The Green brothers have launched a service called Subbable that lets you let Youtube creators make videos without having to resort to advertising for revenue. Briefly, it invites fans to make monthly subscriptions (usually of, it turns out, around $5, but starting from as low as nothing) to creators, contributing to those projects meeting a pre-set funding goal. There are a few questions I wish I knew the answers to, but my general response is that it is a good thing, as generally I just don't like adverts very much, usually considering them to be at best a dead weight loss on the economy (two very similar products pit adverts against one another competing for market share, their revenues are the same as if they had not competed on that front at all but their costs are much higher) and that it favours big economic players over smaller ones. At worst I think advertising is a pernicious scheme to monetize self-hatred and unhappiness. Obviously these are just (strong) opinions, but I thought I'd nail my flag to the mast anyway so it's up there and you can poke it or whatever.
I've subscribed to CGP Grey's videos, because they are absolutely fantastic and because I love maps and constitutions and election systems and other social science geeky stuff. Doing some quick using-the-search-bar-as-a-calculator estimations it looks like his channel is currently at roughly $5000 of a roughly $12000 monthly goal. That's how it looks anyway, based on an average monthly subscription of $4.33 and 1126 subscribers so far. This comes out at about $144,000 a year, or about four times the UK median income or £21,000 (before tax). I think if he met his target that would put him in the econd highest tax bracket that pays 40% of income as tax, and there are various other property taxes and so on that we pay here in order to fund our generally excellent public services. The UK figure is the relevant one because that's where CGP lives (specifically in London which incidentally has the highest cost of living in the country). I don't have any problem with CGP earning a lot from his videos, and I am willing to stand corrected about any of my calculations. As far as I am concerned anyone who wants to give him money for his work is welcome to and based on that he can earn as much as he likes provided that he pays his taxes and if he starts getting really rich gives a lot to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or a similarly cost-effective charity (apparently helping against tropical diseases typically gives the best return in terms of improved human quality of life on amount donated). But the high figure does make one wonder what will happen if, say, he only gets 80% of the target. If that's the case will he get rid of 80% of ads? Will he have ads for two months and a week out of every year? Or will he figure: hey, stuff it, this is enough I'll be fine with this much after all. For that matter, what will he do if he goes over the target some months? Will the spillover be counted against any shortfall in later months? (It seems quite likely that there will be dips around January, and also after the honeymoon periods when popular shows first transition onto Subbable). I do think there is both a debate to be had on the correct response to these things here and some scope for extra information in the FAQs.
So, perhaps more transparency about these issues is in order, so that the people contributing to these projects financially can have a little bit of the accountability that has made Kickstarter such a successful platform. It certainly looks like a service that shows great promise, especially if it can develop a reputation for curating brilliant content and other little extras like that.
Taking a slightly more philosophical turn, is there an ethical imperative for people to restrict their income to some function of local or national medians, or to try to match up their household income to within some window? Persuasive research of the negative effects of inequality suggests that prosperity is not without its externalities, and so with such a baldly scalable means of income as this it is clear that these are ethical questions that both creators and subscribers ought to be asking, and if they do have insights and opinions, it would certainly make sense to share them in the open-minded, polite way that the internet is so famous for.
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
You Will Not Find Your Feminist Unicorn Here
There's been some internet drama, and people have rushed in to arbitrate and so that job's done and we can all settle back down and think about what has just happened.
Here are the facts. A well-known feminist and occasional troll makes, let's face it, a bit of a dick comment.
A well-known troll and probable sexist calls her out on the exercise, citing it as an example of sexism and (apparently worse) double standards.
There are two things I want to pick up on here. The first is the issue around said double standards, and how they might not be as bad as we think. The second has to do with this particular type of nonsense males have to put up with, how it's not cool but why that means they should definitely, definitely be feminists.
Let's give our male argumenteer, let's call him Person D, the benefit of the doubt. Let's imagine, for a second, that his objection is totally right and there totally was some sexism going on. Firstly, as has rightly been pointed out, we live in a world with unequal power relations between the sexes and so all sexisms are not equal. For similar reasons if a black person tells a white person, neither of whom know each other that well, "you're acting so white right now" we can think that's not entirely cool while knowing that it would be enirely different and worse if it had been the other way around. This is because our actions take place in a political and historical context. So, although Person A, the well-known feminist in our example, has done something double-strandardy that doesn't mean it is necessarily bad, or even necessarily inconsistent with her own beliefs. Maybe she, like most people most of the time, thinks that morality has a diverse landscape in which a certain action does not have to be always right or always wrong.
But here's the kicker. Even if there is something wrong with the double-standard, maybe it offends the post-modern cult of apparent authenticity or whatever, something worse has been done, which is the ridiculous standard to which this feminist, and indeed all feminists are being held to. This is not the first example of women (and, lets be honest, women feminists do get a lot more of this crap) being held to ridiculous standards. Women are subjected to completely unreasonable scrutiny by people trying to catch them slipping up, so they can be denounced as physically unattractive or sexually immoral or intellectually lacking. Whole print media empires have been built on this principle. This cultural artefact informs the majority of click-baiting links that try to grab my attention when I am doing totally legitimate research about a TV show or some crap. Well, Person D can stop looking for a perfect feminist unicorn: there is none. It's not just that not everyone in the club is right all the time: as with all clubs, everyone in the club is wrong some of the time. Stop making a big deal out it. It's just blaming people for being people, and it's nonsense.
I return, as I knew I must, to my second point. We do have to stop talking about dicks the way we do. It's not just that people should stop using the suggestion that somebody has a small penis to make fun of them, we need to entirely remove the value judgement from the equation. It's a horrible kind of bullying: it's ability to hurt depends on the presence of powerful underlying insecurities and self doubt. If those vulnerabilities are not there the "joke" is pointless. If they are it is a seriously shitty way to treat someone (even, as far as you're concerned, a bad person). I don't care whether you're a feminist or not, male or female. Don't do it. If you do I'll, well I'll jolly well try to persuade you not to, that's what I'll do.
Here are the facts. A well-known feminist and occasional troll makes, let's face it, a bit of a dick comment.
A well-known troll and probable sexist calls her out on the exercise, citing it as an example of sexism and (apparently worse) double standards.
There are two things I want to pick up on here. The first is the issue around said double standards, and how they might not be as bad as we think. The second has to do with this particular type of nonsense males have to put up with, how it's not cool but why that means they should definitely, definitely be feminists.
Let's give our male argumenteer, let's call him Person D, the benefit of the doubt. Let's imagine, for a second, that his objection is totally right and there totally was some sexism going on. Firstly, as has rightly been pointed out, we live in a world with unequal power relations between the sexes and so all sexisms are not equal. For similar reasons if a black person tells a white person, neither of whom know each other that well, "you're acting so white right now" we can think that's not entirely cool while knowing that it would be enirely different and worse if it had been the other way around. This is because our actions take place in a political and historical context. So, although Person A, the well-known feminist in our example, has done something double-strandardy that doesn't mean it is necessarily bad, or even necessarily inconsistent with her own beliefs. Maybe she, like most people most of the time, thinks that morality has a diverse landscape in which a certain action does not have to be always right or always wrong.
But here's the kicker. Even if there is something wrong with the double-standard, maybe it offends the post-modern cult of apparent authenticity or whatever, something worse has been done, which is the ridiculous standard to which this feminist, and indeed all feminists are being held to. This is not the first example of women (and, lets be honest, women feminists do get a lot more of this crap) being held to ridiculous standards. Women are subjected to completely unreasonable scrutiny by people trying to catch them slipping up, so they can be denounced as physically unattractive or sexually immoral or intellectually lacking. Whole print media empires have been built on this principle. This cultural artefact informs the majority of click-baiting links that try to grab my attention when I am doing totally legitimate research about a TV show or some crap. Well, Person D can stop looking for a perfect feminist unicorn: there is none. It's not just that not everyone in the club is right all the time: as with all clubs, everyone in the club is wrong some of the time. Stop making a big deal out it. It's just blaming people for being people, and it's nonsense.
I return, as I knew I must, to my second point. We do have to stop talking about dicks the way we do. It's not just that people should stop using the suggestion that somebody has a small penis to make fun of them, we need to entirely remove the value judgement from the equation. It's a horrible kind of bullying: it's ability to hurt depends on the presence of powerful underlying insecurities and self doubt. If those vulnerabilities are not there the "joke" is pointless. If they are it is a seriously shitty way to treat someone (even, as far as you're concerned, a bad person). I don't care whether you're a feminist or not, male or female. Don't do it. If you do I'll, well I'll jolly well try to persuade you not to, that's what I'll do.
Friday, June 7, 2013
Rehabilitating the Street
Ah, the street. You have been so maligned.
It's tough out there on the street. You need street smarts. And so on. I mean to illustrate that there is a cognitive and linguistic trend to consider the street to be dangerous, undesirable, or otherwise other. In our perceptions the street has been constructed as a place of drug-dealing, prostitution, malingerling, and other objects of dubious moral outrage.
But the street shouldn't be thought of as a bad thing. In fact, it's the best thing. The street is the basic unit of the public sphere. It both connects us and provides us with a meeting place. I look down my own street, Lawrence Street, and think about how it was established as an old Roman road. Probably bits of it predate even that. From then it has broadly persisted, for all these years, through successive governments and nations. The street remains. Every generation saw fit to keep up its maintainance, because it was so valuable to them. If you tot it up, it's probably the most expensive thing for some distance (although it is likely rivalled by some other streets). It turns into Hull Road, which predictably enough will take you to Hull and the sea. If you follow it into town it has many names, but it's really the same street, and it takes you all the way past the Minster, and then all the way to Thirsk if you want to think of it like that. Romantically perhaps, I like to imagine pilgrims traveling to the Minster along this road, but that probably doesn't make much sense because I don't think it was that major a pilgrimage destination and there is a perfectly servicable river you could travel along.
Within settlements, anything of much value is likely to be on a street. All of our great public spaces: the squares and libraries and all that sort of thing; are arrayed along them like beads of precious stone on a web of golden threads. It is a democratic space, in the sense that it is, even now, a space used for debate and protest, but also in the sense that it is near universally accessible. Street trading is a way of making a living (well, trying to) where the barriers to entry are low. I don't know how it is these days, but for me it is easy to imagine in times past street hawkers graduating into loftier business enterprises. It is an incubator, and an enabler. These qualities that make it attractive to the peddler and the busker also increase its appeal to those whose enterprises find less favour with the law. Some of this may be reality, some is likely to be reputation alone. I suspect that nowadays most drug-dealing and prostitution take place in buildings, for instance.
On two occasions in my travels about the European continent, it was in this public space that I, wearing the apparel and general demeanor of a traveler, was approached by genial strangers with an offer of free lodgings. Both times I accepted and it turned out great, by the way. Charities looking to raise some funds have taken to the streets, as have beggars. The street is therefore also a site of anonymous generosity and community solidarity.
The automobile has changed things somewhat. Although in a place like York there is a large and broadly pedestrianised core, most streets have their choicest parts colonised by private cars. This is a subversion of all that has previously been said of the street. By enclosing oneself in a bubular private sphere within the street, one is also in some senses impoverishing it. Indeed the presumption of a priority for cars in street traffic is somewhat counterintuitive. For within-city travel, there is usually an alternative with fewer negative externalities, and for inter-city travel we tend to use not so much streets as roads. I don't know if there is a formal distinction, but I am sure my meaning is recieved.
But, pardon the pun, this is the path we're on. And there is something to be said for rapid private transportation - there is nothing like it for getting the shopping home. I still do look about, however, for chances to reclaim the street for the public interest. Experiments in shared spaces are a promising lead, wherein priority in the road is not heirarchically arranged but is the result of on the spot negotiation. This has been shown to reduce traffic fatalities, which reinforces my conception of conventional road traffic as suffering from a kind of collective sociopathy. There is no necessity or law of nature bringing about this state of affairs: vehicular privelege is a gift from the public and it can be taken away. It ought not be taken for granted.
I remember when I was in Nairobi, the busiest of roads were a kind of open market, as hawkers would descend anarchically upon our dearly congested. Now I don't want to insensitively romanticise the poverty that led people into busy traffic to try to make ends meet (or understate the inconvenience of somebody trying to sell you something while you are trying to drive), but the illustration does capture one thing: that the street is the cauldron of a creative chaos that is well worth encouraging, and treasuring. Appreciate your street.
It's tough out there on the street. You need street smarts. And so on. I mean to illustrate that there is a cognitive and linguistic trend to consider the street to be dangerous, undesirable, or otherwise other. In our perceptions the street has been constructed as a place of drug-dealing, prostitution, malingerling, and other objects of dubious moral outrage.
But the street shouldn't be thought of as a bad thing. In fact, it's the best thing. The street is the basic unit of the public sphere. It both connects us and provides us with a meeting place. I look down my own street, Lawrence Street, and think about how it was established as an old Roman road. Probably bits of it predate even that. From then it has broadly persisted, for all these years, through successive governments and nations. The street remains. Every generation saw fit to keep up its maintainance, because it was so valuable to them. If you tot it up, it's probably the most expensive thing for some distance (although it is likely rivalled by some other streets). It turns into Hull Road, which predictably enough will take you to Hull and the sea. If you follow it into town it has many names, but it's really the same street, and it takes you all the way past the Minster, and then all the way to Thirsk if you want to think of it like that. Romantically perhaps, I like to imagine pilgrims traveling to the Minster along this road, but that probably doesn't make much sense because I don't think it was that major a pilgrimage destination and there is a perfectly servicable river you could travel along.
Within settlements, anything of much value is likely to be on a street. All of our great public spaces: the squares and libraries and all that sort of thing; are arrayed along them like beads of precious stone on a web of golden threads. It is a democratic space, in the sense that it is, even now, a space used for debate and protest, but also in the sense that it is near universally accessible. Street trading is a way of making a living (well, trying to) where the barriers to entry are low. I don't know how it is these days, but for me it is easy to imagine in times past street hawkers graduating into loftier business enterprises. It is an incubator, and an enabler. These qualities that make it attractive to the peddler and the busker also increase its appeal to those whose enterprises find less favour with the law. Some of this may be reality, some is likely to be reputation alone. I suspect that nowadays most drug-dealing and prostitution take place in buildings, for instance.
On two occasions in my travels about the European continent, it was in this public space that I, wearing the apparel and general demeanor of a traveler, was approached by genial strangers with an offer of free lodgings. Both times I accepted and it turned out great, by the way. Charities looking to raise some funds have taken to the streets, as have beggars. The street is therefore also a site of anonymous generosity and community solidarity.
The automobile has changed things somewhat. Although in a place like York there is a large and broadly pedestrianised core, most streets have their choicest parts colonised by private cars. This is a subversion of all that has previously been said of the street. By enclosing oneself in a bubular private sphere within the street, one is also in some senses impoverishing it. Indeed the presumption of a priority for cars in street traffic is somewhat counterintuitive. For within-city travel, there is usually an alternative with fewer negative externalities, and for inter-city travel we tend to use not so much streets as roads. I don't know if there is a formal distinction, but I am sure my meaning is recieved.
But, pardon the pun, this is the path we're on. And there is something to be said for rapid private transportation - there is nothing like it for getting the shopping home. I still do look about, however, for chances to reclaim the street for the public interest. Experiments in shared spaces are a promising lead, wherein priority in the road is not heirarchically arranged but is the result of on the spot negotiation. This has been shown to reduce traffic fatalities, which reinforces my conception of conventional road traffic as suffering from a kind of collective sociopathy. There is no necessity or law of nature bringing about this state of affairs: vehicular privelege is a gift from the public and it can be taken away. It ought not be taken for granted.
I remember when I was in Nairobi, the busiest of roads were a kind of open market, as hawkers would descend anarchically upon our dearly congested. Now I don't want to insensitively romanticise the poverty that led people into busy traffic to try to make ends meet (or understate the inconvenience of somebody trying to sell you something while you are trying to drive), but the illustration does capture one thing: that the street is the cauldron of a creative chaos that is well worth encouraging, and treasuring. Appreciate your street.
Monday, May 20, 2013
Existence and Essence
There's been something bothering me about the YUSU FemSoc furore which I've been finding it hard to put my finger on. It's mostly blown over now, but my troubled mind still mulls. I think, now, I have a rough idea of what has been niggling so.
A lot of the arguments have centered around questions of what the Women's Committee and Feminist Society are each for. This is based on the principle that if their purposes are too similar, there is no need for the second body to officially exist.
The main defences to these points have been:
1) The purposes are very different and
2) The principle that if they are similar the second shouldn't exist is a) bad and/or b) not even in the rules
Neither of these rebuttals quite capture the anger I felt about YUSUs argumentation. For me, the more telling point is the deeper question, which is about who decides. I was angry because YUSU had presumed to decide both what WomCom's and what FemSoc's purposes were. Apparently without even thinking about it particularly, it had defined them however it pleased: in particular defined them in such a way as to prevent the latter from being ratified. It was a power-grab, and a particularly nasty one. The power that YUSU was saying it had, was attempting to exercise, was a power over the identity of these groups.
Now I personally don't care that much about ratification per se. Financially there are some benefits, but it also involves a lot of hard work and many societies and groups have thrived sans ratification, like Wholly Folk, CU and early days SCOOP, to name but a few. What I do care about is having a union that helps people get on with the things they want to do, instead of getting in their way. And a union which presumes to dictate what the essence of a group or an individual is, that is a union I can't agree with.
A lot of the arguments have centered around questions of what the Women's Committee and Feminist Society are each for. This is based on the principle that if their purposes are too similar, there is no need for the second body to officially exist.
The main defences to these points have been:
1) The purposes are very different and
2) The principle that if they are similar the second shouldn't exist is a) bad and/or b) not even in the rules
Neither of these rebuttals quite capture the anger I felt about YUSUs argumentation. For me, the more telling point is the deeper question, which is about who decides. I was angry because YUSU had presumed to decide both what WomCom's and what FemSoc's purposes were. Apparently without even thinking about it particularly, it had defined them however it pleased: in particular defined them in such a way as to prevent the latter from being ratified. It was a power-grab, and a particularly nasty one. The power that YUSU was saying it had, was attempting to exercise, was a power over the identity of these groups.
Now I personally don't care that much about ratification per se. Financially there are some benefits, but it also involves a lot of hard work and many societies and groups have thrived sans ratification, like Wholly Folk, CU and early days SCOOP, to name but a few. What I do care about is having a union that helps people get on with the things they want to do, instead of getting in their way. And a union which presumes to dictate what the essence of a group or an individual is, that is a union I can't agree with.
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Seven Super Psychopaths
What do Seven Psychopaths and Super have in common? Well I watched both of them last weekend, and they are both highly deconstructive. I don't want to give too much away about either of them, since both films thrive on surprise, but I'll be sort of specific at the same time.
With Seven Psychopaths, this generally means not saying a lot. I felt like in some ways it did for the gangster action movie a la QT or Guy Ritchie what The Cabin In The Woods did for that kind of horror I don't know the name of. And it's a genre that certainly deserved to be pulled apart.
Both films are somewhat lacking in positive gender politics, but there is at least some acknowledgement of the fact. Each film has a WASPman lead, (okay, so one's Catholic) but I think that's to make the jab at the genre more effective. Still, it would be nice to get beyond the woman-as-victim archetype in actiony movies. Forever.
Super seems to have been written from the starting point of: what kind of person would actually try to turn themself into a superhero? This is very different to what I think the premise of Kickass is, which is: what would happen if you tried to become a superhero. Super is about the kinds of people who plausibly could, and they are people who for one reason or another have their own ways of engaging with the sort of basic rules of society. In particular, the character Frank (which is punned on as meaning straightforward, perhaps fittingly) has both a very acute sense of which basic social rules are just not meant to be broken, and he himself is completely indifferent to those rules as they apply to him in his swift and graphic interventions.
I know it's supposed to be about deconstructing and making plausible the superhero, but for me Super was far more interesting as a parable about enforcing the social contract, which is far more realistic that the artifice that a superhero has any kind of access to a higher or transcendent moral truth. It's not about cosmic battles between good and evil, it's about the rules for basic decent interaction and the righteous fury we feel when those rules are broken.
So yes, I very much enjoyed both films, and what really got me about both was the sense I had that, at many points, it felt like anything could happen. They had their flaws, in abundance no doubt, but it was great to see them trying something fresh and new with some rather bloated genres.
With Seven Psychopaths, this generally means not saying a lot. I felt like in some ways it did for the gangster action movie a la QT or Guy Ritchie what The Cabin In The Woods did for that kind of horror I don't know the name of. And it's a genre that certainly deserved to be pulled apart.
Both films are somewhat lacking in positive gender politics, but there is at least some acknowledgement of the fact. Each film has a WASPman lead, (okay, so one's Catholic) but I think that's to make the jab at the genre more effective. Still, it would be nice to get beyond the woman-as-victim archetype in actiony movies. Forever.
Super seems to have been written from the starting point of: what kind of person would actually try to turn themself into a superhero? This is very different to what I think the premise of Kickass is, which is: what would happen if you tried to become a superhero. Super is about the kinds of people who plausibly could, and they are people who for one reason or another have their own ways of engaging with the sort of basic rules of society. In particular, the character Frank (which is punned on as meaning straightforward, perhaps fittingly) has both a very acute sense of which basic social rules are just not meant to be broken, and he himself is completely indifferent to those rules as they apply to him in his swift and graphic interventions.
I know it's supposed to be about deconstructing and making plausible the superhero, but for me Super was far more interesting as a parable about enforcing the social contract, which is far more realistic that the artifice that a superhero has any kind of access to a higher or transcendent moral truth. It's not about cosmic battles between good and evil, it's about the rules for basic decent interaction and the righteous fury we feel when those rules are broken.
So yes, I very much enjoyed both films, and what really got me about both was the sense I had that, at many points, it felt like anything could happen. They had their flaws, in abundance no doubt, but it was great to see them trying something fresh and new with some rather bloated genres.
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