Science, let’s talk: your friend, all other knowledges

The purpose of the Sustaining the Knowledge Commons research program is to help in the process of transitioning to a stable global knowledge commons, through which everyone can access all of our collective knowledge free-of-charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions and to which all who are qualified are welcome to contribute. One common problem that I see in the open access movement and in the scientific community (OA or not) is a tendency to conflate knowledge and science. I argue that this is a serious problem not only for other forms of knowledge, but a potential immanent existential threat to science itself. At a recent talk I presented a brief explanation of the argument. Following is the abstract and a link to the full presentation.

Presentation by Heather Morrison Feb. 26, University of Ottawa, as part of the CC- UNESCO Science as a Human Right Series.

Abstract

Article 27.1 of the UN Declaration on Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits”. The central argument of this presentation is that in order to achieve the goal of scientific advancement and its benefits it is necessary to understand science as one of the interdependent forms of the knowledge of humankind. To understand human rights, we need to understand the current and historical struggles through which the needs for human rights were identified and fought for. The conceptual development and implementation of human rights comes from philosophy, law, and politics, not scientific method. Science itself cannot function without logic, and is best not practiced without ethics; both logic and ethics, essential to scientific practice, are philosophy. Science needs philosophy.

Climate change is presented as evidence of why global policy based on scientific evidence is essential to the future, perhaps the very survival of the human species, and why global policy based on scientific evidence depends on more than science alone. If science alone were enough, the scientific consensus on climate change should have compelled effective action a long time ago. Science alone is not enough; political change requires political action. In the area of policy, belief in progress through science is just that, a matter of belief that competes with other belief systems. To help people change, to achieve political change, we need to understand not just what we know (the science), we need to understand how people think (social sciences and humanities) and how to effectively communicate with people (arts). If we in the developed world were to learn from our First Nations peoples about long-term planning, the ideas that we do not inherent the world from our ancestors but rather borrow it from our children, to plan for the seventh generation, we would have the knowledge to understand why we need policy in this area that is informed by the science. In conclusion, as a holistic scholar who is indigenous to, and cares above, the planet earth, on behalf of all the other forms of knowledges, I extend this invitation to science: let’s talk.

Link to download the full presentation: https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/38890

Won’t Back Down: Jason Aldean and Masculine Vulnerability

October 2017: a week after a Las Vegas gunman killed 58 people at an outdoor festival during a Jason Aldean set, Aldean squared up to the Saturday Night Live mic and soldiered through then-recently deceased Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.” In a short statement before the song, Aldean mentioned that he was “strugglin to understand what happened that night,” and he reiterated this general sense of confusion about what to make of everything in ensuing interviews. It’s unsurprising that Aldean struggled to make sense of the shooting; traumatic experiences like the one he and his audience endured often don’t fit into any ready-made understanding we have about the world. But Aldean, who seemed uncomfortable publicly displaying the kind of emotional vulnerability the trauma produced in him, was eager to resolve the dissonance: with platitudes like “be louder than the bad guys,” with assurances that “when America is at its best, our bond and our spirit – it’s unbreakable,” with an admission of his own hurt only as an empathic response to others’ rather than as his own, and with a cover song borrowed from one of his idols. Here, I’m listening to the compensatory work the cover of “I Won’t Back Down” performs in the face of the kind of vulnerability Aldean wrestles with in the wake of violence. To hear this as clearly as possible, I’ll contextualize Aldean’s performance by comparing it to a similar use of the song by Tom Petty 16 years earlier, then contrast it with Ariana Grande’s performance of “One More Time” at her One Love Manchester benefit a few months before the Las Vegas shooting.

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Screen capture from Cal Vid’s youtube video “Jason Aldean SNL Tom Petty I Won’t Back Down Live Tribute”

Though the song’s titular line, “I won’t back down,” is a fairly direct lyrical idea about maintaining one’s resolve, the rest of the song still manages to paint a rather vague picture. The singer isn’t backing down, sure, but beyond “a world that keeps on pushin [him] around,” there aren’t many specifics about what he’s not backing down from. This is a kind of pop genius: capture a core sentiment that registers with a large audience, then present it in ambiguous enough terms that listeners can fill in the blanks with their own very personal experiences. So, despite Petty’s own analysis that he “laid [the song] out, you know, with no ambiguity at all,” “I Won’t Back Down”’s lyrics are incredibly broad, leaving space for practically anyone to insert themselves into the role of protagonist. Your boss might be a jerk, but you won’t back down. Your employee might think you’re a jerk, but you won’t back down.

Moreover, the sound of the song undermines even its most resolute lyrics. When Petty sings “I won’t back down,” which he does often in the verses and the hook, he scoops all around the pitches of “won’t,” “back,” and “down” so that they sound more interrogative than declarative. Rhythmically, these words sit on weak beats and upbeats in the verses, and in the chorus, the final word, “down,” comes just before – not on – a strong downbeat (see figure below). The effect of the syncopation is similar to the effect of Petty’s pitch bends; lyrical resolve becomes musical uncertainty. Finally, George Harrison’s guitar solo – as George Harrison guitar solos tend to do – plays pensively with the song’s forward momentum, again reining in the lyrics’ more direct message. In all, “I Won’t Back Down” works in a good deal of uncertainty that makes it unclear exactly what the threat is and whether the singer really is as resolute as he’d like us to believe.

+ 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +
verse I won’t back down
hook I won’t back down

What a song means or how it works changes with the times, though, and the defiance lurking in the lyrics of “I Won’t Back Down” crystallized after the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. When Petty performed “I Won’t Back Down” at the benefit concert America: A Tribute to Heroes on September 21, the context of a nation rallying around itself to defeat some yet-unknown foreign enemy overwhelmed any of the sonic signifiers that might otherwise temper the song’s resolve. This concert, which was aired virtually on every channel to a country still reeling from a collective trauma, subsumed Petty’s vocal scoops, the lyrics’ offbeat kilter, and the guitar’s sanguine solo under the clarity of a lyrical sentiment that aligned neatly with the politics of the moment: the US won’t back down. The shift in focus in “I Won’t Back Down” just after September 11 is similar to a dolly zoom effect: the threat referenced by the song’s lyrics feels as if it comes nearer and into sharper focus even as the protagonist broadens from an individual to a collective identity.

This sort of shift in the song’s narrative tracks with Christine Muller’s account of the overarching changes in cultural narratives that happened in the wake of the Twin Towers’ destruction. In September 11, 2001 as Cultural Trauma (2017), Muller argues that the broad perception of the fracture of the “American Dream” – “good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people…come to the United States, and you will have opportunity; work hard, and you will succeed; follow the rules, and you will be rewarded” – harkened the rise of cultural media focused on “no-win scenarios…a fascination with anti-heroes who do the wrong things for the right reasons” (9-10). In the case of “I Won’t Back Down,” a song that was once broadly resolute and unfocused on any particular foe, sung by an artist who sent a “Cease and Desist” letter to George W. Bush when the then-candidate used the song for his presidential campaign morphed into an anthem that became narrowly resolute in the face of a named threat (“terror”), woven into a larger political tapestry that aided in the demonization of Muslims and the Islamic countries targeted by the “global war on terror” – an interminable war fought for vaguely defined reasons started at multiple sites by the same Bush Petty had previously defied.

Aldean’s Saturday Night Live performance 16 years later would emulate Petty’s, as faithful a cover as Aldean and his band could do. Though his vocals lack Petty’s high-end nasal clarity, Aldean dutifully hits all the scoops, honors the syncopations, and even yields to a guitar solo that follows George Harrison’s lead from decades previous. For Aldean, who was 40 at the time, and many millennials, the SNL performance would likely resonate with Petty’s iconic Tribute performance. And in the space of those 16 years, another frequently repeated line in the song would take on a political life of its own, recognizable to younger listeners who may not have immediately registered the post-9/11 context of “I Won’t Back Down.” While “I’ll stand my ground” would’ve been as broadly meaningful as “I won’t back down” when Petty released the song in 1989, the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin pushed the idea of Stand Your Ground laws into public consciousness. These laws nullify one’s “duty to retreat,” to avoid violence if a safe passage away from a threat is reasonably available, instead allowing a person who feels threatened to use violence against their perceived threat. Research shows that Stand Your Ground laws tend to protect white people and endanger Black people, holding up long-standing social norms that cast Blacks as always already violent. So by the time Aldean sang “I’ll stand my ground, and I won’t back down” in 2017, the song had passed through social and political filters that gave its lyrics an anti-Muslim and anti-Black edge.

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“Stand Your Ground” By Flickr User Seattle.roamer, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

At first blush, all this context makes “I Won’t Back Down” a bizarre choice for Aldean to sing in response to the Las Vegas shooting. The identity of the gunman – a white man around retirement age – made him only a bit older than the demographic most responsible for mass shootings in the US. Instead of addressing the fact that mass shootings are a distinctly USAmerican problem, or that country music fosters a close and financial relationship with the NRA (which lobbies against the sorts of regulations that would curb mass shootings), Aldean remained unwilling to offer any thoughts on guns and gun control, even after experiencing the shooting firsthand. While we might reasonably excuse the singer’s lack of reflection on social and political problems in recognition that Aldean was surely traumatized himself, the singer’s performance of “I Won’t Back Down” still performs a specific kind of rhetorical work that relies on Petty’s performance at America: A Tribute to Heroes 16 years earlier. Specifically, Aldean’s rendition of “I Won’t Back Down” places the Vegas shooting in the same political arena used to demonize Muslims after September 11 and to criminalize Black people in political discourse surrounding Stand Your Ground laws. As I mentioned at the top of the essay, Aldean admitted and demonstrated his discomfort with the emotional vulnerability the shooting provoked in him, and I hear his performance of “I Won’t Back Down” as an effort to compensate for that public vulnerability by providing a retreat to a more familiar masculine pose: protective, resolute, stoic.

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“Liverpool vigil for victims and families of MEN Manchester” by Flickr User James O’hanlon, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I published a piece that revolves around the idea of self-care with Sounding Out! in 2017, and one of the two central musical examples I consider there is Ariana Grande’s performance of “One More Time” at the One Love Manchester benefit concert just after the Manchester bombing. Grande’s circumstances run parallel to what Aldean would face a few months later: a traumatic act of violence that disrupted, injured, and killed the artist’s fans as the terror of the event rippled through the community. The two performances are gendered completely differently, however. Grande sings “One Last Time” surrounded by other musicians she invited to participate in the benefit concert. She frequently chokes up and relies on her fans to carry the song forward. She offers no answers or solutions beyond sentiments of love and the need to hold one another close in times of crisis. Grande’s is a performance of feminized care that contrasts sharply with Aldean’s masculinized resolve. Unwilling to publicly grapple with the emotional vulnerability created by the Vegas shooting, Aldean retreats from any public displays of grief and settles into an expression of care rooted in aggressive defense. His performance of “I Won’t Back Down” compensates for the feminized vulnerability triggered by the gunman and provides a masculine space for defiance that shifts attention away from white criminality and toward the US’s usual suspects: Black people and Muslims.

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“#Ferguson protest in Memphis” by Flickr User Chris Wieland, CC BY-NC 2.0

Saturday Night Live has scrubbed the internet of any full videos of the performance (the single is available on Spotify), but we can see and hear Aldean running through the same rendition a couple weeks later at the Louisville Yum! Center. It’s worth noting how Aldean embodies the resolve of the song’s lyrics. While Petty always approached a microphone like he was going to whisper something in its ear, his shoulders slouched and knees bobbing to the beat, Aldean squares his shoulders, plants his feet to form a broad base, and confronts the mic straight on. Some of this boils down to style. Jason Aldean’s stage presence is different from Tom Petty’s. But it also captures the distance “I Won’t Back Down” has traveled since the late 1980s, from a largely empty signifier that listeners could fill with their own meaning to an anthem used for rallying listeners in the wake of mass violence. Here, feminized vulnerability and trauma are recast as masculinized aggression and resolve until the song fills with the politics of the moment: the US’s anti-Black, anti-Muslim refusal to back down from standing its ground.

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Featured Image: “Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Oracle Appreciate Event “Legendary”, JavaOne 2011 San Francisco” by Flickr user Yuichi Sakuraba, CC BY-NC 2.0

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Justin Adams Burton is Assistant Professor of Music at Rider University. His research revolves around critical race and gender theory in hip hop and pop, and his book, Posthuman Rap, is available now. He is also co-editing the forthcoming (2018) Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music Studies. You can catch him at justindburton.com and on Twitter @j_adams_burton. His favorite rapper is one or two of the Fat Boys.

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tape reelREWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

SO! Reads: Hiromu Nagahara’s Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan’s Pop Era and Its Discontents – Shawn Higgins 

Spaces of Sound: The Peoples of the African Diaspora and Protest in the United States – Vanessa K. Valdés

SO! Reads: Shana Redmond’s Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora – Ashon Crawley 

 

L’éducation en Afrique

Auteur : Abdou Moumouni Dioffo (1929-1991)

Cette réédition en libre accès de ce livre fondamental publié pour la première fois en 1964 (François Maspéro éditeur) est un projet dirigé par Frédéric Caille (Université de Chambéry), avec l’autorisation de Mme Aïssata Moumouni.

Pour accéder au livre en version html, cliquez ici.
Pour télécharger le PDF, cliquez ici.
Pour commander le livre en version imprimée, cliquez sur le bouton Paypal ci-dessous.

Acheter un livre, c’est nous soutenir et permettre à ceux et celles qui ne peuvent l’acheter de le lire en libre accès.

«  Si […] on ne perd pas de vue l’importance du facteur culturel et humain pour toute tentative de sortir du sous-développement, pour sauvegarder effectivement l’originalité africaine, la personnalité africaine dans leurs aspects les plus authentiques et les plus positifs, on comprendra l’importance qu’il faut accorder aux questions d’enseignement et d’éducation, l’urgence de leur étude approfondie et de la discussion des voies déjà proposées ou expérimentées, le caractère impératif de l’élaboration de solutions adaptées aux conditions, mais aussi aux objectifs immédiats et lointains de l’ensemble des peuples d’Afrique Noire, aux exigences de la libération totale de l’homme Noir Africain, et à l’éclosion et l’épanouissement de son génie. »

Ce livre écrit en 1964 à propos des enjeux postcoloniaux de l’éducation en Afrique francophone subsaharienne reste d’une pertinence incontestable, tout en offrant des données historiques précieuses. Cette réédition, sous la direction de Frédéric Caille, servira aux étudiants et étudiantes, chercheuses et chercheurs et à toutes les personnes qui continuent à réfléchir à la meilleure manière de garantir un accès universel à l’éducation en Afrique.

ISBN epub : 978-2-924661-77-2
ISBN pour l’impression : 978-2-924661-75-8
397 pages
Design de la couverture : Kate McDonnell

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Pour acheter le livre, choisissez le tarif en fonction de l’endroit où le livre devra être expédié. Des frais de 15 $ sont ajoutés pour le transport. Le ePub (pour lire sur une tablette ou un téléphone) revient à 16 $ et est expédié par courriel.


Version papier ou ePub



The Center for Open Science, MediArXiv, and BodoArXiv Launch Branded Preprint Services in the Humanities

Press Release: April 2, 2019

MediArXiv BodoArXiv

Charlottesville, VA

MediArXiv is a free, community-led digital archive for media, film, and communication research. The mission of MediArXiv is to open up media, film, and communication research to a broader readership and to help build the future of scholarly communication. The collaboration between COS and MedArXiv will provide a non-profit platform for media, film, and communication scholars to upload their working papers, pre-prints, accepted manuscripts (post-prints), and published manuscripts. The service is open for articles, books, and book chapters. In the course of its developments, MediArXiv is working toward interoperability with other important open access scholarly platforms in the humanities and social sciences, such as Humanities Commons.

MediArXiv offers an open access platform to share research run by and for researchers. Its growing community of scholars and papers in media and communications opens international dialogues on scholars’ own terms. Our field is especially critical of the operations of power and money in cultural evolution: here is a practice that turns critique into an new actuality we can all learn from – Prof. Sean Cubitt, Goldsmiths, University of London.

BodoArXiv, named after a Carolingian peasant made famous by historian Eileen Power (1889-1940), gathers scholarly literature in medieval studies across the disciplines. It provides an open, non-profit repository for papers at different stages of gestation, including works that may later find themselves in article form and/or behind a paywall. Anyone can access and download any item on BodoArXiv freely and immediately, in adherence to the basic tenants of the Open Access movement. Beyond helping authors make their scholarship more visible and discoverable, BodoArXiv fosters collaboration and mentoring as a platform that supports various forms of peer review.

MediArXiv and BodoArXiv are the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth community preprint services built on COS’s flagship platform, OSF, which helps researchers design and manage their research workflow, store their data, generate DOIs, and collaborate with colleagues. COS has leveraged the platform to help research communities in many disciplines discover new research as it happens and to receive quick feedback on their own research prior to publication. COS’s Preprints platform provides an easy, robust, and stable solution for organizations that want to launch their own preprints service. COS is currently supporting branded services in marine and earth sciences, psychology, social sciences, engineering, agriculture, imaging, paleontology, sports research, contemplative research, law, library and information science, nutrition, as well as national, multidisciplinary services in Indonesia, France, the Arab nations, and Africa.

Over 2.2 million preprints have been already indexed from a variety of sources and can be accessed by selecting a subject of interest, entering specific search terms, or browsing the preprints most recently added to the service. OSF Preprints uses SHARE to aggregate search results from a variety of other preprint providers like arXiv, bioRXiv, PeerJ, CogPrints and others into its archive. Preprint contributors are also encouraged to upload their supporting materials, if available.

About Center for Open Science

The Center for Open Science

http://cos.io/

(COS) is a non-profit technology and culture change organization founded in 2013 with a mission to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. COS pursues this mission by building communities around open science practices, supporting metascience research, and developing and maintaining free, open source software tools. The OSF is a web application that provides a solution for the challenges facing researchers who want to pursue open science practices, including: a streamlined ability to manage their work; collaborate with others; discover and be discovered; preregister their studies; and make their code, materials, and data openly accessible. Learn more at cos.io and osf.io.

Contact for MediArXiv
All inquiries: Jeroen Sondervan | j.sondervan@uu.nl | +31 (0)6 1422 1443
Web: www.mediarxiv.org
Twitter: @mediarxiv

Contacts for BodoArxiv
All inquiries: Guy Geltner | guy.geltner@scholarlyhub.org
Web: www.bodoarxiv.org

Contacts for the Center for Open Science
Media: Nici Pfeiffer | nici@cos.io
Starting a Branded Preprint Service: Nici Pfeiffer | nici@cos.io
Web: https://cos.io/preprints
Twitter: @osframework

Book Launch State Machines: 23 April @Furtherfield, London

State Machines: Reflections and Actions at the Edge of Digital Citizenship, Finance, and Art

Join editors Yiannis Colakides, Marc Garrett, Inte Gloerich, contributors Max Dovey and Helen Kaplinsky, and respondent Ruth Catlow for short presentations with plenty for time for discussion.

LOCATION: Furtherfield Commons, 269-271 Seven Sisters Road, London

DATE: Tue, April 23, 2019, 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM

Register (for free) here.

About the book: Today, we live in a world where every time we turn on our smartphones, we are inextricably tied by data, laws and flowing bytes to different countries. A world in which personal expressions are framed and mediated by digital platforms, and where new kinds of currencies, financial exchange and even labor bypass corporations and governments. Simultaneously, the same technologies increase governmental powers of surveillance, allow corporations to extract ever more complex working arrangements and do little to slow the construction of actual walls along actual borders. On the one hand, the agency of individuals and groups is starting to approach that of nation states; on the other, our mobility and hard-won rights are under threat. What tools do we need to understand this world, and how can art assist in envisioning and enacting other possible futures?

This publication investigates the new relationships between states, citizens and the stateless made possible by emerging technologies. It is the result of a two-year EU-funded collaboration between Aksioma (SI), Drugo More (HR), Furtherfield (UK), Institute of Network Cultures (NL), NeMe (CY), and a diverse range of artists, curators, theorists and audiences. State Machines insists on the need for new forms of expression and new artistic practices to address the most urgent questions of our time, and seeks to educate and empower the digital subjects of today to become active, engaged, and effective digital citizens of tomorrow.

Contributors: James Bridle, Max Dovey, Marc Garrett, Valeria Graziano, Max Haiven, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Francis Hunger, Helen Kaplinsky, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, Rob Myers, Emily van der Nagel, Rachel O’Dwyer, Lídia Pereira, Rebecca L. Stein, Cassie Thornton, Paul Vanouse, Patricia de Vries, Krystian Woznicki.

This event is hosted at Furtherfield Commons in Finsbury Park*

*Please not this is a separate building to our Gallery and is at the Finsbury Park station entrance to the Park.

 


State Machines: Art, Work and Identity in an Age of Planetary-Scale Computation

Focusing on how such technologies impact identity and citizenship, digital labour and finance, the project joins five experienced partners Aksioma (SI), Drugo More (HR), Furtherfield (UK), Institute of Network Cultures (NL), and NeMe (CY) together with a range of artists, curators, theorists and audiences. State Machines insists on the need for new forms of expression and new artistic practices to address the most urgent questions of our time, and seeks to educate and empower the digital subjects of today to become active, engaged, and effective digital citizens of tomorrow.

This project has been funded with the support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

Acknowledging a downside to APC: opening up scholars and scholarship to exploitation

Brainard (2019) in an April 3, 2019 article in Science, reports that a U.S. judge has ruled that a “deceptive” publisher [OMICS] should pay $50 million in damages. This is a timely opportunity to acknowledge a downside of the APC business model, that is, opening up scholarship to further commercial exploitation, including exploitation by publishers that do not or may not meet reasonable standards for academic quality and ethics in publishing, and to make recommendations to limit this potential for exploitation.

Abstract

The SKC team often focuses on the article processing charges (APC) business model for OA journal publishing, in order to observe and analyze trends. However, this focus is not an endorsement of either OA publishing (as opposed to OA archiving), or the APC business model that is used by a minority of fully OA journals. This post acknowledges a major downside to the APC model. APC “opens up” scholars and scholarly works for further commercial exploitation by traditional and new publishers that offers a wide range of quality in academic terms, ranging from excellent to mediocre and including a few with unethical practices that are not compatible with advancing our collective knowledge.This judge’s ruling provides an opportune moment to acknowledge this flaw in the APC business model, and to discuss potential remedies. I argue that it is essential for scholarly publishing to be scholar-led so that advancing scholarship is the primary priority. One model that I recommend as one to build on and expand is the SSHRC Aid to Scholarly Journals program. This program provides modest funding to scholarly journals that are under the direction of qualified Canadian academics. This funding is awarded through a competitive process that in effect serves as a journal-level academic peer review process. OA initiatives where key decisions are made by the research community (directly or through librarian representatives) are more likely to ensure high quality and ethical services than policies favouring and/or providing support for OA publishing with no clear vetting process of publication venues.

Details

There are downsides to any model for support of scholarly publishing. One important downside to the APC model is that it further “opens” scholars and scholarly works to exploitation for commercial purposes, including exploitation by publishers that do not meet academic standards for a variety of reasons ranging from lack to experience to deliberate deception. I do not personally evaluate or judge the quality of academic publishing. However, as Brainard (2019) reports, a U.S. judge has literally made a judgement in the case of OMICS.

Context

To understand how scholarly publishing has become vulnerable to this kind of exploitation, it is helpful to unravel the conflation of OA and OA publishing, and of OA publishing and the APC business model.

Open access (OA) is about access to the world’s scholarly knowledge. OA is not the same as OA publishing. There are 2 major approaches to OA; one is OA archiving, which is compatible with diverse publishing models. To get a sense of what has already been achieved through OA archiving, I recommend playing around with 2 major services. One is the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE). BASE cross-searches over 6,000 archives around the world that collectively contain more than 140 million documents, 60% of which are OA. The other is the Internet Archive, which provides access to billions of webpages, videos, audio recordings, and over 20 million texts. If a classic text is out of copyright, it is probably available through the Internet Archive.

The majority of fully OA journals (73% of journals in DOAJ as of today) do not charge article processing charges (APCs). How do they manage? Small journals can often get by with in-kind support such as journal hosting, modest university, funder, and/or scholarly society subsidies, and/or collaborative library-based support (e.g. Knowledge Unlatched, Open Humanities Press).

As of today, OMICs is still active. There is reason to think that there are substantial numbers of APC based OA journals by publishers of unknown and potentially problematic academic quality. As I reported based on the 2018 survey of OA journals at ELPUB 2018, ” 5 of the largest publishers are no longer listed in DOAJ (Canadian Center of Science and Education, Internet Scientific Publications, LLC, Macrothink Institute, SCIENCEDOMAINInternational, and Scientific Research Publishing; Bentham Open is listed in DOAJ in 2017, but not 2018). (Morrison, 2018). There are a variety of reasons why publishers might not be included in DOAJ. Publishers may not have completed the re-application process. This would be understandable as (in my opinion) the questionnaire is onerous and specific questions do not entirely make sense. However, not meeting the DOAJ criteria does raise questions about the quality of the publisher, particularly if DOAJ itself is used as a means of assessing quality. Journals and publishers disappearing from DOAJ raise the question of the advisability of relying on DOAJ inclusion as a criteria for quality. In an author selects a journal in DOAJ today, assuming this assures quality publication, the journal might disappear from DOAJ later, possibly when the author is up for tenure and promotion and reviewers are taking quality of publication venues into account in making recommendations.

Scams and poor quality publishing is not strictly an OA problem. There are scam conferences that are not at all OA, and traditional publishers of journals and monographs have a wide range of quality. However, it is a downside of a particular model for OA, and I recommend that the OA movement acknowledge this and help find remedies. As noted above, my remedy is scholarly leadership of OA initiatives, that is key decisions made by scholars whose primary work is in the university or research sectors, as the best way to make sure that quality of academic work is the top priority.

References

Brainard, J. (2019). U.S. judge rules deceptive publisher should pay $50 million in damages. Science April 3, 2019. Retrieved April 4, 2019 from https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/us-judge-rules-deceptive-publisher-should-pay-501-million-damages

Morrison, H. (2018). Global OA APCs 2010 – 2017: major trends. Elpub 2018. Retrieved April 4, 2019 from https://elpub.episciences.org/4604/pdf

SO! Podcast #75: Wring Out Fairlea

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOADWring Out Fairlea

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This podcast commemorates the thirty-year anniversary of the first Wring Out Fairlea demonstration, which was organised by the Coalition Against Women’s Imprisonment to take place at the former Fairlea women’s prison in Melbourne on 26 June 1988. The Wring Out action was repeated three more times over the next eight years, bringing thousands of people to encircle Fairlea prison in protest and in solidarity with the women inside.

The podcast draws on original broadcasts of the Wring Outs and interviews with activists. It grows out of a collaborative research project conducted by Bree Carlton and Emma Russell on the history of an anti-carceral feminist movement in Melbourne, Australia.

The podcast is produced and narrated by Emma Russell at the studios of 3CR Community Radio in Naarm / Melbourne, on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations.

Featured image used with permission by the author.

Emma Russell’s research centres on social movements, punishment and policing. It aims to interrogate punitive logics and the nature of carceral and securitised space. Emma is particularly interested in feminist and queer activist histories, theories of prison abolition, and sound as a tool for understanding carceral space and resistance.

Out now! Bilwet Fascismemap (1983-1994)

Tussen 1983 en 1994 schreef de Stichting ter Bevordering van de Illegale Wetenschap (BILWET) een twintigtal teksten over hedendaags fascisme. De map bevat onder andere een lezing over wolven, zes kleurplaten met Kuifje en Hitler, een analyse van getuigenissen van SS’ers, mijmeringen in Berlijn en een ambulant-wetenschappelijk artikel over filosofenmode. De Bilwet fascismemap, indertijd gemaakt voor scholingsdoeleinden in de kraakbeweging, werd niet eerder uitgegeven. Waarom dan nu toch wel? Vijfendertig jaar oude fascismeanalyses zijn niet zomaar toepasbaar op de huidige maatschappij. Maar in de antifascistische discussies, die in links-progressieve kringen nog niet zo lang geleden gemeengoed waren, liggen belangrijke lessen voor het heden. Hoe zag dat antifascistisch discours eruit? Wat was de relatie tussen klasse- en seksestrijd? Hoe vond de kennisoverdracht tussen de generaties toen plaats en hoe verloopt die nu? De Bilwet fascismemap geeft inzicht in deze vragen en daarmee een inkijk in de geschiedenis van wat ook wel de niet-fascistische, feministische mannenbeweging genoemd kan worden.

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SO! Reads: Hiromu Nagahara’s Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan’s Pop Era and Its Discontents

When times are tough and people are feeling sad, they might need space to be calm, to reflect, and to heal. For example, in the United States following September 11, 2001, Clear Channel (now iHeartMedia) suggested keeping a number of “aggressive” artists, such as Rage Against the Machine and AC/DC, off the airwaves for a while to provide the nation with one group’s version of a calming sonic space. However, this suppression couldn’t hold;  at a certain point, the pilot light re-ignited, and Americans wanted to turn the gas up high, to feel the heat, to extravagantly combust themselves out of the Clear Channel rut.  Explosive tracks followed those tragic times in 2002–from Missy Elliott’s “Lose Control” to DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What” to Miley Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop” to Daft Punk’s “Lose Yourself to Dance”–resonating over the airwaves and web browsers and dance floors. So whose idea of a healing sonic space prevails? For how long? Who decided what healing looks and sound like? And who decides the time for healing is finished?

Hiromu Nagahara is a historian who has examined how music was used during a transformative era in Japanese history. Nagahara’s book, Tokyo Boogie-Woogie: Japan’s Pop Era and Its Discontents (Harvard UP, 2017), focuses on the ryūkōka popular music produced “primarily between the 1920s and the 1950s” (3), which is different from the hayariuta music of the Meiji (1868-1912) and Taishō (1912-1926) periods or the kayōkyoku ballad songs post-1970. One of Nagahara’s central concerns with popular music is how it furthered the nation-building endeavor of the 1920s and 1930s. Another concern is how censorship was implemented and policed through the wartime era and beyond. Nagahara’s stance on censorship in Japan is that state powers such as the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (Nihon Hōsō Kyōkai, NHK), public powers such as music critics, and self-censorship are responsible for the limitations put on artistic productions. This stance is in concert with scholars such as Jonathan Abel and Noriko Manabe, although unfortunately Nagahara’s book doesn’t discuss Manabe’s work on the censorship of music addressing the Daiichi Fukushima disaster.

Nagahara greatly contributes to the English-language scholarship on Japanese music critics; those interested in how Theodor Adorno similarly addressed German sociopolitical issues through music criticism will find both the parallels and the divergences mapped in Nagahara’s work fascinating. The biggest takeaway for this reader, however, was the book’s tracing of Japan’s shifting class formations through these decades. Nagahara shows that Japan evolved from an infamously strict class-caste system into a middle-class society into a society that “increasingly saw itself to be classless” (212) all in the span of a century, and that music and the nation’s burgeoning media industry played pivotal roles in this transformation.

Movie Poster for Tokyo March, 1929, wikimedia commons

Specifically, Nagahara argues that the commercialization and industrialization of music in Japan were natural outcomes of the nation’s shift toward capitalism in the Meiji period. While the “gradual transformation of music, and art in general, into ‘consumer goods’” (64) in Germany signaled the “long-term decline of German middle-class culture” for Theodor Adorno, it actually signaled the opposite for Japan. Nagahara notes that, prior to the Meiji period, the Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1868) “idealized and mandated the separation of different status groups – in particular the division between members of the ruling samurai class and those who were deemed to be ‘commoners’” (21). Therefore, when the Japanese public bought an unprecedented 150,000 copies of “Tokyo March” (“Tokyo kōshinkyoku”) in 1929 and when records produced in 1937 were selling half a million, it became clear that “luxury goods” (18) such as phonographs and records were no longer simply for the ruling elites of Tokugawa-era wealth. Instead, Japan’s former commoners were marching toward capitalism with a middle-class cultural dream on the horizon.

As a period study, Nagahara doesn’t try to tie things up nicely – that’s not often how history works. As such, Nagahara concerns himself with the politicization of media in Japan, and he extends his discussion of pre-war popular music up through the 2000s with quick references to Pokémon and AKB48. However, there is a missed opportunity here in that Nagahara never references the Daiichi Fukushima disaster and the subsequent outpouring of popular music that responded to the public and private-sector management of the catastrophe.

This would have fit perfectly in the “The Television Regime” subsection of the book’s conclusion, and it would have added greatly to what Nagahara recognizes is a “significant dearth of scholarly analysis of the inner workings of popular song censorship in the last decades of the twentieth century” (218) and beyond. This reader would be excited to read more by Nagahara if he were to take up this task. I learned so much about the context and reception of pop music in Japan from Tokyo Boogie-Woogie, and this book would help any reader better understand one of the largest and most influential music and media scenes in the world today.

Featured Image: “Vintage Hi-Lite Transistor Radio, Model YTR-601, AM Band, 6 Transistors, Made In Japan, Circa 1960s” by Flickr User Seah Haupt, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Shawn Higgins is the Academic Coordinator of the Undergraduate Bridge Program at Temple University’s Japan campus. His latest publication is “Orientalist Soundscapes, Barred Zones, and Irving Berlin’s China,” coming out in the 2018 volume of Chinese America: History and Perspectives.

tape reelREWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

SO! Reads: Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder’s Designed For Hi Fi Living–Gina Arnold

SO! Reads: Susan Schmidt Horning’s Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP— Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo

SO! Reads: Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format–Aaron Trammell

Algorithmic Hate: Brenton Tarrant and the Dark Social Web by Luke Munn

“From where did you receive/research/develop your beliefs? The internet, of course.” -Brenton Tarrant

On Friday, March 15th 2019, at 1:40pm, Brenton Tarrant walked into the first of two mosques in central Christchurch and began shooting indiscriminately, leading to the deaths of 50 people. Already there has been speculation about what drove such an attack. For one writer, Tarrant was clearly inspired by French anti-immigrationist rhetoric. After all, the title of his manifesto, “The Great Replacement,” comes from the book by Renaud Camus, a text cited frequently by far-right politicians like Geert Wilders and the more elusive identitarian movement; while visiting France, Tarrant wrote: “I found my emotions swinging between fuming rage and suffocating despair at the indignity of the invasion of France.”[1] But then there is also the reference to Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik. In his manifesto, Tarrant himself said he “only really took inspiration from Knight Justiciar Breivik.” There are certainly parallels between the self-radicalization of Breivik, a man who increasingly isolated himself physically and emotionally, and the path taken by Tarrant.[2] Yet Tarrant didn’t have to look at the other side of the world for white supremacism. Christchurch has long attempted to shrug off its label as a racist city, one fueled in part by its latent skinhead culture.[3] Such culture breeds mainly underground, but flares up occasionally in violent outbursts in  the city and elsewhere: the killing of a council worker in 1989, a Korean backpacker in 2003,[4] an older gay man in 2014.[5] Some speculate that another local influence was the Bruce Rifle Club that Tarrant joined in 2018. One visitor to the club described the members as survivalists and eccentrics who shared “homicidal fantasies” like the zombie apocalypse, and boasted that their guns would only ever be pried “from their cold dead hands.”[6] 

Racist writing and racist killers, radical ideologies and gun culture. Yet alongside these traditional inspirations are two new contenders: the dark web and social media. “The Dark Web Enabled the Christchurch Killer” claims one Foreign Policy article. Shortly before beginning his attack, Tarrant posted one final time to the imageboard site 8chan: “Well lads, it’s time to stop shitposting and time to make a real life effort post.” 8chan emerged in 2013 after its creator became disillusioned with the increasingly “authoritarian” culture of 4chan and created this “free-speech-friendly” version in response. Though the site’s Terms of Use prohibit anything explicitly illegal, the unrestricted nature of 8chan means that topics like child rape can surface, or that children in provocative poses can appear.[7] Such appearances are pounced on by the mainstream media. 8chan is invariably described as a “cesspool” and the “gutter of the internet.” In this framing, 8chan is tasteless, degraded, a magnet for the obnoxious and the sociopathic. This is not to defend the site—after scrolling through some of the pages set up to honor Tarrant, the site’s graphic, gleeful screeds are indefensible—but simply to point out the marginalisation enacted by this rhetoric. Despite being publicly accessible like any other website and containing links to hundreds of external sites, 8chan is carefully isolated by labeling it as the “dark web,” a specialist haven for vile and disgusting people and their vile and disgusting ideas.

Others object, stating that social media was the real culprit. Tarrant livestreamed 17 minutes of the shootings on Facebook. He also posted links to his 74-page manifesto on Twitter. Both platforms are designed, as their promotional copy suggests, to “grow your audience”—to allow ideas and events to move beyond an individual’s immediate circle and spread quickly, irrespective of international borders. Global reach is even more important in a geographically isolated country like New Zealand. In the quest for a motivator, the livestream in particular seems to offer a powerful set of forces in a neat package: the opportunity for the perpetrator to star in his own movie with an international horde of onlookers taking in every move. For a brief moment, the world would be forced to turn to Brenton Tarrant, gazing in horror as each moment was captured by a helmet camera, transmitted to Facebook’s servers, and distributed to viewers around the world. Such a view resonates with the now traditional critique of social media as narcissistic. Self-obsessed, we take the craving for views, likes, and comments to the logical extreme, becoming willing to do anything to ratchet up the metrics quantified so precisely by these platforms. There’s no question that the distribution mechanisms enabled by Facebook Live and Twitter helped Tarrant’s videos and writings to spread. Even after Tarrant’s stream was halted, versions of the video continued to circulate widely, despite content monitoring efforts.[8] As one was taken down, others quickly arose to take its place, slipping from user to user, account to account. But Tarrant doesn’t conform to the egotistic social media user, building up an empire to the self. In his own manifesto, he claims that he was not the type to seek fame: “I will be forgotten quickly. Which I do not mind. After all I am a private and mostly introverted person.”

Both the dark web and social media, then, while containing important elements, seem inadequate on their own. These supposedly separate spheres appear to be merging, feeding off each other to form a cohesive online environment. I suggest, then, that Tarrant was encompassed by a seamless blend of recommended racist content and memetically racist humans—a dark social web.

We are only just beginning to learn how dark social media can become. Key to this dark journey are the technical affordances built into these platforms. On social media, one thing leads to another, automatically and effortlessly. Consume content, and similar content will slide into place surrounding it. Such content is built up from our extensive online history: what we watched and commented on, who we followed or subscribed to. Based on these hundreds of signals, we are presented with content that is attractive by design: hooking into our interests, goals and beliefs. In other words, highly individualized content resonates harmoniously with our worldview.

Published back in 2011, Eli Pariser’s book, The Filter Bubble presciently captured this condition where personalized content creates an echo chamber. But Pariser seemed mainly concerned with the bifurcation of politics into left and right, lamenting the erasure of any middle ground between Democrat and Republican, the lack of dialogue between opposing views. What Tarrant epitomizes—and a growing alt-right culture confirms—is that filter bubbles not only reinforce existing views, but amplify them and generate new ones. Users can be nudged from a middle-ground position (whatever that might be) towards something more right leaning, and then from right to far-right. Social media filters are not static entities, based on some fixed notion of our true self, but rather highly dynamic and updated in real-time. As Zeynep Tufekci observes, in serving up more—and more intense—content, these recommendations are “the computational exploitation of a natural human desire: to look ‘behind the curtain,’ to dig deeper into something that engages us.”[9] Your profile incorporates your history, but also whatever you just watched.

Our bubble of personalized information, then, is constantly shifting. And this environment can quickly become darker, piggybacking on what Rebecca Lewis calls the “Alternative Influence Network”: watch comedian/pundit Dave Rubin and a user is recommended his former guest Jordan Peterson; after that a related video might appear from Carl Benjamin, who came to fame through Gamergate; and from there it’s an easy slide into content by Lauren Southern, who was barred from entering England for her anti-Islam activism.[10] The efficacy of this mechanism stems from its automated speed. Every view calculates a new set of recommendations, and yet the time of considering options, weighing the consequences, and making a choice is annihilated altogether. A decision is made without the appearance of decision-making, an influence that seems unbiased and impartial.

As social media grows darker, the dark web grows more social. Sites like 8chan, as mentioned, have been dismissed as the lewd underbelly of the internet, a lonely destination site visited only by the pathologic. Yet if the content posted to these boards is indeed horrific, it is subsumed by the social act of posting. Call and response, meme and countermeme—in this context, posting is just a means to an end, part of a larger meta-game played for lulz. Indeed if there are any “values” left in these spaces that denounce “moralfags,” it is the validation achieved when an image attains traction and is transformed into meme-proper, becoming replicated, shared, and adapted.

Image boards were never about communication, but about replication. If automated speed was key to social media, memetic speed is critical here. There is no time for discourse in the sense of a considered exchange of ideas. The picture and slogan that gets pasted more, that floods the board, that soaks up more scroll time, wins. Image. Image. Image. The resulting deluge of content desensitizes. The first time a racial slur is encountered, it is shocking. The second time, the visceral disgust has been tempered. The third time, it is abhorrent but expected. And so on. It is not as if the dark web becomes brighter. But the sheer repetition of key terms and images, matched with the enormous volume of posts, becomes numbing. Skimming through the hundreds of posts, one could imagine how the mind of someone already predisposed to extremist views might rapidly adjust. As Tarrant himself observed: “Memes have done more for the ethnonationalist movement than any manifesto.” The shock cannot be sustained; a new normal takes its place.

At a broader level, the so-called dark web becomes socialized through the mainstreaming of platforms. Reddit’s early days, as long-time users can attest, featured child porn, sexual assault, and slavery stories as well as frontpage articles that provoked death and rape threats.[11] Yet over the years, Reddit has been cleaned up through content moderation and is now highly visited, shifting from loser nerd sanctum to heavyweight news nexus. “Reddit has become, simply put, mainstream media,” stressed an AdAge article, noting that, even back then in 2012, it was racking up 400 million unique visitors per month.[12] Purchased by media behemoth Condé Nast, it courts advertisers through sponsored content as well as more organic collaborations like its popular AMA (Ask Me Anything) feature.

Even 4chan has formalized its moderation in order to retain users. Once known as the “asshole of the internet,” the site implemented tools in 2013 to assist its so-called janitors with moderation. These “straightforward and well-intentioned” guidelines, as 4chan’s creator writes, are not meant to “stifle discussion, but to facilitate it.”[13] From 2015 onwards, moderators are asked to sign a legal agreement disclosing their identities and detailing their rights and responsibilities.[14] While not producing cleaner content per se, these measures at least attempt to temper vitriol between users. Yet as discussed, even this moderation is viewed by some as supporting an authoritarian culture of censorship and political correctness, leading to the creation of alternatives like Gab and 8chan. Hard to believe a few years ago, these far-right “havens” for free-speech push 4chan towards a position, that, while certainly not mainstream, is less of an outlier. New extremes emerge; old extremes become normalized. These changes “fill in” the former gaps of ideological terrain, providing more gradual waypoints along an extremist journey.

So rather than the shining beacon of social media and the isolated cesspool of the dark web, we see a dark social web—a smoothly gradated space capable of nudging users towards a far right position. Key here is the notion of seamlessness. Accounts of terror sometimes mention a turning point, a decisive moment when radicalisation occured. But in these technical environments, there is no sign indicating the switch from one ideology to another, no distinctive jolt when transitioning to the next waypoint in this process. The next video autoplays. The next comment is shown. The next site is recommended. As social content gets darker and dark content more social, we witness an algorithmic racism able to select a non-confrontational path through this media and steer the user down it. Based on the rules of recommendations, each piece of content must be familiar, suggested by a user’s previous history, but also novel, something not yet consumed. Calibrated correctly, platforms grasp the social, cultural or ideological connections between content, presenting a sequence of ideas that seem natural, even inevitable. These links, as Lewis argues, make “it easy for audience members to be incrementally exposed to, and come to trust, ever more extremist political positions.”[15]

The dark social web is complex but cohesive. One report states that Tarrant “traveled the world, but lived on the internet.”[16] Meticulously constructed from his extensive internet activity, Tarrant’s online environment corresponded perfectly with his ideology—a world that matched his worldview. It’s easy to imagine him sliding seamlessly between YouTube and 8chan or tabbing from Twitter to Gab without any  sense of cognitive dissonance. And yet these all-encompassing environments encompass a kaleidoscope of connected figures, memes and causes. In this world, Gamergate vids blur into mens-rights tweets, SJW jibes merge into classical liberal lectures, and Pepe memes shade quickly into anti-Semitic rants. This suggests, contrary to the claims made by journalists, that the hunt for a definitive influence is a fruitless one. There was no primary motivator for Tarrant to carry out his attacks, no single driver that radicalized him. “From where did you receive/research/develop your beliefs?” asks Tarrant in his FAQ style manifesto. “The internet, of course,” he answers, “over a great deal of time, from a great deal of places.”

Instead what emerges is a kind of algorithmic hate—a constellation of loosely connected digital media, experienced over years, that constructs an algorithmically averaged enemy. Indeed Tarrant’s manifesto is almost boilerplate in its phrasing: faceless “invaders” with high fertility rates who attempt to colonize the “homelands” of the white peoples. While the history of white supremacism should not be underplayed, our contemporary condition tends to politicize through antagonism—what you are against, rather than what you stand for. Algorithmic hate constantly reproduces an “us” versus “them” relation, but who exactly is constituted by “them” is always indistinct. The figure of the Other is impressionistic and hazy, a composite formed from millions of data points. In a sense, Tarrant never really lived in New Zealand; to do so would mean real social encounter, a risk of swapping his faceless adversaries with the flesh-and-blood communities that call Aotearoa home.

Let’s examine some bridging mechanisms of the dark social web. Tarrant stated: “remember lads, subscribe to PewDiePie” just before commencing his shooting spree.[17] In one sense, mentioning the YouTube star was a red herring, a bait for hand-wringing pundits and tech-challenged journalists. The vlogger was no more responsible for the shooting than any other singular actor. But in another sense, the Swedish star provides a useful archetype for understanding how darker racist, sexist, and xenophobic traits can be drawn together with a lighter, socialized whole.

Recommendations provide one method of convergence. Like the “alternative influence network” discussed above, PewDiePie provides a linking mechanism to prominent alt-right figureheads. As one poster points out, he follows Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux on Twitter; he endorses Jordan Peterson; and he has hosted Ben Shapiro.[18] Whether these recommendations are done verbally in a video, or occur through automated mechanisms like “suggested for you,” they draw together the hugely successful social icon and the darker ideologies of the alt-right—the popular and the populist. In doing so, they provide a set of natural stepping stones, assisting his massive fan base in a transition to a more extremist position while legitimating it as normal.

Gaming provides another bridge. PewDiePie came to fame initially through his Let’s Plays of horror videogames. While his content these days is broader, he still retains strong links to gaming and gamer culture. Hasan Piker unravels the connections between the vlogger and extremist positions in a video titled: “PewDiePie: Alt-Right or Irresponsible Gamer Bro?”[19] Yet while Piker’s take is thoughtful, it should be clear by now that alt-right and gamer bro are not mutually exclusive categories, but rather heavily overlapping cultures. Indeed one of the core germination points for the modern alt-right was the GamerGate controversy and its associated anti-feminist, anti-SJW rhetoric. “Games were simply the tip of the iceberg – progressive values, went the argument, were destroying everything.”[20] Paradoxically, by clinging to the “norm” in the face of “libtard invaders,” Gamergate and its offshoots steered a core group of disaffected young white men into a far-right position.

Irony provides the final link. PewDiePie is no stranger to controversy. This is a man who has hired men to carry a “death to all Jews” sign, who has used the n-word in one stream, and who has called a female streamer a “crybaby and an idiot” for demanding equal pay.[21] These actions have led to criticism and contracts being terminated. But the streamer is also affable and funny, emanating a care-free attitude. He is the perfect conduit for the “ironic racism” employed in heavy doses by alt-right advocates. In the meme-saturated environment of social media, irony provides plausible deniability. It’s a comedy channel. It was obviously a joke. Quit being overly sensitive. Late last year, Pewdiepie recommended the “E;R” channel, which happens to feature Nazi propaganda behind a thin veneer of humour. When the channel creator was asked if he “redpilled,” or tried to convince viewers of their white superiority, he responded: “Pretend to joke about it until the punchline /really/ lands.”  

Pewdiepie thus displays some of the ways in which social media and the dark web converge to form an environment conducive to alt-right ideals. But again, the YouTube star is simply a proxy, the most obvious example of a more general capability. The nodes for others will be different; their paths to extremism will be uniquely theirs. One of the strengths of the dark social web is that is highly individualized, an environment algorithmically optimized to reflect its inhabitant. The path that Brenton Tarrant took is not yet fully known, and the online environment he was surrounded in is open to speculation. Yet in an operational sense, Tarrant’s environment of platforms, sites and services is exactly the same as ours—it is designed in the same way, with the same architectures and affordances. Strangely, as the alt-right proliferates and the far-right secures yet another parliamentary win, it seems as if we’re only just waking up to the dark capabilities—socially, culturally, and politically—that these environments enable. After all, fascism is not congenital; nor is evil innate. Instead, if we are a product of our environment, then we need to seriously investigate the sociotechnical properties of that environment. Failure to do so could result in the next generation following in the footsteps of Brenton Tarrant.

Based in Aotearoa New Zealand, Luke Munn uses both practice-based and theoretical approaches to explore the intersections of digital cultures. He has recently completed a PhD on algorithmic power at Western Sydney University.

 

[1]Sasha Polakow-Suransky and Sarah Wildman, “The Inspiration for Terrorism in New Zealand Came From France,” Foreign Policy (blog), March 16, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/03/16/the-inspiration-for-terrorism-in-new-zealand-came-from-france-christchurch-brenton-tarrant-renaud-camus-jean-raspail-identitarians-white-nationalism/.

[2] Jacob Ravndal, “The Online Life of a Modern Terrorist: Anders Behring Breivik’s Use of the Internet,” VOX-Pol (blog), October 28, 2014, https://www.voxpol.eu/the-online-life-of-a-modern-terrorist-anders-behring-breiviks-use-of-the-internet/.

[3] Paul Spoonley, “Christchurch Mosque Shootings Must End NZ’s Innocence about Right-Wing Terrorism,” Noted, March 16, 2019, https://www.noted.co.nz/currently/christchurch-mosque-shootings-must-end-nzs-innocence-about-right-wing-terrorism/.

[4] Keith Lynch, “White Supremacist Admits Killing Korean Tourist,” Stuff, April 1, 2010, https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/3538712/White-supremacist-admits-killing-Korean-tourist.

[5]Express Magazine, “Found Guilty: Justice for Gay Man Killed in Epsom Motel,” Express Magazine, April 26, 2016, https://gayexpress.co.nz/2016/04/justice-gay-man-killed-epsom-motel/.

[6] Radio New Zealand, “Hunter Says He Warned Police about Dunedin Gun Club, Christchurch Shooter,” TVNZ (RNZ National, March 17, 2019), https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/hunter-says-he-warned-police-dunedin-gun-club-christchurch-shooter.

[7] Patrick O’Neill, “8chan, the Central Hive of Gamergate, Is Also an Active Pedophile Network,” The Daily Dot, November 17, 2014, https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/8chan-pedophiles-child-porn-gamergate/.

[8] Andrew Liptak, “Facebook Says That It Removed 1.5 Million Videos of the New Zealand Mass Shooting,” The Verge, March 17, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/17/18269453/facebook-new-zealand-attack-removed-1-5-million-videos-content-moderation.

[9] Zeynep Tufekci, “YouTube, the Great Radicalizer,” The New York Times, June 8, 2018, sec. Opinion, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html.

[10] Rebecca Lewis, “Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube” (New York: Data & Society, September 2018), https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/09/DS_Alternative_Influence.pdf.

[11] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/724a47/what_dark_part_of_reddit_history_has_been/

[15] Rebecca Lewis, “Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube” (New York: Data & Society, September 2018), https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/09/DS_Alternative_Influence.pdf.

[16] David D. Kirkpatrick, “Massacre Suspect Traveled the World but Lived on the Internet,” The New York Times, March 16, 2019, sec. World, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/world/asia/new-zealand-shooting-brenton-tarrant.html.

[17] In fact “Subscribe to PewDiePie” is not just a generic request but a meme referencing the online campaign to keep Felix Kjellberg as the #1 subscribed-to channel on YouTube. His challenger was the T-Series channel, a company that according to PewDiePie fans, “simply uploads trailers of Bollywood videos and songs.” Already then, race quietly emerges in the war between the white, Swedish Kjellberg and the Indian managed T-series.

[20] Matt Lees, “What Gamergate Should Have Taught Us about the ‘Alt-Right,’” The Guardian, December 1, 2016, sec. Games, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump.