The danger of "spicy" books
Here's a "concerned" essay from 1891 about the dangers of naughty literature on impressionable young minds. It was written by Anthony Comstock, whom Wikipedia says "was an anti-vice activist, United States Postal Inspector, and secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who was dedicated to upholding Christian morality. He opposed obscene literature, abortion, contraception, masturbation, gambling, prostitution, and patent medicine."
The article is full of anecdotes about the callous, self-serving motivations of authors and the tragic results that ensue when kids get their hands on these publications.
The essay's closing paragraph reads:
Save our youth from this fetid blast of corruption which is being sent out by the fiery greed of thoughtless, reckless, or criminal authors and publishers. Authors and publishers need to call a halt upon themselves, ere they further curse the youth of this free land and undermine our free institutions.
Thank goodness that more than a century later we no longer have to worry about authorities spouting beliefs like these... Right?
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Noel Gallagher photographed by Chris Floyd, 1994
"If you look at Noel's lap in the photo, he's got an address book full of phone numbers. He started going through this book, phoning these numbers and asking people, 'Alright, have you seen our kid?' The other person would obviously say, 'No,' and Noel would be like, 'OK, see you later.' I, coming from the south, didn't understand what he meant by 'our kid,' so I asked him, and he was like, 'The singer, my brother.' I was like, 'Oh right, so you're definitely in the band?' He said: 'I am the fucking band.' I was so blissfully ignorant.”
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Free LaKeith Smith
Vice's Documentary About LaKeith:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFjFze39Dcc
(would not let me embed because it is age restricted)
Link to LaKeith Smith's Gofundme:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-me-bring-my-son-lakeith-home?utm_campaign=m_pd+share-sheet&utm_content=undefined&utm_medium=copy_link_all&utm_source=customer&utm_term=undefined
In 2015, LaKeith Smith was charged for the murder of his friend A'Donte Washington, who was shot by a police officer. LaKeith was 15, and charged as an adult. He was sentenced to 55 years, for a crime he did not commit. For 8 years his family has been fighting to free him while he has grown from child, to adult in prison. During the 2020 George Floyd protests, they were able to hire a new attorney with the money raised from LaKeith's Change.org page.
On December 2nd, 2022, LaKeith will be attending a post conviction hearing. This may be the only chance he has to escape imprisonment for the rest of his life.
Please, watch Vice's documentary about LaKeith and A'Donte.
If you live in Alabama, please contact your DA, there is a pre-written email and link to the DA's email in the above link.
If you live anywhere else, please sign LaKeith's Change.org. That is in the above link as well.
LaKeith should be living his life right now, he should be spending time with his family and loved ones, he should not be behind bars. Please, help him.
UPDATE (2/12/2024)
On March 21 2023, Judge Sibley Reynolds re-sentenced LaKeith Smith to a total sentence of 30 years.
Since then, his family and friends have been working relentlessly to free him.
Recently the Alabama attorney general's office agreed that judge Reynolds' order was confusing, misleading and hard to understand,
SO, WITHIN 30 DAYS OF JANUARY 23 2024 LAKEITH IS EXPECTED TO RECEIVE A COURT DATE FROM THE ALABAMA COURT OF APPEALS.
Please spread the word, LaKeith is so close to being able to live his life.
Here is the official Free LaKeith Smith Instagram page which is run by his Mother and updated frequently:
https://www.instagram.com/justice4lakeithsmith/
Here is the linktree with ways you can help:
https://linktr.ee/freelakeith
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Vice surrenders
I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in LA with Adam Conover at Vroman's, then on MONDAY in Seattle with Neal Stephenson, then Portland, Phoenix and more!
Vice died the way it lived: being suckered in by smarter predators, even as it trained its own predatory instincts on those more credulous than its own supremely gullible leadership. RIP, we hardly knew ye.
For those of you who don't know, Vice was a Canadian media success story. It was founded by a motley clique of hipsters, one of whom – founder of the Proud Boys – has since grown to be one of the world's great fascism influencers. Another perfected the art of getting young people to work "for exposure" even as he built a massive, highly lucrative media empire on their free labor:
https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/vice-oral-history/
Eventually, Vice transitioned to a string of progressively worsening corporate owners, each more dishonest, predatory – and gullible – than the last. The company was one of the most enthusiastic marks for Facebook's infamous "pivot to video" – in which Mark Zuckerberg destroyed half the media industry by tricking them into thinking that the public was clamoring for video content, based on fraudulent viewing numbers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video
Vice went all-in on video, spending hundreds of millions to finance Zuckerberg's doomed attempt to conquer Youtube. But unlike other the rubes who got zucked, Vice found greater fools to scam, convincing giant, slow-moving meidia companies that the best way to get in on the Next Big Thing was to shower them with vast sums of string-free money:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viceland_(Canadian_TV_channel)
And yet, at every turn, through a succession of increasingly incompetent owners who bought the stumbling, declining Vice at fire-sale prices and then proceeded to hack away at the wages and tools its journalists depended on while paying executives salaries so high that they beggared the imagination, Vice's reporters continued to turn out stellar material.
This went on literally until the last moment. The memorial posted by 404 Media rounds up a selection of major stories Vice's beleaguered, precarious writers produced even as Vice's vulture capitalist leadership were pulling the rug out from under them:
https://www.404media.co/behind-the-blog-vices-legacy-and-the-idea-that-the-internet-is-forever/
True to form, those private equity scumbags locked all those workers out of the company's CMS without notice – and then forgot to lock down the podcasting back-end. That allowed a group of Vice veterans – Matthew Gault, Emily Lipstein, Anna Merlan, Tim Marchman and Mack Lamoureux – to gather for a totally unauthorized, tell-all session that they pushed out on an official Vice channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKT4OtDEJRA
It's a hell of a listen. Not only do these Vice veterans have lots of fascinating history to recount, but they also describe the conditions under which those blockbuster stories of Vice's final days were produced. As the "visionary leaders" of the company paid themselves millions, they halted payments to key suppliers, from Lexisnexis to the interview transcription service the writers depended on. Writers paid out of pocket to search PACER court records.
Not only did Vice's reporters do incredible work under terrible and worsening circumstances, but the Vice writers who got out ahead of the total collapse are also doing incredible work. 404 Media is a writer-owned investigative news publisher founded by four Vice escapees – Samantha Cole, Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg and Joseph Cox, which is both producing incredible work and sustaining the writers who founded it:
https://www.404media.co/
All of which leads to an inescapable conclusion: whatever problems Vice had, they didn't include "writers don't do productive work" and also didn't include "that work isn't economically viable*. Whatever problems Vice had, they weren't problems with Vice's workers – it was a problem with Vice's bosses.
Which makes Vice's final, ignominious punishment at the hands of those bosses even more brutal, stupid and inexcusable. According to the leaked memos emanating from the company's investors and their millionaire C-suite toadies, the business's new strategy is abandoning their website in order to publish on social media.
This is…I mean, this,..
This is…
Wow.
I mean, wow.
The thing is, the social media business model is a giant rug-pull. They're not even bothering to hide their playbook anymore. For social media, the game is to encourage media companies to become reliant on third parties to reach their audiences. Once that reliance is established, the companies turn down – or even halt – the ability of those media companies to reach their audience altogether. Then, they charge the media companies to reach their audiences:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web
Now, this wasn't always quite so obvious. Back when Vice was falling for Facebook's "pivot to video," it wasn't completely obvious that the long con was to take your audience hostage and ransom them back to you. But deliberately organizing your business to be reliant on social media barons today? It's like trusting your money to Sam Bankman-Fried…in 2024.
If there was ever a moment when the obvious, catastrophic, imminent risk of trusting Big Tech intermediaries to sit between you and your customers or audience, it was now. This is not the moment to be "social first." This is the moment for POSSE (Post Own Site, Share Everywhere), a strategy that sees social media as a strategy for bringing readers to channels that you control:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/19/now-we-are-two/#two-much-posse
Predicting that a social media platform will rug the media companies that depend on it today doesn't take a Sun Tzu – as cunning strategies go, the hamfisted tactics of FB, Twitter and Tiktok make gambits like "Lucy and the football" look like von Clausewitz.
The most bonkers part of this strategy is that it's coming from private equity bosses, who laud themselves as the great strategists of the 21st century, whose claim on so much of our global capital and resources is derived from their brilliant insight, which allows them to buy "distressed assets" like Vice, "restructure" them to find "efficiencies" and sell them on.
The reality is that PE goons – like other financiers – are basically herding animals. Everyone's hit on the tactic of buying up beloved media companies – from the 150-year-old Popular Science to modern publications like CNet – and then filling them with spammy garbage in the hopes that Google will fail to notice and continue to award them pride-of-place on search results pages:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task
The fact that these billionaire brain-geniuses can't figure out how to "turn around" a site whose workers a) produce brilliant, popular, successful work; and b) depart to found successful firms that commercialize that work tells you everything about their ability to spot "a good business opportunity."
PE – like other mafiosi – only have one business-plan, the "bust out," where you invade a business that produces useful things, force them to pay your chosen suppliers sky-high fees for things they don't need, extract massive fees for your "management" and then walk away from the collapse:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/24/anti-posse/#when-you-absolutely-positively-dont-give-a-solitary-single-fuck
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