by large corporations. Advertisers have initiated a boycott against Facebook, at the urging of civil rights groups. Ford, Hershey’s, Clorox, Starbucks, Verizon, Coca-Cola, HP, Levi Strauss, Honda, Pepsi, Microsoft, Vans, Pfizer, Adidas, and hundreds more have suspended their advertising on Facebook and Instagram. The #StopHateforProfit campaign is demanding that Facebook do a better job controlling hate speech on its platforms. Facebook has promised once again to clean up its act, but that hasn’t stopped the pressure.

It’s interesting that large corporations see value in using their power as purchasers to force changes, something their own customers might want to note for the future. And seeing Mark Zuckerberg in the crosshairs of a capital strike has a delightful quality to it. But let’s be clear: This is a cosmetic PR move from a corporate sector looking for simple, performative solutions to deep-seated persecution. Multinationals are trying to buy off protesters with empty symbols of solidarity and diversity training seminars. People are in the streets over far more than that.

It’s very unclear whether this advertising boycott represents anything close to a sacrifice for advertisers. First off, most of the brands are pausing Facebook ads only until the end of July, a one-month “sacrifice” that’s less than meets the eye. No brand that I’ve seen has suggested a permanent end to social media ads. Furthermore, nearly all of these brands have seen weakening revenues and need to find cuts to keep earnings robust. A temporary “furlough” of Facebook ads offers a good way to hang on to more of their funds.

As to whether a one-month pause hurts Facebook, as long as there are politicians in election season, there will be a tremendous revenue stream. Besides, Facebook makes most of its money off small, local businesses, not large advertisers. (...)

Not only is the strategy behind the boycott dubious, so is the solution it proposes. The idea seems to be that Facebook should actively intervene to make its platform less hostile, removing hate, bigotry, racism, misinformation, and violence. As a private platform, Facebook can in theory engage in whatever moderation it wishes. The problem is really the company’s dominance: It looks like censorship to those thrown off because Facebook holds such power over communications. This affects the manageability of the platform too: Facebook is simply too big to moderate, and its algorithmic efforts have failed.

The answer that can actually deal with these platforms is, of course, to break up Facebook, but also to ban targeted advertising. Changing Facebook’s surveillance-based business model would end the incentive toward mass data collection, return the specialness of unique audiences cultivated by publishers, and limit the click-bait dynamic that exists to hook users and scrape their personal information. The answer is certainly not to “pause” advertising until Facebook comes up with a minimally tolerable fig leaf that advertisers can wave around and declare victory.

This attempt to come up with a plausible narrative of progress, rather than rooting out structural failings, comprises a familiar tactic from those holding power. It’s why the Facebook boycott is a microcosm of the bid to resolve a month of protests over racism with distractions.

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t see the death of George Floyd as an opportunity to at long last give Black actors the opportunity to voice characters on long-running cartoons. Politics and culture have become intertwined, no doubt, but this virtue signaling mimics the stances of advertisers in the Facebook boycott. Brands can strut around, express support, and take actions that fall rather short of being meaningful. It gives the impression that centuries of racism can be solved by HR directives and “White Fragility” book clubs. It’s what happens when a corporate giant throws a few bucks at charity or names a stadium “Climate Pledge Arena.” It attempts to wave away dissent without personal cost.

by David Dayen, The American Prospect |  Read more:

Image: Nam Y. Huh/AP

Rio de Janiero
via: (lost)

Seattle's CHOP Went Out With a Bang and a Whimper

The fiery Seattle protests were Mark Anthony’s baptism into protest activism. He had been on the streets for barely a week when on June 8, the 32-year-old former brand ambassador and tour guide for Boeing headed to Capitol Hill. “I drove the entire way with some very choice words for the police,” he said. “I was disappointed when I got here, and they were gone.”

Anthony, who became a leader in the CHOP, said, “One of our white allies grabbed the first tent” — founding the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone that night.

The early vibe was like a festival. “It was a cross between Burning Man and Coachella,” one visitor said. Just as historic protests after Floyd’s death served as a release valve for deep rage against racist policing and relief from months of pandemic lockdown, the CHAZ was a flowering of hope that drew thousands in a season of death. (Organizers later changed the name to CHOP, saying that they were not seeking autonomy and to keep the focus on Black Lives Matter.)

Artists painted an enormous Black Lives Matter street mural that popped with life. DJs hosted late-night dance parties. Documentaries such as “Paris is Burning” and “13th” were screened outdoors. Native American drumming circles cohabited with meditation sessions. Plots of black earth sprouted leafy greens and placards honoring Black historical figures. A “No Cop Co-op” handed out toothpaste, toilet paper, and other supplies while the Riot Kitchen and Feed the Movement dished out free “vegetable kimchi tofu ‘pastrami’ reuben wraps and gochujang beef fried rice.” Families picnicked, social influencers livestreamed, and general assemblies and teach-ins were held regularly.

The miniature society that sprang up was a legacy of a raft of occupation protests over the past years, Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Sandy, and Occupy ICE, in particular. These movements espoused principles of self-organization and mutual aid, where activists learned how to rapidly set up housing, health care, kitchens, education, child care, free stores, and tech support.

“CHOP had a very positive energy and people were taking care of each other. It was like Occupy on steroids,” said Michael, a member of the now-disbanded security team known as Sentinels, who asked that his last name not be used.

Yet the Occupy movements foundered on a broken society and the individuals it produced. One veteran organizer involved in New York’s Occupy movements, who asked not to be named, said, “Occupy is outside the authority of existing institutions. It’s a magnet for people who are needy and even pushy, abusive, and exploitive.”

Similar problems dogged the CHOP. Slate, another Sentinel who did not give a last name, said one self-appointed security person “pulled handguns on and maced people.”

“Tourists” drew considerable ire. “We had people flying in from all over because they thought it was a lawless place, a festival, anything goes,” said Anthony, the CHOP activist. “We made the DJs stop at midnight. We are separating the people here to protest from the people who came to party.”

A party was one draw; others came simply in search of a place. Homeless Seattleites, whose population has grown in recent years, poured into the CHOP. “Of course they are going to come to CHOP,” said Michael. “They got food, a free store, a safe place to sleep and hang out, and there is hope.” On top of that, he said, “Free thinkers do drugs, so there’s going to be people doing drugs. There’s going to be a market, so people will fight over it.” He speculated the drug trade attracted local gangs.

By the end of June, with families and tourists having disappeared because of the violence, the park looked like the end stage of many Occupy camps, with scores of people living in tents. “It’s not a protest,” said Hunt, the CHOP activist. “It’s a damn homeless encampment.” (...)

Despite differences with Occupy, the CHOP faltered for similar reasons. Movements that start online may capture the imagination with slogans like “We Are the 99%” or “Follow Black Leadership,” but they are too flimsy to bridge deep historical divisions. The all-are-welcome, open organizing form, meanwhile, is too shallow to allow for politics and too prone to manipulation. One observer described the general assemblies as more meandering speak-outs than disciplined strategy sessions.

“CHOP is like if Twitter were an actual place. It’s full of different ideologies, perspectives, and pains, and everyone thinks they are right and no one wants to be a follower,” said Slate. “I would hear the term ‘Black leadership’ 15 times a day, and no one knew who they were. There wasn’t a group with shared ideas and leadership.”

Hunt, for his part, is angry. “Greed drowned out the protests,” he said. “Everyone is fighting to be a leader because they want to be in the meeting with the mayor and say, ‘Defund the police and fund my organization.’ We didn’t come out here because nonprofits aren’t being funded. We came out here because cops are killing Black people.”

by Arun Gupta, The Intercept |  Read more:
Image: David Ryder/Getty Images

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