swear I'm the only one on here who listens to trashfuture. not that it's anything to be proud of, mind

Maybe it’s the sourpuss attitude. Maybe it’s the sincerity with which he campaigns for the countryside, rather than just shouting “cows” joyfully when confronted by them. Maybe it’s a general diminishment of interest in British royalty. Maybe it’s the gold state coach and cloak at a time when millions of UK adults are unable to afford essential hygiene products.

But today, as King Charles III is crowned in a ceremony at Westminster Abbey in London, the response of the internet’s meme-makers will feel muted in comparison to the one enjoyed by his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, who was a meme queen we all stanned.

On the face of it, King Charles should be an ideal candidate for memedom. He has unnervingly red, rotund, sausage fingers. He has a cartoonish visage, lampooned for years by cartoonists and eBay sellers, with jug-handle ears and a hangdog, sullen expression. He has an unnerving, innocent, naive approach to life that leads him to say outlandish things, which often come back to bite him. He once, reportedly, shrieked when he first saw plastic wrap.

Charles’ 1989 declaration that he was so infatuated with Camilla, who will become queen this Saturday, that he wanted to be reincarnated as a tampon so he could forever live inside her, has big dril energy.

Yet none of that has cut through to make Charles a perennial internet fave. Even attempts at internet traffic-catching roundups of the best King Charles memes are … underwhelming, and often not really about the man himself.

“He's not publicly weird enough to be endearing, but he’s also not like a patriarch because he's too weird to give off being normal,” says Hussein Kesvani, a journalist and podcaster specializing in digital culture. “When it comes to being popular online, especially cross-audiences, you need to have a malleable weirdness that makes you endearing as a subject or a feature.”

Perhaps the tally of “good-weird” when it comes to evaluating Charles’s suitability for memedom is outweighed by the tally of “bad-weird.” He has always been portrayed as problematic compared to his ex-wife, Princess Diana, who died in a 1997 car crash. He has been willing to intervene in politics in a way that unelected members of the royal family have tried to avoid. He has an unfortunate habit of accepting cash donations in suitcases and grocery bags from Middle Eastern sheikhs.

And perhaps he’s suffering from the problem likely to blight his reign: He spent much of his life playing second fiddle to Queen Elizabeth, living in her shadow and being unable to develop much of a kingly standing of his own in the public’s eyes. “The queen was around for a very long time,” says Jeremy Blackburn, an assistant professor in computer science at Binghamton University and cofounder of the iDRAMA Lab, which looks at memes on the web. “So there was a long history that people had to draw from there.”

While Queen Elizabeth II was seen as a grandmother figure to the world, an innocent, sweet old lady, like Angela Lansbury but with palaces, Charles has long been seen—likely incorrectly—as waiting for his mother to give him his time to shine.

To be memeable, royals have to be likable, which is where the previous queen excelled—mostly. “Usually, they have to do something [to become a meme],” says Blackburn. “What is Charles known for? He’s known for the Diana thing. That’s not a positive meme. Then he was in the background for a lot of time. His kids are around now and seem to be more likable and interesting than him. The guy is not an interesting fellow. And the country’s not in good shape.”

The public knew the queen—at least the concept of her. She was canny enough not to give much away about her views in public, allowing the world to project onto her whatever they wanted, sometimes literally, which made her ripe for internet ribbing. Part of her success was that she was an older woman who sometimes was quirky.

The problem is that the public knows Charles—or at least think they do—based on his years of waiting in the wings. While the queen came fully formed as monarch at age 25, Charles is trying to adopt the role of king after decades spent as a comparatively outspoken campaigner. We know what he likes and definitely know what he doesn’t, which makes it harder for people to accept him as a blank canvas. “I don’t think the new guy is very endearing,” says Blackburn. “What are you going to say about him? His mom was queen for basically as long as everybody was alive, and now he’s prancing around like he [has been king for just as long].”

Gender also likely plays a role. That he’s a man hinders people’s ability to think of him positively in the same way they did the queen, says Alex Turvy, a meme researcher at Tulane University in New Orleans. “He's a reminder of the literal patriarchy,” he says. “Seeing that face, for some reason, sort of reminds you of the ugliness of colonialism, and the state hoarding all of this wealth.”

Notes        

Paris Marx is joined by Hussein Kesvani to discuss the mess of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, the problem with his solution to blue check privilege, and what we should learn from how he posts.

Guest                      

Hussein Kesvani is a journalist and the co-host of Trashfuture and Ten Thousand Posts. Follow Hussein on Twitter at @hkesvani.

"Little wonder that so many analysts of online culture, such as the writer Kyle Chayka, have pointed out that as big money has increasingly encroached into consumer technology, the internet has become less useful to the people who use it – and more importantly, nobody is having fun on it any more."

less useful and less fun. another one bites the dust…

cut out those who take cuts.

"After all, for many of us, social media isn’t just an amalgamation of our social lives but is also intertwined with our economic lives. Post Covid-19, as more businesses and companies expand to incorporate remote workers, social media will be essential to finding and applying for work and vetting prospective employees and contractors well before any formal interview."

Via: Hussein Kesvani, wired.com

Anemoia, czyli nostalgii za czasami, których nie przeżyliśmy.

Hussein Kesvani w swoim artykule omawiającym vaporwave wprowadza problem zjawiska anemoia, czyli nostalgii za czasami, których nie przeżyliśmy. Na wstępie autor próbuje zobrazować nam tę sytuację za pomocą opisu rzeczywistości nastolatka, który to może dotyczyć konceptu Mallsoft’u - 

“Kiedy Michael Tills ze stanu Kentucky chce uciec od rzeczywistości, wybiera się do centrum handlowego. Zagląda do starej lodziarni, gdzie zamawia ulubioną miętę z kawałkami czekolady oraz gumę balonową. Następnie udaje się do sklepu “skateshop”, w którym zwykł kupować obuwie marki DC i papier do swojej deski. Następnie zatrzymuje się przy fontannie umiejscowionej po środku centrum handlowego, gdzie miała miejsce jego pierwsza randka, a także pierwszy pocałunek. Centrum handlowe to dla niego szczęśliwie miejsce, które przypomina mu dawne czasy, gdy jego życie toczyło się beztrosko przy muzyce Weezer, No Doubt and the Counting Crows”.

Fundamentem estetyki vaporwave jest tęsknota milenialsów czy też osób starszych za dzieciństwem i latami dorastania. Jednak nostalgia ta odczuwana jest również przez młodsze jednostki, które nie miały szansy dorastać w czasach rozwoju tej kultury. Autor twierdzi, że ich doznania to fałsz, jednak cały vaporwave może być uznany za fałsz, wyraźny konstrukt i utopię. Kategorie sztuczności czy autentyczności tracą tutaj znaczeniu, liczy się tylko intensywność i spójność przeżycia estetycznego.

i am actually and in all entirety losing my mind right now

Owning the leftists by telling anybody who favors even slight redistribution of wealth to google Venezuela

https://twitter.com/HKesvani/status/830788428321144834

It’s worth noting that many social media platforms already require users to present some form of personal identification when using their services. Facebook, for instance, requires users to provide their real names and phone numbers when signing up: if challenged, they have to provide identification to prove their identities. Even on social media services such as Parler, which has been connected to movements such as QAnon and where white nationalist conspiracies run rampant, users have to upload a valid passport or driving license in order to be able to directly message people on the platform. While social media platforms are not under any legal obligation in the US or UK to hold valid identities of users, it’s clear that even on platforms with ID requirements, harassment and abuse are abundant.

Second, the enforcement of mandatory ID verification could place vulnerable groups of people – from whistleblowers to persecuted minority groups seeking refuge – at significant risk. The Conservative backbencher David Davis has already warned of the censorious potential of the online safety bill, as it will require social media companies to remove any content that the regulator considers to be “harmful” or a potential threat to society. Mandatory verification poses a risk of criminalising dissidents or shutting off an avenue of expression for, say, migrants with precarious residency statuses. This is amplified when one considers what might happen if a tech company holding sensitive identification information is subject to hacking or an accidental data leak.

Perhaps more important, though, is that mandatory ID verification would allow certain politicians to act as if the issue had been solved, leaving underlying causes untouched. While social media platforms might provide a venue for the crudest forms of harassment, it is difficult to justify tech companies removing this material when such attitudes continue to exist in Britain’s major newspapers and media outlets in the form of easy-to-share online content. It’s not only online trolls who claim the current reckoning with racism in Britain is a capitulation to revolutionary Marxism – you can find that argument in respectable newspapers. When senior ministers such as Priti Patel refuse to condemn the booing of footballers showing their own solidarity, they are effectively giving permission and encouragement to what might be termed anti-anti-racist sentiment. Indeed, the mistake that those advocating for mandatory ID verification make is not to believe that social media platforms make it easy to racially harass an individual without fear of exposure, but rather to assume that such behaviour happens in a vacuum.

Crap jobs remain a cornerstone of our working lives (there's a whole book about it), and I'm under no illusions as to it having been better "back in the day," but the atomised nature of employment today — between market-lead shifts towards zero hour contracts and casual workers having zero rights, as well as the pandemic-necessitated shift to working from home — means the collective bargaining of previous generations is much more difficult to put into action. So I'm always interested to hear about alternative ways of resisting shitty work practices, such as the legends in this Novara Media article who've come up with all sorts of workarounds in their WFH set ups. This anonymous software developer is especially inspiring:

"Since working from home, I’ve basically been able to get my job done in half the time I would in the office. Being a programmer, I’ve figured out ways to automate the most annoying parts of my work. I’ve written a set of mouse and keyboard commands to fill out my timesheets, fill up my calendar with ‘private meetings’, and send out emails. Automated mouse movements also keep my Microsoft Teams status green, making it look like I’m hard at work. This is all against the rules, but it saves me hours. Right now, I’m taking Fridays off entirely."

This is obviously not quite the same as organised walkouts over poor pay or loss of pensions, but it's an effective form of resistance against a) jobs where attendance and looking busy appears to be the main thing, and b) work in general. Feeling a sense of resistance to work is, I think, entirely natural. For all the talk of a Protestant work ethic being inherit in humans, performing labour of which you are not a beneficiary in order to afford the rudiments of a comfortable existence is, and I hope this isn't a mad idea, a load of bollocks and totally unnatural. In How To Do Nothing, a book I won't stop wanging on about and I'm sorry for that, Jenny Odell writes about this "Bartleby The Scrivener"-inspired approach to striking. Not so much a justifiably-aggressive collective action, but an organised-or-otherwise shrug of "I would prefer not to." I was reminded of the concept when reading the article "Tired of Running in Place, Young Chinese ‘Lie Down'":

"The new lifestyle buzzword, tang ping [lie down], stems from a now-deleted post on forum site Tieba. Unlike similar, previous terms to have had their time in the spotlight in recent years, tang ping is an action rather than a feeling — resolving to just scrape by, exerting the bare minimum effort at an unfulfilling job, as opposed to the futility of raging against the capitalist machine.

"The author of the Tieba post described how he had been unemployed for the past two years yet did not see this as problematic. Instead of accepting and pursuing society’s ideas of success, he decided to just lie down.

“'Since there has never been an ideological trend exalting human subjectivity in our land, I shall create one for myself: Lying down is my wise movement. Only by lying down can humans become the measure of all things,' the user wrote in his lying-down manifesto."

The article goes on to explicate a fairly defeatist element to tang ping, perhaps understandably, but I don't think the acceptance of your material conditions and rejection of the standard way of improving them is necessarily throwing in the towel. It also certainly isn't the same as the rejection of society and replacing it instead with days dedicated to "lift[ing] weights and be[ing] self-sufficient through crypto," Hussein Kesvani's apt summation of nihilistic self-improvement bros. Quite the opposite: it chimes with something Guy Debord painted onto the walls of a Parisian street in 1953, and which I had on a poster in my room for a bit (because ofc I did): Never Work! Debord wrote, in response to a postcard reproducing his graffiti, disagreeing with its framing:

"Monsieur Buffier’s title, in fact, is 'Superfluous advice.' Given that it is well know that the great majority of people work, and that said work is, despite the strongest repulsion, imposed on the near totality of workers by a crushing constraint, the slogan NEVER WORK can in no way be considered 'superfluous advice.' This term of Monsieur Buffier’s implies that such a position is already unquestioningly followed by all, and thus casts the most ironic discredit on my inscription, and consequently my ideas and those of the Situationist movement."

Karen Elliot wrote more broadly, more recently, on the rejection of work, "which locates the wage-labour relation as the central pillar of capitalist relations and therefore the prime locus of attack." Her piece takes on the then-emergent trends of precarious work and the propaganda of productivity, which are now in full bloom, and places the struggle for an exit from this shitty situation within the history of Marxist thought:

"[Eduard] Bernstein, Engel’s literary executor and one of the most influential figures within reformist Marxism, argued in a series of articles under the title The Problems of Socialism (1897–98) that the ‘final goal’ of socialism would be achieved through capitalism, not through capitalism’s destruction. As rights were gradually won by workers, he argued, their cause for grievance would be diminished and consequently so would the foundation and necessity of revolution."

Which, well, see how that turned out. Not only have worker's rights been further eroded by the strategic destruction of labour unions, passing of laws which allow for predatory hiring and labour practises, but we're also at a point now where the opportunity to address "grievances" has been more-or-less removed by the business models of Uber, Deliveroo, Amazon, et al. But we also don't seem to be particularly close to a glorious fully automated luxury socialist revolution. So given all of that, why not just do the bare minimum and have a lie down?

15 Sociology Books by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) Authors

Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers’ Advisory Podcasts chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here.

Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation by Oluwakemi M. Balogun

W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America edited by by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert

The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century by Grace Lee Boggs &  Scott Kurashige

Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

Follow Me, Akhi: The Online World of British Muslims by Hussein Kesvani

I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism by Lee Maracle

Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and The Fight Against Medical Discrimination by Alondra Nelson

Finding Latinx: In Search of the Voices Redefining Latino Identity by Paola Ramos

Fruteros: Street Vending, Illegality, and Ethnic Community in Los Angeles by Rocío Rosales

Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples by Linda Tuhiwai Smith

Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor by Sudhir Venkatesh

Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis & Inuit Issues in Canada by Chelsea Vowel

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

Hussein Kesvani

“One response favoured by productivity gurus is microscheduling – creating a deliberate and detailed roster of work, broken down not by weeks and days but hours or even minutes. This goes far beyond most people’s idea of being organised: compulsively writing to-do lists (and, usually, instantly losing track of them). How does anyone stick to such a finely detailed plan? And does it make work – and life – any easier?”

“Elaine Lui is the fast-talking founder of the celebrity news site Laineygossip. She wakes up every day between 4.30am and 5.30am, but will, if she needs to, stay up all night to finish a book or, say, cover the Golden Globes. Normal days for her are broken up into mostly 10- to 15-minute chunks. The smallest slot is three minutes, to go to the toilet; the longest, her weekly 90-minute email session.”

“Lui admits that she does have downtime – at the weekends, when she makes the most of her ability to nap on demand. But, from Monday to Friday, her intense schedule leaves little time for basic human stuff such as saying hello to a colleague by the coffee machine or running late. ‘If someone gets to a 10am meeting at 10.02, I’m not very patient,’ she says. It also makes the idea of having children unfathomable.”

“Another example of the limitations of microscheduling comes from Hussein Kesvani, a London-based editor and writer. Last year, faced with a seemingly insurmountable workload, he tried to follow the YouTuber Casey Neistat’s brand of extreme hyperactivity. Neistat has “Work harder” written in big neon letters on the wall in his studio and tattooed on his left wrist, “just in case I forget”; his left arm also displays another tattoo, saying “Do more”. In 2015, he detailed his daily routine in a video that has since racked up 2.6m views. From a 5am start, Neistat’s schedule goes: one hour of email; three hours of exercise (which he says makes up for the little sleep he gets); 10 hours of work; three hours for family (to, say, “put the baby to bed”); another three hours for work; and, from 1am, four hours of sleep. Free time, he says, is the enemy of progress, which is why he has eliminated it entirely from his life.“

Now Andrew Neil has left GB News, I’m selflessly volunteering to replace him | Hussein Kesvani

Now Andrew Neil has left GB News, I’m selflessly volunteering to replace him | Hussein Kesvani

source https://feedimo.com/story/121163851