Among the pivotal and juicy nuggets of film history recounted in “Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound,” Midge Costin’s wonkishly engaging movie-love documentary, there’s one that speaks volumes about the foundation of the New Hollywood.
It’s 1967, and George Lucas, who is three years away from making his first film, is on the set of “Finian’s Rainbow,” the clomping warhorse of a Hollywood musical that his buddy and fellow film-school brat Francis Ford Coppola has been hired to direct. Coppola, who already dreams of making his own more personal film, asks Lucas if he knows a good sound designer; Lucas tips him off to his USC colleague Walter Murch. Coppola and Murch then team up to make “The Rain People,” a road odyssey they literally shoot across the country, with Murch using the new Nagra Portable Audio Recorder. That’s when these filmmakers have their aha moment. “If we can make a film out of a shoe store in Nebraska,” realizes Murch, “then why do we have to be in Hollywood?” At that point the three head up to San Francisco to form American Zoetrope.
The New Hollywood kicked into high gear in 1969, and it was a revolution in countless ways. Yet when you think back to so many of its classics — “Mean Streets” and “Dog Day Afternoon,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” and “The French Connection” — the fact that they were shot on locations that became the films’ realities was central to their aesthetic. It was the new world of aural recording that made that possible. As much as anything, the ’70s film revolution was a sound revolution.
This hit home to me when “Making Waves” dissected the sequence in Robert Altman’s “Nashville” where Ronee Blakley’s Barbara Jean arrives at an airport that’s a mad swirl of scrambling civilians, random traffic, baton twirlers marching in formation, with the film’s main characters sprinkled throughout the jamboree. “Nashville” is my favorite movie, and I have a burnt-in visual impression of that sequence — but watching it in “Making Waves,” you realize that apart from several master shots, the images aren’t as packed and teeming as you might think. What’s packed and teeming is the soundtrack, a layered experiential hubbub that goes beyond even Altman’s famous “overlapping dialogue,” since most of what we’re hearing in this sequence isn’t dialogue. It’s the airplanes, the marching band, the nattering newscaster, all woven into something close to life.
“Making Waves” is about the evolution of film technology, yet the key to its appeal is that it revels in the holistic, aesthetic side of technology: not just buttons and dials and gizmos, but technology as an expression of something human. As lovingly directed by Midge Costin, a veteran sound editor, the film explores landmark moments in movie sound, like the fact that contemporary sound design really began with “King Kong” (1933), which pioneered effects that are still in use today, or that it was Barbra Streisand’s insistence on making the 1976 version of “A Star Is Born” an enveloping experience that pushed movie theaters into using stereophonic systems (she also spent four months and an additional $1 million on the film’s sound editing, unheard of at the time), or the fact that Ben Burtt devoted the better part of a year to coming up with the right modified animal sounds for the voice of Chewbacca (but would you have guessed that the bluster of the fighter jets in “Top Gun” was also modified animal sounds?), or that on “Apocalypse Now” there were half a dozen sound editors, each in charge of a different element (choppers, munitions, the boat), to forge a total symphonic effect.
Or take “The Godfather.” “The Rain People” turned out to be a disaster for Coppola, to the point that Warner Bros. claimed the money they’d given him to make the film was a personal loan. They wanted it back (it was the equivalent of $3 million today), which bankrupted Zoetrope and put Lucas’s career on hold. That’s one reason Coppola took on what Murch calls “this sleazy gangster film that 12 other directors had turned down.”
Murch, once again, was Coppola’s sound designer, and though “The Godfather” is a profoundly realistic film, in the famous scene where Michael Corleone kills Sollozzo in the Italian restaurant, the hit is preceded by a close-up of Michael’s face accompanied by a slow-building electronic din that sounds like the expressionistic version of a screeching subway train. “What you’re listening to,” says Murch, “are Michael’s neurons clashing against each other.” I’ve seen “The Godfather” a dozen times, but when that moment happens I’m so in the moment that I have never consciously heard that sound.
“Making Waves” presents Walter Murch as the grand architect of the Hollywood sound revolution — though the film doesn’t shortchange the extraordinary achievements of Ben Burtt, recruited out of USC by George Lucas to do “Star Wars,” or Gary Rydstrom, who became the sound guru of Pixar. (His first achievement: making those lamps in John Lasseter’s minute-and-a-half 1986 showpiece short “Luxo Jr.” “speak.”) The film also recognizes Orson Welles as the supreme cinema magician who first grasped, based on his radio experience, that sound was the art of illusion: creating an aural landscape to fill the spaces a camera could only show you. (It was the sound in “Citizen Kane” that let you feel those spaces.) The film salutes the directors who worked hand in glove with their sound wizards, notably David Lean and Alfred Hitchcock, Lucas and Spielberg, as well as Kubrick, Altman, and David Lynch.
But it’s Murch’s story that’s the archetype. Born in 1943, he recorded sounds off the radio as a boy, splicing and re-arranging them — and then, in 1953, when he first encountered music concrète from France, he felt like he was part of a movement. The works of John Cage were an influence, revealing a kind of sonic ideology in which anything you could hear became “music.” So were the Beatles, whether it was the future-shock distortion of “Tomorrow Never Knows” or the hipster music concrète of “Revolution 9.”
As a teenager, Murch soaked up Bergman and Kurosawa (both of whom cast spells with sound), and he then moved to Paris and connected with the New Wave, but at USC he returned to his tape-manipulating roots; he fused the mind of a scientist and the heart of an artist. Murch became a collector of sounds, and then a symphonist, forging a new kind of immersion in “Apocalypse Now.” Ben Burtt collected sounds, too, and one of the revelations of “Making Waves” is that many of the movie sounds we think of as futuristic, like the gun blasts in “Star Wars,” are things that were painstakingly culled from this world. (In their paradigm-shifting space opera, Lucas and Burtt actually cut against the eerie synthesized future sounds in films like the 1953 “The War of the Worlds.”)
“Making Waves” is a brisk 94 minutes, the last half hour of which is a quick-study primer on the categories of movie sound. The film is quite educational. I confess I had no idea that a “Foley” refers to a highly specific sound that’s crafted and post-synched — and that the term was named after Jack Foley, the sound editor who was ordered to make the armies of “Spartacus,” with their clanking armor, sound more realistic, and did so by employing such advanced technological devices as jingling car keys. In the years since “The Matrix,” anything has seemed possible. “These days,” observes David Lynch, “there’s so many tools to manipulate a sound that now, if you can think it you can do it.” That said, I wish “Making Waves” focused a little less on movies defined by their visionary action sequences: “Star Wars,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “The Matrix.” I get that each of those films were game-changers, but if anything the movie teaches you to hear the expressive magic in the quietest of sounds — to know that when you’re listening to a movie, there’s always more than meets the ear.
But while Twitter’s sweeping US censorship campaign was garnering most of the attention in US media, another political censorship story was brewing.
Earlier this week, Facebook took down several accounts that were linked to Uganda’s Ministry of Information and Communications Technology for alleged “inauthentic behavior.” Twitter also took action against several accounts that it deemed to be “targeting the election in Uganda.”
Both of these Silicon Valley companies decided to take action against these accounts days before the 2021 Ugandan general election which takes place on January 14.
Ugandan government officials disputed the tech giants’ claims about these accounts and and said that they belonged to Ugandan government officials and celebrities that support the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) party.
Unlike in the US, Uganda’s government pushed back hard against the Silicon Valley giants’ removal of these accounts.
“If you want to take sides against the NRM, then that group should not operate in Uganda,” Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said. “We cannot tolerate this arrogance of anybody coming to decide for us who is good and who is bad.”
President Museveni is a known supporter of social media censorship and has blocked both Facebook and Twitter on election day during the last election in 2016.
However, Twitter has decided to complain about the situation and warn about the harms of this online censorship in Uganda, without any reflection on the impact of Twitter’s mass censorship of political conversations and figures in the US.
“Ahead of the Ugandan election, we’re hearing reports that Internet service providers are being ordered to block social media and messaging apps,” Twitter’s Public Policy account wrote. “We strongly condemn internet shutdowns – they are hugely harmful, violate basic human rights and the principles of the # OpenInternet.”
In a follow-up tweet, the company added: “Access to information and freedom of expression, including the public conversation on Twitter, is never more important than during democratic processes, particularly elections.”
This statement is coming from the same company that heavily censored tweets about the 2020 US presidential election and from President Trump in the months leading up to the election.
If access to information is really so important to Twitter during democratic processes and elections, why did it suppress hundreds of messages from the President, hide criticism of his opponent, and block a major election-related news story from one of the country’s largest media outlets in the months leading up to the 2020 US presidential election?
If freedom of expression is so important to Twitter during democratic processes and election, why did it consistently hide, label, and editorialize those who were sharing their opinion on mail-in voting in the run up to the 2020 US presidential election?
Twitter had no problem clamping down on access to information or its own user’s freedom of expression in the 2020 US presidential election. It only seems to care about these principles now that its own freedom of expression and ability to share information has been cut off by the Ugandan government.
When watching this Jimmy Dore Show about the Capitol incident one can clearly see that some of the police were reluctant to intervene against the surprise visitors. Some even took selfies with them. The police may have been overwhelmed and decided that more fighting would have been counterproductive. Or, maybe, they let it happen on purpose?
The LIHOP theory is often applied to the 9/11 incident in 2001. The FBI and others knew that terrorist from the Middle East were about to use air planes to attack within the U.S. but it was decided to let that happen and to use the event for political gain. That political gain came in form of the Patriot Act which gave the government more power to spy on its citizens, and in form of the war of terror on the Middle East.
Even weeks before Wednesday’s event there had been lots of open source chatter about a big protest in Washington and plans to take on the Capitol. Like in in 455, when the Vandals sacked Rome, there was little done by the local authorities to prevent that. The actors in both incidents have by the way remarkable similarities.
If we consider that ‘Vandals’ storming the Capitol was known to be upcoming and that the vandals actually managed to do it, we have to look for potential aims of those who might have allowed it to happen.
Two are sticking out. The ‘Domestic terrorism’ issues and the mass destruction of communication channels used by Trump and the political right.
President-elect Joe Biden characterized the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday as domestic terrorists, referring to the violence as “one of the darkest days in the history of our nation.”
…
Mr. Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.Federal law defines domestic terrorism as dangerous and illegal acts intended to coerce a population or influence the government. While it can be charged in some states, no generic federal crime exists. Domestic terrorism spans extremist ideologies, but it has been predominantly a far-right phenomenon in recent decades, according to researchers.
In 2019 Adam Schiff, the unhinged Russia basher who has falsely claimed that he had evidence of a Trump collusion with Russia, introduced a ‘domestic terrorism’ bill that will now likely be taken up.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, introduced legislation Friday that would make domestic terrorism a federal crime.The Confronting the Threat of Domestic Terrorism Act would create a federal criminal statute that would cover domestic acts of terror committed by those without links to foreign organizations.
…
“The attack in El Paso by a white supremacist is only the most recent in a disturbing and growing trend of domestic terrorism, fueled by racism and hatred. The Confronting the Threat of Domestic Terrorism Act would for the first time create a domestic terrorism crime, and thus provide prosecutors with new tools to combat these devastating crimes,” Schiff said in a statement.
The actual bill Schiff introduce is quite generic and covers a wide range of actions as well as attempts to take such actions or conspiring to do them:
Whoever, in a circumstance described in subsection (b), and with the intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping—
(A) knowingly kills, kidnaps, maims, commits an assault resulting in serious bodily injury, or assaults with a dangerous weapon any person within the United States; or
(B) creates a substantial risk of serious bodily injury to any other person by knowingly destroying or damaging any structure, conveyance, or other real or personal property within the United States or by attempting or conspiring to destroy or damage any structure, conveyance, or other real or personal property within the United States,
in violation of the laws of any State, or the United States, shall be punished under section 2332b(c).
Any prosecutor will be able to use the wording of the law to indict someone who has been talking about bashing a road sign for ‘domestic terrorism’.
Such a law will of course not only be used against the ‘white supremacists’ who Schiff claims to dislike but, as ACLU pointed out, primarily against the left and minorities:
People of color and other marginalized communities have long been targeted under domestic terrorism authorities for unfair and discriminatory surveillance, investigations, and prosecutions. Law enforcement agencies’ use of these authorities undermines and has violated equal protection, due process, and First Amendment rights. Law enforcement agencies already have all the authorities they need to address white supremacist violence effectively. We therefore urge you instead to require agencies to provide meaningful public data on their use of resources and failure to prioritize white supremacist violence.The ACLU strongly urges you to oppose H.R. 4192, Confronting the Threat of Domestic Terrorism Act because it is unnecessary and would serve to target the very communities that Congress is seeking to protect.
As a second consequence of the Capitol incident the tech monopoly companies, which are largely aligned with the corporate Democrats, took coordinated action to disrupt the communication between Trump and his political followers as well as within the general political right.
Ben Collins @oneunderscore__ – 21:19 UTC · Jan 8, 2021
BREAKING: Twitter is taking dramatic action on remaining QAnon accounts for breaking their “Coordinated Harmful Activity” rules, some of whom heavily promoted Wednesday’s storming of the Capitol.
Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, 8kun’s Ron Watkins banned.
Twitter’s statement below:
Thousands of Twitter accounts, mostly not prominent ones, were culled over night.
The banning of Trump has nothing to do with the actual content of Trump’s or others’ communications:
Byron York @ByronYork – 23:53 UTC · Jan 8, 2021
Twitter has permanently banned President Trump, and they did it on the basis of two unobjectionable tweets. Example: Twitter says Trump’s ‘I won’t go to inauguration’ tweet will ‘inspire’ violence. https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/c…
The was an organized and likely long planned campaign initiated by the incoming Biden administration. Trump’s tweets and followers were probably the biggest traffic generators Twitter and Facebook ever had. They would not have killed off that profitable source of revenues if the incoming administration had not threatened them with new regulations.
Michael Tracey condemned this campaign in a series of tweets:
Twitter’s stated rationale for banning Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn, and others — “behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm” — is extraordinarily creepy and could be used against virtually anyone if the powers-that-be decided it was politically necessary
Purging the sitting President from his primary communications platform is absolute authoritarian lunacy
It was obvious within about 10 minutes on Wednesday that this “crisis” would be exploited to drastically ramp up censorship and suppress political speech
None of this is about “safety,” it’s about purposely inflating a threat in order to assert political and cultural dominance
If we’re accepting this new “incitement” doctrine there are thousands of activists who could be purged/criminalized for “inciting” an enormous wave of violent riots over the summer. But thankfully there’s a thing called “protected speech,” although it’s quickly being shredded
The most extreme, coordinated corporate censorship offensive in modern history and liberals/leftists are in a mindless celebratory stupor. Pathetic shills
Corporate liberals and leftists have been absolutely obsessed with purging the internet of political undesirables since 2016, and this “crisis” is the perfect opportunity to finally fulfill their deepest authoritarian wish
The new corporate authoritarian liberal-left monoculture is going to be absolutely ruthless — and in 12 days it is merging with the state. This only the beginning
Must just be a total coincidence that YouTube also happened to terminate Steve Bannon. Definitely not a coordinated political revenge campaign by the tech oligarchs as they wait for a Democratic administration to come in
Notice that the threat of “violence” Twitter says justifies their political purge never applies to traditional forms of state violence — Trump’s tweets announcing bombings or assassinations were never seen as necessitating some disciplinary intervention in the name of “safety”
Make no mistake. Both actions that follow from the ludicrous Capitol ‘sacking’, Biden’s ‘domestic terrorism’ act and the systematic eradication of communication channels for people with certain opinions, will primarily be used against the left.
When President Biden starts his first war all significant protest against it will be declared to be ‘domestic terrorism’. All communication against it will be ‘inciting’ and therefore banned. We know this because it has always been like this.
Few could have predicted the huge fallout from the Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C. that saw the president of the United States banned from virtually every social media platform, including his favorite, Twitter.
In solidarity with Trump, tens of thousands of conservative users appear to be deleting their accounts and moving over to pro-Trump Twitter clone Parler. Celebrities, politicians, and social media figures — particularly conservative ones — have registered losing tens of thousands of followers in a matter of hours. Twitter’s share price plunged by 7% this morning, knocking around $2.5 billion off its market value in one fell swoop.
While the massive publicity generated would normally be positive news for Parler, which brands itself as a “free speech app,” it seems to have suffered a far worse fate than Twitter. The app was deleted by Google and Apple from their app stores over the weekend. But it was Amazon’s decision early this morning that proved a more fatal blow. The company, whose cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services, hosts the app and website, decided to pull it, effective immediately. “We cannot provide services to a customer that is unable to effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others,” Amazon said in a statement.
Before it was taken offline, however, activists and researchers had begun a project to download and archive vast quantities of information, totaling over 70 terabytes, including deleted posts, videos, and users’ location data. They intend to use it as evidence to find and prosecute those individuals involved in the storming of the Capitol Building last Wednesday, an action that led to Congress and the Senate being evacuated and five people dying. Those leading the action allegedly used Parler to plan and organize the events and to communicate with each other during the violence.
The president himself encouraged the crowds to go to the building and “fight like hell” to stop what he regards as a “stolen election,” where he was the legitimate winner. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong,” he added.
In response, a host of popular social media platforms, including Twitch, Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat froze Trump’s accounts on the grounds that he was directly inciting violence. Discord and Reddit also banned popular Trump forums.
While many who opposed the president celebrated, whistleblower and internet freedom advocate Edward Snowden warned that allowing social media companies to set a precedent where they could effectively ban whoever they want from their services set a chilling precedent. “I know a lot of folks in the comments [who] read this are like ‘YAAAAS,’ which, like — I get it. But imagine for a moment a world that exists for more than the next 13 days, and this becomes a milestone that will endure,” he wrote on Twitter.
Almost immediately, a number of non-Trump accounts began to face problems, with pro-Assange journalist Suzie Dawson locked out of her account, educational file sharing website Sci Hub’s account suspended, and the Red Scare podcast’s profile deleted. Other figures began to demand that the accounts associated with the Venezuelan and Chinese government be removed from social media platforms as well.
If Parler can find a way past its massive data hack and a company to host it, it still faces a number of huge problems, including rampant racism and false information predominating its platform. There are also large numbers of fake accounts purporting to represent public figures. The company has also broken its free speech absolutism promise as well, deleting incendiary tweets from Trump-supporting lawyer Lin Wood calling for Mike Pence’s head.
Perhaps more ominous for America, however, is a media reality where different groups of people become completely insulated from one another on the basis of political identification. Already, algorithms have split us off from others who think differently, showing wildly contrasting news and views to us based on our prior actions. However, until now, this was at least happening on the same platform, meaning there was some overlap. If, however, liberals and conservatives are using entirely different social media websites, any chance for inter party debate is lost.
The storming of the Capitol Building on Wednesday was a prime example of what can happen when one group of Americans lives in an entirely alternative reality. Further disintegration of media will only accelerate this trend, making incidents like this more likely in the future.
In the dark hours of Sunday, the BigTech-government alliance showed its hand in its massive purge of the public square — which is what social media became in a nation of strip-malls, parking lots, and nonstop propaganda — shutting down all voices countering the constructed narrative-du-jour: that the Democratic Party stands for defending Americans’ liberty against a rogue president. There have been many “shots” fired so far to kick off a civil war, but that action was an artillery blast.
Remember, the Left’s playbook is to accuse their opposition of doing exactly what they are doing. And so, of course, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has launched a last-minute impeachment on grounds of the president inciting “insurrection.” By a strange coincidence, reports on as-yet-still-live web channels say that the president has actually invoked the Insurrection Act against seditionists in our government, including, perhaps, Ms. Pelosi. If it is true — and I can’t confirm it — then the nation has blundered into an epic political battle.
Some facts may suggest the truth of the situation: The Washington DC air-space was shut down for hours on Sunday afternoon, and 6000 national guard troops have been moved into the District of Columbia as well as other cities controlled by Democrats with Antifa/BLM mobs at their disposal. What does that signify? The news media couldn’t be troubled to find out. Mr. Trump is reported to be in “a safe location.” As of last week, that was Dyess Air Force Base outside Abiline, Texas. Maybe he is somewhere else now. The New York Times, WashPo and CNN would like you to think that Mr. Trump has been pounded down a rat-hole. That’s one possibility. Another possibility is that the Democratic Party is unnerved and desperate about what’s liable to come down on them in the days ahead, which resembles a colossal hammer in the sky.
Mr. Trump is still president, and you’ve probably noticed he has been president for four years to date, which ought to suggest that he holds a great deal of accumulated information about the seditionists who have been playing games with him through all those years. So, two questions might be: how much of that information describes criminal acts by his adversaries — most recently, a deeply suspicious national election based on hackable vote-tabulation computers — and what’s within the president’s power to do something about it? I guess we’ll find out.
Or, to state it a little differently, it is impossible that the president does not have barge-loads of information about the people who strove mightily to take him down for four years. At least two pillars of the Intel Community — the CIA and the FBI — have been actively and visibly working to undermine and gaslight him, but you can be sure that the president knows where the gas has been coming from, and these agencies are not the only sources of dark information in this world. Also consider that not all the employees at these agencies are on the side of sedition.
By its work this weekend, starring Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Zuck (Facebook), Tim Cook (Apple), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon andThe WashPo), you know exactly what you would be getting with The Resistance taking power in the White House and Congress: unvarnished tyranny. No free speech for you! They will not permit opposing voices to be heard, especially about the janky election that elevated America’s booby-prize, Joe Biden, to the highest office in the land.
Now there’s a charismatic, charming, dynamic, in-charge guy! He’s already doing such a swell job “healing America.” For instance, his declaration Tuesday to give $30-billion to businesses run by “black, brown, and Native American entrepreneurs” (WashPo). Uh, white folks need not apply? Since when are federal disbursements explicitly race-based? What and who, exactly, comprise the committee set up to operate Joe Biden, the hypothetical, holographic President? Surely you don’t believe he’s spirit-cooking this sort of economic policy on his own down in the fabled basement.
And so, here we stand at the start of what’s liable to be a fateful week for the United States. There is a lot of chatter on the lowdown that the current president — that would be Mr. Trump, for those out there who are confused — is about to act to take down the scurvy party that enabled and condoned six months of rioting, arson, and looting in at least a dozen cities — cadres of whom may have actually instigated that incursion into the US Capitol building on Wednesday. The president appears to understand his duty to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. He had plenty of opportunity to be a quitter from 2017 to 2021 and he hung in there, against every cockamamie operation the Deep State threw at him. Odds are he’s not quitting now.
Here’s looking at you, Federal Reserve–thanks for perfecting ‘legalized looting’ and neofeudalism in America.
The problem with pushing a pendulum to its maximum extreme on one end is that it will swing back to the other extreme minus a tiny bit of friction.
America has pushed wealth/income inequality, unfairness and legalized looting to the maximum extreme. Now it will experience the swing back to the other extreme. This will manifest in a number of ways, one of which is a self-organizing populist war on wealth and the wealthy.
To say the system is rigged to benefit the already-wealthy and powerful is a gross understatement. Take the tax code as an example–thousands of pages of arcane tax breaks and giveaways passed by a thoroughly corrupted Congress and thousands more pages of arcane regulations and legal precedents.
How many pages apply to the bottom 95% of American taxpayers? Very few. There’s the standard deductions for mortgage interest, healthcare costs, etc., but virtually no other tax breaks. Very few pages apply to even the 99%–go talk to a CPA and you’ll find there are no more tax breaks for a sole proprietor making $500,000 in earned income than than there are for a sole proprietor making $50,000.
99.9% of the tax code benefits the top 0.1% and the corporations, LLCs and philanthro-capitalist foundations and trusts they own / control. Stripped of artifice and spin, America’s tax code is nothing but legalized looting. This is only one small slice of the entire pie of legalized looting, of course, but it’s one we can all understand.
A sole proprietor pays 15.3% in Social Security and Medicare taxes. Why don’t America’s billionaires pay 15.3% in Social Security and Medicare taxes? Aren’t Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid the bedrock social safety net programs of the American people? Then why does a struggling sole proprietor pay 15.3% tax to support these essential programs and billionaires pay essentially zero?
There’s a term for this disparity / injustice / unfairness: legalized looting. The super-wealthy pay essentially zero percent of their income and wealth to the programs that provide basic economic security for the disabled/elderly citizenry, while Jose the sole proprietor pays 15.3% of every dollar he earns.
So explain to us again why Mr. Buffett can’t afford to pay 15.3% of every dollar of his income to help fund basic economic security for the disabled/elderly. In a system of even the most basic fairness, every dollar of income would be taxed at the same rate. In a system of even the most basic fairness, those with incomes of $100 million would pay the same 15.3% Social Security and Medicare tax as the sole proprietor earning $100,000.
Needless to say, if this most basic fairness was applied to America’s wealthy and powerful, these programs would not be facing insolvency.
If Joe the sole proprietor hits the bigtime, he pays 32% federal tax over $165,000, 35% over $210,000 and 37% over $524,000. If we add 15.3% to 37%, we get 52.3%. How many of America’s super-wealthy / billionaires pay 52% in Social Security-Medicare and income taxes? Zero.
Could America’s super-wealthy / billionaires afford to pay 52%? Of course they could–they own the majority all financial assets and skim the majority of all income. But they won’t, because the system is rigged to benefit the few at the expense of the many via legalized looting.
It isn’t just the inequality of ownership of capital and power that enrages the oppressed; it’s the blatant unfairness of our neofeudal / neocolonial system. As I explained in Neofeudalism and the Neocolonial-Financialization Model (May 24, 2012) and Welcome to Neocolonialism, Exploited Peasants! (October 21, 2016), the Financial Nobility have “come home” and applied the same rapacious exploitation they perfected in colonialism to the domestic populace.
Here’s looking at you, Federal Reserve–thanks for perfecting legalized looting and neofeudalism in America.
The gulf between the lavishly praised American ideals and the putrid, corrupt reality of America’s neofeudal system is wider than the Grand Canyon. As the pendulum accelerates to an extreme equal but opposite to the current extremes of unfairness, exploitation and legalized looting, those who have suffered the consequences of this systemic inequality will find expression in whatever ways are available.
Since it’s difficult to get to the protected compounds of the super-wealthy, the signifiers of the merely wealthy will offer readily available targets. The new Tesla won’t just get keyed; it will be “reworked,” to the great satisfaction of the “workers.”
Please note that I am not promoting a war on wealth and the wealthy, I am merely pointing out that it is as inevitable as the gravity pulling the pendulum.
The war on wealth and the wealthy will manifest politically, socially and economically. It won’t be a tightly controlled, top-down movement. It will be spontaneous, self-organizing and unquenchable.
If you don’t understand why a war on wealth and the wealthy is inevitable, please study this chart: the way of the Tao is reversal.
The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech
By Grafton Tanner
Zero Books, 2020
I’m sure many members of Generation X have taken a moment to look around the pop culture landscape over the past decade and a half and had a sudden moment of realization: there are certainly a whole lot of people trying to sell me things using the media of my youth. Ultimately, this is nothing new. I remember when every pop culture moment, from sitcoms to TV commercials, seemed to be using the Baby Boomers’ favorite songs to sell them cars and sneakers. But in 2020, the dominance of these re-treaded properties is even more nakedly cynical, whether its the endless sequels of the Star Wars and Marvel cinematic universes, or the easy-to-consume, signifier-filled pastiches of the worlds of Stranger Things and Ready Player One. The cultural marketplace, as dominated by bloated media and tech empires, no longer sees any need to admit the novel, the fresh, the unusual.
Both the “why” and the “how” of this cultural and technological tendency are explored by author Grafton Tanner in his new book, The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech. (Disclosure: Tanner is an occasional contributor to We Are The Mutants.) Tanner explores not only the pop culture properties that utilize nostalgia in an effort to assuage the anxieties of contemporary life in the aftermath of the 2008 financial rupture; he also explains how tech companies use the feedback from algorithmic analysis to keep consumers locked into a never-ending cycle—an ouroboros—of digital satisfaction of their subconscious desires for an older, more secure time. This nostalgic digital utopia, in turn, keeps consumers constantly “on,” working through endless “quests” that approximate proactivity but in the end keep people locked into pointless and unproductive cycles of feedback, emotional satisfaction, and control. “Recommender systems and predictive analytics—the very tools that allow our contemporary media to function—zero in on quick reactions, such as a flash of anger or a swell of nostalgia,” says Tanner in his Introduction. “These reactions are noted by algorithms, which then make recommendations based on them… The result is a nostalgic feedback loop wherein old ideas travel round.”
Tanner examines how the Big Tech tendency towards technolibertarianism and monopoly over the past 20 years has created the material conditions for this self-reinforcing system of psychic feedback. With an increasing belief in culture as disposable and “just for fun,” the material and political implications of this system of control are obfuscated. The way that these cultural narratives award Big Tech further and deeper power over all of us is merely part of the game. And we are enlisted as active players, not merely passive viewers, as in the era of television’s height. The online world, Tanner notes, demands a keen eye for analysis and a deep capacity for paying attention. The technolibertarian and neoliberal alike view our tech-suffused world—everyone is plugged in, 24/7—as a kind of utopia-in-waiting, or indeed a permanent utopia, where the idealized past can be endlessly revisited and basked in, while the present never changes from its current state of cultural and political stasis. This virtual plaza of commerce, emotional satisfaction, the illusion of proactivity, and control and surveillance describe the boundaries of Big Tech’s dominance of both our material and psychic space at the beginning of the 2020s.
The interview below was conducted in November and December 2020 via email and has been lightly edited for clarity.
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GRASSO: Given the topic of your first book for Zero, Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, the topic for The Circle of the Snake seems like a natural outgrowth. But from reading the book it also seems like there were a lot of specific events and observations about the world of Online and Big Tech over the past few years that led to the book’s development. What are the origins of The Circle of the Snake, and what kinds of specific cultural developments led you to propose and write the book?
TANNER: I can pinpoint the exact moment I knew I was going to write a book on Big Tech. I was living in a kind of exile in 2016, in this small town in Georgia, trying to piece my life back together after a series of false starts after college. I was sitting in a Barnes & Noble reading the 2016 Tech Issue of The Atlantic, and there was a story by Bianca Bosker about former Google employee Tristan Harris, who left the Valley and started an advocacy group called Time Well Spent because he thought Big Tech was eroding mental health. He was on a mission to fix Big Tech by making it work for us, not against us. But the piece didn’t make me feel better about tech. In fact, it was terrifying: here is an ex-Valley technocrat, mournful that he had invented habit-forming technology with severe public side effects, asking us to not only forgive him, but believe in him to create newer, better tech. I was incensed.
Shortly thereafter, we learned that Cambridge Analytica sharpened their psychographic modeling techniques by harvesting Facebook data from millions of users without their permission, all to aid in the election of Donald Trump. There was suddenly this huge backlash against Big Tech. I was supportive of it, but I also understood it came a little too late. Tech critics had been sounding the alarm for years and years. It took the election of a fascist for the left to wake up to the tech nightmare, only to realize the ones promising to end the nightmare were former technocrats themselves.
And yet, as many were loudly critiquing Big Tech for its role in throwing elections, spreading fascism, and worsening mental health, the culture industry was churning out politically retrograde nostalgia-bait. Was it really that the techlash had made everyone even more nostalgic for the pre-digital past? Or was there some kind of connection between nostalgia and Big Tech? These were the questions I had in mind when I started writing.
GRASSO: I think one of the things I like best about the book is your fusion of theory, philosophy, and epistemology with the material and economic realities of 21st century Big Tech and Big Media. Throughout the book you explore concepts such as surveillance, sublimity, nostalgia (of course), and virtuality with concrete examples from the online plaza. Essentially, if I’m not mistaken, you’re saying that the people who created the feedback loops that keep us hooked on technology and the internet and mine our data for still more ways to sell to us have themselves studied their philosophy, economic history, and techniques of mass psychology and persuasion with great attention?
TANNER: Persuasion techniques, yes, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say the technocrats have studied much else beyond their limited worldview, which is scientistic. Yes, technocrats like James Williams and Tristan Harris like to cite philosophers, but they usually do it to support their self-help solutions to the attention economy. Wake up with a little philosophy, they say, because reading Socrates is better for the mind than scrolling through Twitter. It’s a very neckbeard way of thinking about cultural consumption.
Make no mistake: these technocrats are uninterested in anything other than making a lot of money. If that means learning psychological techniques of persuasion with Stanford psychologist B.J. Fogg, then so be it. They weren’t and aren’t trying to make the world a better place or something. Like the banks before the Great Recession, the technocrats are out to make a quick buck by any means necessary, and they would have kept on doing what they were doing if the bubble hadn’t burst. People were disgruntled with Facebook for years before Cambridge Analytica, and tech critique was already a robust genre by 2016. But it took a kind of implosion, a Great Recession-style reckoning with Big Tech, to change the public opinion. Honestly, the technocrats would probably benefit from studying a little history and philosophy, instead of cloistering themselves in the ideological fortress of STEM.
GRASSO: I think one of the “oh shit” moments in the text for me was finding out that the Black Mirror special choose-your-own-adventure episode “Bandersnatch,” which I quite liked mostly for its material and inspirational signifiers (early ’80s computing, references to Philip K. Dick) was also used to mine viewers’ data in a delightfully dark real-life Dickean stroke. It’s not merely that nostalgia offers us a safe place from the dangerous present, but that those who create these nostalgic visions are working hand-in-hand with the very media empires that make us crave the past: another ouroboros.
TANNER: “Bandersnatch” not only exploits viewers’ nostalgia for its own gain, but it further normalizes the feeling of being controlled. Everyone today knows we’re being controlled from afar: by Twitter, Instagram, Amazon, insurance companies, think tanks, banks, and so forth. We are part of this giant social experiment called consumer capitalism. The purpose is to find out what we’ll buy. But we aren’t being controlled by future gamers or, as much as Elon Musk would like to believe, programmers in this computer simulation we call life. “Bandersnatch” is a work of fiction masquerading a horrible fact—that Netflix is the one controlling us, that we are not as in control as we think. The irony, of course, is that we relinquish our control via the technology we use every day, but we ultimately have very little choice in the matter. Students use devices at school, and jobs often require employees to have smartphones. We aren’t puppets, but we’re by no means totally free either.
GRASSO: So that leads me to asking you about your critique of specific media franchises: Stranger Things and the endless array of sequels and especially reboots we’ve seen since the end of the aughts. You very cannily explore Stranger Things‘ reliance on physical signifiers of commodities and objects that are no longer extant but remind us of the shackles of our technology-laden present (the old landline telephone, the shopping mall) as a key to its appeal to both Gen-Xers who were there and Zoomers who weren’t. Likewise the cinematic reboot is a way to cheaply create product and content that will connect with multiple generations. This element of “spot the Easter egg, aren’t you smart?” for older generations melds with the offer of a trip to a now-alien time for younger generations. These franchises seem to simultaneously reward passive immersion in nostalgia with an illusion of proactivity.
TANNER: Well, the spot-the-Easter-egg activities are very often nostalgic exercises themselves. Viewers are invited to find the nostalgic signifiers, even if they don’t know what they are. That’s the brilliance of Easter egg marketing for advertisers: you might not know what the hidden clue means, but you know it’s a clue and so you make note of it. Of course, the “real” fans will be able to cite all the references, but regular viewers can sometimes recognize a clue, like a corded phone or a VCR or a reference to an older movie, when they see it.
Easter egg marketing is the advertising tactic of choice in the prosumer age. It turns watching into a game. And it’s very heuristic. The films with the most Easter eggs inspire the most “count them all” YouTube videos or Buzzfeed listicles. The problem here isn’t that movies and series reference a bunch of older media; the problem is that Easter eggs reference certain things and leave others out, thus establishing these unnecessary pop culture canons. I don’t care that the Halloween franchise makes reference to itself. It’s an extended universe at this point—of course it’s going to do that. What I find questionable is its constant updating in an attempt to recapture the magic of the original film. I’m always signaling my love of Halloween III: Season of the Witch, but that film is too wacky to be included in the Halloween universe, because the franchise is desperately trying to give us the original again, as if it were the first time, without all the messy parts of the sequels. The Halloween filmmakers want to keep the bloodline of the first film pure, which means anything standing in the way must be excised.
GRASSO: You mark the period between 9/11 and the financial crisis of 2008 (and its aftermath) as the final foreclosure of any alternative to our current future and one of the dividing lines between an idealized past depicted in our nostalgic media and the forever Now. Unsurprisingly, so many of the elements of online life we now recognize as irredeemably toxic (social media, ranking and rating apps, tentpole cinematic universes full of identical sequels) began around the end of the Bush years as well.
TANNER: One of these days, I’m going to write a history-critique of the 2000s. I find the decade fascinating. It was probably the nadir of contemporary culture. Mark Fisher called it “the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s.”
It’s true: there was no breaking point at which contemporary nostalgia ramped up. It was a gradual shift between 9/11 and the Great Recession. Directly after 9/11, the U.S. was reeling from shock. Before nostalgia set in later in the decade, there was a feeling of futurelessness, as Robert Jay Lifton wrote—a feeling that there can be no future after 9/11, that the fear of another terrorist attack foreclosed the future altogether, that if people could fly planes into buildings on a regular weekday morning, then anything horrific is possible. During these years, we saw the birth of cinematic universes with the Star Wars prequels and the first megabudget superhero films. Of course, there were Batman, Superman, and Star Wars films before the twenty-first century, but it was after 9/11 that we saw the avalanche of these movies, several of which could not have been made without post-9/11 Pentagon support, with its bloated influence and near-endless supply of capital. You cannot downplay the reach these films have. They’re seen all over the world. And they aren’t just pro-military propaganda, they are engines of nostalgia.
After the Great Recession, nostalgia calcified. People were moving back in with their parents, revisiting old memories to soothe the anxiety of joblessness. Financial recessions are progressive only for the bankers, if they’re bailed out. For workers, they’re regressive. They set people back and invite the sufferers to hide away from it all. There is nothing wrong with this reaction. We cannot blame people who were hit by the Recession for their nostalgia. But we can blame the ones who caused it. And austerity measures only increase the desire to escape into nostalgic feelings. In short, financial meltdowns are crises that affect the future because they erase the plausibility of surviving the present.
GRASSO: You state that nostalgia is not only an emotion used to track us and to trigger specific emotional responses (which themselves are often assuaged by consumption), but also, possibly most importantly, to control us. And that control is not only physical/material but also social/aesthetic, limiting our options to wander away from the digital plaza. How do nostalgia and nostalgic media help this attempt by the market to quantify, objectify, and commodify us, the consumer?
TANNER: Content creators—a sickening term that reduces art and culture to commodities—understand the value of nostalgia. Consumer scientists have known for years that nostalgia sells. If anger draws your attention to the screen, then nostalgia triggers you to buy what will soothe the anger. That’s the cycle we’re dealing with in the present century.
And the worse things get, the more that nostalgia will naturally rise to the surface for many people. It’s not that media companies force-feed nostalgia to us. Many people are already feeling the emotion. It’s inescapable because nostalgia is a modern condition. Corporations merely go the extra mile by locking nostalgia into these feedback loops. The more you feed nostalgia into the cultural industry, the more of it you will consume because entire companies depend on you to want it. We live in a world of disruption, and every modern displacement is accompanied by nostalgia. Corporate capital knows this and depends on it.
GRASSO: Two of the specific technologies you talk about, Instagram and virtual reality, have undergone mutations in their appeals to our desire to escape the modern world. Instagram started off as a fairly disposable nostalgic evocation of the Polaroid camera aesthetic and has become a playground for big-money influencers and exhibitionists; virtual reality has evolved into just another facet of the internet’s control apparatus, despite its conceptual origins in early ’80s cyberpunk and its promised potential to give people the ability to create their own worlds. Why do these technologies seem to always mutate in the direction of greater commercialization and/or control, despite their initial apparent harmlessness or revolutionary promise?
TANNER: In the case of Instagram, its nostalgia factor was mainly due to the horrible photo quality of early smartphone cameras. With some Wi-Fi, a phone, and an app, you could take photos anywhere and upload them on the spot, which was enticing enough for many people to do just that, but you couldn’t deny the photo quality was very poor. So one way to deal with this poor quality was to saturate photos in a kind of analog haze, which could be done by applying one of several different stock filters. I can’t emphasize this enough: so much of our nostalgic appetite in the early 2010s was whetted by the inability to take and post a decent looking digital photo.
Whether it’s Instagram or virtual reality, digital technology is never totally harmless. It’s like when Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Tech guys tell us we can have our digital cake and eat it too. You can’t have “humane tech” because tech is driven by the profit motive, which itself is often powered by another force: the military. Have you seen this new recruiting ad for the Marine Corps? It’s basically telling young people that joining the military will be an escape from the overwhelming anxieties of the digital age. The scariest thing about the ad is that it conceals the long relationship between tech and the military. Which is to say, the “tech” presented in the ad couldn’t exist without the military-industrial complex. At this point, any new, possibly revolutionary digital technology will either be bought out by a Big Tech monopoly or put to use on the battlefield.
GRASSO: As far as solutions and escapes from this predicament go, you talk a little bit about the ineffectual attempts of former technocrats to try to ameliorate our enslavement to the internet and social media with apps that limit time on websites or “safety labels,” and find them all wholly wanting. Likewise, you mention attempts to make nostalgia something constructive, playful, reflective (in the schema of Svetlana Boym). And yet the very structure of the internet and Big Media as it stands now denies all alternatives to the current control stasis. What does a constructivist nostalgia look like? Where could it exist in the cracks of the current marketplace? Is there a place for nostalgia as a political instrument of the left outside of the usual avenue of Left Melancholy?
TANNER: I’m currently writing a history of nostalgia, out fall 2021 with Repeater Books, called The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: A Recent History of Nostalgia. In it, I put forth a theory of radical nostalgia, drawing on the work of Alastair Bonnett and Svetlana Boym. Radical nostalgia is the third “R” beyond reflective and restorative nostalgia, which Boym coined. She was right about nostalgia, but over the first two decades of the present century, restorative nostalgia ballooned while the reflective strains were edged to the margins. But there needs to be this third form, radical nostalgia, because the melancholic disposition of reflective nostalgia just hasn’t been working for the left and the restorative tint has proven to be destructive.
Radical nostalgia is the act of looking back to those moments when collective action stood up to capital. It yearns for the social movements of the past. It aches for them. It isn’t interested in “getting back there,” in restoring what’s been lost, but in learning from those who came before: the struggle for indigenous rights, the staunch anti-capitalism of Martin Luther King Jr., Stonewall, the Battle of Seattle. When Richard Branson signals his support for LGBTQ+ communities, that isn’t radical nostalgia. There’s nothing radical about it; it’s mere nostalgia. Radical nostalgia looks to these and other movements to continue the fight for a more egalitarian future. It is inherently anti-fascist.
Radical nostalgia takes the action step of restorative and the aching heart of reflective nostalgia and fuses them together. It knows that the past isn’t perfect, which means what we yearn for shouldn’t be either. Restorative nostalgia is too clean, too high-definition. Reflective nostalgia kicks the can around, although reflectors might recognize the problems of the past long before the restorers do. But radical nostalgia knows that everything is imbued with horror, the past especially. Many revolutionary movements of the past suffered from machismo and intolerance, even in their own collectives. Radical nostalgia knows this and endeavors to leave it in the past. Some things must remain buried.
And radical nostalgia is one perspective we can take to resist the utopian thinking of tech. At this point, Big Tech is about the only entity that circulates visions of the future, but those visions are falling out of favor thanks to the techlash. Get ready, because they will absolutely be replaced with a different utopian vision: the humane tech movement. We’re going to be dealing with the technocrats for years. It’s going to seem like we should trust Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Tech guys. They’re going to be pushing their vision of the future for years to come. But they are the new boss, same as the old. Only collective action, informed by the decolonial and anti-fascist movements of history, can resist what’s coming in the next decade and beyond.
After the Crash 