Thursday, February 22, 2024
The Ancestral Tradition of Tequila in Jalisco, Mexico
Invisible to those around me, I could feel tiny tributaries of sweat beginning to creep down my backside. Standing outside under a blanket of blazing heat and looking ahead at a field filled with blue agave plants stretching towards an endless horizon, there was a certain peace here. Earlier that day, I’d traveled from my home in Atlanta to the state of Jalisco, Mexico, arriving in Guadalajara proper before journeying further and further away from those city limits, chiefly, to learn about tequila as a guest at the private, invite-only Hacienda Patrón located in Atotonilco El Alto.
Through the years, I’ve blithely joked that tequila makes me cry. Imbibing on the blue agave spirit does tend to inspire me to be more outwardly emotional than usual, and overall, the spirit isn’t my drink of choice. But being in the land of tequila and learning firsthand about the process, one could say I was inspired, and motivated to move past my perpetual tequila indifference.
A cacophony of sounds disrupted the serene silence as a jimador, someone practiced in the art of breaking down an agave plant for processing elsewhere, went to work. Wielding a hoe, he whacked the greenery over and over again with fervor until the bitter outward leaves began to peel away from the winter-white, pineapple-looking heart of the agave. His movements were so precise, his swings appeared to pare the plant like a hot knife sinking into butter.
Our guides had taken us on a tour of Patrón’s facilities and distilling process. It was only after I missed several cues that I realized it was my turn to get involved in the unearthing process. At the direction of the jimador, I shoved a metal tool that looked like a thermometer into the heart of one of the piñas he’d just finished cutting down. My guide quickly translated into English that the tool was used to measure the amount of sugar within the piña that had just been harvested.
Throughout the rest of my time in Jalisco, thought about what it took to make every tequila I drank. Beyond the labor itself, what stuck with me was how central ancestral tradition is to the making of tequila. But the one thing that stuck with me beyond the sightseeing and tasting of several tequilas within was how central tradition and ancestral practice is to the fruit of labor that is a bottle of tequila.
The practice of being a jimador is often generational; a father teaches the art to a son, nephew, or another family member, and when they are of age, they take the baton, making this trade their own. In areas that are otherwise unreachable — in valleys or on mountaintops — jimadores set out on a tequila quest in teams of up to seven people, filling trucks with piñas, that will be cooked, crushed, and fermented at distilleries before landing in a bottle for consumption and delight.
In a world where buzzy celebrity-backed tequila lines are on-trend, especially when viewed as another way of creating a lucrative income stream, there is importance in looking to the artisanal and indigenous practices that are the foundation of what it means to appreciate tequila.
What we drink and the food we eat are not merely touchstones of our tastes and preferences. They can also be a ritual of remembrance connecting us to those who came before us, those who studied a craft to become truly good at something. We eat, we taste, we drink in celebration of them and of ourselves. We honor them and ourselves in continuing to reach for our ancestral and cultural foods.
by Nneka M. Okona, Eater | Read more:
Image: Michelle K. Min
[ed. The links are key here, like this one (The Ultimate Guide to Tequila).]
Tequila is actually a denomination of origin comprising all of Jalisco, and some municipalities in the states of Nayarit, Tamaulipas, Michoacán, and Guanajuato. To qualify as a tequila, Mexico’s most famous spirit can only be made with agave tequilana Weber azul, or blue agave, from this region. The finished tequila must have a minimum of 51 percent blue agave, although the majority of tequila is 100 percent blue agave, allowing for up to 1 percent additives. Tequilas must also be a minimum of 35 percent to 55 percent ABV, and bottles sold in the United States require a minimum ABV of 40 percent (water is used to lower the proof to the desired number).
These strict regulations do still offer considerable variations to the tequila consumer. There are some 1,377 brands registered by the Consejo Regulador del Tequila (CRT), the regulatory board that upholds the standards of tequila manufacturing tracked by the Norma Oficial Mexico (NOM) for the Appellation of Origin. But the system is not without its flaws. In recent years, the CRT has allowed brands to add up to 1 percent additives to 100 percent blue agave tequila without disclosure. It has also allowed celebrities to easily release tequilas, including George Clooney, Xzibit, and Kendall Jenner, who has faced backlash for cultural appropriation over the launch of her 818 Tequila. It’s a practice that seems at odds with a legal body tasked with preserving tequila and Mexican tradition.
[ed. See also: How Do You Tell If Your Tequila Has Additives? (Forbes).]
Through the years, I’ve blithely joked that tequila makes me cry. Imbibing on the blue agave spirit does tend to inspire me to be more outwardly emotional than usual, and overall, the spirit isn’t my drink of choice. But being in the land of tequila and learning firsthand about the process, one could say I was inspired, and motivated to move past my perpetual tequila indifference.
Our guides had taken us on a tour of Patrón’s facilities and distilling process. It was only after I missed several cues that I realized it was my turn to get involved in the unearthing process. At the direction of the jimador, I shoved a metal tool that looked like a thermometer into the heart of one of the piñas he’d just finished cutting down. My guide quickly translated into English that the tool was used to measure the amount of sugar within the piña that had just been harvested.
Throughout the rest of my time in Jalisco, thought about what it took to make every tequila I drank. Beyond the labor itself, what stuck with me was how central ancestral tradition is to the making of tequila. But the one thing that stuck with me beyond the sightseeing and tasting of several tequilas within was how central tradition and ancestral practice is to the fruit of labor that is a bottle of tequila.
The practice of being a jimador is often generational; a father teaches the art to a son, nephew, or another family member, and when they are of age, they take the baton, making this trade their own. In areas that are otherwise unreachable — in valleys or on mountaintops — jimadores set out on a tequila quest in teams of up to seven people, filling trucks with piñas, that will be cooked, crushed, and fermented at distilleries before landing in a bottle for consumption and delight.
In a world where buzzy celebrity-backed tequila lines are on-trend, especially when viewed as another way of creating a lucrative income stream, there is importance in looking to the artisanal and indigenous practices that are the foundation of what it means to appreciate tequila.
What we drink and the food we eat are not merely touchstones of our tastes and preferences. They can also be a ritual of remembrance connecting us to those who came before us, those who studied a craft to become truly good at something. We eat, we taste, we drink in celebration of them and of ourselves. We honor them and ourselves in continuing to reach for our ancestral and cultural foods.
by Nneka M. Okona, Eater | Read more:
Image: Michelle K. Min
[ed. The links are key here, like this one (The Ultimate Guide to Tequila).]
Tequila is actually a denomination of origin comprising all of Jalisco, and some municipalities in the states of Nayarit, Tamaulipas, Michoacán, and Guanajuato. To qualify as a tequila, Mexico’s most famous spirit can only be made with agave tequilana Weber azul, or blue agave, from this region. The finished tequila must have a minimum of 51 percent blue agave, although the majority of tequila is 100 percent blue agave, allowing for up to 1 percent additives. Tequilas must also be a minimum of 35 percent to 55 percent ABV, and bottles sold in the United States require a minimum ABV of 40 percent (water is used to lower the proof to the desired number).
These strict regulations do still offer considerable variations to the tequila consumer. There are some 1,377 brands registered by the Consejo Regulador del Tequila (CRT), the regulatory board that upholds the standards of tequila manufacturing tracked by the Norma Oficial Mexico (NOM) for the Appellation of Origin. But the system is not without its flaws. In recent years, the CRT has allowed brands to add up to 1 percent additives to 100 percent blue agave tequila without disclosure. It has also allowed celebrities to easily release tequilas, including George Clooney, Xzibit, and Kendall Jenner, who has faced backlash for cultural appropriation over the launch of her 818 Tequila. It’s a practice that seems at odds with a legal body tasked with preserving tequila and Mexican tradition.
Tokenism
First of all, what is tokenism/tokenization?
We work from the below definition:
To recruit an individual or small number of people with marginalized identities in order to give the appearance of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within the workplace while ignoring and/or continuing the root causes of inequity.
For context, the words token and tokenism date back into the Civil Rights Movement and have been referenced in academia many times since then. A few examples include:
The Case Against Tokenism by Dr. Martin Luther King (1962):
“But in the tradition of old guards, who would rather die than surrender, a new and hastily constructed roadblock has appeared in the form of planned and institutionalized tokenism...Thus we have advanced in some places from all-out, unrestrained resistance to a sophisticated form of delaying tactics, embodied in tokenism.”
Malcolm X’s interview with Louis Lomax (1963):
“What gains? All you have gotten is tokenism — one or two Negroes in a job or at a lunch counter so the rest of you will be quiet.” (In response to Lomax's comment "But we have made some gains…")
Tokenism and Women in the Workplace by Lynn Zimmer (1988):
“The token's marginal status [is] as a participant who is permitted entrance, but not full participation…someone who meets all of the formal requirements…but does not possess the ‘auxiliary characteristics’ (race, sex and ethnicity)... Consequently, they are never permitted by ‘insiders’ to become full members and may even be ejected if they stray too far from the special ‘niche’ outlined for them.”
The Making of a Token: A Case Study of Stereotype Threat, Stigma, Racism, and Tokenism in Academe by Yolanda Flores Niemann (1999):
“I was told, ‘Now that we have you, we don’t need to worry about hiring another minority.’ This sentiment is an example of covert racism in academia, which also includes the 'one-minority-per-pot syndrome." (...)
Tokenism is a form of racial capitalism, or extracting value from the racialized identities of others.
Tokenism is often just as prevalent in organizations practicing DEI, where it is used to deflect accusations about lack of diversity or inclusion without actually threatening the status quo.
How Tokenism Works Within Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
As an attempt to pave the way for BIPOC, we’ve seen waves of DEI training, seminars, departments spring up in the last few years. However, these DEI networks often rely on a quota system when it comes to “diversifying” their workforce, or by hiring a few tokens to “represent” diversity in their organization, which only serves to reduce individuals to only their marginalized identities. (...)
"On June 4, the Puerto Rican food writer Illyanna Maisonet called out what she viewed as hypocrisy in Bon Appétit's solidarity effort, Insider's Anneta Konstantinides reported. Maisonet recalled that she pitched a story to the publication "about Afro-Boricuas that make regional rice fritters" — a pitch she said an editor rejected, reasoning it sounded like "a story that could have been told 5 years ago."
Bon Appétit went on to publish "another Euro-ingredient story," she wrote.
—illyanna Maisonet (@eatgordaeat) June 4, 2020
In a since-deleted Instagram post featuring a screenshot of her tweet, Maisonet elaborated on her concerns with Bon Appétit and its social-media activism.
"So, before we go praising them for patting themselves on the back for showing 'solidarity' during a time when it would be bad for business to NOT show solidarity… maybe we can get some full print issues of the regional foods of Puerto Rico," she wrote. "Oh, and Africa. Brazil. Basically, the entire f---ing Diaspora. BY people from the Diaspora." (...)
"I'm definitely certain listing your three POC staff token writers (two of which are white presenting) is helpful in ensuring I am aware of the 'diversity' BA HAS shown," Maisonet responded. "But I get that their avenues are less congested when it comes to getting ideas accepted, as they are staffers. That still doesn't deflect from the fact that you don't have any Puerto Rican stories or recipes."
The screenshots of the messages elicited a strong response on Twitter.
"He himself just listed BA's tokenization problem yet doesn't see it as a problem?" one commenter wrote."
We work from the below definition:
For context, the words token and tokenism date back into the Civil Rights Movement and have been referenced in academia many times since then. A few examples include:
The Case Against Tokenism by Dr. Martin Luther King (1962):
“But in the tradition of old guards, who would rather die than surrender, a new and hastily constructed roadblock has appeared in the form of planned and institutionalized tokenism...Thus we have advanced in some places from all-out, unrestrained resistance to a sophisticated form of delaying tactics, embodied in tokenism.”
Malcolm X’s interview with Louis Lomax (1963):
“What gains? All you have gotten is tokenism — one or two Negroes in a job or at a lunch counter so the rest of you will be quiet.” (In response to Lomax's comment "But we have made some gains…")
Tokenism and Women in the Workplace by Lynn Zimmer (1988):
“The token's marginal status [is] as a participant who is permitted entrance, but not full participation…someone who meets all of the formal requirements…but does not possess the ‘auxiliary characteristics’ (race, sex and ethnicity)... Consequently, they are never permitted by ‘insiders’ to become full members and may even be ejected if they stray too far from the special ‘niche’ outlined for them.”
The Making of a Token: A Case Study of Stereotype Threat, Stigma, Racism, and Tokenism in Academe by Yolanda Flores Niemann (1999):
“I was told, ‘Now that we have you, we don’t need to worry about hiring another minority.’ This sentiment is an example of covert racism in academia, which also includes the 'one-minority-per-pot syndrome." (...)
Tokenism is a form of racial capitalism, or extracting value from the racialized identities of others.
Tokenism is often just as prevalent in organizations practicing DEI, where it is used to deflect accusations about lack of diversity or inclusion without actually threatening the status quo.
“Tokenism is, simply, covert racism. Racism requires those in power to maintain their privilege by exercising social, economic and/or political muscle against people of color.Where Tokenism Begins:
Tokenism achieves the same while giving those in power the appearance of being non-racist and even champions of diversity because they recruit and use PoC as racialized props.”
- Helen Kim Ho, 8 Ways People of Color are Tokenized in Nonprofits
The Foundational Hierarchies in American Society
In order to understand tokenism, we must first accept the foundational hierarchies of our current society in the U.S.:
Systems of Oppression (including capitalism and white supremacy, see Glossary) work in concert to center the experiences, knowledge, and perspectives of white people, wealthy people, straight people, men, and able-bodied people, while oppressing people with marginalized identities.
Mainstream progressive movements (e.g., feminism) often erase people who exist at the intersections of marginalized identities (e.g., a Black queer non-binary person), while centering white identities (e.g. ,white women, white LGBTQ+ people), and people with proximities to whiteness (e.g., wealthy BIPOC).
In order to understand tokenism, we must first accept the foundational hierarchies of our current society in the U.S.:
Systems of Oppression (including capitalism and white supremacy, see Glossary) work in concert to center the experiences, knowledge, and perspectives of white people, wealthy people, straight people, men, and able-bodied people, while oppressing people with marginalized identities.
Mainstream progressive movements (e.g., feminism) often erase people who exist at the intersections of marginalized identities (e.g., a Black queer non-binary person), while centering white identities (e.g. ,white women, white LGBTQ+ people), and people with proximities to whiteness (e.g., wealthy BIPOC).
Consequently, tokenism manifests when the success of the one token minority person who’s “made it” is seen as proof of society’s progress and equality (e.g., when President Obama supposedly ushered in a "post-racial society"). However, even as “the one Indigenous person” or “the one queer person” or “the one working class person” has gained social and economic capital, the same oppressive systems continue to operate. (...)
How Tokenism Works Within Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
As an attempt to pave the way for BIPOC, we’ve seen waves of DEI training, seminars, departments spring up in the last few years. However, these DEI networks often rely on a quota system when it comes to “diversifying” their workforce, or by hiring a few tokens to “represent” diversity in their organization, which only serves to reduce individuals to only their marginalized identities. (...)
This act of tokenism, especially within a PR-friendly DEI campaign, is particularly insidious because it presumes the token will be able to “fix” pre-existing internal issues without challenging the toxic structures already in place. This is usually because the organization’s leadership fundamentally does not want to, see the need to, or is equipped to to alter their approach or processes pertaining to how marginalized identities are addressed within their workplace; although diversity is a goal, inclusion is not.
In the worst scenarios, it becomes frustrating to the organization that the token hire is not supporting this underlying initiative — to stay static but give the outward appearance of being “diverse” or “inclusive” — and often gives way to that token hire becoming seen as the problem, because they are easier to attack, diminish, and ultimately remove than addressing the true structural changes required.
In the worst scenarios, it becomes frustrating to the organization that the token hire is not supporting this underlying initiative — to stay static but give the outward appearance of being “diverse” or “inclusive” — and often gives way to that token hire becoming seen as the problem, because they are easier to attack, diminish, and ultimately remove than addressing the true structural changes required.
by StudioATAO | Read more:
Image: uncredited via
"On June 4, the Puerto Rican food writer Illyanna Maisonet called out what she viewed as hypocrisy in Bon Appétit's solidarity effort, Insider's Anneta Konstantinides reported. Maisonet recalled that she pitched a story to the publication "about Afro-Boricuas that make regional rice fritters" — a pitch she said an editor rejected, reasoning it sounded like "a story that could have been told 5 years ago."
Bon Appétit went on to publish "another Euro-ingredient story," she wrote.
—illyanna Maisonet (@eatgordaeat) June 4, 2020
In a since-deleted Instagram post featuring a screenshot of her tweet, Maisonet elaborated on her concerns with Bon Appétit and its social-media activism.
"So, before we go praising them for patting themselves on the back for showing 'solidarity' during a time when it would be bad for business to NOT show solidarity… maybe we can get some full print issues of the regional foods of Puerto Rico," she wrote. "Oh, and Africa. Brazil. Basically, the entire f---ing Diaspora. BY people from the Diaspora." (...)
"I'm definitely certain listing your three POC staff token writers (two of which are white presenting) is helpful in ensuring I am aware of the 'diversity' BA HAS shown," Maisonet responded. "But I get that their avenues are less congested when it comes to getting ideas accepted, as they are staffers. That still doesn't deflect from the fact that you don't have any Puerto Rican stories or recipes."
The screenshots of the messages elicited a strong response on Twitter.
"He himself just listed BA's tokenization problem yet doesn't see it as a problem?" one commenter wrote."
All 243 of Taylor Swift’s Songs, Ranked
Images: Christie Goodwin; SIPA/Shutterstock
[ed. I've heard she's kind of popular. Some fans even know all the words.]
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
It's Apple's Vision Pro, The Rest of Us Just Live Here
Today I’m writing about the two major events this year for Apple. The first is the release of the remarkable Apple Vision Pro, and the second is a likely antitrust suit against the computing giant. How augmented and virtual reality, aka ‘spatial computing,’ reshuffles our society will in many ways be up to antitrust enforcers.
If we don’t handle Apple properly, not only will we deploy what should be a wonderful technology in soul-crushing ways, but we may even bring closer a war with China. On the other hand, nothing is inevitable, and this new platform could actually reverse a lot of the bad dynamics we see in our culture. So yes, the stakes are high.
To understand the full extent of Apple’s power, I’m going to discuss my brief experience with the Vision Pro, sketch out Apple’s history, and then walk through the new device’s supply chain, to where the sophisticated M2 chip that powers this headset is made. (...)
The Apple Vision Pro headset looks like a genuine technological inflection point. It’s hard to overstate the hype about the device. ‘Absolutely Bonkers.’ ‘I normally don’t call tech things sort of magical or surreal like this but...’ ‘The most mind-blowing piece of tech I’ve ever tried.’ ‘Wearing the Vision Pro for hours on end will call into question what it means to compute, but also, what it means to live in the real world.’ And on and on…
I want one. I probably won’t buy one for awhile, for reasons I’ll get into, but it’s clear that Meta, and then Apple, have legitimized a whole new layer of computing with fantastic world-changing possibilities. And if there’s a killer application, then augmented and virtual reality, aka ‘spatial computing,’ will likely become ubiquitous. The most hopeful commentary came from YouTuber Cleo Abram, who pointed out that the technology, if developed properly, could allow us to reconnect with one another and end the epidemic of loneliness that is so pervasive in our fragmented atomistic and monopoly-dominated society.
If targeted advertising and polarized consolidated media and social networks cause us to become alienated from one another, then rich spatial computing could do the opposite. The emphasis, of course, is on the word ‘could.’
There’s another and much darker possibility.
If we don’t handle Apple properly, not only will we deploy what should be a wonderful technology in soul-crushing ways, but we may even bring closer a war with China. On the other hand, nothing is inevitable, and this new platform could actually reverse a lot of the bad dynamics we see in our culture. So yes, the stakes are high.
To understand the full extent of Apple’s power, I’m going to discuss my brief experience with the Vision Pro, sketch out Apple’s history, and then walk through the new device’s supply chain, to where the sophisticated M2 chip that powers this headset is made. (...)
The Apple Vision Pro headset looks like a genuine technological inflection point. It’s hard to overstate the hype about the device. ‘Absolutely Bonkers.’ ‘I normally don’t call tech things sort of magical or surreal like this but...’ ‘The most mind-blowing piece of tech I’ve ever tried.’ ‘Wearing the Vision Pro for hours on end will call into question what it means to compute, but also, what it means to live in the real world.’ And on and on…
I want one. I probably won’t buy one for awhile, for reasons I’ll get into, but it’s clear that Meta, and then Apple, have legitimized a whole new layer of computing with fantastic world-changing possibilities. And if there’s a killer application, then augmented and virtual reality, aka ‘spatial computing,’ will likely become ubiquitous. The most hopeful commentary came from YouTuber Cleo Abram, who pointed out that the technology, if developed properly, could allow us to reconnect with one another and end the epidemic of loneliness that is so pervasive in our fragmented atomistic and monopoly-dominated society.
If targeted advertising and polarized consolidated media and social networks cause us to become alienated from one another, then rich spatial computing could do the opposite. The emphasis, of course, is on the word ‘could.’
There’s another and much darker possibility.
by Matt Stoller, BIG | Read more:
Video: YouTube
[ed. It really is a very cool technology. I imagine the off-putting ski goggle-type weirdness of the headset will be resolved fairly quickly, much like early smartphone designs (brick to pocket device). Widespread adoption will likely follow, bringing down pricing. Whether this leads to Zuckerberg's metaverse vision or something else is still an open question.]
An America of Secrets
An America of Secrets (New Atlantis)
"There have been two dominant narratives about the rise of misinformation and conspiracy theories in American public life.
What we can, without prejudice, call the establishment narrative — put forward by dominant foundations, government agencies, NGOs, the mainstream press, the RAND corporation — holds that the misinformation age was launched by the Internet boom, the loss of media gatekeepers, new alternative sources of sensational information that cater to niche audiences, and social media. According to this story, the Internet in general and social media in particular reward telling audiences what they want to hear and undermining faith in existing institutions. A range of nefarious actors, from unscrupulous partisan media to foreign intelligence agencies, all benefit from algorithms that are designed to boost engagement, which winds up catering misinformation to specific audience demands. Traditional journalism, bound by ethics, has not been able to keep up.
The alternative narrative — put forward by Fox News, the populist fringes of the Left and the Right, Substackers of all sorts — holds almost the inverse. For decades, mainstream political discourse in America has been controlled by the chummy relationship between media, political, and economic elites. These actors, caught up in trading information, access, and influence with each other, fed the American people a thoroughly sanitized and limited picture of the world. But now, their dominance is being broken by the Internet, and all of the dirty laundry is being aired. In this view, “misinformation” and “conspiracy theory” are simply the establishment’s slanders for inconvenient truths it can no longer suppress. Whether it’s the Biden administration establishing a Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Homeland Security or the New York Times’s Kevin Roose calling for a federal “reality czar,” the establishment is desperate to put the Humpty Dumpty of controlled consensus reality back together again.
As opposed as they seem, in fact both of these narratives are right, so far as they go. But neither of them captures the underlying truth. There is indeed a dark matter ripping the country apart, shredding our shared sense of reality and faith in our democratic government. But this dark matter is not misinformation, it isn’t conspiracy theories, and it isn’t the establishment, exactly. It is secrecy. (...)
As a drip-drip-drip of shocking revelations on a decades-long time lag inflict a Chinese water torture on our political psyche, we have witnessed a slow but steady rise in paranoia and conspiracy thinking in American public life. All of this is the predictable outcome of a national security state of immense scale operating amid a political system like ours, which leads to a clash between two essential principles — bureaucratic self-protection and democratic openness."
by Jon Askonas, The New Atlantis | Read more:
Image: Hannah Yoest
[ed. From the series: Reality: A Post-MortemWhat Happened to Consensus Reality?
- Reality Is Just a Game Now
- How Stewart Made Tucker
- What Was the Fact?
- An America of Secrets
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Why Biden Matters
Biden matters because he is taking on the real problems that are wrecking America, the deep structural problems, created over decades, that benefit powerful people who will do anything to prevent change (the way fossil fuel companies do anything to block climate solutions that hurt profits). He is the first president since LBJ to take on problems that big.
“How can that be?” you ask. “Joe Biden hasn’t transformed the Middle East into peaceful democracies like George W. Bush did. Nor has he ended racial and partisan animosity in America like Barack Obama did, or drained the swamp like Donald Trump did. What has Biden done?” He has taken on a challenge as big as his three predecessors’ ambitions: breaking corporate monopoly power and restoring healthy competition.
“Competition policy” is the innocuous name for this program. It’s big because it seeks to cure the root malady ailing America. Obviously, I was being sarcastic about the successes of Biden’s predecessors: they got nowhere on their signature ambitions, because they did not even try. Bush’s program for the Iraq transition was an arrogant experiment in free-market fantasy, uninterested in democracy. Obama announced in an apology letter to supporters after winning the nomination that he was not going to change our corrupt and toxic politics. (I wrote a Daily Kos piece about it in July 2008.) And Trump, as the very embodiment of the swamp, would no more drain the swamp than a bullfrog would. But Biden is serious.
Look at the ambitiousness of Biden’s people. “She was put in this role to shake things up” is a profile of Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission. She is one of a group of Biden appointees to key offices, including Jonathan Kanter (DOJ Antitrust), Gary Gensler (SEC), and Rohit Chopra (CFPB). Their task is to promote competition (the source of all capitalism’s benefits), mainly by breaking monopolies. The people Biden chose for this task are not timid, half-ass compromisers (unlike every other political appointee of the last fifty-five years who got put anywhere near the real problems). As the Khan profile puts it, they are people “who think excessive corporate power lies at the root of most social ills,” and they are absolutely correct.
The effects of excessive corporate power spill everywhere, and Biden is aligning the whole government with his July 2021 Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy: “The Order includes 72 initiatives by more than a dozen federal agencies.” Party leaders (and big donors) are resisting this radical new direction (or return to basics) for the Democratic Party. But from net neutrality to stopping meatpackers’ domination of farmers, from the right to repair to the uses of personal data, Biden is challenging monopoly power. If you want to know why American health care is bizarrely expensive yet also incompetent, why baby formula can stay out of stock for three desperate months due to a single plant having troubles, why we can’t meet our own semiconductor needs, why we can’t build electric vehicle charging stations at anything like a reasonable pace, why college costs so much, why the Pentagon’s contractors can’t build new weapons systems that are completed before they’re obsolete, why labor unions in America got crushed and wages for most of us have stagnated for fifty years, why rents are exorbitant, why a computer glitch in one airline can practically shut down air travel for a day, if you wonder about these and a thousand other small (and large) constant hits to the quality of our daily lives, the answer to your question is monopoly power. Even the headline-grabbing disasters—wars, environmental catastrophes, refugee migrations—are always partly, and often mostly, driven by excessive corporate power.
Too Big to Fail
Saying Biden has taken on this fundamental problem doesn’t mean he is solving it. But he is, slowly. Progress is difficult because the forces arrayed in support of monopoly power are entrenched in every institution of our society, and they have controlled government policy (and government appointments) for as long as anyone can remember. Reagan blessed the Chicago School’s “big is good, big is efficient” mantra, pretty much ending antitrust enforcement for forty years. Corporate concentration exploded. Now, every senior official, every manager, every judge, in every large business and institution in our country has spent their entire career in a culture that took unchecked corporate power as a simple fact of life, the iron law of our economy. And all of this was tacit, complex, and hidden from the American public. Until the Great Recession. The 2008 meltdown brought the concept of “too big to fail” into the public’s consciousness, as big banks stole six trillion dollars of middle-class home equity and not a single executive (or even flunky) was prosecuted. But now we know.
“Too big to fail” started the slow burn among citizens that finally allowed the anti-monopoly movement (crying in the wilderness for decades) to get some traction. The movement now has real power because Biden supports it. The FTC has begun blocking mergers and the DOJ is prosecuting anticompetitive behavior. The formerly unchallenged lords of the universe were caught flat-footed, because they always before had a veto on those dweeby, goody-two-shoes anti-monopolists getting into office. And they are furious. (...)
Taking on monopolies has produced a string of accomplishments. The hearing aid monopoly was broken and prices plummeted. Insulin prices are capped at $35 a month. Pay-day lender interest rates are capped at somewhere around 40 percent, rather than the hundreds of percent interest these predators were charging (specifically, their loophole around state caps was closed). Non-compete clauses that block ordinary employees from changing jobs, or negotiating on fair terms with their bosses, are being outlawed. Mandatory arbitration that deprives employees of the right to take grievances to court are starting to head that way, too. Mergers and acquisitions have tanked. Private equity sharks are laying off staff. Those infuriating “junk fees” tacked onto bank accounts, tickets, hotels, and everything else are being exposed and curtailed.
Monopoly is so destructive that just beginning to challenge it produces a wealth of small benefits. But they are small, and they will be temporary, unless the system that enables monopolies is changed down deep.
“How can that be?” you ask. “Joe Biden hasn’t transformed the Middle East into peaceful democracies like George W. Bush did. Nor has he ended racial and partisan animosity in America like Barack Obama did, or drained the swamp like Donald Trump did. What has Biden done?” He has taken on a challenge as big as his three predecessors’ ambitions: breaking corporate monopoly power and restoring healthy competition.
Look at the ambitiousness of Biden’s people. “She was put in this role to shake things up” is a profile of Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission. She is one of a group of Biden appointees to key offices, including Jonathan Kanter (DOJ Antitrust), Gary Gensler (SEC), and Rohit Chopra (CFPB). Their task is to promote competition (the source of all capitalism’s benefits), mainly by breaking monopolies. The people Biden chose for this task are not timid, half-ass compromisers (unlike every other political appointee of the last fifty-five years who got put anywhere near the real problems). As the Khan profile puts it, they are people “who think excessive corporate power lies at the root of most social ills,” and they are absolutely correct.
The effects of excessive corporate power spill everywhere, and Biden is aligning the whole government with his July 2021 Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy: “The Order includes 72 initiatives by more than a dozen federal agencies.” Party leaders (and big donors) are resisting this radical new direction (or return to basics) for the Democratic Party. But from net neutrality to stopping meatpackers’ domination of farmers, from the right to repair to the uses of personal data, Biden is challenging monopoly power. If you want to know why American health care is bizarrely expensive yet also incompetent, why baby formula can stay out of stock for three desperate months due to a single plant having troubles, why we can’t meet our own semiconductor needs, why we can’t build electric vehicle charging stations at anything like a reasonable pace, why college costs so much, why the Pentagon’s contractors can’t build new weapons systems that are completed before they’re obsolete, why labor unions in America got crushed and wages for most of us have stagnated for fifty years, why rents are exorbitant, why a computer glitch in one airline can practically shut down air travel for a day, if you wonder about these and a thousand other small (and large) constant hits to the quality of our daily lives, the answer to your question is monopoly power. Even the headline-grabbing disasters—wars, environmental catastrophes, refugee migrations—are always partly, and often mostly, driven by excessive corporate power.
Too Big to Fail
Saying Biden has taken on this fundamental problem doesn’t mean he is solving it. But he is, slowly. Progress is difficult because the forces arrayed in support of monopoly power are entrenched in every institution of our society, and they have controlled government policy (and government appointments) for as long as anyone can remember. Reagan blessed the Chicago School’s “big is good, big is efficient” mantra, pretty much ending antitrust enforcement for forty years. Corporate concentration exploded. Now, every senior official, every manager, every judge, in every large business and institution in our country has spent their entire career in a culture that took unchecked corporate power as a simple fact of life, the iron law of our economy. And all of this was tacit, complex, and hidden from the American public. Until the Great Recession. The 2008 meltdown brought the concept of “too big to fail” into the public’s consciousness, as big banks stole six trillion dollars of middle-class home equity and not a single executive (or even flunky) was prosecuted. But now we know.
“Too big to fail” started the slow burn among citizens that finally allowed the anti-monopoly movement (crying in the wilderness for decades) to get some traction. The movement now has real power because Biden supports it. The FTC has begun blocking mergers and the DOJ is prosecuting anticompetitive behavior. The formerly unchallenged lords of the universe were caught flat-footed, because they always before had a veto on those dweeby, goody-two-shoes anti-monopolists getting into office. And they are furious. (...)
Taking on monopolies has produced a string of accomplishments. The hearing aid monopoly was broken and prices plummeted. Insulin prices are capped at $35 a month. Pay-day lender interest rates are capped at somewhere around 40 percent, rather than the hundreds of percent interest these predators were charging (specifically, their loophole around state caps was closed). Non-compete clauses that block ordinary employees from changing jobs, or negotiating on fair terms with their bosses, are being outlawed. Mandatory arbitration that deprives employees of the right to take grievances to court are starting to head that way, too. Mergers and acquisitions have tanked. Private equity sharks are laying off staff. Those infuriating “junk fees” tacked onto bank accounts, tickets, hotels, and everything else are being exposed and curtailed.
Monopoly is so destructive that just beginning to challenge it produces a wealth of small benefits. But they are small, and they will be temporary, unless the system that enables monopolies is changed down deep.
by Jerry Cayford, 3QD | Read more:
Image: Biden: Mueller / MSC, CC BY 3.0 DE; Brandeis: Harris & Ewing, photographer, Public domain; both via Wikimedia Commons[ed. Not sure how much Biden is actually directing policy (or any president, for that matter) - more like his administration, which seems composed of many smart, forward-thinking, pragmatic, well-seasoned staff. That's where success (and progress) lays. Contrast to Trump, who micro-managed every decision and made sure everything flowed through him, whether he knew anything about an issue or not (or the nuances thereof). If you're tired and want to see an executive who's actually smarter than their staff (and most everybody else), see here. The only reasonable choice in my opinion.]
Fred & Luna
Monday, February 19, 2024
President's Day Historian's Survey
President Biden is in a tight race to keep former President Donald Trump from reclaiming the White House, recent polls show. But that's not how 154 historians and presidential experts see it: They rate Biden in the top third of U.S. presidents, while Trump ranks dead last.
The 2024 edition of the Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey has Biden in 14th place, just ahead of Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan. Trump comes in 45th, behind fellow impeachee Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan, the perennial cellar-dweller in such ratings due to his pre-Civil War leadership.
"While partisanship and ideology don't tend to make a major difference overall, there are a few distinctions worth noting," said political scientists Brandon Rottinghaus of the University of Houston and Justin S. Vaughn of Coastal Carolina University, who first published their greatness survey in 2015.
The 2024 edition of the Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey has Biden in 14th place, just ahead of Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan. Trump comes in 45th, behind fellow impeachee Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan, the perennial cellar-dweller in such ratings due to his pre-Civil War leadership.
"While partisanship and ideology don't tend to make a major difference overall, there are a few distinctions worth noting," said political scientists Brandon Rottinghaus of the University of Houston and Justin S. Vaughn of Coastal Carolina University, who first published their greatness survey in 2015.
Experts responding to the survey who self-identified as conservatives rated Biden No. 30, while liberals put him 13th and moderates ranked him 20th. All three of those same groups ranked Trump, whose presidency was marked by his flouting of historical norms, in the bottom five.
On the survey's 0-100 scale of "overall greatness," a rating of 50 means a president was average, while zero means a president is considered a failure. Only the top three presidents — Abraham Lincoln at No. 1, followed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and then George Washington — scored above 90. The drop-off was sharp from there, with no one else above an 80 rating. Roughly half the presidents were rated below 50.
Trump's overall rating was 10.92, easily the worst showing, while Biden's 62.66 had him tied with John Adams. Some of Biden's appeal could be due to the person he followed in the Oval Office: Trump was seen as "by far the most polarizing of the ranked presidents, selected by 170 respondents," according to a summary of the survey.
The survey emerges as these two contenders for the 2024 presidential race are running against distinctly different headwinds. While historians might prefer Biden, polls show a lack of confidence in his handling of key policy areas, and he is routinely criticized over his age. And Trump is romping his way to another Republican nomination to lead the U.S. despite facing 91 felony criminal counts and lingering disapproval over his one-term presidency.
In a sign of partisan divide, the academics wrote, "Republicans and Conservatives rank George Washington as the greatest president," while Democrats, moderates and independents slotted the nation's founding president in second or third place.
"There are also several presidents where partisan polarization is evident — Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Obama, and Biden — but interestingly not for Bill Clinton," the survey's authors said.
In fact, Clinton fared a bit better among right-leaning respondents, who put him at No. 10, than among liberals and moderates, both of whom had Clinton as the 12th-best president.
Measuring presidential greatness is, of course, both subjective and selective. Historians routinely reanalyze leaders' successes and failures — and in today's polarized political climate, those qualities can look very different, depending on whom you ask. It can also be difficult to extract distinct criteria for presidential greatness, other than helming the United States during critical moments in history — such as helping found the country or keeping the nation together.
On the survey's 0-100 scale of "overall greatness," a rating of 50 means a president was average, while zero means a president is considered a failure. Only the top three presidents — Abraham Lincoln at No. 1, followed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and then George Washington — scored above 90. The drop-off was sharp from there, with no one else above an 80 rating. Roughly half the presidents were rated below 50.
Trump's overall rating was 10.92, easily the worst showing, while Biden's 62.66 had him tied with John Adams. Some of Biden's appeal could be due to the person he followed in the Oval Office: Trump was seen as "by far the most polarizing of the ranked presidents, selected by 170 respondents," according to a summary of the survey.
The survey emerges as these two contenders for the 2024 presidential race are running against distinctly different headwinds. While historians might prefer Biden, polls show a lack of confidence in his handling of key policy areas, and he is routinely criticized over his age. And Trump is romping his way to another Republican nomination to lead the U.S. despite facing 91 felony criminal counts and lingering disapproval over his one-term presidency.
In a sign of partisan divide, the academics wrote, "Republicans and Conservatives rank George Washington as the greatest president," while Democrats, moderates and independents slotted the nation's founding president in second or third place.
"There are also several presidents where partisan polarization is evident — Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Obama, and Biden — but interestingly not for Bill Clinton," the survey's authors said.
In fact, Clinton fared a bit better among right-leaning respondents, who put him at No. 10, than among liberals and moderates, both of whom had Clinton as the 12th-best president.
Measuring presidential greatness is, of course, both subjective and selective. Historians routinely reanalyze leaders' successes and failures — and in today's polarized political climate, those qualities can look very different, depending on whom you ask. It can also be difficult to extract distinct criteria for presidential greatness, other than helming the United States during critical moments in history — such as helping found the country or keeping the nation together.
by Bill Chappell, NPR | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. I'm assuming this survey was based not only on the policies of those presidents, but how their policies worked out. Personally, I wouldn't rate Clinton so highly.]
Selfie Rats
Image: Augustin Lignier
[ed. Next up - Tinder for Rats. Or isn't that already...]
The Future of Silk
The invention of the hypodermic needle in 1844 brought major benefits to the practice of medicine, but ran headlong into an unexpected quirk of human nature. It turns out that millions of people feel an instinctive horror at the thought of receiving an injection – at least ten percent of the US adult population and 25 percent of children, according to one estimate. This common phobia partly explains the widespread reluctance to receive vaccinations against Covid-19, a reluctance which has led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
But a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called Vaxess Technologies plans to sidestep this common fear by abandoning stainless steel needles and switching to silk.
Vaxess is testing a skin patch covered in dozens of microneedles made of silk protein and infused with influenza vaccine. Each needle is barely visible to the naked eye and just long enough to pierce the outer layer of skin. A user sticks the patch on his arm, waits five minutes, then throws it away. Left behind are the silk microneedles, which painlessly dissolve over the next two weeks, releasing the vaccine all the while.
The silk protein acts as a preservative, so there’s no need to keep it on ice at a doctor’s office. ‘It’s similar to what happens when you freeze something,’ said Vaxess founder and chief executive Michael Schrader. ‘It’s room-temperature freezing.’ In testing, Vaxess found that flu vaccines stored in a silk patch at room temperature remained viable three years later.
No more need for a ‘cold chain’, the costly network of refrigerators between manufacturing plants and medical clinics required by so many vaccines. Indeed, there’d be no need to get vaccinated at a clinic at all. Patients could vaccinate themselves.
‘We would mail you a patch,’ said Schrader. ‘It looks like a nicotine patch, only much smaller. You wear the patch for five minutes, then take it off and throw it away.’
Having completed a successful phase one clinical trial of the silk patches in late 2022, Schrader hopes to bring them to market by 2028.
It’s hardly the sort of product we’d usually associate with silk, the tough, luxurious, and luminous fabric that has delighted people for at least 5,000 years. But silk is proving to be far more valuable than its early Chinese cultivators could have imagined.
Much of what we now understand about silk was discovered at Silklab, a branch of the department of engineering at Tufts University in Medford, a suburb of Boston. Here a visitor encounters silken lenses that project words and images when bathed in laser light; surgical gloves coated in silk that display a warning if they’ve been contaminated with pathogens; tiny silken screws that are strong enough to repair a broken bone, only to dissolve entirely once the injury is healed.
For Silklab director Fiorenzo Omenetto, silk is not a fashion statement. It’s a set of microscopic Lego blocks that he and his colleagues are pulling apart and reassembling into an array of unexpected products.
‘We make everything,’ said Omenetto. ‘We make plastics, we make edible electronics, we make coatings for food.’
Silk isn’t everything at Silklab. Omenetto and his colleagues experiment with a variety of similar molecules, known as structural proteins. They’re found all over the place, shaping and strengthening plant and animal tissues. There’s the keratin in hair, collagen that holds our organs together, and more.
But for Omenetto, silk comes first. And his team has found an array of new uses for a fiber that humans have been cultivating for millennia. (...)
But a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called Vaxess Technologies plans to sidestep this common fear by abandoning stainless steel needles and switching to silk.
The silk protein acts as a preservative, so there’s no need to keep it on ice at a doctor’s office. ‘It’s similar to what happens when you freeze something,’ said Vaxess founder and chief executive Michael Schrader. ‘It’s room-temperature freezing.’ In testing, Vaxess found that flu vaccines stored in a silk patch at room temperature remained viable three years later.
No more need for a ‘cold chain’, the costly network of refrigerators between manufacturing plants and medical clinics required by so many vaccines. Indeed, there’d be no need to get vaccinated at a clinic at all. Patients could vaccinate themselves.
‘We would mail you a patch,’ said Schrader. ‘It looks like a nicotine patch, only much smaller. You wear the patch for five minutes, then take it off and throw it away.’
Having completed a successful phase one clinical trial of the silk patches in late 2022, Schrader hopes to bring them to market by 2028.
It’s hardly the sort of product we’d usually associate with silk, the tough, luxurious, and luminous fabric that has delighted people for at least 5,000 years. But silk is proving to be far more valuable than its early Chinese cultivators could have imagined.
Much of what we now understand about silk was discovered at Silklab, a branch of the department of engineering at Tufts University in Medford, a suburb of Boston. Here a visitor encounters silken lenses that project words and images when bathed in laser light; surgical gloves coated in silk that display a warning if they’ve been contaminated with pathogens; tiny silken screws that are strong enough to repair a broken bone, only to dissolve entirely once the injury is healed.
For Silklab director Fiorenzo Omenetto, silk is not a fashion statement. It’s a set of microscopic Lego blocks that he and his colleagues are pulling apart and reassembling into an array of unexpected products.
‘We make everything,’ said Omenetto. ‘We make plastics, we make edible electronics, we make coatings for food.’
Silk isn’t everything at Silklab. Omenetto and his colleagues experiment with a variety of similar molecules, known as structural proteins. They’re found all over the place, shaping and strengthening plant and animal tissues. There’s the keratin in hair, collagen that holds our organs together, and more.
But for Omenetto, silk comes first. And his team has found an array of new uses for a fiber that humans have been cultivating for millennia. (...)
by Hiawatha Bray, Works in Progress | Read more:
Image: Yuji Sakai/Getty, Chemistryworld via
Sunday, February 18, 2024
Influencers
Those of us who take a loving interest in words—their etymological forebears, their many layers of meaning, their often-surprising histories—have a tendency to resist change. Not that we think playfulness should be proscribed—such pedantry would be a cure worse than any disease. It’s just that we are also drawn, like doting parents, into wanting to protect the language, and thus become suspicious of mysterious strangers, of the introduction of new words, and of new meanings for familiar ones.
When we find words being used in a novel way, our countenances tend to stiffen. What’s going on here? Is this a euphemism? Is there a hidden agenda here?
But there are times when the older language seems inadequate, and in fact may mislead us into thinking that the world has not changed. New signifiers may sometimes be necessary, in order to describe new things.
Such is unquestionably the case of the new/old word influencer. At first glance, it looks harmless and insignificant, a lazy and imprecise way of designating someone as influential. But the word’s use as a noun is the key to what is different and new about it. And much as I dislike the word, and dislike the phenomenon it describes, necessity seems to have dictated that such a word be created.
The necessity to which I refer, the raison d’être of influencer, is the rise of social media, the ever more pervasive and enveloping interactive networks made possible by the Internet—X (the social networking service formerly known as Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, TikTok, Snapchat, et alia, ad infinitum—into which and through which so much of our lives are now being poured. This is not the place to evaluate the pluses and minuses of these arrangements, except to point out that they have destabilized, if not demolished, all the conventional means by which we have determined what counts as an authoritative view of a subject. The Wikipedia entry for social media says it all in one dry sentence: “Social media can also be used to read or share news, whether it is true or false.” That the same can be said of open-sourced Wikipedia itself does not detract from the truth of this particular statement.
It has not helped matters that the rise of social media has coincided with a serious decline in the general public’s faith in experts and other trusted sources of objective knowledge—a term we are now too often tempted to put between scare quotes. The debacle of the public health establishment’s response to the COVID pandemic is only the most recent of blows to our confidence in the competence and disinterestedness of our accredited experts. One could cite a great many more examples, including the declining status of my own demimonde, the world of higher education.
So what to believe? And whom to believe? In the night all cows are black, and in the social media age, all opinions become equal. People will turn to whatever sources they trust, for reasons both good and bad, the only stipulation being that these sources be easily available online. And thus enter the influencers, and the need for a word to describe them.
A recent study by the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford found that 55 percent of TikTok and Snapchat users, and 52 percent of Instagram users, get their news from influencers, rather than conventional news sources. The numbers are less startling for older platforms such as X and Facebook, but the figures for general distrust of the news media—32 percent in the United States—are alarming enough.
In the newspaper era now passing, if not already past, figures like Walter Lippmann, Anthony Lewis, A.M. Rosenthal, Meg Greenfield, George F. Will, and Joseph Alsop were called “opinion leaders,” because they not only had access to large audiences but also were thought to be intelligent, informed, broadly well educated, and well acquainted with the various aspects of our political and cultural life. They were not infallible, and they could be opinionated, but they had authority. Their readers learned to trust them not because they were pretty faces or led enviable lives but because their opinions were reliably thoughtful and usually persuasive.
Influencers have some of the same characteristics, but there are two big differences. The term influencer is entirely functionalist and results oriented. There is no credentialed baseline of presumed or demonstrated authority. You don’t need a degree; you don’t even have to have graduated from high school. You become an influencer not because you know anything, or are accredited in any way, but solely on the basis of your demonstrable influence, the size of the audience you are able to gather around you and hang on to—in other words, your ability to carry out the function of influencing. As that audience grows and comes to believe that you know what you are talking about, it follows you and follows your instructions. By their fruits ye shall know them, and the influencers’ fruits are precisely measurable: in followers, and in the promotion and sale of consumer goods.
For make no mistake, and this is the second big difference, the chief importance of the influencer is his or her effectiveness in moving goods. That’s what they do. (When opinion leaders do it, it’s a grave ethical lapse.) Influencers generally do not produce the goods or run the businesses that distribute those goods, but they provide outsourcing for the promotion and marketing of products, and in time develop a brand identity around the products they flog, and if they’re very successful, are sought out in turn by the producers of those goods. The brand identity provides the audience a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, for whatever standard of good housekeeping one might have in mind.
Successful influencers need to have a lot of self-confidence, stepping out there as they do. They have to believe that their seal of approval matters. Back in May, The New Yorker ran an interview with a young woman who uses the moniker Tinx. An influencer with more than two million social media followers, she has become, the magazine says, “the arbiter of all that is worthy: boyfriend behavior, bachelorette destinations, where to order shrimp cocktails and Martinis in many a metropolis.”
Tinx has a podcast, a radio show, and a line of merchandise, including clothing and salad dressing. And she has now written a book, The Shift, which is billed as a guide “to becoming the main character of your life.” What are her qualifications for all this? “The goal is to know yourself, completely. And by that metric, I’m wise as fuck.”
All of this would be harmless, a great example of good old American brassiness, except for the nagging sense that there is nothing but the consensus of the crowd holding it all up, no criterion external to the opinions and tastes of the hyperconfident influencer and those who follow her advice. That’s OK if we are talking about condiments and cocktails, but what about issues of great public moment, issues of war and peace, the quality of our leaders, and the health of our families and our common life? What if there is no general standard to recur to? What if the logic of the social media world continues to envelop our discourse, so that all issues, not merely the marketplace choices of consumers, are being addressed by people who are influencers, rather than authorities?
And it’s worth remembering who the biggest influencers are. We’re not talking about the next generation of Walter Lippmanns or George Wills. We’re talking about Kylie Jenner, Ariana Grande, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Kim Kardashian, Demi Lovato, Justin Bieber, and Katy Perry (just a few representative names taken from a list of the top 35 influencers on Instagram in 2023). In other words, these are celebrities, valued more for style than substance, famous for being well-known, and glamorous beyond the reach (but not the dreams) of ordinary mortals. They have an ability to draw others into the force-field of their manufactured charisma, and induce the faux-intimacy that weds followers to what amounts to a cult of personality, complete with knowing winks and in-crowd signaling.
by Wilfred M. McClay, Hedgehog Review | Read more:
When we find words being used in a novel way, our countenances tend to stiffen. What’s going on here? Is this a euphemism? Is there a hidden agenda here?
Such is unquestionably the case of the new/old word influencer. At first glance, it looks harmless and insignificant, a lazy and imprecise way of designating someone as influential. But the word’s use as a noun is the key to what is different and new about it. And much as I dislike the word, and dislike the phenomenon it describes, necessity seems to have dictated that such a word be created.
The necessity to which I refer, the raison d’être of influencer, is the rise of social media, the ever more pervasive and enveloping interactive networks made possible by the Internet—X (the social networking service formerly known as Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, TikTok, Snapchat, et alia, ad infinitum—into which and through which so much of our lives are now being poured. This is not the place to evaluate the pluses and minuses of these arrangements, except to point out that they have destabilized, if not demolished, all the conventional means by which we have determined what counts as an authoritative view of a subject. The Wikipedia entry for social media says it all in one dry sentence: “Social media can also be used to read or share news, whether it is true or false.” That the same can be said of open-sourced Wikipedia itself does not detract from the truth of this particular statement.
It has not helped matters that the rise of social media has coincided with a serious decline in the general public’s faith in experts and other trusted sources of objective knowledge—a term we are now too often tempted to put between scare quotes. The debacle of the public health establishment’s response to the COVID pandemic is only the most recent of blows to our confidence in the competence and disinterestedness of our accredited experts. One could cite a great many more examples, including the declining status of my own demimonde, the world of higher education.
So what to believe? And whom to believe? In the night all cows are black, and in the social media age, all opinions become equal. People will turn to whatever sources they trust, for reasons both good and bad, the only stipulation being that these sources be easily available online. And thus enter the influencers, and the need for a word to describe them.
A recent study by the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford found that 55 percent of TikTok and Snapchat users, and 52 percent of Instagram users, get their news from influencers, rather than conventional news sources. The numbers are less startling for older platforms such as X and Facebook, but the figures for general distrust of the news media—32 percent in the United States—are alarming enough.
In the newspaper era now passing, if not already past, figures like Walter Lippmann, Anthony Lewis, A.M. Rosenthal, Meg Greenfield, George F. Will, and Joseph Alsop were called “opinion leaders,” because they not only had access to large audiences but also were thought to be intelligent, informed, broadly well educated, and well acquainted with the various aspects of our political and cultural life. They were not infallible, and they could be opinionated, but they had authority. Their readers learned to trust them not because they were pretty faces or led enviable lives but because their opinions were reliably thoughtful and usually persuasive.
Influencers have some of the same characteristics, but there are two big differences. The term influencer is entirely functionalist and results oriented. There is no credentialed baseline of presumed or demonstrated authority. You don’t need a degree; you don’t even have to have graduated from high school. You become an influencer not because you know anything, or are accredited in any way, but solely on the basis of your demonstrable influence, the size of the audience you are able to gather around you and hang on to—in other words, your ability to carry out the function of influencing. As that audience grows and comes to believe that you know what you are talking about, it follows you and follows your instructions. By their fruits ye shall know them, and the influencers’ fruits are precisely measurable: in followers, and in the promotion and sale of consumer goods.
For make no mistake, and this is the second big difference, the chief importance of the influencer is his or her effectiveness in moving goods. That’s what they do. (When opinion leaders do it, it’s a grave ethical lapse.) Influencers generally do not produce the goods or run the businesses that distribute those goods, but they provide outsourcing for the promotion and marketing of products, and in time develop a brand identity around the products they flog, and if they’re very successful, are sought out in turn by the producers of those goods. The brand identity provides the audience a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, for whatever standard of good housekeeping one might have in mind.
Successful influencers need to have a lot of self-confidence, stepping out there as they do. They have to believe that their seal of approval matters. Back in May, The New Yorker ran an interview with a young woman who uses the moniker Tinx. An influencer with more than two million social media followers, she has become, the magazine says, “the arbiter of all that is worthy: boyfriend behavior, bachelorette destinations, where to order shrimp cocktails and Martinis in many a metropolis.”
Tinx has a podcast, a radio show, and a line of merchandise, including clothing and salad dressing. And she has now written a book, The Shift, which is billed as a guide “to becoming the main character of your life.” What are her qualifications for all this? “The goal is to know yourself, completely. And by that metric, I’m wise as fuck.”
All of this would be harmless, a great example of good old American brassiness, except for the nagging sense that there is nothing but the consensus of the crowd holding it all up, no criterion external to the opinions and tastes of the hyperconfident influencer and those who follow her advice. That’s OK if we are talking about condiments and cocktails, but what about issues of great public moment, issues of war and peace, the quality of our leaders, and the health of our families and our common life? What if there is no general standard to recur to? What if the logic of the social media world continues to envelop our discourse, so that all issues, not merely the marketplace choices of consumers, are being addressed by people who are influencers, rather than authorities?
And it’s worth remembering who the biggest influencers are. We’re not talking about the next generation of Walter Lippmanns or George Wills. We’re talking about Kylie Jenner, Ariana Grande, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Kim Kardashian, Demi Lovato, Justin Bieber, and Katy Perry (just a few representative names taken from a list of the top 35 influencers on Instagram in 2023). In other words, these are celebrities, valued more for style than substance, famous for being well-known, and glamorous beyond the reach (but not the dreams) of ordinary mortals. They have an ability to draw others into the force-field of their manufactured charisma, and induce the faux-intimacy that weds followers to what amounts to a cult of personality, complete with knowing winks and in-crowd signaling.
by Wilfred M. McClay, Hedgehog Review | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
[ed. Pretty sure this misses the point. Influencers exist because they've learned how to navigate all the pitfalls and barriers of media, branding, income, and celebrity - no small achievement in itself - something their followers would probably all like to emulate. But there are downsides too - constantly being on a treadmill to produce endless content would be one of them.]
Steph Curry Full Court Shot
[ed. Superhuman. This guy can hit 'em from anywhere (even leaving the arena). See also: Steph Curry’s full-court shot from the tunnel needs to be seen to be believed (SB Nation).]
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