JD Vance

Starting to collect some resources. You can jump down to the critiques of Hillbilly Elegy if you wish.

The guy

He muses that people should stay in violent marriages.

This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term. And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages. And that’s what I think all of us should be honest about, is we’ve run this experiment in real time. And what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that’s making our kids unhappy.

Business Insider is one of countless sources warning about his background in venture capital and tying him to neoreactionary weirdnerd Peter Thiel:

Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance is running for Senate as a savior of the Rust Belt. Insiders and experts say that reputation is unearned.

[⋯]

Experts on venture capital expressed concern about Vance’s potential conflicts, given his investments in everything from agriculture to defense. “There are a thousand red flags,” said Jeff Sohl, director of the University of New Hampshire’s Center for Venture Research. “You’re either going to be a really great VC and a bad senator, or a bad VC and a great senator. Or what will likely happen is you’re worse at both because you can't do both jobs.”

[⋯]

Impressed by Thiel’s focus on improving the economy through investments beyond software and IT, Vance approached the billionaire and expressed interest in working for him. “We sort of had a conversation that led to a job offer,” Vance said in the same interview. “That’s pretty much how I got here. There’s been no looking back.” Vance attributed “pretty much” his entire career to Peter’s mentorship. If not for Thiel, he said, “I probably would have been doing something else.”

J.D. Vance, the False Prophet of Blue America from The New Republic goes into greater detail:

The bestselling author of “Hillbilly Elegy” has emerged as the liberal media’s favorite white trash-splainer. But he is offering all the wrong lessons.

Sarah Jones November 17, 2016

J.D. Vance is the man of the hour, maybe the year. His memoir Hillbilly Elegy is a New York Times bestseller, acclaimed for its colorful and at times moving account of life in a dysfunctional clan of eastern Kentucky natives. It has received positive reviews across the board, with the Times calling it “a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass.” In the rise of Donald Trump, it has become a kind of Rosetta Stone for blue America to interpret that most mysterious of species: the economically precarious white voter.

Vance’s influence has been everywhere this campaign season, shaping our conception of what motivates these voters. And it is already playing a role in how liberals are responding to Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, which was accomplished in part by a defection of downscale whites from the Democratic Party. Appalachia overwhelmingly voted for Trump, and Vance has since emerged as one of the media’s favorite Trump explainers. The problem is that he is a flawed guide to this world, and there is a danger that Democrats are learning all the wrong lessons from the election.

Elegy is little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class. Vance’s central argument is that hillbillies themselves are to blame for their troubles. “Our religion has changed,” he laments, to a version “heavy on emotional rhetoric” and “light on the kind of social support” that he needed as a child. He also faults “a peculiar crisis of masculinity.” This brave new world, in sore need of that old time religion and manly men, is apparently to blame for everything from his mother’s drug addiction to the region’s economic crisis.

“We spend our way to the poorhouse,” he writes. “We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.”

And he isn’t interested in government solutions. All hillbillies need to do is work hard, maybe do a stint in the military, and they can end up at Yale Law School like he did. “Public policy can help,” he writes, “but there is no government that can fix these problems for us … it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

Set aside the anti-government bromides that could have been ripped from a random page of National Review, where Vance is a regular contributor. There is a more sinister thesis at work here, one that dovetails with many liberal views of Appalachia and its problems. Vance assures readers that an emphasis on Appalachia’s economic insecurity is “incomplete” without a critical examination of its culture. His great takeaway from life in America’s underclass is: Pull up those bootstraps. Don’t question elites. Don’t ask if they erred by granting people mortgages and lines of credit they couldn’t afford to repay. Don’t call it what it is — corporate deception — or admit that it plunged this country into one of the worst economic crises it’s ever experienced.

No wonder Peter Thiel, the almost comically evil Silicon Valley libertarian, endorsed the book. (Vance also works for Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management.) The question is why so many liberals are doing the same.

In many ways, I should appreciate Elegy. I grew up poor on the border of southwest Virginia and east Tennessee. My parents are the sort of god-fearing hard workers that conservatives like Vance fetishize. I attended an out-of-state Christian college thanks to scholarships, and had to raise money to even buy a plane ticket to attend grad school. My rare genetic disease didn’t get diagnosed until I was 21 because I lacked consistent access to health care. I’m one of the few members of my high school class who earned a bachelor’s degree, one of the fewer still who earned a master’s degree, and one of maybe three or four who left the area for good.

But unlike Vance, I look at my home and see a region abandoned by the government elected to serve it. My public high school didn’t have enough textbooks and half our science lab equipment didn’t work. Some of my classmates did not have enough to eat; others wore the same clothes every day. Sometimes this happened because their addict parents spent money on drugs. But the state was no help here either. Its solution to our opioid epidemic has been incarceration, not rehabilitation. Addicts with additional psychiatric conditions are particularly vulnerable. There aren’t enough beds in psychiatric hospitals to serve the region — the same reason Virginia State Sen. Creigh Deeds (D) nearly died at the hands of his mentally ill son in 2013.

And then there is welfare. In Elegy, Vance complains about hillbillies who he believes purchased cellphones with welfare funds. But data makes it clear that our current welfare system is too limited to lift depressed regions out of poverty.

Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer reported earlier this year that the number of families surviving on $2 a day grew by 130 percent between 1996 and 2011. Blacks and Latinos are still disproportionately more likely to live under the poverty line, but predominately white Appalachia hasn’t been spared the scourge either. And while Obamacare has significantly reduced the number of uninsured Americans, its premiums are still often expensive and are set to rise. Organizations like Remote Access Medical (RAM) have been forced to make up the difference: Back home, people start lining up at 4 a.m. for a chance to access RAM’s free healthcare clinics. From 2007 to 2011, the lifespans of eastern Kentucky women declined by 13 months even as they rose for women in the rest of the country.

According to the Economic Innovation Group, my home congressional district — Virginia’s Ninth — is one of the poorest in the country. Fifty-one percent of adults are unemployed; 19 percent lack a high school diploma. EIG estimates that fully half of its 722,810 residents are in economic distress.

As I noted in _Scalawag _earlier this year, the Ninth is not an outlier for the region. On EIG’s interactive map, central Appalachia is a sea of distress. If you are born where I grew up, you have to travel hundreds of miles to find a prosperous America. How do you get off the dole when there’s not enough work to go around? Frequently, you don’t. Until you lose your benefits entirely: The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF), passed by Bill Clinton and supported by Hillary Clinton, boots parents off welfare if they’re out of work.

At various points in this election cycle, liberal journalists have sounded quite a bit like Vance. “‘Economic anxiety’ as a campaign issue has always been a red herring,” Kevin Drum declared in Mother Jones. “If you want to get to the root of this white anxiety, you have to go to its roots. It’s cultural, not economic.”

At Vox, Dylan Matthews argued that while Trump voters deserved to be taken seriously, most were actually fairly well-off, with a median household income of $72,000. The influence of economic anxiety, he concluded, had been exaggerated.

Neither Drum or Matthews accounted for regional disparities in white poverty rates, and they failed to anticipate how those disparities would impact the election. Trump supporters were wealthier than Clinton supporters overall, but Trump’s victories in battleground states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio correlated to high foreclosure rates. In Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, Trump outperformed Mitt Romney with the white working class and flipped certain strategic counties red.

But Matthews was right in at least one sense: Trump Country has always been bigger than Appalachia and the white working class itself. You just wouldn’t know this from reading the news.

In March, Trump won nearly 70 percent of the Republican primary vote in Virginia’s Buchanan County. At the time, it was his widest margin of victory, and no one seemed surprised that this deeply conservative and impoverished pocket in southwest Virginia’s coal country handed him such decisive success. And no one seemed to realize Buchanan County had once been a Democratic stronghold.

A glossy Wall Street Journal package labeled it “The Place That Wants Donald Trump The Most” and promised readers that understanding Buchanan County was key to understanding the “source” of Trump’s popularity. The Financial Times profiled a local young man who fled this dystopia for the University of Virginia; it titled the piece “The Boy Who Escaped Trump Country.” And then there was Bloomberg View: “Coal County is Desperate for Donald Trump.” (The same piece said the county seat, Grundy, “looks as if it fell into a crevice and got stuck.”)

And then Staten Island went to the polls. A full 82 percent of Staten Island Republicans voted to give Trump the party’s nomination, wresting the title of Trumpiest County away from Buchanan. The two locations have little in common aside from Trump. Staten Island, population 472,621, is New York City’s wealthiest borough. Its median household income is $70,295, a figure not far off from the figure Matthews cites as the median income of the average Trump supporter. Buchanan County, population 23,597, has a median household income of $27,328 and the highest unemployment rate in Virginia. Staten Island, then, tracks closer to the Trumpist norm, but it received a fraction of the coverage.

No one wrote escape narratives about Staten Island. Few plumbed the psyches of suburban Trumpists. And no one examined why Democratic Buchanan County had become Republican. Instead, the media class fixated on the spectacle of white trash Appalachia, with Vance as its representative-in-exile.

“A preoccupation with penalizing poor whites reveals an uneasy tension between what Americans are taught to think the country promises — the dream of upward mobility — and the less appealing truth that class barriers almost invariably make that dream unobtainable,” Nancy Isenberg wrote in the preface to her book White Trash. If the system worked for you, you’re not likely to blame it for the plight of poor whites. Far easier instead to believe that poor whites are poor because they deserve to be.

But now we see the consequences of this class blindness. The media and the establishment figures who run the Democratic Party both had a responsibility to properly identify and indict the system’s failures. They abdicated that responsibility. Donald Trump took it up — if not always in the form of policy, then in his burn-it-all-down posture.

No analysis of Trumpism is complete without a reckoning of its white supremacy and misogyny. Appalachia is, like so many other places, a deeply racist and sexist place. It is not a coincidence that Trumpist bastions, from Buchanan County to Staten Island, are predominately white, or that Trump rode a tide of xenophobia to power. Economic hardship isn’t unique to white members of the working class, either. Blacks, Latinos, and Natives occupy a far more precarious economic position overall. White supremacy is indeed the overarching theme of Trumpism.

But that doesn’t mean we should repeat the establishment failures of this election cycle and minimize the influence of economic precarity. Trump is a racist and a sexist, but his victory is not due only to racism or sexism any more than it is due only to classism: He still won white women and a number of counties that had voted for Obama twice. This is not a simple story, and it never really has been.

We don’t need to normalize Trumpism or empathize with white supremacy to reach these voters. They weren’t destined to vote for Trump; many were Democratic voters. They aren’t destined to stay loyal to him in the future. To win them back, we must address their material concerns, and we can do that without coddling their prejudices. After all, America’s most famous progressive populist — Bernie Sanders — won many of the counties Clinton lost to Trump.

There’s danger ahead if Democrats don’t act quickly. The Traditionalist Worker’s Partyhas already announced plans for an outreach push in greater Appalachia. The American Nazi Party promoted “free health care for the white working class” in literature it distributed in Missoula, Montana, last Friday. If Democrats have any hope of establishing themselves as the populist alternative to Trump, they can’t allow American Nazis to fall to their left on health care for any population.

By electing Trump, my community has condemned itself to further suffering. The lines for RAM will get longer. Our schools will get poorer and our children hungrier. It will be one catastrophic tragedy out of the many a Trump presidency will generate. So yes, be angry with the white working class’s political choices. I certainly am; home will never feel like home again.

But don’t emulate Vance in your rage. Give the white working class the progressive populism it needs to survive, and invest in the areas the Democratic Party has neglected. Remember that bootstraps are for people with boots. And elegies are no use to the living.

Against Hillbilly Elegy

I was mad about Hillbilly Elegy early, largely because I am such an enthusaist for Joe Bageant, who explores the logics of angry rural poor whites much better.

Hillbilly Ethnography at The New Inquiry:

Vance’s view of Appalachian culture feels more opportunistic than sincerely white nationalistic. It allows him to portray Appalachian and Rust Belt poverty as an exceptional phenomenon, rather than a symptom of broader trends that could not be so easily ascribed to culture. As such, it conveniently justifies the existence of his book. This opportunism makes the book’s racial determinism all the more insidious: it makes it more palatable to audiences that might normally be on guard against explicit white nationalism.

A long Twitter thread from Linda Tirado.

I’m a couple beers and a whiskey in, and I report on white supremacy, it’s one of my beats, so maybe it’s just hitting my ears a bit weird to hear about how this one particular kind of white people are the group of people who haven’t wholesale abandoned tradition and morality. You guys this is the sixth paragraph. This is gonna be like Ivanka where I told you I’d do the first chapter and then it was like half the book long.

Hillbillies Need No Elegy — a long essay about unhappy responses to Vance’s misrepresentations.

When Hillbilly Elegy seemed to be all anyone talked about, and when I realized people associated that book with me because I’m Appalachian, I read it with eagerness and curiosity. And though Vance’s story was different from my own, I read with empathy for his unique experience. But he crossed a line when he began to use “we” instead of “I.” I didn’t like what he said about “us.” Moreover, I didn’t like the idea that any individual could speak for a 13-state region. Many people from Appalachia were angry about the book. They didn’t like the idea of Vance as a spokesperson for Appalachia, especially one who blamed the poor of our region for their poverty.

I didn’t want to silence Vance, and I didn’t want to be mean-spirited. Instead, I wanted to follow Roger May’s lead and complicate any singular view simply by including multiple ones. I wanted to create a chorus of voices, “each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,” to borrow from Walt Whitman’s view of place.

So I read and listened, and tapped into the dense and rich and longstanding tradition of Appalachian writers. Along with Anthony Harkins, I collected voices of Appalachia — to create a snapshot of a place and a time that makes it impossible to believe the idea Appalachia is dead and in need of an elegy. Roger May not only inspired this work, but he collaborated with us to include photography from the region. The result, Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, is a book that intends to offer context for some of the claims Vance makes in his book when it moves beyond memoir, and to pass the mic to a wider range of writers, poets, photographers, activists, and artists who make Appalachia a place far too complex to capture and far too dynamic to die. As long as we keep our eyes open, we will continue to find an Appalachia that evolves, and to build on a strong history of activism and art — and pushback.

Just spend some time with Looking at Appalachia, and you’ll see that. Read writers from that place. Study art from the mountains. Listen to the Trillbilly Workers Party podcast. Follow the work of Y’ALL (Young Appalachian Leaders and Learners) and the STAY Project. Check out Appalshop and their Appalachian Media Institute, celebrating their 50^th anniversary this year. Read David Joy and Bell Hooks and Robert Gipe and the Affrilachian Poets and Silas House and see how they don’t sound one bit alike, even though they’re all Appalachian.

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

In 2016 headlines declared Appalachia ground zero for America’s “forgotten tribe” of white working class voters. Journalists flocked to the region to extract sympathetic profiles of families devastated by poverty, abandoned by establishment politics, and eager to consume cheap campaign promises. Following the election, demystifying Appalachia and locating the roots of its dysfunction quickly became a national industry, shoring up the success of J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy and the author’s rise to fame as the media’s favorite working-class whisperer with broad appeal to liberals and conservatives alike. Personal anecdotes that demonstrated the enduring failures of American progress spoken through the mouthpiece of colorful and bereaved mountain folk became its own genre of election writing – the “Trump Country” piece – and in its creation reduced the region’s rich and complex history to a series of character studies.

Fascism: propaganda, persuasion, support

From the newsletter of Jeff The Undertow Sharlet. Wise on several levels, including in the use of “scare quotes” and the reference to myth, and there is more if you follow the link to his newsletter.

With darkness Trump became president, took over a party, and now threatens the world. Why does anyone imagine he wants to “resist” it? Why do they still pretend darkness can’t win?

It isn’t inevitable — but stopping it requires seeing it. Evaluating Trump's speech according to democracy’s laws of physics makes as much sense as declaring what we don’t know about black holes “impossible.” Fascism exerts a different gravity. The speech fuses the base; it’s the "confidence” of the base that draws in “undecideds.” That’s how fascism “works.” It doesn't have to be how fascism wins. But defeating it, I suspect, means at least a larger number of us discarding our reassurance narratives. Looking at the awfulness dead on, & fighting that, not what we wish it was.

Trump is a grotesque; he broadcasts, and only some can receive such a signal. But many of those aren’t, in everyday life, grotesques themselves. It’s their belief that persuades some. Their confidence. Their delusion. Trump speeches are for them, not for undecideds. Telling yourself no undecided could be drawn into Trumpism's obscene narcissism is by definition self-deception. The fact that someone's undecided, nine years in, means that they're not immune. They haven't caught Trumpism yet, but they aren't vaxxed, either.

It’s also important to emphasize that “undecideds” are a vestige of a vanished political order. It’s not that they don’t matter; but they matter much less. Trump’s campaign hacks may still care, but I think Trump knows he has two paths to power. The first isn’t through undecideds, it’s the activation of the base. If his base roars and democracy — that’s what I’m calling the other option, whoever represents it — mutters, he takes power.

If you're reading this you’ve probably read the reporting on the extensive legal groundwork Trumpism has established not to “contest” the election, as MSM, still operating pre-2016, puts it, but to overthrow it. But thatvs only part of that picture. Trumpism is a many-headed beast. Wonks do the legal stuff. Trump does the myth stuff. “Lies” is an accurate term, too, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t express how the lies work. “Myth” speaks to belief. The myth stuff right now is preparing the public for overthrowing the election if he loses. Preparing his followers to believe it justified, attempting to prepare the rest of us to acquiesce.

And yet, if Trumpism has multiple means of seizing power, that means there are multiple ways we can push it back. But only if we let ourselves see it coming.

Ready Player One

Damien Walter, whose commentaries on science fiction I admire, proposes ten SF novels which belong on any list of The Hundred Best Novels Of The 21^st Century (So Far). It is an interesting list, but I was surprised to see Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One among them. Walter observes:

Take a look at the world. It looks far more like RP1 than any other SF novel. The fact the author has limited self awareness and thinks the nightmare he depicts is keeeewl is another issue.

A striking point. The world of Ready Player One is a near-future of environmental and economic catastrophe in which people escape the misery of their lives through elaborate virtual reality games. Golden Age SFF writers would have given us heroes overthrowing this dystopia. Cyberpunks would have inverted that with antiheroes desperately navigating the horrors. Many SFF writers — and “literary” writers exercising the conceit — could have offered it as satire. These kinds of moves animate comparably prophetic worldbuilding in 20^th century SFF from writers like John Stand On Zanzibar Brunner, Octavia Parable Of The Sower Butler, Bruce Distraction Sterling, or Neal Snow Crash Stephenson.

RP1 breaks from those traditions in treating its world as uninteresting, little more than an enabling conceit for the virtual environment where Cline really wants to focus. This disinterest in his own sensitive prophetic antennae is weird.

Cline wants to give us, instead, the least interesting way SFF dialogues with itself.

All genre works interact with the meta-text of other works; I consider this the defining quality of “genre”. When a western introduces a sheriff, a horror story introduces a vampire, or an SF story introduces a time machine, it takes advantage of reader expectations about how these work from other stories. This can provide storytelling convenience, saving a bit of exposition … or it can support much more powerful effects.

Walter explores a deep version of this in his long video-essay on Iain M. Banks’ Culture stories, which are bursting with general space opera tropes and allusions to deep cut specific works from the SFF “canon”. If one knows those sources, the Culture has fun playing with old favorite toys, but that is candy coating on its sharp critiques of ideas behind earlier works, its use of the depth behind those elements to add complexity to the stories’ themes, and more.

RP1 has a simpler, frothier project. It reflects a style exemplified by John Myers Myers’ 1949 novel Silverlock, a picaresque in which the protagonist stumbles into encounters with various characters from history, myth, and literature. The story does serve a theme — the titular protagonist grows into a better person through a very direct encounter with Literature, as when piggish Shandon Silverlock encounters Circe from The Odyssey — but the main thing is having fun going oh, I get it!

I do not see Cline attempting even Silverlock’s modest thematic payload. The Hey I Recognize That thrill is the whole thing. Its structure as a puzzle-box mystery-thriller — in which the reader “plays along” to see if they can decode the clues presented in the story before the characters do — is a cunning move to amp up the effect. Unlike an Agatha Christie mystery, the clues are not all part of the text; one must know all the stuff it references to connect the dots. To keep from losing the reader, RP1 goes wide rather than deep, as much pop as geeky, referencing movies, teevee, and games which it expects Generation X geeks to all know.

Credit where credit is due: Cline’s love for the material shines through, and the puzzles are pretty good. As I am a GenX geek, the first few chapters of RP1 tickled me. I put down RP1 at that point, disappointed that it offered nothing else, but I cannot not fault people who wanted more of that than I did.

The loose film adaptation delivers fun popcorn entertainment by borrowing this playbook. It exercises Spielbert’s gift for kinetic and fantastical filmmaking, uses more familiar references, simplifies the puzzles down to just enough to drive events, and is a bit ennobled by a subtle performance by Mark Rylance cast as the MacGuffin.

That’s all fine as far as it goes, but I find it weird and troubling that Cline’s box of popcorn produced such a sensation. I wish I could take innocent, adolescent joy in RP1’s story of a fan whose fascination with things I like enables him to fix the media environment he inhabits and win glory, fortune, and (of course) a hawt girlfriend along the way. But I cannot. I think we must see RP1 reflecting a broad pop-geekkultur movement which avoids grappling with the kinds of juicy, challenging ideas available in SFF, a movement which so prefers superficial entertainment & affirmation that it expresses hostility to anything else. Smarter people than me have extensively criticized the cultural politics lurking in the book, and its attitude has realworld consequences: the Gamergate movemement of geeks zealously “protecting” geekkultur hurt real people in real life.

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A follow-up from Damien Walter:

Imagine a work of fiction written by a citizen of Oceania

who thinks Big Brother is keeeewel

and is a “fun read” in the way Nineteen Eighty Four never could be.

So, some folks questioned my selection of Ready Player One as a “great” book of the 21^st century.

Some thoughts.

I really dislike RP1. I viscerally despise the entire construct of “geek culture” it panders to. To borrow a one liner from Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western culture, “I think it would be a very good idea”

But. To think critically about a matter like the greatest SF of the 21^st century means thinking beyond my own preferences.

I strongly suspect that Ernest Cline had no more serious intention writing RP1 than to 1) indulge all the nerdish things he likes and 2) make himself the UberNerd.

And he succeeded on both counts.

So the “greatness” of RP1 wasn’t intended by its author. But nonetheless, deliberately or not, Ernest Cline wrote the perfect primer on the postmodern dystopia that anyone who grew up in the 1980s or later was born into.

The horror of postmodernity expressed by Jean Baudrillard was that even our inner lives were no longer our own. Immersed in the mass media simulacra, our most precious memories are mere imprints of mass culture commodities.

Cline's obsessive presentation of 1980s “geek culture” icons — that he presents with zero irony — is nonetheless a very effective representation of the postmodern horror. There really are billions of us today imprinted, not with unique memories of reality, but with mass manufactured dreams of time travelling Deloreans.

Of course PKD and Gibson did this all much better. But Neuromancer is a book that will always be read by the punks and hackers who already get it.

Ready Player One is a book about the matrix

written by a man who, even if he escaped the matrix, would demand to be put back in

for the poor souls still trapped in the matrix.

I think that qualifies it for greatness. Of a kind.

The Cosby Rule

We do not just fail to combat Missing Stairs doing sexual harassment and worse. We systemtically support predatory individuals. This is part of what feminists are talking about when we talk about rape culture.

As a result, many people understandably turn to trial-by-social-media as the only available way to get any kind of justice. I respect and support that; it is all too often the only available alternative to No Justice At All.

I confess to uneasiness with people who seem to embrace trial-by-social-media as not just a necessary expedient but a positive good.

In particular, I consider it important to take care with what we take as established fact without rigorous legal or journalistic support. We must never suggest that a false accusation is likely — they are vanishingly rare — but they are plausible, and exaggeration of the severity of wrongs is not just plausible but common when social media shitstorm dynamics really get moving.

We must never let that caution undercut our support for accusers. We must always give accusers our vigorous support: taking their accounts seriously, protecting them from harassment, giving them resources & reassurance through the painful process of facing trauma in public. Accusers need this because of how monstrously difficult we make it to make a public accusation of sexual misbehavior. The community needs this because it supports the countless other survivors of sexual harassment, assault, and worse.

But I do wish we would back away from expressing support for accusers with the aphorism “believe victims”: because radical credulity misunderstands the dynamics of trauma and creates an invitation for bad actors to stir up shitstorms.

There is no contradiction between supporting accusers and resisting shitstorms by dawdling to judgment. We have time. Public information usually gets stronger over time. The truth will out.

But sometimes the public does not have good enough information. I have a rubric in those situations I call “The Cosby Rule”:

1. A single allegation plausibly could be just bullshit. Support the accuser, and keep a weather eye on the accused from now on, but leave the pitchforks and torches at home.
2. Two allegations demonstrate that there is some there there, but exaggeration is plausible. Support the accusers, and keep the accused away from power, but hold off on treating the accused as a monster.
3. With three or more allegations, one can feel confident in knowing there is fire behind the smoke. Take at least the weakest allegation as solid.

If the accused really is a villain and we support their accusers, a lot more than three allegations will usually turn up.

Neil Gaiman

I found a post with a very helpful review of the allegations against Neil Gaiman, smart about the messiness of the sourcing and what we can glean despite that.

To say Master was imperfectly executed is an understatement, but I’m grateful for it, both as a means of hopefully helping to ensure that Gaiman is held accountable for his behaviour, and for its willingness to explore the “gray area” of consent that so often impedes the police, courts, and other media outlets from helping survivors in any meaningful way.

I have not yet had the heart to listen to Master, the Tortoise podcast about Gaiman. Given what I have read, and how it evidently comes from the worst people, it seems plausible that it casts Gaiman as worse than he is. It also seems implausible that there is no there there.

Gaiman is far from the first frustrating example of allegations of sexual assault clouded by irresponsible reporting, social media shitstorm dynamics, and a weak vocabulary of Degrees Of Badness. We need to do better.

There have long been rumours about Gaiman’s liaisons with young fans. Skeevy, but short of predatory. The most generous-to-Gaiman reading of these new reports is much worse than that … and still not rape. Experience teaches us to hesitate to embrace a generous reading. If the worst is true, we can expect more survivors to come forward, which would be very clarifying. Part of Doing Better is letting things unfold as we sift those ambiguities … for a while.

I am a fan of Warren Ellis’ work. After a prudent hesitation to believe the worst, I accepted that the worst was true. Fuck that guy. I am a fan of Gaiman’s work. The worst need not be true of Gaiman to get to Fuck That Guy; there is room for a lot of Bad which is short of As Bad As Warren Ellis. Part of Doing Better is taking seriously how Less Bad really can be less bad … and still bad.

Gaiman’s accusers may have gotten played by the Tortoise podcast people, but they undoubtedly suffered from their encounter with Gaiman, and no doubt they are suffering from the pressures of coming forward. Part of Doing Better is giving them our wholehearted support, right now, before drawing firm conclusions about Gaiman.

My prudent hope — that Gaiman is not as bad as some have already concluded he is — wears thin, but it is worth letting more dust settle. Social media shitorms are destructive. There is plenty of time ahead to say Fuck That Guy, if it proves warranted. Part of Doing Better is combatting shitstorm dynamics, which I want this post to do.

I am sweating through this west coast heat wave, but it sure feels cold out there.

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I’m going to start accumulating commentaries I find useful.

A bracing word from @rabbit.in.your.garden:

Two public victims … so far. Previously, widely admired by fans & other writers. A nice guy. I unequivocally believe the victims. One victim was his child’s nanny. The other a fan he met at a signing. The nanny he claims suffered from a mental illness that creates false memories. Let’s talk about that.

He claims the 23 yo nanny, his employee hired to care for his child was actively suffering from a mental illness associated with false memories. First, this doesn’t sound like the person a responsible, loving parent hires to watch their child. Second, if she did suffer from this illness, she was therefore incapable of true consent.

I have to interject that this last point is slippery. It is plausible that her memory is not reliable but he did not realize it at the time. But fergawdsake …

She was also his live-in employee, 40 years younger which also creates a barrier to true consent.

NG, by his public statements, admits to a sexual relationship with a woman who by his statements could not truly consent. As an employee, did she really feel she could safely say no to this rich, powerful man who has entered her bathroom while she was bathing on her 1^st day of employment? The dynamic suggests she could not. Even if she could, she states he did things to her without consent, which is definitely assault. Coupled with his claims, that makes NG undeniably a man who commits sexual assault.

This is why women choose the bear. We know the bear is dangerous. We know how to act around the bear to reduce our risk of harm. This successful, married man was an unexpected danger. He should have been safe but he wasn’t.

Jonathan Fortin:

Stray thoughts on the Neil Gaiman allegations:

• Admission of bias: he's my favorite author, so I'm naturally heartbroken. Then again, all my other favorite creators have been cancelled, and it's an open secret that Gaiman sleeps with his much younger fans, so I kind of expected this. Pains me nonetheless.
• Worth nothing: Tortoise Media, the only source for this story, is a far right anti-LGBT podcast made by the sister of Boris Johnson (basically the Tr*mp of the UK, who Gaiman has been highly critical of). It’s also interesting that this debuted literally right before the UK elections. However, this doesn’t mean the women who came forward are lying.
• Indeed, according to the podcast, Gaiman even admitted to intimacy in situations that definitely weren’t appropriate (such as “making out” with his son’s 23-year-old nanny in the bath on the literal first day of her job). Even if it was consensual (and again, it might not have been), it’s still extremely sketchy. This is a famous multi-millionaire author in his 60’s engaging in sexual contact with his 23-year old employee. With or without consent, the power dynamic there is nothing to sneeze at.
• As someone who also once had a relationship with a public figure, I know first hand how intimidating that can be. It can be hard to say “no” and deny them what they want. The apologist in me wonders if maybe Gaiman wasn’t even aware of how these women actually felt, but it’s certainly also possible that he knew perfectly well.
• As a reminder: SA survivors rarely gain anything from coming out. It’s very, very rare for people to make this shit up.
• Another reminder: SA can absolutely happen even in established relationships where there was consent before. You can text someone that you love them and consent to everything one day, and feel quite differently the next.
• It is worth noting that right wing outlets are eager to paint any BDSM or sexual deviancy as SA or abuse. It’s also worth noting that predators absolutely exist in the BDSM scene just like everywhere else.
• Claiming “she was suffering from a condition associated with false memories, even though her medical history does not support this” is really, really not a good look.
• If this is a pattern for Gaiman, other women will likely come forward. I will not be surprised if they do.

“AI”, students, and epistemic crisis

Weird interaction with a student this week. They keep coming up with weird “facts” (“Greek is actually a combination of four other languages”) that left me baffled. I said let’s look this stuff up together, and they said OK, I’ll open a search bar, and they opened … Ch*tGPT. And I was like “this is not a search bar” and they were like “yes it is, you can search for anything in here”.

The thing that made me feel crazy is like, every kid that’s using this as a browser is getting new bespoke false “facts”. This isn’t “a widespread misconception about X that stems from how it’s taught in schools.” Each individual kid is now hooked into a Nonsense Machine.

With the “widespread misconception about X” you can start at a baseline. Like, OK, in tenth grade we talk about X thing from history, and that leaves us with some misguided concepts about X, but we can correct that as students get broader understandings of the world. But with this, each child is getting unique wrong facts they are sure are correct … because they did what we told them to do! They “looked it up”! They got it from somewhere! It’s not a kid making up a belief on hearsay and assumption … it’s something they think they learned.

This kid was extremely combative with me, and I understood why. I was sitting in front of him telling him that the internet, a computer, technology, all these supposedly authoritative things … were wrong. And that I, one person, was right. He basically couldn’t believe me. He decided that I was simply a teacher who’d made a mistake. He could check it, after all! He could look it up! He could find the real facts. I obviously hadn’t done that, I was just an adult who’d decided I was smarter than him. Hence the defensiveness. Like I said: I understood.

It was so fucking rough. I did my best, but I am one person trying to work against a campaign of misinformation so vast that it fucking terrifies me. This kid is being set up for a life lived entirely inside the hall of mirrors.

Transcribed from Twitter. The author took it down because of harassment, so I am not going to point to who they were. Not that I know anything about them anyway. So you have to make your own tricky call about whether and how it is relevant.

Another fashy pipeline

Al Sweigart observes:

I totally see how self-improvement cults can be a pipeline for fascism. Fascism is rooted in social dominance, which in turn is rooted in sadomasochism: sadism for the dominator, masochism for the dominated. A self-improvement cult can become a vehicle for inflicting pain on yourself, where the goal is eliminating weakness, where "weakness" is defined as self-care, empathy for others, and non-toxic forms of masculinity.

For those who don’t quite see it, here’s a (very) rough outline:

1. The conservative mindset is based on hierarchy. There’s always a bigger fish. (And “you” don’t have to be winning. It's enough to self-identify with the winning team.)
2. This view means you don’t measure by doing well, you measure by doing better than others. Better than “those people.”
3. This promotes zero sum thinking. Good things for “those people” must have come at a cost to you and your group. There are no win-win situations and compromise means losing.
4. Therefore, good things never just happen. No pain, no gain. Focus on your individual improvement; solidarity with other people for systemic change and collective benefit is liberal bullshit. They just want free stuff (from you.) If you are feeling pain, you must be achieving something in return. You must. That’s how the world works.
5. You learn to ignore your pain. In fact, pain is a good thing and to be expected. Self-flagellate to signal your virtue. The wages of sin is death. Softness and mercy are weakness. My dad smacked me around as a kid, and it made me the man I am today.
6. You learn to ignore other people’s pain. Practice disabling your empathy. Practice dehumanizing the other. Hey, if you think about it, they’d do the same to you.
7. Arbeit macht frei

(Yes, it’s more complicated than that. Yes, plenty of evil has been done in the name of “the greater good.” But there’s a reason there’s so much right-wing overlap between self-improvement gurus, Alex Jones selling brain pill supplements, MLMs / crypto ponzis promising “financial freedom”, Make America Great Again rhetoric, and plain ol’ racism and religious bigotry.)

Tapeheads

This is a school of magic for characters in Unknown Armies, “an occult game about broken people conspiring to fix the world”, which is my personal favorite tabletop roleplaying game. It is directly inspired by my favorite horror movie, Videodrome and also relevant to the micro-genre which includes Archive 81, The Ring, and the V/H/S series. I created it for a campaign set circa 1990.

Lemnismancy (documentarian)

a.k.a. Tapeheads, Cassette Cowboys, O'Blivions, Videographers

Whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality, and reality is less than television.

— Professor Brian O’Blivion

Lemnismancy is actually a cluster of practices with variants on charging / taboo / spells. The magical idea animating all lemnismancy is that for most people, what they see on television outcompetes reality itself. Videotape is a magical fetish which represents this TV experience which tapeheads can use for magic.

This particular strain of Lemnismancy — the Documentarian school — focuses on emotionally significant real human experiences, and primarily manipulates memory and attention. One charges by watching tapes of important events in real people’s lives, and breaks taboo if one sees broadcast television. 

Stats

Blast style

Lemnismancy has no freehand Blast, but one can make tapes which attack physically using specific spells, below.

Minor charge

Be the first Tapehead to spend twenty minutes watching a tape recording of a memorable event from someone’s life: something like a first date or a fierce argument or getting a raise or breaking their leg. 

The tape can be a copy, but the tapehead must be the first tapehead to pull a charge from any copy; once the event has been used for a charge, any tape of that event becomes useless for more charges. (In this it is a bit like Cliomancy.) A tape can contain more than one event, but watching each event only works once. If half a dozen or more people are all shown in the segment with the event, and the event is memorable for all of them, the segment is worth two charges.

Significant charge

Be the first tapehead to spend an hour watching a tape recording of a major event from someone’s life: getting married, graduating college, a gunfight, a serious car crash. 

The rules for copies, consuming charges, multiple events on a single tape, and double charges are the same as for minor charges.

Major charge

Be the first tapehead to spend thirty minutes watching a tape recording of a world event of enough significance that millions will be able to answer “where were you when you saw that?”: the JFK assasination, the Challenger explosion, the fall of the Berlin wall.

Taboo

Get a clear look at a TV screen showing current broadcast television. For a tapehead, the cathode ray tube is for showing tapes, not for showing “TV”. 

Random magic domain

Memories, attention, videotapes, and TV displays. 

Spells

Most spells take effect when people watch a TV playing a tape prepared by the tapehead, generally in a lair of recording & playback equipment. Such spell tapes can only be used once; the tape can only run for as long as the tape format permits (20 minutes for a small ¾" cassette, or up to six hours for a VHS cassette). It takes twice the runtime of the tape to make a spell tape. The tapehead rolls to see if the tape creation process worked at the end of the time spent making the tape; if the spell fails, the tapehead of course keeps the charges and can try again, but has lost the time it takes.

A spell tape can be stopped and started, but once ejected it becomes inert, without magickal effects, unless otherwise specified in the spell description.

Minor spells

Plenty Of Tapes — 1 minor charge

The tapehead gets an infallible hunch about the nearest / most convenient way to get their hands on a tape.

Plugged In — 1 minor charge / effect

Ordinarily a tapehead manipulates tapes with a bunch of equipment, and plays or records them normally, but if necessary they can spend charges to forgo the gear. Each of these effects costs one minor charge; they can stack (but that gets expensive fast!)

• Record onto a tape, or play from a tape onto a CRT, by holding the tape in the tapehead’s hands and “plugging in” the machine cable to the tapehead’s mouth (or other orifice, because Cronenberg).
• Enact the effect of a tape using a player but not CRT, again by “plugging in” the cable to the tapehead’s mouth. The tapehead’s face serves as the CRT; though the tapehead’s face will look normal (rather than playing tape images), looking at their face has the same magical effects as if looking at a screen playing the tape.  
• Omit the wire from either of the wired effects above. This can connect things within [tapehead skill] feet. This effect will also switch on and power a device which is switched off … or even unplugged.
• Play the content of a tape directly into the mind of an individual the tapehead is touching, forgoing a CRT. Note that this still requires a tape player, unless the tapehead also spends additional charges.
• Instantaneously record a tape, or produce an enchanted tape’s playback effect.
• Erase a tape, magical or otherwise, without any equipment.

Note how this spell enables tapeheads to deliver a spell without resorting to equipment at all … if they have three extra minor charges to burn. 

Duplicate — 1+ minor charge

A tapehead may create a perfect duplicate of any existing tape, mundane or magical, in just a few seconds. This costs one minor charge … plus whatever charges necessary to create the original tape if it has magical effects. (Note that this enables a tapehead to duplicate a magical tape even if they cannot create those magical effects themselves!) 

The tapehead ordinarily uses recording equipment to do this, but may employ Plugged In effects at additional cost.

Mixtape — 1+ minor charge

A tapehead may decant charges they are carrying back into tapes. The charges can go into any tape, not just one which originally provided them.

This is time-consuming: it takes the same time to capture charges back into tapes that it takes to take them out (20 minutes for each minor charge, an hour for each significant charge) … and then the tapehead will eventually need to spend the time yet again to take the charges back out. And one minor charge is burned casting the spell to do the transfer. 

I Am A Camera — 1 minor charge

Create a tape of events the tapehead witnessed. This tape does not present the tapehead’s memories, it presents what the tapehead actually saw and heard as if they were a skilled and careful camera operator using very good equipment.

Seeing That Fucked Me Up — 1+ minor charge

Creates a tape of images so disturbing that it forces a check on the Madness meter of the tapehead’s choice on anyone who views it (except the creator) at a rank equal to the number of charges the tapehead spent.

Later viewings are still distressing but do not force a stress check.

The Screen Is Distracting — 1 minor charge

Creates a tape of a video so fascinating that anyone who sees it playing on a screen will not be able to look away for the duration of the tape, and will be preoccupied enough to suffer at least -20% for any actions they try to take while watching.

If a person does not know to try to avoid looking at the screen may go one round in its presence without being affected if they fail a Notice check, but they will be affected the following round. People who know to try to avoid the screen must succeed at a Notice check each round they are in its presence to not look; after they have failed once they cannot avoid it again.

This can be applied to a tape with any content. People who watched it during the first, enchanted viewing will have very good retention of the contents of the tape — including things which were on it before or after the segment they actually watched — such that they can recall even the smallest and most fleeting details with a Mind roll.

Reach Into The Screen — 1 minor charge

While any tape is playing, a tapehead may pass any object small enough to fit through the frame of the screen into the video, or to retrieve an item which any tapehead has placed in this way. 

Such a tape does not suffer the usual single-use behavior of tapes; it may be replayed repeatedly. The object will appear in the video starting at the point in playback when the tapehead placed it. It is usually possible to deposit the object just out of frame at the moment when it it is placed, such that its sudden appearance is not immediately conspicuous … but if, for example, a table appears in the recording, the view pans away a bit for a moment during which a tapehead places an object onto the table, and then the view pans back, the new item on the table may well be inexplicable or at least puzzling, such that an Unnatural check may be required. 

A tapehead may retrieve an object they themselves placed by reaching into the video at any point. A tapehead watching a tape with an object placed by another tapehead will always be able to recognize such objects, and can retreive them, but doing so at a point in playback when the object is not actually onscreen will require spending an extra minor charge.

Other people witnessing a tapehead performing this operation in either direction must make a rank-3 Unnatural check.

The Screen Is A Window — 2 minor charges

Creates a pair of tapes which can be used for communication. 

If both tapes are played simultaneously, the TVs act as a videoconferencing system. Nothing can block the “signal” between them. Each CRT acts as a camera sending to the other tape; it behaves like a broadcast-quality camera with a skilled operator, even intelligently zooming and directing its attention, though it must take a viewpoint from “inside” the screen. Likewise, on TVs with speakers, the speakers act like microphones for the tape on the other end, acting like high-quality broadcast mic arrays in the hands of skilled operators, capable of capturing the whole sound of the room, as directional mics pointed at people, and such.

As usual, if one or the other tape runs out the spell effect ends.

Both tapes retain the messages from the other side after they have been used. This can be harvested for charges if they capture a relevant event.

If a tapehead is near a Screen Is A Window tape whose pair is being played, they will “hear” it ring like a telephone and know what is happening.

Significant spells

Retina Of The Mind’s Eye — 1+ significant charges

Enacts a minor spell which would require a prepared tape, without the prepared tape, by spending significant charges instead of minor charges. Effects which require targets to look at a CRT require them to be able to see the tapehead’s eyes.

Video Mail — 1 significant charge

Creates a tape of the tapehead which can hold a conversation with the person who plays it, as if the tapehead were there, knowing what they knew and thinking how they thought at the time when they prepared the tape.

Watching such a tape is a rank-1 Unnatural check if one is familiar with the Video Mail spell, and a rank-4 Unnatural check if one is not. Unfamiliar viewer(s) will presume that the Video Mail tape is some kind of surprising but cunning trick until the tape has concluded, at which point they will suffer the psychological shock as they realize that the conversation was impossible.

A Video Mail tape will only show static if played again, unless the tapehead obtains the tape and plays it back, which will then reveal the conversation to them. If the tapehead does not recover the tape, they will not know what took place in the conversation.

Reach Out Of The Screen — 1 significant charge

A programmed version of Reach Into The Screen which will deliver an object the tapehead has placed into it, if triggered by a condition programmed onto the tape when it is created. (For example, “if no one is looking at the screen”, “if played by Jane”, “if played inside an office building”, “if someone says the word ‘Videodrome’”.)

The tape can only produce the object according to its program the first time it is played. Thereafter, only the tapehead who created it can remove it, using Reach Into The Screen.

While playing, the tape just shows a series of shots of the object in an array of settings: on a table, on the sidewalk, inside a refrigerator, and so forth.

Subliminal Messages — 1+ significant charge

Produces a tape which gives viewers a belief or compulsion of ten words or less, programmed by the tapehead when they create it. The compulsion has a level equivalent to the number of charges used to create it.

Characters given a compulsion automatically break the compulsion if they face a conflict between the compulsion and a shock check of the same rank of the compulsion spell or higher. (Thus it is hard to program someone to kill; in Videodrome Bianca O’Blivion spent a lot on turning Max Renn into an insane assassin.) 

Characters may also resist a compulsion with a Self check. If they succeed they simply break the compulsion. If they fail they must either obey the compulsion or accept a freakout & failed notch in disobeying it, and the compulsion remains in place.

While playing, the tape can show anything the tapehead chooses.

You Are The Camera — 1-2 significant charge(s)

A tapehead may produce a tape of events which another person witnessed, as in I Am A Camera. 

If the subject is cooperating:

• The subject takes a rank-3 Unnatural check; they will not have a fight/flee/freakout shock response but they will face adding failed/hardened notches
• This costs the tapehead 1 significant charge

If the subject is not cooperating (say, in the room while the tapehead fusses with their editing gear):

• The subject must be prompted to think about the memory, though not to concentrate on it
• The subject does not face an Unnatural check …  unless they see the tape later, at which point they take both a rank-3 Unnatural check and a rank-2 Self check 
• It costs the tapehead 2 significant charges

While playing, the tape shows the events the person witnessed, as if they were very skillfully using a good camera at their point of view.

Explosions Are Good TV — 1 significant charge

Creates a tape which effectively makes the CRT playing it into a bomb. 

The tapehead sets the bomb power when creating the tape, to a maximum governed by their Lemnismancy skill. The tapehead may either accept their skill as that maximum, or gamble on a roll against their skill; if they roll under, they can flip-flop the roll if that produces a more powerful bomb, while if they roll over they must accept the sum of the dice as the maximum.

The explosion does [bomb power]+2d10-2d10 damage to people within the max damage radius of [bomb power] feet of the explosion, -1 damage/foot beyond the maximum damage radius.

The explosion may be placed at any point in the tape’s playback, and this may be combined with other effects on the same tape in the lead up to the explosion. But only a real asshole would combine The Screen Is Distracting with Explosions Are Good TV, right?

The tape may show anything up to the point where the explosion occurs. Technically the moment of truth shows an explosion, but no one will ever see it.

The Screen Is A Gun — 2 significant charges

A weaponized variant on Reach Out Of The Screen.

The tapehead places a gun into the tape. The gun will shoot at people it has been programmed to attack by the tapehead when creating the tape. (“John Smith”, “anyone but me”, “cops”, or “anyone threatening me or my friends”, for example.) The tape has Shoot skill equal to the tapehead’s Lemnismancer skill and all of the characteristics of the gun used to create it: max damage, ammo, range. If the gun has been used in previous crimes, police will be able to do a ballistics match.

When played, the tape shows anonymous hands holding the gun, against an indistinct background.

Major spells

Decant the tapehead’s consciousness into a library of tapes, like Brian O’Blivion in Videodrome, so that they extend their consciousness to any screen where one of their tapes is playing, and become effectively immortal so long as tapes of them still remain.

Create a tape which completely rewrites the minds and bodies of people who see it.

Create a tape which absorbs someone bodily into a permanent Video Mail tape.

Make events in a tape a part of everyone’s memories.

Edit the events in every copy of a given tape … including people’s memories of seeing it, written reports informed by it, et cetera.

Dan Secord

Dan, the character for whom I created this school for an UA 2E campaign, is a 36 year old tapehead, freelance video editor, maker of odd little art videofilms, and bassist for local Eagles cover band Hotel California. He lives in San Carlos, a fictional city inspired by Santa Cruz, California, in 1990.

Stats & skills

40 BODY — Scrawny		60 SPEED — Deft
General Athletics 15% Fight A Little Dirty 25% Stay Up Long Hours 20% Climb 20%		Dodge 25% Driving 15% Shoot 15% Initiative 30% Cameraman 10% Lockpicking 25% Sneak Around 25% Sprint 20%
65 MIND — Clever		75 SOUL — Reflective
Video Editor 25% General Education 25% Remember Stuff I Saw 25% Conceal 15% Notice 20%		Lemnismancy 60% Charm 15% Lying 15% Rock ’n’ Roll Band 35% Local Boho Fixture 20%
where Dan thinks he is at any risk of breaking taboo, he does not wear his glasses, so for visual checks he needs to roll under 20% to get just minor success as if rolling under Mind

Passions

Rage: Abusive relationships
Fear: (Unnatural) Losing touch with reality
Noble: Revealing necessary truths

Madness

failed		hardenend
☑☐☐☐☐	Violence	☑☐☐ ☐☐☐ ☐☐ ☐☐
☑☐☐☐☐	Unnatural	☑☑☐ ☐☐☐ ☐☐ ☐☐
☐☐☐☐☐	Helplessness	☐☐☐ ☐☐☐ ☐☐ ☐☐
☑☐☐☐☐	Isolation	☑☐☐ ☐☐☐ ☐☐ ☐☐
☐☐☐☐☐	Self	☐☐☐ ☐☐☐ ☐☐ ☐☐

Relationships

The PCs’ cabal

Dan regards the whole crew as his protégé, as he thinks of himself as the most down-to-Earth and sensible among them.

Janet Philips

Producer of KSCO Eyewitness News San Carlo, who draws on Dan’s editing assistance and personal tape library … and allows Dan to skim raw tapes for his library.

Dave Gold

In-House Editor at Praxinoscope Studios who also daws on Dan’s editing assistance and personal tape library, allows Dan to skim raw tapes for his library, and is amused by Dan’s odd art films.

Alice Morrow

The cabal’s young punk entomancer, whom Dan introduced to the cabal after he saw a recording of her doing magic on video shot by a KSCO reporter. Dan feels responsible to look after her.

Hotel California

Dan’s mediocre Eagles cover band. He plays the Randy Meisner role: bass (and for “Journey Of The Sorcerer”, the banjo) and sings harmonies. Half the reason why he does these gigs is to show his cut-up style art videofilms on a cluster of old TVs, and to shoot candid video of the crowd. Shows typically act as mixers for folks in the local occult underground.

Resources

The DanCave

Dan lives and works in what was a storefront in the bohemian old part of town.. It has a largish “public” portion which was once the front retail space, his workspace (and tapehead lair) with video editing gear and tape library, and a little living space in back.

The Screen Ying Room is the former retail space in front. He has put old TVs and artistically arranged junk in the window displays and boarded up, light-sealed, and soundproofed the big space. Hotel California practice here, and he has it set up for occasional showings of his and others’ art films; he has a couple of dozen folding metal chairs, and if he’s willing to violate fire codes he can squeeze in almost 40 people. The room has a big TV, a bunch of little TVs, and a screen and video projector; all are rigged to play tapes loaded here … or played from inside Dan’s workspace.

The Back Yang Room, Dan’s workspace, is cluttered but orderly … in a way that is almost entirely incomprehensible to anyone but him. The large former storeroom has video editing equipment for several tape formats (plus an 8mm film editing table gathering dust), many of them eccentrically rigged from combinations of half-broken machines. Most of the volume of the room is dominated by metal shelves stacked with tapes, all of them carefully but inscrutably labeled. Dan is not superstitious about it, but he rarely lets anyone in here; it locks with its own key. Dan’s living space is small and tidy. There is just enough room for the bohemian splendor of a carefully-organized kitchenette, a queen-size futon, and a large old wardrobe/dresser. He has one of those weird radios which can play AM/FM/Weather/Shortwave/TV audio so he can listen to Star Trek. There is a back entrance which Dan rarely uses.

The DanVan

Dan drives an old bakery van; he likes the leftover internal shelves. There is seating for two up front and one in back, though the back can hold six if five of them don’t mind sitting on the floor. He keeps a couple of battered old video cameras in it and has a couple of tape players connected to a TV running off of a battery system scavenged from an RV, so that Dan can shoot video or watch a video to pick up charges away from home. When he uses it to take Hotel California to gigs, they complain about “all that junk taking up space”.

Magic tape library

Dan always has at least one tape prepared for most of the major spells he knows, stashed in the Back Yang Room, all on six hour SP VHS tapes:

• Seeing That Fucked Me Up at rank-4
• The Screen Is Distracting
• Reach Into The Screen with a large knife and an envelope with several hundred dollars in cash planted in it
• The Screen Is A Window (pair)
• Subliminal Messages with “Ignore Dan and the people with him”
• Video Mail from 1989

On a successful Lemnismancy roll Dan also has a second prepared tape of whatever type is useful.

Note that Dan has never had the nerve or occasion to make either an Explosions Are Good TV or The Screen Is A Gun tape, though he knows how. He does not even have a gun.

Dan’s backpack

Dan carries a largish backpack with him almost everywhere. It always contains at least an RF converter for connecting a tape player to an ordinary TV, a VHS tape with a significant charge waiting on it, and a 6-hour SP VHS tape enchanted with The Screen Is Distracting which does not show video which might identify Dan; he often will have another tape in it as well.

Dan’s Tapehead Life

Dan has been a tapehead for six years now. He corresponds with about a dozen tapeheads across the country from from other lemnismancy sub-schools he knows — Reporters who always shoot their own videos, Pornhounds who never have actual sex, Performers who try to get tapes of themselves broadcast, Programmers who do some creepy thing with mind control he does not understand — and has heard that there are others.

Between KSCO and Praxinoscope, Dan gets an erratic but voluminous enough amount of video editing work to pay the bills and keep him in tapehead charges. Hotel California, his video showings, occasional events for other folks he allows in the Screen Ying Room, plus the San Carlos bohemian scene this connects him with enable him to maintain a little more social life than he really needs, bring in a little pin money … and gives him an excuse to show up with video cameras which capture “drama” on tape for him to harvest for more charges. If his charge library thins out, Dan is not above creeping on weddings, funerals, and other events, but he generally does not lug a videocamera around.

Charges & tapes

The “economics” of tapehead magic are a bit different from most Unknown Armies adept schools. It is possible to store a large library of potential charges, but it is hard to gain charges out in the world. A tapehead can have a large arsenal of prepared tapes without having to worry about that spellcasting ability getting disrupted by taboo, but they require very particular conditions to deploy, unless the tapehead is prepared to burn through a lot of charges.

And Dan has arranged his life such that he has a steady supply of charge-bearing tapes.

Rather than start with a precise accounting of Dan’s charges, unless explicitly established in play, I played him with a set of rules for charge availability when circumstances call for accounting:

• When Dan is not expecting trouble, he only carries a handful of minor charges: roll 2d10 and take the lower roll under 4, or zero if neither roll qualifies
• When Dan might expect trouble, he will generally be better supplied.
• He can roll Lemnismancy to have an enchanted tape he reasonably could have thought to have prepared in his backpack; if he fails he has an extra tape, but it is enchanted with a spell chosen by the GM.
• He can roll Lemnismancy to see how many charges he is carrying. On a successful roll, he has the sum of the dice in minor charges and the lower die in significant charges (treating 0 as 10); on an unsuccessful roll he only has the 1s die in minor charges and no significant charges.
• If we need to know how many charge-bearing tapes Dan has in his library at the Back Yang Room at the moment, he has a reserve of tapes in his library worth 2d10 significant charges and d100 (flip-floppable) minor charges, d10 of which are double charges.
• If we need to know how many charge-bearing tapes Dan has in the DanVan, he ordinarily has 2d10 minor charges plus two significant charges.
• If we need to know what Dan can harvest from KSCO and Praxiniscope, in a week he ordinarily will bring in 1d10-1d10 significant charges (doubles yield one double tape) plus 2d10 minor charges (rolls of doubles also produce an additional significant charge).

Some capsule political definitions

For now I want to directly lift a Twitter thread by astute leftist Margaret Killjoy:

I’m going to define some terms, because most of them have become essentially jargon. Socialism, communism, anarchism, democratic socialism, libertarian socialism, authoritarian socialism.

First of all, the meaning of these terms shifts country to country and year to year, confusing matters greatly. An anarchist in 1880s Chicago would also call themselves a socialist. “Communist” had a much broader meaning before 1917. So I’m going to be a bit broad.

Socialism is the broadest umbrella term here. Roughly, a socialist fights for a world without gross economic inequality and generally does so through seeking for workers themselves (or the state, but not private companies) own the means of production (factories, farms, etc). It has a more specific meaning for much of the 20^th century, which is to say “not a communist [in the ‘aligned with the USSR sense’] but still into socialism.” It is sort of shorthand for “democratic socialism” for a long time and in a lot of writing.

Communism also has at least two meanings. Generally, communism is the word for a stateless socialist society, in which power rests in communes.

But ever since the Russian Civil War, when Bolsheviks took power and changed their name to the communist party, the word “communist” has generally meant “aligned to the communist party,” which generally took orders from the USSR. So if you read Orwell talking shit on “communists,” he was still a socialist … a democratic socialist. He despised Stalin, and during his lifetime, “communist” was used to mean “literally takes orders from Stalin.” This was not strawmanning, but structurally true.

Democratic socialism also has multiple meanings, because the Bolsheviks among others used to identify as democratic socialists. Generally speaking, a democratic socialist believes in using the democratic power of existing republics to transition them into socialist societies. By the mid-20^th century this was very much distinguished from “communists” aka bolsheviks.

Then there are the anarchists. Anarchists generally believe in not using the existing state to develop a socialist society, but instead using revolutionary structures (such as, well, soviets … worker’s councils basically) to transform society into a stateless society. Anarchists would sometimes call themselves libertarian socialists, in order to distinguish themselves from authoritarian socialists (aka “communists” like the bolsheviks).

The word Libertarian was consciously stolen by pro-capitalist forces decades later, in the 20^th century.

Confused yet? Anarchists generally want communism. The USSR was not a communist society (by its own definitions) but instead a society that claimed to be developing towards communism. (And generally would define socialism as the in-between stage.) Democratic socialists want to reach socialism democratically, that one is pretty clear. If it’s confusing to you, that’s because it’s confusing. Everyone uses these words differently. Someone calling themselves a communist in 1950 might mean a very different thing than in 2024. The cold war and western propaganda thoroughly complicated matters.

In the end, these labels only sort-of matter. What matters to me personally is that we move towards a society in which people control their own destinies but also take care of one another. A society built on mutual aid and solidarity (more jargon words, but I believe in them).

I would focus a little differently than Killjoy does in describing socialism. Socialists are motivated by eliminating economic inequalities, but I would not locate the definition of the ideology there. Rather, I would put it this way:

Socialism boils down to public control of the means of production. The “means of production” refers to wealth which enables creating other wealth: factories, economic infrastructure, et cetera. “Public control” could mean worker-owned corporations, democratically-accountable commons, state control, or other arrangements.

Most Americans confuse socialism with a different social-economic ideology:

Social democracy means systematic public provision (by the state or otherwise) of people’s material needs — stuff like healthcare, housing, et cetera. To some degree, every industrialized society in the world today includes an element of social democracy, so it can pair with socialism, capitalism, democracy, authoritarianism, et cetera. The term is usually employed to describe a society in which those provisions are strong, including such resources as “free” healthcare and education.

Capitalism means private ownership of the means of production, where “private” means individuals — either directly, or indirectly through corporations.

Markets are a social / economic arrangement in which there is a shared sphere in which people may buy & sell a resource. There is a tendency to equate markets with capitalism, but the relationship is more complicated than that. Capitalism implies a capital market in which people may buy & sell the means of production; socialism forbids this. Capitalism also implies a labor market in which people may buy & sell their time working; socialism does not necessarily forbid this, but does at root seek to prevent anyone from needing to sell their time in a labor market in order to survive. The market for consumer goods & services (shoes, cars, massages, house painting, et cetera) is a feature of capitalism which some socialists yearn to eliminate, but socialism does not necessarily mean its elimination, only the elimination of the capital market.

Libertarianism in the US means wanting universal rights including private property without a state, where “private property” means not shoes & cars but capital, the means of production. In practice, libertarians prioritize property rights so strongly that they accept the the state as a guarantor of property as a compromise which can hopefully be overcome in time; in this they differ from anarchists who see socialist public control of the means of production as integral to (and part of the point of) the elimination of the state.

I hope to stack up several more short, clarifying definitions here over time.

Good user experience design

It is hard to name the good-ness of good UXD.

Intuitive?

People outside the field often say that they want a user experience which is “intuitive”. I have talked before about how under-considered that word is.

When people say they want a system to be “intuitive,” they typically think they mean that users should immediately understand how a system works when they encounter it. But you cannot really do that with many systems … not even with most systems people talk about when you ask them for an example of something “intuitive.”

Consider the mouse-and-cursor. Most of us have forgotten the first time we encountered it, and thus forgotten how unintuitive we found it the first time we used it. A little box on a string with a button or three on top? If you have just arrived from the 23^rd century, you might pick it up and try talking to it. But with ten seconds of demonstration you understand it completely and have some sophisticated applications of it immediately available to you, and even if you didn’t see a mouse again for the next ten years you would still remember how it worked.

There you have what people really mean by “intuitive:” easy to explain, powerful in its implications, impossible to forget. You get that through systems that possess a clear, coherent internal logic that feels natural and obvious. Of course, it can take hard work to figure out those “natural and obvious” behaviors; we interaction designers call that work “interaction design.”

So that is not quite enough.

Delightful?

Cyd Harrell has a good critique of facile uses of “delight”:

delight [is] an ambiguous word, referring to either a level of pleasing someone (a high level) or a way of pleasing them (charm, surprise, in any case a very conscious pleasure). adopting a high level of pleasing users as a goal is good - mostly - but when designers, through some kind of linguistic slippage, adopt the “way” sense of delight to inappropriate contexts, it’s like following the script of a romance when trying to get to know a colleague — awkward. that said, lots of designers meant the level.

in recent years I’ve come to understand that the level can also be a problem in a more subtle way. if delight is a conscious pleasure - the spirit stirred somehow - multiple “experiences” or products or whatever trying to stir our spirit can be taxing. it’s not always additive & if it happens to miss — if it’s the wrong way of pleasure for the context, or the experience is just trying to make sure that it visibly, maybe measurably, exerted a high level of pleasure on you - it asks for attention it may not deserve. collectively, it can be a burden.

sometimes, especially with a longterm relationship like, well, a longterm relationship or like belonging in an institution, what we really need is the background level of assumption that we matter & are cared for, & then the occasional sparks in a special smile, the bed, a voting booth if you’re talking about stirring the civic spirit (I have a story I tell about being overwhelmed with institutional belonging in a library) - those become reinforcing & sustaining.

spoiler: those are harder to design for. & they can’t be accomplished entirely through the tools of design; so that’s where I think delight is tempting - it is suited to our toolset, & we can push it towards measurable. but in doing so (sometimes) we can get on the wrong foot.

Giles Colborne has a rap about how designers tend to justify gimmicky, interesting design as pursuing “delight”, but when one asks people about delightful experiences, they often describe effortless resolution of anxiety, a good UX design goal.

Boring?

Ryan Bigge’s In Defence of Boring UX:

“Only when a product is functional, reliable, and usable can users appreciate the delightful, pleasurable, or enjoyable aspects of the experience,” notes Fessenden. In other words, boring underpins delight — and sometimes boring is delightful.

Cap Watkins praises The Boring Designer:

Maybe it’s born out of seeing apps choose flash over function, or trying to understand just one too many indecipherable icons-as-buttons. Whatever the case, here's an ode to the boring designers among us. The designers who …

• Choose obvious over clever every time.
• Rarely stand their ground.
• Are Practical.
• Value Laziness.
• Lead the team.

Delivering power & pleasure?

I used to talk about “systems which deliver power and pleasure to the people who use them”. In 1997, when I was at Alan Cooper’s studio — then the only shop exclusively dedicated to what we now call “UX design”, we had a lively conversation about our mission statement coïnciding with us rebranding from “Cooper Software” to “Cooper Interaction Design”. Alan Cooper had a draft mission statement which was pretty good, but I was uneasy with its allusion to “designing software which is easy to use”. We were simplicity radicals then (and still), but we also worked on a lot of desktop apps which were necessarily complex.

I proposed “systems which deliver power and pleasure to the people who use them”, which I look back on with a mix of pride and unease. It has some distinct advantages as a way to articulate good UX design, and for a while the Cooper studio used it a lot in our materials. (It didn’t work as branding, though. Google search results were … worrisome.)

These days we rightly criticize the concept of “user-centered design” — we need a more global and ethical ground than that implies. (Though fergawdsake in the world we have we need more designers who are at least advocates for users.) But at that time that turn of phrase was a clarifying place to stand, and it still grounds much of how I think about UX design solutions:

Deliver

A lot of tools promise things which they do not deliver, either because they simply do not deliver the right function, or because they are too clumsy in their execution. A feature one does not use just acts as clutter, in the way.

Power

UXD should aspire to make things that are effective and make make people effective; a simple tool can be powerful if it is the right tool, and a tool should not shy from sophistication in the right context.

Pleasure

We need to talk about well-crafted design. This can mean fun, delight, or excitement, yes. But most often UX design should offer the subtler joy of an unobtrusively graceful tool.

The tech “libertarian” right turn

I understand the confusion of people surprised to see many tech “libertarians” have been making a turn toward far right authoritarianism. A few things to help make sense of this:

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Understand the split between anarchists and libertarians in the United States.

Anarchists’ opposition to power & authority includes an opposition to the power of wealth.

The libertarian tradition embraces private property emphatically — it regards anything less than total control of one’s property as a violation morally equivalent to violent bodily assault. “I created that wealth with my time and effort, so taking any portion of it treats me as a slave.” Though libertarians regard private property as logically prior to the state, they have shown again and again that they are eager to support exercise of power by authoritarian states to enforce it.

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Many American “libertarians” are fascists & white nationalists engaged in misdirection. For example, I have an old post cataloguing how Ron Paul was never really a libertarian, but loved misleading people into thinking he was.

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Sincere bonehead contrarian libertarians have a tendency to make the switch.

Partly it is just going from one contrarian form of zealotry to another. Partly it is an easy drift from “I am awesome, and I would prosper were I not handicapped by the state” to “my people are awesome, and we would dominate were we not handicapped by liberalism”.

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Neoreactionaries — a distinctly nerdy strain of far right ideology — have a fantasy of authoritarian minarchy. They argue that the state per se is not the problem; they fault the liberal state as “too big”. If the government is unencumbered by due process and regulatory responsibility, they believe, its ruthlessness allows it to be “small” so that in practice citizens are more “free”.

They misread Singapore as embodying their dream. “You might get the death penalty for spitting on the sidewalk, but if you steer clear of obvious mistakes and political dissent, the government stays out of your way. There is so little regulation of economic freedom!”

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Libertarianism has a crisp simplicity and superficial elegance which appeals to the Engineer Mindset common in the culture of the “tech” industry. But libertarianism is not the only facile “rational” simplification of a complex domain which plays to that frame of mind.

It also produces notorious crackpottery like 9/11 Truthers: “jet fuel cannot melt steel beams, QED!” Fashy “logic” is full of exactly that sort of move:

• pseudoscientific racism and sexism
• Clash Of Civilizations claims about the superiority of Rational Western Culture
• the Fremen Mirage

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Silicon Valley culture understands itself as standing at the top of a competitive meritocracy with authoritarian & fashy implications:

• we defeated supposed experts in their domains because we are smarter and better — competition is the truth of the world which reveals inborn excellence
• it is good when this concentrates resources in our hands, because it empowers our efforts which make the world work better — they must rule, it is destructive when others try to “steal” their deserved wealth and power
• our corporate organizations are Super Effective, unlike the clumsy state — democracy is stupid & inefficient, unlike heirarchical exercise of authority

(It is necessary here to caveat that the common claim “Fascism = Corporatism” is a misleading canard.)

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Animating much of this we can see the libertarian misunderstanding that “authoritarian” means a “big” state. But authoritarianism is better understood as “power unchecked by limiting institutions”, the thing these guys want for themselves, because they are so much smarter than everyone else that they will use that power well.