#via exile. we love irony.
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The Ones That Got Away (Touchstarved OC Rewrite)
I changed the lyrics to “The One That Got Away” by Katy Perry (I listened to this cover by Brielle Von Hugel), based on my Hound!MC Alon's backstory and their childhood friend's betrayal.
Summer in the city where we grew up.
Running from our troubles and tryin’ our luck,
Searching for a world that’d be big enough for two.
Used to steal Headmaster’s liquor and climb to the roof.
Dreamed about the future like we had a clue.
Never thought that one day, I'd be losing you.
In another life, I’d still be your friend.
We'd keep all those promises, be us until the end.
In another life, you would make me stay,
So I don't have to say you were the one that got away,
The one that got away.
One night on that rooftop, we’d made our pact
To leave these walls together, have each other’s backs.
Sometimes when I miss you, I climb towards the sky.
Summer kept on passing, and we grew up,
Found something in the city much bigger than us.
It’s time to face the music, we had long run out of luck.
But in another life, you’d be by my side.
We'd keep all those promises to take charge of our lives.
In another life, I would fight to stay,
So I don't have to say you were the one that got away,
The one that got away.
The one that got away.
All that money won’t buy back our time for me.
Can't replace you with a million dreams.
I never thought you’d turn our dream on me.
So I guess this is goodbye.
But in another life, I could still believe
That friends would keep their promises…
In another life, we’d make our escape,
And everyone who stayed would say we were the ones that got away.
The ones that got away…
In another life, I would make you stay
So I don't have to say you were the one that got away.
The one that got away…
#touchstarved#touchstarved game#touchstarved oc#alon the hound#erick the wolf#song parody#lyrics rewrite#the word “dream” is used a bunch because it's not just the childhood friend they lost in the betrayal it's also their shared dream.#the word “luck” is also repeated because of the childhood friend oc erick. he likes card games and gambling.#“we had long run out of luck.” referring to the heist that was the catalyst for the betrayal.#I changed the bridge lyric to “I can't replace you with a million dreams” for one of the songs I had in their playlist. “a million dreams.”#the “turn our dream on me” refers to the promise to leave the city. so alon did actually end up fulfilling that dream thanks to erick.#via exile. we love irony.#I liked playing with the phrase “the one that got away” because it can mean a lost chance#but since the hound mc is a thief it could also mean the person that escaped. like oh no the criminal got away!#with alon and erick in particular it refers to their promise to leave the walled city together once they gathered enough coin#that was also tied to finding a cure for alon's curse but the most important part of that pact was to be together no matter what happened#for the bridge after the chorus I just took out the second part of “we would keep our promises” because I thought it was more fitting#the sentence just ends because it's too painful to repeat. I also think it makes that quieter more subdued part stand out from the others.#my favourite change was the switch to plural in “everyone who stayed would say we were the ones that got away.”#it's meant to convey: “we were supposed to be the ones that made it out. we were supposed to make it out of here together.”#again it's playing with that phrase: “the one that got away.” I imagine it sung in a very raw and agonized way.
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love fox’s reaction to having inda back on the death. all very much the same old yknow, the saunter and irony and being >:3c over his “legitimate pirate loot” now in the captain cabin, but he’s also smiling about lorm’s cooks and inda’s familiar mannerisms. he immediately recognizes inda’s old signs of pain, despite the two not having seen another for years and years, and offers him a hot tub bath while they both discuss leadership, plans for the upcoming battle, and just news. inda’s surprised at fox’s lack of derision when he tells him about evred’s offer for a marlovan navy, though fox does still poke fun at the king of course of course. it’s very much . . . we get inda’s perspective on this scene:
It’s Fox’s fleet. But I’m acting like it’s mine.
and
Yes, [the cabin] had changed. Well, so have I.
and like. he’s right! this applies to fox. fox banner fleet is indeed fox’s now, and fox has changed. we see that in fox’s anger over no mage being able to magically heal dasta’s spine. we see it in fox teaching mutt and other rats how to read. his getting to meet thog on her own ship, the “first non-Chwahir to do so, as far as [Fox] was aware”. again, the pride over lorm’s cooks being highly sought after at freeport harbor. i know that when inda handed the fleet over to fox at the start of king’s shield that fox beat up anyone who whined about “inda doing it this way” and all that. that was the start of it. but it’s really only now in treason’s shore that i see the fleet being fox’s, ha. it’s cuz of ramis beating fox around a little and adjusting his perspective on Life, the Universe, and Everything. fox learns to think beyond himself and the wrongs done to him and his family, starts thinking instead of the future, of legacy, of what his kids will have to do and deal with. that’s why he’s more open to the idea of turning from independent to a marlovan fleet under montrei-vayir kingship. building bridges
fox’s character arc is neat cuz he never gets his revenge. not in the traditional manner. first couple books he so desperately wants to be the protagonist of the story, and he acts like it, the edgy little snot. most characters like him would get to have a dramatic duel with evred yknow, save his family from exile, be (figuratively) crowned as the Rightful Marlovan King, probably use newfound wisdom to restore olara and idayago to independence or smth, and only then start thinking about Legacy and Future via Posterity. fox doesn’t get that tho. comparatively, he goes very tamely into retirement (before fucking off to norsunder), not even getting to hang out with inda anymore but writing his life story nonetheless. it’s not for the legit like ten generations later that the montredavan-ans are released the treaty and are alright to do their own shit again (magic!). very anti-climatic for a character like fox. it’s funny and anyway i’ve steered way off topic from the start of this post. i think i just wanted to make a joke about fox and inda being five feet apart (ie fox not even in the hot tub, but they’re talking through the open door) cuz they’re not gay
#fox is such a funny guy#i say this about every inda character but it's the facts#dear gods he and tau are soooo similar and they hate that about each other soooo much which of course just makes it ten times better#a better analysis on fox would be accomplished if i had more than just vague memories of what happens to him after the quartet lmao#i remember he bought himself a ridiculously expensive coat that my beloved (cannot remember his name. feather? quill? quill! that's it) from#time of daughters borrows when on a Mountain Journey. why did fox buy it? because he's Like That#i honestly don't remember the details on fox's deal with norsunder and if he even made a deal at all. i think there's stuff about it at the#end of treason's shore so hopefully when i finish that'll help#he is such a character of all time i love the he#but yeah i think it's funny that evred hated magic sooo much and eventually fox's descendants would be The Mages for the kingdom and take#over like all the king's runner lmaoooo#evred's literal worst nightmare lskdfjsldfjslsdlfjslfd#tho tbf the montrei-vayirs aren't even ruling the kingdom at that point iirc so maybe his ghost doesn't give a shit#but knowing evred his ghost would continue to give a shit :pensive:#inda quartet#sartorias-deles#yeah i think the point of the post was supposed to be fox was very happy to see inda but would rather die than show it and inda's oblivious#of course but jokes on you fox: i can see it :3
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Pics: All of them are pretty much self explanatory, being book covers...
1902: Output.
Life: Nothing actually changed for Lovecraft this year. He was still being mentored at home. And he still read thru his grandad's attic library...
His mom was still at odds with her only child. But, she & her aunts also continued to put his needs above their own. Buying him chemistry sets, Jellygraph equipment & even his own telescope...
Output: Lovecraft finished several poetic works this year: 1st, he finally finished "Metamorphoses", 4 minor poems "Poemata Minora" & a nod to the Confederate flag.
1. Ovid's "Metamorphoses" has already been discussed but, here's a recap -
This is a random collection of ancient Roman myths. The tales are mostly not connected, until the last 3rd of the work.
Plot wise, it ranges from the creation of the world to Caesar's murder.
It's theme is mostly about people making rash decisions due to love &/or passion.
As for any 'lessons', there's "change is eternal" & "ordering anything is futile!" Do you think HPL learned something from this?
Since Ovid dared to criticize Emperor Augustus, the writer was exiled to the Black Sea area - where he died.
2. Poemata Minora, Volume Two - These poetic 'series' was written when Lovecraft was 11 years old & self published via Jellygraph.
These works are dedicated, by HPL, "to the Gods, Heroes & Ideals of the Ancients." His preface makes mention of "my" Odyssey, Iliad, Aeneid & the like...
Are there more early poems by HPL? Or, is he talking about his grandpa's array of books?
Volume One is considered lost. But, Volume Two is made up of 5 very short poems. Not really flash fiction, but minute mood pieces.
Quotes:
A. Ode to Selene (with a shout out to Diana) -
A1. "Hide harsh truth in sweet illusion mild."
A2. "Let my spirit rest amid the past."
B. To the Old Pagan Religion -
B1. "Are there no Dryads in these wooded mounts; Over which I often, in desolation, roam?"
C. On the Ruin of Rome -
C1. "Wither has gone, great city; The race that gave law to all?"
D. To Pan -
D1. "Seated in a woodland glen; By a shallow, reedy stream;... I fell... lulled into... dream."
E. On the Vanity of Human Ambition -
E1. "True bliss, methinks,... man can find; In virtuous life & cultivated mind."
3. CSA 1861 to 1865: To the Starry Cross of the South -
Not about the Confederacy, really, but on their war flag. It was adopted, after the Civil War, as a symbol of the South's heritage of slavery & white supremacy...
Quotes:
A. "Proclaming high the rights of human kind."
B. "The South, by treachery's overthrown."
In A, Lovecraft seems unaware of the irony of the "rights of human kind." While he meant the rights of Whites, we must remember that our own Constitution was written with white, land owning folks in mind - not for any other whites or colored folk...
Luckily, fairer minded politicians (Good Lord!! They exist!) have expanded the original meaning to include all of mankind.
In B, we have an early form of HPL adding modern myths to old lies. What we now know as "False News".
The Confederacy was defeated thru gruesome military battles & massive destruction. Until, Robert E. Lee finally surrendered - or the South would have been totally devastated.
That's how raw northern sentiments ran. But, Lincoln stepped in & used federal funds to help rebuild the South - not long before he was assassinated.
As for the South's leaders, most of them emigrated to Brazil, where some of their settlements still survive...
4. "The Secret of the Grave" might have been written during this year. But, it may just be another name for "The Mystery of the Graveyard."
5A. Also out this year was "The Moon", an early scientific work. Lovecraft wrote that learning astronomy was the single greatest thing to ever happen to him!
5B. He actually dreamed of flying above the planet & plunging out into the dark void...
Criticism: At 11 years old, Lovecraft is slowly connecting myth making with his storytelling abilities. He is also growing up - though he later hated the very idea...
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"Summerland”: Review
“There is a place for escapism with an ethical backbone. More than ever, we need to be able to relax under the spell of fantasists we can trust not to poison us with irony or distort history to suit their ideology.“
Summerland is British dramatist and theater director Jessica Swale’s film directorial debut. It tells the story of Alice Lamb (Gemma Arterton), a misanthropic young folklorist who is forced to care for a child evacuated from London in advance of the Nazi blitz. The film opens and closes on the great Dame Penelope Wilton as older Alice in the 1970s, and flashes of the character’s memories of being an Oxford girl in the ‘20s run through the middle, but Summerland is primarily a sort of wartime conversion narrative. Alice’s nature, scarred over by love lost and gone bitter, is gradually healed by the slow emergence of maternal love for the bright-eyed and innocent child, Frank, played with preternatural nuance by newcomer Lucas Bond.
When Frank is dropped at the doorstep of Alice’s romantically isolated cliffside cottage on the outskirts of a town in East Sussex, he finds her in a bitter and recalcitrant state. For their first dinner she hands him an uncooked potato, raw ham, and a whole egg. “You don’t expect me to cook it for you? There’s the stove,” she points, and walks back to her life’s great pursuit—her writing. She spends her days laced into a rigid routine of researching and composing “academic theses, not stories,” as she corrects a prying town elder (Tom Courtenay), that use science to debunk narrative folkloric explanations for strange natural phenomena.
Her life is solitary, studious, and mercilessly subjected to the strictest self-imposed routine. The war’s sudden imposition, via Frank, on that routine brings with it other, more upbraiding interruptions. His inadvertent puncturing of the hermetic seal on her life stirs up vivid flashbacks of a time when she was, like him, looking toward the future with innocent hope. In that time, her twenties in the ‘20s, she met Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Vera at a spring concert at Oxford. The spark was immediate, the chemistry undeniable. So began the hushed and rapturous affair whose sudden break has cast a long, withering shadow over Alice’s life. It is out from under this burden that Frank’s childlike curiosity and unquestioning faith in the goodness of other people begins to pull Alice.
Alice’s emotional flowering begins to dovetail with the subject of her latest inquiry—the Summerland myth. In the film, what Alice calls Summerland is actually Fata Morgana, or centuries-old mariner’s yarns of floating islands materializing inexplicably on the horizon, thought of as conjurings of the wicked sorceress of Arthurian lore, Morgan Le Fay. In reality, Summerland is a term created by theosophists in the 19th century to refer to a concept similar to heaven in ancient pagan cosmologies. Swale has simply nested the one within the visual of the other. Called variously The Otherworld, The Shining Land, and the Land of the Young by Celts, Summerland is “a land of eternal summer, with grassy fields and sweet flowing rivers,” like “Earth before the advent of humans,” writes popular witchsplainer Scott Cunningham. He could well be describing the pastoral, soft and sunlit setting of Swale’s film—the southeast English coast, shot gloriously on location.
If it’s possible to resist Summerland’s principal hook, namely, Swale’s ability to tell an intricately plotted, politically engaged, at times bleak story in a way that feels as sublime, escapist, and low stakes as the folklore its heroine is investigating, then the locations which provide backdrop for it all prove irresistible. It’s simply impossible to look at Gemma Arterton with no makeup on, hair free and flowing down her back, clad in a warm wardrobe of rustic, earth-toned skirts and cardigans, scrawling something about wildflowers in her leatherbound notebook, emblazoned against the operatic white chalk cliffs being continually washed by the sparkling sapphire sea and not feel instantly soothed, regardless of what else is going on, in her life or yours.
Landscape is then not just backdrop, it is central to the film’s most potent attribute—its palliative effect on the weary and discontented viewer’s soul. Cunningham’s evocation of Summerland, as an oasis suspended in time, above and parallel to the conflicted world, where all pain is temporarily abolished, extends beyond how the film looks to how it feels, landing at this particular moment.
Like the floating islands that give it its name, Summerland hovers above real life without ever quite touching down. In the moments the film’s dramatic conflicts threaten to break through the amniotic stasis of its sun-drenched cinematography, romantic thematic pursuits, and effervescent dialogue, Swale vanishes the stakes. Only one line is spoken about what would have been the multiply illicit nature of Arterton and Mbatha-Raw’s relationship, for instance. “They think we should burn in hell,” Alice has to explain to Frank, who in all his totemic, childlike innocence, has managed somehow to avoid homophobic social inculcation. Never mind the fact that their relationship, in addition to being same sex, was cross racial. What would it have been like for Vera, as a woman-loving Black woman, to navigate a white ethno-nationalist empire during a time when homosexuality (though lesbianism was never targeted explicitly in the laws) was punishable by exile, hard labor, and even imprisonment? We can only imagine, because that’s not Summerland’s game.
Summerland isn’t a dirge-like, finger-wagging history lesson like The Imitation Game. Nor is it bright, confectionary, period-set escapism like Autumn de Wilde’s recent adaptation of Emma. It’s somewhere in between, more akin to Jonathan Levine’s Long Shot, which embraces contemporary cultural politics without really getting into them. The result is a kind of guilt-free indulgence in classical Hollywood narrative constructs, made possible not by inverting or deconstructing them, but by simply updating who gets to negotiate their terms. This sounds like criticism but I for one am fully on board. Long Shot was one of my favorite movies of last year, and Summerland is one of my favorite movies this year so far. There is a place for escapism with an ethical backbone. More than ever, we need to be able to relax under the spell of fantasists we can trust not to poison us with irony or distort history to suit their ideology. Spoiler alert, but Summerland has a happy ending. Would you expect that from a period film with an interracial lesbian couple at its center? You wouldn’t, but wouldn’t you like to?
copyright © 2020 Ryan Christopher Coleman
#summerland#jessica swale#film#film critic#film criticism#lgbt film#lesbian films#period piece#lesbian period piece#queer period piece#gugu mbatha raw#gemma arterton#tom courtenay#penelope wilton
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What are your thoughts on Grace? Do you like her or despise her? Cassie has always said that we need to keep an open mind about her because we don't really know her yet, and while I have been doing that and withholding judgement, I have to say I do find her very annoying. There's so many different routes she could've taken to get away from Tatiana, but I guess fear stopped her from seeing them. So while I don't HATE her, i'm definitely not her biggest fan. How about you?
I agree with you. Obviously, I am extremely upset with her for manipulating James and ridding him of his freedom for years through the Gracelet. There is no excuse for that behavior. I understand she has lived in a very toxic environment under Tatiana’s roof and that it can’t have been easy to say no to her adoptive mother when she asked/forced Grace to give James the enchanted bracelet, especially if Belial himself was involved. Especially at the beginning, when she must have been a scared and lonely child. For that, she has my sympathy.
But as she grew up and got to know James, in all those years where she professed to love him to his face, did it never cross her mind that she was taking his free will away and changing his very personality by keeping him in her thrall via the Gracelet? Didn’t it occur to her it might be safer for her and everyone involved if she told James the truth? If she tried to run away? The Herondales - who were living next door in Idris - would certainly have protected her. Will is the head of the Enclave and basically best friends with Consul Charlotte Fairchild, the most powerful of people, they could’ve taken her in AND dealt with Tatiana, while keeping everyone safe.
I’m sorry, but if her only excuse for not seeking help was that she was trying to resurrect Jesse, it’s not enough for me. If Grace thought cooperating with Tatiana/Belial and taking away James’s free will was an acceptable exchange for a chance to maybe resurrect her brother, that doesn’t sit right with me. She surely was in a bad situation, but she kept making the same bad choice every day for years and years. Ultimately, Jesse is a dead boy and James is a living one.
I’m sure Grace’s reasons will be exposed and explained thoroughly in Chain of Thorns. When James finds out about being manipulated for years, he will demand an apology (this scene sounds like a fitting place for the unidentified snippet ”I suffered every thorn for you. I would again.”), and Grace will tell him everything. I think Cassandra has every intention of redeeming Grace at the end, but I don’t think her actions can fully be forgiven for her to be accepted into society. I believe she would be exiled or stripped of her runes for her crimes, she’d be an outcast. Eventually, on the page, she’s a dark gray character and can never fully be a hero. Can she atone for her sins?
The only solution is for Grace to unsefishly sacrifice herself for the greater good in the end, to save the world from Belial, or even to protect James. She would find her redemption and forgiveness in death, just like Jessamine Lovelace did in The Infernal Devices. Maybe in a poetic display of irony and divine (in)justice, Grace might even stay in this world as a ghost herself, especially if Jesse is allowed to move on (let this poor boy find eternal peace and stop trying to bring him back please).
#grace blackthorn#chain of iron#chain of thorns#the last hours#James herondale#grace cartwright#tlh#tsc#the shadowhunter chronicles#jesse blackthorn#tatiana blackthorn#gracelet#belial#jessamine lovelace#the infernal devices#tid#grace x james#James x grace#coi spoilers#chain of iron spoilers#chain of gold#chain of iron theories#tlh theories
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The Stark’s revenge towards Aegon’s conquest
I feel like I have been quite more receptive towards the ending of GoT than other Jonsa shippers as proven with this post and this post. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of things that I don't understand but I chose to let go of those things and write it off as something that D&D just failed to convey without GRRM's book. Three-Eyed Raven King Bran is one of it, and every concern I have read about this is valid and I cannot offer any explanation. I don't know if GRRM would ever be successful in delivering this in his book but obviously he will do much better than D&D. Not that I will be waiting around for it though. Despite my acceptance towards the ending, I am still quite hurt and have decided that I am done with GoT and ASOIAF.
That is after I write a few more meta to tied up loose ends I suppose…
There are basically two things I think, that has made me more receptive towards the ending.
First is the realization that GoT/ASOIAF is really about the retaliation from House Stark with their magical ancestry towards Aegon Targaryen's conquest. Every other storyline is just the events that brought House Stark to the top and beat the other houses, especially House Targaryen in the game. We heard it again and again: Ned Stark should have taken the throne for himself. Because that didn't happen, his son who was named after the first Stark ancestor would have to do it.
I know, I know, Bran is not really Bran anymore, Bran died in that cave, etc, but he still used the name Bran when he is crowned King. Or maybe this interpretation is just dead wrong, but until there’s another one that makes sense and can make me feel better, I’m going to hold on to it.
Aegon Targaryen kneeling to Brandon Stark in 8x06 - The Iron Throne. Winter has come for House Targaryen. The North Remembers.
Aegon Targaryen conquered Westeros and brought King in the North Torrhen Stark to kneel with three dragons. Dragons were then no more until Daenerys Targaryen hatched exactly another three. In the same time that another Brandon Stark was alive and crippled by the Targaryen-King slayer Jaime Lannister.
Bran Stark in 2x01, the episode title is The North Remembers.
House Stark also hide and raised the true heir Targaryen Prince (also named after the conqueror Targaryen ancestor) who shared blood with them, who will later be instrumental in moving the events to bring the demise to House Targaryen. I'm sorry, I know we all love Jon Snow and we know he is a proper lad and much more a Stark rather than a Targaryen, but he is still a trueborn Aegon Targaryen. Is it fair to Jon? Maybe not, but this is something that I am going to discuss later in the second point.
Bran's rise as king in the show came from nowhere because the show only cares about Daenerys Targaryen, the fan favorite and they didn't spare any thought about concluding the story of any other character. It probably would have been more interesting if we got Bran's POV in the last season. How he knows the events that was gonna happen and the realization of what he must do as well as his inner doubts and turmoil about it. How he make decisions and how those decisions affected the story as well as the reason why he must take the throne. But alas, we didn't even get ANY Stark POV in the last season and got the Dany show. Pathetic, considering the Bran's rise is suppose to be culmination of the story.
The second thing is that I firmly believe that there was supposed to be a Jonsa bastard child. The foreshadowing is absolutely there and they told us via subtext exactly when it happens. Other people has speculated that this would happen in the future as some kind of Bael the Bard story. But I think it should have already happened in this story and not only that, but it would have been the thing that moved Aegon Targaryen to commit treason to his house and his aunt Daenerys.
Aemon Targaryen to Aegon Targaryen in 1x09 - Baelor
Look it's just so silly that I can pinpoint exactly when the consummation happened (the night before the war with the NK aka episode 8x02 titled A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms) and when Sansa would have realized that she's pregnant (when Gilly told Jon that she's pregnant, Sam/Gilly has always been a stand-in for Jonsa). Sansa also hides in the crypts after just like Bael the Bard's Stark maiden. However the show decided that it should only be in the subtext for God knows what reason. Maybe it is for future story, I don't know. Or maybe a hint for it to be a different plotline in the books. GRRM did asked "how many children does Scarlett O'Hara has?" when asked whether the show and the books will have different ending. But in the show they decided not to bring it to the text and gave Northern Independence as Sansa's motive rather than her love for Jon Snow and in the end she is given "Queen in the North" as a consolation prize for the missing bastard child plot.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I know that many people are happy that Sansa got what she deserve and she does deserve to be queen, but there are also many people who pointed out that her coronation felt hollow and not satisfying whatsoever because Sansa wanted romantic love and family. Her queen foreshadowing mostly relates being a consort of a King and bear his children and technically if she bears Jon's children, she is bearing a King's child. Jon is a "King" only not in the throne, but a King (that lives exiled) Beyond the Wall.
Sansa Stark in 2x07 - A Man Without Honor (again with the episode title, geez, stahp!)
Secondly, it is just such a messy ending politically. There are already many post talking about this. Bran just give his sister Northern independence, making the North effectively not part of the Seven Kingdoms when he is…from the North? And why would the other kingdoms not ask for their own independence?
I think if the Jonsa bastard child story line happened, Sansa wouldn't need the QiTN ending. She's already the Lady of Winterfell and also she could be Wardeness of the North. They even put a foreshadowing bit for it. Sigh.
Sansa Stark and Littlefinger in 5x04 - Sons of the Harpy
There's no need to bother with Northern independence since a Stark is already on the throne and even ruling other kingdoms of Westeros. They are not "bowing to anyone else", the King of the Seven Kingdoms is of the North. Sansa's conclusion would be her bastard child with Jon.
A Jonsa bastard child would also make sense as a payoff to all the Jonsa romantic scenes and foreshadowing and to our characters. Tell me how you would feel if Jon ends up beyond the wall and Sansa in Winterfell, but they already had a child together? Even if it’s a bastard. Especially if it's a bastard. Named Snow. It would still feel true to a heart wrenching GoT plot but won't leave you feeling hollow. It would have been truly bittersweet. For both the viewers and the characters. Jon has to go through a tragic plot with Dany, but he would have his Stark maiden and he would have sired a Stark heir ala Bael the Bard. And the bloody irony of it! He grew up a bastard, hated it, not wanting to ever sired a bastard, find out that he is not just true born, but a King, but still ended up siring a bastard named Snow. His own bastard name. But he would love it and it would be his source of happiness. So for me, it would made much more sense to have Jonsa in this story rather than the future.
There are other things that I might still want to discuss such as some other foreshadowing for Jon stabbing Dany as well as his exile to the Wall and maybe I will expand about how Bael the Bard story should have already happened. Let's see if I'm still interested to write it but for now I think these are the two arguments that I can give for myself to find closure and acceptance. I hope everyone is doing fine and I have been enjoying reading all your thoughts here on tumblr.
#jonsa#bran is endgame#king bran#jonsa is not endgame#bael the bard#jonsa bastard#jonsa baby#the north remembers#house stark#winter has come
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A parting gift from an old flame, it was given to one of my splinters in a distant timeline before ending up in my posession via lots of complicated shit that I don't wanna get into.
O.K. So someone gave some version of Dirk Hussie painting of a quarterback fighting a horse. I have an intense desire to know who.
"Dear Dirk,
In memory of our precious time together. When you look at it, think of me, and be reminded that while we breathe, we Hope." -B.O
Oh fuck me, it was Obama. Jesus Christ, I can’t.
O.K., I had been wondering what this stuff in the corner was, but didn’t comment as I couldn’t think of how to describe them. Now, though, we have a bigger picture and that’s a cherub paint set and an old troll horn headband. Probably Calliope’s stuff.
This set of paints and the charred remains of my HORNED HEADBAND are the only surviving relics of the first and last WORLDWIDE INTERSPECIES ROLEPLAYING SESSION we ever attempted on Earth C.
Oh. Not Calliope’s. They are, in fact, Dirk’s. The Interspecies Roleplaying Session was probably orchestrated by Calliope, though.
Calliope got it into their head that dressing up in cosplay would be a fun community activity.
Right on the money!
In other news Dirk’s trollsona has a unicorn horn. So it’s not that the headband was tilted and the other horn was hidden behind the paint set like I thought. Also Dave’s trollsona has dick horns. I am not surprised. Weird how Dirk, Dave, and Rose didn’t bother to give themselves black hair. Rose gave herself yellow scleras, but couldn’t commit to the black hair it seems.
Vantas had some very uncharitable things to say about the idea, and for once in his life I think he was right.
I mean, it’s like when white people dress as Native Americans for Halloween. I can understand his anger. Though even if he didn’t have a good reason Karkat would have still been angry, I’m sure.
Plants are basically the ideal friends. They don't constantly question your decisions, or try and undermine your authority, or suggest that perhaps you should try talking about your feelings every once in a while.
I think Dirk’s issue with Homestuck getting too feelings-y was that he doesn’t like talking about his own feelings.
Wait. Does Terezi have some form of narrative control? She made it clear in one of the Epilogues that she was aware of Dirk’s narration. I’m going to assume that while Terezi herself can’t narrate, she can submit commands.
DIRK: I see you've found the command terminal.
Oh. So she can submit commands not through her own power, but because there’s one of those exile command terminals things on this ship. O.K. They have everything else on this ship, might as well have one of those too.
TEREZI: 1T S33MS TO M3 L1K3 L3TT1NG M3 BOSS YOU 4ROUND FOR 4 F3W M1NUT3S 1S TH3 L34ST YOU COULD DO TO M4K3 UP FOR WH4T PROB4BLY 4MOUNTS TO TH3 MOST BOR1NG 1NT3RG4L4CT1C VOY4G3 1N TH3 H1STORY OF SP4C3 TR4V3L
I don’t know, I think Jade’s voyage after Davesprite and John blew up might be a good contender for that title. Then again Jade had practice not having anyone with a degree of intelligence around to talk to. Then again she still had the internet on her island and could talk to her friends, unlike on the Prospit ship.
TEREZI: 4ND CONS1D3R1NG TH4T ON3 OF MY TWO PR1OR 3XP3R13NC3S 1NVOLV3D SCOUR1NG TH3 FR4CTUR3D, D1S1NT3GR4TING CORPS3 OF P4R4DOX SP4C3 FOR... WH4T F3LT L1K3 4N 3T3RN1TY,
Oh yeah, I guess that would also be a contender too.
DIRK: What, Heart and Mind?
TEREZI: M1ND 4ND H34RT, Y3S
I have a feeling Terezi purposefully switched them around to make her aspect first and to just be a tiny annoyance to Dirk.
Dirk, how dare you use Complacency of the Learned to even out a chair! Does Rose know you’re using her book like that?
> L1B3R4T3 L4LOND14N L1BR4RY
Thank you, Terezi.
TEREZI: DO3S ROS3 KNOW YOUV3 B33N US1NG ON3 OF H3R NOV3LS TO PROP UP TH4T DISGUST1NGLY T4CKY CH41R?
Terezi and I are one.
DIRK: (I captchalogue the book into my MSPA MODUS. Forget HASH MAPS, PICTIONARY, or any of that shit. This thing is where it's at.)
What the FUCK does MSPA Modus entail???
TEREZI: 4W WH4T TH3 H3LL
TEREZI: TH3 CH41R W4S SUPPOS3D TO F4LL OV3R
DIRK: I'm not sure I understand. Why would it? The four legs are all touching the floor.
TEREZI: ...
DIRK: Try not to think about it too hard.
Ha!
TEREZI: FOR SOM3ON3 WHO CL41MS TO KNOW 4 LOT 4BOUT JOK3S YOU SUR3 H4V3 CONT1NU3D TO S4Y B4S1C4LLY NOTH1NG FUNNY 3V3R
Oooh, burn! When I get around to doing my fourth read of Homestuck I’ll have to tally any instances of Dirk telling a funny joke just to see if this holds up.
For a second there I was really confused over what fractal nonsense was happening here, but then I remembered Dirk is controlling the narrative. That includes the pictures, not just the text.
DIRK: Not many really understand that when pleasure is taken seriously enough, it can easily mimic the appearance of business, just as when irony is practiced with enough passion, it becomes indistinguishable from sincerity.
So Dirk’s idea of loosening up and having fun, whether for the irony or sincerity of it, is drawing himself in romantic situations with Jake. Yeah, that pans out.
(Seriously, why is Jake such a heartthrob? John is described as dorky looking and he and Jake are practically carbon copies.)
TEREZI: DO YOU... W4NT TO T4LK 4BOUT 1T...?
DIRK: Absolutely the fuck not.
Terezi, did you seriously expect him to answer with anything else?
This feels like a meme image.
TEREZI: TH4TS TH3 ON3 TH1NG 1 4LW4YS FOUND D1FF1CULT 4BOUT M4K1NG COM1CS W1TH D4V3
TEREZI: YOU H4V3 TO DR4W 333333V3RYTH1NG >:[
God, hard agree. This is why I could never have a comic. As much as I’d like to I just get burnt out with all that tedious drawing.
DIRK: Exactly. But sometimes, visuals are just a more effective way of doing things.
DIRK: So finding the right combination of words and pictures to communicate an idea efficiently is where the artistry lies.
DIRK: And sometimes that means dispensing with one or the other entirely when appropriate.
See, this is why the Homestuck style comic is so interesting. I don’t think other comics combined panels and text like Homestuck did, and now there are so many copies of the style out there!
Woah, I feel like I just got whiplash with the disappearance of the panels!
For the sake of precedent, I'm saying that we can cloak the visuals entirely and continue with narration alone, replacing the panel with a block of text like this, which we can call a “prattle” from now on.
Right, so when we go into a more book-like format it’s a prattle. Got it. Good name, since it’s just Dirk droning on to himself.
So then Dirk narrates Terezi using the command terminal to get him to do a slew of bizarre actions. He says it’s to show how much can be done in a short amount of time (a single block of text as opposed to 50 panels), but I have a feeling the real reason is so that we, the readers, don’t actually get to see him doing any of this stuff. He doesn;t get an audience to such an embarrassing display and he gets to rub our faces in it.
She has me undertake the most intense workout routine paradox space has ever seen, all while whistling the entire discography of the Swedish pop group ABBA, which she's taken a liking to recently for some god forsaken reason.
Terezi likes ABBA? That’s amazing. I need a video of Terezi singing and dancing along with Dancing Queen now.
(... And which coincidentally was a favorite cultural weapon of Her Imperious Condescension back on Earth, centuries ago. Mamma Mia in particular was repurposed as a sugar-coated propagandist piece, calling for worldwide submission to the Batterwitch's dictatorship. "My my, how can I resist ya," as the old saying goes.)
HOLY SHIT. Now I just had a headcanon that all trolls love ABBA.
DIRK: I told you I could have fun.
TEREZI: Y34H YOU SUR3 SHOW3ED M3 1 GU3SS
Dirk, are you saying Terezi purposefully trying to torture you was actually fun? ... Are you secretly a masochist? Do you... Do you like being bossed around and forced to do ridiculous stunts? I am learning so many things about Dirk I never expected.
TEREZI: WH4TS TH1S TH1NG OV3R 1N TH3 CORN3R
TEREZI: UND3RN34TH TH1S B1G SH33T TH1NG
DIRK: Don't look in there.
TEREZI: OH SHHHH 1M ONLY T4K1NG 4 P33K
DIRK: Terezi.
DIRK: Listen to me.
TEREZI: 1M JUST L1FT1NG UP TH3 COV3R 4 L1TTL3 W4YS!!!!
DIRK: Terezi please stop talking right now.
TEREZI: D1RK HOLY SH1T
TEREZI: W
Well that sounds sinister. With Dirk I would think ti was a robot of some kind, but given his new hobby of collecting things from various timelines and his skill in building it could literally be anything.
At first I was confused at the three panels that follow, showing Dirk’s room in disarray, but then I rememebered that Dirk did a whole bunch of shit we didn’t get to see because we were in Book Time.
ROSEBOT: So, I guess today is finally the day everything's been heading towards.
I honestly thought she was going to say “today is finally the day we fuck everything up”. Not sure if the actual line counts as a callback or not now.
ROSEBOT: Instead, it feels like the very notion of fortune is simply out of the question as a means of describing the potential outcome.
ROSEBOT: As though in this moment, luck isn't either strictly real or not real, or somewhere inbetween, but absent of meaning completely.
ROSEBOT: Luck took one look at our itinerary from here on out and said you'll just have to go on without me.
So it’s Schrödinger's Luck of Who Gives a Shit? Been reading so much Dirk I tried to channel my inner Strider there. Moving on I feel like this is a very bad situation for Rose to be in. Her Aspect is luck, so what does it mean for her when she’s in a position like this?
ROSEBOT: You aren't going to believe this, but it turns out that the deranged horny ramblings of a spurned anime-obsessive have essentially no therapeutic properties whatsoever.
Rose is a gift.
I wish I could copy and paste Dirk’s whole spiel about the ocean, both literal and metaphorical, but since it’s Dirk it’s just way too long. Suffice to say I thought it was some lovely writing and really got the the meat of who Dirk is as a character. His loneliness, his fear, his eventual peace, what it means to be an ascended Prince of Heart. Good stuff.
DIRK: What's that noise I'm hearing.
DIRK: It sounds a little bit like a cat being caught in a ventilation fan. A sort of...
DIRK: Inhuman screeching, combined with the grinding of metal.
DIRK: Are we even going to make it to the ground?
ROSEBOT: Oh, no,
ROSEBOT: The ship's fine as far as I can tell.
ROSEBOT: That's just Terezi laughing.
Terezi is also a gift.
Then we end with a rather pretty image of the ship coming in for a crash landing on an Earth-like planet. I would share it, but it’s a tall panel and this post is long enough as it is. Very curious what this planet is. I would guess it might be a Earth, but the landmasses don’t look like any on Earth. Could be artistic license, but I feel like we have too many Earths as it is. Let’s get some new planets up in here!
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Carlos Vela breaks MLS’ goals record to live up to the hype of a U17 World Cup prodigy
The MLS goals and single-season points records fall in LAFC’s win vs. Colorado. Watch MLS on ESPN+.
Carlos Vela‘s name will be the subject of headlines far outside the United States after his hat trick in the Los Angeles Football Club’s 3-1 victory over the Colorado Rapids — in U.S. legend Tim Howard‘s final game — saw him break the Major League Soccer record for most goals in a single season. It’s a feat that sees the Mexican place himself firmly among the greatest to ever play in the league and as one of Mexico’s all-time best players, even if that might sound controversial given how much hype he endured early in his career.
Four days before Vela made history, a video from FIFA of the goals from Mexico’s 2005 Under-17 World Cup final win over Brazil went viral on social networks in Mexico, on the 14th anniversary of the game.
@miseleccionmx became world champions #OnThisDay in 2005.
A team featuring the likes of @11carlosV, @OficialGio and @HectorMorenoh won the #U17WC by beating Brazil 3-0 in the final
pic.twitter.com/pbYoXA4bfy
— FIFA.com (@FIFAcom) October 2, 2019
It brought back memories of what was a seminal moment in Mexican football. El Tri had never accomplished anything near as important on the world stage. TV crews set up inside the living rooms of the players’ extended families back home to record reactions, and people poured out onto the streets after the game ended; even 14 years on, Mexican soccer fans still remember where they watched it.
It was heralded, too hastily in retrospect, as a watershed moment for Mexican soccer.
At the forefront of it all was Vela, the scorer of the opening goal against Brazil and the tournament’s Gold Boot winner. The smiley — hence his “hyena” nickname — 16-year-old from the Caribbean town of Cancun was thrust into the Mexican public’s consciousness. The hopes of a football-crazed nation were pinned onto the group, only three members of which — Vela, Giovani dos Santos and Hector Moreno — would go on to have any regularity with the full national team.
– Stream MLS games LIVE on ESPN+
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For Vela, a move to Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal swiftly followed before even a debut with Chivas in Mexico’s first division. Loans to Spain and attempts to integrate into the Arsenal squad failed, before the stability of Real Sociedad and now LAFC. In between, there has been a fractious relationship with El Tri, with Vela opting to make himself unavailable for the 2014 World Cup and being equally evasive post-Russia 2018.
The irony and great shame from the national team’s point of view is that Vela’s best seasons at club level have coincided with him not being available for El Tri. That’s epitomized by Vela’s record-setting season in MLS, while his self-imposed exile from the national team continues.
His reputation in Mexico is that he is not in love with the game he plays, with quotes from 2014 stating football has never been his passion still pervading. The critics when he moved Stateside said the transfer would allow him to be able to follow the sport he loves, basketball, more closely than he could from Europe.
The perception in Vela’s country, even today, is regularly slanted toward what he could’ve been, rather than what he is. But that looks unfair given Vela’s 2019 performance. The player has stepped up in every regard.
Carlos Vela is now Major League Soccer’s single-season goal-scoring record holder.
Former Mexico coach Juan Carlos Osorio challenged players leaving Europe for MLS to be among the best players in the league, which is what Vela has done. And Bob Bradley threw down the gauntlet to Vela and asked him to get as close to the level of Lionel Messi as possible. The LAFC coach took his share of criticism for making the comment, which was part of the We Are LAFC documentary (stream on ESPN+).
Obviously, no player can match Messi’s superhuman output, but Vela has become to LAFC what Messi is to Barcelona and is the embodiment of the Designated Player tag.
Across his 31 appearances this season, Vela is atop the MLS charts in expected assists (10.2) and expected goals (25.94), and he has taken more shots (159) than anyone else and has contributed directly to more goals (49) than Real Salt Lake, D.C. United, Montreal Impact, Orlando City, Vancouver Whitecaps, FC Cincinnati and Columbus Crew have scored all season. No one in the league’s 24-year history has scored more goals in a season than his 34.
MLS defenses clearly don’t stack up to those in La Liga, but if Bradley was asking Vela to be that difference-maker for his team, then the Messi challenge was just: Vela has contributed an average of 1.62 goals plus assists per 90 minutes for LAFC in MLS in 2019, as compared to Messi’s 1.46 per 90 for Barcelona in La Liga.
Bradley has got out of Vela what other coaches couldn’t, coaxing him through one of the best individual seasons MLS has ever seen. And as for the lack of passion, the strop Vela threw when he was taken off in August’s El Trafico against LA Galaxy highlighted that he cares much more than is generally perceived, while the rivalry with Zlatan Ibrahimovic — stoked primarily by the Swede — has surely been spurring Vela on that little bit more.
Just like last winter when Barcelona came in for Vela, LAFC likely will be fielding inquiries from foreign clubs this time around, although the Black and Gold don’t see any benefit from letting him leave on loan.
And while Vela, at 31, is condemned from a Mexico national team point of view never to live up to the expectations generated by those heady days in Peru back in 2005, he almost is more popular with LAFC fans because of it. Vela is a misunderstood genius who belongs to LAFC, embodies the club and has stamped his authority all over it. He has found a home in Los Angeles.
The kid from Cancun was never cut out to seek the type of fame and adulation that some players crave, but he has found success on his own terms. And that should be enjoyed.
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How Mulan’s Main Antagonist Almost Breaks the Disney Mold
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This article contains MAJOR spoilers for Disney’s Mulan. You can read our spoiler-free review of the film here.
A recurring visual motif in Disney’s 1998 animated Mulan is the titular warrior staring at her own face, rendered unfamiliar by makeup and wondering at how to reconcile the image of that stranger with the truth of herself hiding inside. The film’s core “I Want” song, “Reflection,” articulates this ambivalence, this sense of carrying two selves, with lyrics like: who is that girl I see / staring straight back at me / why is my reflection someone I don’t know. The Mulan (Yifei Liu) of 2020, however, doesn’t have to peer at her own blurred reflection in a pond. Instead, those alternate selves are made flesh. She confronts her reflection in the faces of her sister Xiu (Xana Tang), and to a much greater extent the Rourans’ warrior-witch Xianniang (Gong Li): the two potential futures available to her. Throughout the course of the film, Mulan forges a new, third future that she makes reality. And she probably couldn’t have done it without her main antagonist: Xianniang.
From Xianniang’s first scene with Böri Khan, the antagonist is presented as the cautionary tale for what could have been, had young Mulan not heeded her father’s advice to hide her qi as she reached womanhood: Xianniang was exiled from her home for refining her qi, a privilege granted only to men, so that by the time the Rouran commander found her, she was “a scorned dog.” Böri Khan gave her a way to direct her anger and betrayal at her own people, with the promise that, when he ruled China, she would have what she most wanted: a place where her powers would not be vilified, even if that place would only exist under his totalitarian rule.
The promise of this dark future is the chain with which he leashes Xianniang, despite them both knowing that she is more powerful than him by leagues. When he calls her a witch, she grabs his throat and corrects him: “Not witch—warrior.” Yet he laughs at the notion of calling her a warrior, because they both know that a woman cannot name herself with such an honorable title; she must be named by others. The only option is a slur.
The most breathtaking example of this society’s casual sexism comes at the training camp, when Mulan-as-Hua-Jun shows off his use of qi while sparring with Honghui (Yoson An). Later, Commander Tung (Donnie Yen) gently scolds him—for hiding his ability. “You need to cultivate your gift,” he says. “Your qi is powerful, Hua Jun. Why do you hide it?” As a man, Mulan is chided for not utilizing her advantage, while as a woman she would be exiled for daring to do so.
Even her father Hua Zhou’s narration belies the tricky nature of qi: “The qi pervades the universe and all living things. We are all born with it. But only the most true will connect deeply to his qi and become a great warrior.” Only those who use their qi can be true, but only men can use their qi. Women are trapped from the start, with no chance to fulfill that trueness.
All of this lays the foundation for Mulan’s four confrontations with Xianniang—which, interestingly, map onto the four virtues of the film.
True
While the new Mulan adaptation uses the same story beats as the animated film in revealing Mulan’s true identity, they come in a different order, granting our warrior protagonist agency over this pivotal moment in a way she never got in the 1998 film. Instead of getting wounded and having the doctor discover her body beneath her armor, it is Mulan’s bindings that stop Xianniang’s deadly arrow from piercing her heart. Hua Jun dies, but Mulan lives.
Yet even before what was supposed to be a killing blow, Xianniang shames Mulan for lying. “Your deceit poisons your qi,” she snarls in disgust when they first fight—of course she immediately recognizes Mulan as another woman taking on a mantle not offered to her. Twice, Xianniang gives her the opportunity to identify herself; twice, Mulan says, “I am Hua Jun, soldier in the Emperor’s army!”
“Then you will die pretending to be something you’re not,” says the Rouran warrior, who bears the slur of witch by embodying everything that her own people accuse her of being: otherworldly, powerful, unpredictable.
Despite representing opposing sides on the battlefield, Mulan clearly recognizes some solidarity with the other woman. Why else would she willingly return to the Imperial Army as herself? She could have pulled the arrow from her bindings, readjusted her armor, reclaimed her helmet, and ridden back as Hua Jun, having miraculously escaped death. Instead, inspired to finally fulfill the third virtue stamped on her father’s sword, she presents herself in all her courage and vulnerability.
And they call her an impostor and cast her out.
Loyal
Though I briefly theorized that Xiu could have grown up into Xianniang, making her and Mulan sisters, in actuality, having Xianniang be older than Mulan makes her story even more compelling. There is a dearth of older women in fantasy stories, and in Disney tales they are very deliberately siloed into specific roles: Anyone over “marriageable age” is dead (mothers), evil (stepmothers and/or witches), or supporting characters lacking their own arc (fairy godmothers). Obviously, Xianniang falls into the evil category, but the sympathy woven into her story elevates her beyond her peers. Even if you could identify with Maleficent not getting invited to Aurora’s birth, or felt a twinge for the Evil Queen chasing after beauty via her magic mirror, we are taught that these women are past their prime, that they are pathetic for competing with their younger replacements.
Xianniang has no need to compete with Mulan; she was already a prodigy in her youth, rich in her power, and she was crushed for it. She has seen the consequences of trying to fit into their society by men’s standards. That’s why Xianniang invites Mulan to join her, because she sees the younger woman as someone to mold to her own vengeance, to replace Böri Khan as the catalyst for reshaping their future. “Join me,” Xianniang says, the tropiest of moments yet still aching with authenticity as two women trying to find a way forward together. “We will take our place together.”
But Mulan, who has known the camaraderie of men like Honghui and Tung (even if they cast her out) and who clings to the promise of her father’s unfaltering love, rejects Xianniang. “I know my place,” she says, “and it is my duty to fight for the kingdom and protect the Emperor.” And there is something troubling in that a woman will choose the patriarchal society that rejected her over creating something new by allying with a woman who has already trod her path. Yet neither is Xianniang’s destructive plan tenable. Mulan chooses the loyalty she knows, imperfect as it is, over a potential new loyalty, even if it sees her for who she truly is.
Brave
When the two meet again, Xianniang sits on the Emperor’s throne, and Mulan finally believes her: “You were right,” she tells the warrior-witch. “We are the same.”
“With one difference,” Xianniang says sadly. “They accept you, but they will never accept me.”
But buoyed by Honghui and her friends’ willingness to follow her into battle, Mulan believes that they can still change the tide. “You told me my journey was impossible,” she urges Xianniang. “Yet here I stand, proof that there is a place for people like us.”
Unfortunately, this is where what had been an affirming, feminist dynamic falls prey to worn-out tropes in which the older woman gives up. “It’s too late for me,” Xianniang intones, and transforms into her falcon form—not to escape, but to lead the way for Mulan to save the Emperor from Böri Khan, and to seal her own fate.
Devotion to Family
Xianniang is not Mulan’s blood, but they are nonetheless bonded by their mastery of qi. Xianniang is not Mulan’s sister, but she is a role model. When she tells Böri Khan that a young woman from a small village is the sole resistance to his plot, she can’t help smiling at the irony of it. And when he scoffs, “A girl,” she is quick to correct him, not with her violence over the use of the word witch, but with calm certainty: “A woman. A warrior. A woman leads the army, and she is no scorned dog.”
When Böri Khan sees this warrior for himself, before even allowing her to engage him in their first and only face-to-face fight in the film, he takes the coward’s way out: shooting an arrow at her, to swat her away like an inconvenience rather than treating her as an equal.
Are we at all surprised that Xianniang takes the arrow intended for Mulan, and then dies in the young warrior’s arms? “Take your place,” she whispers in her final words, before speaking the woman’s name like a spell, like a blessing: “Mulan.”
In that moment, Xianniang is the fairy godmother quietly stepping offstage after magicking the carriage. She is the evil queen who brings about her own literal downfall by stumbling off a cliff. The wonder of having an older woman in a fantasy story does not last if she dies in the end, doubly so if she takes herself out so that there can be only one female warrior because our mainstream storytelling still too often believes that women can be powerful, but only as exceptions to the patriarchal rule, and only for as long as they are young and traditionally beautiful and never challenge the dominance of men. Women can be powerful, but only in the ways borrowed from traditional masculinity: as soldiers, as comrades to other men, as defenders of the rightness of patriarchy.
Mulan’s fight with Böri Khan is inconsequential, even as she uses qi to defeat him, because the movie’s most important figure has already died, and in the most demeaning fashion. What’s insidious is that their culture still wins out over two women allying together. Mulan carves out her own place in the world, but it is a singular role; it does not leave room for someone like Xianniang, who is considered too far gone to save. It’s ironic how the writers built an entire complex character out of Shan Yu’s falcon from the animated film, but in the end she is reduced back to a symbol.
I already made the joke in my review that the inevitable 2040 remake will hopefully make up for some of this movie’s stumbles. Hopefully, by then, viewers will not just get more than one woman in the movie, but both women will make it to the ending credits.
Mulan is available now on Disney+. More details on how to watch it here.
The post How Mulan’s Main Antagonist Almost Breaks the Disney Mold appeared first on Den of Geek.
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Catalan separatists have tooled up with a decentralized app for civil disobedience
Is our age of ubiquitous smartphones and social media turning into an era of mass civil unrest? Two years after holding an independence referendum and unilaterally declaring independence in defiance of the Spanish state — then failing to gain recognition for la república and being forced to watch political leaders jailed or exiled — Catalonia’s secessionist movement has resurfaced with a major splash.
One of the first protest actions programmed by a new online activist group, calling itself Tsunami Democràtic, saw thousands of protestors coalescing on Barcelona airport Monday, in an attempt to shut it down. The protest didn’t quite do that but it did lead to major disruption, with roads blocked by human traffic as protestors walked down the highway and the cancelation of more than 100 flights, plus hours of delays for travellers arriving into El Prat.
For months leading up to a major Supreme Court verdict on the fate of imprisoned Catalan political leaders a ‘technical elite‘ — as one local political science academic described them this week — has been preparing to reboot Catalonia’s independence movement by developing bespoke, decentralized high-tech protest tools.
A source with knowledge of Tsunami Democràtic, speaking to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity, told us that “high level developers” located all around the world are involved in the effort, divvying up coding tasks as per any large scale IT project and leveraging open source resources (such as the RetroShare node-based networking platform) to channel grassroots support for independence into a resilient campaign network that can’t be stopped by the arrest of a few leaders.
Demonstrators at the airport on Monday were responding directly to a call to blockade the main terminal posted to the group’s Telegram channel.
Additional waves of protest are being planned and programmed via a bespoke Tsunami Democràtic app that was also released this week for Android smartphones — as a sideload, not yet a Google Play download.
The app is intended to supplement mainstream social network platform broadcasts by mobilizing smaller, localized groups of supporters to carry out peaceful acts of civil disobedience all over Catalonia.
Our source walked us through the app, which requires location permission to function in order that administrators can map available human resources to co-ordinate protests. We’re told a user’s precise location is not shared but rather that an obfuscated, more fuzzy location marker gets sent. However the app’s source code has not yet been open sourced so users have to take such claims on trust (open sourcing is said to be the plan — but only once the app has been scrubbed of any identifying traces, per the source).
The app requires a QR code to be activated. This is a security measure intended to manage activation in stages, via trusted circles of acquaintances, to limit the risk of infiltration by state authorities. Though it feels a bit like a viral gamification tactic to encourage people to spread the word and generate publicity organically by asking their friends if they have a code or not.
Whatever it’s really for the chatter seems to be working. During our meeting over coffee we overheard a group of people sitting at another table talking about the app. And at the time of writing Tsunami Democràtic has announced 15,000 successful QR code activations so far. Though it’s not clear how successful the intended flashmob civil disobedience game-plan will be at this nascent stage.
Once activated, app users are asked to specify their availability (i.e. days and times of day) for carrying out civil disobedience actions. And to specify if they own certain mobility resources which could be utilized as part of a protest (e.g. car, scooter, bike, tractor).
Examples of potential actions described to us by our source were go-slows to bring traffic grinding to a halt and faux shopping sprees targeting supermarkets where activists could spend a few hours piling carts high with goods before leaving them abandoned in the store for someone else to clean up.
One actual early action carried out by activists from the group last month targeted a branch of the local CaixaBank with a masked protestor sit-in.
Our source said the intention is to include a pop-up in the app as a sort of contract of conscience which asks users to confirm participation in the organized chaos will be entirely peaceful. Here’s an example of what the comprometo looks like:
Users are also asked to confirm both their intention to participate in a forthcoming action (meaning the app will capture attendance numbers for protests ahead of time) and to check in when they get there so its administrators can track actual participation in real-time.
The app doesn’t ask for any personal data during onboarding — there’s no account creation etc — although users are agreeing to their location being pervasively tracked.
And it’s at least possible that other personal data could be passed via, for example, a comment submission field that lets people send feedback on actions. Or if the app ends up recording other data via access to smartphone sensors.
The other key point is that users only see actions related to their stated availability and tracked location. So, from a protestor’s point of view, they see only a tiny piece of the Tsunami Democràtic protest program. The user view is decentralized and information is distributed strictly piecemeal, on a need to know basis.
Behind the scenes — where unknown administrators are accessing its data and devising and managing protest actions to distribute via the app — there may be an entirely centralized view of available human protest resources. But it’s not clear what the other side of the platform looks like. Our source was unable to show it to us or articulate what it looks like.
Certainly, administrators are in a position to cancel planned actions if, for example, there’s not enough participation — meaning they can invisibly manage external optics around engagement with the cause. Not enough foot soldiers for a planned protest? Just call it off quietly via the app.
Also not at all clear: Who the driving forces are behind the Tsunami Democràtic protest mask?
“There is no thinking brain, there are many brains,” a spokesman for the movement told the El Diario newspaper this week. But that does raise pretty major questions about democratic legitimacy. Because, well, if you’re claiming to be fighting for democracy by mobilizing popular support, and you’re doing it from inside a Western democracy, can you really claim that while your organization remains in the shadows?
Even if your aim is non-violent political protest, and your hierarchy is genuinely decentralized, which is the suggestive claim here, unless you’re offering transparency of structure so as to make your movement’s composition and administration visible to outside scrutiny (so that your claims of democratic legitimacy can be independently verified) then individual protestors (the app’s end users) just have to take your word for it.
End users who are being crowdsourced and coopted to act out via app instruction as if they’re pawns on a high tech chess board. They are also being asked (implicitly) to shoulder direct personal risk in order that a faceless movement generates bottom up political pressure.
So there’s a troubling contradiction here for a movement that has chosen to include the word ‘democractic’ in its name. (The brand is a reference to a phase used by jailed Catalan cultural leader, Jordi Cuixart.) Who or what is powering this wave?
We also now know all too well how the double-sided nature of platforms means these fast-flowing technosocial channels can easily be misappropriated by motivated interest groups to gamify and manipulate opinion (and even action) en masse. This has been made amply clear in recent years with political disinformation campaigns mushrooming into view all over the online place.
So while emoji-strewn political protest messages calling for people to mobilize at a particular street corner might seem a bit of harmless ‘Pokemon Go’-style urban fun, the upshot can — and this week has — been far less predictable and riskier than its gamified packaging might suggest.
Plenty of protests have gone off peacefully, certainly. Others — often those going on after dusk and late into the night — have devolved into ugly scenes and destructive clashes.
There is clearly a huge challenge for decentralized movements (and indeed technologies) when it comes to creating legitimate governance structures that don’t simply repeat the hierarchies of the existing (centralized) authorities and systems they’re seeking to challenge.
The anarchy-loving crypto community’s inability to coalesce around a way to progress with blockchain technology looks like its own self-defeating irony. A faceless movement fighting for ‘democracy’ from behind an app mask that allows its elite string-pullers and data crunchers to remain out of sight risks looking like another.
None of the protestors we’ve spoken to could say for sure who’s behind Tsunami Democràtic. One suggested it’s just “citizens” or else the same people who helped organize the 2017 Catalan independence referendum — managing the movement of ballot papers into and out of an unofficial network of polling stations so that votes could be collected and counted despite Spanish authorities’ best efforts to seize and destroy them.
There was also a sophisticated technology support effort at the time to support the vote and ensure information about polling stations remained available in the face of website takedowns by the Spanish state.
Our source was equally vague when asked who is behind the Tsunami Democràtic app. Which, if the decentralizing philosophy does indeed run right through the network — as a resilience strategy to protect its members from being ratted out to the police — is what you’d expected.
Any single node wouldn’t know or want to know much of other nodes. But that just leaves a vacuum at the core of the thing which looks alien to democratic enquiry.
One thing Tsunami Democràtic has been at pains to make plain in all (visible) communications to its supporters is that protests must be peaceful. But, again, while technology tools are great enablers it’s not always clear exactly what fire you’re lighting once momentum is pooled and channeled. And protests which started peacefully this week have devolved into running battles with police with missiles being thrown, fires lit and rubber bullets fired.
Some reports have suggested overly aggressive police response to crowds gathering has triggered and flipped otherwise calm protestors. What’s certain is there are injuries on both sides. Today almost 100 people were reported to have been hurt across three nights of protest action. A general strike and the biggest manifestation yet is planned for Friday in Barcelona. So the city is braced for more trouble as smartphone screens blink with fresh protest instructions.
Social media is of course a conduit for very many things. At its most corporate and anodyne its stated mission can be expressed flavorlessly — as with Facebook’s claimed purpose of ‘connecting people’. (Though distracting and/or outraging is often closer to the mark.)
In practice, thanks to human nature — so that means political agendas, financial interests and all the rest of our various and frequently conflicting desires — all sorts of sparks can fly. None more visibly than during mass mobilizations where groups with a shared agenda rapidly come together to amplify a cause and agitate for change.
Even movements that start with the best intentions — and put their organizers and administration right out in the open for all to see and query — can lose control of outcomes.
Not least because malicious outsiders often seize the opportunity to blend in and act out, using the cover of an organized protest to create a violent disturbance. (And there have been some reports filtering across Catalan social media claiming right wing thugs have been causing trouble and that secret police are intentionally stirring things up to smear the movement.)
BARCELONA, SPAIN – OCTOBER 17: Protesters take to the streets to demonstrate after the Spanish Supreme Court sentenced nine Catalan separatist leaders to between 9 and 13 years in prison for their role of the 2017 failed Catalan referendum on October 17, 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
So if a highly charged political campaign is being masterminded and micromanaged remotely, by unknown entities shielded behind screens, there are many more questions we need to be asking about where the balance of risk and power lies, as well as whether a badge of ‘pro-democracy’ can really be justified.
For Tsunami Democràtic and Catalonia’s independence movement generally this week’s protests look to be just the start of a dug-in, tech-fuelled guerrilla campaign of civil disobedience — to try to force a change of political weather. Spain also has yet another general election looming so the timing offers the whiff of opportunity.
The El Prat blockade that kicked off the latest round of Catalan unrest seemed intended to be a flashy opening drama. To mirror and reference the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong — which made the international airport there a focal point for its own protests, occupying the terminal building and disrupting flights in an attempt to draw the world’s attention to their plight.
In a further parallel with protests in Hong Kong a crowdsourced map similar to HKmaps.live — the app that dynamically maps street closures and police presence by overlaying emoji onto a city view — is also being prepared for Catalonia by those involved in the pro-independence movement.
At the time of writing a handful of emoji helicopters, road blocks and vans are visible on a map of Barcelona. Tapping on an emoji brings up dated details such as what a police van was doing and whether it had a camera. A verified status suggests multiple reports will be required before an icon is displayed. We understand people will be able to report street activity for live-mapping via a Telegram bot.
Screenshot of Catalan live map for crowdsourcing street intel
Our source suggested police presence on the map might be depicted by chick emojis. Aka Piolín: The Spanish name for the Loony Tunes cartoon character Tweety Pie — a reference to a colorfully decorated cruise ship used to house scores of Spanish national police in Barcelona harbor during the 2017 referendum, providing instant meme material. Though the test version we’ve seen seems to be using a mixture of dogs and chicks.
Along with the Tsunami Democràtic app the live map means there will soon be two bespoke tools supporting a campaign of civil disobedience whose unknown organizers clearly hope will go the distance.
As we’ve said, the identities of the people coordinating the rebooted movement remain unclear. It’s also unclear who if anyone is financing it.
Our source suggested technical resources to run and maintain the apps are being crowdsourced by volunteers. But some commentators argue that a source of funding would be needed to support everything that’s being delivered, technically and logistically. The app certainly seems far more sophisticated than a weekend project job.
There has been some high level public expressions of support for Tsunami Democràtic — such as from former Barcelona football club trainer, Pep Guardiola, who this week put out a video badged with the Tsunami D logo in which he defends the democratic right to assembly and protest, warning that free speech is being threatened and claiming “Spain is experiencing a drift towards authoritarianism”. So wealthy backers of Catalan independence aren’t exactly hard to find.
A message to the world from Pep Guardiola pic.twitter.com/WdUKEyLyjO
— Jordi Pu1gnerO (@jordiPuignero) October 14, 2019
Whoever is involved behind the scenes — whether with financing or just technical and organization support — it’s clear that ‘free’ protest energy is being liberally donated to the cause by a highly engaged population of pro-independence supporters.
Grassroots support for Catalan independence is both plentiful, highly engaged, geographically dispersed and cuts across generations — sometimes in surprising ways. One mother we spoke to who said she was too ill to go to Monday’s airport protest recounted her disappointment when her teenage kids told her they weren’t going because they wanted to finish their homework.
Very many protestors did go though, answering calls to action in their messaging apps or via the printable posters made available online by Tsunami Democràtic which some street protestors have been pictured holding.
Thousands of demonstrators occupied the main Barcelona airport terminal building, sat and sang protest songs, daubed quasi apologetic messages on the windows in English (saying a lack of democracy is worse than missing a flight), and faced off to lines of police in riot gear — including units of Spanish national police discharging rubber bullets. One protestor was later reported by local press to have lost an eye.
‘It’s time to make our voice heard in the world,’ runs Tsunami Democràtic’s message on Telegram calling for a blockade of the airport. It then sets out the objective (an airport shut down) and instructs supporters that all forms of transport are “valid” to further the mission of disrupting business as usual. ‘Share and see you all at T1!’ it ends. Around 240,000 people saw the instruction, per Telegram’s ephemeral view counts.
Demonstrators during a protest against the jailing of Catalan separatists at El Prat airport in Barcelona, Spain, on Monday, Oct. 14, 2019. (Photo by Iranzu Larrasoana Oneca/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Later the same evening the channel sent another message instructing protestors to call it a night. ‘Today we have been a tsunami,’ it reads in Catalan. ‘We will make every victory a mobilization. We have started a cycle of non-violent, civil disobedience.’ At the time of writing that follow-on missive has registered 300k+ views.
While Tsunami Democràtic is just one of multiple pro-independence groups arranging and mobilizing regional protests — such as the CDRs, aka Comites de Defensa de la Republica, which have been blocking highways in Catalonia for the past two years — it’s quickly garnered majority momentum since quietly uncloaking this summer.
Its Telegram channel — which was only created in August — has piled on followers in recent weeks. Other pro-independence groups are also sharing news and distributing plans over Telegram’s platform and, more widely, on social media outlets such as twitter. Though none has amassed such a big following, nor indeed with such viral speed.
Even Anonymous Catalonia’s Telegram channel, which has been putting out a steady stream of unfiltered crowdsourced protest content this week — replete with videos of burning bins, siren blaring police vans and scattering crowds, interspersed with photos of empty roads (successful blockades) and the odd rubber bullet wound — only has a ‘mere’ 100k+ subscribers.
And while Facebook-owned WhatsApp was a major first source of protest messaging around the 2017 Catalan referendum, with Telegram just coming on stream as an alternative for trying to communicate out of sight of the Spanish state, the protest mobilization baton appears to have been passed more fully to Telegram now.
Perhaps that’s partly due to an element of mistrust around mainstream platforms controlled by tech giants who might be leant on by states to block content (Tsunami Democràtic has said it doesn’t yet have an iOS version of its app, despite many requests for one, because the ‘politics of the App Store is very restrictive’ — making a direct reference to Apple pulling the HKmaps app from its store). Whereas Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, is famously resistant to authoritarian state power.
Though, most likely, it’s a result of some powerful tools Telegram provides for managing and moderating channels.
The upshot is Telegram’s messaging platform has enjoyed a surge in downloads in Spain during this month’s regional unrest — as WhatsApp-loving locals flirt with a rival platform also in response to calls from their political channels to get on Telegram for detailed instructions of the next demo.
Per App Annie, Telegram has leapt up the top free downloads charts for Google Play in Spain — rising from eleventh place into the third spot this month. While, for iOS, it’s holding steady in the top free downloads slot.
Also growing in parallel: Unrest on Catalonia’s streets.
Since Monday’s airport protest tensions have certainly escalated. Roads across the region have been blockaded. Street furniture and vehicles torched. DIY missiles thrown at charging police.
By Thursday morning there were reports of police firing teargas and police vehicles being driven at high speed around protesting crowds of youths. Two people were reported run over.
Anti-riot police officers shoot against protesters after a demonstration called by the local Republic Defence Committees (CDR) in Barcelona on October 17, 2019. – After years of peaceful separatist demonstrations, violence finally exploded on the Catalan streets this week, led by activists frustrated by the political paralysis and infuriated by the Supreme Court’s conviction of nine of its leaders over a failed independence bid. (Photo by LLUIS GENE / AFP) (Photo by LLUIS GENE/AFP via Getty Images)
Helicopters have become a routine sound ripping up the urban night sky. While the tally of injury counts continues rising on both sides. And all the while there are countless videos circulating on social media to be sifted through to reinforce your own point of view — screening looping clashes between protestors and baton wielding police. One video doing the rounds last night appeared to show protestors targeting a police helicopter with fireworks. Russian propaganda outlets have of course been quick to seize on and amplify divisive visuals.
The trigger for a return to waves of technology-fuelled civil disobedience — as were also seen across Catalonia around the time of the 2017 referendum — are lengthy prison terms handed down by Spain’s Supreme Court on Monday. Twelve political and civic society leaders involved in the referendum were convicted, nine on charges of sedition and misuse of public funds. None were found guilty of the more serious charge of rebellion — but the sentences were still harsh, ranging from 13 years to nine.
The jailed leaders — dubbed presos polítics (aka political prisoners) by Catalan society, which liberally deploys yellow looped-ribbons as a solidarity symbol in support of the presos — had already spent almost two years in prison without bail.
A report this week in El Diario, citing a source in Tsunami Democràtic, suggests the activist movement was established in response to a growing feeling across the region’s independence movement that a new way of mobilizing and carrying out protests was needed in the wake of the failed 2017 independence bid.
The expected draconian Supreme Court verdict marked a natural start-date for the reboot.
A reboot has been necessary because, with so many of its figureheads in prison — and former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont in exile in Brussels — there has been something of a leadership vacuum for the secessionist cause.
That coupled with a sense of persecution at the hands of a centralized state which suspended Catalonia’s regional autonomy in the wake of the illegal referendum, invoking a ‘nuclear option’ constitutional provision to dismiss the government and call fresh elections, likely explains why the revived independence movement has been taking inspiration from blockchain-style decentralization.
Our source also told us blockchain thinking has informed the design and structure of the app.
Discussing the developers who have pulled the app together they said it’s not only a passionately engaged Catalan techie diaspora, donating their time and expertise to help civic society respond to what’s seen as long-standing political persecution, but — more generally — coders and technologists with an interest in participating in what they hope will be the largest experiment in participatory democracy and peaceful civil disobedience.
The source pointed to research conducted by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, who found non-violent, civil disobedience campaigns to be a far more powerful way of shaping world politics than violence. She also found such campaigns need engage only 3.5% of the population to succeed. And at 300k+ subscribers Tsunami Democràtic’s Telegram channel may have already passed that threshold, given the population of Catalonia is only around 7.6M.
It sounds like some of the developers helping the movement are being enticed by the prospect of applying powerful mobile platform technologies to a strong political cause as a way to stress testing democratic structures — and perhaps play at reconfiguring them. If the tools are successful at capturing intention and sustaining action and so engaging and activating citizens in a long term political campaign.
We’re told the stated intention to open source the app is also a goal in order to make it available for other causes to pick up and use to press for change. Which does start to sound a little bit like regime change as a service…
Stepping back, there is also a question of whether micromanaged civic disobedience is philosophically different to more organic expressions of discontent.
There is an element of non-violent protest being weaponized against an opponent when you’re running it via an app. Because the participants are being remotely controlled and coordinated at a distance, at the same time as ubiquitous location-sensitive mobile technologies mean the way in which the controlling entity speaks to them can be precisely targeted to push their buttons and nudge action.
Yes, it’s true that the right to peaceful assembly and protest is a cornerstone of democracy. Nor is it exactly a new phenomenon that mobile technology has facilitated this democratic expression. In journalist Giles Tremlett’s travelogue book about his adopted country, Ghosts of Spain, he recounts how in the days following the 2004 Madrid train bombings anonymous text messages started to spread via mobile phone — leading to mass, spontaneous street demonstrations.
At the time there were conflicting reports of who was responsible for the bombings, as the government sought to blame the Basque terrorist group ETA for what would turn out to be the work of Islamic terrorists. Right on the eve of an election voters in Spain were faced with a crucial political decision — having just learnt that the police had in fact arrested three Moroccans for the bomb attacks, suggesting the government had been lying.
“A new political phenomenon was born that day — the instant text message demonstration,” Tremlett writes. “Anonymous text messages began to fly from mobile phone to mobile phone. They became known as the pásalo messages, because each ended with an exhortation to ‘Pass it on’. It was like chain mail, but instant.”
More than fifteen years on from those early days of consumer mobile technology and SMS text messaging, instant now means so much more than it did — with almost everyone in a wealthy Western region like Catalonia carrying a powerful, Internet-connected computer and streaming videocamera in their pocket.
Modern mobile technology turns humans into high tech data nodes, capable of receiving and transmitting information. So a protestor now can not only opt in to instructions for a targeted action but respond and receive feedback in a way that makes them feel personally empowered.
From one perspective, what’s emerging from high tech ‘push button’ smartphone-enabled protest movements, like we’re now seeing in Catalonia and Hong Kong, might seem to represent the start of a new model for democratic participation — as the old order of representative democracy fails to keep pace with changing political tastes and desires, just as governments can’t keep up technologically.
But the risk is it’s just a technological elite in the regime-change driving seat. Which sums to governance not by established democratic processes but via the interests of a privileged elite with the wealth and expertise to hack the system and create new ones that can mobilize citizens to act like pawns.
Established democratic processes may indeed be flawed and in need of a degree of reform but they have also been developed and stress-tested over generations. Which means they have layers of accountability checks and balances baked in to try to balance out competing interests.
Throwing all that out in favor of a ‘democracy app’ sounds like the sort of disruption Facebook has turned into an infamous dark art.
For individual protestors, then, who are participating as willing pawns in this platform-enabled protest, you might call it selfie-style self-determination; they get to feel active and present; they experience the spectacle of political action which can be instantly and conveniently snapped for channel sharing with other mobilized friends who then reflect social validation back. But by doing all that they’re also giving up their agency.
Because all this ‘protest’ action is flowing across the surface of an asymmetric platform. The infrastructure natively cloaks any centralized interests and at very least allows opaque forces to push a cause at cheap scale.
“I felt so small,” one young female protestor told us, recounting via WhatsApp audio message, what had gone down during a protest action in Barcelona yesterday evening. Things started out fun and peaceful, with participants encouraged to toss toilet rolls up in the air — because, per the organizer’s messaging, ‘there’s a lot of shit to clean up’ — but events took a different turn later, as protestors moved to another location and some began trying to break into a police building.
A truck arrived from a side street being driven by protestors who used it to blockade the entrance to the building to try to stop police getting out. Police warning shots were fired into the air. Then the Spanish national police turned up, driving towards the crowd at high speed and coming armed with rubber not foam bullets.
Faced with a more aggressive police presence the crowd tried to disperse — creating a frightening crush in which she was caught up. “I was getting crushed all the time. It wasn’t fun,” she told us. “We moved away but there was a huge mass of people being crushed the whole time.”
“What was truly scary weren’t the crowds or the bullets, it was not knowing what was going on,” she added.
Yet, despite the fear and uncertainty, she was back out on the streets to protest again the next night — armed with a smartphone.
Enric Luján, a PhD student and adjunct professor in political science at the University of Barcelona — and also the guy whose incisive Twitter thread fingers the forces behind the Tsunami Democràtic app as a “technological elite” — argues that the movement has essentially created a “human botnet”. This feels like a questionable capability for a pro-democracy movement when combined with its own paradoxically closed structure.
Divendres, dia de vaga general, una petita elit política i tecnològica ja haurà adquirit la capacitat operativa per paralitzar tot el país llançant convocatòries descentralitzades i en temps real des de la més extrema opacitat.
Han aconseguit crear una botnet humana.
— Enric Luján (@imGeheimen) October 15, 2019
“The intention appears to be to group a mass movement under a label which, paradoxically, is opaque, which carries the real risk of a lack of internal democracy,” Luján tells TechCrunch. “There is a basic paradox in Tsunami Democràtic. That it’s a pro-democracy movement where: 1) the ‘core’ that decides actions is not accessible to other supporters; 2) it has the word ‘Democràtic’ in its name but its protocols as an organization are extremely vertical and are in the hands of an elite that decides the objectives and defines the timing of mobilization; 3) it’s ‘deterritorialized’ with respect to the local reality (unlike the CDRs): opacity and verticality would allow them to lead the entire effort from outside the country.”
Luján believes the movement is essentially a continuation of the same organizing forces which drove support for pro-independence political parties around the 2017 referendum — such as the Catalan cultural organization Òmnium — now coming back together after a period of “strategic readjustment”.
“Shortly after the conclusion of the referendum, through the arrest of its political leaders, the independence movement was ‘decapitated’ and there were months of political paralysis,” he says, arguing that this explains the focus on applying mobile technology in a way that allows for completely anonymous orchestration of protests, as a strategy to protect itself from further arrests.
“This strategic option, of course, entails lack of public scrutiny of the debates and decisions, which is a problem and involves treating people as ‘pawns’ or ‘human botnets’ acting under your direction,” he adds.
He is also critical of the group not having opened the app’s code which has made it difficult to understand exactly how user data is being handled by the app and whether or not there are any security flaws. Essentially, there is no simple way for outsiders to validate trustworthiness.
His analysis of the app’s APK raises further questions. Luján says he believes it also requests microphone permissions in addition to location and camera access (the latter for reading the QR code).
Our source told us that as far as they are aware the app does not access the microphone by default. Though screenshots of requested permissions which have circulated on social media show a toggle where microphone access seems as if it can be enabled.
Qualsevol empresa ho pot fer amb apps q passen el filtre Google Play.
I d moment, sense haver denegat cap permís, de forma predeterminada només estan activats la ubicació (amb un motiu q ja has explicat) i la càmera (per escanejar el QR, amb la qual cosa ja podría descativar-lo). pic.twitter.com/TMgQcN402q
— Albert (@Albertet1981) October 16, 2019
And, as Luján points out, the prospect of a powerful and opaque entity with access to the real-time location of thousands of people plus the ability to remotely activate smartphone cameras and microphones to surveil people’s surroundings does sound pretty close to the plot of a Black Mirror episode…
Les similituds amb un capítol de Black Mirror són, evidentment, esfereïdores: Una entitat de la que no sabem res (excepte el seu alt nivell de sofisticació tecnològica) és a punt de guanyar el control efectiu de tot un territori, operant des de la més absoluta foscor.
— Enric Luján (@imGeheimen) October 15, 2019
Asked whether he believes we’re seeing an emergent model for a more participatory, grassroots form of democracy enabled by modern mobile technologies or a powerful techie elite playing at reconfiguring existing power structures by building and distributing systems that keep them shielded from democratic view where they can nudge others to spread their message, he says he leans towards the latter.
“It’s a movement with an elite leadership that seems to have had a clear timetable for months. It remains to be seen what they’ll be able to do. But it is clearly not spontaneous (the domain of the website was registered in July) and the application needed months to develop,” he notes. “I am not clear that it can be or was ‘crowdsourced’ — as far as I know, there was no campaign to finance Tsunami or their technological solutions.”
“Release the code,” he adds. “I don’t understand why they haven’t released it. Promising it is easy and is what you expect if you want to present yourself with a minimum of transparency, but there is no defined deadline to do so. For now we have to work with the APK, which is more cumbersome to understand how the app works and how it uses and moves user data.”
“I imagine it is so the police cannot investigate thoroughly, but it also means others lose the possibility of better understanding how a product that’s been designed by people who rely on anonymity works, and have to rely that the elite technologists in charge of developing the app have not committed any security breach.”
So, here too, more questions and more uncertainty.
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Catalan separatists have tooled up with a decentralized app for civil disobedience
Is our age of ubiquitous smartphones and social media turning into an era of mass civil unrest? Two years after holding an independence referendum and unilaterally declaring independence in defiance of the Spanish state — then failing to gain recognition for la república and being forced to watch political leaders jailed or exiled — Catalonia’s secessionist movement has resurfaced with a major splash.
One of the first protest actions programmed by a new online activist group, calling itself Tsunami Democràtic, saw thousands of protestors coalescing on Barcelona airport Monday, in an attempt to shut it down. The protest didn’t quite do that but it did lead to major disruption, with roads blocked by human traffic as protestors walked down the highway and the cancelation of more than 100 flights, plus hours of delays for travellers arriving into El Prat.
For months leading up to a major Supreme Court verdict on the fate of imprisoned Catalan political leaders a ‘technical elite‘ — as one local political science academic described them this week — has been preparing to reboot Catalonia’s independence movement by developing bespoke, decentralized high-tech protest tools.
A source with knowledge of Tsunami Democràtic, speaking to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity, told us that “high level developers” located all around the world are involved in the effort, divvying up coding tasks as per any large scale IT project and leveraging open source resources (such as the RetroShare node-based networking platform) to channel grassroots support for independence into a resilient campaign network that can’t be stopped by the arrest of a few leaders.
Demonstrators at the airport on Monday were responding directly to a call to blockade the main terminal posted to the group’s Telegram channel.
Additional waves of protest are being planned and programmed via a bespoke Tsunami Democràtic app that was also released this week for Android smartphones — as a sideload, not yet a Google Play download.
The app is intended to supplement mainstream social network platform broadcasts by mobilizing smaller, localized groups of supporters to carry out peaceful acts of civil disobedience all over Catalonia.
Our source walked us through the app, which requires location permission to function in order that administrators can map available human resources to co-ordinate protests. We’re told a user’s precise location is not shared but rather that an obfuscated, more fuzzy location marker gets sent. However the app’s source code has not yet been open sourced so users have to take such claims on trust (open sourcing is said to be the plan — but only once the app has been scrubbed of any identifying traces, per the source).
The app requires a QR code to be activated. This is a security measure intended to manage activation in stages, via trusted circles of acquaintances, to limit the risk of infiltration by state authorities. Though it feels a bit like a viral gamification tactic to encourage people to spread the word and generate publicity organically by asking their friends if they have a code or not.
Whatever it’s really for the chatter seems to be working. During our meeting over coffee we overheard a group of people sitting at another table talking about the app. And at the time of writing Tsunami Democràtic has announced 15,000 successful QR code activations so far. Though it’s not clear how successful the intended flashmob civil disobedience game-plan will be at this nascent stage.
Once activated, app users are asked to specify their availability (i.e. days and times of day) for carrying out civil disobedience actions. And to specify if they own certain mobility resources which could be utilized as part of a protest (e.g. car, scooter, bike, tractor).
Examples of potential actions described to us by our source were go-slows to bring traffic grinding to a halt and faux shopping sprees targeting supermarkets where activists could spend a few hours piling carts high with goods before leaving them abandoned in the store for someone else to clean up.
One actual early action carried out by activists from the group last month targeted a branch of the local CaixaBank with a masked protestor sit-in.
Our source said the intention is to include a pop-up in the app as a sort of contract of conscience which asks users to confirm participation in the organized chaos will be entirely peaceful. Here’s an example of what the comprometo looks like:
Users are also asked to confirm both their intention to participate in a forthcoming action (meaning the app will capture attendance numbers for protests ahead of time) and to check in when they get there so its administrators can track actual participation in real-time.
The app doesn’t ask for any personal data during onboarding — there’s no account creation etc — although users are agreeing to their location being pervasively tracked.
And it’s at least possible that other personal data could be passed via, for example, a comment submission field that lets people send feedback on actions. Or if the app ends up recording other data via access to smartphone sensors.
The other key point is that users only see actions related to their stated availability and tracked location. So, from a protestor’s point of view, they see only a tiny piece of the Tsunami Democràtic protest program. The user view is decentralized and information is distributed strictly piecemeal, on a need to know basis.
Behind the scenes — where unknown administrators are accessing its data and devising and managing protest actions to distribute via the app — there may be an entirely centralized view of available human protest resources. But it’s not clear what the other side of the platform looks like. Our source was unable to show it to us or articulate what it looks like.
Certainly, administrators are in a position to cancel planned actions if, for example, there’s not enough participation — meaning they can invisibly manage external optics around engagement with the cause. Not enough foot soldiers for a planned protest? Just call it off quietly via the app.
Also not at all clear: Who the driving forces are behind the Tsunami Democràtic protest mask?
“There is no thinking brain, there are many brains,” a spokesman for the movement told the El Diario newspaper this week. But that does raise pretty major questions about democratic legitimacy. Because, well, if you’re claiming to be fighting for democracy by mobilizing popular support, and you’re doing it from inside a Western democracy, can you really claim that while your organization remains in the shadows?
Even if your aim is non-violent political protest, and your hierarchy is genuinely decentralized, which is the suggestive claim here, unless you’re offering transparency of structure so as to make your movement’s composition and administration visible to outside scrutiny (so that your claims of democratic legitimacy can be independently verified) then individual protestors (the app’s end users) just have to take your word for it.
End users who are being crowdsourced and coopted to act out via app instruction as if they’re pawns on a high tech chess board. They are also being asked (implicitly) to shoulder direct personal risk in order that a faceless movement generates bottom up political pressure.
So there’s a troubling contradiction here for a movement that has chosen to include the word ‘democractic’ in its name. (The brand is a reference to a phase used by jailed Catalan cultural leader, Jordi Cuixart.) Who or what is powering this wave?
We also now know all too well how the double-sided nature of platforms means these fast-flowing technosocial channels can easily be misappropriated by motivated interest groups to gamify and manipulate opinion (and even action) en masse. This has been made amply clear in recent years with political disinformation campaigns mushrooming into view all over the online place.
So while emoji-strewn political protest messages calling for people to mobilize at a particular street corner might seem a bit of harmless ‘Pokemon Go’-style urban fun, the upshot can — and this week has — been far less predictable and riskier than its gamified packaging might suggest.
Plenty of protests have gone off peacefully, certainly. Others — often those going on after dusk and late into the night — have devolved into ugly scenes and destructive clashes.
There is clearly a huge challenge for decentralized movements (and indeed technologies) when it comes to creating legitimate governance structures that don’t simply repeat the hierarchies of the existing (centralized) authorities and systems they’re seeking to challenge.
The anarchy-loving crypto community’s inability to coalesce around a way to progress with blockchain technology looks like its own self-defeating irony. A faceless movement fighting for ‘democracy’ from behind an app mask that allows its elite string-pullers and data crunchers to remain out of sight risks looking like another.
None of the protestors we’ve spoken to could say for sure who’s behind Tsunami Democràtic. One suggested it’s just “citizens” or else the same people who helped organize the 2017 Catalan independence referendum — managing the movement of ballot papers into and out of an unofficial network of polling stations so that votes could be collected and counted despite Spanish authorities’ best efforts to seize and destroy them.
There was also a sophisticated technology support effort at the time to support the vote and ensure information about polling stations remained available in the face of website takedowns by the Spanish state.
Our source was equally vague when asked who is behind the Tsunami Democràtic app. Which, if the decentralizing philosophy does indeed run right through the network — as a resilience strategy to protect its members from being ratted out to the police — is what you’d expected.
Any single node wouldn’t know or want to know much of other nodes. But that just leaves a vacuum at the core of the thing which looks alien to democratic enquiry.
One thing Tsunami Democràtic has been at pains to make plain in all (visible) communications to its supporters is that protests must be peaceful. But, again, while technology tools are great enablers it’s not always clear exactly what fire you’re lighting once momentum is pooled and channeled. And protests which started peacefully this week have devolved into running battles with police with missiles being thrown, fires lit and rubber bullets fired.
Some reports have suggested overly aggressive police response to crowds gathering has triggered and flipped otherwise calm protestors. What’s certain is there are injuries on both sides. Today almost 100 people were reported to have been hurt across three nights of protest action. A general strike and the biggest manifestation yet is planned for Friday in Barcelona. So the city is braced for more trouble as smartphone screens blink with fresh protest instructions.
Social media is of course a conduit for very many things. At its most corporate and anodyne its stated mission can be expressed flavorlessly — as with Facebook’s claimed purpose of ‘connecting people’. (Though distracting and/or outraging is often closer to the mark.)
In practice, thanks to human nature — so that means political agendas, financial interests and all the rest of our various and frequently conflicting desires — all sorts of sparks can fly. None more visibly than during mass mobilizations where groups with a shared agenda rapidly come together to amplify a cause and agitate for change.
Even movements that start with the best intentions — and put their organizers and administration right out in the open for all to see and query — can lose control of outcomes.
Not least because malicious outsiders often seize the opportunity to blend in and act out, using the cover of an organized protest to create a violent disturbance. (And there have been some reports filtering across Catalan social media claiming right wing thugs have been causing trouble and that secret police are intentionally stirring things up to smear the movement.)
BARCELONA, SPAIN – OCTOBER 17: Protesters take to the streets to demonstrate after the Spanish Supreme Court sentenced nine Catalan separatist leaders to between 9 and 13 years in prison for their role of the 2017 failed Catalan referendum on October 17, 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
So if a highly charged political campaign is being masterminded and micromanaged remotely, by unknown entities shielded behind screens, there are many more questions we need to be asking about where the balance of risk and power lies, as well as whether a badge of ‘pro-democracy’ can really be justified.
For Tsunami Democràtic and Catalonia’s independence movement generally this week’s protests look to be just the start of a dug-in, tech-fuelled guerrilla campaign of civil disobedience — to try to force a change of political weather. Spain also has yet another general election looming so the timing offers the whiff of opportunity.
The El Prat blockade that kicked off the latest round of Catalan unrest seemed intended to be a flashy opening drama. To mirror and reference the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong — which made the international airport there a focal point for its own protests, occupying the terminal building and disrupting flights in an attempt to draw the world’s attention to their plight.
In a further parallel with protests in Hong Kong a crowdsourced map similar to HKmaps.live — the app that dynamically maps street closures and police presence by overlaying emoji onto a city view — is also being prepared for Catalonia by those involved in the pro-independence movement.
At the time of writing a handful of emoji helicopters, road blocks and vans are visible on a map of Barcelona. Tapping on an emoji brings up dated details such as what a police van was doing and whether it had a camera. A verified status suggests multiple reports will be required before an icon is displayed. We understand people will be able to report street activity for live-mapping via a Telegram bot.
Screenshot of Catalan live map for crowdsourcing street intel
Our source suggested police presence on the map might be depicted by chick emojis. Aka Piolín: The Spanish name for the Loony Tunes cartoon character Tweety Pie — a reference to a colorfully decorated cruise ship used to house scores of Spanish national police in Barcelona harbor during the 2017 referendum, providing instant meme material. Though the test version we’ve seen seems to be using a mixture of dogs and chicks.
Along with the Tsunami Democràtic app the live map means there will soon be two bespoke tools supporting a campaign of civil disobedience whose unknown organizers clearly hope will go the distance.
As we’ve said, the identities of the people coordinating the rebooted movement remain unclear. It’s also unclear who if anyone is financing it.
Our source suggested technical resources to run and maintain the apps are being crowdsourced by volunteers. But some commentators argue that a source of funding would be needed to support everything that’s being delivered, technically and logistically. The app certainly seems far more sophisticated than a weekend project job.
There has been some high level public expressions of support for Tsunami Democràtic — such as from former Barcelona football club trainer, Pep Guardiola, who this week put out a video badged with the Tsunami D logo in which he defends the democratic right to assembly and protest, warning that free speech is being threatened and claiming “Spain is experiencing a drift towards authoritarianism”. So wealthy backers of Catalan independence aren’t exactly hard to find.
A message to the world from Pep Guardiola pic.twitter.com/WdUKEyLyjO
— Jordi Pu1gnerO (@jordiPuignero) October 14, 2019
Whoever is involved behind the scenes — whether with financing or just technical and organization support — it’s clear that ‘free’ protest energy is being liberally donated to the cause by a highly engaged population of pro-independence supporters.
Grassroots support for Catalan independence is both plentiful, highly engaged, geographically dispersed and cuts across generations — sometimes in surprising ways. One mother we spoke to who said she was too ill to go to Monday’s airport protest recounted her disappointment when her teenage kids told her they weren’t going because they wanted to finish their homework.
Very many protestors did go though, answering calls to action in their messaging apps or via the printable posters made available online by Tsunami Democràtic which some street protestors have been pictured holding.
Thousands of demonstrators occupied the main Barcelona airport terminal building, sat and sang protest songs, daubed quasi apologetic messages on the windows in English (saying a lack of democracy is worse than missing a flight), and faced off to lines of police in riot gear — including units of Spanish national police discharging rubber bullets. One protestor was later reported by local press to have lost an eye.
‘It’s time to make our voice heard in the world,’ runs Tsunami Democràtic’s message on Telegram calling for a blockade of the airport. It then sets out the objective (an airport shut down) and instructs supporters that all forms of transport are “valid” to further the mission of disrupting business as usual. ‘Share and see you all at T1!’ it ends. Around 240,000 people saw the instruction, per Telegram’s ephemeral view counts.
Demonstrators during a protest against the jailing of Catalan separatists at El Prat airport in Barcelona, Spain, on Monday, Oct. 14, 2019. (Photo by Iranzu Larrasoana Oneca/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Later the same evening the channel sent another message instructing protestors to call it a night. ‘Today we have been a tsunami,’ it reads in Catalan. ‘We will make every victory a mobilization. We have started a cycle of non-violent, civil disobedience.’ At the time of writing that follow-on missive has registered 300k+ views.
While Tsunami Democràtic is just one of multiple pro-independence groups arranging and mobilizing regional protests — such as the CDRs, aka Comites de Defensa de la Republica, which have been blocking highways in Catalonia for the past two years — it’s quickly garnered majority momentum since quietly uncloaking this summer.
Its Telegram channel — which was only created in August — has piled on followers in recent weeks. Other pro-independence groups are also sharing news and distributing plans over Telegram’s platform and, more widely, on social media outlets such as twitter. Though none has amassed such a big following, nor indeed with such viral speed.
Even Anonymous Catalonia’s Telegram channel, which has been putting out a steady stream of unfiltered crowdsourced protest content this week — replete with videos of burning bins, siren blaring police vans and scattering crowds, interspersed with photos of empty roads (successful blockades) and the odd rubber bullet wound — only has a ‘mere’ 100k+ subscribers.
And while Facebook-owned WhatsApp was a major first source of protest messaging around the 2017 Catalan referendum, with Telegram just coming on stream as an alternative for trying to communicate out of sight of the Spanish state, the protest mobilization baton appears to have been passed more fully to Telegram now.
Perhaps that’s partly due to an element of mistrust around mainstream platforms controlled by tech giants who might be leant on by states to block content (Tsunami Democràtic has said it doesn’t yet have an iOS version of its app, despite many requests for one, because the ‘politics of the App Store is very restrictive’ — making a direct reference to Apple pulling the HKmaps app from its store). Whereas Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, is famously resistant to authoritarian state power.
Though, most likely, it’s a result of some powerful tools Telegram provides for managing and moderating channels.
The upshot is Telegram’s messaging platform has enjoyed a surge in downloads in Spain during this month’s regional unrest — as WhatsApp-loving locals flirt with a rival platform also in response to calls from their political channels to get on Telegram for detailed instructions of the next demo.
Per App Annie, Telegram has leapt up the top free downloads charts for Google Play in Spain — rising from eleventh place into the third spot this month. While, for iOS, it’s holding steady in the top free downloads slot.
Also growing in parallel: Unrest on Catalonia’s streets.
Since Monday’s airport protest tensions have certainly escalated. Roads across the region have been blockaded. Street furniture and vehicles torched. DIY missiles thrown at charging police.
By Thursday morning there were reports of police firing teargas and police vehicles being driven at high speed around protesting crowds of youths. Two people were reported run over.
Anti-riot police officers shoot against protesters after a demonstration called by the local Republic Defence Committees (CDR) in Barcelona on October 17, 2019. – After years of peaceful separatist demonstrations, violence finally exploded on the Catalan streets this week, led by activists frustrated by the political paralysis and infuriated by the Supreme Court’s conviction of nine of its leaders over a failed independence bid. (Photo by LLUIS GENE / AFP) (Photo by LLUIS GENE/AFP via Getty Images)
Helicopters have become a routine sound ripping up the urban night sky. While the tally of injury counts continues rising on both sides. And all the while there are countless videos circulating on social media to be sifted through to reinforce your own point of view — screening looping clashes between protestors and baton wielding police. One video doing the rounds last night appeared to show protestors targeting a police helicopter with fireworks. Russian propaganda outlets have of course been quick to seize on and amplify divisive visuals.
The trigger for a return to waves of technology-fuelled civil disobedience — as were also seen across Catalonia around the time of the 2017 referendum — are lengthy prison terms handed down by Spain’s Supreme Court on Monday. Twelve political and civic society leaders involved in the referendum were convicted, nine on charges of sedition and misuse of public funds. None were found guilty of the more serious charge of rebellion — but the sentences were still harsh, ranging from 13 years to nine.
The jailed leaders — dubbed presos polítics (aka political prisoners) by Catalan society, which liberally deploys yellow looped-ribbons as a solidarity symbol in support of the presos — had already spent almost two years in prison without bail.
A report this week in El Diario, citing a source in Tsunami Democràtic, suggests the activist movement was established in response to a growing feeling across the region’s independence movement that a new way of mobilizing and carrying out protests was needed in the wake of the failed 2017 independence bid.
The expected draconian Supreme Court verdict marked a natural start-date for the reboot.
A reboot has been necessary because, with so many of its figureheads in prison — and former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont in exile in Brussels — there has been something of a leadership vacuum for the secessionist cause.
That coupled with a sense of persecution at the hands of a centralized state which suspended Catalonia’s regional autonomy in the wake of the illegal referendum, invoking a ‘nuclear option’ constitutional provision to dismiss the government and call fresh elections, likely explains why the revived independence movement has been taking inspiration from blockchain-style decentralization.
Our source also told us blockchain thinking has informed the design and structure of the app.
Discussing the developers who have pulled the app together they said it’s not only a passionately engaged Catalan techie diaspora, donating their time and expertise to help civic society respond to what’s seen as long-standing political persecution, but — more generally — coders and technologists with an interest in participating in what they hope will be the largest experiment in participatory democracy and peaceful civil disobedience.
The source pointed to research conducted by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, who found non-violent, civil disobedience campaigns to be a far more powerful way of shaping world politics than violence. She also found such campaigns need engage only 3.5% of the population to succeed. And at 300k+ subscribers Tsunami Democràtic’s Telegram channel may have already passed that threshold, given the population of Catalonia is only around 7.6M.
It sounds like some of the developers helping the movement are being enticed by the prospect of applying powerful mobile platform technologies to a strong political cause as a way to stress testing democratic structures — and perhaps play at reconfiguring them. If the tools are successful at capturing intention and sustaining action and so engaging and activating citizens in a long term political campaign.
We’re told the stated intention to open source the app is also a goal in order to make it available for other causes to pick up and use to press for change. Which does start to sound a little bit like regime change as a service…
Stepping back, there is also a question of whether micromanaged civic disobedience is philosophically different to more organic expressions of discontent.
There is an element of non-violent protest being weaponized against an opponent when you’re running it via an app. Because the participants are being remotely controlled and coordinated at a distance, at the same time as ubiquitous location-sensitive mobile technologies mean the way in which the controlling entity speaks to them can be precisely targeted to push their buttons and nudge action.
Yes, it’s true that the right to peaceful assembly and protest is a cornerstone of democracy. Nor is it exactly a new phenomenon that mobile technology has facilitated this democratic expression. In journalist Giles Tremlett’s travelogue book about his adopted country, Ghosts of Spain, he recounts how in the days following the 2004 Madrid train bombings anonymous text messages started to spread via mobile phone — leading to mass, spontaneous street demonstrations.
At the time there were conflicting reports of who was responsible for the bombings, as the government sought to blame the Basque terrorist group ETA for what would turn out to be the work of Islamic terrorists. Right on the eve of an election voters in Spain were faced with a crucial political decision — having just learnt that the police had in fact arrested three Moroccans for the bomb attacks, suggesting the government had been lying.
“A new political phenomenon was born that day — the instant text message demonstration,” Tremlett writes. “Anonymous text messages began to fly from mobile phone to mobile phone. They became known as the pásalo messages, because each ended with an exhortation to ‘Pass it on’. It was like chain mail, but instant.”
More than fifteen years on from those early days of consumer mobile technology and SMS text messaging, instant now means so much more than it did — with almost everyone in a wealthy Western region like Catalonia carrying a powerful, Internet-connected computer and streaming videocamera in their pocket.
Modern mobile technology turns humans into high tech data nodes, capable of receiving and transmitting information. So a protestor now can not only opt in to instructions for a targeted action but respond and receive feedback in a way that makes them feel personally empowered.
From one perspective, what’s emerging from high tech ‘push button’ smartphone-enabled protest movements, like we’re now seeing in Catalonia and Hong Kong, might seem to represent the start of a new model for democratic participation — as the old order of representative democracy fails to keep pace with changing political tastes and desires, just as governments can’t keep up technologically.
But the risk is it’s just a technological elite in the regime-change driving seat. Which sums to governance not by established democratic processes but via the interests of a privileged elite with the wealth and expertise to hack the system and create new ones that can mobilize citizens to act like pawns.
Established democratic processes may indeed be flawed and in need of a degree of reform but they have also been developed and stress-tested over generations. Which means they have layers of accountability checks and balances baked in to try to balance out competing interests.
Throwing all that out in favor of a ‘democracy app’ sounds like the sort of disruption Facebook has turned into an infamous dark art.
For individual protestors, then, who are participating as willing pawns in this platform-enabled protest, you might call it selfie-style self-determination; they get to feel active and present; they experience the spectacle of political action which can be instantly and conveniently snapped for channel sharing with other mobilized friends who then reflect social validation back. But by doing all that they’re also giving up their agency.
Because all this ‘protest’ action is flowing across the surface of an asymmetric platform. The infrastructure natively cloaks any centralized interests and at very least allows opaque forces to push a cause at cheap scale.
“I felt so small,” one young female protestor told us, recounting via WhatsApp audio message, what had gone down during a protest action in Barcelona yesterday evening. Things started out fun and peaceful, with participants encouraged to toss toilet rolls up in the air — because, per the organizer’s messaging, ‘there’s a lot of shit to clean up’ — but events took a different turn later, as protestors moved to another location and some began trying to break into a police building.
A truck arrived from a side street being driven by protestors who used it to blockade the entrance to the building to try to stop police getting out. Police warning shots were fired into the air. Then the Spanish national police turned up, driving towards the crowd at high speed and coming armed with rubber not foam bullets.
Faced with a more aggressive police presence the crowd tried to disperse — creating a frightening crush in which she was caught up. “I was getting crushed all the time. It wasn’t fun,” she told us. “We moved away but there was a huge mass of people being crushed the whole time.”
“What was truly scary weren’t the crowds or the bullets, it was not knowing what was going on,” she added.
Yet, despite the fear and uncertainty, she was back out on the streets to protest again the next night — armed with a smartphone.
Enric Luján, a PhD student and adjunct professor in political science at the University of Barcelona — and also the guy whose incisive Twitter thread fingers the forces behind the Tsunami Democràtic app as a “technological elite” — argues that the movement has essentially created a “human botnet”. This feels like a questionable capability for a pro-democracy movement when combined with its own paradoxically closed structure.
Divendres, dia de vaga general, una petita elit política i tecnològica ja haurà adquirit la capacitat operativa per paralitzar tot el país llançant convocatòries descentralitzades i en temps real des de la més extrema opacitat.
Han aconseguit crear una botnet humana.
— Enric Luján (@imGeheimen) October 15, 2019
“The intention appears to be to group a mass movement under a label which, paradoxically, is opaque, which carries the real risk of a lack of internal democracy,” Luján tells TechCrunch. “There is a basic paradox in Tsunami Democràtic. That it’s a pro-democracy movement where: 1) the ‘core’ that decides actions is not accessible to other supporters; 2) it has the word ‘Democràtic’ in its name but its protocols as an organization are extremely vertical and are in the hands of an elite that decides the objectives and defines the timing of mobilization; 3) it’s ‘deterritorialized’ with respect to the local reality (unlike the CDRs): opacity and verticality would allow them to lead the entire effort from outside the country.”
Luján believes the movement is essentially a continuation of the same organizing forces which drove support for pro-independence political parties around the 2017 referendum — such as the Catalan cultural organization Òmnium — now coming back together after a period of “strategic readjustment”.
“Shortly after the conclusion of the referendum, through the arrest of its political leaders, the independence movement was ‘decapitated’ and there were months of political paralysis,” he says, arguing that this explains the focus on applying mobile technology in a way that allows for completely anonymous orchestration of protests, as a strategy to protect itself from further arrests.
“This strategic option, of course, entails lack of public scrutiny of the debates and decisions, which is a problem and involves treating people as ‘pawns’ or ‘human botnets’ acting under your direction,” he adds.
He is also critical of the group not having opened the app’s code which has made it difficult to understand exactly how user data is being handled by the app and whether or not there are any security flaws. Essentially, there is no simple way for outsiders to validate trustworthiness.
His analysis of the app’s APK raises further questions. Luján says he believes it also requests microphone permissions in addition to location and camera access (the latter for reading the QR code).
Our source told us that as far as they are aware the app does not access the microphone by default. Though screenshots of requested permissions which have circulated on social media show a toggle where microphone access seems as if it can be enabled.
Qualsevol empresa ho pot fer amb apps q passen el filtre Google Play.
I d moment, sense haver denegat cap permís, de forma predeterminada només estan activats la ubicació (amb un motiu q ja has explicat) i la càmera (per escanejar el QR, amb la qual cosa ja podría descativar-lo). pic.twitter.com/TMgQcN402q
— Albert (@Albertet1981) October 16, 2019
And, as Luján points out, the prospect of a powerful and opaque entity with access to the real-time location of thousands of people plus the ability to remotely activate smartphone cameras and microphones to surveil people’s surroundings does sound pretty close to the plot of a Black Mirror episode…
Les similituds amb un capítol de Black Mirror són, evidentment, esfereïdores: Una entitat de la que no sabem res (excepte el seu alt nivell de sofisticació tecnològica) és a punt de guanyar el control efectiu de tot un territori, operant des de la més absoluta foscor.
— Enric Luján (@imGeheimen) October 15, 2019
Asked whether he believes we’re seeing an emergent model for a more participatory, grassroots form of democracy enabled by modern mobile technologies or a powerful techie elite playing at reconfiguring existing power structures by building and distributing systems that keep them shielded from democratic view where they can nudge others to spread their message, he says he leans towards the latter.
“It’s a movement with an elite leadership that seems to have had a clear timetable for months. It remains to be seen what they’ll be able to do. But it is clearly not spontaneous (the domain of the website was registered in July) and the application needed months to develop,” he notes. “I am not clear that it can be or was ‘crowdsourced’ — as far as I know, there was no campaign to finance Tsunami or their technological solutions.”
“Release the code,” he adds. “I don’t understand why they haven’t released it. Promising it is easy and is what you expect if you want to present yourself with a minimum of transparency, but there is no defined deadline to do so. For now we have to work with the APK, which is more cumbersome to understand how the app works and how it uses and moves user data.”
“I imagine it is so the police cannot investigate thoroughly, but it also means others lose the possibility of better understanding how a product that’s been designed by people who rely on anonymity works, and have to rely that the elite technologists in charge of developing the app have not committed any security breach.”
So, here too, more questions and more uncertainty.
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Is our age of ubiquitous smartphones and social media turning into an era of mass civil unrest? Two years after holding an independence referendum and unilaterally declaring independence in defiance of the Spanish state — then failing to gain recognition for la república and being forced to watch political leaders jailed or exiled — Catalonia’s secessionist movement has resurfaced with a major splash.
One of the first protest actions programmed by a new online activist group, calling itself Tsunami Democràtic, saw thousands of protestors coalescing on Barcelona airport Monday, in an attempt to shut it down. The protest didn’t quite do that but it did lead to major disruption, with roads blocked by human traffic as protestors walked down the highway and the cancelation of more than 100 flights, plus hours of delays for travellers arriving into El Prat.
For months leading up to a major Supreme Court verdict on the fate of imprisoned Catalan political leaders a ‘technical elite‘ — as one local political science academic described them this week — has been preparing to reboot Catalonia’s independence movement by developing bespoke, decentralized high-tech protest tools.
A source with knowledge of Tsunami Democràtic, speaking to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity, told us that “high level developers” located all around the world are involved in the effort, divvying up coding tasks as per any large scale IT project and leveraging open source resources (such as the RetroShare node-based networking platform) to channel grassroots support for independence into a resilient campaign network that can’t be stopped by the arrest of a few leaders.
Demonstrators at the airport on Monday were responding directly to a call to blockade the main terminal posted to the group’s Telegram channel.
Additional waves of protest are being planned and programmed via a bespoke Tsunami Democràtic app that was also released this week for Android smartphones — as a sideload, not yet a Google Play download.
The app is intended to supplement mainstream social network platform broadcasts by mobilizing smaller, localized groups of supporters to carry out peaceful acts of civil disobedience all over Catalonia.
Our source walked us through the app, which requires location permission to function in order that administrators can map available human resources to co-ordinate protests. We’re told a user’s precise location is not shared but rather that an obfuscated, more fuzzy location marker gets sent. However the app’s source code has not yet been open sourced so users have to take such claims on trust (open sourcing is said to be the plan — but only once the app has been scrubbed of any identifying traces, per the source).
The app requires a QR code to be activated. This is a security measure intended to manage activation in stages, via trusted circles of acquaintances, to limit the risk of infiltration by state authorities. Though it feels a bit like a viral gamification tactic to encourage people to spread the word and generate publicity organically by asking their friends if they have a code or not.
Whatever it’s really for the chatter seems to be working. During our meeting over coffee we overheard a group of people sitting at another table talking about the app. And at the time of writing Tsunami Democràtic has announced 15,000 successful QR code activations so far. Though it’s not clear how successful the intended flashmob civil disobedience game-plan will be at this nascent stage.
Once activated, app users are asked to specify their availability (i.e. days and times of day) for carrying out civil disobedience actions. And to specify if they own certain mobility resources which could be utilized as part of a protest (e.g. car, scooter, bike, tractor).
Examples of potential actions described to us by our source were go-slows to bring traffic grinding to a halt and faux shopping sprees targeting supermarkets where activists could spend a few hours piling carts high with goods before leaving them abandoned in the store for someone else to clean up.
One actual early action carried out by activists from the group last month targeted a branch of the local CaixaBank with a masked protestor sit-in.
Our source said the intention is to include a pop-up in the app as a sort of contract of conscience which asks users to confirm participation in the organized chaos will be entirely peaceful. Here’s an example of what the comprometo looks like:
Users are also asked to confirm both their intention to participate in a forthcoming action (meaning the app will capture attendance numbers for protests ahead of time) and to check in when they get there so its administrators can track actual participation in real-time.
The app doesn’t ask for any personal data during onboarding — there’s no account creation etc — although users are agreeing to their location being pervasively tracked.
And it’s at least possible that other personal data could be passed via, for example, a comment submission field that lets people send feedback on actions. Or if the app ends up recording other data via access to smartphone sensors.
The other key point is that users only see actions related to their stated availability and tracked location. So, from a protestor’s point of view, they see only a tiny piece of the Tsunami Democràtic protest program. The user view is decentralized and information is distributed strictly piecemeal, on a need to know basis.
Behind the scenes — where unknown administrators are accessing its data and devising and managing protest actions to distribute via the app — there may be an entirely centralized view of available human protest resources. But it’s not clear what the other side of the platform looks like. Our source was unable to show it to us or articulate what it looks like.
Certainly, administrators are in a position to cancel planned actions if, for example, there’s not enough participation — meaning they can invisibly manage external optics around engagement with the cause. Not enough foot soldiers for a planned protest? Just call it off quietly via the app.
Also not at all clear: Who the driving forces are behind the Tsunami Democràtic protest mask?
“There is no thinking brain, there are many brains,” a spokesman for the movement told the El Diario newspaper this week. But that does raise pretty major questions about democratic legitimacy. Because, well, if you’re claiming to be fighting for democracy by mobilizing popular support, and you’re doing it from inside a Western democracy, can you really claim that while your organization remains in the shadows?
Even if your aim is non-violent political protest, and your hierarchy is genuinely decentralized, which is the suggestive claim here, unless you’re offering transparency of structure so as to make your movement’s composition and administration visible to outside scrutiny (so that your claims of democratic legitimacy can be independently verified) then individual protestors (the app’s end users) just have to take your word for it.
End users who are being crowdsourced and coopted to act out via app instruction as if they’re pawns on a high tech chess board. They are also being asked (implicitly) to shoulder direct personal risk in order that a faceless movement generates bottom up political pressure.
So there’s a troubling contradiction here for a movement that has chosen to include the word ‘democractic’ in its name. (The brand is a reference to a phase used by jailed Catalan cultural leader, Jordi Cuixart.) Who or what is powering this wave?
We also now know all too well how the double-sided nature of platforms means these fast-flowing technosocial channels can easily be misappropriated by motivated interest groups to gamify and manipulate opinion (and even action) en masse. This has been made amply clear in recent years with political disinformation campaigns mushrooming into view all over the online place.
So while emoji-strewn political protest messages calling for people to mobilize at a particular street corner might seem a bit of harmless ‘Pokemon Go’-style urban fun, the upshot can — and this week has — been far less predictable and riskier than its gamified packaging might suggest.
Plenty of protests have gone off peacefully, certainly. Others — often those going on after dusk and late into the night — have devolved into ugly scenes and destructive clashes.
There is clearly a huge challenge for decentralized movements (and indeed technologies) when it comes to creating legitimate governance structures that don’t simply repeat the hierarchies of the existing (centralized) authorities and systems they’re seeking to challenge.
The anarchy-loving crypto community’s inability to coalesce around a way to progress with blockchain technology looks like its own self-defeating irony. A faceless movement fighting for ‘democracy’ from behind an app mask that allows its elite string-pullers and data crunchers to remain out of sight risks looking like another.
None of the protestors we’ve spoken to could say for sure who’s behind Tsunami Democràtic. One suggested it’s just “citizens” or else the same people who helped organize the 2017 Catalan independence referendum — managing the movement of ballot papers into and out of an unofficial network of polling stations so that votes could be collected and counted despite Spanish authorities’ best efforts to seize and destroy them.
There was also a sophisticated technology support effort at the time to support the vote and ensure information about polling stations remained available in the face of website takedowns by the Spanish state.
Our source was equally vague when asked who is behind the Tsunami Democràtic app. Which, if the decentralizing philosophy does indeed run right through the network — as a resilience strategy to protect its members from being ratted out to the police — is what you’d expected.
Any single node wouldn’t know or want to know much of other nodes. But that just leaves a vacuum at the core of the thing which looks alien to democratic enquiry.
One thing Tsunami Democràtic has been at pains to make plain in all (visible) communications to its supporters is that protests must be peaceful. But, again, while technology tools are great enablers it’s not always clear exactly what fire you’re lighting once momentum is pooled and channeled. And protests which started peacefully this week have devolved into running battles with police with missiles being thrown, fires lit and rubber bullets fired.
Some reports have suggested overly aggressive police response to crowds gathering has triggered and flipped otherwise calm protestors. What’s certain is there are injuries on both sides. Today almost 100 people were reported to have been hurt across three nights of protest action. A general strike and the biggest manifestation yet is planned for Friday in Barcelona. So the city is braced for more trouble as smartphone screens blink with fresh protest instructions.
Social media is of course a conduit for very many things. At its most corporate and anodyne its stated mission can be expressed flavorlessly — as with Facebook’s claimed purpose of ‘connecting people’. (Though distracting and/or outraging is often closer to the mark.)
In practice, thanks to human nature — so that means political agendas, financial interests and all the rest of our various and frequently conflicting desires — all sorts of sparks can fly. None more visibly than during mass mobilizations where groups with a shared agenda rapidly come together to amplify a cause and agitate for change.
Even movements that start with the best intentions — and put their organizers and administration right out in the open for all to see and query — can lose control of outcomes.
Not least because malicious outsiders often seize the opportunity to blend in and act out, using the cover of an organized protest to create a violent disturbance. (And there have been some reports filtering across Catalan social media claiming right wing thugs have been causing trouble and that secret police are intentionally stirring things up to smear the movement.)
BARCELONA, SPAIN – OCTOBER 17: Protesters take to the streets to demonstrate after the Spanish Supreme Court sentenced nine Catalan separatist leaders to between 9 and 13 years in prison for their role of the 2017 failed Catalan referendum on October 17, 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
So if a highly charged political campaign is being masterminded and micromanaged remotely, by unknown entities shielded behind screens, there are many more questions we need to be asking about where the balance of risk and power lies, as well as whether a badge of ‘pro-democracy’ can really be justified.
For Tsunami Democràtic and Catalonia’s independence movement generally this week’s protests look to be just the start of a dug-in, tech-fuelled guerrilla campaign of civil disobedience — to try to force a change of political weather. Spain also has yet another general election looming so the timing offers the whiff of opportunity.
The El Prat blockade that kicked off the latest round of Catalan unrest seemed intended to be a flashy opening drama. To mirror and reference the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong — which made the international airport there a focal point for its own protests, occupying the terminal building and disrupting flights in an attempt to draw the world’s attention to their plight.
In a further parallel with protests in Hong Kong a crowdsourced map similar to HKmaps.live — the app that dynamically maps street closures and police presence by overlaying emoji onto a city view — is also being prepared for Catalonia by those involved in the pro-independence movement.
At the time of writing a handful of emoji helicopters, road blocks and vans are visible on a map of Barcelona. Tapping on an emoji brings up dated details such as what a police van was doing and whether it had a camera. A verified status suggests multiple reports will be required before an icon is displayed. We understand people will be able to report street activity for live-mapping via a Telegram bot.
Screenshot of Catalan live map for crowdsourcing street intel
Our source suggested police presence on the map might be depicted by chick emojis. Aka Piolín: The Spanish name for the Loony Tunes cartoon character Tweety Pie — a reference to a colorfully decorated cruise ship used to house scores of Spanish national police in Barcelona harbor during the 2017 referendum, providing instant meme material. Though the test version we’ve seen seems to be using a mixture of dogs and chicks.
Along with the Tsunami Democràtic app the live map means there will soon be two bespoke tools supporting a campaign of civil disobedience whose unknown organizers clearly hope will go the distance.
As we’ve said, the identities of the people coordinating the rebooted movement remain unclear. It’s also unclear who if anyone is financing it.
Our source suggested technical resources to run and maintain the apps are being crowdsourced by volunteers. But some commentators argue that a source of funding would be needed to support everything that’s being delivered, technically and logistically. The app certainly seems far more sophisticated than a weekend project job.
There has been some high level public expressions of support for Tsunami Democràtic — such as from former Barcelona football club trainer, Pep Guardiola, who this week put out a video badged with the Tsunami D logo in which he defends the democratic right to assembly and protest, warning that free speech is being threatened and claiming “Spain is experiencing a drift towards authoritarianism”. So wealthy backers of Catalan independence aren’t exactly hard to find.
A message to the world from Pep Guardiola pic.twitter.com/WdUKEyLyjO
— Jordi Pu1gnerO (@jordiPuignero) October 14, 2019
Whoever is involved behind the scenes — whether with financing or just technical and organization support — it’s clear that ‘free’ protest energy is being liberally donated to the cause by a highly engaged population of pro-independence supporters.
Grassroots support for Catalan independence is both plentiful, highly engaged, geographically dispersed and cuts across generations — sometimes in surprising ways. One mother we spoke to who said she was too ill to go to Monday’s airport protest recounted her disappointment when her teenage kids told her they weren’t going because they wanted to finish their homework.
Very many protestors did go though, answering calls to action in their messaging apps or via the printable posters made available online by Tsunami Democràtic which some street protestors have been pictured holding.
Thousands of demonstrators occupied the main Barcelona airport terminal building, sat and sang protest songs, daubed quasi apologetic messages on the windows in English (saying a lack of democracy is worse than missing a flight), and faced off to lines of police in riot gear — including units of Spanish national police discharging rubber bullets. One protestor was later reported by local press to have lost an eye.
‘It’s time to make our voice heard in the world,’ runs Tsunami Democràtic’s message on Telegram calling for a blockade of the airport. It then sets out the objective (an airport shut down) and instructs supporters that all forms of transport are “valid” to further the mission of disrupting business as usual. ‘Share and see you all at T1!’ it ends. Around 240,000 people saw the instruction, per Telegram’s ephemeral view counts.
Demonstrators during a protest against the jailing of Catalan separatists at El Prat airport in Barcelona, Spain, on Monday, Oct. 14, 2019. (Photo by Iranzu Larrasoana Oneca/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Later the same evening the channel sent another message instructing protestors to call it a night. ‘Today we have been a tsunami,’ it reads in Catalan. ‘We will make every victory a mobilization. We have started a cycle of non-violent, civil disobedience.’ At the time of writing that follow-on missive has registered 300k+ views.
While Tsunami Democràtic is just one of multiple pro-independence groups arranging and mobilizing regional protests — such as the CDRs, aka Comites de Defensa de la Republica, which have been blocking highways in Catalonia for the past two years — it’s quickly garnered majority momentum since quietly uncloaking this summer.
Its Telegram channel — which was only created in August — has piled on followers in recent weeks. Other pro-independence groups are also sharing news and distributing plans over Telegram’s platform and, more widely, on social media outlets such as twitter. Though none has amassed such a big following, nor indeed with such viral speed.
Even Anonymous Catalonia’s Telegram channel, which has been putting out a steady stream of unfiltered crowdsourced protest content this week — replete with videos of burning bins, siren blaring police vans and scattering crowds, interspersed with photos of empty roads (successful blockades) and the odd rubber bullet wound — only has a ‘mere’ 100k+ subscribers.
And while Facebook-owned WhatsApp was a major first source of protest messaging around the 2017 Catalan referendum, with Telegram just coming on stream as an alternative for trying to communicate out of sight of the Spanish state, the protest mobilization baton appears to have been passed more fully to Telegram now.
Perhaps that’s partly due to an element of mistrust around mainstream platforms controlled by tech giants who might be leant on by states to block content (Tsunami Democràtic has said it doesn’t yet have an iOS version of its app, despite many requests for one, because the ‘politics of the App Store is very restrictive’ — making a direct reference to Apple pulling the HKmaps app from its store). Whereas Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, is famously resistant to authoritarian state power.
Though, most likely, it’s a result of some powerful tools Telegram provides for managing and moderating channels.
The upshot is Telegram’s messaging platform has enjoyed a surge in downloads in Spain during this month’s regional unrest — as WhatsApp-loving locals flirt with a rival platform also in response to calls from their political channels to get on Telegram for detailed instructions of the next demo.
Per App Annie, Telegram has leapt up the top free downloads charts for Google Play in Spain — rising from eleventh place into the third spot this month. While, for iOS, it’s holding steady in the top free downloads slot.
Also growing in parallel: Unrest on Catalonia’s streets.
Since Monday’s airport protest tensions have certainly escalated. Roads across the region have been blockaded. Street furniture and vehicles torched. DIY missiles thrown at charging police.
By Thursday morning there were reports of police firing teargas and police vehicles being driven at high speed around protesting crowds of youths. Two people were reported run over.
Anti-riot police officers shoot against protesters after a demonstration called by the local Republic Defence Committees (CDR) in Barcelona on October 17, 2019. – After years of peaceful separatist demonstrations, violence finally exploded on the Catalan streets this week, led by activists frustrated by the political paralysis and infuriated by the Supreme Court’s conviction of nine of its leaders over a failed independence bid. (Photo by LLUIS GENE / AFP) (Photo by LLUIS GENE/AFP via Getty Images)
Helicopters have become a routine sound ripping up the urban night sky. While the tally of injury counts continues rising on both sides. And all the while there are countless videos circulating on social media to be sifted through to reinforce your own point of view — screening looping clashes between protestors and baton wielding police. One video doing the rounds last night appeared to show protestors targeting a police helicopter with fireworks. Russian propaganda outlets have of course been quick to seize on and amplify divisive visuals.
The trigger for a return to waves of technology-fuelled civil disobedience — as were also seen across Catalonia around the time of the 2017 referendum — are lengthy prison terms handed down by Spain’s Supreme Court on Monday. Twelve political and civic society leaders involved in the referendum were convicted, nine on charges of sedition and misuse of public funds. None were found guilty of the more serious charge of rebellion — but the sentences were still harsh, ranging from 13 years to nine.
The jailed leaders — dubbed presos polítics (aka political prisoners) by Catalan society, which liberally deploys yellow looped-ribbons as a solidarity symbol in support of the presos — had already spent almost two years in prison without bail.
A report this week in El Diario, citing a source in Tsunami Democràtic, suggests the activist movement was established in response to a growing feeling across the region’s independence movement that a new way of mobilizing and carrying out protests was needed in the wake of the failed 2017 independence bid.
The expected draconian Supreme Court verdict marked a natural start-date for the reboot.
A reboot has been necessary because, with so many of its figureheads in prison — and former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont in exile in Brussels — there has been something of a leadership vacuum for the secessionist cause.
That coupled with a sense of persecution at the hands of a centralized state which suspended Catalonia’s regional autonomy in the wake of the illegal referendum, invoking a ‘nuclear option’ constitutional provision to dismiss the government and call fresh elections, likely explains why the revived independence movement has been taking inspiration from blockchain-style decentralization.
Our source also told us blockchain thinking has informed the design and structure of the app.
Discussing the developers who have pulled the app together they said it’s not only a passionately engaged Catalan techie diaspora, donating their time and expertise to help civic society respond to what’s seen as long-standing political persecution, but — more generally — coders and technologists with an interest in participating in what they hope will be the largest experiment in participatory democracy and peaceful civil disobedience.
The source pointed to research conducted by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, who found non-violent, civil disobedience campaigns to be a far more powerful way of shaping world politics than violence. She also found such campaigns need engage only 3.5% of the population to succeed. And at 300k+ subscribers Tsunami Democràtic’s Telegram channel may have already passed that threshold, given the population of Catalonia is only around 7.6M.
It sounds like some of the developers helping the movement are being enticed by the prospect of applying powerful mobile platform technologies to a strong political cause as a way to stress testing democratic structures — and perhaps play at reconfiguring them. If the tools are successful at capturing intention and sustaining action and so engaging and activating citizens in a long term political campaign.
We’re told the stated intention to open source the app is also a goal in order to make it available for other causes to pick up and use to press for change. Which does start to sound a little bit like regime change as a service…
Stepping back, there is also a question of whether micromanaged civic disobedience is philosophically different to more organic expressions of discontent.
There is an element of non-violent protest being weaponized against an opponent when you’re running it via an app. Because the participants are being remotely controlled and coordinated at a distance, at the same time as ubiquitous location-sensitive mobile technologies mean the way in which the controlling entity speaks to them can be precisely targeted to push their buttons and nudge action.
Yes, it’s true that the right to peaceful assembly and protest is a cornerstone of democracy. Nor is it exactly a new phenomenon that mobile technology has facilitated this democratic expression. In journalist Giles Tremlett’s travelogue book about his adopted country, Ghosts of Spain, he recounts how in the days following the 2004 Madrid train bombings anonymous text messages started to spread via mobile phone — leading to mass, spontaneous street demonstrations.
At the time there were conflicting reports of who was responsible for the bombings, as the government sought to blame the Basque terrorist group ETA for what would turn out to be the work of Islamic terrorists. Right on the eve of an election voters in Spain were faced with a crucial political decision — having just learnt that the police had in fact arrested three Moroccans for the bomb attacks, suggesting the government had been lying.
“A new political phenomenon was born that day — the instant text message demonstration,” Tremlett writes. “Anonymous text messages began to fly from mobile phone to mobile phone. They became known as the pásalo messages, because each ended with an exhortation to ‘Pass it on’. It was like chain mail, but instant.”
More than fifteen years on from those early days of consumer mobile technology and SMS text messaging, instant now means so much more than it did — with almost everyone in a wealthy Western region like Catalonia carrying a powerful, Internet-connected computer and streaming videocamera in their pocket.
Modern mobile technology turns humans into high tech data nodes, capable of receiving and transmitting information. So a protestor now can not only opt in to instructions for a targeted action but respond and receive feedback in a way that makes them feel personally empowered.
From one perspective, what’s emerging from high tech ‘push button’ smartphone-enabled protest movements, like we’re now seeing in Catalonia and Hong Kong, might seem to represent the start of a new model for democratic participation — as the old order of representative democracy fails to keep pace with changing political tastes and desires, just as governments can’t keep up technologically.
But the risk is it’s just a technological elite in the regime-change driving seat. Which sums to governance not by established democratic processes but via the interests of a privileged elite with the wealth and expertise to hack the system and create new ones that can mobilize citizens to act like pawns.
Established democratic processes may indeed be flawed and in need of a degree of reform but they have also been developed and stress-tested over generations. Which means they have layers of accountability checks and balances baked in to try to balance out competing interests.
Throwing all that out in favor of a ‘democracy app’ sounds like the sort of disruption Facebook has turned into an infamous dark art.
For individual protestors, then, who are participating as willing pawns in this platform-enabled protest, you might call it selfie-style self-determination; they get to feel active and present; they experience the spectacle of political action which can be instantly and conveniently snapped for channel sharing with other mobilized friends who then reflect social validation back. But by doing all that they’re also giving up their agency.
Because all this ‘protest’ action is flowing across the surface of an asymmetric platform. The infrastructure natively cloaks any centralized interests and at very least allows opaque forces to push a cause at cheap scale.
“I felt so small,” one young female protestor told us, recounting via WhatsApp audio message, what had gone down during a protest action in Barcelona yesterday evening. Things started out fun and peaceful, with participants encouraged to toss toilet rolls up in the air — because, per the organizer’s messaging, ‘there’s a lot of shit to clean up’ — but events took a different turn later, as protestors moved to another location and some began trying to break into a police building.
A truck arrived from a side street being driven by protestors who used it to blockade the entrance to the building to try to stop police getting out. Police warning shots were fired into the air. Then the Spanish national police turned up, driving towards the crowd at high speed and coming armed with rubber not foam bullets.
Faced with a more aggressive police presence the crowd tried to disperse — creating a frightening crush in which she was caught up. “I was getting crushed all the time. It wasn’t fun,” she told us. “We moved away but there was a huge mass of people being crushed the whole time.”
“What was truly scary weren’t the crowds or the bullets, it was not knowing what was going on,” she added.
Yet, despite the fear and uncertainty, she was back out on the streets to protest again the next night — armed with a smartphone.
Enric Luján, a PhD student and adjunct professor in political science at the University of Barcelona — and also the guy whose incisive Twitter thread fingers the forces behind the Tsunami Democràtic app as a “technological elite” — argues that the movement has essentially created a “human botnet”. This feels like a questionable capability for a pro-democracy movement when combined with its own paradoxically closed structure.
Divendres, dia de vaga general, una petita elit política i tecnològica ja haurà adquirit la capacitat operativa per paralitzar tot el país llançant convocatòries descentralitzades i en temps real des de la més extrema opacitat.
Han aconseguit crear una botnet humana.
— Enric Luján (@imGeheimen) October 15, 2019
“The intention appears to be to group a mass movement under a label which, paradoxically, is opaque, which carries the real risk of a lack of internal democracy,” Luján tells TechCrunch. “There is a basic paradox in Tsunami Democràtic. That it’s a pro-democracy movement where: 1) the ‘core’ that decides actions is not accessible to other supporters; 2) it has the word ‘Democràtic’ in its name but its protocols as an organization are extremely vertical and are in the hands of an elite that decides the objectives and defines the timing of mobilization; 3) it’s ‘deterritorialized’ with respect to the local reality (unlike the CDRs): opacity and verticality would allow them to lead the entire effort from outside the country.”
Luján believes the movement is essentially a continuation of the same organizing forces which drove support for pro-independence political parties around the 2017 referendum — such as the Catalan cultural organization Òmnium — now coming back together after a period of “strategic readjustment”.
“Shortly after the conclusion of the referendum, through the arrest of its political leaders, the independence movement was ‘decapitated’ and there were months of political paralysis,” he says, arguing that this explains the focus on applying mobile technology in a way that allows for completely anonymous orchestration of protests, as a strategy to protect itself from further arrests.
“This strategic option, of course, entails lack of public scrutiny of the debates and decisions, which is a problem and involves treating people as ‘pawns’ or ‘human botnets’ acting under your direction,” he adds.
He is also critical of the group not having opened the app’s code which has made it difficult to understand exactly how user data is being handled by the app and whether or not there are any security flaws. Essentially, there is no simple way for outsiders to validate trustworthiness.
His analysis of the app’s APK raises further questions. Luján says he believes it also requests microphone permissions in addition to location and camera access (the latter for reading the QR code).
Our source told us that as far as they are aware the app does not access the microphone by default. Though screenshots of requested permissions which have circulated on social media show a toggle where microphone access seems as if it can be enabled.
Qualsevol empresa ho pot fer amb apps q passen el filtre Google Play.
I d moment, sense haver denegat cap permís, de forma predeterminada només estan activats la ubicació (amb un motiu q ja has explicat) i la càmera (per escanejar el QR, amb la qual cosa ja podría descativar-lo). pic.twitter.com/TMgQcN402q
— Albert (@Albertet1981) October 16, 2019
And, as Luján points out, the prospect of a powerful and opaque entity with access to the real-time location of thousands of people plus the ability to remotely activate smartphone cameras and microphones to surveil people’s surroundings does sound pretty close to the plot of a Black Mirror episode…
Les similituds amb un capítol de Black Mirror són, evidentment, esfereïdores: Una entitat de la que no sabem res (excepte el seu alt nivell de sofisticació tecnològica) és a punt de guanyar el control efectiu de tot un territori, operant des de la més absoluta foscor.
— Enric Luján (@imGeheimen) October 15, 2019
Asked whether he believes we’re seeing an emergent model for a more participatory, grassroots form of democracy enabled by modern mobile technologies or a powerful techie elite playing at reconfiguring existing power structures by building and distributing systems that keep them shielded from democratic view where they can nudge others to spread their message, he says he leans towards the latter.
“It’s a movement with an elite leadership that seems to have had a clear timetable for months. It remains to be seen what they’ll be able to do. But it is clearly not spontaneous (the domain of the website was registered in July) and the application needed months to develop,” he notes. “I am not clear that it can be or was ‘crowdsourced’ — as far as I know, there was no campaign to finance Tsunami or their technological solutions.”
“Release the code,” he adds. “I don’t understand why they haven’t released it. Promising it is easy and is what you expect if you want to present yourself with a minimum of transparency, but there is no defined deadline to do so. For now we have to work with the APK, which is more cumbersome to understand how the app works and how it uses and moves user data.”
“I imagine it is so the police cannot investigate thoroughly, but it also means others lose the possibility of better understanding how a product that’s been designed by people who rely on anonymity works, and have to rely that the elite technologists in charge of developing the app have not committed any security breach.”
So, here too, more questions and more uncertainty.
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Is our age of ubiquitous smartphones and social media turning into an era of mass civil unrest? Two years after holding an independence referendum and unilaterally declaring independence in defiance of the Spanish state — then failing to gain recognition for la república and being forced to watch political leaders jailed or exiled — Catalonia’s secessionist movement has resurfaced with a major splash.
One of the first protest actions programmed by a new online activist group, calling itself Tsunami Democràtic, saw thousands of protestors coalescing on Barcelona airport Monday, in an attempt to shut it down. The protest didn’t quite do that but it did lead to major disruption, with roads blocked by human traffic as protestors walked down the highway and the cancelation of more than 100 flights, plus hours of delays for travellers arriving into El Prat.
For months leading up to a major Supreme Court verdict on the fate of imprisoned Catalan political leaders a ‘technical elite‘ — as one local political science academic described them this week — has been preparing to reboot Catalonia’s independence movement by developing bespoke, decentralized high-tech protest tools.
A source with knowledge of Tsunami Democràtic, speaking to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity, told us that “high level developers” located all around the world are involved in the effort, divvying up coding tasks as per any large scale IT project and leveraging open source resources (such as the RetroShare node-based networking platform) to channel grassroots support for independence into a resilient campaign network that can’t be stopped by the arrest of a few leaders.
Demonstrators at the airport on Monday were responding directly to a call to blockade the main terminal posted to the group’s Telegram channel.
Additional waves of protest are being planned and programmed via a bespoke Tsunami Democràtic app that was also released this week for Android smartphones — as a sideload, not yet a Google Play download.
The app is intended to supplement mainstream social network platform broadcasts by mobilizing smaller, localized groups of supporters to carry out peaceful acts of civil disobedience all over Catalonia.
Our source walked us through the app, which requires location permission to function in order that administrators can map available human resources to co-ordinate protests. We’re told a user’s precise location is not shared but rather that an obfuscated, more fuzzy location marker gets sent. However the app’s source code has not yet been open sourced so users have to take such claims on trust (open sourcing is said to be the plan — but only once the app has been scrubbed of any identifying traces, per the source).
The app requires a QR code to be activated. This is a security measure intended to manage activation in stages, via trusted circles of acquaintances, to limit the risk of infiltration by state authorities. Though it feels a bit like a viral gamification tactic to encourage people to spread the word and generate publicity organically by asking their friends if they have a code or not.
Whatever it’s really for the chatter seems to be working. During our meeting over coffee we overheard a group of people sitting at another table talking about the app. And at the time of writing Tsunami Democràtic has announced 15,000 successful QR code activations so far. Though it’s not clear how successful the intended flashmob civil disobedience game-plan will be at this nascent stage.
Once activated, app users are asked to specify their availability (i.e. days and times of day) for carrying out civil disobedience actions. And to specify if they own certain mobility resources which could be utilized as part of a protest (e.g. car, scooter, bike, tractor).
Examples of potential actions described to us by our source were go-slows to bring traffic grinding to a halt and faux shopping sprees targeting supermarkets where activists could spend a few hours piling carts high with goods before leaving them abandoned in the store for someone else to clean up.
One actual early action carried out by activists from the group last month targeted a branch of the local CaixaBank with a masked protestor sit-in.
Our source said the intention is to include a pop-up in the app as a sort of contract of conscience which asks users to confirm participation in the organized chaos will be entirely peaceful. Here’s an example of what the comprometo looks like:
Users are also asked to confirm both their intention to participate in a forthcoming action (meaning the app will capture attendance numbers for protests ahead of time) and to check in when they get there so its administrators can track actual participation in real-time.
The app doesn’t ask for any personal data during onboarding — there’s no account creation etc — although users are agreeing to their location being pervasively tracked.
And it’s at least possible that other personal data could be passed via, for example, a comment submission field that lets people send feedback on actions. Or if the app ends up recording other data via access to smartphone sensors.
The other key point is that users only see actions related to their stated availability and tracked location. So, from a protestor’s point of view, they see only a tiny piece of the Tsunami Democràtic protest program. The user view is decentralized and information is distributed strictly piecemeal, on a need to know basis.
Behind the scenes — where unknown administrators are accessing its data and devising and managing protest actions to distribute via the app — there may be an entirely centralized view of available human protest resources. But it’s not clear what the other side of the platform looks like. Our source was unable to show it to us or articulate what it looks like.
Certainly, administrators are in a position to cancel planned actions if, for example, there’s not enough participation — meaning they can invisibly manage external optics around engagement with the cause. Not enough foot soldiers for a planned protest? Just call it off quietly via the app.
Also not at all clear: Who the driving forces are behind the Tsunami Democràtic protest mask?
“There is no thinking brain, there are many brains,” a spokesman for the movement told the El Diario newspaper this week. But that does raise pretty major questions about democratic legitimacy. Because, well, if you’re claiming to be fighting for democracy by mobilizing popular support, and you’re doing it from inside a Western democracy, can you really claim that while your organization remains in the shadows?
Even if your aim is non-violent political protest, and your hierarchy is genuinely decentralized, which is the suggestive claim here, unless you’re offering transparency of structure so as to make your movement’s composition and administration visible to outside scrutiny (so that your claims of democratic legitimacy can be independently verified) then individual protestors (the app’s end users) just have to take your word for it.
End users who are being crowdsourced and coopted to act out via app instruction as if they’re pawns on a high tech chess board. They are also being asked (implicitly) to shoulder direct personal risk in order that a faceless movement generates bottom up political pressure.
So there’s a troubling contradiction here for a movement that has chosen to include the word ‘democractic’ in its name. (The brand is a reference to a phase used by jailed Catalan cultural leader, Jordi Cuixart.) Who or what is powering this wave?
We also now know all too well how the double-sided nature of platforms means these fast-flowing technosocial channels can easily be misappropriated by motivated interest groups to gamify and manipulate opinion (and even action) en masse. This has been made amply clear in recent years with political disinformation campaigns mushrooming into view all over the online place.
So while emoji-strewn political protest messages calling for people to mobilize at a particular street corner might seem a bit of harmless ‘Pokemon Go’-style urban fun, the upshot can — and this week has — been far less predictable and riskier than its gamified packaging might suggest.
Plenty of protests have gone off peacefully, certainly. Others — often those going on after dusk and late into the night — have devolved into ugly scenes and destructive clashes.
There is clearly a huge challenge for decentralized movements (and indeed technologies) when it comes to creating legitimate governance structures that don’t simply repeat the hierarchies of the existing (centralized) authorities and systems they’re seeking to challenge.
The anarchy-loving crypto community’s inability to coalesce around a way to progress with blockchain technology looks like its own self-defeating irony. A faceless movement fighting for ‘democracy’ from behind an app mask that allows its elite string-pullers and data crunchers to remain out of sight risks looking like another.
None of the protestors we’ve spoken to could say for sure who’s behind Tsunami Democràtic. One suggested it’s just “citizens” or else the same people who helped organize the 2017 Catalan independence referendum — managing the movement of ballot papers into and out of an unofficial network of polling stations so that votes could be collected and counted despite Spanish authorities’ best efforts to seize and destroy them.
There was also a sophisticated technology support effort at the time to support the vote and ensure information about polling stations remained available in the face of website takedowns by the Spanish state.
Our source was equally vague when asked who is behind the Tsunami Democràtic app. Which, if the decentralizing philosophy does indeed run right through the network — as a resilience strategy to protect its members from being ratted out to the police — is what you’d expected.
Any single node wouldn’t know or want to know much of other nodes. But that just leaves a vacuum at the core of the thing which looks alien to democratic enquiry.
One thing Tsunami Democràtic has been at pains to make plain in all (visible) communications to its supporters is that protests must be peaceful. But, again, while technology tools are great enablers it’s not always clear exactly what fire you’re lighting once momentum is pooled and channeled. And protests which started peacefully this week have devolved into running battles with police with missiles being thrown, fires lit and rubber bullets fired.
Some reports have suggested overly aggressive police response to crowds gathering has triggered and flipped otherwise calm protestors. What’s certain is there are injuries on both sides. Today almost 100 people were reported to have been hurt across three nights of protest action. A general strike and the biggest manifestation yet is planned for Friday in Barcelona. So the city is braced for more trouble as smartphone screens blink with fresh protest instructions.
Social media is of course a conduit for very many things. At its most corporate and anodyne its stated mission can be expressed flavorlessly — as with Facebook’s claimed purpose of ‘connecting people’. (Though distracting and/or outraging is often closer to the mark.)
In practice, thanks to human nature — so that means political agendas, financial interests and all the rest of our various and frequently conflicting desires — all sorts of sparks can fly. None more visibly than during mass mobilizations where groups with a shared agenda rapidly come together to amplify a cause and agitate for change.
Even movements that start with the best intentions — and put their organizers and administration right out in the open for all to see and query — can lose control of outcomes.
Not least because malicious outsiders often seize the opportunity to blend in and act out, using the cover of an organized protest to create a violent disturbance. (And there have been some reports filtering across Catalan social media claiming right wing thugs have been causing trouble and that secret police are intentionally stirring things up to smear the movement.)
BARCELONA, SPAIN – OCTOBER 17: Protesters take to the streets to demonstrate after the Spanish Supreme Court sentenced nine Catalan separatist leaders to between 9 and 13 years in prison for their role of the 2017 failed Catalan referendum on October 17, 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
So if a highly charged political campaign is being masterminded and micromanaged remotely, by unknown entities shielded behind screens, there are many more questions we need to be asking about where the balance of risk and power lies, as well as whether a badge of ‘pro-democracy’ can really be justified.
For Tsunami Democràtic and Catalonia’s independence movement generally this week’s protests look to be just the start of a dug-in, tech-fuelled guerrilla campaign of civil disobedience — to try to force a change of political weather. Spain also has yet another general election looming so the timing offers the whiff of opportunity.
The El Prat blockade that kicked off the latest round of Catalan unrest seemed intended to be a flashy opening drama. To mirror and reference the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong — which made the international airport there a focal point for its own protests, occupying the terminal building and disrupting flights in an attempt to draw the world’s attention to their plight.
In a further parallel with protests in Hong Kong a crowdsourced map similar to HKmaps.live — the app that dynamically maps street closures and police presence by overlaying emoji onto a city view — is also being prepared for Catalonia by those involved in the pro-independence movement.
At the time of writing a handful of emoji helicopters, road blocks and vans are visible on a map of Barcelona. Tapping on an emoji brings up dated details such as what a police van was doing and whether it had a camera. A verified status suggests multiple reports will be required before an icon is displayed. We understand people will be able to report street activity for live-mapping via a Telegram bot.
Screenshot of Catalan live map for crowdsourcing street intel
Our source suggested police presence on the map might be depicted by chick emojis. Aka Piolín: The Spanish name for the Loony Tunes cartoon character Tweety Pie — a reference to a colorfully decorated cruise ship used to house scores of Spanish national police in Barcelona harbor during the 2017 referendum, providing instant meme material. Though the test version we’ve seen seems to be using a mixture of dogs and chicks.
Along with the Tsunami Democràtic app the live map means there will soon be two bespoke tools supporting a campaign of civil disobedience whose unknown organizers clearly hope will go the distance.
As we’ve said, the identities of the people coordinating the rebooted movement remain unclear. It’s also unclear who if anyone is financing it.
Our source suggested technical resources to run and maintain the apps are being crowdsourced by volunteers. But some commentators argue that a source of funding would be needed to support everything that’s being delivered, technically and logistically. The app certainly seems far more sophisticated than a weekend project job.
There has been some high level public expressions of support for Tsunami Democràtic — such as from former Barcelona football club trainer, Pep Guardiola, who this week put out a video badged with the Tsunami D logo in which he defends the democratic right to assembly and protest, warning that free speech is being threatened and claiming “Spain is experiencing a drift towards authoritarianism”. So wealthy backers of Catalan independence aren’t exactly hard to find.
A message to the world from Pep Guardiola pic.twitter.com/WdUKEyLyjO
— Jordi Pu1gnerO (@jordiPuignero) October 14, 2019
Whoever is involved behind the scenes — whether with financing or just technical and organization support — it’s clear that ‘free’ protest energy is being liberally donated to the cause by a highly engaged population of pro-independence supporters.
Grassroots support for Catalan independence is both plentiful, highly engaged, geographically dispersed and cuts across generations — sometimes in surprising ways. One mother we spoke to who said she was too ill to go to Monday’s airport protest recounted her disappointment when her teenage kids told her they weren’t going because they wanted to finish their homework.
Very many protestors did go though, answering calls to action in their messaging apps or via the printable posters made available online by Tsunami Democràtic which some street protestors have been pictured holding.
Thousands of demonstrators occupied the main Barcelona airport terminal building, sat and sang protest songs, daubed quasi apologetic messages on the windows in English (saying a lack of democracy is worse than missing a flight), and faced off to lines of police in riot gear — including units of Spanish national police discharging rubber bullets. One protestor was later reported by local press to have lost an eye.
‘It’s time to make our voice heard in the world,’ runs Tsunami Democràtic’s message on Telegram calling for a blockade of the airport. It then sets out the objective (an airport shut down) and instructs supporters that all forms of transport are “valid” to further the mission of disrupting business as usual. ‘Share and see you all at T1!’ it ends. Around 240,000 people saw the instruction, per Telegram’s ephemeral view counts.
Demonstrators during a protest against the jailing of Catalan separatists at El Prat airport in Barcelona, Spain, on Monday, Oct. 14, 2019. (Photo by Iranzu Larrasoana Oneca/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Later the same evening the channel sent another message instructing protestors to call it a night. ‘Today we have been a tsunami,’ it reads in Catalan. ‘We will make every victory a mobilization. We have started a cycle of non-violent, civil disobedience.’ At the time of writing that follow-on missive has registered 300k+ views.
While Tsunami Democràtic is just one of multiple pro-independence groups arranging and mobilizing regional protests — such as the CDRs, aka Comites de Defensa de la Republica, which have been blocking highways in Catalonia for the past two years — it’s quickly garnered majority momentum since quietly uncloaking this summer.
Its Telegram channel — which was only created in August — has piled on followers in recent weeks. Other pro-independence groups are also sharing news and distributing plans over Telegram’s platform and, more widely, on social media outlets such as twitter. Though none has amassed such a big following, nor indeed with such viral speed.
Even Anonymous Catalonia’s Telegram channel, which has been putting out a steady stream of unfiltered crowdsourced protest content this week — replete with videos of burning bins, siren blaring police vans and scattering crowds, interspersed with photos of empty roads (successful blockades) and the odd rubber bullet wound — only has a ‘mere’ 100k+ subscribers.
And while Facebook-owned WhatsApp was a major first source of protest messaging around the 2017 Catalan referendum, with Telegram just coming on stream as an alternative for trying to communicate out of sight of the Spanish state, the protest mobilization baton appears to have been passed more fully to Telegram now.
Perhaps that’s partly due to an element of mistrust around mainstream platforms controlled by tech giants who might be leant on by states to block content (Tsunami Democràtic has said it doesn’t yet have an iOS version of its app, despite many requests for one, because the ‘politics of the App Store is very restrictive’ — making a direct reference to Apple pulling the HKmaps app from its store). Whereas Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, is famously resistant to authoritarian state power.
Though, most likely, it’s a result of some powerful tools Telegram provides for managing and moderating channels.
The upshot is Telegram’s messaging platform has enjoyed a surge in downloads in Spain during this month’s regional unrest — as WhatsApp-loving locals flirt with a rival platform also in response to calls from their political channels to get on Telegram for detailed instructions of the next demo.
Per App Annie, Telegram has leapt up the top free downloads charts for Google Play in Spain — rising from eleventh place into the third spot this month. While, for iOS, it’s holding steady in the top free downloads slot.
Also growing in parallel: Unrest on Catalonia’s streets.
Since Monday’s airport protest tensions have certainly escalated. Roads across the region have been blockaded. Street furniture and vehicles torched. DIY missiles thrown at charging police.
By Thursday morning there were reports of police firing teargas and police vehicles being driven at high speed around protesting crowds of youths. Two people were reported run over.
Anti-riot police officers shoot against protesters after a demonstration called by the local Republic Defence Committees (CDR) in Barcelona on October 17, 2019. – After years of peaceful separatist demonstrations, violence finally exploded on the Catalan streets this week, led by activists frustrated by the political paralysis and infuriated by the Supreme Court’s conviction of nine of its leaders over a failed independence bid. (Photo by LLUIS GENE / AFP) (Photo by LLUIS GENE/AFP via Getty Images)
Helicopters have become a routine sound ripping up the urban night sky. While the tally of injury counts continues rising on both sides. And all the while there are countless videos circulating on social media to be sifted through to reinforce your own point of view — screening looping clashes between protestors and baton wielding police. One video doing the rounds last night appeared to show protestors targeting a police helicopter with fireworks. Russian propaganda outlets have of course been quick to seize on and amplify divisive visuals.
The trigger for a return to waves of technology-fuelled civil disobedience — as were also seen across Catalonia around the time of the 2017 referendum — are lengthy prison terms handed down by Spain’s Supreme Court on Monday. Twelve political and civic society leaders involved in the referendum were convicted, nine on charges of sedition and misuse of public funds. None were found guilty of the more serious charge of rebellion — but the sentences were still harsh, ranging from 13 years to nine.
The jailed leaders — dubbed presos polítics (aka political prisoners) by Catalan society, which liberally deploys yellow looped-ribbons as a solidarity symbol in support of the presos — had already spent almost two years in prison without bail.
A report this week in El Diario, citing a source in Tsunami Democràtic, suggests the activist movement was established in response to a growing feeling across the region’s independence movement that a new way of mobilizing and carrying out protests was needed in the wake of the failed 2017 independence bid.
The expected draconian Supreme Court verdict marked a natural start-date for the reboot.
A reboot has been necessary because, with so many of its figureheads in prison — and former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont in exile in Brussels — there has been something of a leadership vacuum for the secessionist cause.
That coupled with a sense of persecution at the hands of a centralized state which suspended Catalonia’s regional autonomy in the wake of the illegal referendum, invoking a ‘nuclear option’ constitutional provision to dismiss the government and call fresh elections, likely explains why the revived independence movement has been taking inspiration from blockchain-style decentralization.
Our source also told us blockchain thinking has informed the design and structure of the app.
Discussing the developers who have pulled the app together they said it’s not only a passionately engaged Catalan techie diaspora, donating their time and expertise to help civic society respond to what’s seen as long-standing political persecution, but — more generally — coders and technologists with an interest in participating in what they hope will be the largest experiment in participatory democracy and peaceful civil disobedience.
The source pointed to research conducted by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, who found non-violent, civil disobedience campaigns to be a far more powerful way of shaping world politics than violence. She also found such campaigns need engage only 3.5% of the population to succeed. And at 300k+ subscribers Tsunami Democràtic’s Telegram channel may have already passed that threshold, given the population of Catalonia is only around 7.6M.
It sounds like some of the developers helping the movement are being enticed by the prospect of applying powerful mobile platform technologies to a strong political cause as a way to stress testing democratic structures — and perhaps play at reconfiguring them. If the tools are successful at capturing intention and sustaining action and so engaging and activating citizens in a long term political campaign.
We’re told the stated intention to open source the app is also a goal in order to make it available for other causes to pick up and use to press for change. Which does start to sound a little bit like regime change as a service…
Stepping back, there is also a question of whether micromanaged civic disobedience is philosophically different to more organic expressions of discontent.
There is an element of non-violent protest being weaponized against an opponent when you’re running it via an app. Because the participants are being remotely controlled and coordinated at a distance, at the same time as ubiquitous location-sensitive mobile technologies mean the way in which the controlling entity speaks to them can be precisely targeted to push their buttons and nudge action.
Yes, it’s true that the right to peaceful assembly and protest is a cornerstone of democracy. Nor is it exactly a new phenomenon that mobile technology has facilitated this democratic expression. In journalist Giles Tremlett’s travelogue book about his adopted country, Ghosts of Spain, he recounts how in the days following the 2004 Madrid train bombings anonymous text messages started to spread via mobile phone — leading to mass, spontaneous street demonstrations.
At the time there were conflicting reports of who was responsible for the bombings, as the government sought to blame the Basque terrorist group ETA for what would turn out to be the work of Islamic terrorists. Right on the eve of an election voters in Spain were faced with a crucial political decision — having just learnt that the police had in fact arrested three Moroccans for the bomb attacks, suggesting the government had been lying.
“A new political phenomenon was born that day — the instant text message demonstration,” Tremlett writes. “Anonymous text messages began to fly from mobile phone to mobile phone. They became known as the pásalo messages, because each ended with an exhortation to ‘Pass it on’. It was like chain mail, but instant.”
More than fifteen years on from those early days of consumer mobile technology and SMS text messaging, instant now means so much more than it did — with almost everyone in a wealthy Western region like Catalonia carrying a powerful, Internet-connected computer and streaming videocamera in their pocket.
Modern mobile technology turns humans into high tech data nodes, capable of receiving and transmitting information. So a protestor now can not only opt in to instructions for a targeted action but respond and receive feedback in a way that makes them feel personally empowered.
From one perspective, what’s emerging from high tech ‘push button’ smartphone-enabled protest movements, like we’re now seeing in Catalonia and Hong Kong, might seem to represent the start of a new model for democratic participation — as the old order of representative democracy fails to keep pace with changing political tastes and desires, just as governments can’t keep up technologically.
But the risk is it’s just a technological elite in the regime-change driving seat. Which sums to governance not by established democratic processes but via the interests of a privileged elite with the wealth and expertise to hack the system and create new ones that can mobilize citizens to act like pawns.
Established democratic processes may indeed be flawed and in need of a degree of reform but they have also been developed and stress-tested over generations. Which means they have layers of accountability checks and balances baked in to try to balance out competing interests.
Throwing all that out in favor of a ‘democracy app’ sounds like the sort of disruption Facebook has turned into an infamous dark art.
For individual protestors, then, who are participating as willing pawns in this platform-enabled protest, you might call it selfie-style self-determination; they get to feel active and present; they experience the spectacle of political action which can be instantly and conveniently snapped for channel sharing with other mobilized friends who then reflect social validation back. But by doing all that they’re also giving up their agency.
Because all this ‘protest’ action is flowing across the surface of an asymmetric platform. The infrastructure natively cloaks any centralized interests and at very least allows opaque forces to push a cause at cheap scale.
“I felt so small,” one young female protestor told us, recounting via WhatsApp audio message, what had gone down during a protest action in Barcelona yesterday evening. Things started out fun and peaceful, with participants encouraged to toss toilet rolls up in the air — because, per the organizer’s messaging, ‘there’s a lot of shit to clean up’ — but events took a different turn later, as protestors moved to another location and some began trying to break into a police building.
A truck arrived from a side street being driven by protestors who used it to blockade the entrance to the building to try to stop police getting out. Police warning shots were fired into the air. Then the Spanish national police turned up, driving towards the crowd at high speed and coming armed with rubber not foam bullets.
Faced with a more aggressive police presence the crowd tried to disperse — creating a frightening crush in which she was caught up. “I was getting crushed all the time. It wasn’t fun,” she told us. “We moved away but there was a huge mass of people being crushed the whole time.”
“What was truly scary weren’t the crowds or the bullets, it was not knowing what was going on,” she added.
Yet, despite the fear and uncertainty, she was back out on the streets to protest again the next night — armed with a smartphone.
Enric Luján, a PhD student and adjunct professor in political science at the University of Barcelona — and also the guy whose incisive Twitter thread fingers the forces behind the Tsunami Democràtic app as a “technological elite” — argues that the movement has essentially created a “human botnet”. This feels like a questionable capability for a pro-democracy movement when combined with its own paradoxically closed structure.
Divendres, dia de vaga general, una petita elit política i tecnològica ja haurà adquirit la capacitat operativa per paralitzar tot el país llançant convocatòries descentralitzades i en temps real des de la més extrema opacitat.
Han aconseguit crear una botnet humana.
— Enric Luján (@imGeheimen) October 15, 2019
“The intention appears to be to group a mass movement under a label which, paradoxically, is opaque, which carries the real risk of a lack of internal democracy,” Luján tells TechCrunch. “There is a basic paradox in Tsunami Democràtic. That it’s a pro-democracy movement where: 1) the ‘core’ that decides actions is not accessible to other supporters; 2) it has the word ‘Democràtic’ in its name but its protocols as an organization are extremely vertical and are in the hands of an elite that decides the objectives and defines the timing of mobilization; 3) it’s ‘deterritorialized’ with respect to the local reality (unlike the CDRs): opacity and verticality would allow them to lead the entire effort from outside the country.”
Luján believes the movement is essentially a continuation of the same organizing forces which drove support for pro-independence political parties around the 2017 referendum — such as the Catalan cultural organization Òmnium — now coming back together after a period of “strategic readjustment”.
“Shortly after the conclusion of the referendum, through the arrest of its political leaders, the independence movement was ‘decapitated’ and there were months of political paralysis,” he says, arguing that this explains the focus on applying mobile technology in a way that allows for completely anonymous orchestration of protests, as a strategy to protect itself from further arrests.
“This strategic option, of course, entails lack of public scrutiny of the debates and decisions, which is a problem and involves treating people as ‘pawns’ or ‘human botnets’ acting under your direction,” he adds.
He is also critical of the group not having opened the app’s code which has made it difficult to understand exactly how user data is being handled by the app and whether or not there are any security flaws. Essentially, there is no simple way for outsiders to validate trustworthiness.
His analysis of the app’s APK raises further questions. Luján says he believes it also requests microphone permissions in addition to location and camera access (the latter for reading the QR code).
Our source told us that as far as they are aware the app does not access the microphone by default. Though screenshots of requested permissions which have circulated on social media show a toggle where microphone access seems as if it can be enabled.
Qualsevol empresa ho pot fer amb apps q passen el filtre Google Play.
I d moment, sense haver denegat cap permís, de forma predeterminada només estan activats la ubicació (amb un motiu q ja has explicat) i la càmera (per escanejar el QR, amb la qual cosa ja podría descativar-lo). pic.twitter.com/TMgQcN402q
— Albert (@Albertet1981) October 16, 2019
And, as Luján points out, the prospect of a powerful and opaque entity with access to the real-time location of thousands of people plus the ability to remotely activate smartphone cameras and microphones to surveil people’s surroundings does sound pretty close to the plot of a Black Mirror episode…
Les similituds amb un capítol de Black Mirror són, evidentment, esfereïdores: Una entitat de la que no sabem res (excepte el seu alt nivell de sofisticació tecnològica) és a punt de guanyar el control efectiu de tot un territori, operant des de la més absoluta foscor.
— Enric Luján (@imGeheimen) October 15, 2019
Asked whether he believes we’re seeing an emergent model for a more participatory, grassroots form of democracy enabled by modern mobile technologies or a powerful techie elite playing at reconfiguring existing power structures by building and distributing systems that keep them shielded from democratic view where they can nudge others to spread their message, he says he leans towards the latter.
“It’s a movement with an elite leadership that seems to have had a clear timetable for months. It remains to be seen what they’ll be able to do. But it is clearly not spontaneous (the domain of the website was registered in July) and the application needed months to develop,” he notes. “I am not clear that it can be or was ‘crowdsourced’ — as far as I know, there was no campaign to finance Tsunami or their technological solutions.”
“Release the code,” he adds. “I don’t understand why they haven’t released it. Promising it is easy and is what you expect if you want to present yourself with a minimum of transparency, but there is no defined deadline to do so. For now we have to work with the APK, which is more cumbersome to understand how the app works and how it uses and moves user data.”
“I imagine it is so the police cannot investigate thoroughly, but it also means others lose the possibility of better understanding how a product that’s been designed by people who rely on anonymity works, and have to rely that the elite technologists in charge of developing the app have not committed any security breach.”
So, here too, more questions and more uncertainty.
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Wombwell Rainbow Interviews
I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.
The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.
John Huey’s
student work of the 60’s-70’s was influenced by teachers in Vermont such as John Irving at Windham College and William Meredith at Bread Loaf.
After many years he returned to writing poetry in 2011. He has had poems presented in ‘Poetry Quarterly’ and in the ‘Temptation’ anthology published in London by Lost Tower Publications. Work has also appeared in ‘Leannan Magazine’, ‘Sein und Werden’, at ‘In Between Hangovers’, ‘Bourgeon’, ‘The Lost River Review’, ‘Red Wolf Journal’, ‘Perfume River Poetry Review’, ‘What Rough Beast’, ‘Poydras Review’, ‘Flatbush Review’ and ‘Memoir Mixtapes’. In 2018 he appeared in two further Anthologies, ‘Unbelief’, published by Local Gems Press, and ‘Addiction/Recovery Anthology’, published by Madness Muse Press. His full-length book, ‘The Moscow Poetry File’, was published by Finishing Line Press in November 2017. Full information and Amazon links can be found at www.john-huey.com .
The Interview
When and why did you start writing poetry?
I started writing poetry in late 1964 or there about as a very young American High School student in Suburban Washington, DC, who had, quite fortunately, received some great guidance form an inspired teacher and his wife who pointed me in the direction of Ginsburg and Ferlinghetti who, though not available in the school library or formal course of study, I did find in a local chain bookstore and devoured immediately. Whitman, of course, was more readily available, and he was also an early major influence. Bob Dylan also had a great deal to do with this awakening in another realm and history has shown that I was right in picking him out as a primary and early source of inspiration.
As a kid who “didn’t quit fit” I noticed, that despite a stable home and family environment in 1950’s – early 1960’s “White Bread America”, that something was “off” and missing in that long gone world and I started to wonder why.
As I had already noticed poets who had come before questioning their place in society I felt that writing something on my own might help with my own questions. To both my delight and relief it did and sorting things out on the page through poetry quickly became a regular, then daily, habit of mind.
So would you say it was the inspired teacher and his wife who introduced you to poetry?
It was in the air. The teachers lit the flame but I would have picked it up within a year of that one way or the other. There was only one other real poet kid in my High School and I met him in 1965 and he was into all the beats that you could find in our environment there. Right place, right time.
How aware are and were you of the dominating presence of older poets traditional and contemporary?
Context is everything, a bit later, in college, I came under the influence of visionaries such as Hart Crane who, for a while, totally dominated my writing as the beats and Bob Dylan had done a bit earlier on. The British kicked in with Blake (psychedelic visions thereof) and a college professor friend introduced me to Donne and the other 17th Century influences like Herbert. The Earl of Rochester fascinated me for other reasons but somehow I did manage to stand my own ground with, for better or worse, my own voice though the 19th century romantics such as Keats had their way with me as did Coleridge (more drug influences included there)..
This is a difficult question of course and there are dozens of important influences on me such as Edward Thomas, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Auden, Plath and later, lesser known voices such as Weldon Keys who played a major role. While still alive, Berryman was looming at the time as was Lowell in their obsessions and brilliant downward spirals.
Every worthwhile poet is, to some degree, responsive to the sum-total of his or her influences but stands up for their own vision in the end.
What is your daily writing routine?
It varies greatly and I wish I had the discipline of some my great old poet friends like Gary Lemons (‘Snake’ series of books that are a must read) who can write every morning.
Much of what I like best takes place past midnight and is written, not without irony, on this handheld device with rough cuts emailed to myself to work on later.
For major projects like my recently completed 60’s-early 70’s book I have have a full vision and a deadline in mind and write to that.
I was stuck on the final section of this book, called ‘The Sunset Fires’, and exiled myself for a week to Putney, VT where a large chunk of the book takes place to “workshop” the final ten poems in a week. That tactic worked in that case but most of the time I write late at night only when so moved and revise in the mornings on the big screen.
What motivates you to write?
Another variable open ended question!
Initially, as a young person, it was a quest for identity combined with a desire to communicate in a unique and visionary way. All high mountaintops and idealization mixed with the ever present emotional upheaval of the young.
By the late 70’s I had burned through this vein and when some personally acquired bad habits, along with an unwise marriage, really kicked in I had an all purpose reason to stop and that’s exactly what I did.
The “bad habits” continued into the 80’s where, after leaving the idealizations surrounding a yet to be fully kindled academic career behind, I somehow figured out how to make money in a totally unrelated career that eventually took me to every corner of the earth.
After taking my last drink in early 1987 I embarked on a second marriage and a family and was just too crazy busy to think of anything else. At least that’s what I told myself at the time when I saw my friends still writing oand publishing.
By 2004 the second marriage was effectively over and an opportunity presented itself to take my then thriving consulting business to Russia where I became a distributor of security screening equipment.
In early 2006 I met, in Moscow, the woman who is my current wife and the intensity and excitement of our life in Russia together became something that literally few people in the West could believe much less understand.
After the inevitable end of my Russian businessi in 2009 we came back to the US where I knew, in my bones, that the Russia “adventure” needed to be chronicled somehow. Though I didn’t fully extract myself from that place until 2013 in 2011 I began writing what became ‘The Moscow Poetry File’ which was my attempt to somehow transfer some of that undefinable and amazing experience into verse. I think I at least partially succeeded on that score.
After the Moscow book I completed two further collections that are still seeking publishers while being fortunate enough to appear in three anthologies as well as numerous magazines both on line and in print.
These books proved to be “event driven” as well and I find that the observable world provides more than enough incentive and stimulus to be both the subject and motivator for poetry.
I’m looking for the essence of both the times and the situations that unfold at this later stage of life and time itself, at age 70, gives me more than enough motivation to “get it down” while and where I can.
5.1. What does “event-driven” and “observable world” mean to you?
In addition to how I address this indirectly in my introduction to ‘The Sunset Fires’ (PDF attached) I am, at root, a determined lifelong atheist and dialectical materialist who only believes what is perceived by the senses in the observable universe. What moves people is both internal and external but all of human history and motivation can be explained by physical/chemical/biological properties as they interact with human populations over time. My favorite Englishman, by many a mile, is Charles Darwin, and I view the world through the lenses developed by Darwin and his fellow geniuses’ of Science and Nature.
But “where is the mystery” you might say? To me there is more than enough “mystery” to go around…. For example, “Where the hell did Trump come from and why is he the embodiment of pure human evil?”, “Why do some people recover from alcoholism and addiction and others die horribly and alone? “, “Why do some find love and lifelong happiness while others, just as capable, end up bereft?”, “Why does randomness determine so many final outcomes in life and are there any external reasons for these effects?”…The list goes on and on, is endless, and would provide countless subjects for Poetry over countless lifetimes.
What is your work ethic?
My “work ethic” goes back to the days of my late mother who, along with many other old time, Protestant American verities, instilled in us the proposition that “when you start something you finish it” which, these days, leads to very few incomplete fragments in the work I attempt now.
The exception to this is when I’m outside my wheelhouse as when I try to write fiction where an idea for a long incomplete novel has been kicking around in fragments for nearly a decade.
Poems however, when started, are always completed as are books.
I wasted enough time when I was on my “hiatus” from writing between 1978 and 2011 to waste any time now.
How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?
All of the writers who influenced me in my youth still resonate of course but there are several who are still a never ending presence.
Ginsburg, despite the overdone hippie trappings and embellishments, still remains central in his revolution of style and strength of spirit that propelled him forward as the indisputably essential beat poet. His shadow is long and his diction and unrelenting cadence still occupy the background in everything I write.
As a lifelong resident of Washington, DC the ghost of Walt Whitman, in his Civil War years, has been present in the city and in my writing as a beacon of goodness in the midst of the death and dismemberment of the hospitals he visited daily during those times. A visionary artist can live a visionary life and while I have never been able to achieve such goodness that great, generous spirit shows me the way to a better way always despite the small chance of fully achieving anything approaching that.
Hart Crane was another gay man who suffered terribly when alive without Whitman’s vast resources of compassion and self love.
Through the alcoholic suffering Crane always showed great courage as a writer and his transcendent lyrical beauty is something I have always reached for but have never, of course, been able to fully grasp.
The writers I most admire are better than I can ever hope to be and triumph over history and adversity to get to the palace of the “gods” with the only form of immortality available to us. The transmission of exactly where they wanted to be over time and the truth of the message, sometimes at the peril of the messenger, is all that any poet, as he or she ages, could aspire to.
There are many others other than these three of course but it is these voices I hear most clearly down to these days.
Whom of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?
There are people I really respect writing now like John Robinson and Charles Wright but most of what I see in the major journals passes me right by. I’m either too old to “get it” or not “tuned in” to most of what’s out there these days. I guess you will never find me in the audience at a “poetry slam”… Enough said on that. Dylan said, when I was young, “Don’t criticize what you can’t understand.” I really should leave it there before I start a riot or burn someone else’s house down.
My good friends who I know personally and who I have watched develop are a whole other matter and I get a world of good from the work of Gregory Luce who I have known for over 20 years and Gary Lemons who I have known for 50. These poets really encouraged and nurtured me when I returned to writing and their ability to hang in there for the “long haul” is really inspiring as are their books.
A great regret was the premature death, in 2006, of my wonderful friend from my college days in Vermont, and fine poet, Gregory Jerozal. He was never properly published in book form during his life and I’m on a mission, with his wife’s permission, to try to pull a proper book together from his many existing journal publications and old manuscripts I have. I’m being remiss for not completing this project and I hope I’m done before life is finished with me. He was a really fine poet and I miss him greatly. He would be a shining light if alive today.
8.1. Why do you admire these writers?
There are people I really respect writing now like John Robinson and Charles Wright but most of what I see in the major journals passes me right by. I’m either too old to “get it” or not “tuned in” to most of what’s out there these days. I guess you will never find me in the audience at a “poetry slam”… Enough said on that. Dylan said, when I was young, “Don’t criticize what you can’t understand.” I really should leave it there before I start a riot or burn someone else’s house down.
My good friends who I know personally and who I have watched develop are a whole other matter and I get a world of good from the work of Gregory Luce who I have known for over 20 years and Gary Lemons who I have known for 50. These poets really encouraged and nurtured me when I returned to writing and their ability to hang in there for the “long haul” is really inspiring as are their books.
A great regret was the premature death, in 2006, of my wonderful friend from my college days in Vermont, and fine poet, Gregory Jerozal. He was never properly published in book form during his life and I’m on a mission, with his wife’s permission, to try to pull a proper book together from his many existing journal publications and old manuscripts I have. I’m being remiss for not completing this project and I hope I’m done before life is finished with me. He was a really fine poet and I miss him greatly. He would be a shining light if alive today.
9. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”
I don’t think that you “become” a writer at all. It’s something you are. When I was 15 I was a writer and have no recollection of how that happened. It’s just something I had to do after having read some things that moved me. Artists in that sense are born, not made. at least that’s the way I look at it. The idea of writers “schools” has always amused me though I was, myself, greatly encouraged by my undergraduate creative writing teacher, John Irving, who, in terms of poetry, was more of a friend, coach and cheerleader than teacher. Likewise, when I went to Bread Loaf the one on one sessions I had with the fine poet William Meredith were also more of the same coaching and encouragement I had experienced with John. Those fine writers didn’t teach me, they inspired.
I was a writer even in those many years that I wasn’t involved at all and I know that because of the fact that things I have written since my “return” in 2011 have a tenor and a voice that I know was in gestation while I was dormant.
Back in the 90’s one of my friends I met in Secular AA was the late Washington DC cultural luminary and black arts movement poet Gaston Neal. I spent a great deal of time with him the year before his death in 1999 and he looked at me one day and told me “You are a poet, always have been and always will be and I know you will write again.” 12 years later I did.
Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.
In addition to trying to get two further volumes of poetry published and continuing to write individual poems to send around to the journals I have had, as I mentioned earlier in response to one of the questions, a long delayed novel in the works that may prove too daunting to complete any time in the near term. The project in question takes place in a timeline from the late 60’s to the early 90’s and involves hippie thieves based in Vermont, the scene around a long defunct artists bar on Lower Broadway in Manhattan called St Adrian’s, a Washington Post journalist and some unique and disturbing circumstances involving parties known and now departed as well as a purely fictional cast of characters who propel the narrative forward despite their early and premature demise.
I’m not at all happy defining my own limitations but I may have met them here. I’m spending a week with an old poet friend in Vermont this coming May to get close to some primary sources with a person who was there
“When” who may be able to help me in moving this difficult (for me) manuscript off the proverbial dime at last. We shall see.
Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: John Huey Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.
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The Wandering Elite
In Wagner's opera The Flying Dutchman, the mythical figure of the Dutchman appears, central to the opera. Cursed by God for blaspheming during a storm, he wanders the seas endlessly. He burns with desire to see his homeland but is forever denied satisfaction by the curse, only finding redemption through the love of a faithful woman.
Wagner - himself an exile and wanderer - envisages nothing worse than being cursed to never coming home - the Dutchman's pain and dark fate are contrasted with the community he visits and disrupts. He can offer gold and treasure to manipulate other characters, but to him is worthless compared to home and love, both forever denied him. A dark and tortured melody rises as the Dutchman describes his cursed fate, and sets the tone of burden and suffering through the opera.
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Wagner could never have imagined that in 2018, a new dark irony had developed; had he ever visited the Netherlands, the Dutchman would have found an unrecognizable place. He would assume he was in North Africa by mistake.
Moreover, he would likely find it most peculiar to see in Europe a globalized elite for whom the concept of homeland is gauche; petit bourgeois. Not for them; they must have studied overseas, friends from every corner of the globe, children studying overseas, and a global mind for the movement of capital and labor.
Regular readers of The Republic Standard will know that the projected demographic future of Europe is bleak. The reality, as well - many Australian, Canadian and American visitors are expecting the continent their parents visited, only to find ethnically fractured nations, brimming with tension and mistrust, and with a native elite that not only refuses to acknowledge the ongoing disaster but elevates it and doubles down.
A new aristocracy, this elite has emerged, displaying as much arrogance and apathy to the suffering of their fellow countrymen as the nobility of the ancien regime. At least that nobility could be occasionally reined in by an honorable monarch, the clergy or by at least the keeping up of Christian appearances. The new elite has no time for such 'superstitious' ideologies, and forges forth, confidently armed with the standard issue modern capitalist, secular worldview, in which social justice overrides any more ancient matters of governance (borders, cohesion, security). Worse than that, unlike the ancient nobility (who could be relied upon to serve their own interests), the new elite genuinely believes that they are on a mission to redress 'historical injustice', 'social injustice'. They lack historical knowledge that contradicts the liberal narrative they were taught in university, in which the West (and now simply white people) is the sole source of violence, oppression, chaos, and corruption in the world. Naïve, ignorant, and armed with an ideology that perceives a post-racial, post-gender politics utopia, they have compressed and moved the Overton window, and are they new clergy and nobility, the liberal secular mullahs of our glorious theocracy.
So far, they have had their way. However, history tells us that gravity cannot be suspended forever; there were definite warning signs that France's finances and governance were veering awry for decades before 1789. Yet the necessary measures could not be taken, for the nobility had refused to accept reality.
So it is with our situation: the brutal facts of mass third world migration; colonies inside countries, parallel legal systems, terrorism, gang rapes, jihad by fertility, etc., are noticed by the public and are already leading to grassroots pressure that cannot be ignored forever. The new nobility sniffs at us and suggests we "eat kebab", for our petty concerns do not touch them, their jobs, their colleagues or their children. The sacraments of the religion of modern liberalism are above mere human concerns - especially when such matters come from grubby white people who can't speak properly.
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For these people are above mere nations; they are global citizens, for whom the Dutchman's fate is not a curse, it is a status symbol. They revel in losing their accents and disconnecting themselves with their homelands, and their 'narrow-minded', 'parochial' concerns. It is far more noble to dedicate oneself to grand international campaigns in which one can sweep in and deliver justice as directly as bags of rice from a helicopter, in which the third world are either the downtrodden Miserables (for whom a generation of food and education would change everything), or the tormented souls executing atrocities only because of some crime Whitey committed eons ago. This elite trumpets their multicultural openness but understands non-Western cultures far less than their Victorian forebears. Usually, they don't speak non-Western languages - unlike the French and English imperialists of yore - which neatly prevents them from confronting the ugly parts of the cultures they wish to simultaneously enlighten, liberate and empower - as if modernization wasn't in conflict with tribal and superstitious beliefs in the third world.
So our tired Dutchman, in the opera redeemed through love, would today seek redemption through an unusual abnegation of his culture, and a studied blindness towards the suffering of his countrymen. I know my feelings on the matter.
from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine http://bit.ly/2ERhLgT
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No one confronts the abyss better than Chris Orrick. The Michigan ex-factory worker formerly known as Red Pill has spent the last half-decade documenting industrial decay, familial pain, and struggles with addiction better than almost anyone inhabiting this poisoned soil. It’s somewhere between Charles Bukowski and Michael Moore, or maybe Atmosphere if he couldn’t ignore the arsenic in the air. As Orrick tells it, “Portraits,” his latest album for Mello Music Group is a return to form. “I tried to strip everything down to what I think I'm best at: simple, concise portraits of who I am,” Orrick says. “Whether that be finding myself through self-portraits, portraits of everyday workers, portraits of the current political moment or portraits of myself told through the eyes of people I encounter daily.” From the corroded arteries of the blue-collar heartland, Orrick emerges as one of the most incisive and savage critics of Trump’s America. If the American dream is dead, he unflinchingly lays the blame on avaricious corporations, crude demagogues, and structural racism. There’s nothing polemical about it: just warm-hearted, sad-eyed, gin-flooded depictions of a life where there are few right answers but a litany of wrong ones. The Michigan native is an acerbic poet, but too unpretentious and sarcastic to ever call himself that. In his love letter to his long-time girlfriend (“Lazy Buddies”), Orrick fantasizes about the pair decamping to a town an hour outside of Paris, where they can blissfully split a bottle of cheap wine. Then he mocks himself for being a little corny. But that’s part of its charm—through his ruthless honesty, we can see ourselves as we actually are—prone to idle delusions, indolence, and self-obsessed. “Portraits can often be overlooked, but there are so many details in the face that tell innumerable stories about what the person portrayed might have been feeling or going through,” Orrick continues. “I'm trying to find those details, within myself and within America today." On “Anywhere Instead,” he grouses about how most days he doesn’t want to leave his bed until noon, staring at his phone, wishing for imminent death. It’s a nothing matters, gallows humor that anoints him a laureate of existential dread. He captures the terror of the void, the ambiguity of not knowing where or when your next direct deposit will hit. He’s wise enough to understand how little he understands, allergic to cheap irony or forced symbolism. As he points out on stories, “not every story has a meaning, not every moment has a reason, sometimes you just let the music play and tell you what to say.” It’s obvious how loudly the music speaks to Orrick, who is rarely short of opinions or serrated observation. The somber piano-based melancholy and rugged drums of “Portraits” thump via a gifted arsenal of producers including Nolan the Ninja, L’Orange, Exile, Apollo Brown, and Onra. Only two guest rappers appear, Fashawn and Orrick’s partner in Ugly Heroes, Verbal Kent. Orrick carries the rest of the weight and you sense the Atlas burden he shoulders. But for the all the poignant complaints, there’s a soulful profundity at the core of the album. It goes further than stress over bills, nicotine and liquor compulsions, and a search for deeper revelation. If you can hear a song like “Mom” without slightly crumbling, you might be iron-born. It’s a eulogy for Orrick’s late mother, dead at 45 without seeing her children grow up, without the opportunity to take pride in her son’s ability to realize his dream—however flawed it can occasionally seem. It’s here where you sense the power of these Portraits. They capture the pain that too many of us feel, that manifests itself in so many distinct ways. For a little while, we understand the raw f&cked up complexity of what it means to be a human being in a lunatic world. The portrait is personal, but it’s all of us too. credits
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