#Yes! not everyday or anything but quite often (same with cassettes)

[unliked-apologist]

hirako shinji headcanons

these were originally posted on Reddit. now they're here. enjoy.

He has lucky socks that he wears to fight Hollows. What makes them lucky is something that the other Visored find to be a mystery, since they look the same as his other socks, but if Shinji's fighting Hollows he's wearing his lucky socks. As a result, he's put on laundry duty a disproportionate amount of the time, because no one wants to deal with the tantrum he'd throw if someone mismatched his godforsaken lucky socks.

In the part of the warehouse that is his bedroom, he has a shelf of hair products. He rarely uses them, but sometimes he'll show up to dinner with a barrette holding his bangs out of his eyes, or a temporary streak of blue dye framing his face.

He loves it when someone brushes his hair out, especially when it's longer. There's just something so relaxing about the feeling of fingers tangling in his hair, guiding the knots out...he could fall asleep like that. He does, sometimes. When he's too wound up to sleep, or too antsy from days on the couch, Rose will sit down behind him and put little braids in his hair until he drifts off.

Shinji doesn't go shopping very often, but when he does, he splurges. From buying an entire piano without prior notice to hiring someone to install highlighter-orange carpets in the warehouse, the other Visored know better than to give him their savings and let him shop alone.

Despite the fact that he's a known paperwork procrastinator, he's very good at focusing when he wants to. He tends to hyperfixate on certain things - as Captain, he'd sit at his desk for hours at night, long after everyone else left the compound, and read through pages of everything from complaints to the Seireitei Bulletin.

He can play the piano. Not as well as Rose - which isn't saying much, since nobody can play the piano as well as Rose - but he's certainly better than average. He'd been in the human world during the birth and spread of Jazz, and would sit in front of an old piano every evening and work his way through Maple Leaf Rag. He taught himself to play.

Sometimes, the ties he wears make him panic. He wears them anyways, since he likes the way they look, but while the weight around his neck is usually comforting, there are times when they'll feel too tight and constricting and for a moment, he's not in the present but back in Seireitei, watching his friends' faces turn to Hollow bone. The tie-like cloth he wears once he regains his position as Captain is looser, and was designed to allow movement and air better than a regular human tie.

Shinji is stubborn. He'll focus on something and not let it go, until it takes over everything else. Once he has an opinion of someone, he rarely changes it. Some people deal with change well, are able to adapt to any environment. He is not one of those people.

(And maybe that's part of why he took his exile so badly. The human world is nothing like Soul Society, and part of him refused to believe that the human world was, in fact, his new home. He loves the human world, with it's strange inventions and funny quirks, but it isn't Soul Society.)

He's not a huge fan of tea. Partially because Aizen had liked tea, and there are indeed certain aromas of the stuff that will make him sick to his stomach, but mostly because boiling leaves in water had never really appealed to him. Sometimes he'll make a hot chocolate, when he's spoiling himself. He loves the tiny marshmallows, leaves them in his mug until all the hot chocolate is gone and then he'll scoop out the marshmallows with a spoon and eat them in one bite.

He's traveled quite a bit, especially in the early years of his exile. Harlem, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, New Orleans, even London - Shinji's seen more of the world than any of the other Visored.

Despite the fact that he's the strongest of the Visored, he isn't their leader. Not really. He bosses around Hiyori, and she throws things at him, and he'll order Kensei to make lunch when he's feeling particularly lazy, but he isn't the leader. He's distant from them, a little. Sure, he goes places with them and trains with them and eats meals with them, but it was his lieutenant that was responsible for their exile. He feels a responsibility for their situation that none of the others do.

All of the Visored have found ways to spend their time. Love and Rose loose themselves in manga, Lisa in swimsuit catalogues, Kensei in cooking and weightlifting. Shinji looses himself in his head. He'll sit on the old couch Hachi'd found on the side of the road two decades back, sprawled on his back with his feet and head hanging over the armrests. He'll spend hours like that.

Shinji is old. Older than Aizen and Urahara and any of the other Visored. He's one of the older Captains; younger than Unohana and Ukitake and Kyoraku, but decades the other Captains' senior.

He'd achieved Shikai quickly, had been hearing Sakanade's voice since before he got his hands on an asuachi. Bankai took him far longer. The average time Bankai training takes is a decade - Shinji was working with Sakanade for almost a century. He'd always got along with his zanpakuto, but harnessing Sakanade's power without loosing himself? That was harder.

He's bad at staying on one place. When he did do his paperwork, it'd never be sitting at his desk. He'd lay on the ground on his stomach, legs kicked up behind him; he'd sit on his desk with a stack of papers on his lap; he'd lay upside-down with his head near the wall and write with his papers against the wall and ink dripping on his face. In the human world, even if he does spend far too much time sulking on the couch, he'll shift from hanging over the back to sliding down until his head's on the floor.

He has terrible spice tolerance. Kensei cooks curry, sometimes, and Shinji'll just order out on those nights. Spicy food makes his eyes water and nose run and mouth burn, and he hates it.

For all of Shinji's moping and laying about, he really does enjoy doing things. He's the one to drag the Visored out for holidays and celebrations. He gets really into them, too; from specially ordering kimonos to hand-making everyone lanterns for Obon, he's throws himself into special occasions with a vigor that's very unlike his everyday self.

(The arcade in Karakura, a small decrepit-looking building next to a hair salon, has Shinji's name at the top of almost every high score list. On one or two of the games, Love's name is just under Shinji's. The arcade manager knows Shinji, calls out to him on the street: "Hirako! How're you doing?")

When Hiyori and Kensei are being a bit too loud, or when Shinji gets so antsy shifting positions on the couch doesn't settle him, he goes to the playground. He'll climb on the monkey bars and hang upside-down and talk to the kids around him.

Something that wears on Shinji especially hard is the secrecy the Visored need to maintain. Even around the humans, Shinji can't make too large an impression, can't make real friends. Sooner or later, they'd start wondering why Shinji doesn't age. The arcade manager's memory had to be removed, after a few years. When Shinji or the others leave their warehouse, they have to do their best to be unremarkable. When they slip up, sure, Urahara's there with a gadget to fix memories, but it's hard for Shinji to be unable to form a relationship with anyone outside of the Visored. For all of the ways his personality can be abrasive, Shinji really does like spending time with others.

Shinji got a Walkman as soon as they were available in stores. Even later, when cassette tapes were replaced with CDs, he still keeps batteries in his Walkman (even if he doesn't use it). If Rose collects instruments, Shinji collects music.

The other Visored find Shinji confusing. He personality contradicts itself. He spends days lounging on the couch not doing anything, but will suddenly decide that 'it's time for a family trip, guys, we're going to Tokyo'. They love him just the same, but wish he wasn't as high management.

(Shinji is old, yes, but there are times when he feels even younger than Mashiro and Hiyori.)

#tryin' to start shit? naw. #bleach #hirako shinji #shinji hirako #headcanons #&oh yes i spent a lot of time on this #&im hyperfixating on shinji in case you cant tell #from Reddit

[vaultofqueenorion]

Review of The Handmaid’s Tale

This book hit me like a ton of bricks. I get a sick feeling every time I think seriously of it, and it chilled me all the way to the bone. And yet, it is such an incredible book, in all its psychological horror. I think the worst part is that I see attributes and slivers of the book in everyday life. There’s a truth to it, and it doesn’t ring hollow. 

Read the book. But read the book only if you can stomach it, because it is truly gruelling. I would never call this a good book. Interesting, observant, thought-provoking, yes. But it is not one that has ever or ever will bring me entertainment.

Trigger warnings / TW / Content warnings: the book goes into detached detail with rape, forced pregnancy, murder, hanging, angry mobs tearing apart living people, shootings, killings, massacres and total oppression. Do not read if you are sensitive to any of these subjects. 

The Title

The title befits the book in two ways; first, it is the tale of Offred (as we know her only), a handmaiden to the Commander. The Commander is likely Frederick R. Waterford, as is discussed in the epilogue of the book, but that is never confirmed. 

What is a handmaiden, you ask, if you have never seen the popular Hulu series or heard of the book. A handmaiden is a woman (girl in the book to remove agency) that is ‘bound’ to a married couple who are unable to conceive children - in the book, we hear only of the whereabouts of the handmaidens of the Commanders and their Wives. 

The handmaiden is stripped of her name, her family, her identity, and she has to serve the couple - she is forced to give them children in a twisted ritual that apparently has root in biblical texts. Basically, she is raped in the presence of the couple in order to bear children for barren women who could otherwise not do so. 

The title also refers to the name of the ‘item’ which is a series of cassettes written into a manuscript discussed at the conference of the ‘Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies’ in the year 2195. 

It is a has-been; a recollection of the events recorded by the same woman from whom we read the story, and the speaker at the conference makes several jokes throughout his speech to keep the mood light and the audience entertained. 

It is a detached study in the history of America when it crumbled to a totalitarian patriarchal society that oppressed women in drastical terms and through drastic means. 

The Characters

Offred is meek yet strong-willed. Outspoken yet scared. It is as if she lives as a chameleon, never quite touching the ground of who she really is, but instead latching on to the world and society around her. 

The most remarkable thing about her is, in fact, her normality. She wonders, she becomes angry and yet she doesn’t do anything. Because what can one person do against overwhelming odds? When the other option is death, do you choose to live in submission?

The quote is one that I feel sums up her character. Instead of raging at the world like the heroes we see in stories, she tries to change the very core of her being to align with the wishes of new society. 

She does what many ordinary people would do, simply because fear is one damn powerful motivator. She feels she has no other choice. And she holds on to hope, throughout it all. Hope that she might - just might - see her daughter or her husband again. Hope that she might break free. 

We never do find out whether she finds absolution for that hope or not. 

The Commander lives a parallel life to the handmaidens. In all actuality it seems he lives a parallel life to the women of the dystopian world. He says that he wants Offred to have a pleasant or at least bearable existence, but what he does is that he gets her to indulge in things that he wants to do. He dresses her up and parades her around in secret bars where other girls are ‘working’ as if he owns her - which shows us that he kind of believes that he does. 

Even when he gives Offred something - a magazine - he doesn’t really think of how it is for her.

It is not only ignorance - it is also a lack of wanting to know. He simply doesn’t care enough about her existence to know that she cannot do so. Or he pretends to, playing the ‘good guy’ who doesn’t have anything to do with the hellscape Offred lives in. 

The thing is, this kind of ignorance is commonly participated in throughout society - just take a look at the men who say that they suddenly ‘understand how women feel’ when they pose as women online. Or the white people who ‘never knew how bad POC had it’ because they simply never bothered to look. 

It just hits a little too close to home, that’s all.

Serena Joy / the Commander’s wife is a chilling person. To be a woman, to see what is being done to other women, and yet still somehow hating them for it, as if it isn’t the higher up around her - including her own husband - who have orchestrated this. 

And then there’s this quote:

It does have several meanings to it. To Joy it means that she longs for children, that she wants them so badly that she will do anything in her power to get them. To Offred it means that if she cannot provide a strange family with children through rape, she will be shipped off to a faraway place where she will likely starve to death

Perspective, indeed.

Offred wants so desperately for her friend and the personification of the rebellion in her mind, Moira, to go out in a ball of fire. To burn the whole damn thing to the ground and either walk away, a cigarette in hand, or die trying. 

It seems that there is something in her that longs to be near her, as if Moira is the ideal that she strives towards, and when she never hears from her or sees her again, there is a melancholy and yet an emptiness to her words. 

She talks about their relationship once, before it all went to hell, and this quote is from that:

Luke. Luke, Luke, Luke. Offred misses Luke, and of course she does. He was her husband, the man she was waiting on while he cheated on his then partner, and the father of Offred’s daughter. And yet. 

I hated him so much. 

Just the mention of him sent spiders crawling down my spine, and really, the cheating was bad enough. Even worse was the small signs of misogyny - him saying that Offred losing her job was no big deal, that they would get through it together. Him joking with her about it - about how she could stay at home now, how he would have the power. 

No, I really didn’t like that casual display of superiority. 

Offred’s daughter is part of the next generation of Wives. Sent off to some lucky childless family, this eight year old girl will be groomed and bred into the oppression around her, and at some point, she will stop questioning the world. 

After all, as Aunt Lydia said to Offred:

Offred’s mother is a full-blooded feminist, which causes her to be shipped off to die early on. She’s an abortion advocate, and one of her most telling quotes is:

As a reply to when Offred in the past says that Luke’s teasings are nothing. But the mother understands. Understands the work that it has taken to get this far, and the work that needs to be done, lest they slip back into oppression.

And you know what? People languished in their complacency at the time of the coup, and the totalitarian society crept into the shadows, settling more and more and consuming the light as time passed by.

The Plot

The plot is really not the remarkable part of this story. Yes, Offred goes to town, befriends a fellow handmaid (this one is part of the resistance, peeps!), attends the ceremony, is taken to the Commander’s office, then later to the forbidden bar. 

The places aren’t so much important as what Offred observes. The small injustices, the doctors and scientists handing from the Wall, the Particicution in which the handmaids tear a man apart because he has allegedly raped someone (which is then told to be untrue; he is part of the resistance group, and handmaids murdering him with their bare hands is a good way for the totalitarian government to get rid of him). 

In truth, the handmaids have no real chance of getting themselves out, if they do not collaborate with Mayday, the resistance group. In truth, they are stuck in their miserable places, and that is why one of the earliest quotes from Offred is so chilling:

This is also why the handmaids live with the bare minimum of utilities - they are watched as they bathe, no light fixtures are present, matches are forbidden, knives unsupervised are forbidden. 

Because so many have killed themselves in desperation to get out of the hell that they have found themselves in. 

The Language

Margaret Atwood especially puts focus on the horror of the world that Offred lives in through two means; the conference / historical notes at the end of the story which brings a light and humorous view on the totalitarian society, and the on-the-verge-but-not-quite tone of hopelessness that Offred uses to describe her tales through. 

Aunt Lydia is often the catalyst for this kind of hopelessness. In the times where Offred tried to convince herself that this really is better. That the world is not quite as bleak, and that she actually has it better now than before.

It is a form of brainwashing that is already beginning to form. And what else can she do, one might think. She has to survive somehow. 

And yet, she brings herself to rekindle a fire once in a while. To open the lid on the anger, the resentment, the fierce cruelty of the world that she is faced with. It is something that she does internally, and one of the more prominent moments of this is when she is faced with the Commander in his office. 

The butter in this scenario refers to a tiny rebellion - an act of survival in a way that goes against the schemes and oppression of the world around the handmaidens. The most telling thing is that he laughs at her - as if the way of coping, the secret tips that are being shared between the handmaidens is nothing more than child’s play.

And it probably is to him. 

With a good standing, a good life and a sweet deal compared to the majority of this society that he helped create, he would never think to ‘stoop’ to such methods. 

The oppression is strong in this one, is all I have to say. 

Notes and worthy mentions

The Ceremony. Ooooh, the Ceremony. Of the most convoluted, terrible scenes I have ever had the displeasure of reading, this detached form of rape, explained as the rape is occuring, was terrifying and horrifying and I really, truly never want to read anything like it again.

Also, Offred calls it something else. She doesn’t want to call it rape, because she feels as if she had a choice - not much choice, but still choice. 

One thing that ticked me off was the mention of Mayday and the Underground Femaleroad - the latter a smuggling ring made to get the women out of their horrible positions. 

And the person at the historical conference calls it a Frailroad. Yes, it’s a shortening of female and road, but dang. And the worst thing is? It is totally realistic as to how it would probably be called - just look at how we treat the witch trials or say feminazi if a feminist speaks up about something that’s a ‘little too radical’. I call BS, is all, even if it just goes to show that Margaret Atwood knows what she’s doing when she writes. 

In conclusion

It is not a good book. It is magnificent in the way it portrays something that many women feel at least slivers of and amplifies them in a way that pierces your heart and leaves you dangling at its mercy. 

Books are meant to entertain, yes, but they are also meant to challenge, to inquire, and to make you think. Rarely has a book stayed with me for this long after I have read it, and rarely have I seen more parallels from the world we live in capable of being drawn to this hellscape that Margaret Atwood has created.

There is truth in this horrifically fantastic book. And this means that I cannot help but give it five paws out of five. The alternative would have been to have given it zero, but the thing is that I have seen society in such a new light after reading this that it wouldn’t have been fair. 

#the handmaid's tale #Offred #review #book review #bookblr #Book #dystopia #serena joy #moira #feminist #oppression

[fandom-star]

Transgender Pride Month Challenge

So, I'm an admin on a trans meme/info account on Instagram, and one of the guys on there sent this to our chat, so I thought I'd do it on here.

1. My name is Elliott or Ell. I am asexual and bi/panromantic (both fit me so I use both) and I am a transmasculine non-binary person.

2. The only proper coming out I've had was with my mum. I don't feel like putting it here, it's somewhere on my blog. Most of the time I've either given my friends my Tumblr knowing they'd figure it out or I've just dropped a thousand hints in group chats! I dunno, I just prefer coming out like that with people I know will be okay with it.

3. I've probably always had an idea, at least since I was about 8, but after the age of 10 I kind of went into a fair bit of denial and threw myself into being a fangirl. I eventually realised I should look into it in May 2018, when I first identified as a demigirl.

4. I am not on hormones. It's probably something I'll look into doing maybe in my mid twenties for half a year, maybe a year, to get the extent of the effects that I want, but I don't think I'd stay on for much more than a year.

5. My support system is mostly my friends. 

6. My chest, my deadname (mostly seeing it written), sometimes my voice, sometimes my height.

7. When I decided to change my name (July 2018 when I was exploring the possibility of being a trans guy) the one thing I knew was that I wanted to still be able to feasibly use the nickname Ell. So I basically looked around online for names with that sound in them. I ended up with about five or six and wrote down the pros and cons of them all. The only con on the name Elliott was that there was a guy in my form class with the same name (Elliot), whereas the others usually had about two. So I chose Elliott.

8. I haven't had much of a transition journey. I had my hair cut short in July 2018. Had my first irl coming out in September 2018 as non-binary to a friend who figured it out. July 2019 I changed my name. July and August 2019 I came out to my mum (if you followed me then you'll know what that story is and why it was over two months). November 2019 I went to a comic con with my friends which was my first time being openly non-binary in public, and I also bought my first pronoun badge there. Later in the month, my mum bought me a pronoun badge. December 2019 my best friend bought me my first binder. And some point before September 2020 I will have come out on my personal Instagram.

9. I don't think I have any regrets. I feel like I shouldn't have any, because everything I have done has brought me here, and I'm happy where I am. Maybe I regret backing out of coming out on Instagram last month, because I was gonna try coming out on 1st of July, but with everything happening I felt like it was a really inappropriate time.

10. My binder is a blue half tank from GC2B. His name is Robbie. I can't be bothered to take a photo!

11. My definite transition goals are to legally change my name and gender (but only when the UK legally recognises non-binary people, until then imma confuse people by having a masculine legal name but being legally recognised as female!) and have a chest reduction. As I said earlier, I'm definitely considering testosterone, but the two effects I definitely want from it are facial hair and a deeper voice, both of which I could probably achieve to an extent without the involvement of T. (I basically have the ability to grow a beard naturally, but I never have because mum's worried about me being bullied or whatever if it gets too much.)

14. I am single and have never been in a relationship. I know, I know, the shock and the horror of a 16 year old having never been in a relationship, but I'm permanently anxious about everything, and I don't develop crushes very often and the last two I've had have been on friends, one of which doesn't live near me and I've never met in person, so.... Yeah, and that means I can't really say whether people knowing I'm trans or not has had any difference in them being attracted to me.

15. Obviously, I'm not completely out right now, but when I do come out I will be quite open about it. There's no real way to be stealth as a non-binary person, so that's not really a possibility. Even on the trans masc side of things, I don't think I'd ever be able to be stealth nor do I really want to be. For one, my transition plans don't exactly allow for it particularly, but also, while being referred to as male is highly preferable to being referred to as female, if I can have control over it, I won't be seen as strictly either.

16. I think I stand with the majority when I say that the only concern I can think of around transitioning is transphobia. Especially with my classmates, because while some of them are amazing (hello the whole five of you here) there's a lot of casual transphobia and explicit mockery of non-binary people at my school. It's one of the reasons I really hope our pride group continues when I start back at Sixth Form in September, because I feel like we could do a lot to combat that.

17. I mean, I guess I basically went over fear of rejection in 16, but I guess I could extend on that by explaining why I don't really mention my dad in regards to all this. Basically, I haven't come out to him about anything regarding my queer identity. This isn't necessarily because of him being explicitly homophobic or transphobic (he's never said anything homophobic ever and seemingly supports my going to pride events), it's mostly because our relationship is somewhat distant. We don't have an awful lot to do with each other outside of sharing interests. And he tends to be averse to anything "new". So, yes, I fear that if I came out to my father about being non-binary he would react by either ignoring it or me or not believing me.

20. September 2016 vs Today, June 2020

21. Something I'm most proud of relating to being trans... ooh! Probably the time I went out for lunch with my mum and my granny (who is basically deaf) and being called "sir" and "young man" by two different waiters while mum went to the toilet. The reason that's such an amazing moment for me is because I was feeling extremely dysphoric about how long my hair was getting, so I wasn't even making any attempt to look at all masculine. 

22. Things that make me euphoric are binding, people saying my name, listening to recordings of my voice (a lot of the time it sounds a lot more androgynous than I expect) and seeing photos of myself in cosplay.

23. Music. Very generic! Um... I have a Spotify playlist of songs to listen to when I feel dysphoric. Speaking of Spotify playlists, most of them are based on ships or characters. My username is seltudoor. I have a rather large record collection and an old record player/radio/cassette player that used to be my dad's that I think is from the 80s. Everything else you know! Classic rock, Sinatra and all that.

24. Freddie Mercury is the love of my life (HA!) and my role model. I have put into words why somewhere on my music blog, but I can't exactly remember. It goes a bit deeper than that he wasn't afraid to be true to himself. I also have an entire post about my trans role model Lou Sullivan that I made last June. In short, he was the first trans man to medically transition as an openly gay man who was also a badass, though I mainly say that because towards the end of his life (he died from AIDS complications) he wrote that, although the medical system didn't recognise him as a gay man, it seemed as though he was going to die like one.

25. Weirdest fact about me. Hmm... not sure I have any weird facts. My bookshelf organisation has two aspects to it that I don't think I've seen anyone else have. I group them by genre and order them by publication date from earliest to latest.

26. Things that cross my mind a lot. The fact that I should really be doing some writing instead of reading another fanfiction or watching another YouTube video that spoils most of Merlin for me. I don't know really.

27. You can win my heart by having a presence that makes me feel like I can happy stim in front of you whilst we watch something together, by accepting the fact that you will probably come second to my fandoms/obsessions a lot of the time, by allowing me to be touchy and clingy at random moments for often a long period of time, by not judging that I can't do "normal everyday things" and helping me with them and by being weird. 

28. My mum, @maestrowave​, @in3ffable-husbands​, @fandom-0bsession​ and everyone else in my active group chats on Instagram, @britpop-bowie​, @esperata​ and some other people.

29. I don't know what I'm most scared of. 

30. I think I'm mostly happy. I have great friends, my education is probably headed in a direction that will allow me to progress into an industry I've wanted to work in since I was 9 and in two years' time I will hopefully be at uni and able to experiment with my transition without worrying about what my parents think.

#pride #pride month #pride 2020 #transgender #trans #non-binary #transgender challenge #about me #don't reblog #if you want to do the challenge just save the picture

[unbreakabletrust]

Mixcloud GO! 1971: Pedantic Details for Nerds Like You and Me

First, some homage due. Back in the mid-'00s, inspired by the sudden availability of seemingly the entire history of recording for "free," me and my friends on the music bulletin board I Love Music got busy with our own obsessive historicizings by compiling a bunch of year-themed MP3 collections. We called CDR GO!s, after the great Bow Wow Wow song about taping music off the radio, replacing C30 etc. cassettes with CD-ROMs, own era's hot, new, and legally murky ways to obtain music. Some CDR GO!s I remember fondly were devoted to 1966, 1968, 1972, and 1988. I myself did one for 1984, which now strikes me as too pedestrian, and much later, the year 1950 (not the decade, damnit), which I'm still quite proud of but OH MY GOD don't listen to the Spotify version. Too many songs left the service after the playlist was published, so what's left is now false metal. (I'll likely recreate it on Mixcloud at some point.) 

But really, the idea behind Mixcloud GO! 1971 is primarily Jonathan Bogart's. He did a 6AM-to-6AM mix for the year he was born, 1977, and listening to it was one of my aesthetic highlights of 2015. The thrilling thing about his mix was that you lived with it: songs were selected and placed based on how they reflected the possible moods and activities of a "typical" day, whatever that is. Starting at 6AM, as prescribed, meant that, for one example, I was listening to music about eating dinner while I was out buying dinner; I was listening to a song about the IRT while I was riding that very same subway. Even as a 24-hour artwork, it respected the contours of everyday life. Something should also be said here about Christian Marclay's The Clock, which I've something like twenty times in three different cities. 

Recordings eligible for inclusion in Mixcloud GO! 1971 include: 

Any live recording from 1971. 

Anything from the Western classical tradition composed in 1971, but recorded and released in 1971 or afterwards. 

Anything from the Western classical tradition recorded in 1971, but composed in 1971 or before. 

Any jazz recorded in 1971, and released in 1971 or afterwards. 

Any other kind of recording made public for the first time in 1971...unless it was sitting around in the vaults for more than a couple of years. The oldest thing here, a folk-raga, was recorded in 1968 but released in 1971. Anything older than that seems contrary to the spirit of the project. "Made public" can mean "released on a record" or "appeared on a movie or TV soundtrack."

Anything recorded in 1971 but released years later. 

Yeah, jazz and classical get treated differently, partly because their academias and fandoms track recording date information way more assiduously than rock and pop do; plus, by 1971, multi-track rock and pop recordings are often things to which one particular recording date can't be meaningfully attached—look at the tortured history of the Beach Boys' "Surf's Up" for an extreme example—so the release date is as good a metric to use as any. I would also argue that classical music and jazz, in 1971, even with guys like Miles Davis and Glen Gould, have a very different attitude towards studio recordings, treating them as quasi-live, as something like commemorations of non-studio events (as well as events in of themselves), like the time that one guy was touring with that particular quartet, or when that soprano and that tenor teamed up with that conductor for a run at the Met, and oh my God, it was heaven. 

My definition of "jazz" and "classical" may be both overly expansive and not terribly consistent. Sucks to be me, right? 

Release, recording, and composition dates were gleaned from discogs.com, Wikipedia, and album liner notes, except when I found information that seemed more authoritative, like an artist's own website. If I get things wrong, tell it to your nearest wall.

There's a lot of music missing from Mixcloud GO! 1971 because there was a lot fucking terrible music released that year. There's a lot of important and influential music missing because, well, this isn't a goddamned history lesson. I'm not really sure WHAT it is, but it's not a history lesson. There's a lot of music I really love not on it for...well...a variety of reasons: issues of length, thematic appropriateness, variety. Like, I always say Miles Davis is my most favorite rock & roll band of all time (yes, all irony intended) but I didn't include anything from Jack Johnson because it was recorded in 1970 (see above), and more importantly, the thing is utterly unexcerptable. 

And I excerpt A LOT, without shame. Sometimes it just means removing extraneous live-in-the-studio chatter and sometimes it means chopping off twenty minutes to highlight the exciting or just plain useful bit. 

I say this mix collection has 330-plus tracks with "no artists repeated" but there are a couple of arguable exceptions and one definite, deliberate exception. To say more would ruin the surprise. 

I did research on and off about the music of 1971 from about, oh, sometime after the Pulse shooting to late last year; I began actually putting these mixes together the beginning of this year using Audacity, as well as MP3Gain to figure out sound leveling. I purchased nearly everything I used from iTunes, though some obscurer things come from Soulseek and even YouTube. Exactly one track was ripped from vinyl by myself. If a track came from a blog or YouTube, I'll provide a link on this Tumblr, and on Mixcloud, if there's room. 

Each mix is accompanied by a picture from a 1971 National Geographic. The one above comes from an AT&T ad.

I thought there'd be more country and reggae and soukous on this thing but... 

I am never, ever, ever doing this again.

[how2to18]

AS AMERICAN DEMOCRACY seems to take another downward bend in its own death spiral with each passing week, the United States might learn a few things from the international Pirate movement, whose Czech wing recently took third place in national elections, and which has become perhaps most known in recent times for its continued presence on Iceland’s political stage.

Iceland, a tiny island nation in the North Atlantic, provides perhaps the best prism through which to understand the rise of the Pirates. The country is perhaps best known as the picturesque backdrop to the colder bits on Game of Thrones, the home of unpronounceable volcanoes that periodically threaten to ground the entire European air fleet, and the birthplace of singer Björk. But despite these natural and cultural claims to fame, politics on the island are not so rosy. The Icelandic political and financial establishment has become synonymous with cronyism and shady dealing, a sentiment incited by two recent revelations: a 2009 Wikileaks document that exposed the Icelandic bank Kaupthing’s lending practices, and the Panama Papers leak of 2016 that revealed the off-shore banking activities of several high-profile individuals, not least Iceland’s then–Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson.

Gunnlaugsson quickly resigned, but in the October 2016 elections that followed his departure it became clear that Iceland’s increasingly internationalized and tech-savvy population would not be content to simply vote in a new face on old politics. Instead, it seemed that the population was increasingly open to seeking political alternatives in previously uncharted territory.

Iceland, of course, is in no way alone in this tendency, as dissatisfaction with the political and economic status quo of the last 40 years has been in steady decline in the Western world for some time. In Europe, where forms of proportional voting are common, this had led to increasing success for both new parties, like Podemos in Spain and the Five Star Movement in Italy, and slightly older ones that previously occupied niche territory, such as Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece, the National Front in France, Sinn Féin in Ireland, and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. In the United States and the United Kingdom, where the first-past-the-post system makes it difficult for small parties to gain proportionate representation in parliament, the desire for change has been funneled through the main establishment parties, most notably on the “right” by Donald Trump’s takeover of the 2016 Republican Party presidential campaign, and on the “left” by Jeremy Corbyn’s transformation of the British Labour party, despite unprecedented pushback from the party’s own top brass.

But while the left-leaning like Corbyn and Podemos could be described as progressive (certainly more so, than say, Golden Dawn, whose flag is, shall we say, hard to get past), when it comes to globalization and technological development, no one seems to have taken the bull by the horns to quite the same degree as the Pirate Party.

Perhaps this willingness to rock the boat partly explains some of the hostile coverage the Pirates received from American media in the run up to the 2016 Icelandic election. “Iceland’s Pirate Party Loves Hackers, Drugs & Revolution” The Daily Beast proclaimed with the subtitle “Iceland’s anti-establishment Pirate Party — led by a ‘poetician’ who worships Julian Assange — looks ready to win the country’s national election”. The Washington Post described the party as “a renegade movement” and “a radical movement of anarchists and hackers.”

This made it all sound pretty wild, but a year after the election, in which the Pirates emerged as one of the most successful parties with nearly 15 percent of the popular vote, Iceland didn’t seem to have been plunged into chaos. A brief perusal of the news site Iceland Monitor revealed that at a recent protest over immigration a sign was broken and one protestor pinched another.

Yes.

Pinched.

With their fingers.

Americans, no doubt, will be appalled.

In other highlights, the police have had to interfere twice with tourists who persist in watching the Northern Lights instead of the road while driving, and someone went skinny-dipping.

In short, the months of prolonged coalition talks that followed the 2016 election, parts of which were conducted by these very “anarchist hackers” don’t seem to have rocked Iceland half so much as, say, the Panama Papers did. And while the Pirates ultimately went into opposition, they are now firmly on the map as political players — tied for second place with the Left-Green Party in terms of number of parliamentary seats in 2016 and remaining firmly on the dash with over nine percent of the vote share in Iceland’s 2017 snap election. Moreover, the Icelandic Pirates’ success is only part of a quiet global trend that has seen the Pirate movement slowly catching on the world over, and often proving popular among younger voters when it fields election candidates.

So what does the Pirate Party really stand for and could American democracy learn anything from it?

  Embracing the Digital World

One of the things that has made the Pirate Party (and similar organizations like the Five Star Movement) so perplexing to many analysts is that it does not adhere to the centuries-old conservative-liberal split, instead embracing policy that cuts across the traditional left-right divide. The most defining characteristic of the movement, and the point of contention that gave the Pirates their name, is the fight against what its members view as restrictive intellectual property laws unsuitable to the digital age.

For those too young to remember, “intellectual property” was once, for most people, a far more esoteric term than it is now. Back in the 1990s (shortly before Björk achieved global fame, in fact), the ill-financed (teenagers and college kids) often copied their favorite songs onto cassette tapes, either directly from the radio or from their friends’ tapes. This was done partly to get all the best songs on one tape and partly to avoid entering the hard cash economy of an actual music store. Then, when CDs and the internet came along two of the prime inhibitors of copying — the poor sound quality and tediousness of the job — fell away, making copying attractive to those who had previously been willing to pay for the convenience and quality of store-bought music (everyone else). In this new atmosphere, a conscientious teen would not just selfishly spend all afternoon listening to Green Day or watching hamsters dance on the magic Pentium machine their parents had paid a fortune for — they’d remember to burn some Kenny Rogers for grandma, too. Unsurprisingly, internet sites facilitating copying, such as Napster and Pirate Bay, boomed while the entertainment industry frantically tried to instill the population with a sudden conviction that what had hitherto seemed an innocuous practice in fact constituted criminal activity.

“You wouldn’t steal a car! You wouldn’t steal a handbag!” industry ads would blare at teenage audiences before every film, “Stealing is against the law!”

It was, shall we say, an ill-considered appeal to kids looking forward to a solid 90 minutes of Hollywood’s leading actors doing all kinds of illegal things, including stealing, driving recklessly, and then totaling all kinds of very cool cars (often to fireball level) in defiance of the nebulous authoritarian forces that opposed freedom. The entertainment industry achieved very little beyond successfully casting itself as the villain in its own favorite narrative.

It was out of this general milieu — a time of quite serious, genuine confusion over just what constituted private property and the legal protection thereof — that the Pirate movement was born. In contrast to the music industry, the Pirates took the tack of sanguinely acknowledging that the train had left the station. People would copy because it was possible to copy. And that, according to the Pirates, was not necessarily a bad thing. Instead of seeking to contain these changes, society and the legal system should embrace them. Eventually this movement coalesced into formal political parties, most notably in Sweden, where Pirates sent their first representative to the European Parliament in 2009.

When I asked Swedish Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge for his views on intellectual property, he described copyright and patent-dependent industries as “old” and “obsolete” and said that efforts to keep them alive are “standing in the way of progress.” According to Falkvinge, this is particularly problematic when those efforts focus on tracking user behavior in order to, for example, prevent or punish copyright infringement. “Paradoxically,” he told me,

in one way of seeing it, Pirates are very conservative. One of our key points is that the same rights and laws that we have offline should also apply online. When you ponder that, you realize that the privacy of correspondence, the right to not be tracked in your everyday life, et cetera — rights that we take for granted offline — have been completely eradicated in the shift to digital.

This touches on another key point of Pirate Party policy: privacy. The movement’s adherents are some of the strongest opponents of online surveillance and the strongest supporters of whistleblowers like former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Birgitta Jónsdóttir, one of the earliest and most prominent Icelandic Pirates, has repeatedly pushed for Snowden — currently in Russia — to be granted Icelandic citizenship.

Critics have often apparently understood these two planks of Pirate policy as something of a contradiction, finding it difficult to reconcile the ideas of open data and file-sharing with personal privacy. The idea would seem to be that since Pirates are unsympathetic to other people’s intellectual property claims, they should not be so squeamish about being spied on themselves. Out in the open is out in the open.

This, however, misses the Pirates’ main point: that advances in technology make conventional understandings of property rights and distribution methods nigh on impossible to enforce anyway. In a previous recorded talk at Black Hat Europe, an information security conference, Falkvinge at one point compared the digital revolution to the invention of the printing press. Just as the printing press destroyed the Catholic Church’s monopoly on reproducing, and thus distributing, religious texts, so too would the internet destroy corporate, indeed perhaps any private, control over publishing and distribution of knowledge and entertainment, ushering in an era of intense social and economic change. The digital revolution, in other words, would be broader and deeper than most people seemed to realize, and much more, in fact, like an actual revolution. This is the era the Pirates are preparing for, and to some extent, already living, an era that, in their view, will not so much require as cause changes not just to information management, but also to the very fabric of our political structure.

  Participation in the Digital World

Few would dispute that in the past 15 years technology has made it possible to disseminate details of international treaty negotiations, like TTIP and TTP, that were once self-understood secrets, or that globalization has put the sovereign nation-state form of political organization — a model grounded in the 17th-century Peace of Westphalia — under some stress, with dual nationalities and migration becoming more and more common. But, perhaps most significantly of all, the idea of representative politics within those nation-states is looking a bit dated in the digital era. With news sites running daily polls on everything from the public’s favorite fruit to nuclear proliferation, it is not a leap to wonder why politicians aren’t consulting the people they allegedly represent a little more often.

The tech-savvy Pirates have picked up on this point, too, often advocating for direct democracy and collaborative intra-party policy-making. In Germany this was facilitated by developing a software known as LiquidFeedback, which allows party members to have a running input on policy. Similar applications have been used by Podemos in Spain and the Five Star Movement in Italy, as well as by the Icelandic Pirate Party, which states on its website that a policy “must also receive sufficient support in the Pirate Party’s online voting system. The online voting system is the primary method through which Pirates settle disputes and reach consensus on policies.”

A trip to the website shows the Icelandic Pirates deciding such bread-and-butter matters as dental care, capital gains tax, and immigration. Despite the contentions of some newspapers that the Icelandic Pirates have few specific policies, thanks to Google Translate I was easily able to access a flood of detailed policy on what seems to be a fully functional site.

In a similar vein, the newly successful Czech Pirates have devoted a segment of their policy document to “direct democracy,” where they advocate utilizing IT to incorporate elements such as binding referenda, recalls, and citizens’ initiatives into the state apparatus.

As these variations indicate, while decentralizing political power through collaborative decision-making is a popular Pirate theme, the exact modality that increased participation should take is debated within the movement. Falkvinge told me that “direct democracy, as such, was never part of the original platform.” Instead the Pirate Party of Sweden sought to work through a different method known as “swarm leadership,” in which people were free to take action furthering the Pirate cause without seeking permission from a higher authority. That some form of increased, non-hierarchical participation is desirable, however, seems to be a firm Pirate Party tenet, and stands in sharp contrast to conventional party politics, which are frequently characterized by firm, even hereditary, hierarchies and long-serving officers. The ramifications of such a change, combined with radically increased transparency and systemic changes in work and education are, indeed, potentially enormous.

Services like Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube have contributed to something of a new equilibrium when it comes to entertainment IP, offering services at a price low enough that many people are, once again, willing to pay for the convenience and quality of a subscription. This has robbed the issue of intellectual property — the original Pirate mainstay — of some of its urgency — at least for now. But the changes the internet has brought to political participation and access have barely been acknowledged, much less addressed, by more established political parties. It is their willingness to step into this lacuna and do the dirty work of experimenting with new ideas under new conditions that is such a key component of the Pirate appeal.

  Pirates — Potential Forerunners of a New Politics

Whatever else one may say about the Pirates, they seek to work across the left-right divide on proposals that attempt to deal with the pressing issues of the digital age. As such they represent a constructive approach that confronts issues head-on instead of denying that any problems exist or trying to put the genie back in the bottle and return to the past. The inability of conventional parties to come to terms with the present and to lay the groundwork for the future was all too apparent in the last American presidential election, in which Republicans and Democrats tussled over whether America should be made great again (past), or if it was already great (present) without providing a vision suitable for coping with the dynamic and rapidly evolving world around them into the future. Economic distribution, political participation, and national organization are all due a serious overhaul, as traditional work and social structures fail to deliver. Prudent politics is about preparing for future challenges and risks — trying to solve tomorrow’s problems today, rather than fighting a war of attrition over yesterday’s issues. It is possible that traditional parties, like the Democrats and Republicans, simply have too much baggage to let go of the past and start working with the present-day reality quickly enough to be effective — and it is this lack of timely change that is producing instability.

Far from representing an anarchic menace to society, Pirates are searching for the way forward in an exciting, perhaps even revolutionary time. Their solutions may not always prove durable or palatable to everyone, but progress depends on people’s willingness to think outside the box and take a chance on new ideas. In fact, perhaps American democracy could do with a few more Pirates.

¤

Roslyn Fuller is the author, most recently, of Beasts and Gods: How Democracy Changed Its Meaning and Lost Its Purpose.

The post Pirates, Democracy, and the Digital Revolution appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2zFigsE via IFTTT

#Blogger

[topmixtrends]

AS AMERICAN DEMOCRACY seems to take another downward bend in its own death spiral with each passing week, the United States might learn a few things from the international Pirate movement, whose Czech wing recently took third place in national elections, and which has become perhaps most known in recent times for its continued presence on Iceland’s political stage.

Iceland, a tiny island nation in the North Atlantic, provides perhaps the best prism through which to understand the rise of the Pirates. The country is perhaps best known as the picturesque backdrop to the colder bits on Game of Thrones, the home of unpronounceable volcanoes that periodically threaten to ground the entire European air fleet, and the birthplace of singer Björk. But despite these natural and cultural claims to fame, politics on the island are not so rosy. The Icelandic political and financial establishment has become synonymous with cronyism and shady dealing, a sentiment incited by two recent revelations: a 2009 Wikileaks document that exposed the Icelandic bank Kaupthing’s lending practices, and the Panama Papers leak of 2016 that revealed the off-shore banking activities of several high-profile individuals, not least Iceland’s then–Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson.

Gunnlaugsson quickly resigned, but in the October 2016 elections that followed his departure it became clear that Iceland’s increasingly internationalized and tech-savvy population would not be content to simply vote in a new face on old politics. Instead, it seemed that the population was increasingly open to seeking political alternatives in previously uncharted territory.

Iceland, of course, is in no way alone in this tendency, as dissatisfaction with the political and economic status quo of the last 40 years has been in steady decline in the Western world for some time. In Europe, where forms of proportional voting are common, this had led to increasing success for both new parties, like Podemos in Spain and the Five Star Movement in Italy, and slightly older ones that previously occupied niche territory, such as Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece, the National Front in France, Sinn Féin in Ireland, and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. In the United States and the United Kingdom, where the first-past-the-post system makes it difficult for small parties to gain proportionate representation in parliament, the desire for change has been funneled through the main establishment parties, most notably on the “right” by Donald Trump’s takeover of the 2016 Republican Party presidential campaign, and on the “left” by Jeremy Corbyn’s transformation of the British Labour party, despite unprecedented pushback from the party’s own top brass.

But while the left-leaning like Corbyn and Podemos could be described as progressive (certainly more so, than say, Golden Dawn, whose flag is, shall we say, hard to get past), when it comes to globalization and technological development, no one seems to have taken the bull by the horns to quite the same degree as the Pirate Party.

Perhaps this willingness to rock the boat partly explains some of the hostile coverage the Pirates received from American media in the run up to the 2016 Icelandic election. “Iceland’s Pirate Party Loves Hackers, Drugs & Revolution” The Daily Beast proclaimed with the subtitle “Iceland’s anti-establishment Pirate Party — led by a ‘poetician’ who worships Julian Assange — looks ready to win the country’s national election”. The Washington Post described the party as “a renegade movement” and “a radical movement of anarchists and hackers.”

This made it all sound pretty wild, but a year after the election, in which the Pirates emerged as one of the most successful parties with nearly 15 percent of the popular vote, Iceland didn’t seem to have been plunged into chaos. A brief perusal of the news site Iceland Monitor revealed that at a recent protest over immigration a sign was broken and one protestor pinched another.

Yes.

Pinched.

With their fingers.

Americans, no doubt, will be appalled.

In other highlights, the police have had to interfere twice with tourists who persist in watching the Northern Lights instead of the road while driving, and someone went skinny-dipping.

In short, the months of prolonged coalition talks that followed the 2016 election, parts of which were conducted by these very “anarchist hackers” don’t seem to have rocked Iceland half so much as, say, the Panama Papers did. And while the Pirates ultimately went into opposition, they are now firmly on the map as political players — tied for second place with the Left-Green Party in terms of number of parliamentary seats in 2016 and remaining firmly on the dash with over nine percent of the vote share in Iceland’s 2017 snap election. Moreover, the Icelandic Pirates’ success is only part of a quiet global trend that has seen the Pirate movement slowly catching on the world over, and often proving popular among younger voters when it fields election candidates.

So what does the Pirate Party really stand for and could American democracy learn anything from it?

  Embracing the Digital World

One of the things that has made the Pirate Party (and similar organizations like the Five Star Movement) so perplexing to many analysts is that it does not adhere to the centuries-old conservative-liberal split, instead embracing policy that cuts across the traditional left-right divide. The most defining characteristic of the movement, and the point of contention that gave the Pirates their name, is the fight against what its members view as restrictive intellectual property laws unsuitable to the digital age.

For those too young to remember, “intellectual property” was once, for most people, a far more esoteric term than it is now. Back in the 1990s (shortly before Björk achieved global fame, in fact), the ill-financed (teenagers and college kids) often copied their favorite songs onto cassette tapes, either directly from the radio or from their friends’ tapes. This was done partly to get all the best songs on one tape and partly to avoid entering the hard cash economy of an actual music store. Then, when CDs and the internet came along two of the prime inhibitors of copying — the poor sound quality and tediousness of the job — fell away, making copying attractive to those who had previously been willing to pay for the convenience and quality of store-bought music (everyone else). In this new atmosphere, a conscientious teen would not just selfishly spend all afternoon listening to Green Day or watching hamsters dance on the magic Pentium machine their parents had paid a fortune for — they’d remember to burn some Kenny Rogers for grandma, too. Unsurprisingly, internet sites facilitating copying, such as Napster and Pirate Bay, boomed while the entertainment industry frantically tried to instill the population with a sudden conviction that what had hitherto seemed an innocuous practice in fact constituted criminal activity.

“You wouldn’t steal a car! You wouldn’t steal a handbag!” industry ads would blare at teenage audiences before every film, “Stealing is against the law!”

It was, shall we say, an ill-considered appeal to kids looking forward to a solid 90 minutes of Hollywood’s leading actors doing all kinds of illegal things, including stealing, driving recklessly, and then totaling all kinds of very cool cars (often to fireball level) in defiance of the nebulous authoritarian forces that opposed freedom. The entertainment industry achieved very little beyond successfully casting itself as the villain in its own favorite narrative.

It was out of this general milieu — a time of quite serious, genuine confusion over just what constituted private property and the legal protection thereof — that the Pirate movement was born. In contrast to the music industry, the Pirates took the tack of sanguinely acknowledging that the train had left the station. People would copy because it was possible to copy. And that, according to the Pirates, was not necessarily a bad thing. Instead of seeking to contain these changes, society and the legal system should embrace them. Eventually this movement coalesced into formal political parties, most notably in Sweden, where Pirates sent their first representative to the European Parliament in 2009.

When I asked Swedish Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge for his views on intellectual property, he described copyright and patent-dependent industries as “old” and “obsolete” and said that efforts to keep them alive are “standing in the way of progress.” According to Falkvinge, this is particularly problematic when those efforts focus on tracking user behavior in order to, for example, prevent or punish copyright infringement. “Paradoxically,” he told me,

in one way of seeing it, Pirates are very conservative. One of our key points is that the same rights and laws that we have offline should also apply online. When you ponder that, you realize that the privacy of correspondence, the right to not be tracked in your everyday life, et cetera — rights that we take for granted offline — have been completely eradicated in the shift to digital.

This touches on another key point of Pirate Party policy: privacy. The movement’s adherents are some of the strongest opponents of online surveillance and the strongest supporters of whistleblowers like former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Birgitta Jónsdóttir, one of the earliest and most prominent Icelandic Pirates, has repeatedly pushed for Snowden — currently in Russia — to be granted Icelandic citizenship.

Critics have often apparently understood these two planks of Pirate policy as something of a contradiction, finding it difficult to reconcile the ideas of open data and file-sharing with personal privacy. The idea would seem to be that since Pirates are unsympathetic to other people’s intellectual property claims, they should not be so squeamish about being spied on themselves. Out in the open is out in the open.

This, however, misses the Pirates’ main point: that advances in technology make conventional understandings of property rights and distribution methods nigh on impossible to enforce anyway. In a previous recorded talk at Black Hat Europe, an information security conference, Falkvinge at one point compared the digital revolution to the invention of the printing press. Just as the printing press destroyed the Catholic Church’s monopoly on reproducing, and thus distributing, religious texts, so too would the internet destroy corporate, indeed perhaps any private, control over publishing and distribution of knowledge and entertainment, ushering in an era of intense social and economic change. The digital revolution, in other words, would be broader and deeper than most people seemed to realize, and much more, in fact, like an actual revolution. This is the era the Pirates are preparing for, and to some extent, already living, an era that, in their view, will not so much require as cause changes not just to information management, but also to the very fabric of our political structure.

  Participation in the Digital World

Few would dispute that in the past 15 years technology has made it possible to disseminate details of international treaty negotiations, like TTIP and TTP, that were once self-understood secrets, or that globalization has put the sovereign nation-state form of political organization — a model grounded in the 17th-century Peace of Westphalia — under some stress, with dual nationalities and migration becoming more and more common. But, perhaps most significantly of all, the idea of representative politics within those nation-states is looking a bit dated in the digital era. With news sites running daily polls on everything from the public’s favorite fruit to nuclear proliferation, it is not a leap to wonder why politicians aren’t consulting the people they allegedly represent a little more often.

The tech-savvy Pirates have picked up on this point, too, often advocating for direct democracy and collaborative intra-party policy-making. In Germany this was facilitated by developing a software known as LiquidFeedback, which allows party members to have a running input on policy. Similar applications have been used by Podemos in Spain and the Five Star Movement in Italy, as well as by the Icelandic Pirate Party, which states on its website that a policy “must also receive sufficient support in the Pirate Party’s online voting system. The online voting system is the primary method through which Pirates settle disputes and reach consensus on policies.”

A trip to the website shows the Icelandic Pirates deciding such bread-and-butter matters as dental care, capital gains tax, and immigration. Despite the contentions of some newspapers that the Icelandic Pirates have few specific policies, thanks to Google Translate I was easily able to access a flood of detailed policy on what seems to be a fully functional site.

In a similar vein, the newly successful Czech Pirates have devoted a segment of their policy document to “direct democracy,” where they advocate utilizing IT to incorporate elements such as binding referenda, recalls, and citizens’ initiatives into the state apparatus.

As these variations indicate, while decentralizing political power through collaborative decision-making is a popular Pirate theme, the exact modality that increased participation should take is debated within the movement. Falkvinge told me that “direct democracy, as such, was never part of the original platform.” Instead the Pirate Party of Sweden sought to work through a different method known as “swarm leadership,” in which people were free to take action furthering the Pirate cause without seeking permission from a higher authority. That some form of increased, non-hierarchical participation is desirable, however, seems to be a firm Pirate Party tenet, and stands in sharp contrast to conventional party politics, which are frequently characterized by firm, even hereditary, hierarchies and long-serving officers. The ramifications of such a change, combined with radically increased transparency and systemic changes in work and education are, indeed, potentially enormous.

Services like Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube have contributed to something of a new equilibrium when it comes to entertainment IP, offering services at a price low enough that many people are, once again, willing to pay for the convenience and quality of a subscription. This has robbed the issue of intellectual property — the original Pirate mainstay — of some of its urgency — at least for now. But the changes the internet has brought to political participation and access have barely been acknowledged, much less addressed, by more established political parties. It is their willingness to step into this lacuna and do the dirty work of experimenting with new ideas under new conditions that is such a key component of the Pirate appeal.

  Pirates — Potential Forerunners of a New Politics

Whatever else one may say about the Pirates, they seek to work across the left-right divide on proposals that attempt to deal with the pressing issues of the digital age. As such they represent a constructive approach that confronts issues head-on instead of denying that any problems exist or trying to put the genie back in the bottle and return to the past. The inability of conventional parties to come to terms with the present and to lay the groundwork for the future was all too apparent in the last American presidential election, in which Republicans and Democrats tussled over whether America should be made great again (past), or if it was already great (present) without providing a vision suitable for coping with the dynamic and rapidly evolving world around them into the future. Economic distribution, political participation, and national organization are all due a serious overhaul, as traditional work and social structures fail to deliver. Prudent politics is about preparing for future challenges and risks — trying to solve tomorrow’s problems today, rather than fighting a war of attrition over yesterday’s issues. It is possible that traditional parties, like the Democrats and Republicans, simply have too much baggage to let go of the past and start working with the present-day reality quickly enough to be effective — and it is this lack of timely change that is producing instability.

Far from representing an anarchic menace to society, Pirates are searching for the way forward in an exciting, perhaps even revolutionary time. Their solutions may not always prove durable or palatable to everyone, but progress depends on people’s willingness to think outside the box and take a chance on new ideas. In fact, perhaps American democracy could do with a few more Pirates.

¤

Roslyn Fuller is the author, most recently, of Beasts and Gods: How Democracy Changed Its Meaning and Lost Its Purpose.

The post Pirates, Democracy, and the Digital Revolution appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2zFigsE

#Los Angeles Review of Books #topmixtrends