Recently, I was in Sweden and Finland, catching up with some friends and seeing Loney Dear playing with the Norrbotens Kammarorkester in Lapland (which was amazingly good). At one point, I got invited to a party in the north of Sweden, with the advice that I may want to bring my own beer. Which is what found me in the aisles of the Systembolaget in Luleå.

The Systembolaget, for those unfamiliar with this word, is the state-run liquor shop chain in Sweden. The government there has a monopoly on the sale of strong beer and all kinds of spirits, and does so through a chain of shops throughout the country. Only those shops may sell any beer stronger than about 2.5% 3.5% or spirits. This is a cast-in-iron law, with no exceptions, which has some peculiar consequences; for example, air passengers flying from Sweden to anywhere in the EU are unable to buy spirits at the airport shops because tax must be levied on spirits not being exported from the EU, and only the state can do that.

Anyway, when I went to buy some beer, I was expecting the experience to have a sort of bland paternalism to it, deliberately avoiding any attempt to encourage people to actually drink. Having read about changes in Sweden between the 1970s and now in Andrew Brown's Fishing In Utopia, I understood that the Systembolaget used to look somewhere between a bookmaker's shop and the waiting room of a methadone clinic, being essentially a paternalistic harm-minimisation programme for those who, for whatever reason, insist on drinking, allowing—but never encouraging—them to do so, but had evolved into more of a standard consumer experience. Nonetheless, I was expecting it to look a bit more minimal and, well, institutional; perhaps like a Lidl or Costco for alcohol, with dim fluorescent lighting and pallets of bottles labelled with only their name and alcohol content in a monospaced laser-printed typeface. Instead, I found something that would put a North London Waitrose to shame; a brightly lit space with huge selection of beers, ales, craft beers and microbrews; each one had, on its shelf, a label enumerating food combinations it goes well with. (The only section where it lagged behind was the gin section, which was somewhat small and mostly limited to mainstream British gins; I suspect Sweden isn't really a gin-drinking country.)

Later, when I recounted my Systembolaget experience, and the way it differed from my expectations, to a friend, they mentioned that the staff are also experts in beer and spirits, and able to make knowledgeable recommendations. The implication of this was that, if you live in Sweden and know your way around beer, the government will want to employ you to recommend ales and pilsners to consumers. Now I'm far from a hard Thatcherite or a believer in the Libertarian ideal of the minimal “nightwatchman state”, though, having grown up in an English-speaking world, in which the free-market principles articulated by Milton Friedman are as accepted as Copernican astronomy (even by those who regard themselves as being on The Left; while there, for example, are calls for the renationalisation of Britain's railways, for example, few would call for the Upper Crust franchises to be kicked out of stations and replaced with the return of the much-maligned British Rail sandwich), this strikes me as rather exotic and a little weird. Beer-recommending civil servants? A state liquor monopoly simultaneously discouraging and encouraging drinking? The State not as Orwellian Big Brother but as the older brother you go to to ask about how to enjoy vodka? We truly are no longer in the neoliberal Anglosphere.

Almost all the Nordic countries have state liquor monopolies. The exception is Denmark, but the other Scandinavians regard the Danes, with one foot on the mainland, to be halfway towards being the wild, laissez-faire Germans (and yes, that is a stereotype in Scandinavia; while in the English-speaking world, the Germans may be stereotyped (at best) as precise, humorless BMW engineers and/or Kraftwerkian Mensch-Maschinen, in Scandinavia, they're an unruly people who drink in the street and don't tax their beer.) In Iceland, the equivalent monopoly chain is known as Vinbuð, though there was talk a while ago about rolling back or eliminating its monopoly. The Finns are slightly more liberal, in that one can buy beer from ordinary supermarkets, where (as in Australia) it's stored in a segregated section which (as I discovered shortly after disembarking from a Helsinki-bound train at 8:30) is physically closed off at 9pm. For stronger spirits, one has to go to the state liquor shop, which is called, with characteristic Finnish lack of euphemism, Alko. And it's not only the quasi-socialist Jante Law societies of the Nordic world that do this; in the US, the conservatively Mormon, and staunchly Republican, state of Utah also has a state liquor monopoly. I imagine that their shop shelves probably look less enticing than those at the Systembolaget.

¶ alcohol culture finland scandinavia sweden 2

In most European languages, personal pronouns (like she, him and such) are gendered; it can be somewhat awkward to talk about a person in English without disclosing whether they are (or are regarded as) male or female. (In some other languages, such as French and German, not disclosing the gender of a person is even harder, with words for “friend”, “coworker” and various occupations being gendered as well.) This means that speakers of those languages have to classify a person as male or female before discussing them, or otherwise go a lot of squirming. Interestingly, this is by no means a universal property of human language; in fact, 57% of the world's languages do not have gendered pronouns.

As the genders of people one deals with become less significant in most aspects of everyday life (discriminating between male and female coworkers could land one in legal trouble, and in the age of remote working, there's the possibility that you might not know whether your accountant or the freelance coder three timezones away you're working with is a man or a woman), this will eventually change, and gender-neutral personal pronouns will arise out of necessity. In English, what will probably happen is that “they” will lose its connotations of plurality, and become the natural way of referring to someone when their gender is irrelevant or unknown.

Not everybody is happy to wait for hypothetical linguistic evolution to take its course; in Sweden, unsurprisingly, they have taken things into their own hands, and introduced a gender-neutral personal pronoun into society, through the child-care system; a generation of Swedish toddlers is growing up used to referring to people as hen (he/she), rather than han (he) or hon (she). The pronoun hen was introduced in two Stockholm nurseries in 2012, and now has spread out of the nursery system to several newspapers; also, it has crossed the border, with reports of it being adopted into Norwegian. (There's a good chance that it'll make it into Danish as well, as it, Swedish and Norwegian are very closely related, and partly mutually intelligible.)

Not everybody is pleased with this, one can imagine the usual conservative talking heads, from Moscow to Wichita, fulminating darkly about “political correctness gone mad”, “Cultural Marxism” and/or “gender” (a term used pejoratively in reactionary circles to mean any deviation from traditional gender roles), in between making disparaging wisecracks involving meatballs and flat-packed furniture. And outside of that, there are some who think that teaching children to refer to people not as men or women but as persons is, for some reason, cruel:

But, argues Dr David Eberhard, a leading Swedish psychiatrist, a new pronoun won’t change the fact that the vast majority of people identify either as men or women. “Whatever you choose to call people, the biological differences between men and women remain,” he notes. “We should treat each other with respect, but ignoring biological gender differences is crazy. Making us identical won’t create more equality.” Boys should be allowed to play with dolls – and girls with cars – if they like to, says Eberhard, who coined the expression “safety addiction” in reference to Sweden’s health and safety system. “But”, he adds, “calling them hen instead of him or her? That’s child cruelty.”

I don't get why this is child cruelty; it's not that a user of a gender-neutral language would not learn to notice that some people are male and some female. The key difference is that this demotes gender from a defining attribute of a person—you are essentially a man or a woman—and turns it into a secondary attribute—you are a person, with a number of attributes (hair colour, height, maleness/femaleness). In a society which is (for the most part) no longer divided into hard-and-fast gender roles, should we still be using language which evolved when the two genders were organised hierarchically, with members of one all but owning members of the other as chattels? That's to say nothing of situations where one does not know the gender of a person (the aforementioned remote coworker), or indeed the rise of non-human personlike entities (with corporate personhood on the books in the US, it seems rude to refer to corporations as “it”, while they are obviously neither a “he” nor a “she”; add to that the prospect of artificial intelligences, which might not always be issued with gendered personae). Finally, one area where a non-gendered personal pronoun would reap immediate, if somewhat trivial, benefits is that of the naming of pets, especially ones hard to sex by superficial inspection (“Nice boa constrictor; what's his name?” “Her name's Ermintrude.”)

¶ culture gender language sweden 5

Gough Whitlam, that lion of the Australian Left who shook up a sleepy, conservative backwater and made it, for at least a few decades, into a modern, forward-looking player on the world stage, died yesterday, aged 98.

Whitlam's brief period in office began in 1972, when the Australian Labor Party which he led won a landslide victory, sweeping aside the arse-end of a decades-long period of conservative rule and cruising into office under the slogan “It's Time”, soundtracked by a groovy rock'n'roll jingle. Whitlam and his party didn't slow down; soon they had abolished conscription and the death penalty, brought in free university education, state-funded health care and arts funding, recognised Aboriginal land rights, passed the world's first no-fault divorce laws, replaced God Save The Queen as the national anthem with Advance Australia Fair (which, though admittedly somewhat turgid-sounding, was at least ours), among other accomplishments. He also had a gift for witty retorts.

This spring was not to last, though, and after winning an early election with a narrower majority in 1974, Whitlam failed to get a budget passed and was dismissed by the Governor-General in 1975, in what some of the more paranoid types still say was a CIA coup. (Interestingly, the Pinochet-figure brought in to replace him, Malcolm Fraser, has, over the past few decades of retirement, drifted considerably to the left of Australian politics, and was last seen endorsing a Greens candidate in the 2013 election; or perhaps he has just stood still, with the political landscape drifting rightward around him.)

Whitlam's accomplishments, however, stuck; by CIA-installed right-wing dictatorship standards, the Fraser government was somewhat of a damp squib, and kept things much as they were, until the ALP's Bob Hawke took over keeping them more or less as they were. It was not until into the first term of John Howard, with his obsession with his idol Robert Menzies, the conservative patriarch of the pre-Whitlam Australia, and the lost father-knows-best arcadia of white picket fences and children who are seen and not heard that he had presided over, that it started to look like what we had thought of as the new, modern Australia was merely a thaw. Howard's successor, Tony Abbott, meanwhile, seems to look even further back; his model of Australia seems to be closer to the authoritarian penal colonies and military outposts of virtuous Empire than to the “relaxed and comfortable” 1950s, dangerously close to outbreaks of rock'n'roll, feminism, male long hair or similar degeneracy.

It's not yet clear which of Whitlam's achievements will be the last to be systematically rolled back by the current government; free education is on the way out, and payments for medical appointments were floated (without any economic planning to make a case for them, but that's not the point; it's the principle that counts, and, to a certain mindset, the very existence of free health care is fundamentally immoral). If Abbott succeeds in unlocking the Strong Wartime Prime Minister achievement, conscription might be on the agenda (though, then again, Australia may take a hint from the US, and eschew outright conscription in favour of, say, making university funding or unemployment benefits contingent on military service). The death penalty may be harder to sell to the public (Australia's regional neighbours threatening our bogans with it should they bring some weed with them tends to do that), but if anyone in Canberra would push for it, the current lot probably would. As for restoring God Save The Queen as the national anthem, for a government that brought back Imperial honours, that would be, if anything, too obvious.

¶ australia gough whitlam obituary politics rip 0

A new study has looked at why fewer women cycle in the United States than in the Netherlands, and found that it has less to do with an often stated Anglophone culture of cycling-as-macho-extreme-sport, and more to do with women in the US being too busy with domestic chores for the luxury of cycling:

In short, despite years of progress, American women’s lives are still disproportionately filled with driving children around, getting groceries, and doing other household chores – housework that doesn’t lend itself easily to two-wheeled transportation. It turns out that women may be more likely to bike in the Netherlands because Dutch culture is giving them more time to do so.

Dutch women can use bikes to get around because they are less pressed for time than American women, in three fundamental ways. First, thanks to family-friendly labour policies like flexitime and paternity leave, Dutch families divide childcare responsibilities much more evenly than American families. Second, work weeks in the Netherlands are shorter. One in three Dutch men and most Dutch women work part-time, and workers of either gender work fewer hours than Americans.

¶ bicyclism culture cycling economics gender neoliberalism netherlands usa 0

There's a piece in The Economist on the challenges of translating technological terms into minority languages, particularly ones whose speakers have lived traditional agricultural/fishing lifestyles until very recently, where the vocabulary tends to be more concrete and specific, and finding local words for new technical concepts requires some uses of poetic metaphor:

Ibrahima Sarr, a Senegalese coder, led the translation of Firefox into Fulah, which is spoken by 20m people from Senegal to Nigeria. “Crash” became hookii (a cow falling over but not dying); “timeout” became a honaama (your fish has got away). “Aspect ratio” became jeendondiral, a rebuke from elders when a fishing net is wrongly woven. In Malawi’s Chichewa language, which has 10m speakers, “cached pages” became mfutso wa tsamba, or bits of leftover food. The windowless houses of the 440,000 speakers of Zapotec, a family of indigenous languages in Mexico, meant that computer “windows” became “eyes”.

(via MeFi) ¶ language tech 0

Last week was the annual ritual the year's iPhone launch. It followed the usual routine: new models (with larger screens and a new iOS version), new technologies (Apple Pay, a contactless payment system) and a preannouncement of an as-yet unready product (the Apple Watch, which, to all appearances, doesn't quite work yet, hence the carefully managed demo). And then, another surprise: Bono, that Tony Blair of adult-oriented rock took to the stage, looking particularly greasy and ratlike in his trademark rock'n'roll sunglasses, and, through a scripted “spontaneous” exchange with Apple CEO Tim Cook, announced that his band U2 have recorded a new album, and that Apple have bought each and every one of their users a copy; it would be showing up in their record collections whether they wanted it or not. And, soon enough, it did. Those whose phones were set to automatically synchronise with iTunes Match found the new U2 album waiting on their phones.

Of course, not everyone was happy with having a record shoved into their record collections; even without it being by a band with such a sketchy reputation (musically and otherwise) as U2. The similarity between Bono's rationale—that those finding the music on their computer may listen to it and may like it, and if they don't like it, they can delete it—and the rationalisations of old-fashioned email spammers, was pointed out. Though, actually, you couldn't even delete it; you could remove it from your computer, and meticulously scrub it from all your Apple devices, but it would always be waiting for you in your list of downloadable purchases on the iTunes Store, like an unflushable jobbie, taunting you with its noisome presence every time you lifted the lid. The most you could do with it was “hide” it, as you would a mildly embarrassing drunken binge-purchase; but you and Apple would know it was always there, mocking you.

This was not so much the “turd-in-a-can” business model of lowest-common-denominator consumer capitalism as the “unflushable turd” business model; or “now you have our album in your music collection; deal with it”. A bit like the Los Angeles band who blocked a freeway with a truck and treated the trapped motorists to a live gig from a stage on the back, only scaled up to the size of Bono's messianic ego and international-level schmoozing abilities. When you're Bono, it seems, you can push your music to millions of people. As for Apple, could this mean that their hubris about knowing their customers' needs better than they know themselves has extended from which controls a user needs in an app to what sort of music the user likes, or ought to like?

After considerable kvetching and sarcasm on social media and the web (and undoubtedly a number of complaints to iTunes Support), Apple relented, and created a world first: a dedicated web link for removing U2's Songs Of Innocence from one's iTunes collection; a privilege (if one can call it that) that no other musical act has merited, or is likely to merit any time soon, with the levels of hubris, influence and public antipathy required to pull off such a feat.

Apple surely have statistics about how many people have availed themselves of this link, and expunged the most recent U2 album from their record collections. It's unlikely that they will publish them. It would be nice if this whole episode had been a lesson in humility for Bono and his people, but, somehow, I suspect that's too much to hope for.

There is, however, some hope from this affair; it seems that, after all, enough people to be counted and listened to still consider their music collections—the recordings they have chosen and curated themselves—to be a personal artefact, rather than just another advertising billboard. Sure, Facebook may abridge our friends' party photos and emotional dramas and squeeze in ads pushing weight-loss plans and financial services in the spaces freed up, Twitter may season our (now similarly algorithmically winnowed down) feeds with “sponsored tweets”, Shazam may turn our phones into micro-billboards for the new Justin Bieber record when we hold them up to check what the bangin' track the DJ is playing is, and Spotify may bombard us with gratingly obnoxious ads until we relent and become paying customers, but both our record collections and our not-inexpensive, non-ad-subsidised, devices are off limits; and woe betide anyone who messes with them.

¶ advertising apple marketing music spam u2 0

In just over three days, Scotland will vote on whether to leave the United Kingdom and go it alone.

The Scottish independence debate, in its present incarnation, has been going on for over a year, though through most of its course, it has had an air of phony war about it. While there was always a possibility of Scotland voting to secede, it was classified somewhere alongside the theoretical possibility of Scotland winning the World Cup, or perhaps one of the fantastic catastrophes in Hollywood action flicks, as something remote enough to be a mildly entertaining diversion worthy of a few minutes of hypothetical conversation. Were the debate a film, it would have borne a sticker reading “Rated 12A for mild peril”; as with a family movie, there was the assumption that, when the adventure was over, everyone would make it home (having learned a life lesson but being none the worse for it) and everything would be as it was before. So much so that the Treasury admitted to not having actually made any contingency plans for Scotland actually seceding.

The polls had been narrowing for a while, as the “Better Together” campaign against independence lumbered on uncharismatically, slowly being bled by Yes’s guerrilla tactics, though it did look as if No had time on their side; at the present rate of attrition, there was little hope of the Yes campaign making it over the line. But then came last weekend’s YouGov poll, showing the Yes campaign in the lead (albeit well within the margin of error), and subsequent polls showing similarly close results, sending the defenders of the status quo scrambling like headless chickens. The three parties made the undignified spectacle of climbing over themselves to promise Scotland the moon and stars if only it would stay, often getting the details of their actual promises mixed up. A second Royal Baby was hurriedly conceived. Banks and supermarkets were discreetly urged to warn their Scottish customers that prices would go up and jobs would move to London. A trainload of Labour party workers made its way from London to Scotland. People in England were urged to obtain Scottish saltire flags and fly them, in the hope of love-bombing the Scots into taking the sassenach back. There was even discussion over whether the Queen, serene and impartial unlike her son, should break her silence (and centuries of protocol) and urge her subjects to vote No. (Her Royal Highness demurred, instead gnomically imploring her Scottish subjects to think carefully about their future.) And, of course, the volume of the scare stories went up.

It seemed to have an effect, with polls showing No having regained the lead, and Labour grandees scenting victory and trying hard not to gloat prematurely. (Not all polls, though; some have shown the result being evenly split; a Sunday Telegraph poll showed Yes ahead by 8 points.) Of course, things are still close, and there are three days left to run. And while things could go either way, at this stage it looks like the more likely outcome is that No will win (by a narrow margin, unless the polling is off). The question of Scottish independence will be deemed to have been settled in the negative, once and for all, with the United Kingdom remaining one nation, united under the axioms of Hayek-Friedman Thought, administered in perpetuity from the City of London, and quite being dragged kicking and screaming out of the EU by PM Boris Johnson and deputy PM Nigel Farage in a few years’ time.

Of course, there are all those promises that the Scots have been offered in return for voting no: greater powers for setting tax rates, more financial and legislative autonomy, and everything up to a Hong Kong-style “one country, two systems” settlement. Of course, these promises were made in the heat of the campaign (often feverishly blurted out by politicians on the campaign trail), their very existence contingent on Scotland’s ability to make good on its threats to leave. Come 19 September, once that window is closed for the foreseeable future, showering the Scots with gifts will no longer be a priority; and, in fact, the English electorate may not be happy about rewarding what could be seen to be a tantrum. The boot will be on the other foot, and how gracious the victor would be to the vanquished remains to be seen. At one extreme, a Tory-UKIP coalition government would have in its power the ability to dissolve the Scottish parliament (which can be done by a vote in Westminster), and crush the rebellious Scots; perhaps using Scotland for punitively testing new austerity policies (as Thatcher did with the poll tax, which effectively annihilated the once influential Scottish Tories and propelling the idea of secession from the UK, once seen as bordering on lunatical, into the mainstream).

What if, however, Yes wins? Well, that would only be the start of a long process of negotiation, with both sides honing threats and promises into compromises. There’d be points of contention about everything from shared use of the pound to the basing of nuclear weapons and reconciling Scotland’s intention to increase immigration with its intention to maintain a common travel area with the UK. One way or another, these would all get resolved within a decade or so. Perhaps prices would go up, or go down, somewhat; businesses serving a largely UK market may relocate to south of the border (or may not, given how many companies trade with their British clients from Ireland or the Channel Islands). Though it’s unlikely that the Scots would be reduced to abject penury as some of the naysayers have been predicting. For the most part, things would remain the same, though a process of divergence would begin, as Scotland and the rest of the UK make their own ways. (Whether Scotland becomes a Scandinavian-style Jante-law market-socialist state while England remains wedded to neoliberalism (possibly shading into some kind of neoreactionary oligarchy) is by no means certain; it’s quite plausible that Scottish politics will grow its own right wing, one that is not beholden to London.)

The Scottish Herald has a piece by Fintan O’Toole, editor of the Irish Times, looking at the issue through the perspective of the history of Ireland (which got its independence from the UK some 90 years earlier). Of course, that is not the only possible precedent; another one is Norway, which gained independence from Sweden in 1905. Meanwhile, Charles Stross (who is firmly in the Yes camp) brings his usually deep perspective to bear on the issue; in his opinion, Scotland should be independent, because the post-Treaty of Westphalia idea of the sovereign nation-state is no longer fit for purpose (due to technological changes), and smaller states have less catastrophic failure modes than larger ones.

I, of course, don't get a vote, though if I lived in Scotland, I would vote Yes. For all the risks, it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Scotland to redefine its destiny and what sort of nation it wishes to be. If Yes succeeds (and perhaps even if it fails), the results will be interesting to watch.

¶ politics scotland uk 0

The Village Voice has a profile piece on the Satanic Temple, the new group pranking the US Religious Right in the name of the Prince of Darkness, and the latest manifestation of the long and somewhat varied tradition of Satanism; this time, as détournement. This particular Satanic Temple seems to have been founded by a Brooklyn-based journalist named Doug Mesner (who goes by the name “Lucien Greaves”, his legal name being presumably insufficiently Satanic-sounding), possibly emerging out of a mockumentary project about “the world's nicest Satanic cult” praising right-wing Christian politicians in Florida, but since then has gone on to hold a “pink mass” on the grave of the mother of anti-gay religious preacher Fred Phelps, posthumously turning her lesbian, and commissioning a rather handsome-looking statue of Baphomet, to be placed outside the Oklahoma State Capitol alongside the Ten Commandments monument, testing the sincerity of state lawmakers' commitment to religious freedom. In fact, most of their work seems to centre around turning the US Constitution's neutrality on actual religions and the entrenched privilege of the Religious Right (as seen in recent court rulings, such as those allowing corporations to have religious values which override their employees' rights) against each other; they campaign (on constitutionally-protected grounds of religious exemption) against corporal punishment in schools and, most recently, have used this angle in a campaign against restrictions on abortion.

Unsurprisingly, the Satanic Temple gets a lot of hate mail from the usual good ol' boys. Perhaps also unsurprisingly, though, their most strident (or at least coherently so) critics are other self-identified Satanists; namely, the Church Of Satan, the Satanic sect founded by Anton LaVey in the Sixeventies, and since inherited by one Peter Gilmore, who has nothing nice to say about the new kids, and keeps saying it:

"When a fellow in horns — with an adopted moniker fit for a 1970s hairdresser — tea-bags a tombstone while some 'goth' rejects swap spit on the grave, it seems to us to be a parody of Satanism rather than a representation of some actual philosophical or religious organization." Those lines were written by Magus Peter H. Gilmore, leader of the Church of Satan, on the Church's official blog. It's one of several denunciations Gilmore has issued against the Satanic Temple in the past year.

The Satanic Temple's website is here; they also have an online shop with T-shirts and mugs.

¶ culture détournement performance art satanism usa 0

An interesting article on the artificial and constructed nature of neoliberalism, the supposedly neutral post-ideological ideology, touted as the mirror of that which is and cannot but be:

The public at large would be hard pressed to know that this strange doctrine of economics actually had a place of origin in the Mont Pèlerin Society, which was the brainchild of Friedrich Hayek. Mirowski tells us that one of the keys to Neoliberalism has always been a sort of “double-truth”, the ability to convey both an outer exoteric version of the truth to the public at large, while at the same time conveying an inward esoteric truth to those in the know: what he terms the Neoliberal Thought Collective.

6. Neoliberalism thoroughly revises what it means to be a human person. “Individuals” are merely evanescent projects from a neoliberal perspective. Neoliberalism has consequently become a scale-free Theory of Everything: something as small as a gene or as large as a nation-state is equally engaged in entrepreneurial strategic pursuit of advantage, since the “individual” is no longer a privileged ontological platform. Second, there are no more “classes” in the sense of an older political economy, since every individual is both employer and worker simultaneously; in the limit, every man should be his own business firm or corporation; this has proven a powerful tool for disarming whole swathes of older left discourse. Third, since property is no longer rooted in labor, as in the Lockean tradition, consequently property rights can be readily reengineered and changed to achieve specific political objectives; one observes this in the area of “intellectual property,” or in a development germane to the crisis, ownership of the algorithms that define and trade obscure complex derivatives, and better, to reduce the formal infrastructure of the marketplace itself to a commodity. Indeed, the recent transformation of stock exchanges into profit-seeking IPOs was a critical neoliberal innovation leading up to the crisis. Classical liberals treated “property” as a sacrosanct bulwark against the state; neoliberals do not. Fourth, it destroys the whole tradition of theories of “interests” as possessing empirical grounding in political thought.

7. Neoliberals extol “freedom” as trumping all other virtues; but the definition of freedom is recoded and heavily edited within their framework. It is economic freedom only.

12. The neoliberal program ends up vastly expanding incarceration and the carceral sphere in the name of getting the government off our backs.

Hayek, no friend of democracy, looked upon this closed society of elite intellectuals as if it were a new Platonic Academy. In fact he saw democracy as a hindrance to the neoliberal world view, saying to his friend Bertrand de Jouvenel, “I sometimes wonder whether it is not more than capitalism this strong egalitarian strain (they call it democracy) in America which is so inimical to the growth of a cultural elite.”

The market was meant to emancipate us, offering autonomy and freedom. Instead it has delivered atomisation and loneliness. The workplace has been overwhelmed by a mad, Kafkaesque infrastructure of assessments, monitoring, measuring, surveillance and audits, centrally directed and rigidly planned, whose purpose is to reward the winners and punish the losers. It destroys autonomy, enterprise, innovation and loyalty, and breeds frustration, envy and fear. Through a magnificent paradox, it has led to the revival of a grand old Soviet tradition known in Russian as tufta. It means falsification of statistics to meet the diktats of unaccountable power.

These shifts have been accompanied, Verhaeghe writes, by a spectacular rise in certain psychiatric conditions: self-harm, eating disorders, depression and personality disorders. Of the personality disorders, the most common are performance anxiety and social phobia: both of which reflect a fear of other people, who are perceived as both evaluators and competitors – the only roles for society that market fundamentalism admits. Depression and loneliness plague us.

The Think Tank that Antony Fisher set up was very different. It had no interest in thinking up new ideas because it already knew the "truth". It already had all the ideas it needed laid out in Professor Hayek's books. Its aim instead was to influence public opinion - through promoting those ideas. It was a big shift away from the RAND model - you gave up being the manufacturing dept for ideas and instead became the sales and promotion dept for what Hayek had bluntly called "second-hand ideas".

Reg Calvert was part of an old, unruly tradition of true independence and libertarian freedom. A real bucaneer who would ignore rules and the structure of class and power in Britain while merrily going his own way. Smedley on the other hand was a "privateer" only to the extent that he wanted to bring the private sector back to power in Britain. Other than that he wanted the traditional power structure to remain the same. And to do this he (and his Think Tank) wanted to reinvent the free market as a managed system - managed by them, and any true "privateer" - like Reg - who challenged that power was doomed.

¶ culture neoliberalism secret societies society 2

Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Le Petit Prince reënvisioned as horror fiction, with the titular Little Prince as a malign, capricious trickster, not unlike the elves or fairies of mythology:

He keeps me drawing with the promise of water. He must have water with him, he must know where water is, because the heat does not seem to bother him and his hands have grown smoother and more childlike every afternoon. He laughs when I lunge after him and dances out of the shade into the sun, where he knows I will not follow him. He hides under the sun.

You look very thirsty, he says. Perhaps tomorrow if you draw me a boa constrictor I will share my tea with you.

The plane is beyond repair. If he has water, surely he will tell me. He has no other companions, no one else to draw for him. What would he gain in watching me die?

¶ fiction horror le petit prince 0

The Washington Post's data-journalism blog has a piece on the relative popularity of cats and dogs, by US state and by country.

In summary, in the United States cat people tend to live around the coasts and in the north, adjacent to the Canadian border, though parts of the Midwest also lean cat; the South, meanwhile, leans dog (with the exception of Florida), with the southwest being most strongly dog. On a worldwide level, though, the US leans cat (albeit weakly) in aggregate, as do Canada, Russia and most of Europe (with the exceptions of Ireland, Poland, the Czech/Slovak republics and the Iberian peninsula, all weakly dog; Switzerland, meanwhile, is strongly cat). The Islamic countries tend to lean strongly cat (presumably for religious reasons, dogs being regarded as unclean). Meanwhile, Australia is weakly dog, as is Brazil; the Spanish-speaking Americas are strongly dog-leaning, as are China, India, Thailand and South Africa. (New Zealand, however, is strongly cat.)

The cat/dog dichotomy is, at least in places, partly political. In the US, the data approximates (albeit imprecisely) the red-state/blue-state divide between conservative- and liberal-leaning states; the most cat-favouring states tending to be the progressive strongholds of the coasts (notoriously liberal Massachusetts has a 2:1 cat:dog ratio, for example); meanwhile, the states most identified with conservative mindsets (open-carrying, convict-executing Texas, Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Arizona, Mississippi) lean most strongly towards dogs. (An exception is Florida, which narrowly favours cats.) This correlation between political identity and pet preference is borne out in surveys, which show that US liberals are more likely to be cat people (among other things). There are several possible explanations: one could be the correlation between population density and liberalism (city folks lean more liberal than rural/small-town people), and cats being more suitable for smaller living spaces than dogs. Another explanation ties to the theories recently floated by the likes of George Lakoff and Jonathan Haidt; in short, conservatives place more of a premium on loyalty, obedience and knowing one's place in a hierarchy; all of which are exemplary qualities of Canis familiaris. Cats, meanwhile, fail this test, and hence get little love from the right (with the possible exception of libertarians; it has been pointed out that both domestic cats and libertarians are highly dependent on their environments whilst imagining themselves to be wholly sovereign and autonomous). Meanwhile, this piece replicates the correlation between cat appreciation and liberalism (using Facebook likes s a proxy), adding that conservatives seem to be generally less fond of animals, with those liked getting an exception for their utility or symbolism (the animals most liked by self-identified conservatives on Facebook have been deer, eagles and, most of all, turkeys; liberals, meanwhile, like only bats and whales more than cats).

Worldwide, trends become murkier; Russia, styling itself as the core of a new “Conservative International”, is cat country by a 4:3 ratio. Spanish-speaking Latin America has dogs outnumbering cats by more than two to one (with Portuguese-speaking Brazil being slightly more equal); perhaps there's something in Hispanic culture which strongly favours dogs or deems cats inadequate as pets? And while Australia is dog country by an almost 3:2 ratio, New Zealand has twice as many pet cats as pet dogs. It is not clear whether that is a sign of Australia being a more intrinsically conservative country, and it would be interesting to see whether this ratio tracked (or was tracked by) changes of government and culture.

¶ cats culture data journalism dogs politics 0

They call me Wayne Kerr, and if there's one thing I hate… it's records that are available only on LP with a download code; with no CD, and no option to buy just the download.

On one hand, this is an improvement on the previous state of affairs: records being available only on vinyl, with no downloads or digital copies whatsoever, so if you were the kind of weirdo computer-nerd to whom the words “download” and “MP3” meant something, your options would be to rig up one of those USB turntables, play your newly-bought record through them, recording to a WAV file, trim it to the separate tracks and do your best to EQ out the inherent suckiness of vinyl so you'd have something approximating what a hypothetical digital copy would sound like. Or if you don't have a USB turntable or reasonable Audacity skills, you would illegally pirate the digital copy from someone who does. At least with download codes, there is an audio file which hasn't been through the vinyl-transfer wringer. On the other hand, though, you can't have it without also accepting the slab of vinyl it comes with, because Authenticity.

The existence of the download code mockingly acknowledges the shift in ways of listening to music, the fact that not everybody owns a turntable or is willing to partake in the vinyl ceremony (taking the record gingerly out of its anti-static sleeve, placing it reverently in the middle of the vinyl shrine, sitting down cross-legged exactly between the two speakers and, for the 22 minute duration of a side, reverently contemplating the gatefold artwork with a joint in one hand, as one's forebears did in the prelapsarian Sixeventies, when love was free, weed was good and rock was the real thing), and that, with the rise of digital audio and portable sound players, the vinyl record has metamorphosed from the humble, utilitarian carrier of most convenience it was in the age of the teenager's Dansette into a fetish object; one part collectible trophy, one part quasi-religious totem of Authenticity. The denial of downloads on their own affirms the primacy of the cult of vinyl: you will take the vinyl record, it dictates, and you will regard it with quasi-religious reverence, as it is a sacred relic, a splinter of the True Cross, in which is embodied Authenticity.

The cult of vinyl-as-ark-of-Authenticity is a sort of conservative (with a small 'c') reaction to, and attempted brake on, the hurtling pace of technological and social change, which, in less than a lifetime, has rendered ways of engaging with music obsolete. The way people consume music has changed as the amount of music has increased and the price has plummeted; consequently, one has considerably more music at one's disposal than one's parents (or even one's younger self) would have, saving up for a few months to get the new LP by their favourite band and then listening the hell out of it. (A few years ago, Jarvis Cocker said that music has become something like a scented candle; something consumed casually in the background, without one's full rapt attention. Of course, Cocker's reaction to this phenomenon is coloured by the contrast with his own formative experiences in the early 1980s, which in terms of the culture of music consumption, were an extension of the Sixeventies.) Meanwhile, with the world's rising population (there are roughly twice as many people alive today as in 1970) and urban gentrification, the size of the typical residence (i.e., one affordable to one of ordinary means) has shrunk; as such, a nontrivial collection of music in physical format is increasingly becoming a luxury only wealthy eccentrics and rural hermits can afford; and this goes doubly so for space-inefficient formats such as vinyl records. The upshot is that each piece of recorded music in one's collection can expect both less attention and less physical space than might have once been the case. Which is why digital files come in handy. But, of course, that wouldn't be Authentic; when you listen to an MP3, you're not really listening to the recording and having the authentic experience of the music; you're a ghost, alienated from your own music-listening life, listening to a ghost of the music, having a ghost experience that doesn't really exist, not in the way that your dad's experience of the Stone Roses did. Or so the narrative of the vinyl mandate goes. Which is why we are stuck buying a slab of vinyl, opening the package, pulling out the card with the download code, and then putting the actual slab of vinyl in the gap behind the IKEA BILLY bookcase with all the other votive icons of Authenticity, its grooves doomed to never be touched by a gramophone needle. Time goes on and the mass of reluctantly adopted household gods grows.

The vinyl mandate is the product of a Baby Boomer elite (and, to a lesser extent, the Generation X that followed it and absorbed some of its superstitions and prejudices), having aged into seniority and cultural power, staring into the abyss of its own mortality, feeling the chill of rapid change having made its own formative experiences obsolete, recoiling before the sublime terror of one's insignificance in the face of the march of time and desperately clutching for the conditions of its own long-gone youth and virility; since these involved listening to rock'n'roll from vinyl records, it is decreed that the way that they consumed music (record player, reverent contemplation, possible recreational substance use; definitely not with a pair of white earbuds at one's desk or in the gym, and absolutely not sacrilegiously shuffled with the rest of one's collection of music) is the one true, Authentic way of truly connecting and engaging with the music. Granted, many of the artists and label owners who enforce this mandate are too young to have invested in this myth first-hand; perhaps they are motivated by a Couplandian displaced nostalgia for the golden age of authenticity they weren't born in, or perhaps such is the power of cultural transmission that values get propagated beyond the rationale from which they sprang. In any case, the myth persists for now, and we're stuck with piles of vinyl records which will never be played, all for want of a download code.

As for physical artefacts: could they not be something more practical? Personally, if I'm at a merch stand, I'd rather buy a band T-shirt or button badge with a download code affixed to it than a vinyl record with one.

¶ authenticity culture music rants vinyl wayne kerr 0

Who is John Galt?, a rant-cum-manifesto for the disruptive-innovation alpha-bros of the Bay Area tech scene's bacon-wrapped economy:

I'm gentrifying the neighborhood. I'm adding special bus service for my employees. I've figured out a way for white people to make money from taxi cabs again. I'm replacing your favorite restaurant with a reptile park. I'm driving Filipino fusion food trucks on your kid's basketball court. I got next and I'm taking all the vowels out of this shithole.

It's time we divide this state into eleven smaller states with Galt's Gulch consisting of this city and the various gate communities to the north. If you don't like it you can just move to one of the other states like Hoboland and whatever we call the desert where we force all the cholos to drive their low riders.

Meanwhile, a piece by Mark Ames (formerly of The Exile) on the US Libertarian Right's courting of the Bay Area techno-elite at a libertarian-themed conference named Reboot, yet somehow inexplicably booking a theocratic hatemonger to give the keynote, and the sometimes uneasy fit this highlights between Californian-style libertarianism (think along the lines of Robert Anton Wilson's Guns And Dope Party—a bit wild-eyed for the average North London Guardianista, let alone the highly regulated yet highly contented citizens of Jante-law Scandinavia, but moderately cuddly, in a Californian hot-tub kind of way—and you won't be far off) and the older and more unsavoury US Libertarianism that grew out of a reaction to Roosevelt's New Deal and, along the way, took in local strains of fascism and white-supremacism:

And then there’s the uglier, darker side of the Kochs’ libertarianism on display in Reason’s archives: the fringe-right racism and fascism that the movement has tried to downplay in recent years to appeal to progressives and non-loonie techies. Throughout its first two decades, in the 1970s and 1980s, Reason supported apartheid South Africa, and attacked anti-apartheid protesters and sanctions right up to Nelson Mandela’s release, when they finally dropped it.

The two libertarianisms — the hick fascism version owned by the Koch brothers, essentially rebranding Joe McCarthy with a pot leaf and a ponytail; and Silicon Valley’s emerging brand of optimistic, half-understood libertarianism, part hippie cybernetics, part hot-tub-Hayek — should have met and merged right there in the Bay Area. And yet — they really were different, fundamentally different. The libertarianism of the Kochs is a direct descendant of the Big Business reaction against FDR’s New Deal, when the DuPont oligarchy created the American Liberty League to undo new laws establishing Social Security and labor union rights. Their heroes are the America Firsters led by Charles Lindbergh. And they haven’t stopped fighting that fight to dismantle the New Deal and everything that followed, even though most Americans have only a dim understanding of what that political war was about, and how its redistribution of political power still shapes our politics today. For the Kochs and their die-hard brand of libertarianism, that war with FDR and the New Deal is fresh and raw, and still far from resolved.

¶ ayn rand california gentrification libertarianism rightwingers san francisco usa 0

Prompted by a 1980s-themed end-of-term disco at her son's school, actual 1980s musician Tracey Thorn (of Everything But The Girl) has written a piece on how decades develop official versions, which often bear little resemblance to the experience of those who lived them. (And, being in the New Statesman, the subtext is that the official versions are a hegemonic discourse of the winners; the 80s are essentially shoulder-padded Thatcherism and Duran Duran, with not a Red Wedge badge to be seen; the 70s Abba, flares and disco, and the 1990s will inevitably be summed up as football-terrace Britpop and Tony Blair's reptilian smile):

Who decides these things? Is it simply that history is written by the victors, so that those who seemingly “won” a decade get to determine what it was like, what it meant? The airbrushing of entire eras has become almost Stalinist in its refusal to allow for complexities, alternatives, or the possibility that various things were happening at any one time. It’s apparently too difficult to understand that there was more than one point of view, one style of fashion, one type of record. Instead we simplify, and homogenise, and boil everything down to a few bullet points. Films and TV dramas are often guilty of this, representing the Sixties, for instance, in a house filled with Verner Panton chairs and Lucienne Day curtains. I grew up in the Sixties and, like most houses, ours was full of dark wooden furniture from the past sitting comfortably next to a recently bought, and therefore period-appropriate, coffee table.

My friend the writer Dave Haslam wrote a whole book (Not Abba) objecting to what he calls the “Abbafication of the Seventies”, in which he quite correctly points out how depressing and demeaning it is to have reduced that decade to a kind of fancy-dress parade of wigs and flares, platforms and glitter, averting our eyes from the vivid realities of “IRA bombs, PLO hijackings, overt racism, football hooliganism, Linda Lovelace, Mean Streets and Apocalypse Now . . .” Similarly I can see how the story of the Nineties is gradually shrinking and contracting, until pretty soon all that’ll be left will be Britpop, and a party that once happened at 10 Downing Street; everything else just a blur, or omitted completely.

¶ 1980s culture everything but the girl history tracey thorn 0

A report in The Verge from a conference in Las Vegas about the business side of electronic dance music (EDM). EDM is not to be confused with the electronic dance music that older readers will remember; the 303-heavy acid-house played in underground clubs in Chicago and New York in the 1980s, the rave-techno that crusties dropped E to in illegal (and definitely undermonetised) raves during the Second Summer of Love, or even the glossier house/trance that superclubs played in the 1990s and 00s, but is a new phenomenon, as different as rock'n'roll was from jump blues. Having moved to Las Vegas, cut its name down, Diddy-fashion, to three VIP-worthy letters, and replaced the loved-up Goa-beach hippyisms with some high-octane all-American shock-and-awe, EDM has had an extreme makeover, and in doing so, not so much sold out as absorbed the whole concept of commercialism and monetisation and become one with it. The fans, apparently, couldn't be happier with it (or so the boosters of the brand synergies say, of course); on some level, being part of a super-hot marketing demographic is this generation's equivalent of the distinctly shabbier solidarity of being a Mod or a punk or whatever your grandparents did because there was nobody around to sell them energy drinks or LED jewellery.

Not surprisingly, people who love electronic music also love electronics. They have "a high propensity to purchase high-tech devices versus other genres, making them ideal for partnerships in the mobile and tech space," Simonian said. They’re more likely than other music listeners to purchase songs after hearing them in an ad. They’re also 50 percent more likely to buy energy drinks and 18 percent less likely to buy diet soda — presumably because they spend too much time dancing to worry about calories, Simonian joked. They spend more of their music money on live events, and they’re trendsetters — EDM listeners are generally regarded as "key influencers" among their peers.

Festivals also offer fertile ground for millennials, a generation entirely unfamiliar with the concept of selling out, to engage in "brand immersion." Swedish House Mafia pioneered the trend when they partnered with Absolut in 2012, releasing a single called "Greyhound" — named after the popular combination of vodka and grapefruit juice — that featured the trio behind a roboticized race dog on its cover. The move successfully cast the cocktail as an EDM staple, and the band incorporated the digital dog into its visuals for an Absolut-sponsored tour. Simonian says Nielsen’s research has revealed that electronic music fans "want brands to sponsor artists." If this concept sounds like "selling out" to you, your problem might be that you were born before 1990, or that you were raised on some form of punk rock ethos that requires strict division between creativity and capital (I’m guilty of both). Selling out is an alien concept in the EDM market — when Simonian says that fans want brands to sponsor artists, it might just mean that fans are happy to see their favorite producers making a decent wage to create amazing music.

So when I hear Skrillex in a Best Buy commercial, hear Calvin Harris teaming up with Rihanna, or a mediocre deadmau5 rip-off while I’m browsing through the underwear section of Target, I can only smile contentedly: finally, the sound I wanted to hear everywhere when I was growing up is actually everywhere. EDM has become the first "voice of a generation" that openly accepts a partner all other types of music bristled at: unabashed capitalism.

¶ authenticity commercialism culture edm music 0

In January 2012, Facebook conducted a psychology experiment on 689,003 unknowing users, modifying the stories they saw in their news feeds to see whether this affected their emotional state. The experiment was automatically performed over one week by randomly selecting users and randomly assigning them to two groups; one had items with positive words like “love” and “nice” filtered out of their news feeds, whereas the other had items with negative words similarly removed; the software then tracked the affect of their status updates to see whether this affected them. The result was that it did: a proportion of those who saw only positive and neutral posts tended to be more cheerful than those who saw only negative and neutral ones. (The experiment, it must be said, was entirely automated, with human researchers never seeing the users' identities or posts.)

Of course, this sort of experiment sounds colossally unethical, not to mention irresponsible. The potential adverse consequences are too easy to imagine, and too hard to comfortably dismiss. If some 345,000 people's feeds were modulated to feed them a week of negativity in the form of what they thought were their friends' updates, what proportion of those were adversely affected beyond feeling bummed out for a week? Out of 345,000, what would be the expected amount of relationship breakups, serious arguments, alcoholic relapses, or even incidents of self-harm that may have been set off by the online social world looking somewhat bleaker and more joyless? And while it may seem that the other cohort, who got a week's worth of sunshine and rainbows, were done a favour, this is not the case; riding the heady rush of good vibes, some of them may have made bad decisions; taking gambles on bad odds because they felt lucky, or dismissing warning signs of problems. And then there's the fact that messages from their friends and family members were deliberately not shown to them if they went against the goals of the experiment. What if someone in the negative cohort was cut off from communications with a loved one far away, for just long enough to introduce a grain of suspicion into their relationship, or someone in the positive cohort didn't learn about a close friend's problems and was unable to offer support?

In academe, this sort of thing would not pass an ethics committee, where informed consent is required. However, Facebook is not an academic operation, but a private entity operating in the mythical wild frontier of the Free Market, where anything both parties consent to (“consent” here being defined in the loosest sense) goes. And when you signed up for a Facebook account, you consented to them doing pretty much whatever they like with your personal information and the relationships mediated through their service. If you don't like it, that's fine; it's a free market, and you're welcome to delete your account go to Google Plus. Or if Google's ad-targeting and data mining don't appeal, to build your own service and persuade everyone you wish to keep in touch with to use it. (Except that you can't; these aren't the wild 1990s, when a student could build LiveJournal in his dorm room; nowadays, the legal liabilities and regulatory compliance requirements would keep anyone other than multinational corporations with deep pockets out of the game.) Or go back to emailing a handful of friends, in the hope that they'll reply to your emails in the spare time left over after keeping up with Facebook. Or only socialising with people who live within walking distance of the same pub as you. Or, for that matter, go full Kaczynski and live in a shack in the woods. And when you've had enough of trapping squirrels for your food and mumbling to yourself as you stare at the corner each night, you can slink back to the bright lights, tail between your legs, reconnect with Mr. Zuckerberg's Magical Social Casino, where all your friends are, and once again find yourself privy to sweet, sweet commercially-mediated social interaction. In the end, we all come back. We know that, in this age, the alternative is self-imposed exile and social death, and so does Facebook, so they can do what they like to us.

As novel as this may seem, this is another instance of the neoliberal settlement, tearing up prior settlements and regulations in favour of a flat, market-based system, rationalised by a wilful refusal to even consider the disparities of power dynamics (“there is no such thing as an unfair deal in a free market, because you can always walk away and take a better offer from one of the ∞ other competitors”, goes the argument taken to its platygæan conclusion). Just as in deregulated economies, classes of participants (students, patients, passengers) all become customers, with their roles and rights replaced by what the Invisible Hand Of The Free Market deals out (i.e., what the providers can get away with them acquiescing to when squeezed hard enough), here those using a means of communication become involuntary guinea pigs in a disruptive, and (for half of them) literally unpleasant experiment. All that Facebook has to provide, in theory, is something marginally better than social isolation, and everything is, by definition, as fair as can be.

Facebook have offered an explanation, saying that the experiment was intended to “make the content people see as relevant and engaging as possible”. Which, given the legendarily opaque Facebook feed algorithm, and how it determines which of your friends' posts get a look into the precious spaces between the ads and sponsored posts, is small comfort. Tell you what, Facebook: why don't you stop trying to make my feed more “relevant” and “engaging” and just give me what my friends, acquaintances and groups post, unfiltered and in chronological order, and let me filter it as I see fit?

¶ ethics facebook neoliberalism psychology social software 0 Share

A gothic horror portrait of Tony Blair as a vaguely Nyarlathotepian manifestation of the eldritch and fathomlessly malevolent:

Tony Blair is old, older than time itself. Beyond left and right, beyond right and wrong, beyond age and death. When the first cave-dwellers made the first image of their god, Tony Blair was there with his shiny spiv’s suit to suggest that it might require a blood sacrifice. When the first half-fish heaved itself out from the boiling sea to flap around in the sodden tidal slime, Tony Blair was there with his cold intense stare to offer it words of vague encouragement and then crush its head under his heel. When the first drifting clouds of interstellar dust began to coalesce into what would one day become our little speckled world, the bodiless malice of Tony Blair was there to help them set the stage for our future suffering.

Older and wiser societies than ours knew about Tony Blair, and they knew to be afraid. Throughout history he’s arrived among the homes of men and promised a very slightly better life, before suddenly carrying out inexplicable destruction.The Sumerians knew him as Tešgali, a snake-demon twenty miles long, who would enter a walled city in the guise of a man, and then uncoil his vast scaly bulk and devour everything inside. This knowledge was passed on to the early Christian Gnostics, who called him Tialdabaoth, the blind creator-god with the head of a lion and a serpent’s tail, architect of all madness, who created this world out of spite and envy and who tried to prevent the first humans from eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Country folk of the Middle Ages were terrified of the bálfar, creatures of beguiling appearance but malicious intent, who lived in the marshes and the wildernesses but would sneak into human villages by night.

But soon after that something changed. With the dawn of the Enlightenment people stopped believing in the old horrors that lurk in the dark corners of reality. The universe was no longer a grand stage for the cosmic clash of good and evil, and God became a kind of divine tinkerer, neatly slotting all the cogs of his Newtonian machine together and leaving it to run with a steady tick. We thought we could understand the world, and so when Tony Blair returned we didn’t even see him for what he really is. We should have known better, but we thought he was just a politician.

(via MeFi) ¶ fiction horror politics tony blair 0 Share

With American Apparel sacking its sexually inappropriate ur-visionary Dov Charney with extreme prejudice, and the recent fall from grace of hipster-porn photographer Terry Richardson, we could be witnessing the twilight of the assholes (or as they call it in Germany, Arschlocherdämmerung) and possibly the end of a vein of ostensibly-ironic hipster misogyny and douchebag chic:

But it’s interesting to think a little bit more deeply about that culture’s gender politics. The hipster aesthetic, such as it was, incorporated plenty of semi-ironic appropriation of the tropes of traditional masculinity: trucker hats, flannel shirts, PBR, beards/mustaches, and so on. I say semi-ironic because beneath the veneer of irony, there was always something deeply conservative and deeply unpleasant about it. Specifically, it was reflective of a wider shift in the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s toward the reassertion of traditional alpha-male masculinity.

[t]here’s nothing transgressive about any of this. American Apparel’s aesthetic, for instance, was the most time-worn cliché in the world: using hot girls in various states of undress to sell clothes. Of course, American Apparel’s aesthetic was all about irony, or so it’d have you believe, but really, whether this was done with a sort of knowingly arched eyebrow and sly wink is kinda beside the point; saying “Hey, I know I’m being kinda sexist” doesn’t change the fact that you’re being kinda sexist. The fact that the half-naked girl being used to sell your clothes is in a deliberately flashed-out photo wearing silly glasses doesn’t change that she’s a half-naked girl being used to sell your clothes.

¶ american apparel assholes hipsters irony vice magazine 0 Share

With the release of an extended reissue of the NME C86 cassette (which gave its name, fairly or unfairly, to a genre of shambolic/jangly guitar-pop by predominantly white people in their early 20s, and/or was instrumental in the redefinition of the term “indie” from meaning non-major-label recorded music in general to meaning a certain style of guitar-based pop), there is an interview with members of several of the bands on the original compilation, where they talk about their creative motivations and what they were getting at in their songs:

Greg Keeffe (Big Flame): Punk happened, and then there was this incredible accelerated culture. ’78 was new wave, in ’79 you had the Specials, by ’80 you had Postcard [Records] and Gang of Four and the Slits. It was an incredible period of time. And then this goth thing happened, and I absolutely hated goth. I thought it was like heavy metal — a return to the bad old days. We were the antithesis of goth. Our raison d’être was to kill goth.

David Gedge (the Wedding Present): When we were in the studio recording our third single, we ended up with two versions of a song called “This Boy Can Wait” — a short version and an “extended” version. There was some discussion as to which version to use on the single. The C86 invitation actually came at the perfect time, because it meant that we could use both. I think it was our drummer, Shaun, who came up with the idea of calling the extended version “This Boy Can Wait (A Bit Longer).”

Kev Hopper (Stump): For “Buffalo,” I came up with a bass line that was full of discords and slides. Mick had this silly idea that Americans were buffalo reincarnated, and ["Buffalo"] was a satire about Americans in London: “How do I get off the bus,” “Does the fish have chips.” I remember David Thomas from Pere Ubu disliking it.

Nikolai Galen (the Shrubs): Every generation is unique, and every generation is less unique than it thinks it is.

¶ c86 culture indie 0 Share

I am currently spending some time in Barcelona, once again on occasion of the Primavera festival.

Whilst in the narrow, winding streets of the old town, I noticed a marmot-shaped door knocker on one door. This immediately brought to mind the French idiomatic expression croquer le marmot (to stand hesitantly at a door with one's hand over the door knocker, without following through), marmot-shaped door knockers presumably being customary in those days. This expression was, of course, memorably gifted to the English language as “to craunch the marmoset” by Pedro Carolino, the non-English-speaking Portuguese author of English As She Is Spoke, an unintentionally surreal (and, needless to say, entirely unusable) Portuguese-English phrasebook.

A contemporary equivalent of craunching the marmoset would presumably involve hovering over the SEND button in one's email client or something similar.

¶ barcelona language pedro carolino travel 0 Share