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old-childhood-drama · 3 years

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Taylor Swift and Joe Jonas Masterpost (Toe/Jaylor)

Before dating (May 2008)

We start with the Taylor lookalike

In May 2008 the Jonas Brothers are filming their music video for Burnin’ Up [x]. Joe’s love interest in it is played by a blonde girl who looks quite a bit (and she’s also styled) like Taylor Swift, for reference, this is the music video that has Selena Gomez as Nick Jonas’ love interest.

As far as we know they hadn’t even met so we don’t know exactly what this was supposed to mean, maybe Joe had a crush on Taylor or maybe it’s a coincidence.

We do know that Nick and Selena were dating when this was filmed and that by the time the MV was released (July 4th, 2008) Joe and Taylor were officially dating.

Toe is alive! (July 2008 – September 2008)

On Tour

Fans claim to have seen Taylor around the tour in early July, which matches with Taylor’s lyrics in "Last Kiss".

Last Kiss. Taylor Swift.

I do recall now the smell of the rain

Fresh on the pavement, I ran off the plane

That July 9th, the beat of your heart

It jumps through your shirt

On July 14th, Taylor and The Jonas Brothers perform “Should’ve Said No”[x] from her debut album, and this performance now forever exists in their 3D movie (a classic), a cute fact is that some fans have said that Taylor tripped when she first came out, so they had to repeat it for the movie.

On July 20th Joe flies to Wyoming to watch Taylor opening up for Rascal Flatts, and they flew back and she was spotted at the Omaha show.

She’s seen in a couple shows more and she joins the stage again for their Madison Square Garden shows in August [x]. They sing “Even now just looking at you feels wrong”.

They’re together but they’re not together.

For more context, we must remember that Taylor was a very new artist from a small label and The Jonas were pretty much at their peak and Disney’s biggest act, and they were managed like crazy and could never even think about being seen with someone in a romantic way. Any rumors were denied so fast, and Disney did the absolute most to keep it secret. So according to everyone they were just good friends, at the time both Taylor and Selena were annoyed by all the secrecy.

Now back to the timeline:

Taylor is backstage of the tour A LOT for the next couple of weeks right next to the other not-girlfriends Selena and Danielle.

She films a cameo for the “Love Is on Its Way” [x] video for the concert in New York. She was said to be only interested in hanging out with Joe and they were seen hugging *gasp* I know it doesn’t seem like much now but back then this was the hottest gossip and again the Jonas were not supposed to breathe near any human of the opposite gender.

Taylor and the Jonas were staying at the same hotel a bunch of rumors ensued, but I will not talk about the whole Olympics and Toe locking themselves in a room at midnight thing. If it’s real, we really needed to touch some grass and stop staying outside of people's rooms all night.

On August 17th Joe goes to Ryan Seacrest's show and denied that Taylor is his girlfriend in the best way a corporation like Disney can train you to deny something that’s true. Saying Taylor is “a great girl and I think anybody would be lucky to date her. I think anybody would love to go on a date with her.”

And Taylor tells People Magazine “He’s an amazing guy and anybody would be lucky to be dating him” Cinematic parallels.

Taylor is spotted in the back (in a mirror) of one of the Jonas youtube videos [x]. Basically, we all knew they were together.

The Central Park date (August 28th)

Now if you were a fan of either the Jonas Brothers, Selena, or Taylor you know this next part and it the iconic triple date of Central Park.

Again, this is kind of famous at this point and Selena has been quoted saying how awful it was because the boys were not allowed to be seen with them so they all went to Central Park (Selena’s first time in Central Park) and Taylor and Selena walked about 20 feet of distance from the guys so nobody would think they were together but we all already knew because it wasn’t like they were that good at hiding it and there are pictures of them together that night (the clownery of it all).

These backstage tour adventures are the reason Taylor and Selena are friends today and in Selena’s own words the best thing to come out of those relationships.

VMAs (September 2008)

With how many pictures of them together that night [x] [x] [x] exist you would think they had gone together as a couple but no just two besties! The 2008 VMAs are so the show where Russell Brand mocks the Jonas Brothers and their purity rings and Taylor publicly defends them.

Toe seems happy for the rest of September but as we know now the end is near.

The Break-Up (October 2008)

Social Media was different back then and Taylor did what every teen girl with a broken heart did in 2008 and she went to myspace with an edited post to make a statement about the Toe current situation.

Post-Breakup

The 27 seconds Joe Jonas will regret for the rest of his life.

Taylor went on Ellen and I don’t even think I need to say much this interview is THAT iconic she sat on that couch and told the world exactly how Joe had broken her heart in the following two quotes:

“There’s one that’s about that guy, but…that guy’s not in my life anymore unfortunately. That guy…that’s an ouch.”

“I’m not even gonna be able to remember the boy who broke up with me over the phone in 25 seconds when I was 18…it was like 27 seconds, that’s got to be a record.” [x]

She also went on Ryan Seacrest’s and when asked about the perfect guy she saw an opportunity and took it, saying “I used to always say sense of humor, but I think that it’s important to have the same kind of sense of humor. I have a really dry, sarcastic sense of humor and if somebody doesn’t think that my sense of humor is funny, then that’s not something that is good. Um, so sometimes you know, that can be a wrong match. If they’re not allowed to go in public with me, that’s sort of an issue too.” [x]

Bonus the amazing youtube video Taylor posted with Joe’s Camp Rock doll and how he comes with his own phone to break up with other dolls [x]. Taylor eventually went full out and cited Camilla Belle (then girlfriend of Joe) as the reason for the breakup. And you know someone at Disney’s PR office wanted to die when this was going down.

So finally, Joe was forced to acknowledge the whole situation with a Myspace post:

"I never cheated on a girlfriend. It might make someone feel better to assume or imply I have been unfaithful, but it is simply not true. Maybe there were reasons for a breakup. Maybe the heart moved on. Perhaps feelings changed. I am truly saddened that anything would potentially cause you to think less of me. For those who have expressed concern over the "27 second” phone call. I called to discuss feelings with the other person. Those feelings were obviously not well received. I did not end the conversation. Someone else did. Phone calls can only last as long as the person on the other end of the line is willing to talk. “

Forever & Always

Now this song is known as THE Toe song and it was born out of the end of the relationship when she felt Joe was getting distant, but she couldn’t do anything to help it, it was made really late into the production of Fearless so she had to rush to finish it in time (so no other breakup songs are about Joe in the original album).

Forever & Always Was I out of line? Did I say something way too honest, made you run and hide Like a scared little boy I looked into your eyes Thought I knew you for a minute, now I’m not so sure

In the 2009 Grammy's Taylor and Miley (insert The Ex-Girlfriends Club Theory here) performed Fifteen (obviously not about Joe) and the Jonas were in the audience. I believe this is probably around the time Taylor writes Mr. Perfectly Fine and You All Over Me, which we know get to have thanks to Fearless (Taylor’s Version) 13 years later.

You All Over Me

The best and worst day of June

Was the one that I met you

With your hands in your pockets

And your 'don't you wish you had me' grin

But I did, so I smiled, and I melted like a child

Now every breath of air I breathe reminds me of then

Mr. Perfectly Fine

'Cause I hear he's got his arm 'round a brand-new girl

I've been pickin' up my heart, he's been pickin' up her

And I never got past what you put me through

But it's wonderful to see that it never phased you

In November of 2009, she also goes to SNL and mocks Joe in her monologue. "You might think I'd bring up Joe That guy who broke up with me on the phone But I'm not gonna mention him *rolls eyes* In my monologue [Spoken:]Hey Joe, I'm doing real well, tonight I'm hosting SNL [Sings:]But I'm not gonna brag about that In my monologue [x]"

To make things even more dramatic and very awkward The Jonas Brothers, Demi Lovato, and Taylor Swift spent NYE together watching the ball drop on TV and this was probably not how they wanted to start their years. [x] [x] [x] and a video [x]

Now let’s discussed some of the songs that came out at the time. The Jonas response to Forever & Always was Much Better. Nick described it as a song that was very personal to Joe and Joe went on to say that it was based on his very interesting year. They also at some point wanted to pretend the song was about their love for their fans but come on. Joe also changed the lyrics from ‘superstar’ to ‘country star’ and later changed it to ‘movie stars’ when he broke up with Camilla who is the ‘Much Better’ girl from the song.

Much Better - Jonas Brothers

I get a rep for breakin’ hearts

Now I’m done with superstars

And all the tears on her guitar

I’m not bitter

But now I see

Everything I’d ever need

Is the girl in front of me

She’s much better

Taylor’s iconic response in Better Than Revenge seems to be more of an attack on Camilla. She’s spoken about her regret for this song since then and hasn’t played it in years and Camilla seems to be ok we never forgiving her for it [x] [x]. Regardless this song remains a staple of the genre ‘Feminism OFF, Bops ON’.

“I was 18 when I wrote [“Better Than Revenge.”] That’s the age you are when you think someone can actually take your boyfriend. Then you grow up and realize no one can take someone from you if they don’t want to leave”. - Taylor 2014.

Better Than Revenge - Taylor Swift

Let's hear the applause (Come on, come on)

Come on, show me how much better you are

(So much better, yeah?)

See you deserve some applause

'Cause you're so much better

She also released "Last Kiss" about the nicer part of their relationship, and some believe other songs such as If This Was a Movie, Haunted (Speak Now) and Jump Then Fall (Fearless) are about Joe. From the Jonas, the other song believed to be about Taylor is Paranoid (Lines, Vines and Trying Times).

Jump Then Fall

Well, I like the way your hair falls in your face

You got the keys to me

I love each freckle on your face, oh

I've never been so wrapped up, honey

Probably a song was written about and in the early days of their romance and the long hair freckles [x] thing definitely fits 2008 Joe.

If This Was a Movie

Baby, what about the ending?

Oh, I thought you'd be here by now

Thought you'd be here by now

According to some this song is a sister song to "Last Kiss" in the same album and that is confirmed to be about Joe.

Haunted

Come on, come on, don't leave me like this

I thought I had you figured out

Something's gone terribly wrong

Won't finish what you started

This song would be a sister to Forever & Always since Taylor described both to be about a relationship that was fading in the end and that she was confused as to how they got there in the first place.

"‘Haunted’ is about the moment that you realize the person you’re in love with is drifting and fading fast. And you don’t know what to do, but in that period of time, in that phase of love, where it’s fading out, time moves so slowly. Everything hinges on what that last text message said, and you’re realizing that he’s kind of falling out of love. That’s a really heartbreaking and tragic thing to go through because the whole time you’re trying to tell yourself it’s not happening. I went through this, and I ended up waking up in the middle of the night writing this song about it.” Taylor

Friendlier days are coming (2010- )

I guess time can heal a lot of wounds and Toe is seen hugging and on friendly terms at the Clive Davis party on January 31st of 2010 [x].

The world was so shocked when we realized that Joe went to see her perform in a couple of her shows in September 2011 [x] [x], and in here Holy Ground is born about her new evaluation of their former relationship rather than the bitterness of the breakup. The lyrics' secret message is “when you came to the show in SD” and the potential parallel to "Last Kiss".

Holy Ground - Taylor Swift

We blocked the noise with the sound of ‘I need you’

And for the first time I had something to lose

And I guess we fell apart in the usual way

And the story’s got dust on every page

But sometimes I wonder how you think about it now

And I see your face in every crowd…

… Tonight, I'm gonna dance

For all that we've been through

But I don't wanna dance

If I'm not dancing with you

Last Kiss - Taylor Swift

I do remember the swing of your step

The life of the party, you’re showing off again

And I roll my eyes and then

You pull me in

I’m not much for dancing

But for you I did

They're seen talking in the MTV's EMA's 2012 [x].

From here they seem to be friendly and in May of 2015 after the Billboards. They even go on a double date later that year with Gigi Hadid, Calvin Harris, and Karlie Kloss (this picture feels so cursed). Nick and Joe get invited to Taylor’s 4th of July party and they seem somewhat distant after his split from Gigi.

Present (2020- )

In 2020, we got the amazing surprise of folklore with the song ‘Invisible String’ that makes a reference to Taylor’s past songs about exes being harsh and how she sent Joe and his wife Sophie Turner a present for their baby girl’s birth. In 2021, she has now released the re-recordings of Fearless and we are all reliving the drama and enjoying the chaos of Taylor’s and Sophie’s friendship not letting Joe know peace for those 27 seconds over a decade ago.

Invisible String

Cold was the steel of my axe to grind

For the boys who broke my heart

Now I send their babies presents

#Taylor Swift #fearless #fearless (taylor's version)#forever & always #mr perfectly fine #you all over me #last kiss #toe #jaylor #joe jonas #jonas brothers #folklore #invisible string #paranoid #much better #lines #vines and trying times #better than revenge

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kapitaali · 3 years

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The New Hippies

THE NEW HIPPIES: The work abolition movement, anarcho-primitivism and biodynamism as ways to combat climate change

Essay for the course LOGS13b The Strategic Role of Responsibility in Business by Teppo Saari

Introduction

The course LOGS13b The Strategic Role of Responsibility in Business had the students think about and discuss the various ethical dimensions in business, moral dilemmas and choices to be made that a decision maker in business world come across every day.

This essay is motivated by our case study with a headline ’Investors urge European companies to include climate risks in accounts’ (Financial Times 2020). In this essay I will explore values and ethical principles that I see as the solutions to our case study and climate change in general. This is not to say that I could stand up for them in business world. Ironically, my main thread and leitmotif here is the untransformational nature of capitalism and business world. Thus, standing up to the values I will discuss here means doing less business, not more.

This essay is divided in three parts: problem – reaction – solution. These three parts will talk about the chosen values and ethical principles. They are by no means new: pragmatism – The Golden Rule – parsimony & naturality. They just seem to be in conflict with our modern way of living.

Thinking pragmatically about the problem

As part of our course assignment, we got to read about a group of investors managing trillions of dollars worth of assets who urged European companies to include climate risks in their accounts (Financial Times 2020). Scientists have warned us for decades, that pumping extreme amounts of CO2 into our atmosphere will result in melting of the polar ice caps (Mitchell 1989; Jones & Henderson-Sellers 1990), which will raise the sea level and drown some of the coastal cities (Peters & Darling 1985). Finally, capitalists are acting responsibly!

It would seem that capitalists actually cared for the planet and not just their profits. Or would it? Maybe they are scared of losing their future profits, and this kind of media escapade would bring back public trust and confidence in the system. It would be a sign that capitalists can act transparently, openly, accountably, respecting others (O’Leary 1993). But is changing the allocation in your investment portfolio really a sign of empathy? Would there be other ways to better express empathy in business?

Shareholders are interested in the risk their assets are facing, not necessarily in the welfare of the people. Investors acting virtuously can be just virtue-signaling or pleasing other elements in the society to take off media pressure and negative PR from them in a conformist way (Collinson 2003). Maybe they are just greenwashing their own conscience. Why is George Soros’ climate buzz astroturfing industrial complex (Morningstar 2019a) financing Greta Thunberg to do public PR campaigns targeting the youth? Maybe there is money in it. It is unlikely that it would have been dubbed ”A 100 trillion dollar storytelling campaign” without some particularly good reasons (Morningstar 2019b).

But there is something else in it too than just money: power and control. The person who gets to limit choices gets to dictate what kind of choices remain. And if a person has that kind of foreknowledge, then that person can be two steps ahead of us. And being two steps ahead of us means securing future profits. Including climate risks in accounts will imply controls. Controls are imposed on accounts, but ultimately it will mean controls imposed on people and their daily activities. Workers are the ones who will naturally suffer the consequences of management decisions. In this case management decisions are ’urged’ externally, from the owners’ part. After all, it is the corporations that are producing most of the climate change effects, in terms of pollution and greenhouse gases (Griffin 2017). People doing their jobs, working everyday, producing things but also at the same time producing climate effects. I would still love to hear politicians use more terms such as ”pollution” when talking about these issues. For it is unclear how reducing carbon emissions will reduce overall pollution that is also a contributor in the destruction of our environment (see eg. Bodo & Gimah 2020; Oelofse et al. 2007). Issues like microplastics, holes in the ozone layer, biodiversity loss, acid rains and soil degradation need to be talked about just as much, if not more so.

The problem is simple: too much economic activity producing too much climate impact, mostly pollution and greenhouse gases. Solving the Grand Challenge (Konstantinou & Muller 2020) of our time is harder if we wish to keep the fabric of our society intact. There’s a clear need for dialogue among stakeholders (Gardiner 1996), but how is it a dialogue if people are not actually listened to and don’t get to say how things will progress in society? What I am proposing is a meme-like solution that has the greater impact the more people adopt it. My solution is: stop working. Produce less. Stop supporting systems and mechanisms that produce climate effects. Stop supporting the mechanisms that don’t listen to your voice. Disconnect from the Matrix. Working a dayjob is one of these mechanisms. Although many people have realized the benefits of working from home (Kost 2020), a lot more needs to be done. Remote work is not available to everyone. Not all jobs are remote work.

Bob Black (2021) in his texts has advocated for the total and complete abolition of work. Stopping working naturally does not mean stopping doing things, it will merely mean stopping working a job, a concept which itself is a social construct. Black’s theses are simple but powerful. Working is the source of all ills, it is not compatible with ludic life (allthemore so in 2021), it is forced labour and compulsory production, it is replete with indignities called ”discipline”: ”surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching -in and -out, etc”. Black does not only describe the negative ontological aspects of working, he goes deeper and invokes many familiar names of Greek philosophers:

Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that “whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves.” His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed “to regain the lost power and health.” Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to “St. Monday” — thus establishing a de facto five-day week 150–200 years before its legal consecration — was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the ancient regime wrested substantial time back from their landlord’s work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants’ calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanov’s figures from villages in Czarist Russia — hardly a progressive society — likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants’ days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited muzhiks would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we.

Black notes that only ”a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages”. In similar vein, the late but great David Graeber saw the futility of most work. Calling this phenomenon ’bullshit jobs’ (Graeber 2018), Graeber sets out to describe what many of us are familiar with: we do useless things to make ourselves feel useful. Because modern society legitimizes itself with having people ’do’ stuff and not ’be’ a certain person. How can you (objectively) measure being? You can’t. But doing, that you can measure. This measurement then qualifies you as a member of society: productive, doing your part (an idiom that is a perfect example how you can’t escape the doing paradigm on a societal level). Graeber’s definition of a bullshit job is: if the position were eliminated, it would make no discernible difference in the world. In many cases these types of jobs are found to be supporting some kind of buraucracy, reporting, assisting decision makers, etc. Our current Matrix has its ways of creating more of these with the clever marketing concept called ’value’ (Petrescu 2019). They don’t make a difference, they create value.

Why would you want to overload the world by doing things that you nor most everyone else see no point in? Why would you waste your time doing pointless things? The easy answer to these questions is ’subsistence’. But there are many other ways to live on this planet. If you keep doing what the society tells you is acceptable or convenient, you will shut your eyes from the problem at hand: climate change.

Legitimizing anarcho-naturism as a solution with The Golden Rule

Our responsibility is to ourselves. We can not properly be held responsible for anything else. Yet the system of representational democracy does just this, holds us collectively responsible for many things, borrows money from creditors with our names on the loan collectively and then makes us pay for the loans. The way this Matrix works is yet another reason to disconnect from it. Or at least stop supporting it as much as possible.

The Golden Rule states: ”Treat others as you want to be treated” (Gensler 2013). From the perspective of climate change, it can first seem curious why you would quit your job and head for the hills. After all, we are facing a global issue here. There are people in need for help and I am running away? But I would see it as a way to get around our predicament. The Golden Rule can be also interpreted in Kantian way as the categorical imperative, particularly its first formulation: ”Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”. This formulation is somewhat more proactive in nature. It talks about acting, doing things, and doing things is what is appreciated in our society, even when your goal is to exit the society.

Why exit the society? Is it enough to just quit your job and find something else to do, something that is more fulfilling and not bullshit? What an excellent question. Long before the advent of smart phones and 5G and DNA-vaccines, this question had been brought up to the table. In the 1800s, people were realizing the negative impact industrialization was having on society at large. People were rooted out from their family homes in the countryside, forced to move to a large city to look for a job, crammed into small apartments with dozens of other workers, coerced into working long and hard days at factories to make a living. The lowly misery of these people attracted the attention of a certain Friedrich Engels, who felt their situation was not adequate to make up for the suffering they had gone through. He meticulously described the working conditions of the English working class in his ”The Condition of the Working Class in England” (2003 [1845]), originally published in German. Sociology as a science was established by Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim to study these changes. Slowly but surely, the influx of people into cities started to cause issues, something that mayors and other municipal representatives had to start taking care of. Planning and zoning were given a lot more attention, since the earlier modus operandi of old European cities had been rather laissez faire (Sutcliffe 1980).

Against this backdrop of massive societal change, people started to question the changes and their direction. Are we really nothing more than slaves, just working in a different environment? Slavery might not be the right word or context here. Many people believe to be free, govern themselves and their property, and yet their daily actions and options to choose from seem to be eerily limited. They have only so many choices, most of which seem somehow related to running their errands. A more appropriate term, with all its connotations, here would be the Greek word ananke, ”force, constraint, necessity”. Like a force of nature, progress towards modernity necessitates that people leave their family homes and go work in large factories, compulsively manufacturing endless amounts of products, some of which are necessary, others merely decorations, and some just pointless.

Many names in 19th century New England worked upon a vision for the future society at a time when unprecedented changes were taking place and the standard of living was rising faster than ever before. The Transcendental Club was a group of New England authors, philosophers, socialists, politicians and intellectuals of the early-to-mid-19th century which gave rise to Transcendentalism, the first notable American intellectual movement. Transcendentalist believe in the inherent goodness of people and nature, but that society and its institutions — particularly organized religion and political parties — corrupt the purity of the individual. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2003; Sacks 2003.) Transcendentalism is a unique mix of European Romanticism, German (particularly Kantian) philosophy, and American Christianity. The impact of this movement can still be seen in the many flavours of American anarchist and radical Christian movements.

Out of the ranks of Transcendentalists rose a couple of names that can be viewed as the progenitors of modern anarcho-primitivism and natur(al)ist anarchy. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the central figure of the Transcendental Club, who together with Henry David Thoreau critiqued the contemporary society for its ”unthinking conformity” and advocated for “an original relation to the universe” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2003). Emerson’s Nature (2009 [1836]) poetically embellishes our view of the natural world, while Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1995 [1854]) is a call for civil disobedience and revolt against the modern world. Another influential natur(al)ist writer has been Leo Tolstoi whose name is frequently mentioned by anarchists. Tolstoi himself was a Christian and pacifist, and his writings have inspired Christian anarcho-pacifism that views the state as ”immoral and unsupportable because of its connection with military power” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2017).

Before the Transcendentalist movement, Europe experienced similar trend in philosophy with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s natural philosophy. Rousseau touched upon many subjects: freedom, free will, authority, nature, morality, societal inequality, representation and government. Like Transcendentalists, Rousseau held a belief that human beings are good by nature but are rendered corrupt by society. ”Rousseau clearly states that morality is not a natural feature of human life, so in whatever sense it is that human beings are good by nature, it is not the moral sense that the casual reader would ordinarily assume” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2010). Rousseau’s work is relevant to many of the social movements that currently fight against COVID restrictions, vaccination agenda, building of 5G antenna towers next to where people live, polluting the environment, systemic poverty and general disconnection from the natural world. Rousseau, although regarded as a philosopher, saw philosophy itself negatively, and to him philosophers were ”the post-hoc rationalizers of self-interest, as apologists for various forms of tyranny, and as playing a role in the alienation of the modern individual from humanity’s natural impulse to compassion” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2010).

Rousseau’s days did not see capitalism as we see it now. It was later Marx (influenced by Hegel, who in turn was influenced by Rousseau) that put together a treatise that considers the societal change we have seen ever since from industrialism and circulation of capital. But Rousseau’s thoughts about the social contract (1968 [1762]), “child-centered” education (Rousseau 2010), and inequality (Graeber & Wengrow 2018; Rousseau 2008) are still relevant today. Especially when we are faced with many societal forces that are contradictory in nature, each of them pushing us into certain direction, demanding our attention, wanting us to change our beliefs about that one particular aspect that connects with other aspects and forms the Matrix of our reality.

We are once again facing a similar situation as the people did back in the days of the first industrial revolution. Now the industrial revolution has reached its fourth cycle, unimaginatively called ”Industry 4.0” (Marr 2018; WEF 2021), where machines are starting to become autonomous and talk to each other. I used to think technology was cool, and went to work for Google. But at Google I learned that technology is not cool, after all. Not until technology becomes completely open source, it will be used by massive conglomerates to build autonomous weapons systems (Cassella 2018; Johnson 2018) and the industry will keep paying ethics researchers to keep writing arguments for them (Charters 2020). Even though I could work for an industry that, given the current trajectory, will be among the biggest producers of CO 2 in the future Vidal 2017), the idea that I would work for an industry that sees weaponizing their products as the grandest idea of mankind’s future is still gnawing.

Because, it is all just business (Huesemann & Huesemann 2011):

One of the functions of critical science is to create awareness of the underlying values, and the political and financial interests which are currently determining the course of science and technology in industrialized society. This exposure of the value-laden character of science and technology is done with the goal of emancipating both people and the environment from domination and exploitation by powerful interests. The ultimate objective is to redirect science and technology to support both ordinary people and the environment, instead of causing suffering through oppression and exploitation by dominant elites. Furthermore, by exposing the myth of the value-neutrality of science and technology, critical science attempts to awaken working scientists and engineers to the social, political, and ethical implications of their work, making it impossible or, at the very least, uncomfortable for them to ignore the wider context and corresponding responsibilities of their professional activities.

It all seems to be connected with state imperialism and the military-industrial(-intelligence) complex. Lenin’s statement (2008 [1916]) equating capitalism with imperialism still prevails this day: ”imperialist wars are absolutely inevitable under such an economic system, as long as private property in the means of production exists”. The conditions change, but the war machine keeps on churning (soon with autonomous weapons!), with wealthy but crooky investors financing projects that are even more dystopian (Byrne 2013). We may remember what president Dwight D. Eisenhower said about the military- industrial complex (NPR 2011):

”In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”

It is exactly these kinds of doomsday scenarios that inspire people like Theodore John ”The Unabomber” Kaczynski. Kaczynski, famous for sending mail bombs to various university professors around the US, holds a doctoral degree in mathematics. (Wikipedia 2021.) Kaczynski was bullied as a child, and it has been suggested that he was part of an MKULTRA experiment in college (The Week 2017). Kaczynski did not send his bombs haphazardly. He wrote long theoretical pieces to justify his actions, most of them being thematically anarcho-primitivist. In 1995, after sending several bombs to university personnel and business executives in 1978-1995, he said to ”desist from terrorism” if he got his text published in media outlets.

In his Industrial Society and Its Future (Kaczynski 1995), a 35 thousand word essay published in The Washington Post, which the FBI gave the name ”Unabomber manifesto”, Kaczynski attributes many our societal ills to ”leftism”. In the manifesto Kaczynski details how two psychological tendencies, “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization”, form the basis of ”the psychology of modern leftism”. Feelings of inferiority are taken to mean the whole spectrum of negative feelings about self: low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, guilt, self-hatred etc. Oversocialization is the process of socialization taken to extreme levels:

24. Psychologists use the term “socialization” to designate the process by which children are trained to think and act as society demands. A person is said to be well socialized if he believes in and obeys the moral code of his society and fits in well as a functioning part of that society. It may seem senseless to say that many leftists are over-socialized, since the leftist is perceived as a rebel. Nevertheless, the position can be defended. Many leftists are not such rebels as they seem.

25. The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. For example, we are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not. Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a nonmoral origin. We use the term “oversocialized” to describe such people.

Kaczynski goes on to describe how this oversocialization causes a person to feel guilt and shame for their actions, especially in the context of performing as society expects them to perform. He writes how this concept of oversocialization is used to determine ”the direction of modern leftism”. Further on, Kaczynski describes how modern man needs goals to strive for, to not run the risk of developing serious psychological problems. This goalsetting activity he denotes ”power process”. But these goals can be real or artificial. Setting a goal is “surrogate activity” if the person devotes much time and energy to attaining it, does not attain it, and still feels seriously deprived. It is just a goal for goalsetting’s sake, the unfulfilled other side of the coin of power process. Kaczynski then connects these concepts to the many societal ills (excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change and the breakdown of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or the tribe) by describing how modern society, with all its marketing and advertising creating artificial needs, disrupts the power process, mankind’s search for itself and meaning-making in life. He sees social hierarchies and the need to climb up them, the ”keeping up with the Joneses”, as surrogate activity.

”Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify human behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will not adjust to society’s requirements: welfare leeches, youth gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts and resisters of various kinds”. This gradual increase, then, the system tries to ’solve’ by using propaganda, ”to make people WANT the decisions that have been made for them”. In regards to technology, the ”bad” parts cannot be separated from the ”good”, and thus we are constantly facing the dilemma between technology and freedom, new technology being introduced all the time, and new regulations being introduced to curb the negative effects of the technology and at the same time stripping us of our freedoms. Kaczynski concludes, that revolution is easier than reforming the system.

Later, Kaczynski released another of his anti-technological theses. In Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How (2015) Kaczynski presents a ”comprehensive historical analysis explaining the futility of social control and the catastrophic influence of technological growth on human social and planetary ecological systems.” This time Kaczynski talks more about how to start an anti-tech movement and how to keep it going. The text reads like a mathemathical proof of sorts, it presents ”rules”, ”propositions” and ”postulates” why the technological system will destroy itself (eg. Russell’s Paradox resulting in chaos in a highly complex, tightly coupled system) and why a successful anti-tech movement needs clear goals to avoid some of the errors revolutionary movements have made, which are elaborated in the book. Violence is not offered as a solution in the book, it is seen more like a mishap of sorts, a suboptimal outcome of a revolutionary movement. But it talks about power. Kaczynski got to learn the hard way how the feeling of powerlessness breeds desperate actions that would have been otherwise unnecessary. The book also talks about climate change and related issues, from a mathematic systems theoretical point of view.

Institutions that are in the business of social engineering and behavioral modification, such as the Tavistock Institute in the UK or the CIA in the US, would have us believe that Kaczynski’s actions were ”defences against anxiety” that can be seen as ”withdrawal, informal organization, reactive individualism and scapegoating” (Hills et al. 2020), and to some extent this is true. But Kaczynski interprets the actions of these institutions stemming from technological progress in our society Kaczynski 1995):

117. In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate MUST depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society MUST be highly organized and decisions HAVE TO be made that affect very large numbers of people.

This uniformity of a large hierarchical modern society then forces its will on people (Kaczynski 1995):

119. The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is not the fault of capitalism and it is not the fault of socialism. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.

We have once again encountered ananke, necessity. Now, if we consider ourselves as the lonely decision makers in this society, what could we do? We can try and fight fire with fire, but such fights end up producing only pain and casualties (Taylor 2013). Anarcho-naturists and anarcho-pacifists understand that (unnecessary) fighting in most cases does not work. Sometimes fighting is warranted, but it is beyond the scope of this essay to examine those cases. Sending bombs to people’s offices may get you some attention and even make somebody quote your manifesto in an essay, but it is not solving the issue, something which the Unabomber addressed in his later texts. If working a job indirectly supports the military-industrial complex NewScientist 2011), what good does it do? The military-industrial complex is the biggest source of pollution in the world (The Conversation 2019; Acedo 2015), detaching yourself from this complex is imperative. Even if they would manage to convince us with their psyops that they are willing to change and that climate change is an important issue (Ahmed 2014), it would still be the biggest polluter that is controlling the conversation. It has even been suggested that they are behind this climate buzz (Light 2014). Is your job doing that much good in society that it outweighs the cons? If I need to act responsibly, but cannot fight the system nor conform, while at the same time keeping in mind our looming climate disaster, the only reasonable and peaceful response is to exit the system altogether.

Biodynamism’s naturality and parsimony

Owning responsibility and transforming the world implies taking some kind of action. We have already seen how feelings of powerlessness and lack of self-worth can lead to destructive actions. But there are an unlimited amount of actions that can be taken, that are not based in feelings of powerlessness but empowerment.

Exiting society might sound like a lonely project, and some people might rightfully feel lonely when all their peers still want to live in the illusion. But it does not have to be so. A lot of soul-searching needs to be done, and that is usually done in privacy, focusing upon oneself, but beyond that there are ways how to go off-grid and drastically reduce your carbon emissions.

One of the key concepts that will be our guiding principle here is degrowth (Paulson 2017), which ties into values such as organicity, naturality and parsimony. We will want to have less production of artificial things, and more organic and natural things. By artificial we mean long supply chains and many phases of production with modern high technology that produce a large amount of climate effects. By natural we mean using primitive technology, mostly all-natural or recycled materials and something that can be produced even alone, given enough time. Primitive technology does not exclude electricity, it just means producing it differently.

Rudolf Steiner, Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, and theosophist, the founder of Anthroposophy and a great reformer of science in matters of spirit, started the first intentional form of organic farming, known as biodynamic agriculture, after he had given a series of lectures on the topic in the last year of his life. (Paull 2011.) Steiner had many spiritual experiences during his life, which lead him to start the Anthroposophy movement. He wanted to apply the scientific process into spiritual realm, inquiring it as it would be as real as our material world. Inquiring this spiritual world helped him access knowledge he claims to not have been access otherwise (Steiner 2011 [1918]). Anthroposophist self-inquiry can be seen as Foucauldian ”technology of the self” that ”provide an intervention mechanism on the part of active subjects, injecting an element of contingency to everyday encounters and alleviating the determinist effect that technologies of power would have otherwise” (Skinner 2012).

Steiner’s thoughts about agriculture are still relevant (Paull 2011):

In 1924 Steiner commented that, “Nowadays people simply think that a certain amount of nitrogen is needed for plant growth, and they imagine it makes no difference how it’s prepared or where it comes from” Steiner, 1924b, pp.9-10). He made the point that, “In the course of this materialistic age of ours, we’ve lost the knowledge of what it takes to continue to care for the natural world” (Steiner, 1924b, p.10).

Our current system seems to think exactly in this way, that if we just compensate our wreaked havoc by investing in ’green’ technology (Elegant 2019), it will all be ok and rainbows in the sky. But it will not. No one is even double checking if the companies that say that they are now carbon neutral actually proactively try to make our world greener. They can just buy a renewable energy company and say now we are green and do nothing else. Some would argue that going ’carbon neutral’ like these massive corporations are doing it is not the way to do it: “’green’ infrastructures are creating conflict and ecological degradation and are the material expression of climate catastrophe” (Dunlap 2020).

Steinerian biodynamism ”encompasses practices of composting, mixed farming systems with use of animal manures, crop rotations, care for animal welfare, looking at the farm as an organism/entity and local distribution systems, all of which contribute toward the protection of the environment, safeguard biodiversity and improve livelihoods of farmers” (Turinek et al. 2009). While modern biodynamic studies focus on agroecological factors such as nutrient cycles, soil characteristics, and nutritional quality (Reganold 1995; Droogers & Bouma 1996), Steiner himself was quite metaphysical in his lectures and paid attention to details such as kingdoms of nature, planetary influences, biorhythms, incarnated and environmental ethers, and the Zodiac (Steiner 2004 [1958]; Nastati 2009).

By shifting to more natural ways of living, we may help Gaia (Lovelock 1991; Singh 2007) heal in many other ways than just reduce our climate emissions. By realizing that we are actually living on the skin of a fairly large and complex organism, we will stop treating it as a plain source of material resources, and start bonding with it, tune into its consciousness and establish two-way communication, just like the natives have done in America.

The way of the natives ought to be our current way, since there is no reason why the natives could not guard the lands they have before. One of the greatest fears of people speaking for private property rights is that managing resources collectively would mean exhausting them. There is no Tragedy of Commons. Just because you are materially poor does not mean that you are any less competent steward of land and wealth, as proposed by Elinor Oström (2009). Acting for climate is not an investment allocation problem. The natives need their land back so that they could do their best to fight the destruction of our ecosystem. The Outokumpu supply chain in Brazilian rainforests, Elon Musk and Bolivian lithium mines, Papua New Guinea indigenous conflict, mining in Lapland in traditional Sami herding areas, Australian uranium mining in indigenous lands… these are all pointless conflicts.

There are also many other ways of staying grounded and in touch with nature, while at the same time cultivating sovereignty. Many of these things revolve around feeding the most immediate community next to you. They reflect ideas such as mutuality, solidarity, organicity, and naturality. Permaculture is a term coined by David Holmgren to describe ”an approach to land management and philosophy that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole systems thinking. It uses these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, rewilding, and community resilience” (Wikipedia: Permaculture 2021). Permaculture has many branches including ecological design, ecological engineering, regenerative design, environmental design, and construction. It also includes integrated water resources management that develops sustainable architecture, and regenerative and self-maintained habitat and agricultural systems modeled from natural ecosystems (Holmgren Desing Services 2007).

Earthships are 100% sustainable homes that are both energy efficient and modern. Earthsips are built with natural and repurposed (recycled) materials, they heat and cool themselves without electric heat, they use solar energy to power electric appliances, they collect all of their water from rain and snowmelt, they re-use their sewage water to fertilize plants, and there’s an indoor garden that grows food in vertical growing spaces (Reynolds 2021). Ecovillages are a ”human-scale, full-featured settlement, in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural world in a way that is supportive of healthy human development and can be successfully continued into the indefinite future” (Gilman & Gilman 1991).

Clifford Harper had a set of drawings imagining an alternative in his book Radical Technology (Harper & Boyle 1976). In them, he shows many of the ideas that were themes in the German garden city movement in the beginning of 20th century (Bollerey & Hartmann 1980), such as collectivised gardens, autonomous housing estates, and community workshops. The book introduces us ’radical technology’, which spans basically all of the concepts we have discussed up to this point: organic agriculture, biodynamic agriculture, vegetarianism, hydroponics, soft energy, insulation, low-cost housing, tree houses, shanty houses, ’folk-built’ houses using traditional methods, houses built from subsoil, self-built houses, housing associations, solar dwellings, domestic paper-making, carpentry, scrap reclamation, printing, community & pirate radio, collectivised gardens, collective workshops for clothesmaking, shoe repair, pottery, household decoration and repairs, autonomous housing estates, autonomous rural villages, etc.

These concepts, while they seem simple, are still empowering, they are meant to let people enjoy they fruits of their labour. Last but certainly not least is the concept that all of these things fall under, alternative (or, appropriate) technology. Alternative technologies are those ”which offer genuine alternatives to the large-scale, complex, centralized, high-energy life forms which dominate the modern age” (Winner 1979). Alternative technologies seek to solve the problems technocentric thinking has caused in society: technical scale and economic concentration, level of complexity or simplicity best suited to technical operations of various kinds, division of labor and its alleged necessity, social and technical hierarchy as it relates to the design of technological systems, and self-sufficiency and interdependence regarding the lives of individuals and communities. Many of these solutions have been developed in Africa, where problems have had to be solved, but resources have been scarce in actuality.

Appropriate technology holds great promise in ways that are currently underappreciated in our society (Huesemann & Huesemann 2011):

As has been mentioned repeatedly throughout this book, the primary goal of technology in our current economic system is to increase material affluence and to generate profits for the wealthy by controlling and exploiting both people and the environment. In view of the reality of interconnectedness, this is neither environmentally sustainable nor socially desirable. In this chapter we discuss how to design technologies which reflect the values of environmental sustainability and social appropriateness. We also emphasize the importance of heeding the precautionary principle in order to prevent unintended consequences, as well as the need for participatory design in order to ensure greater democratic control of technology. Finally, as a specific example of an environmentally sustainable and socially appropriate technology, we discuss the positive contribution of local, organic, small-scale agriculture.

Conclusion

This essay has presented the reader with ramblings of a person who is familiar with Critical Theory, who would like to build a stronger connection to nature, and who is having a major identity crisis in life. I have expressed, albeit feebly, my will to emancipate myself, to exit the Matrix. In Finnish they would say ”Sota ei yhtä miestä kaipaa”, and in George S. Patton’s words this expression would be ”Hell, they won’t miss me, just one man in thousands.”

In this essay I seem to have extensively quoted the Unabomber manifesto. This is not to say that Kaczynski had exceptionally good motives or justifications for his actions. He killed many people and is in prison now. Kaczynski’s ideas are not unique. Quoting his manifesto serves merely to prove one point: he is the product of his environment. Mental illness is no longer a taboo and things have progressed somewhat since Kaczynski’s days. It could be argued that Kaczynski’s writings were just projection of his own feelings of shame and guilt he had gone through. But his mental condition, should he be diagnosed with one (Amador & Reshmi 2000), does not invalidate the things he’s written. In many ways his writings are now more relevant than ever. When we have tech billionaires talking about inserting neuralinks into your brain and downloading thoughts straight from the headquarters, we can really see the manifesto dots connecting.

I wish it would have been just the mental load caused by a ’surrogate activity’ of keeping up with the Joneses that was the cause of all this, but no, it’s the real deal now. When we have corporate executives and federal commissions defending autonomous weapons systems and saying building such systems is a ’moral imperative’ (Gershgorn 2021), you know we have reached peak civilization. It’s all downhill from now on. All participation in society will support this moral imperative, and I don’t want to have anything to do with it. While many would get back to nature for reasons of convenience, such as better health, Rousseau himself would have gotten back to nature ”to feel God in nature” (LaFreniere 1990). It is this kind of humanist transcendentalism (not transhumanism) that we will need again, to realize what we have done to our planet, to realize what needs to be done to abolish the war machine consuming it, and to make ourselves whole again.

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Steiner, R. (2011 [1918]) Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. <http://logoilibrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/A-Knowledge-Of-The-Higher-Worlds.pdf>, accessed 16.3.2021.

Sutcliffe, A. (Ed.) (1980) The rise of modern urban planning, 1800-1914 (Vol. 1). Mansell, UK.

Taylor, B. (2013) Religion, Violence and Radical Environmentalism: From Earth First! to the Unabomber to the Earth Liberation Front. In Muddle, C. (ed.) Political Extremism, vol. IV. Sage Publications.

The Conversation (2019) US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries – shrinking this war machine is a must. <https://theconversation.com/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter-than-as-many-as-140-countries-shrinking-this-war-machine-is-a-must-119269>, accessed 15.3.2021.

The Week (2017) MKUltra: Inside the CIA’s Cold War mind control experiments. <https://www.theweek.co.uk/86961/mkultra-inside-the-cias-cold-war-mind-control-experiments>, accessed 14.3.2021.

Thoreau, H. D. (1995 [1854]) Walden; or, Life in the Woods. <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29433/29433-h/29433-h.htm>, accessed 14.3.2021.

Turinek, M. – Grobelnik-Mlakar, S. – Bavec, M. – Bavec, F. (2009) Biodynamic agriculture research progressand priorities. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, 24 (2), 146–154.

WEF (2021) Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. <https://www.weforum.org/reports/health-and-healthcare-in-the-fourth-industrial-revolution-global-future-council-on-the-future-of-health-and-healthcare-2016-2018>, accessed 14.3.2021.

Wikipedia (2021) Ted Kaczynski. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski>, accessed 14.3.2021.

Winner, L. (1979) The Political Philosophy of Alternative Technology: Historical Roots and Present Prospects. Technology In Society, 1, 75-86.

https://kapitaali.com/the-new-hippies/

#anarcho-primitivism #Anti-technology #naturalism #parsimony #pragmatism #Ted Kaczynski #The Golden Rule #Unabomber #Sekalainen

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cryptocism · 4 years

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ive been scrolling through ur blog for a while (cuz ur dc opinions are Top Fucking Notch) and i saw what you said abt bart in tt 03 and f:fma and while i totally agree (it killed tt 03 for me lol) im super curious abt how youd do his development if given the opportunity?

I’ve been thinking about this one like A Lot so buckle up this is long:

it would kind of depend? On whether or not he’d be in an ensemble team like Teen Titans or with his own solo series.

I understand metatextually why he became Kid Flash in TT, since they needed him to be more mature and a more recognizable character and having him upgrade costumes/codenames is a good shortcut for both. But I’ve already talked about why it didn’t sit right with me.

So, lets flip the script a little bit - the start of TT would be largely the same. Our boy Bart is on the new Titans team, and things are kind of awkward after YJ disbanded, also Max is gone and Bart’s relationship with Wally is still not doing great. Things are rough, Bart has newfound doubts to deal with, especially now that the world seems to have gotten harsher and everyone seems to have a lot less patience to deal with him. The pressure to be more mature and a recognizable character is coming from other characters now rather than an authorial need: he’s reminded to take things seriously, or that he should know better by now, that he needs to slow down and think more. So Bart decides a change is necessary, and we get the library scene. He reads all the books, he reappears as Kid Flash, saves Tim via bullet catch, disassembles a gun, takes down Slade, etc. etc. Here’s my departure from canon though: it doesn’t work.

Kid Flash is not a solution, or a magical cure for immaturity. Reading a whole library so he’s miraculously smarter and more mature and capable is, at its core, a pretty naive conclusion. And it makes sense he would think that. But it doesn’t work. He’s still impulsive, distractible, hasty. He can’t put a lid on his own sense of humor. People still think he’s annoying or lazy or careless. And he keeps trying - he knows all this stuff now, he read a whole library! - but he’s still apparently too much the same person as he's always been. And even though he’s trying very hard to live up to the Kid Flash name, it still doesn’t feel like him. Wally doesn’t like it, since Bart is literally just imitating him now, which makes things between the two even worse. And Bart keeps worrying about what’s supposed to come afterwards, since “Kid Flash” is inherently temporary, and while Impulse was only peripherally related to the flash legacy, Kid Flash comes with expectations.

Bart is trying very very hard to be ‘grown up’ and ‘mature’, but he hasn’t actually learned anything other than a bunch of facts (which are still useful, but) he’s just trying to be who everyone expects him to be.

And this is what i mean about the ensemble thing, because this arc would be in conversation with the rest of the core four, who are also trying very hard to be people they’re not, but all in different ways. Bart obviously with the codename change, but Cassie, Tim, and Kon all have similar issues, they’re all trying to imitate people.

Tim is doing his Batman jr. routine, reverting back to the persona he had at the start of YJ. He’s cagey and mysterious and does questionable things without telling anybody, because he’s de-facto leader of the team again, and he has to be better than he is. No more kid stuff, the Titans are serious, he has to treat it like a job, not like a sleepover. And this whole act is putting distance between him and his friends.

Cassie is trying her hardest to put herself in a support role. Donna’s gone and she has some big shoes to fill (she and Tim could probably bond about that if he weren’t stubbornly trying to brood at all hours of the day) and she’s doing her best to just Be Donna. Cassie and Tim would work better with their team roles swapped, and they both sort of know this - Cassie is naturally charismatic, thinks on her feet, can maintain good PR, and when she’s confident in herself is great at leading. Tim is partial to planning ahead, secrets, and keeping in the shadows, and is better at being a confidant and emotional problem solver among the team (when he allows himself to be open among friends, that is).

But they’re both trying to fit themselves into what they see as pre-ordained roles: Robin is leader, Wondergirl is a supportive mediator. But Cassie’s got a temper and little patience for people being idiots, and Tim’s not predisposed to spotlights.

Kon on the other hand has a story that’s less about who he should be and more who he shouldn’t be. The Lex Luthor dad storyline is here (minus the mind control shit, although the threat of it is still brought up) and Kon is doing his level best to do nothing that could be interpreted as something Lex might do. While everyone is doing their best to Not be their own person, Kon has no idea if he ever was his own person. He’s questioning everything he does, wondering if it’s some kind of evil gene showing through when he’s angry or petty or selfish. He’s going through lots of clone angst.

So they’re all dealing with expectations and who they are or aren’t supposed to be, trying to fit themselves into boxes that don’t suit them and then convincing themselves that this is how it ought to be. Kon ought to avoid feeling or acting in any negative light because any sign of Luthor is a sign of evil, Cassie ought to tone herself down and act like Donna, Tim ought to step up and lead the team and act like Dick, and Bart ought to listen better and be smarter and slow down and grow up and do his level best to just Be Wally.

Throughout the issues they’d all get a spotlight on their various crises, taking them through complimenting character arcs. Kon would realize through a couple close encounters and chats with ma and pa and talks with his friends and citizens of metropolis that nobody is all good or all bad. Clark can be a real asshole sometimes and Luthor’s actually done a fair bit of good (usually in his own interests, but still we’re gunning for nuance). Turns out he doesn’t have a dark side to be tempted by, he was made from 50% complex person and 50% complex person, just like everyone else. Which means he isn’t destined to be the next Superman, or Superman’s next supervillain. He’s just like, a person. With his own thoughts and feelings that have nothing to do with genetics.

Tim would wear himself out and hide it from everybody until he killed himself, but it’s only when he sees Cassie also wearing herself out too that his ‘somebody needs somebody’ instincts kick in and they’re actually able to talk about how miserable they both are. Through some trial and error they’re able to figure out a good co-leader system for leading the team, having each other’s backs along the way, which allows for them both being able to help out the other members of their team with their own shit i.e. Kon and Bart’s identity issues.

Bart is, like Cassie and Tim, wearing himself out trying to be this perfect version of Wally that never actually existed. He actually hates the recognition the new name gives him, because people have expectations for him now, ones he can never seem to live up to. He’s bad at following orders still, which makes him a pretty shit sidekick for Wally, in fact he’s just pretty shit at being a sidekick in general. But, he reasons, he’s supposed to be grown up and responsible now, and responsibility is all about doing shit you hate until you die, so he’s probably on the right track.

It’s only later, once he gets some support from his friends, who help him deal with things like Max and YJ disbanding and stuff that he’s able to actually sit down and have a heart-to-heart with Wally. Wally confesses that he understands the pressure to live up to a legacy, and how he did his best to just Be Barry when he became the flash. In fact while Bart was trying to live up to Wally and be a good sidekick, Wally was trying to live up to Barry and be a good mentor. Wally’s the one to tell him that Bart’s always done his own thing, and is at his best when he does. They both agree they suck as partners, but maybe they should’ve tried to be family first. And there’s probably a racing metaphor in there somewhere because speedsters love their racing metaphors.

ANyway Bart returns to Impulse, forging a new path, getting along better with Wally now and hanging out with him just as civilians with no pretense. He learns some valuable lessons about how maturity can’t be learned in a book, and that he’ll get it himself the more he lives and learns from experience. The Titans all get along better now that they’re all sure of their places in the group, and they can all go on just being themselves without worrying about expectations or roles to fill or whatever.

...If Bart still had his solo series instead though, id actually want it to go in a sort of different direction? The thing about living up to predecessors and trying to be some ideal version of another person works well for the Titans because they can all deal with a similar issue in different ways, but I think it would also be interesting to do the complete opposite.

Lots of shitty things happened in very quick succession in Bart’s life that he had no control over: Max’s disappearance, having to move in with Jay and Joan (who are nice, but whom he barely knows,) leaving his friends in Alabama, Young Justice breaking up… Basically, things kind of suck for Bart, and all he wants is for them to go back to the way they were. Instead of trying to be grown up or mature or whatever, Bart is resisting every single encroaching thing about coming adulthood. Because all growing up ever seems to mean is that everything changes and either you have to leave the people you love or they have to leave you.

So this series would focus mostly on that, both in his civilian life; going into high school, not knowing anybody, the few friends he does make are less interested in ‘kid stuff’ and more focused on dating and interpersonal drama, high school itself seems to be geared entirely toward the “what are you going to do with your life” question, when he visits his old friends back in manchester, they’ve all kind of grown up without him. And in hero life; everyone from Young Justice is trying to move on and not talking to each other, his father figure and mentor is gone and he's not really jiving well with the rest of the flash family, and people just seem to have less patience for Impulse now that he’s older.

Growing up is hard. It’s hard and no one understands. Especially not when you’re also a superhero and have dealt with some quality trauma like losing loved ones and feeling yourself die. So it makes sense that Bart would resist that in every way possible, do his best to pretend like everything is still how it used to be, for once in his life just trying to make everything stay put. He refuses to get rid of his old stuff, he doesn’t want to treat any villainous threats seriously, people in school keep talking about college and jobs and tuition fees and Bart wants none of that, he acts out, refuses responsibility, gets reckless under the pretense that he never used to have to be cautious.

And this is the part where I’d bring in Inertia, cause Thad was robbed and I want him to have an actual arc that doesn’t end with infant-splosion. Also he can have a good ol companion arc to Bart. Welcome to foils everybody, where two identical boys with opposing life experiences get to thematically compare and contrast with each other as they deal with the trials and tribulations of growing up.

So, I’m ignoring every appearance Thad ever made after Impulse 1995, picking up instead where his story left off where he swore vengeance on his creators and disappeared into the speed force. And he’s off to do exactly what he said; Thad Thawne II is going to kill his namesake/grandfather/creator - the president of Earthgov.

But, turns out assassinating the president of a whole fucking planet is a lot harder than he thought - Thad has planned extensively for every moment of his life, so once he starts going off script things predictably go a little off the fuckin rails. Thad fails, obviously. For one because despite how much President Thawne might deserve to die, Thad at this point hasn’t done anything worse than attempted murder, and making him a killer would put a wrench in any kind of redemption arc he could have. Also he’s acting on rage, in a highly emotional state, basically going up against the entire government. Of course he’s going to get caught by the science police and brought into custody.

Bart, meanwhile is jumping with both feet into any kind of escapism he can find, which involves various time travel shenanigans and lands him in the 30th century. He gets to reunite however briefly with his mom, but the mission he had gets derailed by the appearance of Inertia.

Every time Bart and President Thawne interact, the president always seems to make a bid to sway Bart to the Thawne side. This never works, which is part of the reason Inertia exists in the first place; a version of Bart that the president could control. When Inertia landed in the 30th century, hell bent on assassinating his creator, the President subdued him and eventually coerced him back over to the Thawne side of the family feud. No longer a rogue agent, Inertia is back to his old self, all about destroying Bart and the rest of the Allens.

They have a battle, taking place all over the 30th century city, and Bart does his best but Inertia has the entire Earthgov police force on his side, and Bart eventually gets captured. He gets taken to some kind of holding facility, meets with the President who monologues as him while Inertia stands beside him like a good lackey. Then suddenly the speed-inhibiting cuffs or whatever Inertia had put on Bart to stop his speed malfunctions, and Inertia drops the act, now Impulse and Inertia working together to take down the Earthgov people holding them there.

Turns out as soon as Inertia knew he couldn’t take out the president, what with all the military force President Thawne had on his side, he bided his time until he could. He uses Bart’s help to finally get President Thawne cornered, and the assassination plan is back on track. Except now Bart is the thing stopping him. He makes the argument about how murder bad. Heroes don’t kill, etc. Inertia insists he isn’t a hero. But Bart reminds him that that’s not how Max saw him.

Inertia hesitates just enough that President Thawne is able to get away, and now the two of them have to make an escape attempt back to the past. Bart insists on trying to take Meloni with them, and they try but ultimately fail somehow (maybe someone has to stay behind to make sure they can make the trip safely, idk. At first Thad is willing to stay behind, since there’s nothing really for him in the past. But Meloni knows that President Thawne would destroy him if he did, and she can’t let harm come to either of her sons - and she does consider Thad her son, just like Bart. She’s had far too little time with either of them, but she loves them all the same. She tells them to take care of each other, and is the first to encourage them to be like, actual brothers.)

After yet another tearful goodbye, Bart swearing he’ll find a way for them to all be together again, Bart and Thad go back. And they do end up having to lean on each other, because shit’s tough for the both of them. Thad initially wants to apologize and possibly reunite with Max and Helen, and then finds out Max is gone. And Bart has someone who understands exactly what he’s going through.

Things get a little more lighthearted from here. Bart and Thad don’t get along well at first, since they’re both going through rough times and lots of changes and their first instincts are to lash out at each other. But eventually they form a sort of camaraderie through shared grief, then shared fish-out-of-water experiences. Which evolves into shared inside jokes and video games and comic books and they become slow but steady friends.

They upgrade into brothers when Bart defends Thad against the repeated (and not entirely undeserved) suspicion he receives from the rest of the Flash family. Jay and Joan take him in, but it’s clear they don’t trust him, and neither does Wally. Bart stands up for Thad, arguing that he’s as much of a Thawne as Thad is, and treating Thad like he’s the next Cobalt Blue is just going to ensure that history never changes and stupid family feuds are forever. After this, Thad starts trusting Bart a little more, and kind of solves Bart’s problems regarding encroaching adulthood with his friendship. Neither of them really had a childhood, and Thad hasn’t experienced 21st century life at all, much less the societal expectations to grow up. So Bart gets to have fun again, and Thad won't judge any of his games or his books or his attitude or interests for being childish or lame because he’s fascinated by the experience of anything regardless of the target audience.

And from there it's a series about these two becoming brothers and growing up and the different lessons they learn and wacky characters they meet along the way. Thad ironically also puts Bart in a position where he has to take on more responsibility, since even though Thad can imitate heroic actions and is actually pretty good at it, he doesn’t understand what makes them heroic. Bart has to draw on a lot of the things Max taught him and now has to teach them to Thad.

There’s crossover comics with Superboy, where Bart laments about having to deal with grown up stuff, and Kon gives him a new perspective on the whole “being young forever” thing, since that was a reality Kon actually had to deal with and it sucked.

Through various misadventures they meet new and familiar characters to give them different perspectives on the whole passage of time thing. Villains who despise children or childish things, villains who embrace it but probably too much. People who talk about growing up as the worst time of their lives, others talking about it like it was the best. Kids and adults alike trying to force Bart and Thad to act a certain way while treating them another.

The two of them come to opposing conclusions about this; Thad wants to embrace change completely, partly because he wants to experience firsthand all that life has to offer, but also his worldview depends on believing that anyone can change, and anyone can be better, because he has to believe he can be redeemed for all the shitty stuff he did. Bart, on the other hand, knows his life isn’t perfect but thinks, based on recent events, that it’s all just going to get worse from here, and so resists change as much as possible.

Thad, in his haste to experience everything, sometimes ends up going too far, either burning both of them out, or pushing them into situations that they’re not ready for or are ill-equipped to handle. Bart, on the other hand is so resistant to change or responsibility that he stops them from doing actual necessary things like planning their futures or doing chores or making new friends. This acts as the crux for their main conflict that slowly builds throughout the series, and then in a finale to the arc, they both figure out a way to get Meloni back to the past, and to raise some stakes they have a falling out in the middle of the mission about it.

Bart accuses Thad of trying to leave him behind, or trying to be the better version of him again, and that old insecurity about Thad replacing him crops up. Thad thinks Bart just can’t handle anything outside his personal bubble and wants to force him to live in the real world. Plus he also feels kind of abandoned by Bart, who often would leave Thad to do the scary adult things on his own.

Tensions still high, there's suddenly an external threat to deal with - probably president thawne and the science police - and they attempt to continue arguing even while fighting the president. I’m making this up as I go so lets say yada yada big climactic moment it's looking like the two might fail to get Meloni back and they’re both still angry with each other and Bart just… can’t take it anymore.

He keeps losing people, and the ones he keeps he always seems to screw up with. And at the end of the day he’s just a kid who wants his mom. Is that really so much to ask? So there’s a reversal, a parallel, if you will, of the assassination attempt from the beginning of the series, this time with Bart. Or, because I don’t think many people would buy that Bart would actually ever for real kill someone, maybe he’s finally about to get his mom back, but she doesn’t want to go (since she made that deal with the president that he wouldn’t harm anyone of the Allen family so long as she stayed with him) so he’s trying to force her, risking the lives/well-being of the entire Allen bloodline across all of time.

This time it’s Thad who has to talk him down, who has to remind him about being a hero, who has to remind him that trying to go back to some magical time in the past where things were better is just going to stop him from learning and growing as a person, and that doing anything and everything possible to get there is just going to lead to Bart doing something he Actually Can’t walk back from.

Alright but here’s the thing because having Bart be forced to leave his mom again for like the billionth time is tired and overdone, and personally the whole message about heroics involving extreme and damaging amounts of sacrifice can only go so far. So here; Thad and Bart are both right.

Like on the one hand, yeah, it’s childish and selfish for Bart to want to be with his mom at the expense of literally everyone else in his family. On the other hand, the fact that they can’t be together because some asshole is upholding a stupid grudge is bad and unfair and wrong. The issue needing to be fixed is not the kid who wants his mom, it’s the jackass keeping them apart (and who also wants to kill/imprison people). So Bart convinces Thad that they have to save Meloni, and Thad convinces Bart that there has to be another way - one where they get their mom back and the Allens don’t have to be hunted.

The whole story would be leading up to the two of them coming to this conclusion; the healthy middle between the two extremes. Where they have the maturity to plan ahead and sort through their differences and figure out the best course of action with the least amount of collateral, but they don’t let go of that adolescent need for justice and fairness - that thing that makes you dig in your heels and say “no. That’s not fair, that’s not right.”

SO here’s where I’d put the title card: “Bartholomew and Thaddeus Take Down The Government”. How do they do it? No idea! I’m flyin by the seat of my pants here! Do they run for office? Do they publicize the president’s crimes in such a way he gotta go to jail? Do they somehow turn public opinion against him enough to get him out of office? idk!!! And I don’t remember enough about Earthgov’s political situation to put an accurate read on what exactly they might do to disrupt it.

Either way they don’t kill him, manage to free their mom, and they all go back to the past together. And a new arc would involve the three of them getting settled in the past; Meloni would be a main character now, and hers is a two-pronged fish out of water story where she’s trying to figure out how shit works in the past, with overtones of the struggles of being a single parent.

And... I’m not going to say any more about that because this is long enough already oof.

TL;DR I think a coming of age story would be cool for Bart, and having to deal with growing up when he never really had a childhood. Also the comic itself would be aimed at younger audiences, who can probably relate to having a Bad Time in the Teens and wacky hijinks with friends and siblings.

#soapbox #anonymous #asks

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migleefulmoments · 5 years

Text

More Crissmyglitz Wedding Guest Angst: part 2

OMG they won’t let it go. Crissmyglitz-Guest Gate. The ccers are still obsessing over the #CrissMyGlitz guest list. As I pointed out in my first post (X), every single photo posted in round one of Crissmyglitz-Guest Gate was taken while Darren was working. That’s right, every single photo the tinhatters presented as “Darren and a real friend” was taken at work. For a fandom who constantly remind the world they are astute and ALWAYS PAYING ATTENTION TO DETAILS, it was a supermassiveblackhole.

In part 1 they presented Elvis (X), Alan Cummings (X), Jenna Ushkowitz (X), Laura Osnes (X). In part 2 they added Jane Lynch, Matt Bomer, Matt Morrison, Kevin McHale, Lena Hall, Ricky Martin and Edgar Ramirez. Idk what was worse, that they didn’t learn any lessons after part 1 or that the fandom egged them on in utter delight.

cc-still-going-strong

Keep on.

I love your guys’ game 🤣🤣🤣

chrisdarebashfulsmiles

I like this game

(This got SUPER RIDICULOUS LONG so under)

This is the LAMEST shade ever thrown and they were eating it up. Abby spent her Sunday adding to the nonsense and trying out sarcasm. She brought up the algorithm nonsense again and I can’t stop shaking my head. The fact that it’s easier for them to believe that someone wrote an algorithm to determine the guest list for Darren and Mia’s wedding rather than simply to acknowledge that they don’t really know Darren at all is absurd. Rational people would see Darren’s guest list and realize that they got it all wrong. Rationale people don’t see wedding photos and spend 7+ months proclaiming it’s all fake because he clearly is much better friends with former coworkers, Edgar Ramirez and Lena Hall than he is with Jennifer Coolidge and Pamela Aldon based entirely on the fact that nobody posted social media pics with Jennifer or Pamela.

Mysterious absence part 2- Let’s do this…

1. LENA HALL

(see part 3 (X) for further information)

ajw720

(Opening Hedwig LA 11/16 from Lena’s IG)

(From Lena’s Twitter and Instagram July 28, 2016 (X). They were Flying to perform at DNC see pic below)

(AGAIN- same night as #1-Hedwig’s opening night LA 11/16)

(Dec 12, 2016-I don’t know the context of this one. It is obviously her photoshoot and he popped in for a pic. See below: another pic from this photoshoot posted to her IG. This is actually a nonword photo)

ajw720:guess the algorithm eliminated her for joking weekly that DC had all the privileges of homosexuality but none of the responsibilities……

(Oh ho ho ho...the shade of it all).

chrisdarebashfulsmiles: Probably.

ajw720: Or perhaps it eliminated her as when D was kissing her on stage, he was giving his PBB the finger? Remember that time

(No, actually I don’t because that is nonsense. Darren flipped someone off from stage? Right because that is such professional. You believe that perfect, well-mannered Darren Criss would flip off his fiancee while working? That’s very inappropriate behavior during working hours, especially in front of a big audience of people- each with a cellphone. It’s also very risky to flip off the woman he is engaged to- the cc secret might get out. If Darren is terrified to come out and terrified to breach THE Contract, why would he risk if all just give Mia the bird? Giving someone the bird is hardly a satisfying diss for anyone over the age of 12).

flowersintheattic254: Maybe the algorithm excludes those who like way too many posts on that had Ch/ris in them?

(OMG- Lena “liked” some pics of Chris....a pig just flew by my window. It’s almost like Hollywood is a small town and people know each other.

(No dates so it’s impossible to know what the context of the posts but that is typical of the tinhatting- they aren’t concerned with accuracies)

leka-1998: When the difference in chemistry is undeniable even in pics that show nothing but hands, that’s probably an issue.

(I have never in my 51 years heard someone claim a married couple had no chemistry as evidenced by their hands in a photo taken specifically to show off their nail polish or that a PR photo for a Broadway show showed more chemistry than the actual couple. I mean seriously?)

(I will give this one to them as as personal photo )

(Is “hand chemistry” a thing? I’m only speculating here but is the degree of hand chemistry a function of the depth finger-penetration-on-finger-penetration? Cuz.....that would make total sense amiright?)

cc-still-going-strong: Keep on.

I love your guys’ game 🤣🤣🤣

(Blergh)

ajw720: Seriously is that his wife on the left…..oh

(hahahah nice try Abby, you have every single photo of Mia memorized- its actually a very sweet photo)

(I can’t with this entire post. She wasn’t invited because he kissed Lena on stage as per the script? Oh wait- no- she was not invited because he kissed Lena on stage and he flipped off Mia (how they know he is flipping off Mia is anyone’s guess. I like to imagine he is flipping off the tinhatters). But wait- is he actually flipping off anyone? No, no he actually isn’t because that would be terribly unprofessional. Darren is at work and his bosses would not appreciate him flipping off anyone the audience. No actor who wants a career is going to flip off someone in the audience while just-fingers crossed- hoping the message is received by the intended person and not a critic or investor.).

(Work Pic. He is NOT giving anyone the finger- his finger is actually just in the shadow from Lena’s outfit).

(Lena is working: As for Mia banning Lena from the wedding- in a recent post by Lena, she talks about catching up aka they don’t haven’t spent much time together lately and notice the Mia hashtag)

(The tinhatters like that she alls Darren wifey but in fact she calls all the Hedwig’s “Wifey”. She has a lot of Hedwig photos on her social media- the vast marority are NPH).

(Lena’s Christmas photoshoot as mentioned above)

(I probably should have led with this but I wanted to prove them wrong in all the ways possible Lena was busy on February 16, 2019 performing at Lincoln Center. She may have very well been invited. See my update (X)

2. EDGAR RAMIREZ

leka-1998: Yet another person missing on February 16

(PR for ACS: A photoshoot for promotion aka PR)

(I am not sure about this pic. Darren posted it on his Instagram and Edgar responded “love you brother”- that’s sweet and all but what does it prove- nada. I am sure they really had a great time together filming ACS and felt close, but they haven’t maintained that relationship-at least not publicly -since they end of awards season. I’ll give the tinhatters half a point for this one- but bear in mind- I’m being generous because it looks like a PR pic)

(PR for ACS; ”GQ Style & Hugo Boss Celebrate Amazing Spaces”- see photo below).

(PR for ACS Emmy: This is from the 2018 Emmy “For Your Consideration” on 3/19/18.)

(PR for ACS. This is hilarious....so Edgar is doing a red carpet interview and Darren walks by him and Edgar walks away with Darren. OKAAAYYY-what does this prove? Again, they are at a work event- so far all the pics with Edgar are from work events except maybe 1)

(PR for ACS- photoshoot. While the sentiment is sweet, Edgar hashtagged it #ACS and #Emmys. OMG how much ccproof do you need to understand that this is PR? ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION? Me think not cuz he freakin’ tagged it for you and you still don’t understand that it was promotion for the Emmy. He-lar-E-ous!)

chrisdarebashfulsmiles: I like this game

(of course you do- it’s catty, bitchy and pointless. I’m glad it makes you happy because this has been eye-opening as to the extend that you are collectively super bad at separating Darren’s personal life from his work life)

ajw720: @leka-1998 this friendship seems very contrived to me, constantly calling each other brother, they aren’t nearly as close as say D and J/ennifer C/oolidge or B/en F/eldman or P/amela A/ldon……………

(Ohhh ho ho ho sooo funny. It’s so funny I forgot to laugh...har har har aha Since Jennifer, Ben and Pamela actually got invites to the wedding, it is clear that they are indeed close to Darren or Mia, soooo the joke doesn’t actually work. As for Edgar being his closest friend because he called him “brother” during a big ACS promotion push-I’m not feeling it. What is so baffling to this “stupid stan” is how the tinhaters CAN’T SEE the details right in front of their faces. The Darren-Edgar love-fest was hot and heavy during the promotion of ACS and then it stopped all together...THAT is the definition of PR. I am sure they actually did like each other during the production of ACS, but when the project ended they both moved on to other projects and other friends. I’ve had coworkers -and I’m sure many of you have too-that I adored and I never wanted lose the connection we shared while working together but alas, the romance fizzled after we no longer had the workplace in common. Obsessing about the meaning of the almost-2-year-old photo of 2 strangers is pretty silly)

ajw720: The Algorithm is a very scientific way to figure out the wedding guest list-no doubt it knows who D is closest to and would not lie…..

(The problem is simple- there are no social-media pics of Darren (or Mia) with Jennifer, Ben, or Pamela which means, according to the cc-logic that it didn’t happen-aka they aren’t friends. In order to explain why the trio were in fact, at the wedding, the THE Algorithm was created. This Algorithm is a very scientific way to figure out the wedding-guest list-no doubt it knows who D is closest to and would not lie. The cc posse hate it when they don’t know what is going on Darren’s life which is why we are talking about a fake “CrissMyGlitz Invitation” algorithm 7 months after the wedding).

ajw720: @chrisdarebashfulsmiles It is seriously my new favorite game and there are so many people that the algorithm eliminated.

(Seriously? There are what- 2 or 3 photos that aren’t definitively traced to work This game isn’t working out the way the posse believes it is. This is however, THE definition of confirmation bias clouding their judgment).

3. KEVIN MCHALE

ajw720:Poor KM didn’t make the cut either. Perhaps his invite was eliminated by the weird algorithm for tagging d at his 30th right below c, yet d not pictured? He clearly considers d a good friend as he invited him to the party.

(Did Kevin suggest he was devastated to miss the destination wedding of his former coworker? Kevin and Darren went out with their former-Glee castmates maybe once or twice in the last four years- they are hardly besties. I don’t remember Kevin and Darren as being particularly close while Glee was in production. They are literally former coworkers.)

(Kevin inviting Darren to his birthday party doesn’t indicate that he “clearly considers d a good friend”. It seems like I remember the party was a surprise party?)

ajw720: Thankfully I think they’ve made up as d had no problem straddling him recently.

(OMG seriously? They are former coworkers in which some level of friendship exists. Darren straddled his leg while sitting on a very crowded seat- he wasn’t riding Kevin while they had sex in public.)

(ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION? Darren invited the Glee peeps that he has consistently been close to over the years - Max, Harry and Chord).

ajw720: So many mysteries. But hey D&M’s new straight couple besties, Al/len & his wife, made the cut!

(Nope, no mysteries at all. Darren simply cared more about inviting people that mean something to him and Mia rather than those who mean something to the tinhatters.)

flowersintheattic254: @ajw720 I expect old habits die hard with K and D. They were always flirty and fun. Maybe Mr and Mrs Le/ech are stricter regarding lap sittering. That’s probably why (nods head).

(nods head and wonders if tinters were drinking early on Sunday because this thread is petty, dumb and not at all funny or clever.)

ajw720: @flowersintheattic254 they are WAY too comfortable together, way more chemistry than D has with his bride. I’m thinking that was the algorithm’s issue.

(Comfortable? Chemistry? WTF, he looks like he is passing a kidney stone and Kevin is coaching him through it.)

flowersintheattic254: @ajw720 especially when you consider that the only similar pose with M has D holding his own arm to his chest. No chemistry at all!!!!

(Do you guys actually believe the nonsense you write or did you give up on 2/16/19 and you're just blowing smoke up each other’s ass now because I gotta tell you, the second-hand embarrassment is really uncomfortable now)

flowersintheattic254:It’s the pic on the boat with the fam. Can someone add it as I cannot find it?

leka-1998

ajw720: Not even close, if i didn’t know, i would say KM&DC were the couple and i t think the algorithm knew. It is magical how that algorithm works.

(Ooooh right...it’s so confusing, I can totally understand your befuddlement!)

(In all seriousness, watching this fandom’s toxic nonsense is like watching Kellyanne Conway and Lindsey Graham defend Trump’s baloney. Everyone knows they are full of shit but we are powerless to stop it. The damage they are doing will take years to repair- if not decades)

(Oh....Will you look at that. That is a screenshot taken from a video that is actually cute and shows a smitten Darren cuddling with Mia. Color. Me.SHOOK) .

youtube

4. MATT MORRISON

standingoutsidethefire: I thought of another ..

That the algorithm just didn’t seem to include ...

standingoutsidethefire: Clearly these two don’t have any affection for each other

standingoutsidethefire: Not friends at all

standingoutsidethefire: I get why MM wasn’t included ..I really do

(Maybe a personal- photo though likely at an show or industry event)

ajw720: Hate each other

(Once again, almost all -if not all - work pics)

youtube

5. MATT BOMER

leka-1998: “He’s just a really, really good, grounded person, and I think someone who I’ll probably always be friends with.”

- M/att B/omer

(Holy shit, Matt said something nice about Darren when asked about him by during an interview... no doubt when they worked together either on Glee or ACS)

(According to Bride’s Magazine, “How to Make Your Wedding Day About YOUl” June 2017.

5. The guest list is one of the most difficult decisions. Should you invite your mom’s work associate? Great Aunt Gertrude whom neither of you have met? Everyone from the gym? Communicate communicate communicate. One piece of tried-and-true advice is ALWAYS invite the person who said nice about you to the national media. You won’t regret it and most likely that person will give you the best gift).

(Work event)

(Wait -isn’t this Blaine and Cooper?)

(Work event)

Leka-1998: But the great algorithm said no.

ajw720: My understanding is they despise each other, cannot stand to be in the same room together.

(Nobody ever suggested that).

ajw720: #funny #so many of the univited #queer

(seriously “#queer”? No, not cool)

flowersintheattic254

True they have clearly and from the beginning disliked each other intensely.

ajw720: But see @leka-1998 there is D calling him handsome, we don’t want to have anything that even hints at d talking about a boy in that manner at the sham mockery, i mean nuptials………………. Because D is the STRAIGHTEST MAN ALIVE!!!!!

(OMG,,the sarcasm isn’t working).

#cc #cc fandom #ccer #darren criss #crisscolfer #debunking CC lies #debunking cc nonsense #Critssmyglitz #guest list #wedding guest #Darren and Mia get married

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vikasgoddubarla · 4 years

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How To Tell Your Brand's Story?

The heart and soul of the company are human-to-human relations. You work with people at the end of the day–the business fixes challenges eliminates pressure and delivers delightful customer experience. Revenue is a by-product of a strong business model and a positive customer experience. Storytelling is an effective tool for relationship building. This is an age-old concept which unites and engages people. Where you are in the world or how much your company is funded does not matter. Good stories give small businesses big voices. It is therefore important for businesses to take the time to create their own storytelling strategies in full. Marketing and storytelling go together. Only think about it. Only think about it. You need to catch the audience's attention whether you create infographics, writing copies for a Facebook ad or writing an online guide (like this one). Consumers (including themselves) face a constant flood of ads. Marketers also fight for the interest of their clients and prospects. Your company would be buried more often than not with spammy marketing posts. How do you get your brand to stand out? The storytelling. This guide is an inclusive guide which explains why the storytelling should be your priority for your brand and how your company should begin. It, too, is not soft. The storytelling technique is strong and realistic. Do you believe? Let's get to it. Let's just get to it. Related: 12 Best Tools To Use For Your Startup What is Storytelling of a brand? Brand storytelling: The reason why your company has come to be What motivates the team to wake up and work every day How did you make your product? What types of customers esteem your brand and why A straightforward view of the company's employees A relationship-building tool Subtler than you would grasp A definition that emphasizes the whole web presence Everything the whole team requires at the organizational level A look into who you are as a company Direct Avoid telling your story brand in: A long-winded, 5-paragraph essay about your company A blog post Something isolated A split view of the market Just one for the marketing department A PR stunt A viral video A consumer and opportunities identification tool Boring Artsy Brand history does not concern your company, contrary to popular belief. It's about the clients and the interest they get from the product or service. Those that give customers priority are the most strong brand tales. Think of the supporting character of your business. It is a crucial element in your brand strategy. That is significant. This idea is frequently hung up by marketers. You stress the right message and are uncertain about whether the business will be involved in this initiative. Surely you should employ an adviser? Do you want to loop on corporate communications EVP in your company? So what would you be if you were an engineer? You're dead, doesn't that mean? Do not reverse this process. Do not reverse this process. Storytelling is obviously something we do. We don't even know we're doing it more often than not. The problem is that it's hard to write online content. Through translation, tales are lost. The expectations of the people behind our brands will be broken down. So you feel lost— a lack of vocabulary to tell your clients what you do. So why don't your clients tell you your story? Clarity did that. The business provides consultants and specialists with a commonplace to communicate and exchange client advice. A variety of reports from real consumers have been published recently. Take lessons from the leaders who really use Clarity if you wonder how Clarity can help develop your business? This efficient approach is not only used by startups. CRM SalesForce shares videos on its Pinterest page for consumer performance. The storytelling of brands is more than what you write to your clients on your website. More than the updates and the articles you share on your blog. That's how the messages are conveyed. These are your values. These are your values. In every piece of copy, customer service responded, okay, so you're sure your brand's stories are values. But what does all this mean by the heck? Telling stories still seems hard. The writing of site copying and marketing messages is still difficult. That is what you have to do. Forget about brand marketing This might sound contrary to the idea, but it is the key to marketing success. Avoid as a marketer thought. Stop marketing the company and then focus on increasing public interest. Answer the question of why people should be interested in what their company is to say. Related: Creating a More Repeatable Sales Process for Your Startup: Experts Advice It means to be persuasive and emotional. Don't be boring whatever you do. Don't let the words on your website mask your organization's personalities. Share what you sell more than. Share your strengths, your weaknesses and who you are now. One way is by participation in the process of storytelling. For the consumer reviews and case studies, make sure you pay for them by giving other companies case studies. Be Conversational Copywriting relies on authenticity. You will lose faith with your audience if you are too formal or guarded. And because customers can detect false messages from thousands of kilometres. Empty messages can only hurt your brand, from awkward stock photos by fake customers to false promises. Instead, be honest. Be mankind. Tell yourself you talk to a new acquaintance about drunkenness or coffee— don't give a lecture in 1862. If you refer to your clients and opinions (or display some signs of disrespect), you can automatically quit listening. Don't dwell on whether you use perfect grammar or not. A copywriter can also be hired for this. Avoid thinking about the misplaced viruses sometimes. Concentrate instead on improving your message. Talking always means keeping it short. Write down what you want to learn. Get it on paper. Get everything on paper. Break it then. Once again, break it off. Stop getting into the mind you need a minimum word count to effectively convey information. Write down what you'd like to write — unless you're too long and complicated to make your tales. Too much writing on a website or blog post will confuse or lose your followers. Say in as few terms as possible what you have to say. No need to pretend to sound-wise. Your clients and prospects will view your firm as extremely knowledgeable if you are creating a successful product. Expertise in a Message architecture The storytelling of brands is more subtle than your company says. The' how' is just as relevant as we discussed previously. Learn from Tiffani Jones Brown, Pinterest's chief marketing strategist. The voice, sound, copying user interface, grammar conventions and pinner education on the website are the responsibility of both She and her five-man team. That's right. That's right. Five people are expected to accurately receive Pinterest's public message. This may sound shocking because certain companies have zero resources to fix their communications. The architecture of the company's message is not by chance. Good strategic planning is needed to position the strategic plan. Don't expect positive news from thin air to emerge. You must concentrate on correctly getting your message. You will create the messaging infrastructure for your company to emphasize all your interactions with your brand. Yeah, that's a true material. Informative Blogs and Support center: For almost all on the website, the business history as a technology, alliances and customer service organization is conducted. Though the company's blog and support center, for example-a leading customer service agent and marketing consultant-is operated by two separate individuals, the same brand heritage still shines. Speak2Leads is a public interest organization dedicated to fixing a real selling issue. And how do you continue to choose the keywords in the architecture of your message? Name strategists use the method known as card sorting. Set up a list of brand-related keywords. Those may be keywords that customers have talked for your business or your own definitions. Into index sheets, transcribe the keywords. Specify the words most relevant for your band by means of note cards. as a group. Divide from the rest of these terms. Go through the left and identify the brand's keywords as a priority. Who are and who aren't most relevant? Assemble these words into the phrases the company represents. Bring together the architecture of your message. Consider including the customers in this process if necessary. One approach is for consumer cases to be consulted. What are their terms and phrases for your brand description? The more interviews you perform and the more service ratings you begin to see. Let your customers determine your messages for your brand. Only let them describe the company's expression. Unify your presence on-site and off-site You can follow your team members everywhere, ranging from blog posts to PR opportunities on the main media outlets, the history, message architecture and brand identity of your company. You must establish as cohesive and coherent as possible the identity of your organization. Like we said before, the picture you share of the world in your organisation should be real, honest and clear. Choose Your Words Wisely It is as important what you are saying as how you say it. Make sure you use the style of your listeners ' sound, speech and communication. What do you know and what words do you choose? Turn back to Chapter 1, where the art reaches your audience with the facts. For example, if you speak to a crowd of thousands of people, they tend to take on a casual, conversational tone and style–more than a crowd of baby boomers would. Also, if you were an English college major (as was Ritika), voice, sound and style definitions are very loosely described. How are you putting everything on paper? What you need is a style guide for both on-site and off-site contact with your company. Start with the following template: Start Website objective: Refer to some information on what visitors to your website are supposed to do while visiting your website. Audit: Who would you trust to deal with these specific parts of the website? Main principles to be strengthened: After visiting this part of your site or the email, what do you want your readers to feel? Tone: Which emotions will happen after someone has read your website's story or section? Outlook: Do you want your first, second, or third person authors to communicate? Who's the storytelling? Voice: Is it conversational, formal or somewhere between the language? You can tailor your brand style guide and message architecture to any form of multimedia over and above writing. Your plans must ensure that your messages are consistent across media whether you create infographics, branded images, e-books or blog posts. Online correspondence is just one way to communicate. Make sure you spend time on energy building the framework behind all your online production. Conclusion The heart of marketing is human-to-human relations. The storytelling of the company is a strategy that can reinforce these ties. Stories will give your brand a strong voice no matter whether you run a company, a small business or a startup. Tales are medium-agnostic. Tell your story through blog posts, customer service facilities, websites, videos or infographics. You need to formalize your brand history, particularly if your company is actively developing PR strategies to create connections both on and off your web. Storytelling is more than simply what you think. It is like sharing the message and engaging with the target audience. The notion of storytelling is ambiguous, theoretical and difficult to prepare. Configure the plan and spread it around teams on card sorting exercises, message layout charts, and brand concept guides. Brand history is a cross-functional undertaking that should direct your whole business. The message of your products will be conveyed by the sales staff, developers, marketing managers, executives and entry-level professionals. Who defines your brand? Who defines your brand? Your friends. Research what they mean about you and really understand that. Identify trends and keep them as close as possible to your heart. Related: Effective Marketing Tips for a Small Business 2020 Read the full article

#brandstory #storytelling #brand #branding #business #success

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davewakeman · 4 years

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Talking Tickets: 21 February 2020--MLB! NBA! NHL! And More!

Hey everybody!

How’s your week? Let me know!

If you haven’t had a chance to fill out my short survey yet, I’d appreciate it if you’d take 3-4 minutes to share your thoughts and ideas so that I can make sure this newsletter and the podcast continue to deliver value to y’all.

Anytime you want to say hello or share something with me, you can always reply to this email…you definitely will get a response from a live human.

To the tickets!

————————————————————————————————————

1. MLB continues to struggle to put the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal in the rearview mirror:

My frustration with baseball is that they just are always on the back foot to use a soccer term.

This week really highlighted the challenge that is going to have for the game to ever right its ship.

I know they report that they are making more money than ever, but from an attendance standpoint, reporting tickets distributed while Twitter is showing you stadiums sitting there with 3,000-5,000 fans a lot of nights isn’t a great look.

Compare MLB’s reaction to the Astros scandal with the way that Man City’sbreach of Financial Fair Play in Europe is being handled and you see a leadership gap, which hasn’t been helped by the Rob Manfred trying to throw the blame everywhere but his office.

From a marketing standpoint, a tough situation, selling baseball in a crowded market, has gotten more difficult.

I’ll type up some more thoughts about this on my blog, but here are a few actionable things:

1. Stop digging. Rob Manfred’s PR team shouldn’t keep running him out there if he is just saying the same things. If you find yourself in a PR crisis, please don’t just start saying crazy things.

2. Step back and focus on how you are going to move forward. Just speaking about the scandal in the past tense isn’t very effective. You have to have a clear plan for moving forward.

In any organization, change begins by sharing a compelling vision for the future. This is obviously a challenge for MLB and all the teams, not just the ones directly implicated in the scandal. The teams need some leadership and a vision for how this ends and how the game gets back on the front foot, their partners and sponsors need this, and their fans and customers deserve it.

3. I’ve worked with teams that have won the World Series and one of the coolest things from my teenage years was making friends with a member of the World Series winning Big Red Machine teams and going over to my friend’s house to see his replica trophies.

Don’t slag on your trophies, ever. Those trophies represent much of the power and emotional connection your fans have to your sport and if you are crapping on that, why are people supposed to even care?

2. The NBA is seeing some financial challenges from their dust-up with China:

I’ve had the flu this week and I haven’t had the voice to record the intro to a new, updated episode with Greg Turner about doing business in China, but if you can make out anything from the first episode, it would be how this was to be expected. (Technical difficulties due to the firewall in China’s internets caused the first episode to be a big disjointed.)

It seems like the NBA is reporting taking about a 4% hit on revenue this year due to standing up for their beliefs in dealing with China.

In a world where brands are all shouting about how “cause marketing” is so important, real cause marketing means you put your bottom line on the line. The NBA did that, on purpose or not.

To me, the more problematic situation that the NBA is facing right now is a ratings slump at the local level with the Warriors falling 66% and the average team down 13%. Which mirror a slump in the NBA’s ratings this year despite a jump in viewership for this year’s All-Star Game.

Right now, we see the NFL rushing to finish up a new labor deal so that they can negotiate their next round of TV deals while extreme premiums are still likely to be had.

My concern is that losing ratings for a season isn’t going to harm the NBA too much, but if the trend of NBA viewing continues to lag, the issues in China become a multi-year challenge, and maybe you have some more injuries, retirements, or other on-court issues…the revenue becomes challenged. And, that trickles down to raising ticket prices, concessions, and merchandise to levels that to higher levels than they are now.

I mean, you’re already seeing in New Orleans with Zion.

As we’ve seen since the online shopping has become so prominent, we have trained consumers to wait and shop for deals. We’ve also seen an entire generation of marketers and business folks that have become almost blindly committed to managing by spreadsheet while consumer spending on experiences has increased dramatically.

TV viewership is a fickle beast. Live by the sword, die by the sword…I guess.

The real focus here has to be on creating communities of fans around teams, communities, stories, and experiences. These can absolutely happen online and offline.

P.S. The NHL is having hiccups as well. This can be even more problematic because the NHL probably would benefit from more television exposure.

3. Rage Against The Machine is raising money for charity and taking on the secondary market:

I’m going to guess that the Rage Against The Machine tour is going to be interesting. It is their first tour in a decade. It is an election year. It seems like a perfect storm for them, yeah?

This idea that Rage is going to thwart the secondary market would seem consistent with their ethos. Raising money for charities also seems on brand.

Where the big challenge comes in, is whether or not the charity pricing aspect was explained clearly at the start.

Pearl Jam does a similar thing with their charity tickets that support their Vitalogy Foundation. They handle it slightly differently, which I think helps with the messaging and the fan blowback.

To me, this is just a situation where if you have a fan base and you can sell the tickets directly with no issues at all, sell. But today’s consumer also has a higher expectation of transparency…so that if you are going to institute a charity program like Rage to fight the secondary market, just share that at the start.

BTW, where did Tom Morello get his “85% of the secondary market” comment anyway?

And, Don Vaccaro and TicketNetwork have committed to donating all their service fees from the first 3 shows in March to National Action Network, the civil-rights organization founded by the Reverend Al Sharpton.

4. Congress is going to continue to investigate the world of tickets:

Just as I trying to close out this week’s newsletter, this news came down the pipe. So, on February 26th, 2020, Congress is going to hold a hearing on tickets.

This comes on the heels of a letter being released that Pearl Jam sent to Representative Frank Pallone Jr on Wednesday saying that the BOSS act will hurt consumers and pointing to transferability and transparency of the number of tickets being on sale would be bad for consumers.

After the release of Pearl Jam’s letter, Bill Pascrell sent out a release of his own rejecting Pearl Jam’s feedback on the BOSS act.

This continued investigation of the ticket business is a global trend. Last week, I talked about the CMA in the UK halting the Viagogo & StubHub merger due to their concerns, even as the US government approved the deal despite these objections.

And, this week, news out of Australia shows that people are rallying around an Information Standard in regards to the secondary market.

Along with the UK government stating they will investigate the illegal resale of football tickets in the UK after a report in the Guardian uncovered the ins and outs of massive football ticket resale.

As for how do you approach this story:

* Pay attention to what comes out of next week’s hearing. I stated at the time of the workshop in June of 2019 that I felt like this would be an issue that would hang over the industry through the election because it is easy for both sides to beat down on ticket sellers, technology companies, resellers, and everyone involved in the industry directly or indirectly. Fun for the whole family.

* I’d also pay attention to what gets defined as “consumer” friendly. I’m on the side of giving Pearl Jam the benefit of the doubt. They’ve worked pretty hard and taken steps that definitely haven’t been in their own best interests to do what was right for their fans, but I’m also conscious of unintended consequences.

5. Red Bull shows how to grow a team from the ground up:

RB Leipzig beat Spurs 1-0 on Wednesday! (Just adding to the suffering of having the flu. You think Dele was mad…try watching a poor showing while barely keeping your eyes open and feeling like reheated death!)

But this story is really great in the context of the continuing story of the Astros scandal in the States, Man City in Europe, and Thursday’s news of the arrest of PSG’s president for bribery.

Closer to home for me, it highlights what is possible with vision as the Mets are for sale and the sale has started to have its own amount of drama…and, as the Knicks continue to struggle at MSG.

3 things here:

1. Vision is so important. Melbourne FC just released a plan this week for their fans. It was called out on Australian radio, but without a plan and a vision…you don’t ever reach your potential.

2. Winning matters, but community is powerful. I’ve given this speech on 3 continents now…but you can’t just sell winning, you need to build a community. Leipzig is showing that now and we can see in a lot of places that there is a thing like winning fatigue. Or, in the case of the Warriors, a new arena and a lot of winning aren’t going to fix a bad season in every case.

3. Marketing matters: Red Bull’s involvement in sports and the way they have managed their teams shows that they understand the value of marketing and they understand that great brands, teams, and organizations aren’t built in a day.

While their teams haven’t been successful 100% of the time, they have been consistent and have continued to focus on their vision, their values, and their message over and over. That’s something we can all learn from. —————————————————————————————————————-

What am I up to this week?

I’ve got a couple of webinars coming up this week starting with Wednesday’s visit of my ebook created in partnership with Booking Protect: What Matters In Ticketing Now. Sign up for the webinar and learn ideas, trends, and actions that you can take to put these insights to work for your business.

On Thursday, I’m turning my eye to sales by putting together: The Language of the Sale–10 Ways To Use Language More Effectively In Your Sales Process. This is built on the last 6-9 months of sales training I’ve done with teams around the world and this one will be fast and actionable for your team as soon as you get through with the webinar.

Check out the podcast archives: new episodes coming this week now that my voice is coming back. If you have suggestions for guests and the podcast, fill out the survey at the top of the page.

Please follow and like us:

Talking Tickets: 21 February 2020–MLB! NBA! NHL! And More! was originally published on Wakeman Consulting Group

#marketing #sports business #tickets

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timalexanderdollery · 4 years

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A bait-and-switch scam ran unchecked on Airbnb. Here’s how it worked.

While Airbnb has been slow to implement strong verification policies, some customers are getting scammed in a big way. | Photo Illustration by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

On this episode of Reset, hear how one woman found herself in the middle of it, and how to protect yourself.

While on vacation in September 2019, reporter Allie Conti accidentally uncovered an elaborate Airbnb con when she herself became the unwitting victim of the scam.

Conti and her friends paid Airbnb $1,200 to stay at an apartment in Chicago. But just as they were about to check in, the host called to say the place was flooded. He offered another property of his instead but that alternative turned out to be pretty dingy. Even worse, the host kicked out Conti and her friends after just two days — forcing them to find a hotel at the last minute.

The host never offered them a refund. But Airbnb ended up refunding her in full after her article was published.

When Conti researched her horrible host, she found that the same people responsible for scamming her also managed Airbnb listings in eight cities across the US.

On this episode of the Reset podcast, she tells host Arielle Duhaime-Ross how the scam works:

“You book a place that looks pretty nice and pretty cheap and then about five minutes before check-in you get a call about an emergency. It’s flooded, the air conditioner’s broken, something insane is happening. You don’t want to stay here. But luckily, he’s there to save the day with a nicer, bigger place. You’re going to be disoriented in a new city and just decide to do the easiest thing, which is to trust this person that you don’t know. You get it there and it’s just disgusting. But you have to request a refund before check in. So it’s too late at that point to ask for a refund through their policies as written.”

Later in the episode, New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac breaks down what about big tech companies makes them ripe for exploitation at the hands of crafty criminals. Isaac explains that Silicon Valley’s insistence on “scaling up” and having companies like Facebook, Uber, and even Airbnb grow very big, very fast leaves little room for them to focus on “doing the proper due diligence to make everyone safe and happy.”

“That’s just the nature of being a platform. You have to get big before you can police your content. And then it becomes impossible to properly police it once you get that big. So it’s kind of a Catch-22.”

If you’ve ever rented a place or Airbnb or plan to one day, listen to the entire discussion here. Below, we’ve also shared a lightly edited transcript of Isaac’s conversation with Duhaime-Ross.

You can subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

The scam that Allie discovered is actually just one of the scandals Airbnb is dealing with right now. How could these issues have been prevented? And why weren’t they?

Mike Isaac, you just came out with a book about Uber, which is perfect because Uber, like Airbnb, is an app that connects customers to people who own a thing like a car or an apartment that they can share.

So, Mike, walk us through the last couple of weeks for Airbnb?

Mike Isaac

It’s just been a series of total press PR nightmares for Airbnb the past few weeks. They had this really awful tragedy happen in this community called Arenda in Northern California, where folks had rented out an Airbnb house to basically use it as a party house for Halloween.

Some really awful shootings happened and people got killed over what should have been like a fun night. Folks essentially said that Airbnb should be more responsible in policing that.

And then Allie Conti stumbled upon this crazy widespread scam where folks are essentially getting ripped off for renting Airbnbs and then getting duped last minute when they got to the place. It was a way of scamming people out of paying a lot more than they should for these properties.

So all of that kind of blowing up at one time for the company has not been great on showing how Airbnb handles these properties.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

How has the company responded?

Mike Isaac

They’re doing these standard corporate things — “We’re looking into this. We’re taking this seriously. We guarantee we’re going to police our platform a lot better.” They said they’re going to start verifying each property and making sure what is advertised is the correct thing that you’re going to get. But I see it as kind of a little bit of lip service.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

So Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO, recently said in an interview with Kara Swisher that his company had been slow to implement strong verification policies.

Mike Isaac

That’s kind of a head fake, honestly. Part of the whole philosophy of becoming a platform — and Airbnb is one of the largest platforms for home sharing and renting your place in the world — is expanding as fast as possible. That means just getting people to sign up and list their houses or apartments or whatever. By design, those verifications and checks in the process are not going to be built in from the beginning just because you have to have what’s called liquidity on the platform. You have to give people as much selection as possible.

The way that technologists view it is some subsection of our properties are always going to be false or at least not properly vetted. That’s the sort of percentage that our platform is willing to deal with in order to make this work in the long run.

So I would argue that it’s kind of built by design that way initially. And then later on, once you get to a big enough scale, then they could say, “Oh, we’re going to start doing the proper due diligence to make everyone safe and happy.”

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

These policies that would be designed to keep people safe, to make sure that there’s a very low percentage of scams on the platform, they cause friction. They stop people from signing up. They’re a barrier to entry. And companies like Airbnb don’t really like that.

Mike Isaac

Yeah. Hundred percent. All of these are very interchangeable. Airbnb might have said we could have had better vetting policies upfront, but that’s the same as Uber, which has gone through this process of background checks for drivers and making it harder for people to sign up for the platform if they didn’t have identity verification.

That all comes later once they get to the scale that they are on. Uber was just kind of taking as many bodies, whether as riders or drivers on the platform as possible, just as Airbnb was trying to do.

They’re like software corollaries to this, too. You can look at YouTube in its earliest days. All they wanted was just getting as much video content on the platform as possible to grow. And that included copyrighted material that was just ripped off or was free-booted material from other networks.

That’s just the nature of being a platform. You have to get big before you can police your content. And then I would also argue that at the same time, it kind of becomes impossible to properly police it once you get that big. So it’s kind of a Catch-22.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

What is it about that culture that these companies respond only after something bad happens and a reporter writes about it? Is this a Silicon Valley thing?

Mike Isaac

This is why I take all of these “We’re very concerned” statements with a real grain of salt because everyone who’s building these platforms knows exactly what they’re doing. And sort of by design — this is how it was meant to scale.

It’s fair to argue that you don’t know exactly how the platforms are gonna be exploited because criminals or thieves are very creative. And we’re finding new ways that Facebook is being manipulated every day. It’s hard to really predict how your platform is going to be used.

That said, there’s an acceptable amount of risk built in to building any of these things in the first place. It’s really about getting to scale and doing that as quickly as possible for it before some other competitor beats you to it.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

I feel like these companies want to get as big as possible and as quickly as possible. Why, though, is it so important for these companies to reach scale?

Mike Isaac

There is the advantage of what’s called “a network effect,” which means the bigger you get, the more your platform reinforces its own entrenched incumbency.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

You’re the dominant force, basically.

Mike Isaac

Facebook greatly benefits from that. The more people that use it, the more people are going to continue using it over time. Part of that is maybe the nature of the business itself.

I can’t imagine most of the folks in Silicon Valley wanting to be fine with a small, modest, and sustainable business that isn’t growing by 100 or 200 percent every other quarter. It’s just about changing the world and world domination.

For the past 15 or 20 years, that was a lauded approach to how we look at CEOs. Now that sort of view is becoming questioned in tech, which is in for this reckoning right now.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

It’s interesting because I think that for a lot of people listening to my question, they would just go, well, money, obviously. But clearly, it’s not just money, it’s more than that?

Mike Isaac

I’m hesitant to put all this stuff on money just because a lot of the guys — and again, it’s mostly guys that are running these companies — have money right there. They’re set for life. Zuckerberg isn’t doing it for the money. He has more money than you will ever be able to spend.

It’s about conquest. It’s about history. It’s about making one’s mark on the world. Or if you want to go, Steve Jobs, the dent in the universe thing.

Really, it’s about ego.

I’m hesitant to say these businesses only care about money because I think it’s not the thing that really drives them at the end of the day. It’s about maintaining power and and beating your competitors so that you don’t have to worry about being usurped or becoming irrelevant.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross

And in order to do that, you say I’m okay with 2 or 3 percent of listings being fraudulent and customers be damned. That’s just their problem.

Mike Isaac

There’s always going to be laws being broken or crimes being committed or some “acceptable” amount of problems. It always exists.

So it might be hard to hold the platforms to a 100 percent standard of keeping everything pristine. But they also know what they’re getting into when they’re building as quickly as possible without proper verification.

So you have to come in and say, look, you need to forget worrying about growth at all costs and start protecting people on your platform, especially when it’s having real world, potentially life-threatening consequences.

To find out, listen to the full episode and subscribe to Reset on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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gracieyvonnehunter · 4 years

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A bait-and-switch scam ran unchecked on Airbnb. Here’s how it worked.